The final screening of LACMA’s weekend classic film program, begun 41 years ago and overseen by Ian Birnie for the last 15, features Yasujiro Ozu’s “Late Autumn” (1962). That’s on Saturday, July 30, 2011.

In his program note setting up the film, reprinted below, you’ll note Birnie’s inclusion of the word “heart” in the first sentence. This indicates why so many of us love his screenings. Take it away, Ian:

Japanese cinema occupies a special place in my heart so I was gratified that every program we mounted including single revivals (Tokyo Twilight, The Story of Late Chrysanthemums) attracted large and dedicated fans. In addition to two series of Japanese classics curated by Susan Sontag, the department presented major retrospectives devoted to three of Japan’s greatest filmmakers: Kenji Mizoguchi, Nagisa Oshima, and in 2004 Yasujiro Ozu who remains in a class by himself.

Like The River, Ozu’s late color masterpiece is steeped in nostalgia and the acceptance of life’s disappointments; and its tale of a widow who urges her single daughter to marry and leave home marks the passage of time. No plot summary can convey the harmonious achievement of Ozu’s unique style of filmmaking: the geometric framing of the shots, the musical rhythm and repetition of the scenes, the muted color palette, and the restrained performances of actors like Setsuko Hara as the mother and Chishu Ryu as a family friend all magically combine to produce a work of profound insight and compassion.

LACMA’s Weekend Classic Film Series: Celebrating Classic Cinema: Curator and Audience Favorites | Late Autumn | Saturday Oct 30, 2011 7:30 pm

Starring the great Jack Benny and the precious Carole Lombard, who died horribly in an airplane crash two months after the film’s completion, “To Be …” is the funniest movie I’ve ever seen in my life, full stop.

Anyone who passed Friday evening at the funky-friendly Bing Theater will explode in laughter at the sight of the guy at right. Sig Ruman, who cut his comic teeth working with the Marx Brothers, plays a hard-striving Nazi functionary who grows increasingly flummoxed as a group of wily Polish actors outfox him and his Fuhrer (“Heil, me!”)

Linking these two movies are indelible threads, delicious connections for the audience. Both films:

• were made by master directors within a few years of each other, 1941-42.
• careen wildly, but credibly, between slapstick, biting satire and social commentary.
• feature art within art: “Sullivan” acerbically reflects on the film industry, as “To Be…” lovingly portrays the theater world.
• use brilliant writing to take on humongous, almost unapproachable, issues — in “Sullivan,” the festering cycles of the American underclass, and in “To Be …” the threat of Nazi totalitarianism, and its absurdities.

In the coup de grace, in “Sullivan,” Veronica Lake plays a striving Hollywood actress who yearns to be introduced to Lubitsch.

Ian — what a masterful duo. Thank you, thank you.

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• LACMA film series majestic in July. Go!

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All four movies are all de rigeur, but until you’ve seen “The Earrings of Madame de…” on the Bing Theater’s big screen, well, you’re missing a huge pleasure! And “L’Avventura.” And “Sunrise.”

LACMA’s classic film series expires on July 30, when it gets replaced by something, let’s face reality, that is sure to be worse. I therefore encourage you to spend an evening this July at the Bing.

_{This post dedicated to the memory of Robert Sklar.}

This just in from the museum: “Los Angeles (April 6, 2011)—The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced today that it has entered into a partnership with Film Independent, the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

LACMA and Film Independent will inaugurate the new weekly Film Series in September 2011 with previews of feature-length narrative and documentary films; archival films and repertory series; conversations with emerging and established filmmakers and artists; international showcases; family films; and special guest-curated programs. In addition, monthly post-screening receptions will bring together the Los Angeles creative community by offering a gathering place for film lovers, artists and the general public. The current LACMA film program, as well as Film Independent’s year-round Film Series will continue through mid-September.”

An interesting media sponsorship: “The New York Times will be the sole Presenting Sponsor of the new Film Series. As a national newspaper that has long offered extensive coverage of films and filmmakers, this collaboration will serve to establish a larger cultural presence in Los Angeles for The New York Times.”

And some sad news: “Ian Birnie, LACMA’s Consulting Curator in the Film Department, will be leaving this fall.”

