LACMA

National Velvet
Tuesday, August 31 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1945/color /125 min. | Scr: Theodore Reeves, Helen Deutsch; dir: Clarence Brown; w/ Mickey Rooney, Donald Crisp, Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Lansbury

A British farm girl fights to train a difficult horse for the Grand National Steeplechase.

View the film's trailer here.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tuesday, September 7 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1958/color/108 min. | Scr: Richard Brooks, James Poe; dir: Richard Brooks; w/ Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives

A Southern house is divided by patriarchal dominance and the marital problems between one of the sons, a heavy drinker, and his wife.

View a trailer here.

Persona
Friday, September 10 | 7:30 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1966/b&w/81 min. | Scr/dir; Ingmar Bergman; w/ Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann

Blessed with two extraordinary actresses whose faces in close-up reveal the subtlest of emotions, Bergman's most audacious and enigmatic film focuses on two women—Elizabeth, a traumatized actress who has lost the ability to speak, and her extraverted but insecure nurse Alma—whose relationship evolves from affection and intimacy into resentment and hostility over the course of one summer. In this exploration of identity and representation, Bergman moved beyond psychology dissolving the line between reality and fantasy, and challenging the relationship between the spectator and the filmmaker: at the moment that Alma's emotions spill over into violence, the film we are watching "burns" in the projector. On release, Persona was acclaimed for its austere beauty and modernist ambitions, and recognized as a new chapter in Bergman's career, but few could agree on which scenes were real, or define the meaning. Some saw Elizabeth and Alma as two halves of the same personality; others read the relationship as that of a psychoanalyst and his patient. Susan Sontag called it "a masterpiece" and cautioned against the urge to interpret the film when she wrote: "The Latin word persona, from which the English 'person' derives, means the mask worn by an actor. To be a person then is to possess a mask; and in Persona, both women wear masks. Elizabeth's mask is her muteness. Alma's mask is her health, her optimism, her normal life. In the course of the film, both masks crack." 

View a trailer here.

Cries and Whispers
Friday, September 10 | 9:00 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1972/color/91 min. | Scr/dir; Ingmar Bergman; w/ Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann.

In a turn of the century villa, Bergman lays bare the souls of four women: Agnes who is dying of tuberculosis, her two emotionally distant sisters-Karin, a hate-filled, cold person, and Maria, a narcissistic, childish one-and the family maid, who is the only one able to deal with the mortality that they are all forced to confront. The concluding scene, depicting the moment when one can confront death and achieve grace, is both shattering and comforting. Evoking the paintings of Edvard Munch and the plays of August Strindberg, Cries and Whispers is one of Bergman's most provocative and intimate films: the dialogue is precise yet restrained, the music of Bach and Chopin is used sparingly but to overwhelming effect, and the cinematography, in shades of crimson, won Bergman's longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist an Academy Award.

The Magic Flute
Saturday, September 11 | 4:00 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1975/color/135 min. | Scr/ dir: Ingmar Bergman; w/ Josef Köstlinger, Irma Urrila, Håkan Hagegård,

The themes of Mozart's comic opera—in which Tamino must overcome the forces of darkness to find true love with the princess Pamina—infuse much of Bergman's work; an excerpt even appears as a demonic puppet show in Hour of the Wolf.  Bergman finally realized his dream of filming the opera when this enchanting and idiosyncratic production, commissioned by Swedish television and made on a modest budget, was released into theaters. Shooting on sets that replicated the intimate Drotningsteater in Stockholm, whose scale is in keeping with the probable first production, Bergman captures the excitement of live theater by pointing his camera both backstage and into the audience. Twenty-five years after its first appearance, it is still considered the finest screen version of an opera ever produced. "By reminding us that The Magic Flute is a fairy tale whose 'childish magic and exalted mystery' can appeal to spectators of all ages, Bergman neither betrayed nor merely reproduced Mozart's magic; rather, it is filtered through the Swedish maestro's own metaphysical vision in a remarkable act of homage."—Peter Cowie.

