Tonight @ Subliminal Projects - TOO FAST TO LIVE, TOO YOUNG TO DIE - Featuring Raymond Pettibon, Glen E. Friedman, Dave Markey, Shepard Fairy.

TOO FAST TO LIVE, TO YOUNG TO DIE is a selection of photography, art and ephemera from the California Punk & Hardcore scene with an emphasis on the explosive period of the late 70's and early 80's. This exhibition features both photographers and artists who were present for the detonation of the Southern California scene and whose imagery helped capture and craft it's angles, attitudes, music, fashion and sub-culture. Reflections of other punk scenes throughout California are included as well as contemporary collaborations inspired by one of the most potent and important periods of free expression in the California story.

Edward Colver has been a Los Angeles-based photographer for over thirty years creating some of the most iconic images of the L.A. punk scene early in his career. Self-taught he had his first photograph published after just three months. A fixture of the early SoCal scene, its been said, “If you went to a show and Edward Colver wasn’t there shooting pictures, you were at the wrong show.” The retrospective exhibition and publication, “Blight at the End of the Funnel” was hosted by Cal State Fullerton in 2006 and the documentary “American Hardcore” featured many of his images.

Glen E. Friedman is based in New York City and is one of the most revered photographers of his generation, continually capturing rebellious individuals from the musical and youth sub-cultures. In 1982, he photographed, art directed and published the influential punk zine “My Rules”, one of the first comprehensive documents and commercially successful chronicles of the American hardcore punk scene. Continuing through the 1980s and 90′s, he captured classic punk and hip-hop images of Black Flag, Minor Threat, Public Enemy, Run DMC and more, many of which are considered the subject’s definitive portrait. Since 1997 his exhibition, “Fuck You All” has been consistently traveling both nationally and internationally, highlighting important works that span throughout his prolific career. His photographs are in the collections of institutions such as Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institute and the Experience Music Project Museum.

Shepard Fairey is based in Los Angeles and is the founder of the Obey Giant street art campaign. Obey Giant was largely modeled after the D.I.Y., by any means necessary, ethos of punk rock. Fairey heard the Alternative Tentacles comp “Let Them Eat Jellybeans” in 1984 and was energized by the music including California bands like Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, Flipper, and the Circle Jerks.

Jenny Lens, MFA, a native Angeleno, immediately rose to prominence with her first photos of the Ramones first west coast tour, August 1976, ending with the Clash, England, July, 1980. She shot revered and iconic photos of X, Germs, Iggy Pop, Blondie, Patti Smith and many more. Her images are extensively seen in and grace the covers of many major punk books, CDs, DVDs, docs, TV. She is hailed as the most published West Coast photographer documenting the early punk scene of 1976-80. In addition, her popular online postings of historical recollections continue to provide accurate first-hand insights into an often under-documented scene, especially from a West Coast woman’s point of view. Her solo book, “Punk Pioneers, When Punk was Fun,” was published by Rizzoli/Universe.

Dave Markey and Jordan Schwartz are the founders of the zine “We Got Power” which documented the Southern California punk scene in the early 1980′s. The subsequent photographs it produced uniquely captured this important period. Schwartz was also a producer for Lovedoll Films and served as press and booking agent for SST Records during this period. According to the 1985 Rolling Stone article he was one of the last people to sleep on the floor of the now-legendary record company, “If you work for SST Records you have to be prepared to sleep on the floor”. Markey’s work in film/video created some of the most important documents of it’s time and included collaborations with Sonic Youth, Raymond Pettibon, Nirvana, Mudhoney, The Ramones, Black Flag and many more. His films have been in festival screenings both national and internationally, including the United Kingdom screening tour entitled “Desperate Cinema” in 2005. A solo exhibition of his films was hosted by Seventeen Gallery in London in 2009. Most recently a selection were included in the Sonic Youth internationally traveling retrospective “Sensational Fix”.