The full LACMA announcement posted here.

Fittingly, today is International Women’s Day. Et quelle femme!

We’d just watched Francois Ozon’s latest,”Potiche,” a wacky, very French farce about the growing feminist consciousness of a wealthy industrial wife in the 1970s. How quaint; the family factory manufactures umbrellas (de Cherbourg?). La Deneuve figures imperiously and comically in nearly every scene, a huge role for her in a really fun recommended movie.

Engaging with LACMA’s ever-fluid film curator, Ian Birnie, Deneuve was a tough interview, failing, in conversation, to comprehend such Americanisms as our eternal quibble over funding public radio, the fact that our actors have to wait tables between gigs, and our neurotic movie actresses who double as kleptomaniacs.

She looked dead confused when it was suggested she should make a film in Los Angeles, or at least want to. Why would she do that, she somewhat stumbled, when she works steadily in France?

She didn’t give much beyond her regal and ravishing presence, garbed as she was in black knit, her blonde hair tucked back, then falling naturally to her shoulders in absolute perfection. Two large hoop earrings, presumably made of tiny diamonds, framed her stunning face, and diamonds, as well, circled her ankle in a bracelet decorating the bottom of one of her pretty legs. Like, who do you know that wears bare legs, perilously high heels, and an ankle bracelet … and still looks like royalty?

La Reine Catherine Deneuve!

Here’s the trailer for “Repulsion,” Polanski’s amazing film that we saw last Friday night as part of LACMA’s Deneuve retrospective:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO0niGPR5S4

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• Ian Birnie riffs on “Repulsion“

_{photos: thank you, carol brenner}

Ian Birnie, film curator responsible for the museum’s Deneuve retrospective, shares his view on “Repulsion”:

“It’s brilliant. And dramatically so well constructed. Everything introduced in the beginning – the cracks, the potatoes, the rabbits, the sound through the walls – re-appears later in demented form. And I love Polanski’s ‘outsider”s view of London — all two-story brick buildings next to poured concrete towers, filled with surreal sights like the long shot of the buskers. The b&w cinematography beautifully evokes those kitchen-sink Brit films of the late ’50s, early ’60s but with a shot of Kafka and Beckett. And has Deneuve ever been better directed? You can practically feel Polanski right outside the frame.”

Like this?

• arts·meme catalogues the French actresses

Zsigmond, in tandem with his compatriot Laszlo Kovacs, introduced a palette of mittel European muted natural light to Hollywood. According to Zsigmond, when he first arrived in L.A. (early project here), “American films were very bright and musical.” The two Hungarians forged a new look and feel that came to characterize movies in the ’70s.

Chatting with LACMA’s Ian Birnie about director Jerry Schatzberg‘s picaresque “Scarecrow,” a road movie starring Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, Zsigmond reminisced in his heavily accented English.

Dark movie

“One of the better of my movies,” he said. “I have the distance to look at it [now].  It’s very dark. I would not have the courage to do it that dark [today]. People don’t like when they cannot see the actor’s faces.

“It was an underlit film. The French nouvelle vague was underlit. German film was underlit. It looks very real. [In the seventies] pictures started to get very real. European influence. [Shooting "Scarecrow"] I was panicking because I didn’t have much time [to light the scenes]. The interiors have a dull look.

“Roger Ebert, one of my favorite critics, [reviewing "Scarecrow"] said something so funny: “A great still photographer like Jerry Schatzberg sure didn’t get any help from Zsigmond. It’s hard to look at; it hurts your eyes.”

Road movie

“It was a real road movie, made on a very low budget, $800,000. We went to Bakersfield, we had to shoot in sequence. We were on the road. We sent someone ahead to find locations. There were no sets in the film. We used motel rooms and bars.

“We had a cinemobile [bus] that held everything, actors, equipment, crew. We had unusual crew, the smallest I ever saw, camera, gaffer, key grip, sound man, dolly man, boom operator.

“Everyone was helping; the driver of the cinemobile was pulling cables.

“We were traveling every day. At the beginning, in L.A., we went through the script and agreed on what we were doing. We settled in Denver, but we had no time to rehearse. [On the road] we had no time for rehearsal.”

