POINT BLANK (double feature w BLOW-UP) $6-$9 February 16, 2007

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



7:30 POINT BLANK
9:15 BLOW-UP

(1967/color/92 min./Panavision) Scr: Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse, based on a novel by Richard Stark; dir: John Boorman; w/ Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Vernon.

One of the most violent and influential gangster films of the 1960s, Point Blank follows Lee Marvin as Walker, an implacable force who will stop at nothing to find his gangster friend Reese and Reese's lover, Chris (Walker's wife), who stole his money and left him for dead in a cell at Alcatraz. A nihilistic nightmare fashioned out of surreal fragments, the film owes a stylistic debt to Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, but its vision of the modern city as an alienating jungle and the criminal organization as a faceless corporation run on credit cards is distinctly American. Critic David Thomson called the film a masterpiece. "The actual and the imaginary are perfectly joined in Point Blank," he wrote. "For it is not only an account of Marvin's remorseless and romantic hacking away at the syndicate, but his dream in the instant that he dies."

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