Last Year at Marienbad / The Innocents
May 28 7:30pm PT
Last Year at Marienbad Widescreen
Thu, 05/28/2015 - 19:30

Linwood Dunn Theater
Pickford Center, 1313 Vine Street
Hollywood, CA 90028

Cinema has endured for decades in the face of competing visual storytelling mediums. In connection with our event The New Audience: Moviegoing in a Connected World, discover how studios and filmmakers – long before tablets, smartphones and the Internet – responded as audiences began trading regular visits to the movies for the ease and affordability of the first small screen: television. In response, numerous widescreen cinematic formats were rolled out around the world and capitalized on the breathtaking width of the projected image, not to mention the heightened fidelity of stereophonic sound, to achieve effects far beyond the reach of TV sets. This Is Widescreen offers a colorful assortment of films that demonstrate how filmmakers found new means of engaging the flexibility of the cinema and the key larger-than-life film formats employed over a 15-year period in Hollywood – from the launch of Cinerama in 1952 and the subsequent widescreen boom that included CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO and others – plus highlights from the first wave of 'Scope filmmaking from around the globe.

The Innocents Widescreen

Last Year at Marienbad

Thursday, May 28 | 7:30 P.M

French filmmaker Alain Resnais had one of his greatest critical and commercial successes with this elegantly filmed mind-twister from an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig play a man and a woman who meet for the first time at a resort hotel…or have they met before? Resnais and cinematographer Sacha Vierny (Hiroshima, Mon Amour; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) created black-and-white Dyaliscope images that tantalized the viewer as thoroughly as the enigmas of Robbe-Grillet’s script, including a panoramic view of formally clad figures statue-still in rays of the setting sun that has become an iconic image of international cinema. Marienbad was a conversation starter from its first screenings in 1961, and it continues to dazzle and puzzle audiences more than a half-century later.

1961, 94 minutes, black and white, 35mm | Directed by Alain Resnais; written by Alain Robbe-Grillet; with Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff, Françoise Bertin, Luce Garcia-Ville, Héléna Kornel, Françoise Spira.

THE INNOCENTS

Thursday, May 28 | 9:20 P.M.

This film version of Henry James’s classic short story “The Turn of the Screw” is one of the screen’s all-time great ghost stories. Six-time Academy Award nominee Deborah Kerr (who received an Honorary Award from the Academy in 1993 for her remarkable career) plays Miss Giddens, a repressed governess whose new charges (played by Martin Stephens and Pamela Franklin) may be haunted by the spirits of departed servants. Two-time Oscar winner Freddie Francis, who went on to a prolific career as a director of British horror films, was responsible for the ethereal black-and-white CinemaScope photography,  and returned to monochromatic widescreen nearly two decades later for David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.

1961, 100 minutes, black and white, DCP | Directed by Jack Clayton; screenplay Truman Capote, William Archibald, adaptation by John Mortimer, based on the play by Archibald, based on the short story “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James; with Deborah Kerr, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Michael Redgrave, Martin Stephens, Pamela Franklin.

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