Hour of the Wolf
Saturday, September 11 | 7:30 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1967/b&w/89 min. | Scr/ dir: Ingmar Bergman; w/ Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Erland Josephson

Bergman plunders the iconography of classic horror films like Nosferatu, Vampyr and Dracula to find a visual correlative for the demons—real and fantastical—that visit Johan Borg, an artist who has moved with his wife Alma to an island in order to paint. Plagued by insomnia, Johan waits in terror nightly for the "hour of the wolf'—the hour just before dawn when most babies are born and most people die—as his hallucinations, shared by Alma, pour forth. But as his diary reveals, worse was to come: nocturnal visits to a castle populated by demons and ghosts where a sinister count oversees evenings of debauchery and violence. Made at a time of personal stress, Hour of the Wolf is clearly Bergman's most extreme depiction of the struggles an artist must endure when giving birth to his art. "A dazzling flow of surrealism, expressionism and full-blooded Gothic horror."—The Observer

View a trailer here.

The Magician
Saturday, September 11 | 9:10 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1958/b&w/100 min. | Scr/ dir: Ingmar Bergman; w/ Max von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand

Sweden, 1846. Vogler's Magnetic Health Theater, a travelling show led by the charismatic and mute magician Albert Vogler arrives in a small town to give a performance. But the local authorities have heard of the troupe's dubious reputation and are determined to prove that Vogler and associates are charlatans. The magic of theater versus the forces of rationalism is Bergman's theme in this darkly humorous film in which Vogler, a sexually charismatic von Sydow, turns the tables on the petit bourgeoisie that are persecuting him in a tour de force finale derived from horror movie conventions.  "Widely underrated, probably because of its strong comic elements, Bergman's chilling exploration of charlatanism is in fact one of his most genuinely enjoyable films."—Time Out

It's Always Fair Weather
Tuesday, September 14 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1955/color/102 min./Scope | Scr: Betty Comden, Adolph Green; dir: Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen; w/ Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse

World War II buddies get mixed up with gangsters and an egotistical TV star when they hold a 10-year reunion.

View a trailer here.

The Touch
Thursday, September 16 | 7:30 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1970/color/113 min. | Scr/ dir: Ingmar Bergman; w/ Elliott Gould, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow

In this low-key, intimate drama set on the island of Gotland, just south of the filmmaker's home in Fårö, Karin, a Swedish housewife lives quietly with her husband. a surgeon.  Into her harmonious life comes an impetuous and engaging Jewish American archaeologist with whom Karin, perhaps affected by the recent death of her mother, begins an affair. And this new passion with which she is 'touched', like the medieval statue of Mary unearthed by the archaeologist, self-destructs from within. Bergman's first film in English reflects a larger world—touching on the holocaust—and Gould, cast as the "intruder", paints a vivid portrait of an uncompromising man tormented by inner contradictions and compulsions. "Andersson creates a finely tuned portrayal of a woman facing a midlife crisis, and the sparsely lit, claustrophobic interiors and subdued autumnal exteriors are beautifully photographed by cinematographer Sven Nykvist"—Jon Wengström

NOTE: The Touch, a Swedish-U.S. coproduction, was shot and released in two versions: one with Swedish and English dialogue, and one entirely in English. The original bilingual version—the version released in Sweden—is presented in this series in a restored print courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute. 

In person: Elliott Gould

The Seventh Seal
Friday, September 17 | 7:30 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1956/b&w/95 min. | Scr/ dir: Ingmar Bergman; w/ Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson,

Returning home from a decade of battling in the Crusades, a knight (von Sydow) encounters Death on a desolate beach and challenges him to a fateful game of chess. Keeping Death at bay, the knight encounters bubonic plague, superstition and witch burnings, as he journeys through a land from which God is absent. Only a young troupe of commedia dell'arte jugglers and acrobats offers some joy in a world of pain and suffering. Much studied, imitated, even parodied, but never outdone, Bergman's stunning allegory of man's search for meaning was one of the benchmark foreign imports of America's 1950s art-house heyday, ushering in a new era of movie going. "Did God create man or did man create God, and does it matter once the bond of faith is accepted? The Seventh Seal embraces doubt the way other films embrace piety, futility, or melodrama. Nor have Bergman's moral concerns dated—not in the film's disdain for religious persecution, trumped-up wars, and the deals most of us desperately make with Death to delay the inevitable."—Gary Giddens

View a trailer here.

