
Un prophète aka A Prophet (2009)
(2009), dir. Jacques Audiard, 35mm, French with English Subtitles
(2009), dir. Jacques Audiard, 35mm, French with English Subtitles
DOUBLE FEATURE! Your Face - 5pm + Visage - 7pm
Kirikou et la sorcière
Dir. Michel Ocelot, 1998
FREE SCREENING
Brunch and drinks start at 11am!
DJ set in the front café with Gerard Lollie
Based on a popular West African folk tale, directed and animated by the French writer and director Michel Ocelot, Kirikou and the Sorceress is a warm, gorgeously textured animated feature that deserves a place alongside masterpieces like Fantastic Planet and the films of Miyazaki. While the film is universally cherished as a classic in France, it’s less well-known in the United States, which is why La Collectionneuse and Zebulon are screening Kirikou for free to charm audiences here in Los Angeles just in time for its 20th anniversary. Aside from the stunning animation— with its rich display of African flora and fauna, patterns and forms— Kirikou and the Sorceress is a truth-seeking tale about a young boy who from the moment he’s born unflinchingly pursues the meaning of love, life, and evil. What sets this animation apart, you’ll immediately feel, is the patience and uncommon profundity of its answers— we’re certainly not in Disneyland any longer. Though born in France, Ocelot spent much of his childhood in Guinea, and Kirikou resounds with the African origin of the tale, from the French dialogue spoken by African actors to the soundtrack by Senegalese composer Youssou N’Dour created on indigenous instruments. Though not exactly a Christmas tale, its warmth and emphasis on family bonds still make it somehow good for the soul and fitting viewing over the holidays season.
We welcome everybody to come early, starting around 11AM, for food, drinks, and conversation, and music DJed by Gérard Lollie in front café.
La Collectionneuse & Acropolis Cinema present:
Caniba (2017)
Dir. Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
GET TICKETS
Los Angeles premiere, co-presented by Acropolis Cinema!
A new documentary from the pioneering filmmakers behind Leviathan, Caniba reflects on the discomfiting significance of cannibalistic desire in human existence through the prism of one Japanese man, Issei Sagawa, and his mysterious relationship with his brother, Jun Sagawa. As a 32-year-old student at the Sorbonne in Paris, Issei Sagawa was arrested on June 13, 1981 when spotted emptying two bloody suitcases containing the remains of his Dutch classmate, Renée Hartevelt. Two days earlier, Mr. Sagawa had killed Hartevelt and began eating her. Declared legally insane, he returned to Japan. He has been a free man ever since. Ostracized from society, he has made his living off his crime by writing novels, drawing manga, appearing in innumerable documentaries and sexploitation films in which he reenacts his crime, and even becoming a food critic.
CALDER’S CIRCUS (1961)
Dir. Carlos Vilardebó
Starring Alexander Calder, Louisa James Calder
Doors 7pm / screening 8pm
+ Circus Marionettes
*** Since this event is part of a fundraiser for the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, tickets are $30 ***
Calder’s Circus is a historical film, by Carlos Vilardebo, of Alexander Calder’s miniature circus — tiny wire performers, ingeniously articulated to walk tightropes, dance, lift weights, and engage in acrobatics in the ring. Resulted from his fascination with the circus in his mid-twenties when he did illustrations for Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, this film exudes the great personal charm of Calder himself, moving and working the tiny players like a ringmaster.
Calder’s Circus (1926-31) was created to be performed by the artist and only by the artist himself. Made primarily in Paris, when the young Alexander Calder lived there and during his frequent travels back to New York, Calder performed the Circus for colleagues, friends, artists, critics, collectors, and luminaries from the worlds of theater, art, and literature.
Calder’s Circus is a world unto itself, yet also has important implications for Calder’s breakthrough sculptures. He developed the Circus in the same period he created his open-form wire portraits, wire animal sculptures, and his now iconic mobiles. During this time, movement became Calder’s signature material. In the words of the artist: “Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.”