Raymond Pettibon is based in Venice, California and is a leading figure in the international art world who sprang from the world of California punk and illustration and whose work is now in the permanent collections of galleries and museums throughout the world. His early artistic roots lie in music, specifically in the Los Angeles punk rock scene designing artwork for SST Records and bands such as Black Flag, The Minutemen, and Sonic Youth. He has had museum exhibitions at MOCA, SFMOMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Malaga, Spain and many more. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Bucksbaum Award in relation his installation at the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Winston Smith is a San Francisco-based artist whose roots lie in punk rock album cover design and collage imagery. His early work involves album art for the Dead Kennedy's and has gone on to create over 50 record covers and has had numerous international exhibitions of his artwork over the last thirty years. Last Gasp has published a large selection of his work and he recently had a retrospective exhibition “Deep Dimension” in San Francisco, CA

OPENING RECEPTION:
Friday, February 25th, 2011 7-11p

Musical performance by OFF! and The Nichemakers at 9PM

EXHIBITION DATES:
February 25th - March 26th, 2011 Curated by Katherine B. Cone and Jon Cournoyer.

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William S. Burroughs: A Man Within - Saturday 2.26. on PBS.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within investigates the life of the legendary beat author and American icon. Born the heir of the Burroughs Adding Machine estate, he struggled throughout his life with addiction, control systems, and self. He was forced to deal with the tragedy of killing his wife and the repercussions of neglecting his son. His novel, Naked Lunch, was one of the last books to be banned by the U.S. government. Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer testified on behalf of the book. The courts eventually overturned the 1966 decision, ruling that the book had important social value. It remains one of the most recognized literary works of the 20th century.

The film features never-before-seen footage of William S. Burroughs, as well as exclusive interviews with his closest friends and colleagues including John Waters, Genesis P-Orridge, Laurie Anderson, Peter Weller, David Cronenberg, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Sonic Youth, Anne Waldman, Hal Willner, James Grauerholz, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra, V. Vale, Wayne Propst, Diane DiPrima, Dean Ripa (the world's largest poisonous snake collector), and many others, with narration by actor Peter Weller, and soundtrack by Sonic Youth. William Burroughs was one of the first to cross the dangerous boundaries of queer and drug culture in the 1950s, and write about his experiences. Eventually he was hailed the godfather of the beat generation and influenced artists for generations to come. But his friends were left wondering if he had ever found contentment or happiness. This extremely personal documentary pierces the surface of the troubled and brilliant world of one of the greatest authors of all time.

The Filmmaker -
Yony Leyser is a 25-year-old filmmaker living in Chicago, Illinois. He has directed several short films. After being kicked out of film school, he moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and began shooting William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, his first feature film.

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Wednesday 2.23. - Free-Flowing Spoken-Word with Writer/Director John Waters @ UCLA Live's Royce Hall.

Director, actor, author and all-around filth elder John Waters brings his wildly popular one-man show to UCLA Live’s Royce Hall Wednesday February 23, taking aim at Hollywood during the industry’s most self-indulgent week--the Oscars--with “This Filthy World Goes Hollywood.”

Waters has performed his free-flowing spoken-word lecture entitled “This Filthy World” at colleges, museums, film festivals and comedy clubs worldwide, including a 2010 appearance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Last year, Waters also played to a sold out audience at the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival and appeared in the Sydney Opera House.

In this UCLA Live appearance, the multi-talented artist focuses his rapid-fire wit on show business, the art world and his own lunatic career in a one-man vaudeville performance.

Independent filmmaker, sketch artist and actor (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) Matthew Gray Gubler serves as emcee and dynamic modern-rock artist Elvis Perkins opens the show with a solo set.

Waters’ sixth book, Role Models, debuted at No. 11 on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list in May of 2010, also earning spots on the bestseller lists for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Waters other books include Shock Value, Crackpot, Pink Flamingos and Other Trash, Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs, and Art: A Sex Book (co-written with art critic Bruce Hainley).

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Go See - Richard Hawkins: Third Mind now @ The HAMMER through May 22 .

