When it comes to movies, cinephiles often avoid Brooklyn to escape an onslaught of independent hipster films. But while Film Forum, Lincoln Center, and the Museum of Modern Art dominate Manhattan, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek program challenges the island’s dominance in both quality theaters and quality movies.
Since 1998, BAMcinématek has been home not only for independent cinema from around the world, but for also daily retrospectives. And their latest retrospective may be one of the most curious choices by any cinema in the past year.
“The Late Film” presents exactly what the title implies—final works from the greatest directors of Hollywood and around the world. While film historians often cite the early work of directors as their best (who can forget Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, or Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs?), films that come late in a director’s lifetime often lack the visceral novelty that made him or her famous in the first place. But “The Late Film” challenges this notion, exploring the highly personal element that directors bring to these final works.
Possibly the most famous, as well as most debated, is Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (May 3rd), a sexual mystery film from the late ’90s starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Kubrick finished the film just days before his death, and left a strange coda for his endless fans.
For many, the film was borderline pornography, but it has been reexamined as an exploration of sexual politics and relationships in a darkly satirical universe. The final sequence is possibly Kubrick’s most wondrous—a strange reunification of two harrowed individuals, in an innocent toy-store, deciding the solution to their broken relationship is to “fuck.”
“The Late Film” aims to show that Eyes Wide Shut is not the only late masterpiece from a director. The two films from Howard Hawks, Red Line 7000 (May 20th) and El Dorado (May 21st), show Hawks cramming all the ideas of his earlier work—masculinity, group dynamics, and the American way—into an aviation flick and a western. Godard’s Shakespeare adaptation King Lear (May 15th) may be messy, but with performances by Molly Ringwald, Woody Allen, and Peter Sellers, it is hard to resist.
Not every film featured in “The Late Film” series is a classic, however. John Ford’s 7 Women (May 13th) drops his masculine examination for a often boring women’s picture, and Jerry Lewis’ Cracking Up (May 5th) is a uneven mess, saved only by Lewis’ performance.
But BAMcinématek’s “The Late Film” certainly accomplishes its aim—it truly presents the auteurs of cinema at their most honest and real. The greatest example may be Federico Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On (May 14th), a love letter to opera after the death of Fellini’s close friend, composer Nino Rota. What the series shows is that at the end of the day, films are a truly personal expression, and Brooklyn is certainly a worthwhile trip for film buffs.
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