Two things that I’m pissed off about this morning:
1. My email is not working, so I can’t answer the four or five emails I intended to this morning while I still have the Mt. Dew surge in my veins.
2. A few days ago I was really very excited to see that Oak Street was planning on running a Bresson series in November and December. The titles weren’t up, but I figured a month span gave them more than enough room to pack in all or most of Bresson’s dozen or so feature films (which would presumably be relatively easy to find prints for, given the recent retrospectives in NY and elsewhere). Haha. Joke’s on me. They’re showing five films total, all but one readily available on DVD editions that will no doubt put their shoddy projections/prints to shame. (The exception being Mouchette, which Criterion unofficially has in the pipeline.) No The Devil Probably. No Four Nights of a Dreamer. No Une femme douce. No Procès de Jeanne d’Arc. D’ya think they’ll show Les Anges du péché? You must be joking! Once again, the new programming order at MN Film Arts continues to radically scale back on fulfilling its promises, ignoring its duty to cinephilia in favor of umpteen reiterations of the new breed of cult flick programming that I guess they assume will drum up campus hipster crowds (“Bad Boys of Cinema”? Lindsay Anderson? Terry Gilliam?) — I could be mistaken, but the new schedule even seems to suggest that the auteurist “Sunday series” has already been abandoned after only three overexposed usual suspects (Renoir, Hitchcock, Bunuel). It doesn’t even matter all that much to me that it’s Bresson getting the gloss job “we’re only showing the masterpieces anyway” treatment. Because they denigrated the legacy of John Carpenter in an equally insulting manner, playing his mini-series on a series of rowdy Friday nights, ignoring anything in his oeuvre that didn’t scream “sneak a beer.” I don’t mean to suggest that I want audience members, as per Kael, burning incense for Christine. But I haven’t felt a shred of reverence attached to the Oak Street in almost a year; their brand of unadventurous alternative programming, their prudish cleaving to that which is known and pre-chewed, is precisely what’s to blame for the theatrical experience’s subjugation to DVD Nation. If this is the sort of development required to keep the place afloat, then I can’t say I think it’s worth saving. Residents of Madison are pointing and laughing at us.