Film at Lincoln Center announces “Angels and Puppets: The Stage on Screen with Annie Baker,” a series of 17 films handpicked by acclaimed playwright Annie Baker that engage with theater as a cinematic theme, in anticipation of the release of Baker’s directorial debut, Janet Planet, on June 21. The series will be presented at FLC from June 14 through June 20, with many films shown on 35mm and Baker in-person for select introductions and Q&As, including a sneak preview of Janet Planet on June 20. Opening Night of the series will feature Louis Malle’s iconic collaboration with André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, My Dinner with André (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), both presented on 35mm. Baker will also engage in a discussion with Shawn about each film’s perspective on theater as an art form and its translation to the big screen.
Since her off-Broadway debut in 2008, Baker—perhaps best known to New York audiences as the author of 2014 Pulitzer Prize–winner The Flick, a chamber piece set entirely in the auditorium of a fading movie palace in suburban Massachusetts—has been celebrated for pioneering a dramaturgical sensibility situated at the intersection of theater and cinema. Noting her careful attention to the mechanics and affective consequences of duration, critics have heralded the pointedly “anti-theatrical” slant of Baker’s work in theater, where she exhibits a granular fascination with idiosyncratic regional textures, the rhythms and linguistic patterns of small talk, and the minute, unstudied gestures of everyday self-expression—all deployed with wry, understated humor and an unwavering compassion for characters who inhabit the margins of a social or cultural ecosystem.
With the release of NYFF61 Main Slate selection Janet Planet, lauded as one of last year’s most aesthetically sophisticated and strikingly original filmmaking debuts, Baker has come full circle, adapting her immense talents for world-building and characterization to the visual vocabularies and narrative syntax of the seventh art.
Organized by Florence Almozini, Madeline Whittle, and Annie Baker.
Acknowledgements:
The Library of Congress; Matt Hoffman and Indie Collect; Clay Hapaz, Ken Kobland, and the Wooster Group.
Tickets will go on sale on Thursday, May 16 at noon, with an early access period for FLC Members starting Wednesday, May 15 at noon. Tickets are $17; $14 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $12 for FLC Members. See more and save with a 3+ Film Package ($15 for GP; $12 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $10 for FLC Members).
Artist’s Statement: Annie Baker
“The terrible habit of theatre.” I was working at St. Mark’s Bookshop (RIP) at age 21 when I first discovered Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, in a pocket sized edition that we sold at the front desk. I was a young playwright and Bresson-lover and I was shocked and thrilled by how much Bresson seemed to hate an art form I loved (the truth was, I hated it 90 percent of the time). Over the next few years I came to understand the subtleties of his anti-theatrical argument and in my own way tried to embody them in the theatre I wrote and made. The book was for me, in the end, about understanding the limitations and possibilities of the form you’re working in, and trying your hardest not to lie to yourself. “Everything to be called into question.” “Don’t run after poetry.” “Your film must take off. Bombast and the picturesque hinder it from taking off.” Later I discovered the bombastic, picturesque spectacle of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, a beginning to end hallucinatory recreation of Offenbach’s opera that is all theatre and all cinema, totally rigorous, completely bonkers, and so joyful it made me cry. And then of course there’s the symbiotic relationship between Broadway musicals and Technicolor movie musicals, and how with so many of them I couldn’t tell you if it started as a stage musical and then became a movie musical and then a stage musical adaptation of the movie musical or the other way around. And why does Gene Kelly tap dancing in tiny shorts on a theatre set on a movie set on a soundstage feel like the epitome of truth in both mediums? Bazin called theatre “film’s evil genius” in his essay “In Defense of Adaptation” and that feels right to me, like somehow theatre is the degenerate puppeteer responsible for the best and worst of 20th century cinema. When it comes to recent theatre history, nothing is more satisfying than Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André, a movie that feels like a play but could only be a movie about two legendary theatre makers discussing the agonies and ecstasies of living as an artist in New York City, in which 30 minutes of screen time is spent discussing the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski (look closely in my film Janet Planet and you’ll see a postcard of him hanging on the wall). Other filmmakers in this series, from Bergman to Cassavetes to Ozu, show the characters actually putting on a play inside the movie, and the struggle to make something live and the experience of being in an audience is captured with irony and a lot of love for theatre’s rough edges. There are only two filmed pieces of actual live theatre: the Wooster Group’s archival recording of the seminal performance piece Rumstick Road and The Meadows Green, DeeDee Halleck and George Griffin’s immersive documentary that makes you feel after 20 minutes like you just spent three days outside in Vermont with Bread and Puppet Theater in 1974. And then there’s D.A. Pennebaker’s great documentary about the cast recording of Company, which captures the exquisite pain of having to do something over and over again in a windowless room full of tired people, and that, two decades after reading Bresson, is still my favorite thing about making theatre.
