It’s All a BIG Conspiracy
July 1–9, with all films on 70mm
Experience cinema on a monumental scale with this summer series charting the evolution of conspiracy as a powerful staple of American cinema through a selection of masterpieces presented entirely on 70mm.
Batman on 70mm
Tim Burton
1989 | 126 minutes
Returning to FLC on a 70mm-blow-up print that hasn’t screened in New York City since its original theatrical run in 1989, Tim Burton’s strangely singular superhero blockbuster fundamentally redefined franchise filmmaking at the same time it imagined the nightmare version of consumer culture.
The Untouchables on 70mm
Brian De Palma
1987 | 119 minutes
Brian De Palma transformed a TV property into a subversive crime epic showing Capone (Robert De Niro) not merely as a villain but as the visible face of an over-greased criminal system cloaked behind tailored suits, marble lobbies, opera boxes, and police badges.
TICKET INFORMATION
Tickets are $25; $22 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $20 for FLC Members. Save $2 on each ticket with a 3+ Film Package.
About the Series
Conspiratorial thinking has migrated from the margins toward one of the defining moods of our present—not merely the belief in a single grand secret plot but an ambient suspicion that the visible world is organized by forces beyond ordinary perception. Hollywood especially has made this suspicion feel so natural (amusing, even) that we often overlook how many of its most gripping pictures, far beyond the paranoid thriller canon, rely on the seductive notion that the world’s complexities ultimately yield to a secret, meticulously orchestrated logic. “It’s All a BIG Conspiracy” will put this idea under a magnifying glass with a program of 70mm films drawn to the allure of collusion as one of Hollywood’s most pliable and captivating storytelling maneuvers. Amplified by the grandeur of wide-gauge imagery and outsized soundscapes, these films will plunge us into worlds immersive enough to disarm our skeptical distance, yet detailed enough to reward near-forensic scrutiny.
The series brings together films by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, James Cameron, Brian De Palma, Tim Burton, Spike Lee, Kenneth Branagh, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and Jordan Peele. From mistaken identity as Cold War statecraft (North by Northwest) to civic connivance in Chicago and Gotham City (The Untouchables, Batman), palace intrigue both Shakespearean and interstellar (Hamlet, Dune) to postwar cultic doctrine (The Master), state surveillance and the machinery of white supremacy (Malcolm X) to corporate cover-ups on a colonized moon (Aliens), time-traveling espionage (Tenet), and image-making as predation (NOPE), this July Fourth week invites you to peer beneath narratives whose darkly coordinated worlds feel uncannily at home in the American imagination… or simply surrender to the 5-perf spectacle.
Organized by Tyler Wilson.
Acknowledgements:
Film at Lincoln Center’s projectionists: Greg Sherman, Maeve Cavadini, Frank Hudec, Gregory Wolfe, and James Wolfe, and Tim White
Please note: Several films will be screened from the original release prints, which use a vintage magnetic soundtrack. Audio tracks are stored on magnetic stripes attached to the film print itself and are more prone to degrade than optical soundtracks. It will sound louder and richer compared to most 35mm prints and many digital sound systems, but because it’s an older analog format you’ll also hear the wear-and-tear of its many years going through projectors. This is part of the experience, so let every hiss, softness, pop, intermittent silence and visual imperfection remind you of the many audience members who saw this same print before you.
