Nastassja Kinski in Roman Polanski's Tess

German-born actress Nastassja Kinski will take the spotlight at the Film Society with a selection of her signature films. Nastassja Kinski: From the Heart, taking place November 27 – December 3, will present a weeklong assortment of the Golden Globe-winning actress's films, spanning from 1979 to 1993. Kinski will be in attendance for the series.

Kinski launched her career as a public personality while still a child as a model in Germany. She quickly moved into acting, first playing the role of Mignon in Wim Wenders's film The Wrong Move at age 12. From there she catapulted her career going between the U.S. and Europe working with some of the world's biggest filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, who cast her in the musical One from the Heart, her first film made in the U.S., and Paul Schrader's erotic horror movie Cat People. Both films are screening in the series.

“I…feel I owe it to the people that believed in me since I was 12, and I owe it to myself, to begin again and do some things I'm proud of,” Kinski said in a 1995 interview. “This is not something that I ever chose, it chose me.”

The earliest Kinski feature in the series is Roman Polanski's 1979 Oscar-nominated Tess, which earned the actress a Golden Globe. The romantic drama revolves around a strong-willed young peasant girl (Kinski) who becomes the affection of two men. Prior to casting her in Tess, Polanski had urged the young woman to study acting with Lee Strasberg.

Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984) won the Palme d'Or in Cannes and is considered to feature one of Kinski's most acclaimed roles. In the film, which also stars Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, a man wanders out of the desert after being absent for several years. His brother finds him and the two head to L.A. where the man is reunited with his son. Then he and the boy set out to find the child's lost mother who also disappeared.

Noted the Film Society: “Kinski’s greatest strength as an actor might be her gift for suggesting areas of her inner life that audiences could never access. Few screen performers are capable of making themselves at once so undeniably, physically present on-screen and yet so mysteriously withdrawn. It was a tension that Kinski mastered early on, producing unforgettable performances in Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, and Roman Polanski’s Tess—all of which, and more, can be rediscovered on the big screen in Nastassja Kinski: From the Heart.”

“I have learnt a lot from my life in general as well as my career as an actress,” said Kinski to Indiantelevision.com in 2003. “While I would earlier act on instinct, I don't anymore. I did a lot of things when I was younger, that could have been done another way, and my mistakes have taught me a great deal.”

[Special thanks to the UCLA Film & Television Archive; Harvard Film Archive; Nastassja Kinski; Josef Csongei; James Toback. Screenings will take place at the Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th Street). Tickets and a discount package for the series will go on sale Thursday, November 6. Single screening tickets are $13; $9 for students and seniors (62+); and $8 for Film Society members. See more and pay less with a discount package starting at $30; $24 for students and seniors (62+); and $21 for Film Society members. The discount package prices apply with the purchase of tickets to three films or more. Visit filmlinc.com for more information.]

Films, descriptions, and schedule follow:

Cat People
Paul Schrader, USA, 1982, 35mm, 118m
One of Kinski’s greatest strengths as a young actress was her ability to embody seemingly contradictory personas side by side. In Paul Schrader’s erotic nightmare (and remake of Jacques Tourneur’s supernatural horror classic) about a woman—the last female descendent of an ancient race—who morphs into a deadly cat when aroused, she perfected her ability to balance timid innocence with raw sexuality. Her beautifully modulated performance is what makes the movie, for all its mythic goofiness, an emotionally potent glimpse of a young woman torn between desire and fear. With Malcolm McDowell, John Heard and Annette O’Toole and featuring a now-classic techno score by Giorgio Moroder and a theme song by David Bowie.
Thursday, November 27, 8:45pm
Wednesday, December 3, 9:30pm

Exposed
James Toback, USA, 1983, 35mm, 100m
Nastassja Kinski plays the part of a Midwestern English student turned New York supermodel in James Toback’s zigzagging urban odyssey, which also takes its heroine through an affair with a somewhat unhinged violinist (legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev) and an embroilment with the ringleader of a Parisian terrorist cell (Harvey Keitel). Kinski’s performance embodies a woman driven by ambition, passion, reflection, self-possession, and a hunger for life, while Toback pushes the film’s increasingly knotty plot in surprising directions, cultivating an uneasy air of spontaneous violence and tragic fatalism.
Friday, November 28, 8:30pm (Q&A with James Toback)

Faraway, So Close!
Wim Wenders, Germany, 1993, 35mm, 144m
English, German, Italian, French, and Russian with English subtitles
Wings of Desire, Wenders’s classic fable about the hunger of a wistful angel for mortal life, was also a city symphony dedicated to Berlin as it stood two years before the fall of the wall. The Berlin of that film’s sequel, made six years later, is a very different place: unified in name but overrun with crime, corruption, and—in what turns out to be a key theme here—Americans. The underrated Faraway, So Close! is no less thoughtful or generous than its predecessor, and Kinski’s turn as a sympathetic, trench coat–clad angel now stands as one of her best mid-career performances. She joined one of the most gloriously eccentric casts in movie history, including Peter Falk, Willem Dafoe, Lou Reed, and, in his first film role, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Saturday, November 29, 8:30pm

