See Hong Sang-soo's WOMAN ON THE BEACH for Free!

Thursday, July 9th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

The UW Cinematheque's free series of view-at-home movies continues this week with another memorably awkward look at modern romance from Hong Sang-soo, Woman on the Beach (2006). One of South Korea's most acclaimed and prolific artists, Hong's work has been showcased over the last two decades at the Cinematheque and the Wisconsin Film Festival. Last month, we provided the opportunity to view Hong's Hill of Freedom at home for free and it is now available here for a rental price, proceeds from which will benefit the Cinematheque.

WOMAN ON THE BEACH (2006, South Korea, 127 min, Korean with English subtitles) A filmmaker travels to a sparsely populated seaside resort town to get some writing done on his next project.  While seeking inspiration, he becomes romantically entangled with a pair of women—first his assistant’s companion, then a second woman who reminds him of the first.  On the surface, this pair of overlapping love triangles appears to be one of Hong’s most breezily conventional films, but embedded within Woman on the Beach’s straightforward story is a trickier web of narrative rhymes and variations—a kind of Vertigo by way of Eric Rohmer—as its characters attempt to overcome their own preconceptions of one another (Mike King). This selection is brought to you in part with the support of UW Madison Center for East Asian Studies.

The Cinematheque has a limited number of free opportunities to view Woman on the Beach at home. To receive your free access, send an email to info@cinema.wisc.edu and simply put the title of the film, Woman on the Beach, in the subject line or the first line of the email.

On a new episode of our Cinematalk podcast, Cinematheque programmers Mike King and Zach Zahos discuss Hong and Woman on the Beach. The episode complements our earlier podcast with Mike King and Professor David Bordwell's in-depth discussion of Hong's career and Hill of Freedom. To listen to this talk on Woman on the Beach, scroll below, or visit Soundcloud here. You can also subscribe to Cinematalk through Apple Podcasts here.

Cinematalk Podcast #11: Hong Sang-soo's WOMAN ON THE BEACH

Thursday, July 9th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

As a complement to our earlier podcast with David Bordwell discussing Hill of Freedom and the cinema of Hong Sang-soo, episode 11 of Cinematalk takes a closer look at another superb and semi-autobiographical Hong feature, Woman on the Beach (2006). 

In Woman on the Beach, a filmmaker travels to a sparsely populated seaside resort town to get some writing done on his next project.  While seeking inspiration, he becomes romantically entangled with a pair of women—first his assistant’s companion, then a second woman who reminds him of the first.  On the surface, this pair of overlapping love triangles appears to be one of Hong’s most breezily conventional films, but embedded within Woman on the Beach’s straightforward story is a trickier web of narrative rhymes and variations—a kind of Vertigo by way of Eric Rohmer—as its characters attempt to overcome their own preconceptions of one another.  

Discussing Woman on the Beach on this episode of Cinematalk are Mike King and Zachary Zahos, both programmers for the Cinematheque and Wisconsin Film Festival. You can listen to the episode below or here on Soundcloud or subscribe through Apple Podcasts.

THE GREAT SILENCE: Supplemental Viewing

Friday, June 19th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

The following blog post contains spoilers for The Great Silence.

As discussed on our Cinematalk podcast with Alexander Payne, the ending of The Great Silence fulfills Sergio Corbucci's icy, pitiless vision of an America where murder drives the economy. Watching the bleak story unfold, it is hard to imagine that the movie could conclude any other way, and yet...

The producers of The Great Silence requested that Corbucci shoot an alternate ending, one where Sheriff Burnett (Frank Wolff) has miraculously survived the frozen lake and returns to aid Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Pauline (Vonetta McGee) in their final confrontation with Tigrero/Loco (Klaus Kinski). And don't worry about the bullets that seemed to have already destroyed Silence's hand, he has come up with a protective, secret plan similar to Clint Eastwood's in A Fistful of Dollars.

In addition to this "happy" ending (look at that smile on Trintignant), it seems the producers were able to devise a second alternative ending by re-editing the existing footage into a more ambiguous (and confusing) ending that suggests Pauline and the group of outlaw hostages have their lives spared. Both of these alternative endings can be found on Film Movement's excellent blu-ray release of The Great Silence. Most sources confirm that neither of these alternate endings were ever shown to audiences.

North American distribution and intellectual rights to The Great Silence were acquired in 1969 by 20th Century Fox, and it has been suggested that Fox was interested in remaking the film as a vehicle for Clint Eastwood. Unfortunately, the movie was shelved when Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck determined that the movie was too grim a trip to lay on American ticket buyers. It was not until the 21st century that most Americans had a chance to see one of Corbucci's finest efforts. Interestingly, the Italian distributors decided to use a pull quote from Zanuck to promote the movie in their original release trailer. Zanuck's comments translated: "The Best Italian Western of Recent Times."

