Nastassja Kinski: From the Heart
November 27 – December 3
“If Nastassja breaks through—and it’s my feeling she will—as an American star, she’ll be the first European, non-English-speaking actress [to do so] since Ingrid Bergman.” That was Paul Schrader, speaking in 1982, and the actress to whom he’s referring now stands as one of the most elusive and fascinating figures in modern cinema. Nastassja Kinski was barely over 20 when she starred in Schrader’s Cat People, but she was already six years into a remarkable career spent bouncing back and forth between Europe and the United States and working with some of the world’s premiere filmmakers.
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performers are capable of making themselves at once so undeniably, physically present on-screen and yet so mysteriously withdrawn.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, and it produced—in Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, and Roman Polanski’s Tess, among others—some of the most indelible screen performances of the 1980s and beyond.
See more for less with a 3+ Film Package (excludes screenings with Kinski in person).
Cat People
In Paul Schrader’s audacious reimagining of Jacques Tourneur’s supernatural horror classic, Kinski perfected her ability to balance timid innocence with raw sexuality.
Exposed
Q&A with James Toback!
Nastassja Kinski plays the part of a Midwestern English student turned New York supermodel in James Toback’s zigzagging urban odyssey.
Faraway, So Close!
This underrated sequel to Wings of Desire, set in a tenuously unified Berlin, gave Kinski one of her finest mid-career performances as a sympathetic, trench coat–clad angel.
The Hotel New Hampshire
Tony Richardson’s adaptation of John Irving’s epic, plot-stuffed tragicomic novel moves from the funny to the horrifying at the drop of a hat. With Kinski as a young woman who spends most of the film in full-body bear suit.
Maria’s Lovers
As a Yugoslav immigrant in 1940s Pennsylvania, Kinski is the undeniable center of fascination in Maria’s Lovers, bickered over by the movie’s male characters but keeping the rest of the film at a vague, restless remove.
The Moon in the Gutter
With this hyper-stylized, noir-infused psychodrama, co-starring Gérard Depardieu, Jean-Jacques Beineix gave Kinski possibly her most memorable screen entrance as a wealthy, mysterious femme fatale perched behind the wheel of a bright-red Ferrari Spider.
One From the Heart
Francis Ford Coppola’s shimmering, Vegas-set nocturnal reverie—his doomed follow-up to Apocalypse Now—cries out for rediscovery. With Kinski as a beguiling circus tightrope walker.
Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders’s emotionally overwhelming, Palme d’Or–winning odyssey stars Harry Dean Stanton as a lonely amnesiac seeking out his estranged wife and son, and Nastassja Kinski giving what might be her finest performance to date.
Tess
Due to travel issues, Nastassja Kinski will no longer be in person for this screening. Ticket buyers will be contacted. We apologize for the inconvenience.
In her breakthrough performance, Kinski gave the heroine of Roman Polanski’s beautifully shot Thomas Hardy adaptation a forceful, smoldering presence and a tragic breadth of spirit.