Since the early 1990’s, Richard Hawkins has developed an emphatically diverse art practice that resists easy classification. Offering alternate histories through the juxtaposition of decidedly unlike elements—whether ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, 19th-century French Decadent literature, post-structuralist theory, 1980s teen hearthhrobs, Native assimilation in the American Southeast, or the intricacies of Thai sex tourism—the work is, at its core, about the pleasure of intense looking. Hawkins is an equal opportunity voyeur, but it is the male figure—often young, beautiful, and exotic—that is the subject and inspiration in his work. Bolstered by alternative historical precedents or influences and infused each time with new ways of seeing, he takes his subject well beyond personal indulgence into the realm of a deeply engaged rethinking of representation. Critical pairings are primal matter, making collage not simply a medium for Hawkins but a philosophy/methodology that defines his art. His earliest mature statements took the form of collage, and the medium has held firm within his oeuvre ever since. For this reason, Richard Hawkins: Third Mind—the artist’s first American museum survey—is largely focused on his collage-based work as a platform from which to understand his larger practice.

The title, Third Mind, makes reference to Richard Hawkins: Of two minds simultaneously, the artist’s 2007 exhibition at DeAppel in Amsterdam. The phrase “of two minds” typically means to be undecided, uncertain, or unsure. It is not indecision, however, that is at play in Hawkins’s practice. Rather he is deliberate and indeed mindful in the “duplicity and ambiguity” that characterizes his work. In this way, Third Mind serves as a testament to the artist’s continued propagation of “minds,” made up of a steady stream of thoughts, ideas, desires, fantasies, interactions, possibilities, viewpoints, opportunities, opinions, memories, and meanings. The title also invokes William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s 1978 book, The Third Mind, which introduced the concept of the “cut-up” in literature. Inspired by the history of collage in the visual arts and a natural extension of Gysin’s own visual collage practice, the cut-up becomes for the authors an alternative to the “either-or proposition” and linear declarative sentence structure that “shackles” Western thought and linguistics. Just as Burroughs and Gysin had deconstructed narrative structure through their cut-ups, Hawkins continually reconstructs himself as an artist with a practice that is remarkably unified within constant yet fluid shifts over time and among genres, techniques, and mediums. Inherent to his work is an invitation to feel things at the extremities of human experience and an acknowledgment, even championing of difference, desire, and pleasure as productive ends in themselves.

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@ REDCAT: 'Afro Fusion Dance' - Association Noa/Vincent Mantsoe: San - Now Thru 2.13.

Raised in Soweto in the 1980s, internationally renowned choreographer Vincent S.K. Mantsoe has forged a distinctive style of “Afro Fusion” dance, energetically mixing the ritual dances and rhythms from his family line of traditional healers with street dancing and popular moves. Now, inspired by the journeys and spirits of the Khoi-San people of Southern Africa, Mantsoe’s newest work brings together five dancers of different cultures—all linked in one way or another—in a powerful piece that traces the history of a people forced from their land, silenced and subjected to continued brutality. Set to a mesmerizing score by famed Iranian vocalist and Sufi music master Shahram Nazeri and interspersed with the 12th-century poetry of Rumi, San draws a line from ancient past to contemporary experience. As Mantsoe reveals the diverse ancestral influences within the dancers’ movements, his company expresses the range of joy, exaltation and melancholic despair that have become the melodies of their bodies today.

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Tonight Feb.10 - HAROLD AND MAUDE Kicks off Valentine's Day Weekend @ The American Cinematheque.

It's that time of year again - the time when we're reminded of all the bliss, ecstasy, contentment (and, yes, uncertainty and even misery) that goes arm-in-arm with romance. And what better way to celebrate this roller coaster of a holiday than to go to the movies and see the power of love beautifully and cathartically magnified on the big screen?

Join The American Cinematheque Valentine's Day weekend for films both classic and contemporary that celebrate amour in its many forms, including CASABLANCA, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, HAROLD AND MAUDE, GONE WITH THE WIND, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, THE AFRICAN QUEEN, THE PRINCESS BRIDE and THE NOTEBOOK.

