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Saturday nights this summer, Thirteen brings you some of the best foreign film classics, from Fellini to Kurosawa and Bergman. For cinephiles and casual film fans alike, you'll watch some of the most exciting and ground-breaking films from around the globe - films that influenced many of the biggest names in modern American film, including Steven Spielberg, Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
Film Schedule:
SEVEN SAMURAI (Saturday, July 7 - 10:30pm)
If you had to find one word to describe Akira Kurosawa's awe-inspiring epic, it might be: undeniable. This movie sent shockwaves across the world, inspiring generations of filmmakers and rousing generations of filmgoers with its dynamic action, density of detail, moral clarity, diamond-sharp pictorialism and intricate design. Starring Toshiro Mifune.
(Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1954, 202m, Japanese)
BLACK ORPHEUS (Saturday, July 14 - 10:50pm)
In this classic, a streetcar conductor falls in love with a girl during carnival in Rio de Janeiro. A striking bas-relief of the Greek legend of Orpheus and his lost love Eurydice fills the screen as colorfully-garbed favela dwellers burst through. Adapted from Orfeu da Corceicao, the award-winning play by Vinicius de Moraes, Black Orpheus was a triumph (Cannes Palme d'Or and Best Picture Oscar) for French director Marcel Camus. It's the movie's end music, performed as the sun rises by two little boys and a wisp of a girl samba-ing up a storm, that first got the world hooked on the new beat from Brazil.
(Marcel Camus, France/Brazil, 1959, 108m, Portuguese)
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (Saturday, July 21 - 10:55pm)
Victor Erice's spellbinding Spirit of the Beehive was widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian village in 1940, directly following the country's devastating Civil War, six-year-old Ana (played by the luminous Ana Torrent) attends a traveling movie show of Frankenstein and then becomes seemingly possessed by its memory. Produced as Franco's long regime was nearing its end, Spirit of the Beehive, a bewitching portrait of a child's haunted inner life, is one of the most visually arresting movies ever made-from one of cinema's most elusive auteurs.
(Victor Erice, Spain, 1973, 99m, Spanish)
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (Saturday, July 28 - 11:25pm)
Jean Cocteau's remarkable 1946 version of the Le Prince de Beaumont tale is one of the few films ever made to truly capture the spirit, as well as the look and feel, of a fairy tale. Cocteau's enchanted world brims with life and scintillating emotions. The radiant Josette Day personifies "La Belle" -- Beauty. Jean Marais is exquisitely beautiful as the beast - at the point near the end of the film when the charm wears off and he is revealed as the handsome prince, Greta Garbo uttered the famous cry: "Give me back my beast!"
(Jean Cocteau, France, 1946, 94m, French)
LA STRADA (Saturday, August 18 - 11:10pm)
Fellini's tale of a brutish traveling salesman (Anthony Quinn) who takes a simple woman (Giulietta Masina) along with him as he travels the countryside is deceptively simple and challenges audiences around the world. Fellini, known as one of the top screenwriters in Italian cinema and a promising young director, poured everything he had into this film, physically and psychologically, and in the process created what he called "the complete catalogue of my entire mythological world." When La Strada premiered in Venice, it was celebrated by Catholic critics and subsequently scourged by leftists as a betrayal of Neorealism, edging it over the precipice and into magic realism.
(Federico Fellini, Italy, 1954, 109m, Italian)
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (Saturday, August 25 - 11:15pm)
One of the most influential political films in history, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (La bataille d'Alger) vividly recreates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the French in the 1950s. As violence escalates on both sides, children shoot soldiers at point-blank range, women plant bombs in cafés, and French soldiers resort to torture to break the will of the insurgents. Shot in the streets of Algiers in documentary style, the film is a case study in modern guerrilla warfare, with its terrorist attacks and the brutal techniques used to combat them. Gillo Pontecorvo's tour de force is a film with astonishing relevance today.
(Gillo Pontecorvo, France/Italy/Algeria, 1966, 122m, French/Arabic)
THE VIRGIN SPRING (Saturday, September 1 - 11:05pm)
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden. Starring frequent Bergman collaborator and screen icon Max von Sydow, the film is both beautiful and cruel in its depiction of a world teetering between paganism and Christianity, and of one father's need to avenge the death of a child.
(Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1960, 90m, Swedish)
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SEVEN SAMURAI
BLACK ORPHEUS
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
LA STRADA
THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS
THE VIRGIN SPRING
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