The Silence
Friday, September 17 | 9:15 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1963/b&w/90 min. | Scr/ dir: Ingmar Bergman; w/ Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom

Bergman's search for the presence of God in The Seventh Seal reached its bleak conclusion is The Silence, the third in a trilogy comprised of Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light. Two sisters—Ester an intellectual and a translator, with a pathological need to control and Anna, younger, sensual and instinctive—are travelling with Anna's son Johan by train through a strange war-torn country during a heat wave when they are forced to disembark due to Ester's illness. Trapped in an old hotel, unable to speak the language, each character expresses loneliness in starkly different ways: Ester, bickering with Anna, drowns her despair in alcohol; Anna, restless, neglects her son to seek out anonymous sex in a local bar; while Johan prowls the hotel encountering an anachronistic old porter and a troupe of circus dwarves. Reflecting the inner angst of the characters in a series of striking images-the long empty corridors down which the camera tracks, the tanks rolling through the streets at night, the claustrophobic room with its baroque ceiling and ornate metal beds, the probing close-ups of the women's faces and bodies-Bergman created one of his most disturbing films, and one that would leave a mark on the future films of Kubrick and Lynch. "This harrowing study is Bergman's definitive allegory on human isolation and the absence of God."—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice.

View a trailer here.

…but Film is My Mistress
Saturday, September 18 | 4:00 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
2010/color/66 min. | Scr/dir: Stig Björkman.

This new documentary which premiered at the Cannes Festival last May features interviews with Woody Allen, Bernardo Bertolucci, Olivier Assayas, Martin Scorsese, Arnaud Desplechin, Lars von Trier and Liv Ullmann.

In person: Stig Björkman

Free admission, tickets required, reserve yours here.

Fanny and Alexander
Saturday, September 18 | 7:30 pm
The Psychological Cinema of Ingmar Bergman
1982/color/189 min. | Scr/dir: Ingmar Bergman; w/ Börje Ahlstedt, Allan Edwall, Pernilla Allwin,  Bertil Guve, Erland Josephson, Pernilla August, Harriet Andersson

As a child, Bergman was given a magic lantern that he credits with his earliest creative impulses; and so it is fitting that youthful imagination is at the core of his final film, an artistic summing up that depicts the coming of age of 10 year-old Alexander. The film begins as the loving Ekdahl family, a financially comfortable clan in turn-of-the-century Sweden, gathers to celebrate Christmas; but tragedy soon strikes when the patriarch Oscar dies, and his widow, the mother of Alexander and his eight-year-old sister Fanny, marries a clergyman who turns out to be a sadistic tyrant. It takes the efforts of their indomitable grandmother, her eccentric Jewish friend and the ghost of Oscar to liberate the children. With its opulent design and languid, confident pacing, Fanny and Alexander realistically evokes a specific time and place while bathing Alexander's adventures in the light of a fairy tale: on the one hand, there's an ebullient sense of wonder; on the other, a gothic sensibility reminiscent of such tales as Jane Eyre. "Fanny and Alexander is a big, exciting, ambitious film—one of the most detailed and specific he's ever made, and therefore one of the most universal."—Roger Ebert

View a trailer here.

Without Love
Tuesday, September 21 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1945/b&w/111 min. | Scr: Donald Ogden Stewart; dir: Harold S. Bucquet; w/ Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball

A World War II housing shortage inspires a widow to propose a marriage of convenience with an inventor.

View a trailer here.

Dark Passage
Tuesday, September 28 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1947/b&w/106 min. | Scr/dir: Delmer Daves; w/Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Bruce Bennett, Agnes Moorehead

A man falsely accused of his wife's murder escapes to search for the real killer..

View a trailer here.