Thursday, February 10 – HAROLD AND MAUDE, Producer Robert Evans fought hard for non-conformist editor-turned-filmmaker Hal Ashby to be allowed to direct this wildly offbeat romance between suicidal youngster Bud Cort and eccentric, 80-year-old Ruth Gordon. The result is one of the most poignant and subversive films of the New Hollywood era. - 1971, Paramount, 91 min, 35mm
7:30p


Saturday, February 12 – Double Feature: Digitally Restored! THE AFRICAN QUEEN, 1951, Gin-soaked captain Humphrey Bogart decides to take pity on skinny, psalm-singing spinster Katharine Hepburn after her brother is killed in a German attack during WWI - and instead, winds up falling in love, and ferrying her downriver to launch a suicidal assault on a German warship! - Paramount, 105 min. Dir. John Huston.
7:30p

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, - Digitally Restored! This 1953 Oscar winner (for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography and others) remains a timeless combination of war movie and love story that's as smart and adult as it is entertaining. James Jones' novel about military life at a Hawaiian army barracks on the brink of America’s entering World War II is the source for a riveting drama starring Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift and many others. 1953, Sony Repertory, 118 min. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. 35mm

Sunday, February 13 – The second of four Sunday matinees, running monthly at the Egyptian Theatre. Join The American Cinematheque in the coming months for LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR and LA BOHEME, screening in beautiful digital format on the really big screen.
1:00p


THE ELIXIR OF LOVE, Donizetti's charming comedy is a celebration of innocence, so what setting could be better than a small Italian-American community in Napa Valley, circa 1915? In this ingenious update, the naive Nemorino believes a love potion will win him Adina's heart. Blossoming from a shy Italian immigrant to a plucky entrepreneur, he captures both his sweetheart and the American dream over the course of this delightful opera buffa. Tenor Ram�n Vargas superbly embodies the role of the lovesick Nemorino. The beautiful but aloof Adina is sung by soprano Inva Mula. Sung in Italian with English subtitles. In two acts with one 10 minute intermission. 158 min.

Sunday, February 13 – DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, This story of Tsarists, revolutionaries, two beautiful women in love with the same man, a nation in upheaval and, above all, the poet physician (Omar Sharif) who witnesses and remembers it all - is one of the most lyrical, visually breathtaking films in the history of the medium. Co-starring Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Tom Courtenay and Alec Guinness, with sublime music by Maurice Jarre. 1965, Warner Bros., 193 min. Dir. David Lean. 35mm
5:00p


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Spoken Word - Tomorrow Night! THE ONION Editors Headline UCLA Live's Royce Hall.

Deadpan satire and journalistic skill collide in the phenomenon that is The Onion. Founded in 1988 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the “fake news” newspaper is the notable precursor to such biting, faux-news programs as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Last year, The Onion News Network, an online send-up of 24-hour cable TV news, was named a Peabody Award winner and praised as “hilarious, trenchant and not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing.” Join current Onion editor Joe Randazzo and fellow staffers @ UCLA Live's ROYCE HALL for a multimedia discussion on the state of media, politics and pop culture as they offer up insight into how the paper’s culture-skewering stories and hilarious headlines are created.

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Friday 2.11.@ CINEFAMILY - The Soup w/ Director Alexandre Rockwell in person!

Series: 'When Indies Rocked'

In The Soup
b/w - Living In Oblivion

In The Soup
At the height of the indie boom, Alexander Rockwell won the Grand Jury prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival with this fantastic deadpan farce about the foibles and struggles of an aspiring filmmaker. Making ridiculously good use of indie poster boy Steve Buscemi as the young NY wannabee auteur and old-school Cassavetes favorite Seymour Cassel as the charismatic shyster/criminal who promises to finance Buscemi’s unfilmable behemoth dream project. Buscemi and Cassel are an absolute delight as the befuddled youngster and the “wise” scoundrel, whose magnetic comic chemistry cries out for future re-pairings -- and right down to the bit parts, everyone performs at the peak of their craft, with juicy roles also going to Sam Rockwell, Stanley Tucci, Elizabeth Bracco, Debi Mazar, and in one scene-stealing bit, Jim Jarmusch and Carol Kane offering Buscemi a demeaning stint for a bit of quick cash. Lively fun and a potent time capsule, In The Soup wonderfully captures a bohemian New York and a view of independent cinema soon to be replaced by a soulless doppelganger. Dir. Alexandre Rockwell, 1992, 35mm, 93 min.

