present Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror on November 24
present John Cassavetes’s Gloria on December 10
presents Yasuzo Masumura’s Manji on October 29
New York, NY (October 20, 2015) – The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today details for upcoming events in Print Screen, a recurring series bridging the worlds of cinema and literature where authors present films that complement and inspire their work, followed by discussions and book signings.
On the occasion of the publication of her latest collection of essays, The Quarry (out November 10 from New Directions), poet Susan Howe joins us November 24 to present a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterful meditation on memory, The Mirror, followed by a discussion and book signing. The final Print Screen event of the season on December 10 features author Garth Risk Hallberg, who will discuss his widely acclaimed, gritty 1970s New York–set novel City on Fire alongside a screening of John Cassavetes’s dreamy crime-thriller/fantasy Gloria.
Also upcoming is the previously announced evening with Delicious Foods author James Hannaham, who will present Yasuzo Masumura’s rare 1964 feature film Manji on October 29. The screening will be followed by a discussion and book signing and is co-presented with Japan Foundation New York. The Print Screen series is organized by Rachael Rakes and Dennis Lim.
Print Screen tickets are $18; $13 for members, students, and seniors (62+). The Susan Howe event will go on sale October 29; the Garth Risk Hallberg event will go on sale November 24. Visit filmlinc.org for more information.
Discussion with James Hannaham and screening of Manji
“Harrowing . . . Hannaham details a cycle of despair and enslavement in the poverty-ridden South . . . What emerges is the powerful tale of a place whose past is ‘a ditch so deep with bodies it could pass for a starless night.’”―The New Yorker
“A writer of major importance . . . Moments of deft lyricism are Hannaham’s greatest strength, and those touches of beauty and intuitive metaphor make the novel’s difficult subject matter easier to bear… The novel’s finest moments are . . . in the singular way that Hannaham can make the commonplace spring to life with nothing more than astute observations and precise language.”―Ted Genoways, The New York Times Book Review
James Hannaham is the author of the novel God Says No, which was honored by the American Library Association. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute.
Manji
Yasuzo Masumura, Japan, 1964, 35mm, 92m
Japanese with English subtitles
The bored housewife of a passionless lawyer, Sonoko (Kyoko Kishida), enrolls in a women’s art school and develops a friendship with Mitsuko (Ayako Wakao), the school’s reigning beauty, setting the stage for an intersecting, bisexual love affair between wealthy residents of Osaka. Japanese New Wave iconoclast Yasuzo Masumura rendered this lurid melodrama, based on the novel by Junichiro Tanizaki, with a liberating intensity that rebelled against Japanese social norms of the time. Exquisitely lensed by Setsuo Kobayashi (Fires on the Plain),Manji traces decadent sexuality across nude bodies that are never fully exposed, and sharp close-ups of bare skin and uncovered napes are captured through furtive glances, suggesting tactile beauty by way of material minutiae. Print courtesy of Japan Foundation New York.
“Yasuzo Masumura’s sensibility, and its mixture of meticulous work, elegance, and sleaze, first captured my attention when I saw Giants and Toys (1958), a satire about two candy companies battling for PR dominance in progress-mad Japan. I expected a similar tone from Manji (1964), but I got instead an intense, almost campy, over-the-top love rhombus. The film handles the gay relationship without judgment, self-consciousness, or even politics—unheard of for movies of the time. Masumura studied in Italy with Antonioni, Fellini, and Visconti; accordingly, his movies are eye-poppingly beautiful spectacles of light and shadow, especially this one. The film’s sumptuous allure creates a wonderful tension with its lurid story, one that seems at times a powerful metaphor for Japan’s postwar seduction by and submission to Western culture. The filmmakers and artists I find most inspiring are those who successfully combine intellect, beauty, humor, and unabashed vulgarity—Luis Buñuel, Pedro Almodóvar, Kara Walker, John Waters, Jean Genet. Masumura has this kind of scope; I aspire to his level of eloquent shamelessness.”—James Hannaham
Thursday, October 29, 7:00pm (Post-screening discussion and book signing with James Hannaham)
“Howe’s brilliant, idiosyncratic essay is—like much of her work—a combination of fierce rigor and deep generosity. Howe unlocks.”—Ben Lerner
One of the preeminent poets of her generation, Susan Howe is known for innovative verse that crosses genres and disciplines in its theoretical underpinnings and approach to history. Layered and allusive, her work draws on her Irish roots and early American history weaving quotation and image into poems that often revise standard typography. Howe has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including most recently the 2010 Bollingen Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She taught for many years at the State University of New York-Buffalo, where she held the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities.
