THOU ART DUST AND FOOD FOR WORMS: DARK AGES

Orson Welles

119 minutes

The crowning achievement of Orson Welles’s extraordinary cinematic career, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT was the culmination of the filmmaker’s lifelong obsession with Shakespeare’s ultimate rapscallion, Sir John Falstaff. Usually a comic supporting figure, Falstaff—the loyal, often soused friend of King Henry IV’s wayward son Prince Hal—here becomes the focus: a robustly funny and ultimately tragic screen antihero played by Welles with looming, lumbering grace. Integrating elements from both Henry IV plays as well as Richard II, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Welles created a gritty and unorthodox Shakespeare film as a lament, he said, “for the death of Merrie England.” Poetic, philosophical, and visceral—with a kinetic centerpiece battle sequence that rivals anything in the director’s body of work—CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT is as monumental as the figure at its heart.

Ingmar Bergman

96 minutes

Ingmar Bergman's most celebrated film, THE SEVENTH SEAL stars Max von Sydow as Antonius Blok, a 14th-century knight who returns home after a decade fighting in the Holy Crusades to find his plague-ravaged country in a frenzy of self-flagellation and witch hunts. When Death comes to claim the knight, Blok challenges him to a game of chess, hoping to gain enough time to overcome his spiritual doubt before he perishes. As the fateful game progresses, and the knight and his squire encounter a gallery of outcasts from a society in despair, Bergman mounts a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the torment of mortality. One of the most influential films of its time, THE SEVENTH SEAL is a stunning allegory of man's search for meaning and a work of stark visual poetry.

"A magically powerful film." - Pauline Kael

"THE SEVENTH SEAL was as important to the development of world cinema as the New Wave in France or the work of Fellini, Antonioni and Bertolucci. It continues to enthrall each new generation with its complex investigation of love, self-sacrifice, and the problems of pain and death." - Peter Cowie

Andrei Tarkovsky

183 minutes

Tracing the life of a renowned medieval icon painter, the second and grandest feature by Andrei Tarkovsky vividly conjures the murky world of 15th century Russia. This dreamlike and remarkably tactile film follows Andrei Rublev as he passes through a series of poetically linked scenes—snow falls inside an unfinished church, naked pagans stream through a thicket during a torchlit ritual, a boy oversees the clearing away of muddy earth for the forging of a gigantic bell—gradually emerging as a man struggling mightily to preserve his creative and religious integrity. Screening here in the director's preferred 183-minute cut, the masterwork ANDREI RUBLEV is one of Tarkovsky's most revered films, an arresting meditation on art, faith, and endurance.

"You may dread being ground down by this extraordinary film, but fear not. It will bear you aloft." - Anthony Lane, New Yorker

"Perfection lingers in each frame as Tarkovsky crafts one of the finest films ever made, an ecstatic story about art that has little interest in the artist himself, but in the power of art to transcend the age that produces it." - Jamie Russell, BBC

"It is not a film that needs to be processed or even understood, only experienced and wondered at." - Steve Rose, Guardian

Carl Theodor Dreyer

81 minutes

Spiritual rapture and institutional hypocrisy come to stark, vivid life in one of the most transcendent masterpieces of the silent era. Chronicling the trial of Joan of Arc in the hours leading up to her execution, Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer depicts her torment with startling immediacy, employing an array of techniques—expressionistic lighting, interconnected sets, painfully intimate close-ups—to immerse viewers in her subjective experience. Anchoring Dreyer's audacious formal experimentation is a legendary performance by Renée Falconetti, whose haunted face channels both the agony and the ecstasy of martyrdom.

"Dreyer's most universally acclaimed masterpiece remains one of the most staggeringly intense films ever made." - Tony Rayns, Time Out

"This is neither a hopeful nor a hopeless film, but one of feeling so colossal and resplendent, it can't be constrained by prison or consumed by fire." - Jaime N. Christley

"Dreyer's radical approach to constructing space and the slow intensity of his mobile style make this 'difficult' in the sense that, like all the greatest films, it reinvents the world from the ground up." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

SCREENING FOUR TIMES WITH FOUR DIFFERENT SOUNDTRACKS:
1/26 - Richard Einhorn’s 1994 libretto Voices of Light paired to the film
1/28 - an original score by Portishead’s Adrian Utley and Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory
1/29 - true silence, just as Dreyer intended
1/31 - an original score by composer and pianist Mie Yanashita