ANNA KARENINA Debut Headlines Film Society of Lincoln Center's Upcoming Events

The Film Society of Lincoln Center announces its upcoming film series and events:

AN EVENING WITH Joe Wright
Thursday, November 1
6:00PM
Since making his feature directorial debut in 2005 with an impeccable, Oscar-nominated take on Jane Austen’s PRIDE & PREJUDICE, Joe Wright has quickly established himself one of the brightest young filmmakers on either side of the Atlantic--a reputation bolstered by the Oscar-winning ATONEMENT (2007), the sleek teen assassin thriller HANNA (2011), and now his latest: a visionary adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna KarenINA that marks Wright’s third teaming with the extraordinary Keira Knightley. We are delighted to welcome Wright for this special evening featuring a preview screening of Anna KarenINA, an onstage discussion, and an encore screening of ATONEMENT.

Anna KarenINA (2012) 130min
Director: Joe Wright
Country: UK
Tolstoy’s classic tragedy of aristocratic life in 19th century Russia comes to the screen as you’ve never quite seen it before in Wright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Tom Stoppard’s gorgeous, dazzlingly stylized new adaptation. Oscar nominee Keira Knightley is brilliant as the ill-fated Anna, whose affair with the dashing cavalry officer Vronsky (AaRon Taylor-Johnson) jeopardizes her marriage (to government official Jude Law) and scandalizes St. Petersburg high society. Taking Shakespeare’s cue that “all the world’s a stage,” Stoppard and Wright set the action under a theatrical proscenium that intensifies the love story’s already heightened emotions and sense of an appearance-obsessed society in which nothing is quite as it seems.
Following the screening there will be a Q&A with Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard.
Screens at 6:00PM.

ATONEMENT (2007) 123min
Director: Joe Wright
Countries: UK/France/USA
Wright followed PRIDE & PREJUDICE with this superb film version of Ian McEwan’s bestselling, seemingly unfilmable novel. Adapted for the screen by Oscar winner Christopher Hampton (DANGEROUS LIAISONS), ATONEMENT begins in 1935, where 13-year-old fledgling writer Briony Tallis (Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan) and her family live a life of wealth and privilege in their enormous mansion. Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the educated son of the family's housekeeper, carries a torch for Briony's headstrong older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley). When they connect, Briony–who has her own crush on Robbie–is compelled to interfere, going so far as accusing Robbie of a crime he did not commit. Cecilia and Robbie declare their love for each other, but he is arrested–and with Briony bearing false witness, the course of three lives is changed forever. Nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, and winner for Best Original Score (Dario Marianelli).
Screens at 9:00PM.

LIFE AND OTHER ANXIETIES: THE FILMS OF ED PINCUS
November 2-4
Insightful and ever-surprising, the films directed or co-directed by Ed Pincus mark the transition between the more issue-oriented tendency of American documentary in the early Sixties and the more personal approach that characterized work in the Seventies and beyond. Pincus’s first film, BLACK NATCHEZ, co-directed with David Neuman, chronicled in exciting detail the struggle for voting rights in a sharply divided southern community. The team followed this with ONE STEP AWAY, a portrait of a hippie commune that explored the growing gap between commune members’s stated ideals and their actual actions and relationships. With PORTRAIT OF A MCCARTHY SUPPORTER, Pincus and Neuman looked at Pincus's own father-in-law, a man whose contradictory politics, the film argues, revealed the ambiguity of Eugene McCarthy's campaign for President.

Yet it was with his next project, DIARIES: 1971-1976 (completed in 1981), that Pincus really hit his artistic stride. Taking advantage of the new Nagra SN tape recorder, a device that could capture high quality sound yet was small enough to fit in your pocket, Pincus embarked on a five-year chronicle of his own life. In many ways the film was the logical conclusion to a tendency in cinema verite documentary towards more personal, less "newsworthy" subjects. With DIARIES, Pincus brought the very idea of a diary film to a whole other level.

For personal reasons, Pincus dropped out of the film scene in the late Seventies, and as a consequence the full impact of the DIARIES project was seen perhaps more clearly in the work of some of his students, such as Ross McElwee and Mark Rance. In 2007, however, he returned in top form with THE AXE IN THE ATTIC (co-directed with Lucia Small), a film that traces the lives of several victims of the diaspora that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

THE AXE IN THE ATTIC (2007) 110min
Directors: Ed Pincus and Lucia Small
Country: USA
When I finished DIARIES in 1980, I thought my life in film was over. I had completed the work I wanted to do and saw no encore. Then, some 20 years later, a chance meeting as a judge at a film festival led to a collaboration with Lucia Small. For three years, Lucia and I discussed film ideas and decided we wanted to make a film about the temperature of America during the Bush era. Then, Hurricane Katrina hit and our film found a focus in the diaspora of the hurricane. THE AXE IN THE ATTIC was the distillation of a 60-day road trip to document what happened to a country displaced, and the role of the filmmakers who bare witness. The film made its world premiere at the 2007 New York Film Festival. (Description by Ed Pincus.)
Screens November 4 at 8:00PM.