Spontaneous creativity

“The whole film was improvised. [Hackman’s] strip tease was absolutely improvised.

“We sometimes took scenes five or six times. Pacino and Hackman are actors who can direct themselves. They know what they are doing. Gene Hackman said that it was his most favorite film.

“The final scene [in which Pacino is catatonic], we had to shoot twice. We went home, Pacino didn’t like what he did. Schatzberg and he agreed to shoot it again. He [Pacino] improvised it again. I just followed the action with my zoom. The style is long set-up. Schatzberg liked keeping the scenes long — turn the camera as long as it’s good.”

Zsigmond’s career

“I like most of them [his movies]. I’ve been lucky. I worked with great directors. I worked with Altman, De Palma, Cimino, Rydell, Schatzberg, Spielberg, all directors who love the image. I would have loved to work with Fellini … all the directors I admired, so many of them … Bertolucci.

“[When watching my old films,] I don’t see the mistakes. I like the mistakes because it makes it real.”

Like this?

• Read about Kovacs and Zsigmond’s escape from communist Hungary.
• Must viewing, PBS documentary “No Subtitles Necessary.”

Martin Scorsese is a valued friend of the film program at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); he’s also a friend to cinephiles everywhere through his pioneering organizations devoted to film preservation, The Film Foundation (formed in 1990) and the World Cinema Foundation (formed in 2007).

LACMA film curator Ian Birnie’s latest program, 20th Anniversary Tribute to the Film Foundation, offers five remarkable double features (and one silent film) weekends in October. The series gives Angelenos a rare opportunity to see signature titles projected in stunning prints.

Having just written the program notes for the series, the film I most esteem is Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). I saw “Pather” projected at the museum’s 2002 retrospective on the Calcutta filmmaker — a revelation to those of us who had only seen poor versions of the film on VHS. The 20th Anniversary restoration screening on October 9 promises to be even better. Ray is probably the most world-renowned filmmaker whose works continue to elude DVD in the US (though the Apu Trilogy is available as a sub-par edition from Columbia), and the film’s rural textures and subtle details can only be fully appreciated on the big screen.

Although the LACMA film program was saved last year, this past summer, President Melody Kanschat told the Los Angeles Times that fund raising for the program had turned out to be “a tremendous amount of effort.”  She floated one solution: cutting the weekend second features. If that happens, thematic series such as this tribute will be virtually impossible to present, so enjoy them while you can.

Finally, note that two extra screenings—both directed by Elia Kazan—will be shown in other venues: the UCLA Film and Television Archive will present Baby Doll (1956) and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will screen Wild River (1960), a brilliant and absorbing film unavailable on DVD. I saw the new restoration at the TCM Classic Film Festival and wrote about it here.

Doug Cummings is a film critic who blogs at Filmjourney.org.

At LACMA we enjoyed Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Le Amiche” (“The Girlfriends,” 1955), the great Italian director’s refined social melodrama.

The film depicts the world of Clelia, a Rome-based fashionista sent by her employer to open a boutique in the smaller, northern city of Turin. Clelia soon falls in with an arty group of architects, artists, models, and one determined suicide candidate.

Across the pond (and over the river and through the woods), Hollywood was churning its own version of the genre. Ladies of the ’50s certainly had their cat fights, but they also enjoyed strong sisterhood. Unlike today, the values, feelings, experiences and behavior of women seemed to fascinate male screenwriters.

Beautifully shot in black and white, “Le Amiche” represents an early example of the maestro’s oeuvre. Doug Cummings of filmjourney.org notes the film’s “extremely elegant visual structure” and how its “themes foreshadow Antonioni’s more mature works.”  It’s also a personal favorite of LACMA film curator, Ian Birnie, who shares with us:

“I love LE AMICHE. The storytelling is brilliant; the characters are amazing.

It’s way ahead of its time. My favorite moment is when Ferzetti comes out of the restaurant after the brawl — Cortese follows him and they lean, without speaking, against a wall in the rainy street, with the lamp silhouetting their overcoats. It’s a shot that epitomizes classic Italian cinema.

Our screenings were very successful. Over 1,300 people attended and the distributor did well too, which pleased me.”

Read A.O. Scott’s wonderful “Le Amiche” review in the NYT.