Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker
In anticipation of the release of Annie Baker’s directorial debut Janet Planet, Film at Lincoln Center presents a series of 17 films handpicked by the acclaimed playwright that engage with theater as a cinematic theme.
June 14-20
Louis Malle
1981|
U.S.|
110 minutes
By turns entertaining, confessional, funny, and moving, My Dinner with André depicts an encounter between playwrights Wallace Shawn and André Gregory as they discuss mortality, money, despair, and love over a meal at an Upper West Side restaurant.
Louis Malle
1994|
U.S.|
119 minutes
Renowned stage director André Gregory reteamed with My Dinner with André director Louis Malle and co-star/co-writer Wallace Shawn for this sneakily playful pseudo-documentary of the rehearsals of David Mamet’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya.
Michael Powell
1951|
U.K.|
128 minutes
In some ways an artistic “sequel” to The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1951 version of French composer Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera—a film composed entirely of music, dance, color, light, rhythm, and pure fancy.
Bob Fosse
1979|
USA|
123 minutes
Roy Scheider gives a captivating performance as a complicated choreographer and stage director patterned after Bob Fosse in this Palme d’Or- and Oscar-winning tour de force.
Éric Rohmer
1992|
France|
114 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Éric Rohmer’s late-career masterpiece is the fullest expression of his career-long reckoning with Shakespeare, and one of his most graceful, mysterious, and emotionally overwhelming films.
D. A. Pennebaker
1970|
U.S.|
53 minutes
Originally conceived as the pilot of a televised series, D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal entry in the canon of musical theater documentaries follows the raucous 1970 production of the original cast album for Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Screens with George Griffin and DeeDee Halleck’s The Meadows Green.
Vincente Minnelli
1953|
USA|
112 minutes
One of the greatest musicals of all time, Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon features the stunning choreography of Michael Kidd, gorgeous performances by Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, and a witty script about showbiz shenanigans by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
Marcel Carné
1945|
France|
189 minutes
In 1830s Paris, theatrical mime Baptiste (the extraordinary Jean-Louis Barrault) falls in love with an actress and notorious woman about town, Garance (Arletty). When she’s falsely accused of a crime, Garance must seek the protection of one of her other admirers.
Ingmar Bergman
1982|
Sweden / France / West Germany|
188 minutes|
English, Swedish, German, Yiddish, and French with English subtitles
With his semi-autobiographical masterpiece Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman dazzled audiences worldwide with the story of young Alexander Ekdahl, who must navigate the unstable boundary separating his family’s far-from-rosy reality and the fantastical world of his imagination.
Yasujirō Ozu
1959|
Japan|
119 minutes|
Japanese with English Subtitles
A traveling theater troupe arrives in a sleepy village on Japan’s Inland Sea to mount a series of traditional kabuki-style performance in Yasujirō Ozu’s remake of his own 1934 silent film.
Ingmar Bergman
1975|
Sweden|
135 minutes|
Swedish with English subtitles
Ingmar Bergman’s filmed adaptation of Mozart’s late operatic masterpiece The Magic Flute deploys a thrillingly theatrical framework of 18th-century stagecraft to animate the classic fairy-tale adventure narrative.
John Cassavetes
1977|
USA|
144 minutes
In one of her finest performances, Gena Rowlands plays an aging stage star in the midst of preparing for a new role whose sense of self begins to crumble after she witnesses the car-accident death of an obsessive fan in Cassavetes’s masterful psychodrama.
Elizabeth LeCompte
2013|
USA|
77 minutes
This 2013 video reconstruction of The Wooster Group’s 1977 theater piece Rumstick Road, conceived by Spalding Gray, registers in a new composite the texture of time and memory that shaped the original production.
Kenji Mizoguchi
1939|
Japan|
148 minutes|
Japanese with English subtitles
Kenji Mizoguchi’s hauntingly beautiful masterpiece stars Shotaro Hanayagi as a young actor and the adopted son of a Kabuki star in late-19th-century Tokyo in a poignant tale of conflict between generations and, most pointedly, of female sacrifice.