BLACK NATCHEZ (1967) 62min
Directors: Ed Pincus and David Neuman
Country: USA
The advent of portable sync-sound equipment in the early ‘60s meant, for the first time in the sound era, that filmmakers could go to the subject as opposed to bringing the subject to the camera. The ability to take a camera out into the world created the desire to "get it right," to film the world independent of the act of filmmaking. In the US, all sorts of rules were being created in documentary film—no script, no narration, no interviews, no lighting, no mic boom, no collusion between subject and filmmaker.
In 1965, the second year of intense voter registration drives in Mississippi, we decided to make a film in the southwest corner of the state. Little civil rights work had been done there because of the danger in the region. Our approach was to seek out several story lines and then continue with the most interesting. A car bombing of a civil rights leader while we were there changed everything. The event emphasized the rifts in the black community around the demands for equality. Rifts between teenagers and women on the one hand and the black business community on the other. Rifts between black males forming armed protection groups and the call for non-violence by the major civil rights groups. And rifts between grassroots organizations and more traditional leadership organizations such as the FDP (Freedom Democratic Party) and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). (Description by Ed Pincus.)
Screening with
PANOLA (1970) 21min
Directors: Ed Pincus and David Neuman
Country: USA
Panola’s life was a performance. He was always “on the set.” Wino, tree pruner, possible police informant, philosopher, "the most dangerous X that ever was," "father of eight with one more on the way," Panola challenged our filmmaking convictions. In no way could we film him independently of the presence of the camera. The conflict between our aesthetic convictions and the reality and authenticity Panola expressed led to few years of confusion, unsuccessful attempts at edits, and ultimately the need to find an outside editor (primarily MichAl Goldman). (Description by Ed Pincus.)
Screens November 2 at 6:30PM and November 3 at 2:00PM.

DIARIES (1971 - 76) (1980) 200min
Director: Ed Pincus
Country: USA
It was a time of upheaval in people's personal relations. Everything was on the table. Feminism had a slogan: “The personal is political.” Filmmaking technology was rapidly evolving. It became possible for the first time to shoot single-person sync. A crew of one meant that intimate relations could be filmed in a documentary. Films could be shot over a long duration without skyrocketing costs. I decided to do an experiment. I would film for five years, not look at the footage, leave it in the can for five more years and then edit. Editing would mimic what came out of the camera ("the rushes"). David Hume had called the self no more than a bundle of perceptions. How much of individual personhood could be recreated in such a film? I wanted to test the personal is political in this brave new world of relationships. (Description by Ed Pincus.)
Screens November 3 at 6:30PM and November 4 at 2:15PM.

LIFE AND OTHER ANXIETIES (1977) 90min
Directors: Ed Pincus and Steve Ascher
Country: USA
In 1975, I was invited to “make any film I wanted as long as it was shot in Minneapolis.” David Hancock, a filmmaker friend in Vermont, who coincidentally grew up in Minneapolis, had just asked me to film him. He had been recently diagnosed with terminal cancer in his early thirties and wanted me to document the craziness of his dying days, as he was buffeted from chemotherapy to New Age cures recommended by friends. I didn’t have the stomach to follow much of David’s last days. Meanwhile, Steve Ascher and I teamed up to go to Minneapolis. We wanted to ask strangers what in their lives they would like to have filmed. For me, it was almost like an act of expiation. (Description by Ed Pincus.)
Screens November 3 at 4:30PM and November 4 at 6:00PM.

