LACMA Film
Special Preview Screening
Friday, November 2 | Dalí & Buñuel
7:30 pm
Un chien andalou
1929/b&w/16 min. | Scr: Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, dir: Buñuel
L'Âge d'or
1930/b&w/60 min. | Scr: Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel; dir: Buñuel; w/ Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Max Ernst
Friday, November 9 | The Birth of Poetic Cinema & Trance Films
7:30 pm
The Blood of a Poet
1930/b&w/50 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Cocteau; w/ Lee Miller, Enrique Rivero
Les Mystères du château de Dé
1929/b&w/20 min. | Scr/dir: Man Ray
ticket info | $9, $6 for LACMA members, seniors (62+), and students with valid ID. Price includes both films in a double bill, except where noted. $5 for second film only with no advance purchase. Purchase of a film ticket includes entrance to the galleries.
Many programs sell out. Pre-purchase your ticket by visiting the museum box office, calling 323 857-6010, or clicking below:
Friday, November 2 | Dalí & Buñuel
7:30 pm
Un chien andalou
1929/b&w/16 min. | Scr: Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, dir: Buñuel
L'Âge d'or
1930/b&w/60 min. | Scr: Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel; dir: Buñuel; w/ Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Max Ernst
A landmark of avant-garde cinema and arguably the first truly surrealist film, Dalí and Buñuel‘s still striking Un chien andalou is a feverish maelstrom of dream imagery and time-bending drama. L'Âge d'or, the pair's second and final collaboration, is even more outrageous: a masterwork of delirious subversion and inventive blasphemy that was met with riots in Paris and was banned for fifty years.
9:00 pm
Wuthering Heights
1953/b&w/90 min. | Scr: Luis Buñuel, Julio Alejandro, Arduino Maiuri; dir: Buñuel; w/ Irasema Dilián, Jorge Mistral, Lilia Prado
Buñuel began working on this adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel (a favorite of the surrealists) in Paris in the early 1930s, though it took two decades to go into production. Transported to the barren, petrified landscape of Taxco in Mexico, Brontë's tale of doomed, all-consuming love is pushed to tortured excess and etched with dark, surreal images. "Triumphant...a blatant hacienda melodrama that camps out on poverty row before blasting into the stratosphere-a great movie that successfully travesties a great novel." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Friday, November 9 | The Birth of Poetic Cinema & Trance Films
7:30 pm
The Blood of a Poet
1930/b&w/50 min. | Scr/dir: Jean Cocteau; w/ Lee Miller, Enrique Rivero
Les Mystères du château de Dé
1929/b&w/20 min. | Scr/dir: Man Ray
In The Blood of a Poet, Jean Cocteau follows a young artist as he plunges into the blackness of a mirror and drifts through a sublime realm of visions and dreams populated with sphinxes, angels and living statues (among them Lee Miller, Man Ray's lover and collaborator). In Man Ray's last film, a strange group of visitors, faces obscured by shrouds, go about fanciful games and movements in and around the striking modernist villa (designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens) belonging to the Vicomte de Noailles, who also commissioned both Cocteau's film and L'Âge d'or.
9:20 pm
Meshes of the Afternoon
1943/b&w//18 min | Scr/dir: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid
At Land
1944/b&w/14 min. | Scr/dir: Maya Deren
Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort
1947-48/color/70 min./three parts: Psyche, Lysis, Charmides | Scr/dir: Gregory J. Markopoulos
European surrealism hit American screens with the development of the trance film. Described as works of "visionary experience" by scholar P. Adams Sitney, they feature "somnambulists, priests, initiates of rituals, and the possessed" as protagonists "wandering through a potent environment toward a climactic scene of self-realization." In Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land, Maya Deren infuses this model with psychodrama and mystery. Begun in Los Angeles while he was a student at USC and completed in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio, Gregory J. Markopoulos' Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort is inspired by an unfinished Pierre Louys novella and Platonic dialogues. "His shimmering, complex films, with their elusive themes of memory, desire, and creativity...were once compared to the works of Joyce, Proust, and Eisenstein." - Kristin M. Jones, Artforum.
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