Capital Projections: Making films is a dangerous business 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.
PIG
In this scathing satire, someone is beheading the great Iranian directors, and blacklisted filmmaker Hasan Kasmai (played by Hasan Majooni, who starred in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly) may be the next one to die — unless he’s the killer. In a political environment where directors such as Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof are banned from making films but manage to do it anyway, filmmaker Mani Haghighi (who also appears on screen as a victim of the fictional killer) cranks up the volume on a self-deprecating movie that comes off as if Woody Allen were a heavy metal junkie making a dark horror comedy. Mercilessly poking fun not just at social media hysteria but also at the prestige neo-realist dramas that are a staple of Iranian cinema, Pig takes no prisoners, and sends out the 23rd annual Iranian Film Festival, co-presented by the AFI Silver and the Freer and Sackler galleries, with an irreverent bang.
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver. $12.50
BUILT TO LAST — RELICS OF COMMUNIST-ERA ARCHITECTURE
Czech-Japanese actress Haruna Honcoop, who appeared in Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer, directed this series of short films that catalogs over 200 examples of Soviet-style buildings and monuments in Central and Eastern Europe. Fans of Brutalism will find plenty to drool over here, although one may wish for the more probing eyes of a documentary filmmaker such as Chris Marker or Dusan Makavejev. Still, Honcoop uses these forbidding structures, edited with archival audio and film footage of communist leaders, to deflate a propaganda machine that intended such architecture to stand as a permanent reminder of the invincible state. But not all of these buildings have withstood the test of time. Honcoop explained to Radio Praha that while most residents of former communist nations would rather erase these testaments to an oppressive past, she is in favor of preserving this uncomfortable history: “Such structures were built within the communist regime but sort of against the communist regime. The architects wanted to show that they are free [and] were sort of bringing Western ideas to locked countries.” The film screens as part of the second annual Architecture & Design Film Festival: D.C., taking place at the National Building Museum.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Feb. 23, at 6:45 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 24, at 4:45 p.m. at the National Building Museum. $15.
SHAFT
The National Gallery of Art’s exhibition of photographer Gordon Parks’ early work closed last weekend, but the accompanying film series continues on Wednesday with the 1971 drama for which Parks may be best known. Richard Roundtree, in a breakout role, stars as John Shaft, a private detective in the tradition of Philip Marlowe. Parks, in only his second feature behind a movie camera, was the first black director to make a major studio picture. The commercial success of Shaft led to a wave of black action thrillers, while Isaac Hayes’ iconic theme song and brassy funk score likewise became highly influential. In his 2.5-star review, Roger Ebert wrote, “The strength of Parks’s movie is his willingness to let his hero fully inhabit the private-eye genre, with all of its obligatory violence, blood, obscenity, and plot gimmicks. The weakness of Shaft, I suspect, is that Parks is not very eager to inhabit that world along with his hero.”
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Feb. 27, at 12:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
BLACK WAX
Poet-musician Gil Scott-Heron, who died in 2011, was living in DC when director Robert Mugge made this concert documentary, first released in 1983. The bulk of the film documents Scott-Heron’s April 1982 performances (accompanied by local sax legend Ron Holloway) at Wax Museum, a long-closed Southwest nightclub. Mugge (whose films also featured such subjects as Sun Ra and Al Green) intersperses concert footage with Scott-Heron walking around the Tidal Basin and other locations in the city, singing along with a boombox that’s playing his own music. Black Wax is indispensable not only for fans of Scott-Heron’s music, but for anyone curious to see what Washington looked like in the early 1980s.
Watch a clip.
Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 8 p.m. at Suns Cinema. $8.
CAPTAIN BLOOD and THE GOONIES
As part of a series dedicated to film composer Erich Korngold, the Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress presents a thrilling double bill with 35mm prints of a classic pirate adventure and the ‘80s children’s movie it inspired. (Disclosure: I work at the Library of Congress but did not program this event.) Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland became stars thanks to Captain Blood (1935), one of a number of swashbucklers made by the Hungarian-born director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca). This masterpiece of action at sea is one of the centerpieces of a monthlong program of films scored by Korngold, whose influence can be still be heard decades later — as in Dave Grusin’s score for the 1985 hit that fills the second half of the bill. Directed by Richard Donner from a script by Steven Spielberg, The Goonies tells the story of kids who try to keep greedy real estate developers from destroying their home — and find a pirate map that sends them on an escapade right out of an Errol Flynn picture. The movies will be preceded by a lecture on Korngold by Paul Sommerfeld, reference specialist in the Music Division at the Library of Congress.
Watch the trailers for Captain Blood and The Goonies.
Saturday, Feb. 23, at 11 a.m. in the Mary Pickford Theater on the third floor of the Madison Building at the Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. SE. Admission is free. Seating is first-come, first-served. For the best seating options, patrons are encouraged to arrive 15 to 30 minutes before the scheduled start time.
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