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5/7/2012

See It Big!

Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria

Films include 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, and double-feature screenings of works by Francis Ford Coppola, Powell and Pressburger, Alfred Hitchcock, and David Lean

Museum of the Moving Image’s popular series See It Big! presents classic and contemporary films the way they were meant to be seen: on the big screen. Despite the increasing portability and decreasing size of consumer media, the Museum remains committed to showing films in the best available versions, whether it is a pristine digital restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey or a rare Technicolor 35mm print of Vertigo. In the Museum’s state-of-the-art theater, audiences are treated to a visually and aurally immersive experience like no other.

Running from July 6 through September 28, 2012, the summer season of See It Big! opens with two films that are featured in the exhibition PERSOL MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS: 30 stories of craftsmanship in film. Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, screening in a pristine digital restoration from July 6 through 8, is highlighted in the exhibition for the work of special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull who created the legendary “Stargate” sequence that ends the film. The other featured film, Francis Ford Coppola’s wildly imaginative musical One from the Heart, will be screened on July 14 and 15, in a 35mm restoration supervised by Coppola himself. This tale of ruined lovers in a dream-like Las Vegas was almost completely shot on a Hollywood stage set designed by Dean Tavoularis. Drawings by Tavoularis and behind-the-scenes set photos from the film are on view in the exhibition.

Other titles in the See It Big! series include: Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux, which screens on a double bill with One from the Heart (July 14 and 15); Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (July 21 and 22); Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, presented in a rare 35mm Technicolor print, and To Catch a Thief (July 28 and 29); a western double-feature of The Wild Bunch and Rio Bravo (August 4 and 5); David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai and Doctor Zhivago (August 1 and 2); and Taxi Driver (August 18 and 19), Brazil (August 25 and 26), Blue Velvet (August 25 and 26), and more. See below for full schedule.

See It Big! was organized by the Museum’s Chief Curator, David Schwartz, and Assistant Film Curator, Rachael Rakes, in collaboration with Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert, editors of Reverse Shot, a quarterly independent online film journal.

”See It Big! is a great series for the Museum, because it celebrates the theatrical experience and the proper presentation of film,” said Schwartz. “It also celebrates the Museum’s great theater, an architectural masterpiece and one of the finest film venues in the world.”

Tickets for films are included with paid Museum admission ($12 adults / $9 senior citizens and college students / $6 children 3–17) and are free for Museum members.

The exhibition PERSOL MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS: 30 stories of craftsmanship in film celebrates stories of obsessive workmanship behind some of cinema's most iconic and compelling on-screen moments. It offers the opportunity to view rarely seen artifacts, as well as behind-the-scenes research notes, sketches, video interviews, and materials used in the pre-production process by ten of the world’s greatest filmmakers. They include Ed Harris, Todd Haynes, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Ennio Morricone, Arianne Phillips, Vittorio Storaro, Hilary Swank, Dean Tavoularis, and Douglas Trumbull. Curated by Michael Connor, the exhibition is on view in the Museum’s 4,000 sq. ft. gallery through August 19, 2012. Access is included with Museum admission.

SCHEDULE FOR “SEE IT BIG!,” JULY 6–SEPTEMBER 28, 2012
Unless otherwise noted, screenings are included with Museum admission and take place at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue, in Astoria.

2001: A Space Odyssey
FRIDAY, JULY 6, 7:00 P.M.
SATURDAY, JULY 7, 2:00 P.M. AND 6:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, JULY 8, 2:00 P.M. AND 6:00 P.M.
Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1968, 141 mins. plus intermission. DCP. With Keir Dullea. Kubrick’s mysterious and profound science-fiction epic remains—in the words of its tagline—“the ultimate trip.” Many of its sequences—from the spellbinding dawn of man to the spaceship ballet set to Strauss to the deadly Jupiter mission manned by HAL 9000 to the final “Stargate” mind-blower—are undeniable classics. With just eighteen minutes of dialogue, this is a sight-and-sound experience that simply can’t be watched anywhere other than on a big screen.