Charles Walters
1950|
U.S.|
108 minutes
Gene Kelly and Judy Garland romance each other in this delightful musical about an unquenchable love of show business.
Ernst Lubitsch
1942|
U.S.|
99 minutes|
English, German, and French with English subtitles
A satirical take on collective artmaking under Fascism, To Be or Not to Be draws a darkly humorous connection between the workaday labor of stage performers and the life-and-death stakes of wartime subterfuge.
Film at Lincoln Center presents “Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker,” a series of 17 films handpicked by acclaimed playwright Annie Baker that engage with theater as a cinematic theme, in anticipation of the release of Baker’s directorial debut, Janet Planet, on June 21.
The series will be presented at FLC from June 14 through June 20, with many films shown on 35mm and Baker in-person for select introductions and Q&As, including a sneak preview of Janet Planet on June 20. Opening Night of the series will feature Louis Malle’s iconic collaboration with André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, My Dinner with André (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), both presented on 35mm. Baker will also engage in a discussion with Shawn about each film’s perspective on theater as an art form and its translation to the big screen.
Organized by Florence Almozini, Madeline Whittle, and Annie Baker.
Artist’s Statement: Annie Baker
“The terrible habit of theatre.” I was working at St. Mark’s Bookshop (RIP) at age 21 when I first discovered Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, in a pocket sized edition that we sold at the front desk. I was a young playwright and Bresson-lover and I was shocked and thrilled by how much Bresson seemed to hate an art form I loved (the truth was, I hated it 90 percent of the time). Over the next few years I came to understand the subtleties of his anti-theatrical argument and in my own way tried to embody them in the theatre I wrote and made. The book was for me, in the end, about understanding the limitations and possibilities of the form you’re working in, and trying your hardest not to lie to yourself. “Everything to be called into question.” “Don’t run after poetry.” “Your film must take off. Bombast and the picturesque hinder it from taking off.” Later I discovered the bombastic, picturesque spectacle of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, a beginning to end hallucinatory recreation of Offenbach’s opera that is all theatre and all cinema, totally rigorous, completely bonkers, and so joyful it made me cry. And then of course there’s the symbiotic relationship between Broadway musicals and Technicolor movie musicals, and how with so many of them I couldn’t tell you if it started as a stage musical and then became a movie musical and then a stage musical adaptation of the movie musical or the other way around. And why does Gene Kelly tap dancing in tiny shorts on a theatre set on a movie set on a soundstage feel like the epitome of truth in both mediums? Bazin called theatre “film’s evil genius” in his essay “In Defense of Adaptation” and that feels right to me, like somehow theatre is the degenerate puppeteer responsible for the best and worst of 20th century cinema. When it comes to recent theatre history, nothing is more satisfying than Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André, a movie that feels like a play but could only be a movie about two legendary theatre makers discussing the agonies and ecstasies of living as an artist in New York City, in which 30 minutes of screen time is spent discussing the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski (look closely in my film Janet Planet and you’ll see a postcard of him hanging on the wall). Other filmmakers in this series, from Bergman to Cassavetes to Ozu, show the characters actually putting on a play inside the movie, and the struggle to make something live and the experience of being in an audience is captured with irony and a lot of love for theatre’s rough edges. There are only two filmed pieces of actual live theatre: the Wooster Group’s archival recording of the seminal performance piece Rumstick Road and The Meadows Green, DeeDee Halleck and George Griffin’s immersive documentary that makes you feel after 20 minutes like you just spent three days outside in Vermont with Bread and Puppet Theater in 1974. And then there’s D.A. Pennebaker’s great documentary about the cast recording of Company, which captures the exquisite pain of having to do something over and over again in a windowless room full of tired people, and that, two decades after reading Bresson, is still my favorite thing about making theatre.
Acknowledgements:
The Library of Congress; Matt Hoffman and Indie Collect; Clay Hapaz, Ken Kobland, and the Wooster Group.