La Collectionneuse & NAVEL present
THE HUNGER (1983) Dir. Tony Scott
Starring Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, Ann Magnuson
+ special guest Ann Magnuson premiering her new music video
+ a Halloween video mixtape from EXP TV
+ Bully Fae Collins performs "Plight Notions with Shandy"
+ all ticketbuyers to The Hunger get free access to NAVEL's Halloween party ANXIETY immediately following the film screening
+ installations, surprises, dark corners, and more…
7:30PM - Doors
8PM - Screening
11PM - Bully Fae Collins performs "Plight Notions with Shandy"
12AM-Late - DJ sets by Bae Bae, Bapari, Andy Warren, and Noise Pup
--COSTUMES STRONGLY ENCOURAGED--
The exquisitely beautiful Catherine Deneuve plays Miriam, a centuries-old vampire capable of bestowing the gift of immortality on her lovers -- namely her current partner John (David Bowie). To sustain their sanguinary requirements, the pair cruises New York nightclubs in search of victims (as illustrated in a stunning opening sequence to the accompaniment of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" performed by seminal Goth band Bauhaus). When John awakens one morning to discover telltale signs of aging, it is revealed that his own sustained youth is not permanent, and his physical decrepitude begins to increase at an incredible rate...
Brunch, Drinks & Movie!
Starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse
Brunch starts at 11, movie at 2pm
FREE!
In this classic of French suspense, the cruel and abusive headmaster of a boarding school becomes the target of a murder plot hatched by an unlikely duo -- his meek wife and the mistress he brazenly flaunts. The women, brought together by their mutual hatred for the man, pull off the crime but become increasingly unhinged by a series of odd occurrences after the corpse mysteriously disappears…
“Satisfying, elegant and nasty.”
-- Peter Bradshaw
"(...) a diabolical double-reverse plot that keeps the audience guessing right up to the thoroughly implausible final scene."
-- Roger Ebert
"The icily brilliant suspense thriller about a bathroom murder is said to have inspired Alfred Hitchcock to make Psycho, but I suspect Hitchcock may also have been fascinated by the Patrick-Hamiltonish nature of the plot and its final twist."
- Peter Bradshaw
"Clouzot directed several of the best thrillers ever made, including Le corbeau, Quai des Orfèvres, The Wages of Fear and this one, made in 1955 and based on a novel by Boileau-Narcejac, the same duo who wrote the equally ingenious D'entre les morts, the source of Vertigo."
-- The Guardian
La Collectionneuse & Bob Baker Marionettes present:
Screening of ALICE (1988) - by Jan Svankmajer
With marionette performances + post reception
Doors at 7:30pm
$15
GET TICKETS
Svankmajer's ALICE remains true to the absurdity of Carroll's original, but bears the stamp of his own distinctive style and obsessions. Combining techniques of animation and live action, he gives a new and fascinating dimension to the classic tale of childhood fantasies.
“Svankmajer's sinister visual music has an irresistible potency and allure. Watching it, we feel the enthrallment of the irrational. It takes us back to a time in the history of movies when audiences responded to the images on screen with a combination of awe and fear, when in submitting to them, we felt as if we were submitting to a spell.”
“Svankmajer's creations have a quality of wonderment, but of a very peculiar sort; they're partly enchanted, partly haunted, and there's a hint of the morphologist's lab in them, a trace of formaldehyde.”
- Washington Post
“Mr. Svankmajer (...) has called ''Alice'' a series of ''dialogues with childhood, or expeditions into its landscape.'' (...) ''Alice,'' as it unearths the fears that animate dreams and nightmares, is definitely a film for adults.”
- NY Time
"An astonishing, dangerous, and Kafkaesque adventure through the subconscious."
- Highbrow Magazine
"the eeriest descent down Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole yet committed to film."
- Indiewire
“no other film-maker (...) is so consistently inventive in his ability to marry pure, startling nonsense with rigorous logic, black wit with piercing psychological insights.”