Apocalypse Now Redux
FRIDAY, JULY 13, 7:00 P.M.
SATURDAY, JULY 14, 6:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, JULY 15, 6:00 P.M.
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. 1979/2001, 202 mins. DCP, courtesy of American Zoetrope. With Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper. Coppola’s transposition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War is one of the most ambitious Hollywood films of all time. With Vittorio Storaro’s virtuoso cinematography and Walter Murch’s overwhelming sound design, this is an absorbing work of existential terror and awe, lorded over by Brando as that icon of madness Colonel Kurtz. This is Coppola’s restored 2001 version, truer in spirit to the Conrad novel than the original release.

One from the Heart
SATURDAY, JULY 14, 3:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, JULY 15, 3:00 P.M.
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. 1982, 108 mins. Restored 35mm print, courtesy of American Zoetrope. With Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, Harry Dean Stanton. Coppola’s legendary, lyrical film maudit is an unexpected, audacious visual treat. Rather than shoot his tale of a pair of Las Vegas lovers in the city itself, Coppola built the town from scratch on soundstages, bankrupting American Zoetrope though certainly not his wild imagination. Dean Tavoularis’s magical production design is explored in the exhibition Persol Magnificent Obsessions.

Cabaret
FRIDAY, JULY 20, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Bob Fosse. 1972, 124 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey. Fosse rightly won the Oscar for best director for his shattering musical set in Berlin on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power. Minnelli and Grey also scored Oscars, for their unforgettable performances as, respectively, Sally Bowles, a vivacious but damaged American singer selling her soul in a seedy nightclub, and the devilish emcee who presides over it. A devastating, delirious movie experience, featuring Kander and Ebb’s rousing show tunes and Geoffrey Unsworth’s gloriously ragged photography.

The Red Shoes
SATURDAY, JULY 21, 3:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, JULY 22, 3:00 P.M.
Dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. 1948, 133 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring, Moira Shearer. The story of a ballerina who becomes consumed by her obsession with her art was realized by Powell and Pressburger with obsessive attention to the power of cinematic expression. The ultimate film about the way that art can take over life, The Red Shoes was recently restored, fittingly, with obsessive perfectionism. Thanks to this truly eye-opening restoration, which employed a state-of-the-art blend of photochemical and digital technology, The Red Shoes has never looked better.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
SATURDAY, JULY 21, 6:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, JULY 22, 6:00 P.M.
Dirs. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. 1943, 163 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesy. Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker supervised the astonishing new restoration of the movie that Dave Kehr has called “very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.” An intricate, deeply ambiguous saga that both satirizes and celebrates military life, it uses a flashback structure to cover forty years in the existence of a British colonel, from the second Boer War to World War II. As Kehr writes, “Powell’s camera renders the winding plot through boldly deployed Technicolor hues and camera movements of exquisite design and expressivity.”

To Catch a Thief
SATURDAY, JULY 28, 3:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, JULY 29, 3:00 P.M.
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1955, 106 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, Jessie Royce Landis, Charles Vanel. Hitchcock’s Technicolor crime caper is the acme of glamorous 1950s escapism. Grant is devilishly charming—as ever—playing a retired cat burglar on the Riviera suspected of masterminding a new wave of robberies. While he tries to find out who really did it, a gorgeous American tourist catches his eye. Filmed partly on location in France, this is a gloriously shot, deliriously witty entertainment.

Vertigo
SATURDAY, JULY 28, 6:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, JULY 29, 6:00 P.M.
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. 1958, 128 mins. 35mm IB Technicolor print. With James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes. Considered by many cinephiles the greatest of all films, Hitchcock’s peerless psychological thriller follows a San Francisco private detective who comes out of retirement to trail an old schoolmate’s beautiful wife, who appears to be haunted by a figure from her ancestral past. Both an ingeniously plotted mystery and a profoundly disturbing tale of romantic obsession, Vertigo is an emotional experience like no other—on the level of image, sound, and storytelling. This is a very rare screening of a vintage Technicolor print, with the film’s original soundtrack and color beautifully intact.

