1971 – 1972 Season
Bryant Woods Elementary School · 8:30 P.M. · Eight Second Fridays · $8.50
1971
Bonnie and Clyde
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as Bonnie and Clyde pursue the good life through bank robbery. In the setting of the early thirties, this film chronicles their increasingly violent escapades until their bloody deaths.
1971
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
This film appears to be a spoof on Westerns; in reality it is based on real characters: two delightful robbers and their girl on the Western frontier, hilariously and hauntingly portrayed by Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Katharine Ross.
1971
The Learning Tree
This autobiographical film is produced and directed by Gordon Parks. It is a nostalgic story of all boyhood and, at the same time, the grim reality of a young Black growing up in the White American heartland and surviving that experience to have hope in the future.
1972
Midnight Cowboy
Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight give outstanding performances in this honest and affecting story of two friends: Ratso, the crippled guttersnipe, tricky but winning, and Joe Buck, the naive, good-hearted, dimwitted Texas dishwasher. A statement that at any social level the exchange of trust and devotion is the only spiritual oasis.
1972
The Wild Child
François Truffaut's film about a child raised in the wilderness in his first confrontation with society; based on a historical case. An epic theme of the evolution of beast into human.
1972
The Passion of Anna
Ingmar Bergman's beautiful film is the essence of emotional passion and physical beauty, played to perfection by Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow. In exploring the specifics of personality, Bergman states that most human beings are capable of devastating their own lives without the outside help of war or society.
1972
The Damned
One of the year's ten best, directed by Visconti and starring Dirk Bogarde and Ingrid Thulin. This film probes the soul of Germany on the eve of Nazi power. "A shattering experience in the watching…" — Judith Crist
1972
Firemen's Ball
A delicious triple-leveled parody-fable directed by Miloš Forman. The firemen stage a ball in honor of their chief; but he is quickly forgotten as the affair gives way to the most hilarious beauty contest ever to demoralize a fireman's fantasies.
1972 – 1973 Season
Wilde Lake High School · 8:30 P.M. · Eight Second Fridays · $9.00
1972
Sunday Bloody Sunday
The theme of this triangular love story is love and desperation in a cold, permissive climate. A mod, amoral young man is at the apex while a middle-aged doctor (Peter Finch) and a businesswoman (Glenda Jackson) are his sensitive, intelligent and lonely lovers.
1972
My Night at Maud's
A rare sort of film where characterization is revealed through the art of conversation. Jean-Louis Trintignant finds one woman while he is looking for another in this moral tale by Éric Rohmer.
1972
Tokyo Story
Yasujirō Ozu's masterpiece has been hailed as one of the best films of all time. The story of an elderly couple who visit their married children describes the coming apart of the family system in post-war Japan. Intensely involving, it reaches the inner core of universal human experience.
1973
The Sorrow and the Pity
Marcel Ophüls' four-and-a-half-hour documentary about Nazi-occupied France shows men who saw nothing extraordinary in risk and men with the single passion for survival. The hidden subject is always moral choice, and the revelations are not just of the French, but of all human reaction in time of crisis.
1973
Bed and Board
François Truffaut's warm and witty sequel to Stolen Kisses traces with love and humor the tribulations of his alter-ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud, in his first year of marriage and parenthood.
1973
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
The sad and exquisitely photographed story of unrequited love between a middle-class boy and an upper-class girl takes place amidst, and is finally overwhelmed by, the growing horror of anti-Semitism in Mussolini's Italy. Vittorio De Sica's finest film in years.
1973
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
A sad and haunting frontier ballad about a gambling man (Warren Beatty) and a madam (Julie Christie). With rich, moody photography, it is a curiously moral film set in a northwest mining town on the rise.
1973
Days and Nights in the Forest
Satyajit Ray's magical film about some friends who go off for a week with nature. Each finds something different and unexpected. Chekhovian is the only word to describe its mood and achievement.
