THE CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US
(VITTORIO DE SICA, 1944, ITALY) 85 MIN.
Paired with Joelysa Pankanea’s Bicycle Thieves, p36.
Five years before Bicycle Thieves, director De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini collaborated for the first time (along with three other writers) on this heartbreaking tale of a family breakup witnessed through the eyes of a child. Shot in 1942 under the fascist regime, the film broke with the pieties of the time by acknowledging the tensions that can tear apart a marriage. As Zavattini remarked, the film marked “the most important stage in my evolution as a filmmaker… and as a human being. Through the character of the child, we felt for the first time a human being… all my previous characters felt like puppets.” JA N 20 3PM VA NCI T Y T H EAT R E
PRIPYAT
(NIKOLAUS GEYRHALTER, 1999, AUSTRIA) 100 MIN.
A haunting, monochromatic vision of life in the not-entirely-abandoned radioactive “Workers’ City” of Pripyat more than a decade after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s film is akin to a documentary version of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker: a potent, patient meditation on a post-apocalyptic city which is gradually being reclaimed by nature and the handful of hold-outs who refuse to give up the ghost. Using long, still takes and interviews with four of the residents, Geyrhalter constructs a movie that is both concrete and abstract. “A non-fiction horror story… fascinating and deeply troubling.” —VARIETY JA N 27 3 P M VA N C IT Y T H E ATR E
Paired with BERLIN’s ZVIZDAL, p41.
A SCANNER DARKLY
(RICHARD LINKLATER, 2006, USA) 100 MIN.
Composer Graham Reynolds has worked with director Richard Linklater on four feature films, including Before Midnight, Bernie and Last Flag Flying. But their first collaboration was on this weirdly funny, inescapably prophetic Rotoscope-animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel about alternate realities, drugs, paranoia and the surveillance state. Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey, Jr. and Winona Ryder can still be detected underneath the movie’s digitally scrambled rendering of suburban stoner simulacra. Paired with Graham Reynolds’ Pancho Villa From a Safe Distance, p42. Preceding the film, join Graham Reynolds with Joelysa Pankanea (Bicycle Thieves, p36) in conversation about composition for film and theatre, details on p53.
“The brilliance of A Scanner Darkly is how it suggests, without bombast or fanfare, the ways in which the real world has come to resemble the dark world of comic books.” —LA TIMES FEB 3 3 P M (TALK , FR EE) 4:3 0 P M (FI LM) VAN CITY TH EATR E 47