Also discussed on the podcast, here is part one of Western, Italian Style a short documentary exploring the phenomenon of Italian Westerns narrated in English by Frank Wolff and featuring behind-the-scenes footage of The Great Silence. Plus, interviews with Corbucci, Trintignant, and other notable action directors like Sergio Sollima and Enzo G. Castellari.

And here is part two of Western, Italian Style:

Hear Alexander Payne & See THE GREAT SILENCE for Free!

Thursday, June 18th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

This week, the Cinematheque is providing free access to another restored Western, Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence (Il Grande Silenzio). Originally released in Europe in 1968 but not given an official US release for 50 years, The Great Silence stands alongside Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Andre De Toth’s Day of the Outlaw as one of the great snow-covered Westerns. In the story, an unethical judge looking to clean up his small, remote mountain community invites a group of ruthless, murdering bounty hunters to invade. American actress Vonetta McGee plays Pauline, whose husband is gunned down by a loathsome killer (Spaghetti Western veteran Klaus Kinski). Looking for revenge, Pauline then hires a mysterious, mute drifter, known only as Silence, played by European cinema legend Jean-Louis Trintignant. 

The Great Silence is a violent, mythic, and nihilistic tale that provides a grim vision of capitalist America where murder equals money, a theme it shares in common with Sergio Leone’s "Dollars" trilogy. Director and co-writer Sergio Corbucci, who had previously directed Westerns like the classic Django and the Burt Reynolds vehicle Navajo Joe, wisely stayed away from the typical sun-baked locations of other Spaghetti Westerns in favor of Italy’s snowy Dolomite mountains. Corbucci achieves a unique and appropriately icy mood, one that is reinforced by the haunting score of the director's frequent collaborator, composer Ennio Morricone. 

The Great Silence screened in its recent restoration at the 2018 Wisconsin Film Festival, and now, the Cinematheque has a limited number of opportunities for you to view The Great Silence at home. Simply send an email to info@cinema.wisc.edu, and remember to put the word SILENCE in the subject line or the first line of the email.

On our Cinematalk podcast this week, we are privileged to welcome one of the finest of all contemporary filmmakers, Alexander Payne. Our discussion begins with a look at The Great Silence and the mythic qualities of the Western genre. We also touch on the development of his cinephilia, the future of moviegoing, and "the three H's".

Usually writing in collaboration with Jim Taylor, Alexander Payne is the renowned director of sophisticated comedies for adults like Citizen RuthElectionAbout SchmidtSidewaysThe DescendantsNebraska, and Downsizing. He is the recipient of two Academy Awards for his screenplays and he is also a passionate movie-lover. In 2014, he visited madison to present a Wisconsin Film Festival screening of another 60s Italian classic, Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso. He also joined us at that time for a Cinematheque screening of Nebraska. This week he spoke to us from his hometown and the frequent setting of his movies, Omaha, Nebraska. You can hear this episode through Soundcloud, by subscribing through Apple podcasts, or simply scroll below, click, and begin listening.

See Hong Sang-soo's HILL OF FREEDOM for Free!

Thursday, June 11th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

The UW Cinematheque's free series of view-at-home movies continues this week with a marvelously inventive gem from one of South Korea's most acclaimed and prolific artists: Hong Sang-soo's Hill of Freedom.

HILL OF FREEDOM (2014, South Korea, 67 minutes, English and Korean with English subtitles)  “Time is not a real thing, like your body, my body, or this table,” a Japanese man confides in English to a Korean woman after a few too many drinks. “Our brain makes up our mindframe of time continuity: past, present, future. I think you don’t have to experience life like that, necessarily, as a species. But at the end, we cannot escape from this frame of mind, because our brain evolved this way. I don’t know why.” Across 24 feature films in as many years, South Korean writer/director Hong Sang-soo has continually experimented with the possibilities of cinematic time, bending and breaking its rules in an unflashy, irresolvable manner far from the self-seriousness of Christopher Nolan—these are films to inhabit rather than unlock. His filmography is riddled with bifurcated structures, repeated scenes, dreams, flashbacks, and do-overs, never simply proceeding from points A to B without exploring the rest of the alphabet first. Packing its mind-bending chronology into a fleet 67 minutes, Hill of Freedom’s deceptively simple story follows a Japanese man’s return to Seoul to track down a lost love, who is nowhere to be found. Although relayed through multiple narrators, a stack of out-of-order letters, and characters who are frequently drunk and rarely speaking their native languages, Hill of Freedom is at its core a funny, tender, and modest exploration about the misunderstandings between men and women. Indeed, it is characteristic of Hong’s unpretentious humor and persistent jabs at male vanity that the woman’s response to the man’s drunken pontifications on the unreality of time is an eye-rolling, “Very interesting, tell me about it later, okay?”