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W 65th Street) unless otherwise noted at the Francesca Beale Theater (144 W 65th Street).
All That Jazz
Bob Fosse, 1979, U.S., 35mm, 123m
All That Jazz
“It’s showtime, folks!” That’s the refrain of anxiety-ridden and unhealthily driven choreographer and stage director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) at the center of Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical musical extravaganza, which also features star turns by the likes of Ann Reinking (playing a version of herself), Ben Vereen, and Jessica Lange. Scheider is never less than captivating in his portrayal of Gideon, a complicated figure not so secretly patterned after Fosse himself, as he navigates a frenetic array of personal and professional commitments and the lingering specter of his own mortality. Reportedly called “[the] best film that I think I have ever seen” by Stanley Kubrick at the time of its release, the Palme d’Or- and Oscar-winning tour de force remained the last live-action musical to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture until 2002’s Moulin Rouge!
Saturday, June 15 at 8:45pm – Introduction by Annie Baker
The Band Wagon
Vincente Minnelli, 1953, U.S., 35mm, 112m
The Band Wagon
One of the greatest musicals of all time, Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon features stunning choreography by Michael Kidd, including the memorable “Dancing in the Dark” sequence in Central Park, and a cheekily clever script by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The film centers on a musical movie star (Fred Astaire) who fears his career is about to hit the skids, until two friends (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray) write a script for him that becomes Broadway-bound. But just as things begin to look promising, an egotistical director (Jack Buchanan) joins the project and casts ballerina Gaby Gerard (Cyd Charisse) as the leading lady. Tensions rise between the two co-stars, who clash immediately—and whose temperaments threaten to capsize the show—in this timeless classic of the backstage romantic musical genre.
Saturday, June 15 at 3:30pm
Children of Paradise
Marcel Carné, 1945, France, 35mm, 189m
French with English subtitles
Children of Paradise
In 1830s Paris, theatrical mime Baptiste (the extraordinary Jean-Louis Barrault) falls in love with an actress and notorious woman about town, Garance (Arletty). When she’s falsely accused of a crime, Garance must seek the protection of one of her other admirers. Yet Baptiste’s passion, once kindled, never really dies. Made during the last years of WWII, Children boasted the largest set ever constructed for a French film, a tour de force for legendary production designer Alexandre Trauner (who worked in secret to escape the scrutiny of the Occupation), plus a sparkling script from the legendary poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. Carné moves the action effortlessly between stage and audience, teeming streets and intimate boudoirs, bringing the world of these characters to pulsing, vibrant life.
Sunday, June 16 at 3:00pm
Fanny and Alexander
Ingmar Bergman, 1982, Sweden/France/West Germany, 35mm, 188m
English, Swedish, German, Yiddish, and French with English subtitles
Fanny and Alexander
In his 1988 memoir The Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman wrote: “No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul… At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood.” With his semi-autobiographical masterpiece Fanny and Alexander—the director’s would-be swan song—Bergman put this philosophy into virtuosic practice, dazzling and moving audiences worldwide with the saga of the Ekdahl family, operators of a successful local theater in early-20th-century Sweden. Caught between the spirit of life-affirming wonder embodied by their vibrant, loving mother on the one hand, and the physical abuse of a tyrannically strict stepfather on the other, young Alexander Ekdahl must navigate the unstable boundary separating a far-from-rosy reality and the fantastical world of his imagination.