- Washington post
Free screening of SWIMMING POOL by - and in!- the pool on The Rooftop at The Standard Downtown LA
550 S Flower St
Doors at 8:30pm
RSVP HERE
SWIMMING POOL (2003), dir. François Ozon
Starring Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier
The two women, the handsome waiter, the hours of idleness, the swimming pool: it sounds like, and on one level is, a scenario worthy of Eric Rohmer.
But Mr. Ozon is as perverse as he is resourceful, so he slyly turns his delicate study in generational and cross-cultural sexual rivalry into a suspense thriller. There is a mystery lurking in Julie's past...
''Swimming Pool'' is rated R. It's summertime. It's the south of France. It's a French movie. Who said anything about clothes?
-- NY Times
It’s easy to be seduced by Ozon’s deadly use of silence. Far scarier than any one specific moment is the uncomfortable line the director allows his characters to walk between the deadpan and the grotesque. And because Rampling and Sagnier are so good, watching their characters is not unlike observing two sparring organisms see-sawing for power while trapped inside a pastoral petri dish.
-- Slant Magazine
Rampling plays Sarah Morton, a British crime writer whose novels seem to exist somewhere between those of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. Now she is tired and uncertain, and her publisher offers her a holiday in his French villa. She goes gratefully to the house, shops in the nearby village, finds she can write again.
Then an unexpected visitor turns up: Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), the daughter her publisher didn't think to tell her about. Sarah is annoyed. Her privacy has been violated. Her privacy, and her sense of decorum. Julie is gravid with self-confidence in her emerging sexuality, appears topless at the villa's swimming pool, brings home men to sleep with--men who have nothing in common, except Julie's willingness to accommodate them. Sarah is surprised, intrigued, disapproving, curious. She looks down from high windows, spying on the girl who seems so indifferent to her opinion. Eventually she even steals glimpses of the girl's diary...
-- Roger Ebert
The Double Life of Veronique - (1991)
Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors Trilogy)
Doors: 7pm / Show: 8pm
+ Special performance by whistler Molly Lewis
+ Marionettes Performances by the Bob Baker Marionette Theater
+ Pre and post-reception with DJ set by Mark Wright from Vidéothèque South Pasadena and Décadanse Soirée
Krzysztof Kieślowski's international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to each other, the two women share an enigmatic, emotional bond, which Kieślowski details in gorgeous reflections, colors, and movements. Aided by Slawomir Idziak's shimmering cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner's haunting, operatic score, Kieślowski creates one of cinema's most purely metaphysical works. The Double Life of Véronique is an unforgettable symphony of feeling.
-- The Criterion Collection
Here is a film about a feeling. Like all feelings, it is one that can hardly be described in words, although it can be evoked in art. It is the feeling that we are not alone, because there is more than one of us. We are connected at a level far, far beneath thought. We have no understanding of this. It is simply a feeling that we have.
-- Roger Ebert
The trope of double-identity becomes a brilliant meditation on choices and alternative lives, on the presence of death which forces these choices on us, and on the terrible demands which art can make - if we choose to let it. Véronique's identity, her very existence, become vivid and deeply felt because the fable or mirage of its duality has allowed it to be questioned and examined.
-- The Guardian
Presented by La Collectionneuse & The Bob Baker Marionette Theater
Dir. Federico Fellini, 1965, Digital presentation, Soundtrack by Nino Rota
***Free Screening***
Come early for brunch and drinks, starting at 11am on + dress up encouraged!
"How enjoyable it will be to watch this movie with a glass of bubbly and a nice brunch from Zebulon on a beautiful Sunday afternoon... Dress up encouraged!" -- La Collectionneuse
"Fellini's odd love poem to his wife." -- Michael Wilmington
Believing her husband to be unfaithful, Giulietta is advised by a mystic to "trust in the spirits." Before long, she is conjuring up the ghosts of past friends, who advise her to cut her matrimonial strings.
