h. nazan ışık—
June 1, 2014 —
Yılmaz Güney’s Duvar (The Wall)1983, is only one of the movies that Marin Karmitz produced. His independent, family owned company MK2 has produced over a 100 movies and won so many awards.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) offers Mr. Karmitz a “carte blanche” selection of his favorites among the films he has produced, distributed, or directed. The series takes place between June5 –June 23.
French business man Mr. Karmitz (born 1938 in Romania) opened his first theatre in 1968, and has continued to operate a chain of art cinemas in France. He is known to produce films of strong personal vision regardless national boundaries. His company MK2 which manages a catalog of classics that includes work by Charlie Chaplin, François Truffaut, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Claude Chabrol, David Lynch… has produced films of many famous directors such as Michael Haneke, Gus Van Sant,, Olivier Assayas, Abbas Kiarostami, Alain Resnais, Xavier Dolan, and continues to do so.
MK2 has specialized in creating, distributing, and screening independent cinema, including short films.
The event is organized by Dave Kehr, Adjunct Curator, and Sophie Cavoulacos, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, to celebrate of the upcoming 40th anniversary of MK2’s founding.
Related Film Screenings
Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm)
2013. Canada/France. Directed by Xavier Dolan. Screenplay by Michel Marc Bouchard, Dolan, based on Bouchard’s play. Director Dolan, the young Canadian phenomenon behind I Killed My Mother, stars as the title character, a Montreal copywriter who travels to a remote farming community in Northern Quebec to attend the funeral of his lover. When he finds that his companion’s brutish older brother, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), has kept his sibling’s sexuality a secret from their fragile mother, Tom is initially appalled but is gradually drawn into Francis’s sadomasochistic games. In French; English subtitles. 95 min.
Friday, June 20, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Coup pour coup (Blow for Blow)
1972. France. Directed by Marin Karmitz. The last of Karmitz’s three features as a director, this lively bit of agitprop was a staple of left-leaning campus film societies in the 1970s. A collective enterprise that mixes professional and amateur performers, the film takes place in a clothing factory where women make up much of the workforce. When the harsh conditions become more than they can bear, the women occupy the factory and take their male boss hostage. Digital preservation courtesy MK2. In French; English subtitles. 89 min.
Friday, June 6, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Monday, June 9, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 2,
Mourir à trente ans (Half a Life)
1982. France. Written and directed by Romain Goupil. Combining home movies, archival footage, and contemporary interviews, Goupil recounts his youth as a teenage militant Trotskyite in the years leading up to May 1968, and the decade trailing off from it, climaxing with the suicide of his boyhood friend, the charismatic student leader Michel Recanati. A remarkable blend of bildungsroman and political essay, the film is attentive both to the youthful romantics of revolt and the pain that comes with age and disillusionment. In French; English subtitles. 95 min.
Friday, June 6, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Thursday, June 19, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colors: Blue)
1993. France/Poland/Switzerland. Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Screenplay by Kieślowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski. The first installment of Kieślowskii’s intricate Three Colors trilogy is a melodrama set in a stylized France of material plenty. Juliette Binoche is the coddled wife of a famous composer, who suddenly finds herself alone when her husband is killed in a car accident. Shaking off her old identity, Binoche sets out to explore her newfound freedom, but finds that she is unbreakably bound to other humans, including one in particular—her husband’s mistress, whose existence she never suspected. Courtesy Janus Films. In French; English subtitles. 98 min.
Saturday, June 7, 2014, 2:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Monday, June 16, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Trois couleurs: Blanc (Three Colors: White)
1994. France/Poland/Switzerland. Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Screenplay by Kieślowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski. The tone turns to comedy in the second part of Kieślowski’s pan-European trilogy, set this time in a hardscrabble Poland. A timid hairdresser (Zbigniew Zamachowski) schemes and bungles his way to fortune in his newly capitalist country, intending to use his newfound wealth to lure his ex-wife, a beautiful Frenchwoman (Julie Delpy), back into his arms—though he’s not quite sure what he wants to happen next. Courtesy Janus Films. In Polish, French; English subtitles. 91 min.