Sunday, June 16 at 6:45pm
Floating Weeds
Yasujirō Ozu, 1959, Japan, 119m
Japanese with English subtitles
Floating Weeds
Twenty-five years after the release of his 1934 silent film A Story of Floating Weeds, the now-middle-aged Yasujirō Ozu set about remaking the earlier backstage drama, an endeavor that would yield his only collaboration with Daiei Film Co., and one of just six color films that the master auteur would direct in his lifetime. Like its predecessor, Floating Weeds takes as its subject a traveling theater troupe that arrives in a sleepy village on Japan’s Inland Sea to mount a series of traditional kabuki-style performances. During their stay, troupe leader Komajuro (portrayed by the acclaimed real-life kabuki actor Nakamura Ganjirō) reconnects with a former lover (Ozu regular Haruko Sugimura) whose son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) doesn’t know that the itinerant performer is his father. When Komajuro’s current mistress and fellow troupe member (Machiko Kyō) becomes suspicious of his attachments, romantic and existential complications ensue, all of which are provocatively juxtaposed against the highly stylized expressive intensity of the art form they practice.
Tuesday, June 18 at 9:00pm
The Magic Flute
Ingmar Bergman, 1975, Sweden, 35mm, 135m
Swedish with English subtitles
The Magic Flute
Director Ingmar Bergman was a lifelong fan of Mozart’s late operatic masterpiece Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), having seen the work as a young boy. Decades later, in late middle-age, Bergman would go on to direct a filmed adaptation of the opera for Swedish television, featuring a libretto in his native language by the poet Alf Henrikson. For the film, which deploys a thrillingly theatrical framework of 18th-century stagecraft to animate the classic fairy-tale adventure narrative, maestro Eric Ericson conducted the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and a cast that included a number of young Scandinavian artists, most notably baritone Håkan Hagegård—who sang nearly 90 performances for Met audiences—as the charming bird catcher Papageno.
Wednesday, June 19 at 9:00pm
My Dinner with André
Louis Malle, 1981, U.S., 35mm, 110m
My Dinner with André
When Dan Talbot, the pioneering distributor and exhibitor of international art films, read playwrights Wallace Shawn and André Gregory’s script for My Dinner with André, he was so excited about the project that he helped director Louis Malle procure production funding from Gaumont. The concept was to depict an encounter between the two writers, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, as they discuss mortality, money, despair, and love over a meal at an Upper West Side restaurant—according to Gregory, Malle’s one direction was to “talk faster.” By turns entertaining, confessional, funny, and moving, suffused with melancholy and joy alike, the film became a sensation at the art house upon its release, playing to packed theaters for a solid year, and went on to endure as a perennial favorite on the nascent home video circuit.
Friday, June 14 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Annie Baker and Wallace Shawn
Opening Night
John Cassavetes, 1977, U.S., 35mm, 144m
Opening Night. Courtesy of AGFA.
John Cassavetes’s gale-force, exposed-nerve psychodrama plunges headlong into the art and mysteries of acting. In one of her finest whirlwind, woman-under-the-influence performances, Gena Rowlands plays an aging stage star in the midst of preparing for a new role whose sense of self begins to crumble after she witnesses the car-accident death of an obsessive fan. Scrambling the boundaries between art and life, rehearsals and reality, Cassavetes leads his fearless band of actors into ever more vulnerable and startling realms of emotional honesty. Opening Night attracted little attention upon its U.S. release (save for Cassavetes’s most devoted followers), opening in December 1977 to poor box-office numbers and tepid reviews. Months later it had its international debut at the 1978 Berlinale, where the filmmaker received a nomination for the Golden Bear and Rowlands won best actress.
