Capital Projections: Total madness edition
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting arthouse and repertory screenings in the coming week.
WALKING ON WATER
“This is a horror show!” That’s just one of the outbursts you’ll hear in this documentary about the most recent work from Bulgarian artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff. With the help of his late wife Jeanne-Claude, Christo created site-specific works of environmental art on a massive scale, such as the 7,500 vinyl “gates” installed along 23 miles of pathways in New York’s Central Park in 2005. In Walking on Water, director Andrey Paounov documents the making of Floating Piers, a 2016 installation on Italy’s Lake Iseo that was the artist’s first major piece after the death of his wife in 2009. Christo’s work, which typically features huge swatches of bright saffron-colored fabric, can have a meditative effect. But behind the scenes, it’s anything but peaceful.
Paounov focuses on technical frustrations and frequent arguments between Christo and his nephew, project production manager Vladimir Yavachev. This doesn’t tell you much about the creative process, but it has the same voyeuristic entertainment value as watching a neighbor’s domestic dispute. When Floating Piers finally opens after the project overcomes numerous setbacks, the tension is just beginning; overwhelmed by crowds estimated to top 200,000 visitors on the exhibition’s first day, Christo, fearing an accident, shouts, “Madness! Total madness!” This may be why IMDb categorizes the film as both a drama and a comedy. Yet much of the film seems more like an anxiety dream, as when footage of bureaucratic meetings (in unsubtitled Italian) shows Christo looking around the room in uncomprehending frustration.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, May 31, at E Street Landmark Cinema. $12.50.
INFINITE FOOTBALL
With dryly comic features such as The Treasure and Police, Adjective, director Corneliu Porumboiu has been one of the primary architects of Romania’s cinematic New Wave. In this dense, 70-minute documentary, he profiles a childhood friend who has long been obsessed with changing the rules of football (what Americans call soccer). Infinite Football is the director’s second film about the sport. In the 2014 documentary The Second Game, Porumboiu and his father watched and commented on the videotape of a match that his father had refereed in 1988, the year before the fall of Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu. Critic Michael Sicinski, who specializes in experimental cinema, makes the fascinating suggestion that Infinite — when seen in tandem with the 2014 film — is in fact a political metaphor. “After all if football really has been played incorrectly for all these years, then everything his father stood for was in error,” Sicinski writes. “And this would be the perfect analogy to the communism of the previous generation.” The National Gallery of Art is screening the film as part of the series Reinventing Realism: New Cinema From Romania, which runs through June 16.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, June 1, at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium. Free.
THE SHINING
Nearly 40 years after its original release in 1980, director Stanley Kubrick’s Stephen King adaptation — known for having taken great liberties with its source material — has lost none of its horrific power. Jack Nicholson stars as Jack Torrance, a writer who hopes to find quiet and inspiration in a job as winter caretaker of the massive Overlook Hotel. But to the dismay of his wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and precocious son (Danny Lloyd), the isolation doesn’t lead Torrance to a burst of creation, but instead sends him on a destructive path. King’s novel fills in Jack’s backstory, including drunken episodes in which he physically abuses his son prior to the fateful mountain retreat, but Kubrick disposes of any such history, which makes Jack’s descent into madness that much more demonic. The Shining has given rise to a variety of outlandish theories that interpret the film as everything from an apology for stealing Native American land to a confession that Kubrick helped fake the 1969 moon landing. Such diverse exegeses may well be a testament to its perennial strength and the mysterious pull it has on the imagination. This weekend, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center screens a new 4K digital restoration of this uncanny classic.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, June 2, at 8 p.m. and Monday, June 3, at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI
The Coen brothers’ 1998 comedy was not a box office hit upon release, but it has since earned cult status as one of the directors’ most beloved films and as a touchstone for its leading actor. Jeff Bridges stars as Jeff Lebowski, known to his friends as The Dude. He spends his days smoking pot and drinking White Russians at a Malibu bowling alley, but his chill lifestyle is interrupted when gangsters mistake him for a millionaire by the same name whose trophy wife (Tara Reid) has been kidnapped. “This is a plot and dialogue that perhaps only the Coen Brothers could have devised,” Roger Ebert wrote. “Only a steady hand in the midst of madness allows them to hold it all together — that, and the delirious richness of their visual approach.” The Smithsonian will screen a 35mm print as part of the Totally ’90s Film Festival, which runs through June 16 at the National Museum of American History.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, June 6, at 6:30 p.m. at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Warner Bros. Theater. $12.
THE WESTERNER
Walter Brennan, a character actor who defined “cranky old guy” for generations of moviegoers, won an Oscar for his portrayal of real-life Wild West saloonkeeper and “hanging judge” Roy Bean in this 1940 film. But it’s Gary Cooper who steals the scene — just as he reportedly did at the film’s Texas premiere by riding in on a white horse. Cooper plays the fictional Cole Harden, a drifter accused of horse theft. The stranger is an obvious target for Bean’s swift justice, but since he is played by Gary Cooper, he’s sure to find his way out of the jam. Master cinematographer Gregg Toland, who would later work on Citizen Kane, gives The Westerner a dreamy look suitable for American myth. Catherine Wyler — daughter of the film’s director, WIlliam Wyler — will appear for a Q&A at Sunday’s AFI screening, which will be on 35mm film, as part of a United Artists Centennial Retrospective that runs through July 18.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, June 2, at 3:30 p.m. at the AFI SIlver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
LORD LOVE A DUCK
Roddy McDowall was in his late 30s when he played a mischievous, manipulative teenager in this 1966 black comedy directed by George Axelrod. The future Planet of the Apes star plays Alan, a strangely mature transfer student at Consolidated High School who takes a senior, Barbara (Tuesday Weld), under his wing. Calling himself Mollymauk and intermittently squawking like a giant bird, Alan promises Barbara that she can have everything she wants: 12 cashmere sweaters, a handsome husband, and a Hollywood movie career. Soaked in bitterness and alcoholism, courtesy of Barbara’s mother (Lola Albright), Lord Love a Duck is a little more somber than the usual fare programmed by the Washington Psychotronic Film Society. But it’s still a dizzying satire of high school, consumerism, beach movies, creepy old guys and whatever else it could get its teeth on.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, June 3, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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