Doors Open @ 7:00p

Note: Alexandre Rockwell will be here at the Cinefamily for a Q&A after the film.
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Living In Oblivion
Both a hilarious farce and a frighteningly realistic portrait of low-budget moviemaking in an era before video made everything so damn easy, Tom DeCillo’s Living In Oblivion frames collaborative creativity as an existential hell of other people, and anticipates the "cringe comedy" movement by a decade. Smirk at one all-too-familiar crew member type after another, squirm as a delicate long take is ruined again and again, gasp in horror at what passes for craft service -- and don't drink the milk! No filmmaking experience is necessary; this shaggy-dog story of dreams within dreams has the power to console anyone who's ever tried to do anything without enough money or cooperation. Come for Catherine Keener's star-making turn as the ingenue, stay for Steve Buscemi's epically foulmouthed tantrum, and get ready for James LeGros' devastating send-up of a certain then-rising ‘90s star with whom DeCillo had previously worked (and whose name may or may not rhyme with Pad Britt.).
Dir. Tom DeCillo, 1995, 35mm, 90 min. - Starts @ 9:45p

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Cat Power - Sunday, February 6, @ The Music Box.

Chan Marshall stops time. She sits at a piano or lays her guitar across her lap, and whether it’s a noisy club overflowing with drunks or a coffee house full of lap-toppers, Chan Marshall draws all the attention in the room and makes the world stop spinning. As Cat Power, Marshall’s music seems to rise from nowhere, envelop the room, then vanish; listeners know they’ve been hit by something but they’re not sure what.

If you don't know much about Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall) by now, you should. Chan moved to NYC in 1992 and began playing shows and putting out records with; Runt records (Dear Sir, 1995), Smells Like records (Myra Lee, 1996) (Steve Shelly from Sonic Youth's label), then eventually Matador records (What Would The Community Think, 1996). Cat Power released "The Greatest" (Matador 2006) Cat Power now tours with "Dirty Delta Blues", a band made up of Judah Bauer (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion), Gregg Foreman (Delta 72), Erik Paparazzi (The Glass) and Jim White (Dirty Three).

This show seems to be the last stop for Chan in 2011, so catch her 'Fresh out the (Music) Box" if you can.

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@ the EGYPTIAN - French New Wave Double Feature: Contempt / Shoot The Piano Player, Thursday Feb. 3

JEAN-LUC GODARD’S radiant, ambiguous, serenely perverse “Contempt,” is being revived again, in startling color and elegant, ribbony CinemaScope, for the umpteenth time in just over a decade, and it’s beginning to look like one of those movies we can’t do without for very long: a classic.

When the picture, Mr. Godard’s sixth feature, opened in France in 1963, admirers of his challenging, radically innovative previous work, like “Breathless” (1960) and “My Life to Live” (1962), didn’t quite know what to make of it. Based on an Alberto Moravia novel that the director dismissed (unfairly) as a “nice, vulgar one for a train journey,” produced by Carlo Ponti and by Joseph E. Levine — two of the most powerful men in movies at that time, neither known as a patron of the arts — and starring, of all people, Brigitte Bardot, “Contempt” seemed at first a more conventional film than generally associated with Mr. Godard. Further confusing matters (as was, and remains, his custom), he told an interviewer that his movie was “a simple film, without mystery.”

It is nothing of the kind. Moravia’s story, which the film tells surprisingly faithfully, is a fairly simple one, about a screenwriter (played by Michel Piccoli) who can’t figure out why his wife (Ms. Bardot) has suddenly begun to despise him. The collapse of their marriage occurs while the writer is mulling an offer to punch up the script of “The Odyssey,” produced by a wily and crude American mogul (Jack Palance) and directed by Fritz Lang, who plays himself. (In the novel the director is an invented character, a generic veteran of the German silent cinema, who is, we’re told, “certainly not in the same class as the Pabsts and Langs.”) That’s about it for narrative: the writer frets, the wife glowers, the producer rants and manipulates, and Lang, calm in this storm of domestic malaise and showbiz madness, tries to make a movie that will reflect, at least a little, his vision of “The Odyssey.” “Homer’s world is a real world,” he says. “The poet belonged to a world that grew in harmony, not opposition, to nature.”

