Directed by Billy Wilder

US, 1948, 116 mins, black and white.

A little over three years after the end of the war, A Foreign Affair was released in US cinemas in August 1948. War-damaged Berlin in the spring of 1946, with its ruined landscapes and the black-market business of everyday survival, forms the backdrop to the comedy. A US congresswoman, Phoebe Frost from Iowa (Jean Arthur), is tasked with checking the morale of the troops stationed in the city. Her counterpart is a German nightclub singer, Erika von Schlütow (Marlene Dietrich), who uses her seductive talents to ensnare a captain who is supposed to provide her with nylons, soap and coffee as well as a clean slate. However, the fact that she was the mistress of a high-ranking Nazi has not escaped the notice of the US officer.
Ever since Billy Wilder first offered her the role in March 1947, Dietrich stubbornly refused to play a Nazi mistress. Erika von Schlütow was conceived more as an apolitical figure who was ultimately only concerned with her own survival. Finally, at Dietrich’s request, a dialogue is written between the two women in which the singer describes to the congresswoman the daily struggle for survival during the war and in post-war Berlin. As a nightclub singer, Dietrich wears the same sequined costumes in the film that made her sparkle during her tours entertaining the US Army troops.
Wilder shot the footage of the destroyed city at the beginning of the film when he was stationed in Berlin as an American officer after the end of the war and roamed the city with a cameraman. Shortly before filming began, on 18 November 1947, Dietrich was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the US’s highest award for civilians, for her war work.
Wilder’s comedy divides the critics. The portrayal of such a serious subject in a comedy is considered tasteless by some. Others are full of praise for the quality of the dialogue and the authentic atmosphere. The songs by Friedrich Hollaender, performed in a smoky voice by Dietrich and accompanied by Hollaender himself on the piano, underline this with clear allusions to Der blaue Engel.
A Foreign Affair was Oscar-nominated for its cinematography and screenplay and was a considerable financial success in the US. For the American military government in Berlin, however, the film, which was primarily intended to be used for re-education purposes, was unacceptable. It was banned in postwar Germany. (Silke Ronneburg)

Film card: Il Cinema Ritrovato

Screening: Thursday, March 6, 7pm - UMD campus (TWS 0320)

Directed by Sergei Parajanov

USSR, 1966, 96', color, Ukrainian with English subtitles.

It was Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962) that brought about Parajanov’s Damascus experience. In 1964, when Ukraine’s Dovzhenko Studio charged him with the task of bringing Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s novel Tini zabutykh predkiv to the screen to mark the author’s centenary, Parajanov’s approach was resoundingly poetic. Ostensibly a tale of doomed love between members of two warring families, the plot is both fragmented and interspersed with fantasy. Harking back to the Formalist-influenced works of early Dovzhenko (Earth, 1930), Parajanov forged the blueprint for a cinema derived from folklore, poetry, song, and dance. Shot with the participation of the Hutsul Rusyn hill people in the Carpathian Mountains in West Ukraine, Parajanov straddled the line demarcating ethnography and surrealist flights of fancy. Through elaborate camera mounts and complex printing effects, cinematographer Yurii Illienko took Sergei Urusevsky’s notion of the “emotional camera” into uncharted psychedelic territory. Composer Myroslav Skoryk drew upon the repertoire of Hutsul folk music, with trembita, long, distinctive mountain horns, featuring both on screen and on the soundtrack. The result changed Ukrainian filmmaking, effectively birthing the “Kyiv School’” of poetic cinema (along with Ilyenko’s subsequent films as a director and those of Leonid Osyka), and influenced filmmakers in the South Caucasus (Armenia’s Artavazd Pelechian, Georgia’s Tengiz Abuladze), Central Asia (Uzbekistan’s Ali Khamraev, Kyrgyzstan’s Bolotbek Shamshiyev) and beyond (Czechoslovakia’s Juraj Jakubisko). By the time Tini zabutykh predkiv made it to New York, its delirious, hallucinatory qualities made it an unlikely psychedelic film. While Parajanov himself tended to talk down his previous work, there are, nevertheless, lines of continuity: the fairytale aspect of Andriesh, the attention to folk art evident in the short documentary Zoloti ruky, to name but two. When Tarkovsky, along with the Formalist critic (and would-be Parajanov scriptwriter) Viktor Shklovsky, wrote a letter protesting against Parajanov’s imprisonment during the 1970s, he recognised Tini zabutykh predkiv as one of two films that had changed cinema, both in the Soviet Union and abroad (the other was Parajanov’s subsequent completed feature: The Colour of Pomegranates, 1969). (Daniel Bird)

Restored in 4K by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in collaboration with the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre and in partnership with Dovženko Film Studios. Special thanks to Daniel Bird and Łukasz Ceranka. Restoration co-sponsored by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Film card: Il Cinema Ritrovato

Screening: Saturday, March 8, 2pm  - National Gallery  of Art, Washington, D.C. 

Directed by Chantal Akerman

Belgium/France/Switzerland, 1986, 96', color, French with English subtitles

In her last major cinema role, Delphine Seyrig joined forces again with Chantal Akerman, a few years after Jeanne Dielman, in which she played a meticulous housewife. Golden Eighties, a burlesque musical comedy, tender and frantic, once again dresses the flamboyant actress and militant feminist in the garb of the petit bourgeoisie for the role of Jeanne Schwartz, a shopkeeper in Brussels’ Galerie de la Toison d’Or shopping centre. Outwardly conformist in her Peter Pan-collared black dress, Jeanne stands out as one of the most political of the galaxy of Akerman heroines. An attractive, middle-aged woman, who owns a clothes shop, she becomes the main focus of this film in matters of love and commerce, well before the advent of the economic crisis. As confidante to the whole shopping centre, she is the high priestess of serenity and goodness. However, her sweet nature conceals the immense trauma of the Second World War and the silence of a Holocaust survivor. Broken by her experiences in the camps, her inability to speak about it echoes the silence of the filmmaker’s mother, another survivor of the great tragedy of the 20th century. Thus, happiness becomes for Jeanne a political duty, her only defence against barbarism. The world, such as it is, with its toing and froing and its thwarted desires, rests on the dependability and favour of this fairy godmother of hope. Not a single regret lingers as though she were bowing out of francophone cinema while spreading promise for the future. (Gabriela Trujillo)

Restored in 4K in 2024 by the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique in collaboration with Chantal Akerman Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the 35mm original negative and the original sound mix. Funding provided by Centre du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Leora Barish, Henry Bean, Ostrovsky Family Fund (OFF), SWA. Restoration supervised by Luc Benhamou.

Film card: Il Cinema Ritrovato

Screening: Sunday, March 9, 2pm - AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center