“A masterwork. Achieves a complexity akin to the grand historical meditations of Alain Resnais. Ingeniously constructed. I’ve watched it three times forwards and one time backwards and I feel as if I’m just beginning to get the hang of it” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker).

The Cinematheque is offering a limited number of opportunities to view Hill of Freedom at home for free. To get your access to the movie, simply send an email to info@cinema.wisc.edu and remember to write the word HILL in the subject header or in the first line of the email. This presentation of Hill of Freedom is brought to you in part with the support of UW Madison Center for East Asian Studies.

And, on our Cinematalk podcast this week, we are delighted to be joined by the great film scholar, author, and teacher David Bordwell, Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies right here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Bordwell has been following Hong Sang-soo since his very first film, and his discussion with the Cinematheque's Mike King touches on Hong’s filmography as a whole, Hill of Freedom in particular, and Hong’s visit to the 2001 Wisconsin Film Festival right here in Madison. Scroll down to listen to that conversation.  You can also listen to Cinematalk on Soundcloud or subscribe through Apple Podcasts.

See New Restoration of GREGORY'S GIRL at Home for Free!

Thursday, June 4th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

While the UW Cinematheque's screenings at 4070 Vilas and the Chazen Museum of Art remain on indefinite hiatus during this challenging time, we are pleased to offer another wonderful contribution to world cinema that you can watch at home for free this week. Our selection is a new restoration of a marvelous Scottish comedy and audience favorite from the early 1980s, Gregory's Girl, written and directed by Bill Forsyth.

GREGORY’S GIRL (1980, UK, 93 min.) The lovable and gawky Gregory (Gordon John Sinclair) is a teenage boy who develops a serious fixation on Dorothy (Dee Hepburn), the first female member of his school’s soccer team. Advised and aided by a delightfully quirky group of friends and family, Gregory’s pursuit of romance leads him down several surprising and unexpected paths where he learns that you can’t always get what you want and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Forsyth’s wise, wistful, and very funny youth comedy is populated by a plethora of dreaming, memorable characters. A significant part of the cast of Gregory’s Girl was made up of performers from Glasgow Youth Theatre, many of whom collaborated with Forsyth on his debut feature, That Sinking Feeling, in 1979.

The new restoration of Gregory's Girl includes the movie's original European soundtrack, with a viewing option of English subtitles.

We are offering a limited number of opportunities to view Gregory's Girl at home for free through June 11. To get your access to the movie, simply send an email to info@cinema.wisc.edu and remember to write the word GREGORY in the subject header or in the first line of the email.

And Bill Forsyth is the very special guest on our Cinematalk podcast this week! He speaks with us from his home outside of Edinburgh, about the making of Gregory’s Girl, its influences, and his approach to the art of cinema. Forsyth also discusses how the success of Gregory's Girl paved the way for his next, and best-loved movie, 1983’s Local Hero

You can listen to Cinematalk here on Soundcloud or scroll below to listen right here on our blog.

Cinematalk Podcast #9: GREGORY'S GIRL, w/Special Guest Bill Forsyth

Thursday, June 4th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

The Cinematheque’s free online film selection this week is a marvelous Scottish comedy and audience favorite from the early 1980’s, Gregory's Girl, written and directed by Bill Forsyth.

Bill Forsyth is our very special guest on Cinematalk this week. Forsyth’s achievements as a Scottish filmmaker are pioneering to say the least. He started a career in film at age 18 and spent nearly a decade and a half making commissioned documentaries and industrial films. This experience partly explains why his sublime and distinctly personal brand of filmmaking was fully realized when he made his first two narrative features, That Sinking Feeling and Gregory’s Girl. The international success of these two movies kicked off a wave of national filmmaking that led to the creation of what would become Screen Scotland, a national agency dedicated to the development and support of Scottish filmmaking. For Forsyth, the personal success paved the way for his next, and best-loved movie, 1983’s Local Hero, and several films made in the U.S., including his masterful 1987 adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping

This week, he spoke with us from his home outside of Edinburgh, about the making of Gregory’s Girl, its influences, and his approach to the art of cinema. Plus, learn how to see Gregory's Girl for free!

You can listen to the episode below or here, on Soundcloud.

Cinematalk Podcast #8: THE GREY FOX, w/Guests Peter O'Brian & Mary Sweeney

Thursday, May 28th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

Produced in conjunction with this week's offer to screen the new restoration of The Grey Fox at home, another new episode of our Cinematalk podcast is available. The show focuses on The Grey Fox through an interview with the film's producer Peter O'Brian, who remembers Phillip Borsos and the "Tax Shelter" era of Canadian Film Production. Later on in the podcast, a chat with Mary Sweeney, co-writer, producer and editor of The Straight Story, who shares her memories of Grey Fox and Straight Story leading man Richard Farnsworth. Listen here on Soundcloud or just scroll and click below to begin listening! Cinematalk is also available through ITunes podcasts.

