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“What are the choices each individual faces in a totalitarian country? Although we thought these are questions of the past, they are slowly starting to haunt us also today.” Andrzej Wajda’s final film, AFTERIMAGE, opens May 26 at the Royal and Playhouse.

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The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda‘s completed his last film just before his death last October. Poland’s official submission for this year’s Oscars, AFTERIMAGE (Powidoki) is a passionate biopic about avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski (brilliantly played by Polish superstar Boguslaw Linda), who battled Stalinist orthodoxy and his own physical impairments to advance his progressive ideas about art. Wajda said this about his movie:

“I wanted to film the story of an artist – a painter, for a very long time now. I decided to bring Władysław Strzemiński to screen because he is one of the most accomplished Polish artists, and he has been wiped out of the public memory by the consequent actions of the Communist government. Strzemiński understood the path of modern art. He explained it in his book entitled “Theory of Vision.” The conviction that the abstract art is the only option left to an artist, because thematic painting and post-impressionism have already said everything, gave him a strength to oppose the Communist authorities. He was an exceptional teacher, as well as a founder of the Museum of Modern Art in Łódź in 1934, second modern art museum in the world.

 

Andrzej Wajda

“AFTERIMAGE is a portrait of an unbroken man – a man confident of decisions he has taken; a man fully dedicated to art. The film depicts four grave years 1949 – 1952, when the “Sovietisation” of Poland took the most radical form, and the socialist realism became the obligatory style of artistic expression. I wanted to show a conflict of a distinguished individual with the Socialist state attempting to control every aspect of human life. How a human being can stand against the state apparatus? What is the price one has to pay for freedom of expression? What are the choices each individual faces in a totalitarian country? Although we thought these are questions of the past, they are slowly starting to haunt us also today, and we should not forget what we already know about how to answer them.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiMz0L_R7vI

With a career spanning over 60 years, Wajda’s contribution to cinema has been recognized by the Academy Awards (Honorary Oscar in 2000), European Film Awards (Lifetime Achievement, 1990), Berlin Film Festival (Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement, 2006), and many others. Four of his films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: THE PROMISED LAND (1975), THE MAIDS OF WILKO (1979), MAN OF IRON (1981), and KATYŃ (2007). MAN OF IRON won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Wajda has directed films from many genres, but he began his career with a trilogy of anti-war films: A GENERATION (1954), KANAŁ (1957, Cannes Special Jury Prize) and ASHES AND DIAMONDS (1958). He has made many films set during or dealing with post-World War II, including KORCZAK (1990), a story about a Jewish-Polish doctor who cares for orphan children, HOLY WEEK (1995) specifically on Jewish-Polish relations, and KATYŃ (2007) about the Katyń massacre, in which Wajda’s own father was murdered.

Wajda’s commitment to Poland’s Solidarity movement was manifested in Palme d’Or winner MAN OF IRON with Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa appearing as himself. The director’s involvement in this movement would prompt the Polish government to force Wajda’s production company out of business. Three decades later, Wajda made the biopic WALESA, MAN OF HOPE (European Film Awards – FIPRESCI Prize of the Year). Wajda’s other credits include 1983’s post-French Revolution epic DANTON, starring Gérard Depardieu, 1980’s THE ORCHESTRA CONDUCTOR, starring John Gielgud; 1983’s A LOVE IN GERMANY featuring Hanna Schygulla, and 1988’s THE POSSESSED based on Dostoyevsky’s novel.


Award-winning director of photography Paweł Edelman has been one of Wajda’s great collaborators. They worked together on several films, including AFTERIMAGE ; WALESA: MAN OF HOPE; PAN TADEUSZ; SWEET RUSH (Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2009); and Wajda’s 1994 film version of Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot.

 

Wajda was born in 1926 in Suwałki, Poland, the son of a school teacher and an army officer. Wajda’s father was murdered by the Soviets in 1940 in what came to be known as the Katyń Massacre. In 1942 he joined the Polish resistance and served in the Armia Krajowa. After the war, he studied to be a painter at Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts before entering the Łódź Film School.

