Linwood Dunn Theater
Pickford Center, 1313 Vine Street
Hollywood, CA 90028
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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.
Shoot the Piano Player
Thursday, May 21 | 7:30 P.M.
Writer-director François Truffaut followed his classic debut feature The 400 Blows with a freewheeling New Wave noir based on an American pulp novel. Franco-Armenian music legend Charles Aznavour plays a grief-stricken classical pianist who hides out in a Parisian dive smoking cigarettes and tinkling the ivories, only to find unexpected danger from his past at the same time as he falls for an innocent waitress. Composer Georges Delerue provided the catchy music, the first of his 10 feature scores for the director, while New Wave great Raoul Coutard was responsible for the black-and-white Dyaliscope cinematography. The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman called Shoot the Piano Player “the most purely enjoyable movie Truffaut ever made.”
Shoot the Piano Player will screen with a new 35mm print of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 short La Paresse.
1960, 81 minutes, black and white, 35mm | Directed by François Truffaut; screenplay by Truffaut, Marcel Moussy, based on the novel Down There by David Goodis; with Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger, Michèle Mercier, Albert Remy, Jacques Aslanian, Richard Kanayan.
Lola
Thursday, May 21 | 9:10 P.M.
Jacques Demy made his auspicious filmmaking debut with this charming romance, set in his hometown of Nantes on France’s Atlantic coast. Anouk Aimée (8 ½, A Man and a Woman) plays Lola, a cabaret dancer pursued by both an American sailor and a childhood copain, but all the while pining for the estranged father of her child. This crystalline homage to the great tradition of Hollywood romance boasts a swoon-worthy score by three-time Academy Award winner Michel Legrand, whose partnership with Demy began here and would encompass their classic screen musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (in which Marc Michel reprised his Lola role). Raoul Coutard supplied the black-and-white Franscope cinematography. Pauline Kael called it “an adolescent’s dream of romance, formed from old movies.”
1961, 90 minutes, black and white, DCP | Written and directed by Jacques Demy; with Anouk Aimée, Marc Michel, Jacques Harden, Alan Scott, Elina Labourdette, Annie Duperoux.
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