The Dryden Theatre is a staple to film culture and motion picture history. The venue contains decades of memories among the walls, floors, and folding seats. The stories within the deep, curious cinema are many. The modest piano sits stage right, finely tuned and ready to go.  The hushed voices, watchful eyes, ears and smiles surround the box office just before a film begins.

So let’s talk 35mm – let’s talk depth of field, luminosity, purity and beauty. The Dryden screens 35mm almost exclusively (well, every once in a while we mix it up).  You won’t find DVD or Blue-ray here- only film–and oftentimes original. The George Eastman House collection is vast, as are our connections to fellow archives and studios, allowing the Dryden’s film series to be strategically crafted with thoughtful themes and chock-full with the best actors, directors and producers throughout history.

The next frontier for the Dryden is making members and the public aware of the magic of the theater. It is reminding patrons of the unique experience of watching a movie on the big screen shot on 35 or screening silent films with musical accompaniment. It is about the conversations before and after, and the community of this place. I’m proud to present to you a look at the Dryden Theatre and its importance locally and internationally. 
Meet Lori and Kolbe…

Despite appearing in more than a dozen silent films, Marlene Dietrich didn’t achieve her big international breakthrough until 1930 with The Blue Angel, when she first paired with visionary director Josef von Sternberg. Over the course of seven films in six years the partnership produced some of the most highly crafted and visually stylish films to come out of the Hollywood studio system.
Pulled from the world of Berlin theater and cabaret by Sternberg, Dietrich really made her mark in sound films. Following her devastating performance as Lola Lola opposite Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, Paramount studio execs immediately signed the star to a seven-year contract and brought her over to Hollywood.

Sternberg’s exceptional skill in lighting and photography, against the backdrop of carefully controlled set design and costumes, presented an ideal canvas for Dietrich to play a series of dangerous and enigmatic women. At once radiantly sensual and glamorously mysterious, Dietrich’s alluring image was crafted in light and shadow and soft focus photography. Sternberg positioned Dietrich in a variety of atmospheric locales from a desert legionnaire outpost in Morocco to a Spanish carnival in The Devil Is a Woman. Her deep contralto voice and often risqué performances turned now-classic songs into unforgettable moments. Her rendition of “Falling in Love Again” is hard to shake, and who could forget Dietrich, dressed as a gorilla performing “Hot Voodoo” in Blonde Venus?
— James Layton, Assistant Archivist, Motion Picture Department

Wednesday, August 15, 8 p.m..
Morocco
(Josef von Sternberg, US 1930, 92 min.)

Wednesday, August 22, 8 p.m..
Blonde Venus
(Josef von Sternberg, US 1932, 93 min.)

Wednesday, August 29, 8 p.m..
The Devil is a Woman
(Josef von Sternberg, US 1935, 75 min.)

Coleman plays the bigoted supervisor in 1980’s groundbreaking Nine to Five. Office workers played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton take matters into their own hands, putting their boss under lock and key and transforming the workplace into a haven of equality and efficiency.

Coleman will introduce the film and do a Q&A after the screening! May 25, 2012, @ 8:00 p.m. Doors open at 7:15 p.m., Dryden Theatre prices apply: $8 general admission and $6 members and students.

(Faust, Jan Švankmajer, Czech Republic 1994, 97 min., Czech/Latin w/ subtitles)

A childless woman nurses a tree stump into a gargantuan, omnivorous monster. A taxidermic rabbit breaks out of its display case and leads a young girl through a nightmarish wonderland. Marionettes made of raw meat dance to the sounds of a carnival hurdy-gurdy. Welcome to the world of Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, a strange universe where even the most mundane objects can, through expert stop-motion animation and traditional folk puppetry, spring to life to tickle our fancies and trouble our dreams.

Coming of age in repressive, post-WWII Czechoslovakia, Švankmajer began making films in the mid-1960s — animated short subjects with a decidedly surrealist bent (he joined the Czech Surrealist Group in 1970) and enough caustic political commentary for Švankmajer to be banned from making films for most of the 1970s. Švankmajer returned to filmmaking in 1979 and, working closely with his wife, the artist and writer Eva Švankmajerová, began crafting a series of extraordinary films of increasing length and complexity.

Widely hailed as an important latter-day Surrealist, Švankmajer’s influence has been profound and far-reaching, inspiring filmmakers as diverse as Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and Tim Burton. Throughout May and June, the DrydenTheatre will pay tribute to this master of  the fantastic with a complete retrospective of his feature films, that started with Alice, Švankmajer’s endlessly inventive adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and including Surviving Life, Švankmajer’s most recent feature. A special program of Švankmajer’s innovative short films will round out this close look at a true visionary whose work continues to shock, disturb, and delight.

— Ken Fox, Dryden Theatre Manager

(Trois Couleurs: Rouge, Krzysztof Kieslowski 1994, France/Poland/Switzerland, 99 min., French w/subtitles)

Some film trilogies are deliberate creations: meticulous superproductions with elaborate thematic and narrative designs that aspire to the density of novels. Others occur more organically, with filmmakers gradually improvising after an unexpected breakthrough.

An exemplar of the latter type is Abbas Kiarostami’s informal Koker trilogy. The opening feature, Where Is the Friend’s House?, offers a straightforward but meditative fable about a young boy’s search for a classmate’s home. When an earthquake nearly destroyed the village where Friend’s House was shot, Kiarostami embarked on a quest of his own, returning to Koker to learn the whereabouts of the boys who starred in the film. He fictionalized this search in the faux-documentary Life and Nothing More… and further fictionalized the making of that film in Through the Olive Trees. As described by the Pacific Film Archive, “Expecting to find death, Kiarostami found life, and proceeded to transform it into cinema.” The Koker films garnered an enormous reputation but have remained difficult to see, not least because Through the Olive Trees was acquired and then withheld from release by Miramax. At the time, Miramax was focusing its attention on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy — a multinational monument to the history of art house cinema and a forward-looking dream of a European Union. Crisscrossing the continent and musing on fate, discipline, and love, Kieslowski’s triptych scales impossible emotional heights. It also looks particularly interesting today as the eurozone that Kieslowski celebrates teeters on the economic brink — a fate also shared by Freedonia, the make-believe country inhabited by the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, the beloved conclusion to their informal trilogy of anarchic, animal-inflected comedies conceived directly for the screen.

Films and Screenings

— Kyle Westphal, Chief Projectionist

(Leo McCarey, US 1933, 68 min.)