"The movie is about a betrayed wife who falls into the spirit world (or insanity?) and tries to fight her way out of it to wholeness and peace."
"A mad, resplendent peacock of a film, a cinematographic riot of color and sensuality that evokes its era -- the swinging mid-'60s -- as much as any movie made during those giddy years." -- Michael Wilmington
"A dazzling technical achievement, from the color to the tracking shots that delight in running down every detail of Juliet's companions." -- Chris Vognar
"Within a simple, naively romantic narrative frame concerning a wife's desperation over her husband's philanderings, director Federico Fellini has put together an imperial-sized fantasy of a physical opulence to make the old Vincente Minnelli Metro musicals look like army training films." -- Variety
Come celebrate La Collectionneuse 3 YEARS ANNIVERSARY on the dance floor!
Dance party w/ DJ Brian T (Restless Nites) + visuals by La Collectionneuse
***NOTE: Tickets valid ONLY for the after party following Chorégraphies et Cinéma event***
18+
To celebrate LA COLLECTIONNEUSE'S 3 YEARS ANNIVERSARY!
La Collectionneuse x NAVEL present:
Chorégraphies et Cinéma
A night of dance & films
Featuring:
This April 27th marks the Three Year Anniversary of La Collectionneuse, and as an anniversary gift to herself, she’s fulfilling a long-held wish: to present a night— Chorégraphies et Cinéma— dedicated to the rhapsodies of artful movement in film. The night opens at 8PM with Un chant d’amour, a 1950 silent film directed by the infamous playwright, novelist, and unrepentant criminal Jean Genet. Though long banned in the United States for its frankly homosexual displays of “masturbation, oral copulation, crimes against nature, voyeurism, nudity, sadism, masochism and sex,” the film is far less shock than it is seduction. Genet traces and fixates on the sensual movements of otherwise dangerous bodies, and as always, finds tenderness and longing where others see only brutality. Following, and filling out Navel’s beautiful open floor, will be live dance performances by Zena Bibler and Alexsa Durrans performing Institute IDGAF’s “Dirty Work.”, new work by Barry Brannum and more! La Collectionneuse will then project a montage of “choreography” in an expanded sense— scrambling, signing, swimming, spinning, synchronizing— and viewers may watch attentively or freely mingle as the evening transitions to a late-night dance party, DJed by Brian Tarney of Restless Nites.
$15 for film + performances + afterparty
DAISIES
Dir. Vera Chytilová, 1966, digital presentation, 79 minutes
"One of the most exhilarating stylistic and psychedelic eruptions of the 60s, this madcap and aggressive feminist farce by Vera Chytilova explodes in any number of directions. Two uninhibited young women engage in escapades that add up to less a plot than to a string of outrageous set pieces, including several antiphallic gags and a free-for-all with fancy food (rivaling Laurel and Hardy) that got Chytilova in lots of trouble with the authorities; disturbing yet liberating, it shows what this talented director can do with freedom. A major influence on Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, this 1966 feature is chock-full of female giggling, which might be interpreted in context as the laughter of Medusa: subversive, bracing, energizing, and rather challenging to most male spectators."
-- Jonathan Rosenbaum
+ PRE-RECEPTION at 5pm with DJ LADY C (Dublab)
http://dublab.com/labrat/labrat-dj-lady-c/
FREE
21+
This March, on the evening of the 9th, at imprecisely 11:00pm, in co-production with Bob Baker Marionette Theater, La Collectionneuse brings you Strange Soirée, an evening of mind-bending shorts and mind-bendinger marionette performances. This year, La Collectionneuse is unlocking her cabinet of international cinema, beginning with Strange Soirée’s spam of absurdist, little-s surrealistic shorts from Europe and the United States: Samuel Beckett’s philosophical chase film starring a faceless Buster Keaton, Svankmajer’s dark comic vision of not-so-inanimate objects, Guy Maddin’s manic riff on the silent film era, as well as other, lesser-known leaps into the uncanny. In between films, marionettes will stir to life at the hands of the acclaimed Bob Baker puppeteers, whose incredibly dedicated high-artistry has for the last half-century elevated the beautifully-vintage, storybook theater into a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural landmark.