1973 – 1974 Season
Bryant Woods Elementary School · 8:30 P.M. · Eight Second Fridays · $10.00
1973
Made for Each Other
This marvelously funny, semi-autobiographical screenplay is written and performed by Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna. The pitiful loser from the Bronx and the seminary dropout meet at an encounter group, and the comedy is always compassionate as they struggle to reach each other.
1973
An Autumn Afternoon
The quintessence of Yasujirō Ozu's art and philosophy deeply involves us in the life of a widower who must let his children marry and face the loneliness of his own ultimate solitude. The utmost of drama is achieved in this quiet acceptance of the life cycle.
1973
Women in Love
With exciting language and pictorial opulence, this film based on the novel by D. H. Lawrence poses the problem of achieving the ideal love against such impediments as repression, jealousy, and the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Alan Bates speaks for the author and Glenda Jackson plays Lawrence's ideal heroine.
1974
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Luis Buñuel's masterful film dissects the comfortable world of the upper middle class through a series of dreamlike, comic disruptions to a dinner party that never quite happens.
1977 – 1978 Season
Bryant Woods Elementary School · 8:30 P.M.
1978
Cria!
In an interesting reflection of Spanish life, director Carlos Saura explores the frightening world of the pre-adolescent. Beautifully acted by Ana Torrent and Geraldine Chaplin, the complex structure of parallel times shows past and present to be one web. Starting with the death of her mother, which 9-year-old Ana sees as caused by her philandering father, she is caught in adult affairs she can only partly comprehend but feels compelled to manipulate. Highly original, this is a deft and strangely touching film.
1978
Cousin, Cousine
At a wild, Rabelaisian wedding of an older couple, two middle-aged, newly made cousins-by-marriage meet, stranded by spouses having a fling. Their growing friendship gradually becomes a joyous love affair. It all takes place within a large and loving extended family where the oddities of character are caught and the wry human mixture of the droll and the fragile is displayed. Directed by Jean-Charles Tacchella.
1978 – 1979 Season
Bryant Woods Elementary School · 8:30 P.M. · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $10.50
1978
Outrageous
A vital, engaging Canadian film about an unusual but sustaining friendship between a homosexual, female-impersonating hairdresser and a panicky, schizophrenic young woman. The story of these outcasts is handled tenderly and sympathetically, without sentimentality. Our world is revealed anew to us by those who live on its most precarious edges.
1978
We All Loved Each Other So Much
A wise and witty social comedy that examines thirty years of Italian social history in terms of the friendship of three men and the one woman each man has loved. Meeting as leftist partisans during the Nazi occupation, they have neither prevailed nor entirely succumbed to the world they live in. Directed by Ettore Scola, dedicated to De Sica.
1978
One Sings, the Other Doesn't
A French film, lovely in every way, demonstrating the new attitudes of women toward women and men. The theme is the loving lifelong friendship between two women and how it strengthens them in themselves and in their lives with men. This narrative of two women's very different but intertwined lives is at once perceptive and engrossing.
1979
Padre Padrone
A work of desolate poetry, this is an adaptation of the autobiography of Gavino Ledda. Growing up in isolation as a Sardinian shepherd boy and subject to the brutal authority of his father, Ledda escapes through the Italian army into the world of intellect, where he becomes both linguist and writer. The film moves in primitive rhythms of dramatic power, with pivotal incidents underlined by creative use of sound.
1979
Short Eyes
A prison film of stinging authenticity, taken from the award-winning play by Miguel Piñero, an ex-convict. Filmed in "The Tombs" and played by street people, this story shows the need in most of the inmates to reject and finally brutalize the weak and cowardly child molester. There is raw dramatic power in the ironies and implications of the plot and in the fullness of characterization.
1979
The Obscure Object of Desire
Director Luis Buñuel twines the surrealist themes of social justice and transcendent sexuality in this wise and playfully mysterious comedy. Modern violence and terrorism intrude into the non-political hero's world but he never notices, riveted as he is by an elusive but tantalizing heroine. Fernando Rey, as the hero, humorously reminds us that we all live precarious lives with goals always beyond our grasp.
