The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced its full lineup of repertory programs and festivals for the 2017 summer/fall season, featuring the tenth edition of Scary Movies; retrospectives of Jane Campion, Yvonne Rainer, and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma; a survey of 1977’s extraordinary cinematic output; and, in conjunction with the release of Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama at FSLC, a series of inspirations programmed by the French director.

Scary Movies 10
July 14-20

New York’s top horror festival—bringing you the genre’s best from around the globe—is back with a vengeance. This year’s tenth anniversary edition offers an exhilarating week of terrifying shockers, featuring a host of hair-raising premieres and rediscoveries, guest appearances, and giveaways. Occultism, zombie action, home invasions, survival thrillers, Victorian-era slashers, and creepy clowns are all on tap, in addition to films that play on the very human fears associated with sexual desire and motherhood.

Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer
July 21-27

When she completed her first feature in 1972, Yvonne Rainer, a founding member of the avant-garde Judson Dance Theater, was already established as a key choreographer of her generation; her contributions to filmmaking, surveyed in this comprehensive retrospective, would prove just as radical. Rainer’s cinema signaled new directions for film language, retooling narrative generally and melodrama specifically with a disjunctive audiovisual syntax, restless political intelligence, deft appropriation, and deadpan wit. Here questions of form raise, rather than diminish, the emotional stakes. “I remember that movie,” reads an intertitle from Lives of Performers, echoed across Rainer’s filmography: “It’s about all these small betrayals, isn’t it?” Complementing the lineup, as context and counterpoint, are works that feature Rainer as subject or actor, as well as those that influenced her and selections from her fellow travelers in the burgeoning feminist film movement of the 1970s.

Shot by Carlo Di Palma, from Rome to New York
July 28-Aug 3

Among the most lauded and influential of cinematographers, the late Carlo Di Palma got his start as a camera operator for Vittorio De Sica and Gillo Pontecorvo and made his mark through collaborations with Bernardo Bertolucci, Ettore Scola, and, most crucially, Michelangelo Antonioni. Having inspired a generation of lensers with his work on such seminal sixties films as Red Desert and Blow-Up, he later forged a comparably rich partnership starting in the 1980s with Woody Allen on some of his most beloved films (Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Husbands and Wives). On the occasion of the Film Society’s theatrical run of a new documentary on the influential DP, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life (directed by Fariborz Kamkari and produced by Di Palma’s wife, Adriana Chiesa), we revisit an assortment of rarities and masterworks that display the cinematographic richness of Di Palma’s career.

Red Desert

 

’77
August 4-24

Forty years ago this summer, the Son of Sam killer wreaked havoc, New York experienced a city-wide blackout, Elvis was found dead—and the American box office was having a stratospheric moment. Buoyed by the astonishing success of George Lucas’s behemoth Star Wars, 1977 boasted “the best summer in years at the movie box office,” according to Variety. Of course, there was much more to cinema ’77 than that industry-changing space opera, which officially cemented the idea of the summer blockbuster following the runaway success of Jaws two years earlier. From disco (Saturday Night Fever) to punk (Jubilee); from cult horrors in the making (Eraserhead, Suspiria, Hausu) to ambitious auteur projects (New York, New York; Sorcerer); from works of idiosyncratic artistry (Opening Night, 3 Women, That Obscure Object of Desire) to runaway Hollywood crowd-pleasers (Smokey and the Bandit, Airport ’77), our international survey of films that year from around the world celebrates a diverse—and wildly enjoyable—cinematic landscape.

Deeper Into Nocturama
August 18-24

One of the year’s most acclaimed and provocative films, Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama doesn’t just confirm its director’s astonishing command of his medium and his willingness to take audacious risks to explore and understand our endlessly complicated present—it is also unmistakably the work of a consummate, learned cinephile. To lend cinematic context to Nocturama on the occasion of its theatrical run at the Film Society this August, Bonello has selected an assortment of works that were on his mind while crafting his masterful new film. Including such titles as Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably, John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, this series illuminates the rich lineages to which Nocturama belongs: metaphysical masterpieces, hangout films, politically charged genre pictures, works that induce chills and profound reflection in equal measure.

Jane Campion
Sep 8-17

Since her indelible 1989 debut feature Sweetie, New Zealand–born Jane Campion has been one of the most distinctive talents in world cinema. The first woman awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes—for her Oscar-winning 1993 feature The Piano—Campion makes films that reflect a highly personal and idiosyncratic style, influenced by her background in anthropology and painting, and notable for their visual inventiveness, dark sense of humor, and complex depictions of women and sexuality. For four decades now, Campion has moved freely across genres—family melodrama, gothic romance, literary adaptation, farce, suspense-thriller—and also between cinema and television. This September, the Film Society marks the U.S. premiere of the eagerly awaited series Top of the Lake: China Girl (airing on SundanceTV starting in September) with a retrospective survey of Campion’s rich and revelatory body of work, with the director in person for select screenings.

The Piano