Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny
From the opening sequence of two helicopters transporting a Christ sculpture over Rome to the very last vision on the beach, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is a captivating sequence of events revolving around one man, Marcello Rubini. A playboy both confident and unsure, we follow one week of his “sweet” life of bizarre characters such as fading aristocrats, second-rate movie stars, aging playboys and rich women. There are suicidal fiancees, alluring mistresses, and a lecherous father; all of these people affirm the centering around a man who is fruitlessly looking for love and purpose.
La Dolce Vita straddles Fellini’s previous neo-realist films and his future carnivalesque style of filmmaking. Some narratives are straight while others are winding out of control. A comedy-drama, it is expressive in design (those costumes!) and in eccentric characters who wear them. One can never visit Rome without wanting to dive into Trevi Fountain crying, “Marcello! Marcello!” An unforgettable Italian cinematic experience.
Starring: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Robert Helpmann
Containing a story within a story, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes parallels the ambitions of a young ballerina with the narrative of the ballet she is performing (also called The Red Shoes based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale). Shown in one of the most stunning sequences in cinematic history, the ballet within the film features a young woman purchasing a pair of gleaming red ballet slippers that start her off on a beautiful dance but are ultimately destructive. The dancer, Victoria Page (played by Moira Shearer), also her own demons to confront; does she continue with the passion for her art or cease altogether for the love of a man? In both instances, there is only one way it can end.
Boris Lermontov: Why do you want to dance?
Victoria Page: Why do you want to live?
Boris Lermontov: Well I don’t know exactly why, er, but I must.
Victoria Page: That’s my answer too.
Incorporating a risky material like ballet as the core subject matter and rumored to have gone way over budget, The Red Shoes was met with little fanfare until it debuted in New York and was distributed by Universal. After that, the British audiences got on board and it became one of the highest grossing films in UK history. And with good reason, it’s an artwork unto itself. Painfully beautiful and larger than life, The Red Shoes is a sincere representation of the difficulties one faces when melding art and life together. Pure magic.
A master’s master!
Ricky Jay is a world-renowned magician, author, historian and actor (often a mischievous presence in the films of David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson) — and a performer who regularly provokes astonishment from even the most jaded audiences. Deceptive Practice traces Jay’s achievements and influences, from his apprenticeship at age 4 with his grandfather, to such now-forgotten legends as Al Flosso, Slydini, Cardini and his primary mentors, Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller. Featuring rare footage from his 1970s TV appearances (doing 3-card Monte with Steve Martin on The Dinah Shore Show) and told in Jay’s inimitable voice, this is a remarkable journey inside the secretive world of magic and the small circle of eccentrics who are its perpetual devotees.
A sales girl who has sex appeal in spades goes after a wealthy playboy in the third of our Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins program – It with a live score performed by djangOrchestra.
In the cinematic silence of the roaring twenties Clara Bow personified the flapper- a modern woman who wanted to be able to drive, drink and stay out all night if she wanted! She’s a flapper, more fun loving and decadent that the vamp who lures men to certain doom. In It, Clara Bow plays a shopgirl who has her eye on the handsome owner of the department store she works in. Clara has ‘It’ and ‘It’ holds the promise of many happy nights and sleep-in mornings in the mind of a weak willed prosperous man. Miss Bow’s tangled sleepy-time hair and fleshy bounce is the epitome of Brooklyn sass, manic Jazz Age energy and guilt-free sex appeal. You will love It.
Mary Alouette (award-winning singer, composer, and bandleader) leads djangOrchesta. Together with her four gypsy jazzmen, she’ll orchestrate hot acoustic jazz guitar and blazing horns in the style of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt that calls forth a sound that can be described as beautiful music and dangerous rhythm.
It is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Fritz Lang’s science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis is a Vamps and Virgins Live Sound Cinema event with a live score by Black Lodge.
The utopian society of Metropolis unravels when the son of the city’s main planner realizes there is an entire network of underground workers/slaves. Subsequently, he falls in love with the leader of the underground workers movement in society “Maria” who prophetically claims a savior will come to send the class war. Helm masterfully portrays a double role of “virgin” and “vamp” in Metropolis as the angelic “Maria” who is a prophet/mother to her followers with elements of both the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. Helm also plays the false Maria, a robot whose role is to destroy Maria’s revolution. The false Maria is nothing less than the “Whore of Babylon”, the apocalyptic figure of Revelation, rousing the workers into acts of violent sabotage.