It is nothing of the kind. Moravia’s story, which the film tells surprisingly faithfully, is a fairly simple one, about a screenwriter (played by Michel Piccoli) who can’t figure out why his wife (Ms. Bardot) has suddenly begun to despise him. The collapse of their marriage occurs while the writer is mulling an offer to punch up the script of “The Odyssey,” produced by a wily and crude American mogul (Jack Palance) and directed by Fritz Lang, who plays himself. (In the novel the director is an invented character, a generic veteran of the German silent cinema, who is, we’re told, “certainly not in the same class as the Pabsts and Langs.”) That’s about it for narrative: the writer frets, the wife glowers, the producer rants and manipulates, and Lang, calm in this storm of domestic malaise and showbiz madness, tries to make a movie that will reflect, at least a little, his vision of “The Odyssey.” “Homer’s world is a real world,” he says. “The poet belonged to a world that grew in harmony, not opposition, to nature.” But Mr. Godard’s fidelity to the novel’s straightforward, rather uneventful plot has, like the heroine’s sullen fidelity to her husband, an undertone of refusal, even of subversion. The novel is interested primarily in the psychology of its characters, while the film is concerned with something so different that it seems, at times, almost to mock the very idea of psychology. When the screenwriter begins to interpret “The Odyssey” in terms of his own marital difficulties, he is purely ridiculous, and Mr. Godard emphasizes the absurdity by having the character deliver his loony exegesis while walking with Lang in a lovely grove on the island of Capri. The camera keeps its distance, as it does throughout the film; you can measure this picture’s indifference to psychology by the near-total absence of close-ups.

Now, what “Contempt” is most profoundly interested in is what Lang is interested in: the relation of man to nature, here represented by Capri and the tranquil Mediterranean and, of course, by the less restful beauty of Ms. Bardot. Mr. Godard was prevailed upon by Mr. Levine to shoot extra footage of his lead actress in the altogether, and so tacked on an opening sequence of Ms. Bardot and Mr. Piccoli in bed. He may have done this grudgingly, but it’s good for the movie, because between that short scene and the characters’ arrival on the “Odyssey” set in Capri about an hour later, the action takes place in an eerily depopulated Rome, in settings from which nature has, it seems, been forcibly excluded. A full half-hour of “Contempt” is set in the couple’s sleekly modern high-rise apartment, where they roam and bicker among angular, primary-colored chairs and sofas, which stand out more strongly against the stark white walls than the tones of the hero’s, and even the heroine’s, flesh.

Ms. Bardot’s body, in that first scene, and Capri, in the concluding scenes, are the natural world that nobody in this movie seems quite capable of harmonizing with, or of seeing, as entirely, irreducibly real, the way Homer did. And it isn’t, of course. As “Contempt” does not allow us to forget, Lang is shooting a movie, and we in the audience are watching one, and here, as in every other movie ever made, we gaze, like Odysseus in this film’s gorgeous final shot, at a reality that’s a projection of our own desires, an Ithaca turned hazy by artifice and distance.

The greatness of “Contempt” is that Mr. Godard is not, finally, nostalgic for the Homeric harmony Lang speaks of. He knows that ship has sailed. In this picture everything, ancient or modern, “real” or “unreal,” has its own stunned dignity, and the movie wants us to see it all as beautiful — as its people, tragically, cannot. Even early ’60s furniture. “Contempt” is about men and women rendered graceless by their times, but the movie, substituting rigorous aesthetics for the novel’s psychology, shows us where they (and we) went wrong and achieves an extraordinary grace. (The crisp natural-light cinematography, by Raoul Coutard, and Georges Delerue’s mournful score have something to do with this too.)

Maybe we need “Contempt” because it’s one of the few movies of the anxious past half-century that seems equally at home with history and modernity. It might once have looked conventional, but its audacity, we now see, is breathtaking. The world of “Contempt” is epic in a new way: a world growing in harmony, not opposition, with artifice. - NYT
1963, 103 min.

The Second film screening is Francios Truffaut's -Shoot The Piano Player (Tirez Sur Le Pianiste), In Truffaut’s second film, Charles Aznavour is a washed-up concert pianist unable to return to his former glory due to connections with gangsters and other nefarious types.
*Both films are in French with English subtitles.
1963, 103 min.

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