Fists in the Pocket
Friday, October 1 | 7:30 pm
Spotlight on Marco Bellocchio
1965/b&w/105 min. | Scr/dir: Marco Bellocchio; w/ Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora

Belloccio's debut feature is an audacious portrait of dysfunctional upper class family whose crazed, epileptic teenage son plots to kill his mother and brother. "From the moment Lou Castel literally falls from the sky into the film, one knows that one has signed up for one darn crazy ride… This [film] spells y-o-u-t-h with the greatest virulence. It captures its never abetted sense of social claustrophobia and, its consequence, its recurrent fantasies of murder and mayhem. For anyone, anywhere, at any time, who uttered, 'Families, I hate you!' this film should be the Bible. Nervy, hilarious, and bleaker than bleak, it manages to make you believe the impossible, namely that a filmmaker could take a trip on the Rimbaud side of the street and not come out looking ridiculous. And, as an added bonus, for those who want to understand the sixties beyond the banalities that are ritually uttered about them, every scene of Fists in the Pocket, with the convulsive beauty of its framing and composition, amply proves how much this period was made by people so steeped in classical culture that they fantasized it could be solid beyond its fragility, shaking it to the core and ultimately ushering in a world they could themselves hardly live in."—Jean-Pierre Gorin

China is Near
Friday, October 1 | 9:30 pm
Spotlight on Marco Bellocchio
1968/b&w/108 min. | Scr: Elda Tattoli, Marco Bellocchio; dir: Marco Bellocchio; w/ Glauco Mauri, Elda Tattoli, Paolo Graziosi

This biting satire about sex, religion and politics, that ranges in tone from farce to dead earnest, "concerns a rather doltish Italian aristocrat, a professor of political science who has been, by his own account, a member of 'all four parties of the Italian center-left', and a young Maoist, a student who is having an affair with the professor's secretary, and a leading candidate for the local Socialist Council. But because the professor is rich, the Socialists nominate the professor, who in turn hires the cynical student as a campaign assistant. While touring tour the countryside, where they address sparse groups of toothless and old men and packs of delinquent boys, they are set upon by Stalinists, and nearly blown up by a time bomb placed in their headquarters by the Maoists… The student begins an affair with the professor's sister; the student's former girlfriend becomes involved with the professor. And the two young people on the left, having grown more fond of money and social position than of each other, resolve to marry the two aristocrats."—Renata Adler, The New York Times

The Devil in the Flesh
Saturday, October 2 | 7:30 pm
Spotlight on Marco Bellocchio
1987/color/114 min.  | Scr: Enrico Palandri, Ennio De Concini, Marco Bellocchio; dir: Marco Bellocchio; w/ Maruschka Detmers, Federico Pitzalis, Anita Laurenzi

"Raymond Radiguet began his masterpiece—the romantic novel Le Diable au Corps—when he was 17 or 18 and published it in 1923, the year he died of typhoid fever at the age of 20. Helped no doubt by Radiguet's liaison with Jean Cocteau, Le Diable au Corps was an instant success. It's also been an enduring one, at least in France: a classic to be discovered by youthful readers with the same kind of excitement that American college students come upon Ernest Hemingway, J. D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. Its World War I story, about the passionate affair of an adolescent boy and an older woman married to a French soldier at the front, is no longer as shocking as it once was.  However, its cynicism (early critics found it unpatriotic) continues to speak to successive generations of restless young people at odds with inherited tradition. In 1947, Claude Autant-Lara directed the definitive film version (starring newcomer Gérard Philipe), but Marco Bellocchio has made no attempt to adapt the Radiguet original. Instead, he uses it loosely, more or less as inspiration for a contemporary romantic drama in which he once again explores his favorite themes- family relationships and the individual's relationship to the society that represses him. Photographed in bright, shiny, primary colors, which (intentionally, I suspect) give everything, even the characters, the look of plastic, it is also more studiously erotic than anything Radiguet (or Autant-Lara) would have dared. "—Vincent Canby, The New York Times

Please note: No one under the age of 18 will be permitted into this screening.