After his apprenticeship with director Aleksander Ford, Wajda was given the opportunity to direct his own film: A GENERATION (1955). Throughout his film career, Wajda has simultaneously worked as a director in theater. His acclaimed productions include versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Antigone and a unique interpretation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He passed away October 9, 2016 in Warsaw.

HAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY – NYT Critic’s Pick

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On Friday we’ll open the winning documentary HAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY at the Monica Film Center, Playhouse 7, and Town Center 5. It is a fascinating account of the romantic and creative partnership of storyboard artist Harold Michelson and film researcher Lillian Michelson, two unsung heroes of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Although they worked on hundreds of classic films and were responsible for some of Hollywood’s most iconic examples of visual storytelling, their contributions remain largely uncredited. This film chronicles their remarkable marriage and careers through six decades of movie-making history.

To get a sense of how special this film is, read the April 28, 2017 the New York Times ‘critic’s pick’ review by Monica Castillo: ‘Harold and Lillian’ Introduces a Hollywood Power Couple ­ and then come see the film. Several screenings will feature Q&A’s, including some with Mrs. Michelson. 

“Harold and Lillian Michelson’s names may not sound familiar, but you’ve most likely seen their work in “West Side Story,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Birds,” among many other films. Harold, the storyboard artist husband, and Lillian, the film researcher wife, were a prolific team whose careers are being profiled in Daniel Raim’s documentary “Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story.”

“Through charming animated sketches and interviews with the couple and some of their friends, like Mel Brooks, Francis Ford Coppola and Danny DeVito, the documentary reflects on the couple’s work together — often with Mrs. Michelson’s findings inspiring her husband’s art.
“Mr. Michelson, who died in 2007, climbed the industry ladder as a storyboard artist, eventually becoming an art director and production designer. Not wanting to stay at home, Mrs. Michelson volunteered at a studio library and became a sought-after film researcher.
“Their behind­-the-­scenes influence on filmmakers was far­-reaching. Mr. Michelson’s storyboards show sketched versions of memorable scenes, like the parting of the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments” and Anne Bancroft’s raised leg overshadowing Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate.” Mrs. Michelson excitedly recalls interviewing women at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles about traditional costumes for “Fiddler on the Roof” and questioning a drug kingpin for “Scarface.”
“The stories are told out of order to make room for personal tangents, including the challenges of raising an autistic son in the 1960s. Like flipping through misplaced leaves in a photo book, the documentary maintains a free­flowing tone as it uncovers the work that went into creating some of the indelible scenes in Hollywood history.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA6fdelvNtw

George Chakiris in Person at the NoHo with WEST SIDE STORY.

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Oscar winner George Chakiris (Bernardo) will participate in a Q&A at the WEST SIDE STORY screening at the NoHo on Thursday, May 11.

Kim Basinger and Guy Pearce in Person with L.A. CONFIDENTIAL May 9th at the Fine Arts.

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Oscar-winner Kim Basinger and Guy Pearce will participate in a Q&A at the 7:30pm, May 9th screening of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills. Presented in 35mm.

Click here to purchase tickets.

Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a tribute to Oscar-winning writer-director Curtis Hanson with a 20th anniversary screening of his film noir masterpiece, L.A. Confidential.

Based on James Ellroy’s acclaimed novel, the film focuses on Los Angeles police officers in the 1950s, whose investigations of several murders intersect with the worlds of Hollywood celebrities, scandal sheets, and organized crime.

The startling critique of police brutality and corruption remains timely and hard-hitting. Ellroy himself praised the screenwriters, saying that Hanson and Helgeland “preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main theme.”

In addition to its potent social commentary, the film represented a remarkable evocation of time and place, with major contributions by cinematographer Dante Spinotti, art director Jeannine Oppewall, and composer Jerry Goldsmith, all Oscar-nominated for their work.

Hanson, a classic film enthusiast as well as filmmaker, screened several films made in the 1950s for the cast and crew in order to encourage their dedication to authenticity.

The award-winning cast includes Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, James Cromwell, Danny DeVito, and Simon Baker.

