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Películas Gratis!
In conjunction with the exhibition The Arts in Latin America: 1492:1820, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be screening a series of selected classics of Latin American cinema this weekend. Best of all, thanks to a generous grant from the Getty Foundation, all of these screenings are 100% FREE! Make the trip to the LACMA this weekend and enjoy films rarely seen on the big screen in this country. Two of the screenings will feature interviews and an audience Q&A with the filmmakers. Check the complete schedule below for all the details.
The Violin
August 24 | 7:00 pm
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An itinerant musician to the naked eye but secretly a campesino revolutionary, the dignified Don Plutarco is faced with government forces occupying his land and turns to his violin for a solution. This poetic and stark debut film from Francisco Vargas won a best actor prize at Cannes.
Special Guest: Gerardo Taracena
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Memories of Underdevelopment
August 24 | 9:30 pm
A portrait of Cuba after the revolution as one man struggles with his country's contradictions and promises. Widely considered the greatest work of director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, this landmark of Latin American cinema was praised by the New York Times as "a fascinating achievement . . . wise, sad and funny" and described by Andrew Sarris as "the eloquent antithesis to impersonal agitprop."
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Susana
August 25 | 2:00 pm
Luis Buñuel followed Los Olvidados with this adaptation of a Manuel Reachi story in which an exaggerated femme fatale escapes from a reformatory and finds refuge on a ranch where her seductions dismantle its bourgeois hierarchy. "The irrepressible sexual urge which society was doing its best to repress throughout L'Age d'Or reappears again in Susana, more naked and unashamed than in any other Buñuel film." (Tom Milne, Sight & Sound) "A perfectly routine film." (Buñuel)
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Rosaura at Ten O'Clock
August 25 | 3:40 pm
A classic of Argentine cinema rarely seen in the US, this adaptation of Marco Denevi's best-selling novel retains the mesmerizing play of fictions in its fragmented tale of a mild-mannered painter and his mysterious sitter.
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Oriana
August 25 | 5:30 pm
Marie returns from Paris to the rundown hacienda in the Venezuelan jungle that she has inherited from her aunt and begins to unravel the Gothic mysteries of its past. Winner of the Camera d'Or prize at Cannes.
Special Guest: Fina Torres
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The Place Without Limits
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August 25 | 7:30 pm
A feisty transvestite recalls his marriage to a lusty prostitute while evading the arrival of a threatening trucker; Arturo Ripstein's twenty-third film is a compelling indictment of homophobia and a deconstruction of Mexican machismo.
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Si sos brujo: A Story of Tango
August 25 | 10:15 pm
Director Caroline Neal follows a young Argentine musician as he races to find the legendary maestros of tango's golden age. He wants to learn and preserve the exquisitely nuanced music played by the tango orchestras of Buenos Aires in the 1940s and 1950s before their secrets are lost forever. If you are at all familiar with the names of Osvaldo Pugliese, Anibal Troilo, and Astos Piazzolla, then this documentary is essential viewing.
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The Woman of the Port
August 26 | 1:30 pm
Andrea Palma plays the title character in this seminal work of Mexican cinema, which hinges on her star-making debut as "a kind of Marlene Dietrich from Veracruz [. . .] a magnificent vampiress," per film critic Jorge Ayala Blanco. Fleeing from a hometown embedded with painful memories, she works in a dingy brothel frequented by sailors, one whom tragically turns out to not be a stranger. The Woman of the Port was later remade four times, with such notable Mexican filmmakers as Arturo Ripstein and Alberto Gout taking the helm. Its original director, Russian-born Arcady Boytler, went on to introduce the world to one of Spanish-language cinema's comedy icons: Cantinflas.
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Victims of Sin
August 26 | 3:00 pm
A cabaret dancer tries to escape the clutches of her hot-headed pimp in this treasure of Mexican cinema. The exotic underworld of postwar Mexico City comes vividly to life in the haunting images of Oscar-nominated cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.
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Film summaries courtesy of LACMA
Photo courtesy of DonnaGrayson via Flickr
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