The Hotel New Hampshire
Tony Richardson, UK/Canada/USA, 1984, 35mm, 109m
For his adaptation of John Irving’s epic, plot-stuffed tragicomic novel, Tony Richardson cast Kinski against type as… a bear. That her character, a young woman helping to run a hotel in Vienna, spends most of the film in a full-body bear costume is far from the most outlandish plot point in The Hotel New Hampshire, which zigzags giddily from New England to Austria to New York, accumulating episodes funny and horrifying, minor and grave, satisfying and (more often) unresolved. Alongside Kinski, the film boasts memorable eccentric turns by Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster. A forerunner in subject matter and plot structure to the films of Wes Anderson, especially The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Saturday, November 29, 1:30pm

Maria’s Lovers
Andrei Konchalovsky, USA, 1984, 35mm, 109m
In 1984, Kinski had top-billed roles in three films of markedly different stripes: a Cannes hit from an auteur at the top of his powers (Paris, Texas), an ensemble American comedy (The Hotel New Hampshire), and this considerably smaller-scale, sepia-toned drama on the lingering aftereffects of war. As a Yugoslav immigrant in 1940s Pennsylvania, Kinski is the undeniable center of attention in Maria’s Lovers, bickered over by the movie’s male characters—a scarred war veteran (John Savage), a straight-and-narrow captain (Vincent Spano), and a traveling, guitar-slinging drifter (Keith Carradine)—but keeping the rest of the film at an enigmatic, restless remove.
Friday, November 28, 3:00pm

The Moon in the Gutter
Jean-Jacques Beineix, France/Italy, 1983, 35mm, 137m
French with English subtitles
Kinski and Gérard Depardieu star in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s hyper-stylized, noir-infused psychodrama, in which a working-class man (Depardieu) fixated on the memory of his sister’s violent death finds his attention drawn away toward a beautiful, wealthy woman who drives a red Ferrari Spider, and who may or may not know the secret behind the crime. Kinski’s grand entrance—head tossed back, hands caressing the Ferrari’s steering wheel, eyes slowly moving up to meet the camera’s gaze with a smile—is a lesson in on-screen seduction.
Wednesday, December 3, 6:45pm

One from the Heart
Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1982, 35mm, 107m
If Apocalypse Now was Coppola’s King Lear, then One from the Heart, in which two lovers split up one evening in Vegas and spend the night with mysterious new dream partners, turned out to be the director’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Kinski, as a circus tightrope walker, steals the show in this romantic fable speckled with magical upheavals and disappearances that becomes, in the end, a challenging reflection on the contingency of love. With an original score by Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits, and featuring an exceptional ensemble cast of Raul Julia, Harry Dean Stanton, Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest. 35mm print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Thursday, November 27, 6:30pm
Wednesday, December 3, 4:30pm

Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders, West Germany/France/UK/USA, 1984, 35mm, 147m
Wim Wenders’s emotionally overwhelming, Palme d’Or–winning American odyssey is a film of oppositions: wispy, home-recorded memories and rock-solid Southwestern landscapes; long stretches of silence and soul-baring monologues; and American and European sensibilities. It instantly became a career highlight for nearly all involved: Sam Shepard; Ry Cooder; Robby Müller; Harry Dean Stanton, whose performance as a lonely amnesiac seeking out his wife and son became his most iconic screen role; and Kinski, whose absence—she plays Stanton’s estranged wife—dictates the movie’s rhythm. When she finally appears, it’s with what might be her finest performance to date, a condensed showcase of all her skill and restraint on-screen. 35mm print courtesy of the Sundance Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Friday, November 28, 5:30pm
Sunday, November 30, 7:30pm (Q&A with Nastassja Kinski)

Tess
Roman Polanski, France/UK, 1979, DCP, 186m
Kinski’s breakthrough performance was in the title role of Roman Polanski’s beautifully shot, emotionally wrenching adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The novel concerns a young farmer’s daughter, possibly descended from a wealthy family, who finds herself trapped, publicly compromised, and finally destroyed by the lusts and social ambitions of the two men in her life. However, Kinski refuses to make Tess into a passive victim; in her and Polanski’s hands, the character takes on a forceful, smoldering presence and, ultimately, a tragic breadth of spirit.
Thursday, November 27, 3:00pm
Saturday, November 29, 4:00pm (Q&A with Nastassja Kinski)