Wednesday, June 19 at 6:00pm
Original Cast Album: Company
D.A. Pennebaker, 1970, U.S., 53m
Original Cast Album: Company
Originally conceived as the pilot of a televised series, D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal entry in the canon of musical theater documentaries follows the raucous 1970 production of the original cast album for Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Tasked with documenting an extended recording session at the Manhattan studio of Columbia Records, taking place less than two months after the show’s Broadway debut, Pennebaker and his crew cast a humane, inquisitive gaze on Sondheim, director Hal Prince, and a vibrant cast of veteran actors including Elaine Stritch, Dean Jones, Barbara Barrie, and George Coe. Alternately startling for its frankness and unexpectedly moving in its author’s sensitive attunement to irruptions of raw frustration and artistic exuberance, the film deftly chronicles how the often conflicting forces of ego, talent, and personality are prone to combust under the pressure-cooker conditions of a collective creative endeavor.
Screening with:
The Meadows Green
George Griffin and DeeDee Halleck, 1974, U.S., 23m
Fantastical, larger-than-life puppetry and rambunctiously playful choreography is framed against an Edenic backdrop of Vermont farm country in George Griffin and DeeDee Halleck’s luminous, lyrical short film, which documents the 1974 edition of the Bread and Puppet Theater’s annual Domestic Resurrection Circus, taking place soon after the company’s relocation from downtown Manhattan to the rural New England enclave where it remains headquartered to this day. 4K restoration by IndieCollect, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art.
Thursday, June 20 at 9:00pm – Introduction by Annie Baker
Rumstick Road
Ken Kobland and Elizabeth LeCompte, 2013, U.S., 77m
Rumstick Road
The Wooster Group’s 1977 theater piece Rumstick Road has been recognized by critics and scholars as a landmark work that helped usher in a new era of experimental performance. Conceived by Spalding Gray as a response to the suicide of his mother, and directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, Rumstick Road combined Gray’s personal recorded conversations, family letters, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 35mm slides, music, and dance. This 2013 video reconstruction of Rumstick Road keeps faith with the theater piece by registering, in a new composite, the texture of time and memory that shaped the original production. LeCompte and filmmaker Ken Kobland have worked with Wooster Group archivist Clay Hapaz to layer, juxtapose, and blend together numerous archival fragments—including U-Matic video, Super-8 film, reel-to-reel audio tapes, photographs, and slides—in order to reconstruct that lost performance.
Monday, June 17 at 6:00pm at Francesca Beale Theater
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939, Japan, 35mm, 148m
Japanese with English subtitles
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
Kenji Mizoguchi’s hauntingly beautiful adaptation of Shofu Muramatsu’s popular novel stars Shotaro Hanayagi as Kikunosuke Onoe, a young actor and the adopted son of a Kabuki star in late-19th-century Tokyo. Failing to meet the standards set by his father, Onoe estranges himself from his family by entering into a relationship with Otoku (Kakuko Mori), his newborn brother’s nurse, who makes agonizing self-sacrifices to advance her beloved Onoe’s career. Mizoguchi thoughtfully conveys a culture’s social limitations and repressive gender roles while maintaining a pitch-perfect balance of tragedy and romance. With its flowing camera movements, delicate long takes, and measured choreography of actors, this masterpiece is marked by splendorous interplay of movement and space, and is a poignant tale of conflict between generations and, most pointedly, of female sacrifice.
Tuesday, June 18 at 6:00pm
Summer Stock
Charles Walters, 1950, U.S., 35mm, 108m
Summer Stock
Reunited again after For Me and My Gal and The Pirate, Gene Kelly and Judy Garland romance each other in this delightful musical about an unquenchable love of show business. When Kelly’s theater troupe needs a place to perform, Garland’s farm ultimately becomes their haven—forcing the latter to join the show when her actress sister (Gloria DeHaven) throws a hissy fit and drops out. This leads to drama within the local farm community, especially as Kelly’s and Garland’s characters grow closer. Both stars deliver knockout song-and-dance performances, such as Garland’s iconic rendition of “Get Happy” and Kelly’s dynamic choreography featuring a squeaky floorboard and old newspaper. In the latter sequence—which is often considered one of Kelly’s most imaginative numbers—the star smoothly integrates the dance sequence within the larger narrative, as his joyous and curious investigation of the surrounding space becomes the foundation for a kinetic and passionate dance. Directed by Charles Walters, Summer Stock is an enjoyable excursion into the mishaps and victories of both life on a farm and the world of entertainment.