See New Restoration of THE GREY FOX at Home!

Thursday, May 28th, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

UPDATE (5/29/20, 3:15 p.m.) Due to overwhelming demand, we have distributed all of the free passes to view The Grey Fox. The new restoration from Kino Lorber is still available to view at home for a $10 rental fee. 50% of the rental proceeds go to support future Cinematheque programming. You can access the rental page here.

Once again this week, the UW Cinematheque brings you another slice of great cinema that you can watch at home for free. Our selection is The Grey Fox, a Western adventure and love story originally released to American cinemas and widespread critical and audience acclaim in 1983.

THE GREY FOX (Canada, 1982, 91 min.). One of the best remembered of all contemporary Canadian features, The Grey Fox tells the lyrical and legendary saga of real-life outlaw Bill Miner (Richard Farnsworth) in the early years of the 20th century. Miner finds it difficult to fit into polite American society after spending more than 30 years in prison for stagecoach robbing. Inspired by a classic silent movie, "The Gentleman Bandit" relocates to British Columbia where he finds romance with an outspoken and independent artist (played by Jackie Burroughs) and a new career as the leader of a train robbing gang.

The Grey Fox marked the feature debut of Oscar-nominated director Phillip Borsos, whose films have been noted for their gentle rhythms and pictorial beauty. Only 27-years-old during the production of the The Grey Fox, Borsos and his movie brought widespread recognition to former stuntman and Western bit-player Richard Farnsworth, who was 60 during production. The successful original release of The Grey Fox launched two busy decades of character actor work for Farnsworth, culminating in his Oscar-nominated leading role in David Lynch’s The Straight Story in 1999.

The Cinematheque is offering a limited number of opportunities to watch a brand new restoration of The Grey Fox at home. To receive your free online access, send an email to info@cinema.wisc.edu, and don't forget to put the words GREY FOX in the subject line or in the first line of the email. 

Plus, another new episode of our Cinematalk podcast is available. The show focuses on The Grey Fox through an interview with the film's producer Peter O'Brian, who remembers Phillip Borsos and the "Tax Shelter" era of Canadian Film Production. Later on in the podcast, a chat with Mary Sweeney, co-writer, producer and editor of The Straight Story, who shares her memories of Richard Farnsworth. Listen here on Soundcloud or just scroll and click below to begin listening!

Discover J. Lee Thompson's ICE COLD IN ALEX for Free!

Thursday, May 21st, 2020
Posted by Jim Healy

While the UW Cinematheque's screenings at 4070 Vilas and the Chazen Museum of Art remain on indefinite hiatus during this challenging time, we are thrilled to be bringing you another terrific feature film to watch at home and for free, the exciting 1957 British action drama Ice Cold in Alex.

ICE COLD IN ALEX (UK, 1957, 130 min.) North Africa, 1942. Fleeing encroaching German forces, a five-person British ambulance crew take on a perilous journey to Alexandria after being separated from their unit. Led by a traumatized but disciplined and determined Captain (played by British screen great John Mills), the tiny band of heroes must contend with scorching desert heat, land mines, quicksand, and other more insidious obstacles on the road to safety. This suspenseful and beautifully acted adaptation of Christopher Landon’s novel is one of the finest of all war films (and road movies). Ice Cold in Alex marked a turning point in the career of veteran British director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear), who, along with the cast, brought impeccable, showstopping craftsmanship to this tale of ordinary individuals faced with extraordinary challenges. The arrestingly beautiful black-and-white cinematography is by frequent Thompson collaborator Gilbert Taylor (Star Wars, A Hard Day’s Night). The American release of this beloved-in-Britain classic was generically re-titled Desert Attack and had nearly an hour removed from the original running time. The Cinematheque is pleased to offer a recent restoration of the uncut version of Ice Cold in Alex, the perfect way to discover this unsung masterpiece.

We have a limited number of screening codes (100) that will allow you to watch Ice Cold in Alex at home through May 28. To receive a link to view, send an email to info@cinema.wisc.edu, and please write the words ICE COLD in the subject line or the first line of your email.

Also, listen below to this week's Cinematalk podcast. On the first segment of the podcast, Cinematheque programmers Jim Healy and Ben Reiser discuss Ice Cold in Alex and assess the fascinating career of director Thompson. In the second segment, we are joined by our special guest, UW Madison alum and esteemed editor Mark Goldblatt (The TerminatorRise of the Planet of the Apes), Goldblatt offers his own praise of Ice Cold in Alex and reflects on his time as the editor of J. Lee Thompson’s 1984 movie The Ambassador, which screened at the Cinematheque in 2017.

Pages