L.A. Confidential has a 99 per cent positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert called it “seductive and beautiful, cynical and twisted, and one of the best films of the year.”

Time’s Richard Schickel paid tribute to the film’s style: “It’s a movie of shadows and half lights, the best approximation of the old black-and-white noir look anyone has yet managed on color stock.”

The film was named best picture of 1997 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the National Board of Review—one of only three films in history to win the top award from all four major critics’ groups. The film was selected for the National Film Registry in 2015.

Curtis Hanson’s many other films as director include The Bedroom Window, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The River Wild, Wonder Boys, 8 Mile, and In Her Shoes.

Kim Basinger co-starred in the James Bond movie, Never Say Never Again, and had one of her biggest successes as Vicki Vale in Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989. Her many other films include Barry Levinson’s The Natural starring Robert Redford, Robert Altman’s Fool for Love, the controversial 9 ½ Weeks with Mickey Rourke, Robert Benton’s Nadine with Jeff Bridges, the remake of The Getaway, The Door in the Floor, and I Dreamed of Africa. She reunited with Curtis Hanson when she played Eminem’s mother in 8 Mile, and she reunited with her L.A. Confidential co-star, Russell Crowe, in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys in 2016.

Guy Pearce first attracted attention in the Australian comedy, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert.  He had the lead role in Christopher Nolan’s influential Memento.  Among his many other films are Rules of Engagement, The Proposition, Animal Kingdom, Lawless, Iron Man 3, and two Oscar-winning Best Pictures, The Hurt Locker and The King’s Speech.  He co-starred with Kate Winslet in the HBO miniseries, Mildred Pierce, and recently had a key role in Dustin Lance Black’s acclaimed miniseries, When We Rise.

Laemmle Glendale Update: Sign Installation Video and Residential Loft Leasing Info

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Way back in 2014 we talked to the L.A. Times about our company’s 75th anniversary and what we had up our sleeves for the future. That’s when many of you first learned of our project located at Wilson and Maryland Avenues in the heart of Glendale. How time flies! We’re happy to report the Laemmle Glendale is expected to open in time for the holidays in late 2017!

Yes, seeing is believing, so we submit this short time-lapse of the “LAEMMLE” sign installation on our building:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCpDuAkhhOg

If just visiting a Laemmle theater isn’t enough for you, how about living atop one? Lease applications are now being accepted for the 42 luxury lofts above the theater. Visit lloftsglendale.com for more information. The ‘L’ is for LAEMMLE!

For updates, follow @LaemmleGlendale on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Admittedly, there’s not much to look at right now… but there will be soon!

Food Historian Linda Civitello on Terence Davies’ New Emily Dickinson Bio-Pic A QUIET PASSION.

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The following post is by food historian Linda Civitello:

Terence Davies’ masterpiece, A Quiet Passion, has a scene where Emily Dickinson bakes bread and later is informed that it won a prize. This is true. In 1856, Dickinson’s Brown Bread won second prize at a local fair. One of the judges was her sister Lavinia—“Vinnie”—played by Jennifer Ehle, who was Elizabeth Bennet in the mini-series Pride and Prejudice, and the miscalculating intelligence agent in Zero Dark Thirty. Dickinson’s prize-winning bread was made from rye and cornmeal because wheat did not grow well in New England. The bread, like New Englanders such as Dickinson’s father, played by Keith Carradine, was solid with a thick, hard crust; leftovers were used to scrub walls. This staple bread nourished New Englanders until the end of the 19th century.

Emily Dickinson also nourished herself with language: “He ate and drank the precious words, / His spirit grew robust.” Hunger and thirst are recurring metaphors that reflect Dickinson’s profound loneliness and awareness of her position on the fringes of society. Often, she is nose-pressed-against-the-glass observing others at the banquet of life while she gets only crumbs: “God gave a Loaf to every Bird— / But just a Crumb—to Me—”. She also takes a sour grapes attitude toward society and belonging, and especially toward success: “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate.” However, hope is not just “the thing with feathers,” but “Hope is a subtle glutton,” too.

