R.I.P. Aretha Franklin (1942-2018)

Celebrate Madonna’s 60th birthday tomorrow with one of the most iconic American independent films, Slacker, playing at 8:30pm in 35mm. Richard Linklater’s debut film maps Austin by ambling from vignette to vignette, encountering all manner of eccentrics, dropouts, and armchair philosophers along the way.

Prepare to be terrified. 🔪 New York's top horror festival, Scary Movies, returns this Friday for a wicked week of hair-raising premieres and rediscoveries. The blood-filled fun begins on opening night with the zombie Christmas musical horror Anna and the Apocalypse followed by a festive afterparty, with more horror all weekend long. 😱 Schedule + 🎟, including a discount package, available at the link in bio.

Next weekend at our annual Scary Movies festival, the retrospective sidebar “Tainted Waters” features a quartet of 35mm titles whose horrors take place above or below the surface, or sometimes come creeping onto the land. 🌊

The lineup includes Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, and Billy Zane in Dead Calm, the ultimate in edge-of-your-seat suspense; the Nazi zombie flick Shock Waves; Stuart Gordon’s terrifying H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Dagon; and more! See more & save with a discount package at the link in bio.

Our volunteer call for the 56th #NYFF is now open! Also, this Monday is the last day to apply for Press & Industry accreditation. See more details about both applications—and how to submit—at the menu in the link in bio. [📸: Kim Min-hee in Hong Sangsoo’s Main Slate selection Grass]

Produced by David Lynch, Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (playing Sunday at 6:30pm) is a vampire movie of the most idiosyncratic sort—Bram Stoker by way of Breton. Staged primarily in modern Manhattan, the film offers a wry update of the old Universal picture Dracula’s Daughter (beloved in some circles for its sapphic subtext). The eponymous, undead protagonist, a glamorous Transylvanian expat (Elina Löwensohn), must journey to a land she has never seen—Brooklyn—to reunite with her estranged sibling in the wake of their father’s death, consumed all the while by a new love, and tailed by vampire hunter Van Helsing (a tweedy turn for Peter Fonda). As elsewhere, Almereyda puts the little PXL 2000 to work, using the contraption’s ethereal imagery to punctuate the stylish black and white cinematography throughout, further amplifying Nadja’s otherworldly undertones.

The rarely-screened work of trailblazing feminist filmmaker Germaine Dulac will be presented August 24-30! Tickets now on sale, including discount packages. Dulac was a feminist and socialist artist and thinker of the 1920s and ’30s whose bold experimentation helped legitimize cinema as an art form that would be on the same footing as painting, dance, theater, and music. Best known for The Seashell and the Clergyman, her 1927 collaboration with Antonin Artaud, Dulac straddled the worlds of commercial and experimental cinema, playing with narration, montage, and visual effects, and making the case, in both films and writing, for a “Pure Cinema” approach that took full advantage of the medium’s unique properties. For her, only cinema was up to the task of capturing the spirit of a generation scarred by World War I, who were emancipated by the new freedoms of the 1920s, and whose daily lives had been shaped irreversibly by industrialization and social and cultural modernity. The Film Society is pleased to present a survey of work by this pioneering figure of French avant-garde and queer cinema.

Michael Almereyda on his experience with Pixelvision.
See his boundary-pushing work, alongside films from Sadie Benning + more, starting this Friday during our Pixelvision series. On Monday at 7pm, join Almereyda, Ben Coonley, and Cecilia Dougherty for a free talk about their intimate experiments with these temperamental toy cameras.

“I live with this movie every day of my life." - Martin Scorsese on Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, which returns for a six-day run starting this Friday! With fastidious attention to period detail in his Palme d'Or winner, Visconti evokes a gilded world fading into oblivion, his camera gliding over baroque palazzos, magnificent banquets, and ornate ceremonies. It all culminates in a majestic, dusk-to-dawn ball sequence that is as poignant as it is breathtaking.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s medieval-set masterpiece Andrei Rublev endures as a film unlike any other—a richly shot, elliptical meditation on representation and vision, as well as a profound testament to art made under a repressive regime. A new restoration from Janus Films opens exclusively at the Film Society of Lincoln Center starting August 24. Tickets now on sale at the link in bio.