Rio Bravo
SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 3:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 3:00 P.M.
Dir. Howard Hawks. 1959, 141 mins. New restoration on DCP. With John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond. Hawks’s laconic and wise big-screen Technicolor western pits Wayne and a group of misfit deputies against a gang of well-armed bad guys intent on busting one of their own out of jail. Will the sheriff and his gang be able to hold tight until the marshal arrives? Bracingly comic and unsentimental, Rio Bravo is also the epitome of Hawks, with its emphasis on professionalism, male camaraderie, and—with the playful chemistry between Dickinson and Wayne—the battle of the sexes.

The Wild Bunch
SATURDAY, AUGUST 4, 6:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 6:00 P.M.
Dir. Sam Peckinpah. 1969, 145 mins. 35mm. With William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates. As the western genre dried up around him, Peckinpah assembled a group of grizzled veterans for one last trip into the breach. A cadre of aging outlaws, fleeing the authorities, attempts to make a final score for a Mexican generale, but when things go awry, the gang finds itself in one of the wildest and bloodiest of screen shoot-outs. Peckinpah’s masterpiece is at once classical and revisionist, an exemplar of the very genre it so brilliantly subverts.

The Leopard
SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 2:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 12, 2:00 P.M.
Dir. Luchino Visconti. 1963, 185 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Pierre Clémenti. Visconti’s extraordinary, luxuriously beautiful three-hour work—about a prince who watches his fortune and way of life crumble around him amid the upheaval of the Risorgimento in mid-nineteenth-century Italy—is one of the grandest of all movie epics. The sumptuous widescreen cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno and aching Nino Rota score are matched by the truly dazzling cast.

Fellini Satyricon
SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 6:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 12, 6:00 P.M.
Dir. Federico Fellini. 1969, 185 mins. 35mm. With Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny. The ultimate Fellini phantasmagoria. The maestro’s legendary re-creation of first-century Rome provides the backdrop for a wondrous journey into another world—a free adaptation of Petronius’s satirical ancient novel that is as gritty as it is surreal. Grotesque, erotic, and bizarre, and reportedly inspired by Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Fellini Satyricon remains a hotly debated film, but no one can deny its almost constant visual invention.

The Searchers
SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 3:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 19, 3:00 P.M.
Dir. John Ford. 1956, 119 mins. New restoration on DCP. With John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood. Martin Scorsese has claimed that he watches this film, arguably western master John Ford’s greatest achievement, every year, and with good reason. Its epic story sweeps from the American Southwest to the Canadian border as it tracks Wayne’s increasingly unhinged quest for his beloved niece, kidnapped by Chief Scar in a raid years before. Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is as neurotically obsessed as DeNiro’s Travis Bickle.

Taxi Driver
SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 6:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 19, 6:00 P.M.
Dir. Martin Scorsese. 1976, 113 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Robert De Niro, Cybil Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel. Scorsese’s dark, dyspeptic view of New York, made all the more menacing by a brassy Bernard Herrmann score, is also a great visual love letter to the Big Apple. Among the pimps, prostitutes, vermin, and trash, Scorsese highlights striking flashes of visual beauty and ultimately reveals an undying affection for a New York disappearing all around him. Paul Schrader’s script pays homage to The Searchers, a touchstone film for many American directors.

Brazil
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 3:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 3:00 P.M.
Dir. Terry Gilliam. 1985, 132 mins. 35mm. With Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Ian Holm, Michael Palin. Gilliam’s jaw-dropping dystopian science-fiction black comedy, which was almost shelved by Universal, imagines a totalitarian surveillance society that would make Orwell envious. When minor bureaucrat Pryce notices a clerical error that led the state to arrest the wrong man, it sets him on a quest for freedom, and makes him public enemy number one.

