Italian Style: SUMMERTIME – 35mm print!

Jane (Katharine Hepburn), a lonely American spinster on vacation in Venice and hoping to find romance, succumbs to a passionate, bittersweet affair with Renato (Rossano Brazzi), a married Italian antique dealer. A visually enchanting valentine to the glories of the city as well as an endearing love story, Jane’s transformation from gloom to joy is echoed in an evolving wardrobe designed by Rosi Gori. A key item is a certain pair of red mules designed by Pompei in 1955 and reproduced in more recent years by Giuseppe Zanotti. “The film had an enormous effect on tourism. I remember the head of a hotel chain coming up to me and saying, ‘We ought to put a monument up to you.’”—David Lean. (102 mins.)

SUMMERTIME screens Sunday, March 15 at 7pm in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum).  The film is being presented as part of our Italian Style series.

The Portland Art Museum’s exhibition, “Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945,” provides the inspiration for this survey of iconic Italian and Italian-set classics from the 1950s and 60s. During this era, Italian fashion, and everything from Italian thought, attitude, and automobiles to food, design, and Vespas, influenced audiences, filmmakers and culture worldwide—especially in the United States. A legacy of alluring films, directors, and stars timelessly endures, still providing inspiration and an unmistakably Italian vision of pop culture cool.

Tickets are available online or at the door.

Italian Style: JULIET OF THE SPIRITS – 35mm print!

The female counterpoint to 8½, Fellini ventures deeply into the surreal as JULIET OF THE SPIRITS explores the repressed desires of a bourgeois housewife, played by Giulietta Masina who stars as a middle-aged woman haunted by hallucinations from her past and subconscious. While her husband philanders, she consults clairvoyants and mediums and escapes into a world of imagination drawn from the “spirits” of her past, present, and future. In an effort to prevent her world from crumbling, she confronts the specters and fantasies that have imprisoned her throughout her life. A lavish and baroque visual spectacle, JULIET boasts Gianni de Venanzo’s brilliant cinematography, a memorable score by Nino Rota, and the opulent fashion designs of Piero Gheradi, who won Oscars for Best Costume Design for LA DOLCE VITA and 8½. Winner of the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Picture. (148 mins.)

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS screens Saturday, March 14 at 7pm and Sunday, March 15 at 4pm in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum).  The film is being presented as part of our Italian Style series.

The Portland Art Museum’s exhibition, “Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945,” provides the inspiration for this survey of iconic Italian and Italian-set classics from the 1950s and 60s. During this era, Italian fashion, and everything from Italian thought, attitude, and automobiles to food, design, and Vespas, influenced audiences, filmmakers and culture worldwide—especially in the United States. A legacy of alluring films, directors, and stars timelessly endures, still providing inspiration and an unmistakably Italian vision of pop culture cool.

Tickets are available online or at the door.

Italian Style: L’AVVENTURA – 35mm print!

Antonioni’s meditation on meaning in modern existence remains an obligatory experience in existential cinema-going. On a yachting trip off Sicily, a woman (Lea Massari) mysteriously disappears during an excursion on a desolate island. Her lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her friend (Monica Vitti) begin a search, but during the fruitless quest, each slowly becomes enamored with the other and their guilt is soon replaced by passion. L’AVVENTURA is at once a mesmerizing mystery, a thought-provoking study of human behavior—the impermanence of romance, bourgeois boredom, and the ease with which we betray one another—an experiment in the expressive use of landscape, costume, and architecture, and an allegory on the troubled state of postwar Italy. Adriana Berselli’s costumes introduced a modern, understated Italian glamour, blending with the landscape as a key element to understanding the characters and their purposeless lives. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. (143 mins.)

https://vimeo.com/69397467

L’AVVENTURA screens Friday, March 13 at 7pm in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum).  The film is being presented as part of our Italian Style series.

