PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (double feature w STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN) $5-$9 February 9, 2007

Double Feature
$9, $6 Students, Seniors, Members
$2 service fee for online purchases

$5 for the second film only with no advance purchase

7:30 STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN aka A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
9:30 PENNIES FROM HEAVEN

(1981/color/108 min.) Scr: Dennis Potter; dir: Herbert Ross; w/ Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken.

Dennis Potter's multipart Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986) made television history and broke new surrealist ground by introducing a world in which characters lip-synch to old popular songs. In MGM's lavish film adaptation of Pennies, an unhappily married sheet-music salesman in Depression-era Chicago convinces a small-town Kewpie doll to run off with him in search of a better life "over the rainbow." Sadly, for the characters there's no escaping grim reality, but audiences will be transported by numbers in which Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters appear to dance with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or by how the wall of a diner miraculously rises to reveal a cascade of glittering coins. Ravishing to look at with its Edward Hopper-esque images courtesy of production designer Ken Adam and cinematographer Gordon Willis, Pennies from Heaven foreshadowed by twenty years such "dark" musicals as Moulin Rouge (2001) and Dancer in the Dark (2000).

Through the Looking Glass (and Down the Rabbit Hole...) January 19, 2007–February 24, 2007 "The world is much deeper but also more transparent than we think.... And the magic of film consists in the possibility to express any phenomenon you want. That's why I like it so much. Sometimes you may think that I am out of touch with reality, but in fact I am a part of reality, that's all."—David Lynch Rene Magritte's enigmatic paintings, with their deadpan humor and emphasis on monumental objects, were created during a century that saw the birth of both cinema and psychoanalysis and, in the words of LACMA's senior curator of modern art, Stephanie Barron, continue "to appeal to modern audiences hungry for the puzzling conjunctions of the everyday and the fantastic." Though the concept of parallel realities existed in the Victorian era, it was cinema that could induce a dreamlike state in the viewer and depict the visual landscape of the unconscious. Lewis Carroll's "looking glass" is perhaps our most famous metaphor for the irrational, but it is also an ancient symbol with a variety of meanings: vanity, duplicity, madness, schizophrenia, and hallucination among them. Not surprisingly, many of the films in this series are thrillers, and many depict characters whose obsessions become pathological or self-destructive. For filmmakers like David Lynch, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, and Jacques Rivette, the "looking glass" is the cinema itself, and the silver screen is the mirror through which we, the audience, pass. At its most mythic, death is the unknown land that lies on the other side of the looking glass: in Orphée and Vertigo, the characters journey into the mirror to steal a loved one back from Death itself. Alternatively, films such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz depict imaginary landscapes peopled by delightful and menacing creatures. And in virtually all the films in the series, the audience, like the characters, must ask itself: what is real, and what is fantasy?

Official Website: http://www.lacma.org/programs/FilmListing.aspx#bdp