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 the 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.
A Woman Is A WOman
Thursday, June 4 | 7:30 P.M.
French New Wave revolutionary Jean-Luc Godard teamed up with his muse, actress Anna Karina, for his first color and widescreen effort, an homage to Hollywood musical comedies. The plot concerns a romantic triangle involving exotic dancer Karina, her boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) and his amorous friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo), but the story is less important than Godard’s joy at working in the medium, aided by Michel Legrand’s effervescent music and Raoul Coutard’s eye-popping Franscope cinematography, which inaugurated the bold use of color that would be developed further in many of Godard’s classic ‘60s films.
A Woman Is a Woman will screen with a new 35mm print of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 short Le grand escroc.
1961, 84 minutes, color, 35mm | Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard, from an idea by Geneviève Cluny; with Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Nicole Paquin, Marie Dubois, Marion Sarraut, Jeanne Moreau.
Cruel Story of Youth
Thursday, June 4 | 9:10 P.M.
Often considered Japan’s answer to Jean-Luc Godard, firebrand auteur Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses, Taboo), directed his second feature, the masterful Cruel Story of Youth, at the age of 28. A lurid portrait of disaffected youth in postwar Japan, the film follows a delinquent couple as they shake down middle-aged salarymen with fateful results. Oshima used extensive location filming – grungy watering holes, industrial wastelands, teeming sidewalks – and handheld Shochiku GrandScope cinematography to create one of his most talked-about films. A key example of Japanese cinema’s own New Wave, the Nuberu bagu, Cruel Story of Youth has been newly restored by Shochiku.
1960, 96 minutes, color, DCP | Written and directed by Nagisa Oshima; with Yusuke Kawazu, Miyuki Kuwano, Yoshiko Kuga, Fumio Watanabe, Shinji Tanaka, Shinjiro Matsuzaki.
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