Despite its reputation as home for the entertainment industry, Los Angeles has a thriving alt/repertory film scene, one of the realities I hoped to reflect when I started this blog eleven years ago. One of the city’s best programmers, Bernardo Rondeau, has maintained the beleaguered LACMA weekend film screenings in the five years since they were initially threatened, and has brought such rare gems to Los Angeles as Aleksei German’s Khrustalyov, My Car!, Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer, and several series built around the museum’s excellent Stanley Kubrick and Gabriel Figueroa exhibits.
Happily, Rondeau has recently been hired to program a regular weekend film series for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in LACMA’s 600-seat Bing Theater, great news for cinephiles desperate for a mid-city, centralized venue for regular retrospectives, revivals and highlights from the festival circuit. (Presumably, it also helps set the stage for the Academy/LACMA plan to build the city’s first major movie museum by 2017.)
La Perla, 1945
Doug Cummings: I was curious about the Gabriel Figueroa film series you programmed at LACMA; is that traveling anywhere? I’m sure it was difficult finding the prints.
Bernardo Rondeau: Yes, it was quite a formidable project. We had the support and backing of Fundación Televisa, who had access to a lot of the films, so they were extremely helpful in that regard. Mexico does have a rather robust government support for film. But generally speaking, there is still a tremendous amount of prints that do not have English subtitles, and there is still restoration work to be done. I did get a fair number of emails from programmers asking where I found some of the prints. Maybe some of the films will turn up somewhere down the line; I hope they do, because there are a lot of fascinating films that deserve to be better known; just absolute landmarks in Mexican cinema of such stature that it’s important for American filmgoers to at least be aware of them.
DC: Mexican films still haven’t gained wide cinephile appreciation here in the States, they still seem to be missing from many of the established art house DVD catalogues.
BR: Absolutely. I’ve been trying to make the impression upon people that these are really important films to be rediscovered, or discovered, period. We’ll see what the long term impact of that is, but I do hope that some of titles begin to surface here.
DC: Can you tell us about your new Academy @ LACMA series?
BR: The Academy is doing screenings at LACMA on Fridays and Saturdays. I only joined the Academy in early December, and things didn’t really get rolling until after the Oscars, but we’ve already offered an introduction series to Jim Jarmusch, which included prints that the Academy Archive itself had newly struck (Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law and Mystery Train) and then we did a screening of his latest film, Only Lovers Left Alive, with Tilda Swinton in conversation with Henry Rollins. So that was the first event in this program.
This month, we’ve done the complete Decline of Western Civilization trilogy. We’ve had a soft launch with these events, and then in May, we’re going to begin longer series; we’ll have two series running, one every Friday and one every Saturday. As much as possible, we’re going to have extra components, such as special guests, which I really didn’t have the resources for when I was on my own at LACMA.
Welles directing Too Much Johnson (1938).
DC: I’m excited to hear about your Orson Welles retrospective in May.
BR: We’re mainly taking a look at many of Welles’ more or less “completed” works, although we are starting with Too Much Johnson, which is the Mercury Theatre film he directed but never finished. It was created as a series of interstitial pieces for a stage production in 1938 – so it was a few years before Citizen Kane (1941) – in the hopes of incorporating film into a theatrical setting. It was recently rediscovered, of all places, just outside the Italian town of Pordenone, where they now have a major silent film festival, and the National Film Preservation Foundation has managed to reassemble it with the help of George Eastman House, so it will be really wonderful to show that; it has only been shown in a couple places so far.
From there, we’ll show pretty much all the feature films he directed from Citizen Kane to F for Fake (1973). In addition to our series, the Cinefamily will be showing Othello (1952). And LACMA’s Tuesday matinees will support the Saturday series, with other titles Welles either directed and/or starred in.
DC: It has been a long time coming to Los Angeles. In the last dozen or so years that I’ve lived here, the American Cinematheque has offered one or two Welles spotlights, but they never include the elusive Chimes at Midnight (1965), which a lot of critics (myself included) consider one of his best films, so I’m delighted you’re showing it.
BR: We’ll also be showing some new DCPs, both The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Touch of Evil (1958) are new DCPs; Mr. Arkadin (1955) is a relatively new print made by the Munich Film Museum. So this will be the first Welles series of this stature in L.A. in the past decade. We’re coming up on his centenary in 2015. He was one of the earliest filmmakers that I saw that I connected with on a deep level, whose work taught me a tremendous amount about filmmaking and film viewing. Your attention was drawn to the style of the film as much as the content – the camera placement, movement and editing – his signature was the mechanism, not so much the types of films that he made. Even with a scarcity of resources, he would still apply his inexhaustible curiosity and work at a very high level of sophistication with his framing and sound design and everything else.
Night Train (1959)
DC: Also in May, I understand you’re showing Martin Scorsese’s program of Polish cinema? What have been some of your personal discoveries in that series?
BR: We’re getting 17 or 18 of the 21 titles available. A fair amount of it was educational for me. We’ll be doing those on Fridays in May, and actually fold them into Tuesday matinees in June to fit them in, and we’ll be partnering with Cinefamily on some titles as well.
We’re kicking off with two films by Krzysztof Zanussi (Camouflage and The Constant Factor), who makes these really cerebral films that explore issues with a kind of intellect you don’t often find in American movies. Films will often use characters such as scientists or doctors in a strategic or dramatic sense, but for Zanussi they’re people who live in a world of weights and measurements that becomes a kind of metaphor for their lives. A lot of these films take place within specific time frames; many of them look at the trials and tribulations and sacrifices that span over lifetimes. They also feature music by great Polish composers, with lots of atonal, highly modernist scores.
Night Train (1959) by Jerzy Kawalerowicz takes place over the course of a single night as a train moves through the countryside, and it’s a great black-and-white noir, so I definitely recommend that.
Innocent Sorcerers (1960) by Andrej Wajda is a Polish cinema all-star movie: Skolimowski’s in it, Polanski’s in it, Krzysztof Komeda is the composer. It’s a really great, shambling, New Waveish film that, again, takes place over the course of a single night.
Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) is a film you’ve got to imagine Béla Tarr saw because of its muddiness – non-mystical muddiness, because there’s mystical muddiness and non-mystical muddiness! – and great compositions in every shot.