Although Dickinson’s poetry uses food metaphorically, almost one-third of her letters—approximately 300—deal with real food. Even if Dickinson did not leave the house, she sent her desserts out into the world. Children were delighted when she lowered a basket of little oval loaves of gingerbread out the window. Dickinson’s delicious “Cocoanut” Cake—that was the spelling at the time—is a modern pound cake. What makes it modern is that it is leavened with saleratus (aka baking soda) and cream of tartar, an early baking powder. What makes it Emily’s is that on the back of the recipe, she wrote a poem, “The Things that never can come back, are several.”

Cynthia Nixon’s penetrating Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion is the polar opposite of Julie Harris’s tremulous, teary hostess serving Black Cake—a spice cake loaded with raisins—to visitors in the 1976 play The Belle of Amherst. In A Quiet Passion, Davies cannot show Dickinson baking bread or making cake with real-life frequency. What Davies does do is capture the essence of Dickinson’s complex persona and life. Davies’ genius shows Dickinson’s genius: her intensity, her originality, her gift—and his—for bringing forth a universe of poetry and beauty where others see only the mundane, or cannot bear to look at all.

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Linda Civitello is a food historian. She is the author of Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight That Revolutionized Cooking, and the award-winning Cuisine & Culture: a History of Food and People. She will be speaking about Emily Dickinson and food later this year at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts.

To learn more about Emily Dickinson:

Emily Dickinson is the author chosen for the weeks-long 2017 Los Angeles “Big Read” program. On Saturday, April 29, the Washington Irving Library, 4117 Washington Boulevard, will host a Poets’ Panel, open mic reading, and a poetry workshop on Dickinson. Linda Civitello will speak briefly about Dickinson, and present desserts she made using Dickinson’s recipes and heirloom flour.

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Introduction and Notes by Rachel Wetzsteon. The hundreds of poems in this collection are organized thematically: Life, Nature, Love, Time and Eternity, The Single Hound.

For children: Emily Dickinson  in the Poetry for Young People series edited by Frances Schoonmaker Bolin, illustrated by Chi Chung, from Sterling Children’s Books.

The Dickinson letters: http://www.emilydickinson.org/

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is the pioneering 1979 book of feminist literary criticism by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The lengthy final essay is on Emily Dickinson. The book’s title is an allusion to one of the writers Dickinson admired, Charlotte Brontë. The poem that Dickinson wrote when Bronte died ends, “Oh, what an afternoon for heaven, / When Brontë entered there!”

Sandra M. Gilbert is also a poet. Her homage to Dickinson is in the title poem in her poetry collection Emily’s Bread, and in the final section and final poem, both entitled “The Emily Dickinson Black Cake Walk.”

Miss Emily. This 2015 novel by the award-winning Irish writer Nuala O’Connor is an intimate fictional portrait of daily life in the Dickinson household. Told in the first person, it shifts back and forth between Emily and the family’s Irish maid, Ada.

The American Frugal Housewife by Lydia Maria Child. This cookbook, first published in 1832, was used in the Dickinson household.

The Emily Dickinson Museum: https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/

 

45th Anniversary Screening of THE RULING CLASS with Director Peter Medak in Person April 25th in West LA.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a 45th anniversary screening of THE RULING CLASS starring Peter O’Toole followed by a Q&A with director Peter Medak on Tuesday, April 25th at 7 PM at the Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles. Presented on DVD. Click here for tickets.

This biting black comedy, in the tradition of such British classics as Kind Hearts and Coronets, focuses on a fierce battle for succession within an aristocratic family. Peter O’Toole plays a paranoid schizophrenic nobleman who believes himself to be Jesus Christ. When he is elevated to a top position, his relatives scheme to have him declared insane. O’Toole called the film, adapted from Peter Barnes’ play, “a comedy with tragic relief.” In addition to O’Toole, who earned an Oscar nomination for his vibrant performance, the cast of superb British thespians includes Alastair Sim, Arthur Lowe, Harry Andrews, Coral Browne, and Caroline Seymour.


