Live musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra! Rush tickets available!

The marvelous Alloy Orchestra returns to NYFF to accompany this rarely screened masterpiece of Soviet cinema. A product of the FEKS group, a radical arts collective led by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg (who co-directed this film), FEKS productions combined aspects of circus, music hall, puppet show and American silent comedy. With Gogol’s tragicomic story, The Overcoat, FEKS found fertile ground for experimentation. A minor clerk, Bashmachkin, replaces his threadbare overcoat with one made from the finest materials he can afford. Then one evening ruffians beat him up and steal his cherished new garment. The actors’ highly stylized gestures border on modern dance, and Bashmachkin’s world, especially as he begins to lose his grasp on reality, is powerfully rendered with looming shadows, oblique camera angles and eccentric architecture.

Screening with:
Filmstudie 
Hans Richter | 1926 | Germany | 7m
Hans Richter’s experimental Dadaist short, full of geometric shapes, seagulls, flying eyeballs and floating heads.