Stanley Kubrick’s early, low-budget film noir “Killer’s Kiss” (1955) will be screened on August 19.
Elevated cinema
Outdoor film series evokes the beauty and underbelly of New York
By Leonard Quard
Now
in its third season, Movie Nights On The Elevated Acre takes place
every Tuesday in August, starting at sundown between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.
The Elevated Acre is a rooftop plaza offering stunning views of the
East River, the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade, Red Hook, and the old Ferry
Terminal. A seven-leveled concrete amphitheater with a sloping, lushly
landscaped garden, the Acre, like the selection of movies screened this
summer, is imaginatively conceived.
The
curator of the series, video and multimedia designer Tal Yarden, has
focused on films dealing with New York. And Yarden makes the viewing
experience more inviting by having buskers play before the screening,
and providing the audience with free popcorn.
Yarden’s
offerings are an appealing mixture of films with mass appeal, like
Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” and experimental, non-narrative shorts that
open each evening’s programs. These disparate selections are unified by
their urban images and their focus on New York City. This year’s shorts
include Nisi Jacobs’ 10-minute “Sugartown”(2001), which will be
introduced by the filmmaker on August 5. An abstract and formal film,
it centers on the city from the perspective of two women looking at
life on the streets through a glazed window. We get glancing views of a
billboard, a mailbox covered with graffiti, a church, pedestrians, and
cars. Jacobs’ eye focuses more on the patterns she sees, rather than
the people or objects. The images are accompanied by a striking sound
track filled with street sounds and songs like “Sugartown,” sung by
Rita Calypso.
Another short, Adam
Cohen’s “Blind Grace” (1993), is a personal street document shot with a
hand-held camera that captures the hallucinatory, nocturnal poetry of
the city’s desolate streets, and of people walking on subway stairs and
through street festivals, and sitting despondently on stoops. The city
in “Blind Grace” is pre-gentrification, so the Orchard Street it
portrays has no boutiques or luxury towers, just bargain clothing shops
and tenements, some of whose windows are boarded up or are mere gaping
holes. The screening will also feature a conversation with the
filmmaker, Adam Cohen, on August 12.
The
feature films include: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s musical, “On the
Town” (1949) on August 5; Allen’s “Manhattan” (1979) on August 12;
Kubrick’s early, low budget film noir “Killer’s Kiss” (1955) on August
19; and Douglas Sirk’s visually stunning melodrama (pools of
expressionist color), “Imitation of Life” (1959) on August 26. “On the
Town” turns New York into a magical place for three sailors on 24 -hour
leave who meet three single women, and all of them sing and dance with
inexhaustible energy and joy. In “Manhattan,” one of Allen’s best
films, the city is foregrounded, turning it into a major character. New
York becomes an extension of Allen’s protagonists’ personalities — its
streets are places to have random and absurd encounters, reflect on
both one’s private angst and the city’s plight, and mute or escape
one’s anxieties. New York is also a public projection of Allen’s
protagonists’ happiest selves and moments — a city of infinite promise
and possibility.
In “Killer’s Kiss,”
the streets of Manhattan come alive with striking black and white
cinematography. Kubrick chooses to tell this story of a l’amour fou
with images rather than dialogue. The final chase sequence where the
gangster chases the lovers is a thing of beauty.
Douglas
Sirk’s last major film, “Imitation of Life,” stars Lana Turner (Lora)
as an aspiring actress and single mother who hires a black widowed
single mother as a nanny. The nanny has a daughter who attempts to pass
for white, and both mothers experience tormented relationships with
their respective daughters. Style is always the essence in a Sirk film.
In American film, New York has always
been ‘the city’—the place where dreams of success and living a
glamorous life are realized, and where corruption, crime and nightmare
imagery achieve their apotheosis. New York is not only a city of
sharply contrasting imagery, but also a cornucopia of intricate
personal and social worlds. The festival presents four of the better
films evoking the city, and augments them with original experimental
shorts.