Leonard Maltin called the film a “hilarious, irreverent black comedy…overflowing with crazy ideas, people bursting into song, boisterously funny characterizations, and one-and-only Sim as befuddled bishop.” Time magazine’s Jay Cocks had high praise for the film’s star: “Funny, disturbing, finally devastating, O’Toole finds his way into the workings of madness.” Over the years since its release, the film has turned into a cult classic.

Peter Medak directed such films as Negatives with Glenda Jackson, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg with Alan Bates and Janet Suzman, The Changeling with George C. Scott, the popular spoof, Zorro: The Gay Blade, and two acclaimed British crime stories, The Krays and Let Him Have It.

For more about our Anniversary Classics Series, visit www.laemmle.com/ac and join our Facebook Group.

Our New Twofer Tuesday Series Begins April 4th with a Double Dose of Bette Davis

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present Twofer Tuesdays, a classic movie double bill that will screen on the first Tuesday of each month as a recurring event at three Laemmle locations.

Our first attraction celebrates Hollywood legend Bette Davis in one of her most beloved roles, NOW, VOYAGER (1942), on its 75 th anniversary. As a bonus feature, we are pairing it with MARKED WOMAN (1937; 80th anniversary) starring Davis and Humphrey Bogart. Both movies will show as a double feature (two movies, one admission price) at the Ahrya Fine Arts in Beverly Hills, NoHo 7 in North Hollywood, and Playhouse 7 in Pasadena.

Click here to buy tickets to the 5PM show of MARKED WOMAN, admission to the 7:15pm NOW, VOYAGER is included. Click here to get tickets to the 7:15PM show of  NOW, VOYAGER, admission to the 9:45pm MARKED WOMAN is included.

NOW, VOYAGER is considered a consummate “woman’s film,” a genre that was Davis’ forte in her heyday in Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930s and 40s, an era that she ruled as a top box office star.

The plush melodrama, based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty (author of “Stella Dallas,” another classic tale of a self-sacrificing, independent woman), was adapted by Casey Robinson (Dark Victory) and directed by Irving Rapper (Deception).

The film was nominated for 3 Academy Awards, including Davis as Best Actress as a repressed spinster who emerges from her shell in one of the screen’s most dramatic makeovers.

Co-starring Paul Henreid as her suave romantic partner, Oscar nominee Gladys Cooper (Supporting Actress) as her domineering mother and Claude Rains (one of Davis’ favorite actors), as a paternal psychiatrist; the film was a huge commercial hit, the biggest box office success for Davis in that period.

In “The Essentials: 52 Must-See Movies and Why They Matter,” author Jeremy Arnold calls it “a movie that has stood the test of time for its high entertainment value, romanticism, and subversive theme of female empowerment.”

Featuring a lushly romantic Oscar-winning score by Max Steiner, and with one of the most memorable closing lines in movie history, Now, Voyager was added to the National Film Registry in 2007.

Our bonus feature, MARKED WOMAN stars Davis as a nightclub “hostess” who becomes the target of a vengeful mobster (Eduardo Ciannelli), who in turn is prosecuted by a crusading district attorney (Humphrey Bogart). Co-written by Robert Rossen (All the King’s Men, The Hustler) and Abem Finkel (Jezebel, Sergeant York), and directed by Lloyd Bacon (42 nd Street), the movie is notable for its “torn from the headlines” realism that characterized Warner Bros. style in the 1930s.

Because of the censorious Production Code, the brothel employing Davis’ character was disguised as a clip joint. Davis’ assured performance and the film’s success contributed to her rise as queen of the Warner’s lot, a position she held for the next decade.

The Twofer Tuesdays double feature of NOW, VOYAGER and MARKED WOMAN plays April 4 at three locations: Ahrya Fine Arts, NoHo 7, and Pasadena Playhouse 7. Special Introduction by film historian Jeremy Arnold at the Ahrya Fine Arts only.

NOW, VOYAGER plays at 7:15 pm; MARKED WOMAN at 5:00 pm and 9:45 pm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyryB44kq64