“Johnny Guitar,” Film Forum, through November 19Nicholas Ray’s allegorical melodrama is finishing its short run at Film Forum, screening in a new 4K restoration. The colors are sure to pop in this campy Western, which pits Vienna (Joan Crawford), a local saloon owner in favor of the railroad that is planned to run through the town, against Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), a rancher attempting to purge what she sees as unwanted forces — namely, the Dancing Kid (Scott Brady) and his posse, who are accused of holding up a stagecoach and killing an innocent rancher. The title character (Sterling Hayden) enters this scene, a famous gunslinger and former lover of Vienna. It’s easy to read “Johnny Guitar” as being about Joseph McCarthy and the House of Un-American Activities Committee, but that’s only one part of it. Buried within the film are more radical ideas about gender swapping, sexual repression (“He makes her feel like a woman, and that frightens her,” Vienna says about Emma), and hysteria, boldly presented in a pictorial frame that’s absurdly colorful and almost cartoonish, which is why many have dismissed the film over the years as silly. “Imitation of Life,” Film Society of Lincoln Center, November 20Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece about race and class in America, his final Hollywood film, is screening as part of “Todd Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams,” a retrospective dedicated to the filmmaker’s work over the previous two decades along with a selection of movies that have influenced him. Here, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) is a struggling actress and commercial model, living alone with a child. When she meets Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), an African-American single mother, at the beach, she invites her and her child into her home. The four women live as a family, except Annie ostensibly works for Lora, and the divisions that separate the four reveal themselves as cracks in the perfect veneer. On a recent viewing of the film, I was blown away by Sirk’s compositions; his subtle and precise arrangement of figures and objects within the frame suggest the hidden conflicts under the surface. (Toward the end of the film, a particular shot positions Lora hovering above Annie, signaling the hierarchy of characters, with Annie’s estranged daughter between them silently witnessing them from inside a picture frame.) This is the perfect introduction to Sirk before the Film Society unravels its massive retrospective of the filmmaker’s work in December.“Safe,” Film Society of Lincoln Center, November 20Since you’re already up at Lincoln Center to see “Imitation of Life,” why don’t you stick around and see Todd Haynes’s “Safe”? The two films are paired together in the series, variations on the domestic-life-as-prison genre of woman’s pictures. But “Safe,” undoubtedly Haynes’s most complex work, is much more than that, a product of the time it was created (1995) and the culture it at once critiques and attempts to understand. Carol White (Julianne Moore) is a fragile housewife in the San Fernando Valley who struggles to even get out a sentence. She seems at all times on the verge of collapse, and her life is constructed of various housewifely duties — directing the movers who deliver a new couch; dinners with her husband’s co-workers. But there is a void at the center, something that is unclear. We don’t know much about Carol, nor does it seem anyone else does. When someone asks her what she does, she responds, after an uncomfortable hesitation, that she’s a “homemaker,” as if it was the first time she ever thought about it. Carol soon develops an unnamed disease, an allergic reaction to toxins in the air that cannot be cured by doctors or therapists, and travels to a New Age clinic in the woods led by charismatic leader who lives in a mansion above the patients. Set at the height of the AIDS epidemic — not a coincidence — and dealing with philosophical questions of illness and accountability, “Safe” is a film that, despite being 20 years old, remains contemporary. “Feelings are Facts: The Life on Yvonne Rainer,” IFC Center, November 18One of my picks from DOCNYC, which is running through the end of the week, “Feelings are Facts” takes as its subject the life and career of the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Best known for her groundbreaking work with the Judson Dance Theater, which she co-founded, this ever-combative artist (a section of the film is dedicated to a 1969 performance where she projected pornography behind the dancers without telling the audience, or critics, beforehand) made her most personal work late in her career through a series of auto-biographical essay films and, in the last decade, a return to dance in her mid-60s.“Out 1: Noli me Tangere,” Brooklyn Academy of Music, through November 19Have you not seen Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1” yet? This film event of the year, maybe even the decade, is making its world theatrical premiere at BAM in a new restoration. The 13-hour film, spread out over eight episodes, has been almost impossible to see, at least in this form, and especially in this country. I expect it will be available for home-viewing soon enough, but the sprawling narrative deserves the attention of a theatrical viewing.
↧