Providing the live score to Metropolis is Black Lodge.
Metropolis is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
An abused waifish woman finds solace in the arms of an immigrant to tragic consequences in Broken Blossoms; part of our Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins series featuring a live score by Gersh/Reed.
Before the Jazz Age, it was the dark ages for women. In D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms Lillian Gish plays a girl living in poverty with a violent and abusive father. Seemingly her only escape is the questionable freedom of a life of prostitution or the squalor and slavery is in the form of a loveless marriage. She discovers a middle path through a chance meeting with an outsider: Cheng, a Chinese immigrant shopkeeper. But she is a white, virginal and underage. Their relationship is impossible in the time and place they live. There love is an illicit and tragic but because of this it is also transcendent and beautiful.
Broken Blossoms is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Bradford Reed & Geoff Gersh have been collaborating together for almost 20 years. During that time, there have been many performances together with various bands as well as working together on projects for dance and film. They have been accompanying silent films at Nitehawk Cinema on a regular basis since July 2012.
The second film in Nitehawk’s Vamps and Virgins silent film series is based on the most famous martyr in history, Joan of Arc. This LIVE SOUND CINEMA event features a live score by Guizot.
A landmark of cinema featuring one of the best performances in film history by Renée Jeanne Falconetti, The Passion of Joan of Arc is based on the actual trial record of the infamous Joan of Arc (1412-1431). It depicts her trial, imprisonment, torture, and execution by the English after refusing to recant her belief that’s she is on a mission from God to drive England out of France. Some believe she’s a saint while others, well, you know. Hailed as a masterpiece even immediately after its release, it’s just an impressive today and is one to certainly see on the big screen with a live band.
From the Vamps and Virgins series text…The Passion of Joan of Arc has Maria Falconetti acting without makeup or artifice; as “Joan” she is a defiant fortress of will. Such a terrible and tearful portrait of uncompromising virgin purity driven into martyrdom is a subject rarely experienced in contemporary cinema.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Room 237 is a subjective documentary that explores the numerous theories about the hidden meanings within Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980).
If Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) taught us one thing, it was not to go into Room 237. But yet, here we are, entering into a portal of conspiracy theories, intense scrutinization, and the supposed hidden meanings embedded within the horror masterpiece through the eyes of uber fans. Consider IFC’s Room 237 as a code to unlocking all the mysteries you considered along with all the things you never even noticed in The Shining and other Kubrick films. Through voice overs, film clips, animation and dramatic reenactments, five obsessive film fans take us on an elaborate journey through the Outlook Hotel where we discover there is, indeed, no way out.
Danger Diabolik is a Live Sound Cinema event featuring a live soundtrack by Morricone Youth.
He robs from the rich and gives to the girls.
Mario Bava’s film adaptation of the popular Diabolik Italian comic books is a stunning visual experience that epitomizes the swinging style of the late 1960s. Danger Diabolik is a mysterious man, thin and dressed in black and armed with his beautiful woman cohort Eva, who manages to outsmart, outrun, and outdrive all the European bad guys he encounters. Money and jewels are his game, and he’ll kill to get them. Bava’s scenic design and cinematography are at his innovative best in Danger Diabolik, particularly in our hero’s underground psychedelic crystal lair where he and Eva make magic happen…on top of money!
Providing the live score to Danger Diabolik is Morricone Youth.
Nitehawk Nasties invites you to find out if cannibalism still exists with CANNIBAL FEROX (a 35mm presentation).
A bona-fide Video Nasty (as decreed by the British Board of Film Classification in the 1980s), Cannibal Ferox is the trashier sister to Cannibal Holocaust but still full of adventurous youth, needless animal torture, and gruesome special effects. Three young anthropologists head down to Columbia to prove the cannibalism no longer exists and was, in fact, a story concocted by greedy European colonizers. After meeting two New York-based drug dealers who have wreaked havoc on the Columbian village, most of them wind up proving this theory with their lives. Turns out, violent killing and cannibalistic urges do come about when prompted. Hungry for more?
Part of the 2016 Nitehawk Nasties I EAT CANNIBALS program.