The Main Slate selections for the 56th #NYFF have been announced, featuring 30 films from 22 countries! See the full lineup at the link in bio, including new films from Olivier Assayas, Bi Gan, Richard Billingham, Joel & Ethan Coen, Paul Dano, Claire Denis, Louis Garrel, Jean-Luc Godard, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Hong Sangsoo, Christophe Honoré, Barry Jenkins, Tamara Jenkins, Jia Zhangke, Ulrich Köhler, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Lee Chang-dong, Mariano Llinás, Jafar Panahi, Paweł Pawlikowski, Alex Ross Perry, Christian Petzold, Alice Rohrwacher, Dominga Sotomayor, Frederick Wiseman, and Ying Liang. Secure your seats today with a Festival Pass.

What strange deceptions lurk beneath the placid veneer of the average Japanese family? Playing Tuesday at 6:45pm in 35mm, horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s unexpected—but wholly rewarding—foray into family melodrama-cum-black comedy Tokyo Sonata quivers with an undercurrent of dread. The elegant long shots of Akiko Ashizawa toy with the meticulous framings of Ozu as Kurosawa guides the film through a series of increasingly audacious tonal shifts.

Michael Almereyda: "The pixel camera practically forces you to be reckless and original. If you're shooting something at a distance, with a crowded background, detail goes out of the window; you might as well be using a bank camera. So it's necessary to compose shots with an eye towards compressed space, to stage action with an awareness of how silhouettes register and relate to one another, and to favor close-ups, which the camera delivers with startling detail." See his expressive, boundary-pushing Pixelvision films starting this Friday during our series + join the filmmaker for a free talk next Monday at 7pm. Save with a discount package or pass at filmlinc.org/pixelvision

Wim Wenders’s Pina sets the standard against which all future uses of 3D to record performance will be measured. Playing at 2pm tomorrow + Tuesday—in 3D, of course! Wenders began planning this project with legendary choreographer Pina Bausch in the months before her untimely death, selecting the pieces to be filmed and discussing the filmmaking strategy. Impressed by recent innovations in 3D, Wenders decided to experiment with the format for this tribute to Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal. Not only are the beauty and sheer exhilaration of the dances and dancers powerfully rendered by Hélène Louvart and Jörg Widmer’s lensing, but the film also captures the sense of the world that Bausch so brilliantly expressed in all her pieces. Longtime members of the Tanztheater recreate many of their original roles in such seminal works as “Café Müller,” “Le Sacre du Printemps,” and “Kontakthof.” 💃 🕺🏼

56 days until the 56th #NYFF! Stay tuned for our Main Slate announcement this Tuesday. 🎥

Secure your seats today with a Festival Pass, available at the link in bio.

This month at the Film Society of Lincoln Center: The Female Gaze continues, Scary Movies is back, we present the experimental films of Pixelvision, Visconti returns, the trailblazing artistry of early queer filmmaker Germaine Dulac gets the spotlight, plus Andrei Rublev restored, new releases, and more! Pick up our August 2018 calendar in theaters now or explore at filmlinc.org/calendar 📅 [Pictured: Monica Bellucci in Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders, playing this Friday and August 8 in The Female Gaze.]

Julian Schnabel's luminous drama At Eternity's Gate, featuring a shattering performance by Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh, will make its North American premiere as the Closing Night selection of the 56th #NYFF! Dafoe stars alongside Oscar Isaac as Gauguin, Rupert Friend as Theo, Mathieu Amalric as Dr. Gachet, Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, and Mads Mikkelsen as The Priest. "At Eternity’s Gate is such a surprising film, for all kinds of reasons. Julian Schnabel makes use of the most up-to-date information about Vincent van Gogh, altering our accepted ideas of how he lived and died; he grounds the film in the very action of painting, the intense contact between an artist and the world of forms and textures colored by light; and he gives us Willem Dafoe’s performance as Vincent—acting this pure is endlessly surprising," said New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones. Secure your seat with a Festival Pass before they sell out! See more details and purchase at filmlinc.org/nyff

“Please let me keep this memory, just this one.” In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, playing in a pristine 35mm print this Wednesday and Saturday, the feverish imaginations of DIY surrealist Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman kick into overdrive for the great gonzo sci-fi romance of the early 2000s. The high-contrast handheld camerawork of Ellen Kuras enhances the whiplash sense of disorientation in what is, ultimately, a heart-wounding parable about the ways in which we inevitably hurt those we love most.