ONE STEP AWAY (1968) 54min
Directors: Ed Pincus and David Neuman
Country: USA
It was the Summer of Love, 1967. The Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco was to be the center of a vast cultural experiment. Ideologically it was an attempt at a post-industrial society, where people no longer needed to work and communities of choice allowed people to "do their own thing.” David Neuman and I set off to film what happened that summer. We decided to do what we thought would be a film about a rural commune, because that seemed to be the apotheosis of hippie ideals. What we found was a bizarre replication of bourgeois society—the sun rose on the nothing new. We decided to use an anecdotal editing style with an attempt to enforce a narrative line. (Description by Ed Pincus.)
Screening with
HARRY’S TRIP (1969) 16min
Directors: Ed Pincus and David Neuman
Country: USA
Harry, the leader of a commune, was in the middle of an acid trip when we put him in a room all by himself in front of the camera.
And
PORTRAIT OF A MCCARTHY SUPPORTER (1969) 16min
Directors: Ed Pincus and David Neuman
Country: USA
PORTRAIT OF A MCCARTHY SUPPORTER was a commission from Public Television. Each of five filmmakers were asked to make a 20-minute film about the state of the country. The Vietnam War was on everyone's agenda. We felt that Eugene McCarthy, an anti-war Democratic candidate for President, was co-opting the left's opposition to the war. We decided to make a film about my father-in-law to represent how far Eugene McCarthy's ideology was from progressive politics. The title’s ambiguity between Joe McCarthy and Eugene McCarthy faded as Eugene became a minor footnote in history. (Description by Ed Pincus.)
Screens November 2 at 8:30PM.

The Films of Keisuke Kinoshita
November 7-15
Universally considered one of the greatest Japanese directors, Keisuke Kinoshita, whose centenary we celebrate with this series, worked almost his entire career for Shochiku, the Japanese studio that also housed Yasujiro Ozu. Shochiku was that studio most devoted to what the Japanese call shomin-geki, stories of everyday life; yet while Ozu developed a rigorous, austere style that he perfected from film to film, Kinoshita was constantly changing, challenging himself to adapt to new subject matter and ways of storytelling. The director of Japan’s first color feature film, the charming musical satire CARMEN COMES HOME, could move just a few months later on to the bold experimentation just a few months later of A JAPANESE TRAGEDY, a work whose jumbled timeframe and insertion of newsreel footage anticipates the modernist films of the Sixties. He made bold use of traditional Japanese art forms such as kabuki (THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA) and brush painting (THE RIVER FUEFUKI), but could just as easily indulge in a steamy melodrama (WOMAN).

ART OF THE REAL
CAPE SPIN! AN AMERICAN POWER STRUGGLE
November 13 at 6:30PM

CAPE SPIN! AN AMERICAN POWER STRUGGLE (2011) 84min
Directors: John Kirby and Robbie Gemmel
Country: USA
Where do the lines get drawn in a battle over the first proposed offshore wind farm in the U.S. when the energy company wants to build turbines in Nantucket Sound? The traditional lines are quickly blurred and the usual suspects end up in unusual camps. With humor and tenacity, filmmakers John Kirby and Robbie Gemmel untangle the threads and put 10 years of arguments into perspective presenting both sides clearly and fairly. Political activism and good documentary filmmaking live on!
Directors John Kirby and Robbie Gemmel will attend and participate in a post-screening Q&A.

INDIE NIGHT
THE GIRL
November 15 at 8:00PM

THE GIRL (2012) 90min
Director: David Riker
Countries: Mexico/USA
More than a decade after bursting onto the scene with his acclaimed debut feature THE CITY (La Ciudad)--a quartet of stories about Spanish-speaking immigrants trying to make it in New York--director David Riker travels south of the border for his long-awaited follow-up, THE GIRL. In a performance of staggering power, Abbie Cornish (BRIGHT STAR, SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS) stars as Ashley, a single Austin mother and recovering alcoholic trying to hold her life together after losing custody of her son and her job at a Wal Mart-esque big box store. Desperate for cash, Ashley offers her services as a “coyote” for a Mexican family trying to cross the border illegally. But when the attempted crossing ends in tragedy, Ashley finds herself playing surrogate mother to a lost and confused young girl desperate to find whatever family she has left. The harrowing, moving and ultimately hopeful journey that ensues takes us deep into the heart of Mexico, and of a woman trying to make amends for her troubled past.
Director David Riker will attend and participate in a post-screening Q&A.

LOOKING FORWARD: MORE FOR NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER

Short Takes: 30 Years of the Princess Grace Foundation
(November 26)

Film Comment Selects: Ray Bradbury X 2 – Screenings of FAHRENHEIT 451 and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
(November 27)

Ettore Scola X 2 – Screenings of DOWN AND DIRTY and THE FAMILY
(November 28)

Making Waves: A Festival of Romanian Cinema in New York
(November 29-December 5)

Through Our Eyes: A Retrospective of 3 Decades of EVC Youth Documentaries
(December 6)

ImageNation: Celebrate Brazil – Screening of 5X FAVELA: NOW BY OURSELVES
(December 6)

Spanish Cinema Now
(December 7-16)

Indie Night – I AM NOT A HIPSTER
(December 17)

All the Right Moves: The Films of Tom Cruise
(December 17-20)

Art of the Real – MONEY FOR NOTHING: INSIDE THE FEDERAL RESERVE
(December 18)

See it in 70mm!
(December 21-January 1)