Cinema Reads

Read about Gertrude Lawrence's life and career in conjunction with promotional coverage of STAR! in these rare scans

Douglas Sirk fled Nazi Germany and quickly found a home amongst a number of expatriated filmmakers in Hollywood. His distinctive style and palette alongside his subtly subversive melodramas were a commercial success and, later, a critical one. His influence looms large on the work of filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch and Todd Haynes.

The beginning of 2023 at SHC features several tie-ins with the literary world. From an Oscar nominated script from Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro to Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary about powerhouse literary duo Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb to the great Frederick Wiseman’s latest film, a monologue based on Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries.

"White Noise" was long considered an unadaptable book and Noah Baumbach may not have been the obvious choice to take on the task, but when Baumbach reread the book following his Academy nominated Marriage Story, he found a relatable entry point, “The story is about a culture that is saturated by media,” Baumbach said. “Movies and entertainment being a big part of that. I felt like there could be a cinematic language we’re all familiar with that I could use to tell this story.”

Fresh off the success of Jacques Tourneur's CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, the American frontier story of CANYON PASSAGE was a very different kind of Western than audiences were used to seeing. Gothic tropes and sweeping landscapes are likely responsible for the film's lasting impact on filmmakers like Martin Scorsese.

"There are films that are lost or so deteriorated that they take on the quality of a holy grail. 'Rosita' (1923), the first American movie by the German director Ernst Lubitsch, is one."

“There is not a day that goes by when I don’t think of The Wizard of Oz” - David Lynch

George Stevens' epic Western with Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean tackled culture clashes and racial injustice in this classic depiction of the transformation of the American West.

A film featured in our upcoming Festival of Preservation, THE RUNNER, will feature a Q&A with filmmaker Amir Naderi. Read more about him and his film in our blog post for the series.