One of the most enduringly powerful records of a historical event in all of cinema, Gimme Shelter is a searing real-time chronicle of the death of ’60s idealism. This Tuesday (tomorrow) at 7:30pm, join us for a special screening + panel with the film's crew, featuring cinematographer Joan Churchill, producer Porter Bibb, editor Mirra Bank, and Judy Maysles. Presented by Saul Austerlitz, whose new book Just a Shot Away explores Altamont and its legacy.

A landmark of feminist art, Chantal Akerman’s minimalist masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is both a monumental and microscopic view of three days in the life of a fastidious Belgian single mother. The rigorous, relentlessly impassive gaze of Babette Mangolte’s camera is transfixing but, in the words of the director, “never voyeuristic." Playing tomorrow at 3:15pm and this Saturday at 1pm. The Female Gaze also features Mangolte’s structuralist auto-portrait The Camera: Je or La Camera: I, playing next Monday.

"Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it's passing, to be in the moment. It's the hardest thing to do. You're either in the unknown future that you're working toward, or you're in the past that becomes a little abstract." - Richard Linklater, born on this day. Pictured with cinematographer Lee Daniel on the set of Slacker, screening during our Pixelvision series on August 16.

Christian Bale and Todd Haynes in a promotional shoot for Velvet Goldmine. Playing tonight at 8:30pm in 35mm and shot by cinematographer Maryse Alberti, the David Bowie-inspired film is one of the most visually thrilling music movies of the 1990s.

“Cinematography is much more than a job, a craft or your artistic expression; it’s a way of life.” – Natasha Braier

The cinematographer will give Q&As after her sleek, kaleidoscopically stylized The Neon Demon tonight at 8pm and her strikingly beautiful The Milk of Sorrow tomorrow at 3:30pm.

Made for the kids. Used by the avant-garde. Our Pixelvision series, starting August 10, looks back on a curious, fertile episode of media history. Though it failed as a plaything, Pixelvision was taken up by a range of experimental auteurs drawn to its distinctive—grainy, spectral, colorless—textures, including Michael Almereyda, who made several feature-length projects with the toy; and a teenage Sadie Benning, who got one for Christmas from Benning’s filmmaker father James in 1988, and used it to create intimate studies of burgeoning queer identity. Film Society’s survey showcases efforts by Almereyda and Benning, as well as Peggy Ahwesh, Cecilia Dougherty, Joe Gibbons, and Eric Saks, among others. Tickets now on sale, including discount packages, at the link in bio or filmlinc.org/pixelvision 📹

“Sometimes I am gazing, sometimes I am moving, sometimes I am swooning with discovery, always I am searching.” – Kirsten Johnson. Her essential self-portrait Cameraperson plays tonight at 6:30pm at The Female Gaze, followed by Derrida at 8:45pm, which finds her capturing a postmodern intellectual rockstar.

‪“I had the feeling of being in harmony with them. You could say it was a dance.” - cinematographer Agnès Godard on capturing male bodies in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, the sold-out opening night film of The Female Gaze. She’ll return Saturday for The Intruder + a free talk! #FilmLivesHere 🎥

"When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films." - Chantal Akerman

During The Female Gaze, see her minimalist, monumental masterpiece Jeanne Dielman (Jul. 31 & Aug. 4), shot by Babette Mangolte, whose visionary The Camera: Je or La Camera: I is also part of the series, playing on Aug. 6. Akerman's hypnotic exploration of erotic obsession La captive plays this Sunday, shot by Sabine Lancelin, who also brought crisp chiaroscuro compositions to Manoel de Oliveira’s sly, metaphysical romance The Strange Case of Angelica, playing this Friday and on Aug. 1. See them all and save with a discount package at the link in bio.

"The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good." - Stanley Kubrick, born 90 years ago today. Pictured on the set of The Shining.

Our record-breaking Luchino Visconti retrospective will return again next month, featuring his symphony of decadence The Damned and daily screenings of his sweeping Palme d’Or winner The Leopard! 🇮🇹 August 10-15. Tickets on sale now at filmlinc.org/visconti

The Female Gaze, our two-week series celebrating female cinematographers, begins tomorrow with a Claire Denis-Agnès Godard double feature: Beau Travail and 35 Shots of Rum–both in 35mm! Ticket holders are invited to a pre-reception starting at 6pm + Godard will be in person for a Q&A at Beau Travail. Save with a discount package at the link in bio.