Blue Velvet
SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 6:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26, 6:00 P.M.
Dir. David Lynch. 1986, 120 mins. 35mm. With Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell. This nightmarish vision of the suburban underbelly forever marked Lynch as America’s premiere poet of the perverse. MacLachlan’s straight-arrow kid finds himself drawn ever deeper into a mystery involving a severed human ear, a melancholy lounge singer (Rossellini), and a violent, gas-huffing maniac (Hopper, in a career-changing performance). The effect of this beautifully designed wide-screen work of American gothic on the last two decades of moviemaking is incalculable.

Doctor Zhivago
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2:00 P.M.
Dir. David Lean. 1965, 197 mins. DCP. With Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger. Grand-scale moviemaking became Lean’s forte in the 1960s, and Doctor Zhivago was one of his grandest triumphs. Based on Boris Pasternak’s novel, this tale of a love triangle set against the Bolshevik Revolution is an astonishing feat, as emotionally involving as it is visually spectacular. Highlights include Freddie Young’s Oscar-winning cinematography and Maurice Jarre’s iconic score.

The Bridge on the River Kwai
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 6:30 P.M.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 6:30 P.M.
Dir. David Lean. 1957, 161 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Alec Guinness, William Holden, Sessue Hayakawa. David Lean’s epic and thrilling drama, which won seven Academy Awards, is set mostly in a Japanese POW camp, where a British colonel (a superb Guinness) is tasked with overseeing the building of a railway bridge. Meanwhile, a troupe of Allies, led by Holden, has been dispatched to blow it up. Equal parts action adventure and psychological drama, this is one of the most compelling of all World War II films.

Ben-Hur
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2:00 P.M.
Dir. William Wyler. 1959, 212 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith. This stunning restoration was one of the highlights of last year’s New York Film Festival. Heston is magnetic as Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur, betrayed by his childhood friend Messala, now a commanding officer of a Roman legion. Judah’s extensive journey—from a slave galley to the film’s legendary chariot race scene—is paralleled by the rise of Christ. Winner of a record eleven Oscars, Ben-Hur is a breathtaking biblical epic that outdid even De Mille.

The Last Picture Show
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 7:00 P.M.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 7:00 P.M.
Dir. Peter Bogdanovich. 1971, 126 mins. New restoration on DCP. With Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybil Shepherd. Bogdanovich emerged as a great American director with this lively and haunting elegy for the West, for movies, and for childhood, a coming-of-age saga about three high school friends stuck in a fading Texas town in the 1950s. This black-and-white masterpiece was photographed by the great Robert Surtees, whose other credits include The Graduate and Ben-Hur.

Museum of the Moving Image (movingimage.us) advances the understanding, enjoyment, and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media. In January 2011, the Museum reopened after a major expansion and renovation that nearly doubled its size. Accessible, innovative, and forward-looking, the Museum presents exhibitions, education programs, significant moving-image works, and interpretive programs, and maintains a collection of moving-image related artifacts.

Press contact: Tomoko Kawamoto / tkawamoto@movingimage.us / 718 777 6830
Images available.

Museum of the Moving Image
36-01 35 Avenue (at 37 Street) in Astoria
Hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Friday, 10:30 to 8:00 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Closed Mondays. The Museum will also be closed on Tuesday, July 3, and Wednesday, July 4.
Film Screenings: Friday evenings, Saturdays and Sundays, and as scheduled. Unless otherwise noted, screenings are included with Museum admission.
Museum Admission: $12.00 for adults; $9.00 for persons over 65 and for students with ID; $6.00 for children ages 3-18. Children under 3 and Museum members are admitted free. Admission to the galleries is free on Fridays, 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. Tickets for special screenings and events may be purchased in advance by phone at 718 777 6800 or online.

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