1979
Black and White in Color
A wry moral tale of two friendly neighboring French and German West African colonies in 1915 that, belatedly discovering their home countries are at war, feel patriotism demands their mobilization against each other. There is much room here for satirical treatment of the absurd. Winner of the 1977 Oscar for Best Foreign Picture.
1979
The Lacemaker
Swiss director Claude Goretta tells a deeply moving story of love between a rich intellectual hero and a poor, working-class heroine whose liaison is doomed to failure because of an inability to communicate. Lost initially in an impressionistic romantic idyll, we suddenly find ourselves in a harsh political parable — a masterful shift in mood.
1979
Stroszek
A wonderfully droll and compassionate ballad about unfulfilled hopes, tenacity, and spiritual exile, directed by Werner Herzog. The story of three mismatched adventurers, all gentle failures, who leave Berlin to make a new life in northern Wisconsin and who inevitably discover that, for them, America is a land of false promises. Both funny and bleak, balancing the human condition against visual lyricism.
1979 – 1980 Season
Bryant Woods Elementary School · 8:30 P.M. · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $10.50
1979
Autumn Sonata
Repressed love-hate feelings between a mother and daughter explode into a penetrating dramatic confrontation during a single night. This is a powerful film about the hidden effects parents and children have on each other and the difficulty they have in communicating. Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann remind us they are the world's finest director and actress; Ingrid Bergman is exalted in the hands of a master.
1979
All Screwed Up
The third of Lina Wertmüller's trilogy on class, work, and sex in industrial society. The film tells of a group of rural immigrants to Milan. Drawn together in a communal apartment, they all scramble for a decent life but find only frustration and hunger. The film remains to this day the favorite Wertmüller film of many critics and audiences.
1979
Days of Heaven
Three young migrant workers forced to flee the Chicago steel mills end up harvesting wheat in the Texas panhandle where they experience a series of cataclysmic events. The pervasive themes are those of America in 1916: rich against poor, city against country, love against power. This film is hauntingly beautiful in image, sound, and rhythm.
1980
A Slave of Love
Director Nikita Mikhalkov's luminous Russian tragicomedy about a group of self-absorbed film artists turning out foolish silent movies in southern Russia (circa 1917) while the Bolsheviks desperately try to consolidate their revolution in Moscow. The movie records the metamorphosis of the star actress from prima donna to revolutionary, with wit, passion, and breathless beauty.
1980
A Geisha
This 1953 film by the master Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi was first released in the United States in 1978. It is about the friendship of two Kyoto geishas, the younger of whom tries unsuccessfully to upgrade the dignity of the profession as she supposes is guaranteed by General MacArthur's new Japanese constitution. The film is funny, moving, and incredibly beautiful.
1980
1900 (four hours)
Bernardo Bertolucci's epic film explores the twentieth-century conflict between reaction and revolution with almost unrelenting beauty and power. The conflict between radical and bourgeois is personified in the intertwining lives of the son of the landowner and the peasant leader. Robert De Niro and all the cast deliver strong, clear performances.
1980
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
A major hit of the 1978 N.Y. Film Festival, this latest film by Bertrand Blier is both a love story and a buddy movie. Raoul will do anything to make his wife happy, including finding a potential lover to lift her out of depression. In the process he almost drives them both crazy. A charming, amusing tour-de-force.
1980
Bread and Chocolate
A witty, uproariously funny social comedy about the frustrations endured by a southern Italian family man struggling to better his lot by working in Switzerland. A fable about Everyman, caught between the person he no longer chooses to be and the dream he doesn't fit. Best Picture winner of the Berlin festival.
1980
Peppermint Soda
A rare and utterly charming film that luminously illustrates W. H. Auden's observation that "We were children… a moment ago." It is a bittersweet memoir of two Parisian teenage sisters coming of age in 1963. Writer-director Diane Kurys, with a keen, prismatic eye, misses nothing. Winner of France's most prestigious film award.