The Mirror / Zerkalo
Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1975, 35mm, 108m
Russian and Spanish with English subtitles
Andrei Tarkovsky’s fourth feature is perhaps the great director’s most personal and evocative work. It traverses three generations of a poet’s family in 20th-century Russia; his relationships with his wife, mother, and children, and the society around him coalesce through events connected only by the interior logic of the poetic subconscious, yielding associations that both mystify and enthrall. Unified by Georgi Rerberg’s delicate lensing, The Mirror radically shifts in both texture and color, abstracting elemental happenings from the minutiae of everyday life (the way that waves of air spread across a field or that spilled milk pools on a table), and instilling in us the enigmatic sense of being outside space and time—recalling the nostalgic sensations of memory through our seamless immersion into those of another.
“One could say Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror is preeminently a poet’s film or a documentary poem. It has an extra and terrible reverberation for me because my childhood was profoundly marked by the Second World War and the longing I felt for my absent father who was serving in ‘The European Theatre of War’ during those years coupled with fear for my mother’s family across the ocean we couldn’t cross. The way Tarkovsky measures out his life not with T.S. Eliot’s coffee spoons but by way of screen memories and dreams including central sequences of documentary newsreel footage enthralls me. The timelessness of this great film of mirrored memory seems profoundly moving today as we see all the current images of refugees, so many of them children, endlessly walking, adrift, some drowning, dying of exhaustion; people crowded into railroad cars, or herded into buses in a seemingly endless progression across national borders now toward Spain, toward Germany as if history moves in an immense ironic circle. Is repetition a law? All of us are on the seashore now. ‘Drum roll percussion echo reverberation.’”—Susan Howe
Tuesday, November 24, 7:00pm (Post-screening discussion and book signing with Susan Howe)
“City on Fire is a big, stunning first novel and an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s with bravura swagger and style and heart . . . A novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power—a novel that attests to its young author’s boundless and unflagging talents.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“A soaring debut . . . Over the course of Hallberg’s magisterial epic, distinctions of class, race, geography, and generation give way to an impression of the human condition that is both ambitious and sublime.”—Lauren Christensen, Vanity Fair
Garth Risk Hallberg was born in Louisiana and grew up in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Best New American Voices 2008, and, most frequently, the online literary magazine The Millions; a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was published in 2007. He lives in New York with his wife and children.
Gloria
John Cassavetes, USA, 1980, 35mm, 123m
Gena Rowlands plays the titular ex-moll in Cassavetes’s crime-thriller/fantasy, dreamily enhanced by Bill Conti’s jazz score and Taxi Driver D.P. Fred Schuler’s cinematography. Unfortunate happenstance pairs Gloria with a 6-year-old boy (John Adames) after his family is murdered by the Mafia, and the odd couple takes to the New York City streets, fleeing an interminable succession of gangsters. Despite Cassavetes’ initial reluctance to direct the screenplay, he accents the melodramatic plot with a poetic affection for his displaced characters. Rowlands’s hard-talking, gun-toting performance, a display of virtuosic range, earned her a second Oscar nomination for Best Actress (after A Woman Under the Influence).
“A novelist whose subject is New York in the ’70s has a wealth of cinematic sources at his disposal, from Mean Streets to Manhattan. And for the thrills it coaxes from the ruined city streets, John Cassavetes’ Gloria certainly belongs in that exalted company. But it was Cassavetes’ peculiar formal genius, and the mirroring genius of Gena Rowlands—the explosive sense that anything might happen—that I found the most illuminating as I tried to capture that time when ‘everything was on the verge.’ Fire up the popcorn and dim the lights: research has never been so fun.”—Garth Risk Hallberg
Thursday, December 10, 6:30pm (Post-screening discussion and book signing with Garth Risk Hallberg)
ABOUT FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility, and understanding of the moving image. The Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year’s most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment magazine, the Film Society recognizes an artist’s unique achievement in film with the prestigious Chaplin Award, whose 2015 recipient was Robert Redford. The Film Society’s state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year-round programs and the New York City film community.
The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from American Airlines, The New York Times, HBO, Stella Artois, The Kobal Collection, Variety, Trump International Hotel and Tower, RowNYC, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. For more information, visit www.filmlinc.org and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.
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