October 10 (Wednesday) 7 pm
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
Italy 1953, 16mm, b/w, 100 min.
With Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders
Tensions pile up in Rossellini’s deeply moving and beautifully nuanced story of a frustrated and bored British couple (Bergman and Sanders) who struggle to keep their marriage alive. The film resembles a diary as it meditates on the problems of the jaded communication between the spouses on their visit to Naples. As Rossellini has stated, “It was very important for me to show Italy, Naples, and that strange atmosphere in which is found a very real, very immediate feeling: the feeling of eternal life, something that has entirely disappeared from the world.”
October 17 (Wednesday) 7 pm
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Italy 1960, 35mm, b/w, 145 min.
With Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari
Italian with English subtitles
After an argument with her lover during a yachting party, a woman disappears from the Sicilian island they’ve been exploring. Both the lover and her best friend set out to find her, but the urgency of their search dissipates as they fall into a disquieting sexual relationship. Antonioni’s celebrated film, which he once described as “a detective story back to front,” displays the director’s fascination with landscape, geometry, and architectural forms as means of expressing the troubled state of Italy’s postwar middle class.
October 24 (Wednesday) 7 pm
Directed by Dorothy Arzner
US 1936, 16mm, b/w, 75 min.
With Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Billie Burke
Rosalind Russell's wild performance dominates Dorothy Arzner's adaptation of George Kelly's play about a woman’s struggle to control every inch of her home. By assuming the housewife’s perspective and confining plot and conflict to discrete moments within the home, Craig’s Wife takes the cult of domesticity to a strange extreme. Through the director’s subtle yet subversive treatment of domestic space, a fascinating portrait emerges of a housewife who walls herself up, brick by brick, in a pathological tomb of her own creation.
October 31 (Wednesday) 7 pm
Directed by Chantal Akerman
France/Belgium 1982, 35mm, color, 90 min.
With Aurore Clement, Tcheky Karyo, Jan Decorte
French with English subtitles
On a sultry summer night in Brussels, various bodies in search of love collide: some succeed, others do not. Fashioned from the shards of two dozen pulverized melodramas, Akerman’s urban nocturne foregrounds small gestures as it captures the shape of solitude itself. Locations criss-cross as characters meet and embrace, dance and split up, yank one another into cabs, or merely watch the action from doorways and stairwells. The choreography of indoors and out, upstairs and down, attraction and rejection distills the complex machinations of urban romance into a sweetly rhythmic dance.
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