Educated in physics, mathematics, and philosophy at Princeton University and trained in graphic design at Yale, Berkeley-based Aaron Marcus explores new possibilities for expression. He created his first “computer-assisted poem-drawings” in the spring of 1972, when he served as a research associate at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture. Using standard typographical symbols, Marcus...

Lang’s remake of Renoir’s La bête humaine reunites his stars from The Big Heat. Glenn Ford is just back from the Korean War, ignoring the advances of his landlord’s daughter and heading straight for Gloria Grahame’s seductively puckered mouth. Problem is, Grahame has a husband. Lang replaces Renoir’s humanism with a sense of determinism and perverse doom, continually arranging the characters...

Lang’s remake of Renoir’s La bête humaine reunites his stars from The Big Heat. Glenn Ford is just back from the Korean War, ignoring the advances of his landlord’s daughter and heading straight for Gloria Grahame’s seductively puckered mouth. Problem is, Grahame has a husband. Lang replaces Renoir’s humanism with a sense of determinism and perverse doom, continually arranging the characters...

Over-Under, Sideways-Down explores the politics of everyday life in America through the experiences of a working-class couple, Roy and Jan Stannis, who live with their two children in a cramped tract home. An assembly line worker in a steel plant, Roy entertains the fantasy of moving from the local semi-pro baseball team, for which he plays third base, to the big leagues. “It’s just a matter of...

Keenly attuned to the mythopoeic resonance of popular songs, Kenneth Anger’s films presaged the use of rock ’n’ roll in narrative cinema as well as the way that cinema would later be employed to give rock songs a visual dimension for TV. The three films on this program illustrate his uncanny genius and his ability, as David E. James writes, to visualize “the ambiguities of rock ’n’ roll’s social...

Best known for his television documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey, filmmaker Mark Cousins here adopts the form of a film essay, a letter from himself to Orson Welles. In this idiosyncratic and highly personal work, he muses on Welles’s life, career, and visual imagination. Cousins gained rare access to hundreds of sketches, drawings, and paintings made by Welles, and he uses these images to...

“If Bob Dylan isn’t exactly an ‘event’ of the sixties, surely he is a felt presence for the decade. Marrying the social impulse of Woody Guthrie to the rhythms of rock-and-roll is only part of his achievement. To look once more at him now, through the direct-cinema prism of Dont Look Back, is to see him navigate the difficult terrain between art and commerce, between Woodstock nation and...

One of Mexican cinema’s great flores del mal, Twilight renders a world of darkness and shadows, where rational thought rails against irrational desire—and fails. Arturo de Córdova stars as a successful, forward-looking professional whose views on Mexico’s progress are obscured by a destructive passion for his best friend’s wife, the alluring Gloria Marín. “Don’t stay in the light, come into the...

Inspired by the group’s reunion, more than thirty years following its dissolution, Irola decided to create this documentary tracing the formation, development, and eventual splintering of Cine Manifest. Featuring frank, often hilarious interviews with all the group’s members, who reminisce about their days working together, Cine Manifest is a fascinating account of the hopes, ideals, and...

Lang’s first Hollywood film after fleeing Germany is a vivid social melodrama with many visual elements of Expressionism-turned-noir. Spencer Tracy, a stranger in a small town, is bizarrely charged with kidnapping—implicated by a bag of salted peanuts—and becomes the object of a mob who burn down the jailhouse and, they think, him with it. From his position as a “dead” man he follows the trial of...