Harpur Cinema

HARPUR CINEMA SPRING 2023

Cinema Department

Binghamton University, State University of New York

Programmed by

Cinema Professors Kenneth White  and Brian Wall

________________________________________________________________________

Fri Feb 10 & Sun Feb 12:

DRIVE MY CAR

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan, 2021, 179 min

Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koji Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins—with the help of his driver—to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a haunting road movie traveling a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace. Winner of three prizes at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, including Best Screenplay.

________________________________________________________________________

Fri Feb 17 & Sun Feb 19:

THE VASULKA EFFECT

Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir, Iceland, 2019, 87 min

Artists Steina and Woody Vasulka escaped the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to find refuge in New York City. There, they founded the legendary art and performance gallery The Kitchen. Their groundbreaking installations were at the heart of New York’s art scene in the 1960s, where they shared wild nights with the likes of Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, and Candy Darling. Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir’s intimate portrait reintroduces the Vasulkas for a new generation, as the couple, now retired in Santa Fe, reckon with age, mortality, debt, and the future of their artistic archive.

________________________________________________________________________

Fri Feb 24 & Sun Feb 26:

GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE

Jacquelyn Mills, United States, 2022, 113 min

An immersion into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island, a remote sliver of land in the Northwest Atlantic, the film follows Zoe Lucas, a naturalist and environmentalist who has lived there for over 40 years collecting, cleaning and documenting marine litter that persistently washes up on the island's shores. Shot on 16mm and created using eco-friendly filmmaking techniques, Geographies of Solitude is a playful and reverent collaboration with the natural world filled with arresting images and made with an activist spirit. 

_______________________________________________________________________

Fri Mar 10 & Sun Mar 12:

60th ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL TOUR PROGRAM 1

Harpur Cinema is pleased to present the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour! Established in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 200 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid and performance-based works. Program 1 includes films from Argentina, Iran, Japan, Portugal, Singapore, the UK, California, and NYC: Birdsaver Report Volume 2 (Heehyun Choi), The Fourth Wall (Mahboobeh Kalaee), She Gather Me (Miatta Kawinzi), After the Dance (Shunsaku Hayashi), Precautionary Measures (Lizzy Deacon, Ika Schwander), Irani Bag (Maryam Tafakory), Cosmos-War-Finally-Love (Luciano Zubillaga), and John L (Nina McNeely).

________________________________________________________________________

Fri Mar 17 & Sun Mar 19:

60th ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL TOUR PROGRAM 2

Harpur Cinema is pleased to present the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival Tour! Established in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 200 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid and performance-based works. Program 2 includes films from Austria, Germany, Taiwan, the UK, California, Michigan, and North Carolina: Theorie und Praxis (Leonie Minor), Miracle Whip (Jerod Willis), Money is the One True God (Lachlan Turczan), Moving or Being Moved (Sabine Gruffat), Amazon Woman (Anna Vasof), A Brief Appearance of Neon (Matthias Sahli, Immanuel Esser), 3 Wetlands (Jane Cheadle), Tank Fairy (Erich Rettstadt). 

________________________________________________________________________

Fri Mar 24 & Sun Mar 26:

RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Great Britain, 1977, 92 min

LAURA MULVEY IN-PERSON ON FRI MAR 24!

Laura Mulvey, author of the seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped to establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. With Peter Wollen, she directed one of the most visually stimulating, theoretically rigorous films to emerge from the 1970s. Riddles of the Sphinx is a landmark fusion of feminism and formal experimentation that seeks to create a non-sexist film language. Its title figure, the legendary creature of antiquity, terrorized Thebes and self-destructed only after Oedipus correctly answered her riddle. Invoking and challenging traditional interpretations of the Oedipus story as a movement from matriarchal culture to patriarchal order, the film also probes representation in film itself. The central narrative section, about Louise, a middle-class woman, and her four-year-old daughter Ana, is an inquiry into the arbitrary nature of conventional film techniques that captures Louise's struggles with motherhood in a patriarchal society.

________________________________________________________________________

Fri Apr 14 & Sun Apr 16:

FOREVER A WOMAN

Kinuyo Tanaka, Japan, 1955, 110 min

Kinuyo Tanaka’s third film as a director tells the story of Fumiko Nakajo, an ill-fated female tanka poet whose life was brought to a premature end by breast cancer. Set on the plains of Hokkaido, it features a fully-committed performance from star Yumeji Tsukioka, whose character deals with the pain of being separated from her son, then suddenly finds herself forced to confront her mortality, yet still invests herself wholeheartedly in one last love affair. The supporting cast includes Masayuki Mori, one of the most revered actors of Japanese cinema’s golden age, as well as Ryoji Hayama in his first film role, Yoko Sugi, and Shiro Osaka. The screenplay was penned by Sumie Tanaka, further consolidating the “films for women, by women” outlook that Kinuyo Tanaka strived to advance.

________________________________________________________________________

Fri Apr 21 & Sun Apr 23:

HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING

RaMell Ross, United States, 2018, 75 min

Composed of intimate and unencumbered moments of people in a community, Hale County This Morning, This Evening allows the viewer an emotive impression of the Historic South—trumpeting the beauty of life and consequences of the social construction of race, while simultaneously a testament to dreaming—despite the odds. How does one express the reality of individuals whose public image, lives, and humanity originate in exploitation? Photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross employs the integrity of nonfiction filmmaking and the currency of stereotypical imagery to fill in the gaps between individual black male icons. Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a lyrical innovation to the form of portraiture that boldly ruptures racist aesthetic frameworks that have historically constricted the expression of African American men on film.

________________________________________________________________________