Saturday, June 7, 2014, 5:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Trois couleurs: Rouge (Three Colors: Red)
1994. France/Poland/Switzerland. Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Screenplay by Kieślowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz. In the symphonic finale of Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy, narrative themes and visual motifs carefully established in the first two installments come together in a rush of ravishing, nocturnal imagery and surging emotion. Yet little seems to be happening on the surface—the story of a tentative friendship between a misanthropic retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintingant) and a young model (Irene Jacob) in a hilltop neighborhood of Geneva. The film builds to an ineffably moving vision of global interconnection, amplified by Zbigniew Preisner’s score. Courtesy Janus Films. In French; English subtitles. 99 min.
Saturday, June 7, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Padre Padrone (Father and Master)
1977. Italy. Written and directed by Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani. The Taviani brothers first established their international reputation with this powerful film based on an autobiographical novel by Gavino Ledda, who escaped an impoverished childhood in Sardinia to become an accomplished linguist. Ledda himself introduces the film by passing the stick used by his father, an illiterate shepherd who can conceive no other future for his son than following the family tradition, to the actor (Omero Antonutti) who will play him. The primal conflict between an authoritarian father and a rebellious son is carefully situated by the Tavianis within a specific culture and a specific landscape, which paradoxically serves to make the struggle seem more timeless. Courtesy RAI. In Italian; English subtitles. 114 min.
Sunday, June 8, 2014, 2:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Thursday, June 19, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Duvar (The Wall)
1983. France. Written and directed by Yilmaz Güney. A band of young boys fight to survive in a Turkish prison, itself a metaphor for Turkey under the rule of the oppressive military government that had come to power in a 1971 coup. The film was shot in France by Güney, a popular leading man who had become politicized and was himself imprisoned for much of the 1970s. In French; English subtitles. 117 min.
Sunday, June 8, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Theater 2, T2 (Introduced by Erju Ackman, Turkish film scholar)
Sunday, June 22, 2014, 2:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Taksi-Blyuz (Taxi Blues)
1990. USSR/France. Written and directed by Pavel Lounguine. Amid the accelerating social breakdown of the Soviet Union, an unlikely bond forms between a burly, anti-Semitic cab driver—the hulking embodiment of Old Russia—and a birdlike Jewish jazz musician. Probing the always problematic but ideologically privileged relationship of the working man and the intellectual, director Lounguine explores the paradoxes of a repressive culture on the verge of collapse. In Russian; English subtitles. 110 min.
Monday, June 9, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Saturday, June 21, 2014, 2:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
O Melissokomos (The Beekeeper)
1986. Greece/France. Directed by Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay by Angelopoulos, Dimitris Nollas, Tonino Guerra. Feeling himself an outsider in contemporary Greece, a schoolteacher (Marcello Mastroianni) leaves his job and family to return to his hometown, where he intends to take up the occupation of his ancestors as a beekeeper. Over the course of his road trip he visits the sites and friends of his childhood, hoping to gather the pollen of his past, but instead meets and becomes obsessed with a young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi) who represents the empty hedonism of the present. In Greek; English subtitles. 120 min.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Saturday, June 21, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Mélo
1986. France. Written and directed by Alain Resnais. Resnais’ fascination with the interpenetration of film and theater reaches its expressive height with this very close adaptation of a 1929 play by the boulevard dramatist Henry Bernstein. The plot, dense and improbable, is centered on two old friends (and fellow violinists) played by Pierre Arditi and André Dussollier; when Dussollier falls in love with Arditi’s wife (Sabine Azéma), melodramatic complications ensue. Resnais’ symmetrical compositions and extended long takes emphasize the artificiality of the proceedings while liberating their emotional truth. In French; English subtitles. 112 min.