Among the greatest music docs ever made, the Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s vérité classic Gimme Shelter indelibly captures the Rolling Stones in 1969 on the road to one of the most infamous events in rock and roll history: the Altamont Free Concert. In one week, join cinematographer Joan Churchill, producer Porter Bibb, editor Mirra Bank, and Judy Maysles for a special event featuring a screening and panel. Presented by author Saul Austerlitz on the occasion of the publication of his new book, Just a Shot Away: Peace, Love, and Tragedy with the Rolling Stones at Altamont. Preceded by Sam Green's short Lot 63, Grave C. Tickets now available at the link in bio or filmlinc.org/gimmeshelter 🎸

"One of the joys of this series is to realize how many women have shot footage that I've loved. To make that explicit at this point in time feels really useful." – veteran cinematographer and Cameraperson director Kirsten Johnson on The Female Gaze, speaking to AP. Our two-week series starts this week, kicking off with films from Johnson, Claire Denis, Lucrecia Martel, Nicolas Winding Refn, Jacques Rivette, and more! This Saturday at 6:30pm, don't miss a free hour-long conversation with cinematographers Natasha Braier, Ashley Connor, Agnès Godard, and Joan Churchill as they discuss the series and reflect on their careers and influences, and how they approach their craft.

See the full schedule and reserve a discount package at the link in bio. MoviePass also accepted at all screenings!

Yorgos Lanthimos’s wildly intricate and very darkly funny The Favourite, starring Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, and Olivia Colman, is the Opening Night selection of the 56th #NYFF! “The Favourite is a lot of things at once, each of them perfectly meshed: a historical epic; a visual feast; a wild, wild ride; a formidable display of the art of acting from Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, and Olivia Colman, abetted by a brilliant cast; a tour de force from Yorgos Lanthimos. And… it’s a blast. We’re very excited to have it as our opening night film," said New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones. Secure your seat with a Festival Pass before they sell out! See more details and purchase at filmlinc.org/nyff

"To me, romantic means you follow your heart more than your mind." - Wong Kar-wai, who turns 60 today. Pictured with Maggie Cheung on the set of In the Mood for Love.

Here’s some Alain Delon to help you get through the week. #mondaymotivation

Photographed by Patrice Habans in between shooting The Leopard, which plays this Tuesday and Thursday during our Visconti encore screenings. Full schedule at the link in bio, including The Damned, Rocco and His Brothers, Sandra, and more.

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

"No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” - Ingmar Bergman, born 100 years ago today. Pictured on the set of The Seventh Seal.

This year, Mudbound DP Rachel Morrison made history as the first woman nominated for the Best Cinematography Oscar, a triumph that also underscored the troubling issue of gender inequality in the film industry. Few jobs on a movie set have been as historically closed to women as that of cinematographer—the persistence of the term “cameraman” says it all. Despite this lack of representation, trailblazing women have left their mark on the field through extraordinary artistry and profound vision. As seen through their eyes, films by directors like Claire Denis, Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman, Ryan Coogler, and Lucrecia Martel are immeasurably richer, deeper, and more wondrous. Featuring in-person appearances, our international two-week series The Female Gaze (July 26-August 9) spotlights the amazing work of such accomplished female cinematographers as Agnès Godard, Natasha Braier, Kirsten Johnson, Joan Churchill, Maryse Alberti, Ellen Kuras, and Babette Mangolte, while also posing the question: is there such a thing as the “Female Gaze” at all? Tickets are now on sale at the link in bio, include discount packages.

“Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.” - Roger Ebert

Starting Friday, experience all 10 of their collaborations on the big screen with every screening in 35mm or 16mm. 💃 🕺🏼

Fred Astaire, photographed by Cecil Beaton. 📸

Fred & Ginger, a 10-film complete retrospective, starts Friday and Love, Cecil is now playing!

Few artists have as diverse a background as Ryuichi Sakamoto—composer, performer, producer, and environmentalist. Go on a personal journey through his life + career in the acclaimed Coda, now playing daily at 12:30, 2:30, 4:45, 7, and 9:30. MoviePass accepted at all screenings!

Our record-breaking Visconti retrospective returns next week with encore screenings of The Leopard, The Damned, Rocco and His Brothers, Sandra, and more! Nearly all Visconti screenings sold out last month, so we encourage to reserve your seats in advance. Full schedule + tickets available at filmlinc.org/visconti 🇮🇹

"Art has to be severe. It cannot be commercial. It cannot be for the producer or even for the public. It has to be for oneself." - Vittorio De Sica, born on this day. Pictured on the set of Marriage Italian Style with Sophia Loren.