January 10-16, 2025

Hello, friends! 

This week, the wildly popular  A Complete Unknown and Nosferatucontinue their theatrical runs with us, and we have three individual special events to add to the mix: Alice, Rebecca, and Only the River Flows. 

Alice is the next selection in our ongoing, monthly Third Eye series featuring “late night, staff-curated, cult classics.”  Chosen by Pickford projectionist Atlas, Alice, directed by Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, is a delightfully bizarre live-action and stop motion retelling of Alice in Wonderland, and “a welcome antidote to the cute and cuddly Disneyfication of Carroll's iconic tale,” as critic Nick Schager puts it. Schager further writes that the film “remains largely faithful to [the] source material’s narrative arc while bestowing it with a bustling undercurrent of . . . menace . . . and grotesque, violent visuals . . . The director’s synthesis of the authentic and the artificial (replete with frighteningly creaking, clanging sound effects) – as well as his refusal to bookend the fantastical action with comforting visions of the waking world – allows Alice to tap into the element of nightmarish dread that’s always colored the classic kid’s story.” I always found even the Disneyfied version of Alice in Wonderland fascinatingly unsettling as a kid (the determined irrationality of the Mad Hatter, the aloof caterpillar, the violent Queen, the dream logic of it all), a fascination that ultimately led me to the delight that is Carroll’s book, and the full commitment to the surreal here makes it only all the more wonderful as an adaptation. 

Join us on Saturday, January 11, at 10 pm!  

This week also brings us the first entry in our new series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rebecca. As a lifelong Alfred Hitchcock fan, I could not be more thrilled at the opportunity to give our community the chance to see a selection of Hitch’s films on the big screen with an audience, as they were meant to be seen. I’ll be on hand at the screening to talk a bit about Hitch’s oeuvre--the classic tropes, obsessions, and motifs that can be found throughout his filmmaking career and in all the films in our series--as well as a bit about Rebecca itself, Hitchcock’s first American film: his first film with a big Hollywood budget and with a big producer’s ego to contend with in David O. Selznick, who was coming in hot after the tremendous success of the box office hit Gone with the Wind. 

Hitchcock, quite notably, insisted he did not win the Oscar for Rebecca, but it was Selznick who won (for Best Picture), an indication that Hitch was not quite satisfied with the level of control he had over the film, and he even went so far as to tell Francois Truffaut (when Truffaut interviewed him about all his films in their famous and wonderful week-long conversations together), that Rebecca is “not really a Hitchcock picture.” 

But if I may be so bold as to disagree with the Master of Suspense about his own work, no one but Alfred Hitchcock could have made Rebecca. It is a ghost story -- not the supernatural kind (Hitchcock was not all at interested in that sort of thing) but a ghost story that reveals and examines human psychology and human obsessions and fears and nightmares, the kind of “ghost” story we’ll see in Psycho and in Vertigo, where the dead haunt the living but only because the living themselves, with their tangles of human frailties, have created such “ghosts.”

It is impossible to walk away from any Hitchcock film without feeling unsettled -- yes, delighted, entertained, thrilled, swept away, all that too -- but always unsettled, for Hitch has a way of getting under the skin of what it means to be human, a way of so involving us as an audience in the subjective perspectives of his complicated characters, that we cannot quite disentangle ourselves even after we’ve left the theater. His mastery of this audience involvement was perhaps at their height with Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window, but it’s all here in Rebecca, too. And beautifully, chillingly so. 

So join us, this Sunday, January 12, at 1:00 pm, as we dive into Hitchcock’s work with Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, George Sanders, and Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers (one of the most unforgettable antagonists in cinema and with one of the best entrances of all time) and into the haunted minds and haunted mansion of Manderley.