A man, a young girl of about six years of age and a teenager with short red hair lean on a railing and are looking at something off screen.
'One Fine Morning' will have its local premiere at Cinematheque.
Okay, Madison. Here’s your chance to prove that there is interest in moviegoing besides commercial fare in Sun Prairie or Fitchburg. The complete fall Cinematheque schedule has dropped and lead programmer Jim Healy and his colleagues have assembled an overwhelming schedule. Even focusing just on the month of September is a challenge. A discussion of a visit from director Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World), Nov. 10-11, will have to wait (but save those dates!). Some but not all Cinematheque films are grouped into series, and this fall there’s “Finntastic: New Cinema from Finland,” “1980s Fan Favorites,” “Cinema in the Shadow of the JFK Assassination,” “Asian American Media Spotlight,” “Special Presentations” and “Fall Premieres.” We’ll start with some of my recommendations for September, but there’s plenty going on in October and beyond.
Right off, here’s why you should see Wong Kar-wai’s classic In the Mood for Love (2000) on Sept. 8: Close ups of Maggie Cheung Man-yuk and Tony Leung Chiu Wai. That should be enough. If not, there’s the vibrant cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-Bing, which will give nature’s fall colors some stiff competition. The luscious production design and the cheongsam dresses hover somewhere between Wong’s memory and his dreams of the Hong Kong of his childhood. The film’s iconography has become a shorthand for romantic longing, as evidenced by its not so subtle lifting/homage by Everything Everywhere All at Once last year. They don’t make them like this anymore, even when the imitators try to do so.
That said, perhaps Wong owes a debt to the angst and heartbreak of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), starring Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot, which screens a week later. Add George Delerue’s “Thème de Camille” to your Spotify playlist, play on repeat, and you should be emotionally prepared to see Contempt on Sept. 15.
The 12-week Fall Premieres series on Thursdays showcases a wide range of recent American independent and international art cinema — films that should be playing Madison’s commercial theaters but aren’t.
The premiere I previewed, Sebastian Silva’s Rotting in the Sun (Sept. 14) was a little too content with its own so-called daring (drug use, explicit sexuality, those old saws). For me, the results played slow, derivative and flat.
I don’t think Cinematheque programmer Mike King has seen a Mia Hanson-Løve film he didn’t like (from Eden to Bergman Island), and her new feature One Fine Morning, starring Léa Seydoux, screens on Sept. 21. And filmmaker Linh Tran will visit in person for the screening of her Slamdance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize winner, Waiting for the Light to Change, on Oct. 5.
Other visitors include names you know and names you should know. Documentarian Tony Buba made the hybrid documentary Lightning Over Braddock (1988) years before the term “hybrid” was used to describe a mix of documentary and fiction techniques. Buba has chronicled the fate of his hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania, which was once an essential steel town, in several films. But he has also been a key member of the film community in Pennsylvania, and was a sound recordist (and bit player) on George Romero’s Martin (1977). Buba will present Lightning Over Braddock and Martin on Sept 22 and 23.
Madison native Mary Sweeney is best known for co-writing (with John Roach) The Straight Story, directed by David Lynch. She also edited several Lynch projects, and produced Lost Highway through Inland Empire. Her directorial debut, Baraboo (2009), which she also co-wrote, produced and edited, screened at the 2010 Wisconsin Film Festival. Sweeney and Baraboo will return to Madison for a Cinematheque screening on Sept. 29.
Housed in the Department of Communication Arts at UW-Madison, Cinematheque has never just been a movie house. The programming also showcases developments in academic film studies and archival restorations. On Sept. 16, George Eastman Museum’s preservation manager, Anthony L’Abbate, will present a new restoration of Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927), starring Lon Chaney and a young Joan Crawford.
Marsha Gordon, film studies professor at North Carolina State University, will present two films related to Ursula Parrott, the topic of her new book. Bestselling author and co-screenwriter of The Divorcee (1930) and Love Affair (1932), Parrott wrote about career women and single mothers long before they were discussed in the general popular culture. Gordon will present two adaptations of Parrott’s novel There’s Always Tomorrow, back-to-back on Sept. 30: the 1934 Edward Sloman-directed version, starring Frank Morgan (the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz) and the 1954 Douglas Sirk-directed version, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck.
Screenings of these and all films take place Thursdays through Saturdays in 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. The complete fall schedule is available at cinema.wisc.edu.