Saturday, June 15 at 1:00pm
A Tale of Winter
Éric Rohmer, 1992, France, 114m
French with English subtitles
A Tale of Winter
From one angle, Éric Rohmer’s late-career masterpiece is a luminous Christian parable about the transformative effects of grace; from another, it’s a frightening, unresolved picture of the role that chance plays in human affairs. One summer, a young man and woman (Frédéric van den Driessche and Charlotte Véry) fall deeply, passionately in love. Five years later, after accidentally giving him a false address, she is raising his child and drifting back and forth between two infatuated men with whom she’s unwilling, or unable, to settle down. A Tale of Winter—which includes a generous excerpt of the play from which it takes its name—is the fullest expression of Rohmer’s career-long reckoning with Shakespeare, the most sophisticated of his many attempts to pin down the nature of faith, and one of his most graceful, mysterious, and emotionally overwhelming films.
Monday, June 17 at 8:30pm at Francesca Beale Theater – Introduction by Annie Baker
The Tales of Hoffmann
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1951, U.K., 128m
The Tales of Hoffmann
In some ways an artistic “sequel” to The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1951 version of French composer Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera, which in turn was adapted from three stories by the late 18th–early 19th century German author E.T.A. Hoffmann. Where the earlier film features a narrative set in motion by music and dance, The Tales of Hoffmann is a pure opera, a film composed entirely of music, dance, color, light, rhythm—and pure fancy. Powell and Pressburger assembled a spectacular team for the project: Sir Thomas Beecham conducted the Royal Philharmonic; Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tchérina, Robert Helpmann, and Léonide Massine (all of whom also appear in The Red Shoes) danced principal roles along with the choreographer Frederick Ashton; Robert Rounseville played Hoffmann and sang; Hein Heckroth was the production designer and Christopher Challis the cinematographer. A Rialto Pictures release.
Saturday, June 15 at 6:00pm – Introduction by Annie Baker
To Be or Not to Be
Ernst Lubitsch, 1942, U.S., 35mm, 99m
English, German, and French with English subtitles
To Be or Not to Be
The famed “Lubitsch touch” was perhaps never deployed to such urgently political ends as in To Be or Not to Be, a satirical take on collective artmaking under Fascism in which the German-born auteur draws a darkly humorous connection between the workaday labor of stage performers and the life-and-death stakes of wartime subterfuge. Released just three years after the Nazi invasion of Poland and set amid the fraught social and cultural climate of the German occupation, the film’s intricately plotted comedy of manners concerns Joseph and Maria Tura (Jack Benny and Carole Lombard), the married stars of a celebrated Warsaw theater company mounting a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on the eve of the invasion. When Maria’s admirer, a lovesick Polish lieutenant with connections to the resistance, unwittingly puts her in harm’s way, Joseph and Maria are drawn into a web of sexual entanglements worthy of the bard himself, building to a virtuosic series of impersonations that hinge on the chameleonic acting prowess of the Turas and their fellow troupe members. 35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress.
Sunday, June 16 at 1:00pm
Vanya on 42nd Street
Louis Malle, 1994, U.S., 35mm, 119m
Vanya on 42nd Street
Over several years in the late 1980s and early ’90s, renowned stage director André Gregory convened a group of established theater actors in an abandoned Broadway theater for a recurring private performance workshop, for which the unofficial cast would come together occasionally to rehearse a stripped-down staging of David Mamet’s adaptation of the great Chekhov play Uncle Vanya. Building on the success of this project, Gregory reteamed with My Dinner with André director Louis Malle and co-star/co-writer Wallace Shawn (playing the titular Vanya) to develop a filmed version of the makeshift troupe’s rehearsals. The result, which would turn out to be Malle’s final film, is a sneakily playful hybrid artifact, a pseudo-documentary reenactment of the real-life spectacle of theater actors at work—most notably a young Julianne Moore, then fresh off her star-making turn in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.
Friday, June 14 at 9:00pm
