Films at the Whitney Archive
Spring 2023
(Les demoiselles de Rochefort, 1967). Liked La La Land? You’ll love this! Jacques Demy followed up his international smash hit The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with another musical about missed connections and second chances, this one a more effervescent, less melancholic confection. Or is it? Twins Delphine and Solange, a dance instructor and a music teacher (played by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac), long for big-city life; when a fair comes through their quiet port town, so does the possibility of escape.
Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a lesser-known novel by William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair). In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society.
(Francesco, giullare di Dio, 1950)
In a series of simple and joyous vignettes, director Roberto Rossellini and co-writer Federico Fellini lovingly convey the universal teachings of the People’s Saint: humility, compassion, faith, and sacrifice. Gorgeously photographed to evoke the medieval paintings of Saint Francis’s time, and cast with monks from the Nocera Inferiore Monastery, The Flowers of St. Francis is a timeless and moving portrait of the search for spiritual enlightenment.
Recently voted the “greatest film of all time” by the Sight and Sound critics’ poll in 2022, now you get a chance to see for yourself … in the format and the setting in which the film was meant to be seen: the cinema! A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow (the unforgettable Delphine Seyrig), whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick.
A single misstep, and reedy postman Frédéric Andréi is on the run all across Paris— including a hair-raising motorcycle-and-moped chase through the Métro—hotly pursued by a drug dealer’s hit team, ruthless Taiwanese music pirates, and the obviously outmanned flics: all because he pirated a recording of the woman of his dreams, the never-recorded opera superstar Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, singing an aria from obscure 19th-century composer Alfredo Catalani’s La Wally.
Special Mother’s Day screening! Perhaps Steven Spielberg’s greatest film, A.I. is “a collaboration between the living Steven Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick,” which “seems appropriate to a project that reflects profoundly on the differences between life and nonlife.
Special Graduation Weekend Presentation! One of the most beloved American films of all time, The Graduate earned Mike Nichols a best director Oscar, brought the music of Simon and Garfunkel to a wider audience, and introduced the world to a young actor named Dustin Hoffman. Benjamin Braddock (Hoffman) has just finished college and is already lost in a sea of confusion and barely contained angst when he becomes sexually involved with a friend of his parents, the indomitable Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), before turning his attention to her college-age daughter (Katharine Ross).
Fall 2022
Sofia Coppola’s sly, delectable biopic (2006) of France’s iconic but ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) before the events of the French Revolution and the fall of Versailles. Replete with songs by New Order, the Radio Dept, and the Strokes, this much-maligned film has now been recognized as “an elegy to frustration, where every color and sound evokes the longing and rapture of a girl who didn’t understand her adult responsibility” (Ed Gonzalez, Slant).
Join us for a three-part film series celebrating Nigerian cinema in honor of the special exhibition of sculptures by Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè on view this fall in the Yale University Art Gallery. To commemorate Bámigbóyè’s 50-year career, the films focus on themes of migration, identity, and the legacy of historic artworks and tradition in Nigerian society.
To celebrate Michael Roemer’s career, Films at the Whitney and Treasures from the Yale Film Archive are teaming up to present a new 35mm print of Michael’s lesser-known, but no-less-masterful feature film The Plot Against Harry. Jonathan Rosenbaum, who listed it among his 1,000 Personal Favorite Films, writes: “Shot in black and white in 1969, but neither completed nor shown until 1989, this delightful, offbeat comedy about a sad-eyed, small-time New York numbers racketeer named Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) who
Join us for a three-part film series celebrating Nigerian cinema in honor of the special exhibition of sculptures by Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè on view this fall in the Yale University Art Gallery. To commemorate Bámigbóyè’s 50-year career, the films focus on themes of migration, identity, and the legacy of historic artworks and tradition in Nigerian society.
The international breakthrough film (1988) of anime director Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke). It solidified Studio Ghibli’s position as the top animation studio in the world and served as the distilled quintessence of the Ghibli house style, which commands millions of ardent fans around the world. Two sisters move to the country with their father to be closer to their hospitalized mother, where they discover that the surrounding trees are inhabited by Totoros, magical spirits of the forest.
It’s 1982, and Taeko is 27 years old, unmarried, and has lived her whole life in Tokyo. She decides to visit her family in the countryside. As the train travels through the night, memories flood back of her younger self in 5th grade, 1966: the rock-craze sparked by the Beatles in Tokyo, the first immature stirrings of romance, the onset of menstruation, the frustrations of math and boys, the desire to act and be somebody else.
Join us for a three-part film series celebrating Nigerian cinema in honor of the special exhibition of sculptures by Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè on view this fall in the Yale University Art Gallery. To commemorate Bámigbóyè’s 50-year career, the films focus on themes of migration, identity, and the legacy of historic artworks and tradition in Nigerian society.
In the Pacific Northwest of the 1950s, two young sisters whose mother has abandoned them wind up living with their eccentric Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti), whose views of the world and its ways don’t quite live up to most people’s expectations. Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s mesmerizing adaptation (1987) of the now-classic Marilynne Robinson novel (1980), his first American film, is more than just “a commercial for the book,” as Forsyth himself modestly put it.
In the fall of 1963, Anne is becoming a teenager. She lives in Paris with her mother and her older sister, Frédérique. They’re just back from summer at the beach with their father. School starts. A turbulent year awaits them both. Writer-director Diane Kurys had worked as an actress for Fellini and others before growing sick of being told what to do by male directors uninterested in the inner lives of women and deciding to become a director herself.
Spring 2022
After two years away, Films at the Whitney is back with a screening of François Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) on 35mm. This turn-of-the-twentieth-century love triangle features Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays a young writer in love with two beautiful sisters, played by Kika Markham and Sylvia Marriott. In French with English subtitles.
After two years away, Films at the Whitney is back with a screening of François Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) on 35mm. This turn-of-the-twentieth-century love triangle features Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays a young writer in love with two beautiful sisters, played by Kika Markham and Sylvia Marriott. In French with English subtitles.