Another’ film festival

Another Look 3 treats viewers to 12 European classics

By HANNAH BROWN
"Another Look 3" film festival (photo credit: PR)
"Another Look 3" film festival
(photo credit: PR)
Another Look 3: The Restored European Film Project is a new festival of restored classic movies from European Union countries. It will run at the Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv cinematheques from January 15 to February 1.
Twelve films will be shown, one from each of the participating countries. Among these movies are some rarely seen gems from some of the most celebrated directors in film history. The program will be presented with the help of the European Union and the embassies of the participating countries.
The films being shown fit into two groups. One is about city life, its delights and its discontents, while the other is about life in the country. The program also includes some panel discussions and workshops on the future of film restoration.
Among the films being screened is La Chienne , the 1931 movie that is one of Jean Renoir’s early classics. It stars the incomparable Michel Simon, who later made a huge impression in a very different role in Boudu Saved from Drowning (the film that was later remade as Down and Out in Beverly Hills by Paul Mazursky). Simon plays a henpecked husband who falls for a prostitute, thinking she really loves him. But she is still in touch with her pimp and sells his paintings as her own, making a lot of money. It may sound like an ordinary story, but it is infused with Renoir’s master touch.
Roberto Rossellini’s The Machine That Kills Bad People is a rarely seen film by the director famous for Open City , Paisan and Stromboli . The movie, as its title indicates, is a fantastical black comedy about a photographer who is given power by a demon to kill evildoers using his camera. everything. But instead of capitulating to the threat, he determines to track down the blackmailers. There was such a taboo against portraying homosexuals that Bogarde’s agent warned him he would never work again, although after this role his career really took off. Sylvia Syms plays his wife.
Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976) is famous as the film in which he hypnotized the actors before shooting. The dreamlike movie is about a glass-blowing factory in the 1800s. A master glassblower in the factory has died, taking the secret of how to manufacture the famous rose-colored glass to his grave. A shepherd who at first seems mad prophesies that the factory will fail and the entire town will struggle to make a living.
Heart of Glass has been called an allegory of the Industrial Revolution, although there are many other theories as to its meaning.
Eva Wants to Sleep (1958), the first film by Polish director Tadeusz Chmielewski, is a comedy about a young woman who goes to the big city to start college and can’t find a place to get a good night’s sleep. This slapstick-filled movie was influenced by everything from the Keystone Cops comedies to the films of Rene Clair.
Juan Antonio Bardem – Javier Bardem’s uncle – directed the 1956 Spanish film Main Street , a drama about a group of young men who decide that one of them should seduce an older unmarried woman. But the prank turns sour when she falls in love with the man.