In cooperation with the Czech Consulate.
Presented by La Collectionneuse & Bob Baker.
With a performance by harpist Mary Lattimore.
This March, on the evening of the 2nd, at imprecisely 8:00pm, in co-production with Bob Baker Marionette Theater, La Collectionneuse brings you Strange Soirée, an evening of mind-bending shorts and mind-bendinger marionette performances. This year, La Collectionneuse is unlocking her cabinet of international cinema, beginning with Strange Soirée’s spam of absurdist, little-s surrealistic shorts from Europe and the United States: Samuel Beckett’s philosophical chase film starring a faceless Buster Keaton, Svankmajer’s dark comic vision of not-so-inanimate objects, Guy Maddin’s manic riff on the silent film era, as well as other, lesser-known leaps into the uncanny. In between films, marionettes will stir to life at the hands of the acclaimed Bob Baker puppeteers, whose incredibly dedicated high-artistry has for the last half-century elevated the beautifully-vintage, storybook theater into a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural landmark. Once the spell has broken, we’ll regroup for drinks, discussion, and music!
In cooperation with the Czech Consulate.
Presented by La Collectionneuse & Bob Baker.
This March, on the evening of the 2nd, at imprecisely 8:00pm, in co-production with Bob Baker Marionette Theater, La Collectionneuse brings you Strange Soirée, an evening of mind-bending shorts and mind-bendinger marionette performances. This year, La Collectionneuse is unlocking her cabinet of international cinema, beginning with Strange Soirée’s spam of absurdist, little-s surrealistic shorts from Europe and the United States: Samuel Beckett’s philosophical chase film starring a faceless Buster Keaton, Svankmajer’s dark comic vision of not-so-inanimate objects, Guy Maddin’s manic riff on the silent film era, as well as other, lesser-known leaps into the uncanny. In between films, marionettes will stir to life at the hands of the acclaimed Bob Baker puppeteers, whose incredibly dedicated high-artistry has for the last half-century elevated the beautifully-vintage, storybook theater into a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural landmark. Once the spell has broken, we’ll regroup for drinks, discussion, and DJ set by Ramakawa and Jimi Hey!
In cooperation with the Czech Consulate.
Dir. Philippe Puicouyoul, 1981. Digital presentation. 55 minutes. $8 21+
The story of a pretty punk chick who seduces and bullies a square business man into making her a rock star, La Brune Et Moi is 55 minutes of 16mm that plays like a 33 of the French punk underground: Ici Paris, Marquis de Sade, Edith Nylon, Les Privés, Go-Go Pigalles, The Questions, Astroflash, les Dogs— with versions of their songs recorded exclusively for the film. As vital, stylish, raw, and awful as you’d expect from any self-respecting punk cinema, La Brune Et Moi captures a fleeting highpoint in French punk, with a dismal reception for its 1980 debut and most of its acts and actors disappearing, disbanding, or dying shortly after the film’s appearance. Anouschka, its starring scene-queen, vanished without a trace and Pierre Clementi, its other star (as well as Catherine Deneuve’s lover in Belle de Jour), died shortly after. The film maudit was long forgotten until its resurrection in 2005 by rock-archivists Rockenscope, then screened to sold-out, dumbfounded crowds at the Parisian underground space Les Voutes. Now, La Collectionneuse brings this zero-budget anti-classic to Los Angeles, this November 22nd at Zebulon, with live music by Hit Bargain, a dance party DJed by Jimi Hey and Fifi LaRoux, and visuals by Tom Fitzgerald.
+ Hit Bargain (live)
+ Dance party with DJ FIfi La Roux and Jimi Hey
+ Visuals by Tom Fitzgerald
Details:
http://zebulon.ticketfly.com/event/1590847
Tickets:
https://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1590847?utm_medium=bks