La Balia/The Nanny
Saturday, October 2 | 9:40 pm
Spotlight on Marco Bellocchio
1999/color/106 min. | Scr: Daniela Ceselli, Marco Bellocchio; dir: Marco Bellocchio; w/ Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Maya Sansa

A Pirandello adaptation set in pre-World War I Rome, The Nanny examines the subject of motherhood, a theme that runs throughout Bellocchio's work. A fraught relationship develops when a stern psychiatrist and his estranged wife hire a wet nurse to care for their new-born child. The matriarch is dejected; she is incapable of bonding with her baby, even less feed it. But the illiterate, country girl who's usurped her has abandoned her own infant son in order to take the job. All around them the bourgeois order of Rome is collapsing amid proletarian riots, red flags and Socialist strikes. "This time Bellocchio is not encumbered by auto-biographical concerns and is free to take advantage of more opportunities. In a dramatic birth scene, the 'mother figure' is dismantled into a series of characters, of different gender and social class. Although inspired by the text of Luigi Pirandello, The Nanny is not particularly Pirandellian. The Sicilian writer is more cynical and his short story features a greater dose of evil and pessimism. Bellocchio's characters have been softened through greater complexity; there is more room given to the contrast between the world of men and women, wealth and poverty, origins and culture. Non-Italians will also enjoy the brilliance with which Bellocchio reveal aspects of Sicilian culture that have heretofore remained mysterious."—Alessandro Bruno

Follow the Fleet
Tuesday, October 5 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1936/b&w/110 min. | Scr: Dwight Taylor, Allan Scott; dir: Mark Sandrich; w/ Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Betty Grable, Lucille Ball

Two sailors on leave romance a dance-hall hostess and her prim sister.

View the film's trailer here.

The Swan
Tuesday, October 12 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1956/color108 min./Scope | Scr: John Dighton; dir: Charles Vidor; w/ Grace Kelly, Alec Guinness, Louis Jourdan, Agnes Moorehead, Brian Aherne, Van Dyke Parks

On the eve of her marriage to a prince, a noblewoman falls for her brother's tutor.

View the film's trailer here.

Arsenic and Old Lace
Tuesday, October 19 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1944/b&w/118 min. | Scr: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein; dir: Frank Capra; w/ Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey, Jack Carson, Edward Everett Horton, Peter Lorre

A young man about to be married discovers his two aunts are poisoning lonely old men.

View the film's trailer here.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Tuesday, October 26 | 1:00 pm
Tuesday Matinees
1932/b&w/98 min. | Scr: Samuel Hoffenstein, Percy Heath; dir: Rouben Mamoulian; w/ Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, Rose Hobart

Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale of a scientist who unleashes the beast within.

Program Notes

Friday and Saturday screenings begin at 7:30 pm unless otherwise noted. There is a ten-minute intermission between features on a double bill. All programs are subject to change. Films are in 35mm unless otherwise indicated. Foreign-language films are subtitled in English. Many films are unrated and may not be appropriate for younger viewers. If a film is listed as "sold out," a standby line will form one hour before the screening. Any cancellations or seats that become available will go to people waiting in this line. Please note that there is no guarantee that everyone in the standby line will be accommodated.

The Leo S. Bing Theater is equipped with a DTS digital sound system courtesy of Universal Pictures, an SDDS digital sound system courtesy of Sony Cinema Products, and Dolby digital sound.

$5 second film only of a double-feature; no advance purchase.

$2 Tuesday matinees.
$1 Tuesday matinees, seniors (62+).

Where to Buy
Buy tickets at the museum box office (tel. 323 857-6010) or online. Many programs sell out so try to purchase in advance.

Included
Your film ticket covers both films in a double bill, except where noted, and includes entrance to the museum galleries as well.

Film Department
Tel. 323 857-6177
Ian Birnie, Director
Bernardo Rondeau, Program Coordinator
Pauline Posner, Volunteer

If you would like to subscribe to the Film Department’s e-mail newsletter, please send a message to film@lacma.org.