Wednesday, June 11, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Saturday, June 21, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages (Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys)
2000. France/Germany/Romania. Written and directed by Michael Haneke. The director of Amour spins a series of interlocking stories that begins when a Parisian teenager mocks a Romanian woman begging on the street, a spectacle of arrogance and injustice that comes to affect a widening circle of characters including an actress (Juliette Binoche), her war-photographer boyfriend, and an African music teacher. Filmed in extreme long takes, the film is one of Haneke’s most stylistically adventurous, politically pointed works. Courtesy Leisure Time Features. In French; English subtitles. 117 min.
Friday, June 13, 2014, 4:30 p.m., T1
Saturday, June 14, 2014, 8:00 p.m., T1
La Cérémonie
1995. France. Directed by Claude Chabrol. Screenplay by Chabrol, Caroline Eliacheff. Working from a novel by Ruth Rendell, loosely based on the same case that inspired Jean Genet’s play The Maids, Chabrol delineates the social and sexual tensions that underlie an apparently idyllic bourgeois household in Brittany. Sandrine Bonnaire is the sullen young woman hired as a maid by a successful art dealer (Jacqueline Bisset) to help around her family estate; Isabelle Huppert is the local postmistress, who draws Bonnaire into her world of class envy and violent resentment. Courtesy Janus Films. In French; English subtitles. 112 min.
Friday, June 13, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Monday, June 16, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Ten
2002. France/Iran. Written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Shooting with a small video camera mounted on the dashboard of a Tehran taxi, Kiarostami records a series of 10 conversations between a female driver and her passengers, including one regular whose collapsing marriage has provoked the anxiety and anger of her young son. As always, Kiarostami develops a powerful creative tension between the scripted and the improvised, the planned and the unpredictable. Courtesy Zeitgeist. In Farsi; English subtitles. 94 min.
Saturday, June 14, 2014, 2:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T
Yeojaneun namjaui miraeda (Woman Is the Future of Man)
2004. South Korea/France. Written and directed by Hong Sang-soo. This fifth feature by the South Korean director of Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors radiates a distinct New Wave vibe with its droll, pointed account of two old friends, an academic and a filmmaker, who meet again after a long separation and decide to spend an evening with a woman they both dated (and mistreated) years earlier. Although she has moved on, the men seem stuck in the past, trying to atone for forgotten transgressions. Courtesy New Yorker Films and Finecut. In Korean; English subtitles. 87 min.
Saturday, June 14, 2014, 5:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Paranoid Park
2007. USA/France. Written and directed by Gus Van Sant. Based on a young adult novel by Blake Nelson, Van Sant’s 2007 film takes him back to the Pacific Northwest of his earliest work. Gabe Nevins heads a mostly non-professional cast as a teenaged skateboarder profoundly traumatized when he witnesses a killing; with his sudden maturity, life with his cheerleader girlfriend will never be the same. Photographed by Christopher Doyle in a delirious swirl of video, Super 8, and 35mm. Courtesy IFC Films 85 min.
Sunday, June 15, 2014, 2:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Monday, June 23, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T
Claire Dolan
1998. USA/France. Written and directed by Lodge Kerrigan. The unsparing director of Clean, Shaven creates another study of an extreme outsider’s attempts to rejoin society, centered on a high-priced prostitute (Katrin Cartlidge) working the chilly corridors of Manhattan power. Motivated by the death of her mother, she struggles to escape her life through a relationship with a gruff cabdriver (Vincent D’Onofrio). 95 min.
Sunday, June 15, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Monday, June 23, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Theater 1, T
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Every Man for Himself)
1980. Switzerland/Austria/France/West Germany. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. After spending much of the 1970s on the radical fringes of filmmaking, Godard returned to the “commercial” cinema—as represented by stars, a story, and ravishing 35mm images—with this challenging triptych filmed in an antiseptic, industrial Switzerland. The problems of a married couple in collapse (Nathalie Baye and Jacques Dutronc) are intertwined with the experiences of a country girl (Isabelle Huppert) who has come to the big city to practice that most Godardian of professions, prostitution. Courtesy The Film Desk. In French; English subtitles. 87 min.
Friday, June 20, 2014, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
Sunday, June 22, 2014, 5:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1
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