The Portland Art Museum’s exhibition, “Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945,” provides the inspiration for this survey of iconic Italian and Italian-set classics from the 1950s and 60s. During this era, Italian fashion, and everything from Italian thought, attitude, and automobiles to food, design, and Vespas, influenced audiences, filmmakers and culture worldwide—especially in the United States. A legacy of alluring films, directors, and stars timelessly endures, still providing inspiration and an unmistakably Italian vision of pop culture cool.

Tickets are available online or at the door.

Italian Style: ROMAN HOLIDAY

The first Hollywood film to be shot and produced on location in Italy, ROMAN HOLIDAY made Audrey Hepburn an enduring international star and fashion icon. Princess Ann (Hepburn), on a visit to Rome, decides to try to escape her stifling royal identity and head out to see the city incognito. She runs into American reporter Gregory Peck, and love blossoms as they discover the charms of the eternal city in a way that stimulated Italian tourism and fashion consciousness like no film before it. The winner of three Academy Awards for Best Screenplay (Ian McLellan Hunter, John Dighton), Best Actress (Audrey Hepburn), and Best Costume Design (Edith Head) in collaboration with the Fontana Sisters. (117 mins.)

ROMAN HOLIDAY screens Saturday, March 7 at 7pm and Sunday, March 8 at 4:30pm in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum).  The film is being presented as part of our Italian Style series.

The Portland Art Museum’s exhibition, “Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945,” provides the inspiration for this survey of iconic Italian and Italian-set classics from the 1950s and 60s. During this era, Italian fashion, and everything from Italian thought, attitude, and automobiles to food, design, and Vespas, influenced audiences, filmmakers and culture worldwide—especially in the United States. A legacy of alluring films, directors, and stars timelessly endures, still providing inspiration and an unmistakably Italian vision of pop culture cool.

Tickets are available online or at the door.

Italian Style: LA DOLCE VITA

Fellini’s emotional travelogue of the soul of modern Rome is a seductive meditation on what was truly meaningful (if anything) for the dusk-to-dawn Italian jet set of the era. Marcello Mastroianni was catapulted into superstar status in America as the sensitive (and Brioni-suited) tabloid reporter juggling the affections of several women (voluptuous movie star Anita Ekberg, icy mistress Anouk Aimée, and neurotic girlfriend Magali Noel) while making the rounds of the spirit-destroying nightlife of the Via Veneto. The film’s costumes–which won Piero Gherardi the Academy Award for Best Costume Design–portray a sophisticated, expensively dressed, and sensually alluring Mastroianni, an elegantly feline Aimée wearing black dresses and cat’s-eye sunglasses, and an impossibly glamorous Ekberg. “I feel that decadence is indispensable to rebirth.”—Fellini. (185 mins.)

LA DOLCE VITA screens Friday, March 6 at 7pm in our Whitsell Auditorium (located in the Portland Art Museum).  The film is being presented as part of our Italian Style series.
The Portland Art Museum’s exhibition, “Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945,” provides the inspiration for this survey of iconic Italian and Italian-set classics from the 1950s and 60s. During this era, Italian fashion, and everything from Italian thought, attitude, and automobiles to food, design, and Vespas, influenced audiences, filmmakers and culture worldwide—especially in the United States. A legacy of alluring films, directors, and stars timelessly endures, still providing inspiration and an unmistakably Italian vision of pop culture cool.

Tickets are available online or at the door.

Get Ready for the New Year by Downloading our January/March 2015 schedule

The print edition of our January/March 2015 schedule is hitting the streets right now and is on its way to mailboxes all around town.  We’re really excited about our upcoming lineup, which includes:

–classes & workshops at our School of Film
–Italian Style, featuring films by Fellini, Antonioni, Lean, and others!
–a Ruben Östlund (FORCE MAJEURE) retrospective entitled “In Case of No Emergency: The Films of Ruben Östlund”
–the local and regional selections that populate our Northwest Tracking series
–four Alec Guiness powered films from his classic Ealing Studios days
–a mini-selection of Altman-oriented goodies
–films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Lav Diaz, and much more. 

If you’d like a handy & portable digital version of the schedule to comb over, you’ve come to the right place.  Just click on the image below to view, download or embed our January/March 2015 schedule: