Los Angeles County Museum of Art: March 2011 Events

TALKS & COURSES

Architecture Lecture: Bjarke Ingels
Thursday, March 3 | 7:30 pm
Bing Theater | Tickets: $10 general admission; $7 LACMA and A+D Museum members; $5 seniors 62+ and students with ID | Tickets: 323-857-6010.
Bjarke Ingels is the founding partner of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which he started in 2005. Recent and current projects include the Danish Pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, the Danish Maritime Museum, and the recently-awarded Waste-to-Energy Plant in Copenhagen that doubles as a ski slope for the city’s residents and visitors. Presented by LACMA and the A+D Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles; organized by Francesca Garcia-Marques, Hon. AIA/LA and Ann Videriksen, Hon. AIA/LA.

Author Talk: Terry Allen and Dave Hickey
Sunday, March 6 | 4–6pm
Art Catalogues Bookstore, Ahmanson Building | Free, no reservations | Refreshments will be served.
Please join us to celebrate the publication of Terry Allen, the first comprehensive retrospective of this prolific artist’s work. Terry Allen and author Dave Hickey will continue their long-time conversation about Allen’s endlessly evolving art, installations, and music.

Decorative Art and Design Council Lecture Series
The Private Life of a Public Place: 400 Years of the Sackvilles at Knole
Tuesday, March 8 | 7 pm
Brown Auditorium | Free admission for DADC members and Students with ID | $15 LACMA members; $20 General Admission | Tickets: 323 857-6528 or decartscouncil[at]lacma.org
Robert Sackville-West discusses Knole, an English country house in Kent, England that is remarkable not only for its history and contents, but for the continued presence of the Sackville family who have lived there since 1604. Robert Sackville-West, the 7th Baron Sackville, will explore the continuous relationship of Knole and the people who have lived there for 400 years.  He will discuss the way his family has shaped and furnished the house, along with the way the house has influenced the family. The National Trust has owned the house since 1946, and Sackville-West will bring the story right up to date. These lectures are made possible by the Elsie de Wolfe Foundation.

Lecture—Wolfgang Tillmans
Wednesday, March 9 | 6:30 pm
Wolfgang Tillmans is known for photographs that appear casual, authentic, and immediate. Constantly shifting in scale and subject, his work explores the nature of the medium: exploiting numerous formats (Polaroid, Xerox, inkjet) and presentation styles. Whether pinned to the wall or on the pages of a book, Tillmans's imagery is at once very personal and embedded in contemporary culture, politics, and art history. This lecture is a collaboration between the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, and the Otis College of Art and Design, Fine Arts Department.
Bing Theater | Free, tickets required and available one hour before the event | LACMA is closed to the public on Wednesdays but the Box Office will open at 5:30 pm for this event. | Parking available only in the Spaulding Parking Lot off of Wilshire Blvd.

Gallery Discussion: The Art of Looking
Thursday, March 10 | 12:30 pm
BP Grand Entrance | Free with general admission
Join LACMA educator Mary Lenihan for a one-hour facilitated gallery discussion focusing on the permanent collection. Offered on the second Thursday of the month, each tour offers an in-depth look at masterpieces in the galleries. On March 10th look at LACMA’s Modern art collection.

Marianne Stockebrand and Robert Irwin
Sunday, March 13 | 4–6 pm
Please join us to celebrate the publication of Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd with Editor and former Chinati Director, Marianne Stockebrand. Marianne and artist Robert Irwin will talk about their experiences at Chinati, and his plans for a large permanent installation for Chinati at the site of a former U.S. Army hospital dating from the 1930s.
Art Catalogues Bookstore, Ahmanson Building | Free, no reservations | Contact 323 857-6587 or artcatalogues[at]lacma.org for more information.
 

Masters of Architecture Lecture Series: Craig Dykers, AIA
Tuesday, March 15 | 7 pm
Bing Theater | Tickets: $12 general admission; $10 LACMA and AIA members; $5 seniors 62+ and students with ID | Tickets: 323-857-6010
Craig Dykers is a co-founder of the transdisciplinary architecture, landscape and interiors company Snøhetta in Oslo. He has been deeply involved with the design of over 200 projects in Asia, Africa, America and Europe. Since establishing an office in New York City, Dykers and his company have been awarded new commissions that include the expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Presented by LACMA and the American Institute of Architects/Los Angeles.

 

European Art: The Renaissance
Saturday, March 19 | 9 am
Brown Auditorium | Members $30, nonmembers $35 (refreshments and parking fees included) | Reservations: 323 857-6010.
Join LACMA educator Mary Lenihan as she presents a unique behind-the scenes looks at the museum’s newly reinstalled March 19, Lenihan discusses The Renaissance: A New Way of Seeing. On April 9 she covers Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: Painting Modern Life. Following each lecture is a private gallery tour.

Gil Garcetti and David DiMichele on Photography
Saturday, March 19 | 4:30 pm
Brown Auditorium | Free, no reservations
Photographers David DiMichele and Gil Garcetti describe their photographic process as they discuss their work in the exhibition. After the conversation, visit the museum’s Art Rental and Sales Gallery exhibit.

Lecture—Vince Aletti
Thursday, March 31 | 7 pm
Brown Auditorium | Free, tickets required and available the day of the event.
Critic, curator and regular photography reviewer for The New Yorker, Vince Aletti talks with Britt Salvesen, curator and department head for LACMa’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department. This lecture is a collaboration between the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, and the USC Roski School of Fine Arts, MFA Program.

Gallery Conversations: Modern and Contemporary Art
Saturdays & Sundays | 1–4 pm
Conversations about works of art with gallery educators.
BCAM Level 3 and Ahmanson Building Level 2 | Free, no reservations

MUSIC

Art & Music: LACMA & Long Beach Opera Present An Afternoon with Philip Glass
Saturday, March 12 | 2 pm
Bing Theater | LACMA and Long Beach Opera members $25 or $40 VIP (VIP includes reserved seating and a voucher for an individual small bottle of wine); general admission $35.
Hailed as “The most powerful composer of our time...“ Philip Glass returns to LACMA for an intimate afternoon of conversation and music from his
opera, Akhnaten. Glass will be discussing his acclaimed opera about the
Pharaoh Akhnaten with Long Beach Opera Music Director Andreas Mitisek, along with excerpts performed by singers of the Long Beach Opera. Akhnaten completes the trilogy of portrait operas began with Einstein on the Beach and continued with Satyagraha.  Einstein - the man of science; Gandhi - the man of politics; Akhnaten - the man of religion.

U.S. Army Chorus
Sunday, March 6 | 6 pm
Bing Theater | Free, no reservations
The United States Army Chorus, under the direction of Major Dwayne Milburn, performs works by Gounod, Wagner, and Foster, together with popular standards and traditional favorites.

Pianist Andrew Bronell
Sunday, March 20 | 6 pm
Bing Theater | Free, no reservations
Pianist Andrew Brownell performs Clementi: Toccata, Opus 11 and Sonata in B-flat, Opus 24, No.2; Mozart: Variations on a Theme of Paisiello, K.398; Beethoven: Sonata in B-flat, Opus 22.
 
Abbey Simon
Sunday, March 27 | 6 pm
Bing Theater | Free, no reservations
Pianist Abbey Simon performs works by Beethoven and Chopin.

UCLA Philharmonia
Sunday, March 13 | 6 pm
Bing Theater | Free, no reservations
UCLA Philharmonia performs Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Miraculous Mandarin Suite. Neal Stulberg, conductor.

FILM

TICKETS & INFORMATION
Film tickets are on sale now and can be purchased in advance at the museum box office or at lacma.org. Films are subject to change. Many films are unrated and may not be appropriate for younger viewers.
 
To check current programs, call the museum box office at 323 857-6010 or the film recording at 323 857-6000; or visit lacma.org. Email film[at]lacma.org to receive the film department’s weekly e-newsletter.

The 2010-11 film program is made possible by the generosity of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association®.

 

Tuesday Matinees
Every Tuesday at 1 pm, LACMA presents a classic film from the Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment Company’s library. Bing Theater | Admission: $2; $1, seniors (62+).

Bells Are Ringing
Tuesday, March 1 | 1 pm
1960/color/127 min./Scope | Scr: Betty Comden, Adolph Green; dir: Vincente Minnelli; w/ Judy Holliday, Dean Martin.
An answering service operator gets mixed up in her clients' lives.

Riffraff
Tuesday, March 8 | 1 pm
1936/b&w/94 min. | Scr: Frances Marion, H. W. Hanemann, Anita Loos; dir: J. Walter Ruben; w/ Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy.
A young married couple in the fishing business runs afoul of the law.

Never So Few
Tuesday, March 15 | 1 pm
1959/color /126 min./Scope | Scr: Millard Kaufman; dir: John Sturges; w/ Frank Sinatra, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lawford, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson.
A U.S. military troop takes command of a band of Burmese guerillas during World War II.

Gaslight
Tuesday, March 22 | 1 pm
1944/b&w /114 min. | Scr: John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L. Balderston; dir: George Cukor; w/ Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, Angela Lansbury.
A newlywed fears she's going mad when strange things start happening at the family mansion.

Marie Antoinette
Tuesday, March 29 | 1 pm
1938/b&w/160 min. | Scr: Claudine West, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ernest Vajda; dir: W. S. Van Dyke II; w/ Norma Shearer, Tyrone Power, John Barrymore.
Lavish biography of the French queen who "let them eat cake."

The Early Films of Catherine Deneuve
Bing Theater | General admission: $10; $7, museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID.

Belle de jour
Friday, March 4 | 7:30 pm
1967/color/101 min. | Scr: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière; dir: Luis Buñuel; w/ Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, Jean Sorel, Geneviève Page, Pierre Clémenti.
Luis Buñuel, the great Spanish-born director and former surrealist, who once remarked that Keaton's College was a film with "the cool beauty of a bathroom," achieved his most immaculate-looking, most formally perfect film with Belle de jour which he made at the age of sixty-seven. Ostensibly the tale of a far-from-ordinary wife whose sadomasochistic fantasies drive her to spend her afternoons in a high-class bordello where she attracts a possessive young thug, the subject allowed Buñuel to blur the line between reality and dreams, and thus to fashion from the physical action depicted onscreen a surrealist poem. As the inscrutable Sévérine aka "Belle de jour", Deneuve whom Buñuel called "an excellent actress, very beautiful, reserved and strange", gives one of her greatest performances. "Buñuel wants us to understand Sévérine by contemplating the nature of her obsession. Instead of indulging in sentimental psychology by staring into Deneuve's eyes, Buñuel fragments her body into its erotic constituents. His shots of feet, hands, legs, shoes, stockings, undergarments, etc. are the shots not only of a fetishist, but of a cubist, a director concerned simultaneously with the parts and their effect on the whole…Buñuel loves Sévérine because he sees Belle de jour as Sévérine's liberator, and he wishes neither to punish Sévérine nor save her. He prefers to contemplate the grace with which she accepts her fate."—Andrew Sarris.

Repulsion
Friday, March 4 | 9:20 pm
1965/b&w/105 min | Scr: Roman Polanski, Gerard Brach; dir: Roman Polanski; w/ Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, Yvonne Furneaux.
At the center of many of Roman Polanski's films are characters grappling with sexual or psychological afflictions (he has an avowed affinity with such modernist writers of the "absurd' as Kafka, Ionesco and Beckett) whose sufferings he makes painfully real, however gothic the context or paranoid the character. Repulsion, his second film and his first in English, is a textbook example of his style with only hints of the parody and irony he was to bring to later films like Cul-de-sac and Rosemary's Baby. Deneuve, in a tour-de-force performance—she is virtually alone onscreen for an hour—plays Carole, a pretty but shy Belgian girl who shares a gloomy apartment with her sister, works as a manicurist in a busy salon surrounded by chattering women, and panics whenever a man tries to befriend her; though she spends evenings alone at the movies, her nights are sleepless thanks to the noisy lovemaking of her sister and her fiancé whom she despises. When her sister leaves on holiday and Carole closes herself into the apartment, Polanski reaches for his bag of Expressionist tricks, revealing his true genius for the macabre. The film becomes a harrowing journey into the subconscious during which the apartment itself comes alive with Carole's fantasies and fears: ceilings crack open, potatoes grow monstrous tentacles, a dead rabbit with one baleful eye watches her, arms reach out from the walls to grope her...and then the doorbell rings. "Polanski makes his fair heroine—played with exquisite deadly grace by Catherine Deneuve—seem authentically tragic, herself the most pitiable victim of the evil she does…Repulsion more than lives up to its title and in the long tradition of cinematic shockers, looms as a work of monstrous art."—Bruce Williamson, Time.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Friday, March 11 | 7:30 pm
1964/color/91 min | Scr/dir: Jacques Demy; w/ Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon.
On the subject of director Jacques Demy, the great French critic Georges Sadoul wrote that his films have "a fragile, poignant, bittersweet flavor with a characteristic quality of nostalgia reminiscent of French poetic cinema and of Max Ophuls. He established an international reputation in 1960 with Lola, a gentle, gay film and a kind of musical without songs and dances...but his revolutionary musical is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, an audaciously inventive and uninhibited work, splendidly designed in glowing colors."  This enchanting film, set in the provincial city of Cherbourg on France's rainy Atlantic coast, tells the fable-like tale of an angelic beauty named Genevieve, who works in her widowed mother's umbrella shop and who dreams of the day she will marry Guy, a mechanic in a local garage and the love of her life.  But shortly after Guy heads off to war, Genevieve discovers that she is pregnant and anxiously waits for news of Guy's return. But the letter doesn't come...For over a year, Demy worked closely with designer Bernard Evain and composer Michel Legrand to fashion a unique work in which all the characters sing all the dialogue while moving about real locations transformed by candy-colored art direction into a landscape of the heart. Though the film has the look of a fairy tale, not all fairy tales have happy endings: it is a tribute to Deneuve that she could be both captivating and heartbreaking without a trace of sentimentality, and her performance made her a star. "With this most rapturous of melodramas, Demy incorporates song and dance not in the service of escape but of realism. The effect is hypnotic, beautiful and profoundly moving."—Joshua Klein.

Donkey Skin
Friday, March 11 | 9:15 pm
1970/color/90 min. | Scr/dir: Jacques Demy; w/ Catherine Deneuve, Jacques Perrin, Jean Marais, Delphine Seyrig.
Following the death of her mother, a Princess (Deneuve) is appalled and frightened when her father, the Blue King, declares that the only woman in the land beautiful enough to be his new wife and Queen is his daughter.  Help arrives in the glamorous guise of the lilac fairy who advises the Princess to distract her father with impossible requests—such as a dress the color of the weather—and then to don the skin of a donkey and flee into the forest. Shunned by the residents of the village where she finds shelter and is reduced to working as a scullery maid, the Princess goes unnoticed until, one day, a prince happens to ride by... As in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, Demy splits the action between fantastical sets and real Loire Valley chateaux, and unleashes a stream of surreal images and anthropomorphic creatures: a singing parrot; blue and red kingdoms each populated with blue and red people and horses; a hag who coughs up frogs; a donkey that excretes gold coins. Aided by a lilting Michel Legrand score and the dazzling color cinematography of Ghislain Cloquet, Demy successfully realized his unique vision: a fairy tale for adults set in an imaginary kingdom estranged from any particular time or place, where the forces of dark and light coexist. "A visual feast... Deneuve was then, as she was before and since, a great beauty with the confidence such beauty requires."—Roger Ebert.

The Last Metro
Saturday, March 12 | 7:30 pm
1980/color/131 min. | Scr: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman; dir: François Truffaut; w/ Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu.
In occupied Paris, an actress continues to perform in a play while her Jewish husband, the play's director, hides from the Nazis in a basement room from whence he monitors his wife's growing intimacy with the lead actor. Truffaut called the Occupation "the most turbulent and romantic period of the 20th century—consequently the most fascinating and inspiring" and a period when "everything was paradoxical. We were told to be honest while surrounded by examples of the dishonesty needed to survive." By making The Last Metro, Truffaut wrote, "I satisfied three dreams: to take the camera backstage in a theatre, to evoke the climate of the Occupation, and to give Catherine Deneuve the role of a responsible woman." With its references to such Hollywood classics as To Be or Not to Be, "The Last Metro was clearly a very personal work… animated by one of the director's enduring beliefs: that the domain of art and illusion—be it that of books, of cinema, or theater—is not only more magical that any other but, in some ways, more 'real.' The dramas that take place in the theater, both onstage and off… frequently appear to have been drawn less from real life than from earlier films. The Last Metro differs, of course, from old Hollywood movies in one critical respect: it alludes to the dark zones of the French past—the presence of collaboration, of anti-Semitic legislation—that had been exposed to the light in the early 1970's."—Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss.

 

Classics from La Semaine de la critique 
Bing Theater | $10 general admission. $7 museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID.

Regarde les hommes tomber
Friday, March 18 | 7:30 pm
1994/color/90 min. | Scr: Jacques Audiard, Alain Le Henry; dir: de Jacques Audiard; w/ Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean Yanne, Mathieu Kassovitz, Bulle Ogier.
In Jacques Audiard's directorial debut, parallel stories unfold, on course for a fateful collision: Trintignant plays a scruffy, small-time crook mentoring young Kassovitz as they hitchhike through France; straight-laced Yanne seeks to avenge the shocking murder of a friend. Foreshadowing his award-winning 2009 film A Prophet, Regarde les hommes tomber sharply renders both the explosive relationship of teacher and pupil in the dog-eat-dog world of organized crime and revenge's slow, calculated boil. Audiard's screenwriting background, honed over a decade prior to stepping behind the camera, shines through in the film's ambitious structure and gritty dialogue. Winner of three Cesars, including Best First Work, Regarde les hommes tomber has never been released in the United States. "[Audiard's films are] characterized by an unusual ability to create tension within the bounds of traditional genre plotting while focusing on mature examinations of the complexities of human behavior. Above all else, Audiard, who has a novelist's gift for creating personalities, is an intensely curious investigator of psychological states. He's fascinated with character, with who people are versus who they imagine themselves to be in the private corners of their minds."—Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times.

Pitfall
Friday, March 18 | 9:10 pm
1962/b&w/97 min. | Scr: Kôbô Abe; dir: Hiroshi Teshigahara; w/ Hisashi Igawa, Kunie Tanaka, Hideo Kanze.
Japanese modernist Hiroshi Teshigahara made his feature debut with this hallucinogenic, sun-baked noir which he called a "documentary-fantasy." A coal miner quits his grueling job and hits the road with his young son in tow. Finding work as he goes, he stumbles from one eerily deserted landscape to another, all the while tailed by an enigmatic man in a spotless white suit. Filled with ghosts, doppelgangers and anonymous strangers, Pitfall is Teshigahara's first collaboration with novelist Kôbô Abe. Over the course of three more films—The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another and Man without a Map—the duo further explored Pitfall's existentialist themes of alienation, identity and escapement. Toru Takemitsu's hauntingly minimalist score—for prepared pianos and harpsichord—intensifies the film's stark and often surreal mood. "Teshigahara's visual flair, evident in his sculptural use of wastelands and remarkable superimpositions, is matched by the singular assault of Takemitsu's unorthodox score."—Jonathan Rosenbaum.

The Hour of the Furnaces
Saturday, March 19 | 2 pm
1968/b&w/260 min./16mm | Scr/dir: Octavio Getino, Fernando E. Solanas.
Argentine activist filmmakers Fernardo E. Solanas and Octavio Getino co-authored the seminal manifesto "Towards a Third Cinema" which called for a break from the escapist spectacle of Hollywood production ("First Cinema") and Europe's auteur-driven works of personal expression ("Second Cinema"). "Third Cinema" would be made by and for the masses, outside mainstream channels and screened secretly. Solanas/Getino put their theory into practice with this epic, four-hour agitprop masterwork, whose call for a violent social revolution in the face of tyrants and imperialists is matched by Soviet-style montage, vérité footage and Brechtian appeals to the audience. An award winner at both Venice (Special Jury Award) and Cannes (Best Director), The Hour of the Furnaces has never been released on home video, perhaps due to its appropriation of newsreels and subversive indictment of American expansionism. "A brilliant tour de force of tumultuous images and sledgehammer titles, fused into a passionate onslaught of radical provocation to jolt the spectator to a new level of consciousness. Here is a Marxist film that 'rocks'"—Amos Vogel.

Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach
Saturday, March 19 | 7:30 pm
1968/b&w/94 min. | Scr/dir: Jean-Marie Straub, Daniele Huillet; w/ Gustav Leonhardt, Christiane Lang, Paolo Carlini.
Bach's second wife recounts the last thirty years of her husband's life, from his tenure as Capellmeister at the court of Anhalt-Cöthen to his death. Overturning the norms of cinematic biographies, Straub/Huillet's "voluptuously minimalist" film (J. Hoberman, The Village Voice) consists largely of uninterrupted, single-take tableaux of Bach's music being performed on period instruments, led by acclaimed Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt as Bach. Original documents (letters, manuscripts) and Lang's voice-over are interspersed throughout, recounting the composer's struggles, both professional and domestic, at the hands of the aristocracy. Contrasting the richness of Bach's compositions with the struggles of his life, Straub/Huillet's copiously researched film depicts how the process of artistic creation is rooted in a material world. "The restrictive form of the film liberates rather than limits… we're given pure sensual intimacy. Marital love is not expressed but is inherent in every word and note; history is fastidiously resurrected, but only for its sounds. The net effect is not having seen a film but having lived a real moment, in the presence of monumental music. Is this a documentary, or a biopic, or something else we've never named?"—Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice.

More
Friday, March 25 | 7:30 pm
1969/color/110 min. | Scr: Barbet Schroeder, Paul Gégauff; dir: Barbet Schroeder; w/ Mimsy Farmer, Klaus Grunberg, Heinz Engelmann.
Born in Tehran and raised in Iran, Africa and Colombia, Schroder may be the most cosmopolitan filmmaker to surface from the Nouvelle Vague's wellspring of activity. Throughout his career he has switched between documentaries, Hollywood thrillers and international art films, along the way giving Mickey Rourke one of his most memorable roles (Barfly) and garnering Jeremy Irons his only Oscar win (Reversal of Fortune). In 1962 he helped launch Les Films du Losange and began producing films by Rohmer, Rivette and Fassbinder while also acting in a few of them. That the company remains in business is a testament to Schroeder's lasting commitment to stimulating and relevant cinema. Such is the case with his directorial debut: largely improvised and set to an eclectic Pink Floyd score (their first ever), More traces the volatile relationship between a German student and his American girlfriend as they commit themselves to a life of hedonism amid the craggy, sun-soaked shores of Ibiza, rendered in all of its Mediterranean splendor by Nestor Almendros, the master of "magic hour" cinematography. Rarely screened, More weaves a dream-like trance of Balearic debauchery, stoned mysticism and primal urges. "[Farmer and Grunberg are] trying to live out a bootleg Byron fantasy of metamorphosing from pasty, civilized, uptight Northerners into Mithraic Philistines ('I wanted the sun and I went after it. I didn't care if I got burned')…More establishes the story Schroeder returned to over the years: a couple conjoined by obsession, first in a kind of mentor-student relationship, later in a mutual ante-upping game. It endures better than a [typical] freakout dropout time-capsule by chronicling without buying stock in junkie romance and mind-expansion pamphleteering."—Nick Pinkerton, Moving Image Source.

Trash
Friday, March 25 | 9:40 pm
1970/color/110 min. | Scr/dir: Paul Morrissey; w/ Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlaw, Geri Miller.
Paul Morrissey became and still remains famous for a trilogy of films—Flesh, Trash and Heat—made and released under the banner "Andy Warhol Presents" that feature the iconic Joe Dallesandro as the passive center of a swirling, loquacious society of junkies, prostitutes, and transvestites. Morrissey became a member of Warhol's circle in the mid-sixties when the Factory was already infamous as the production center for Warhol's static camera real time films, and the clubhouse of the Superstars, Warhol's colorful and uninhibited entourage. Gradually introducing editing and narrative into the Warhol films, Morrissey fundamentally changed their aesthetic: rather than observant documents, the films became a medium for the performers and their real and constructed personas. Taking the idea "that drug people are trash," to its illogical extreme, Morrissey created a seminal work of cinema, a topical black comedy that is as relevant today as it was in the sixties. Like a Beckett play, the action is situated in an unheated basement apartment furnished with trash scrounged from the street, where Holly, determined to salvage her dignity, vainly tries to arouse her drug addicted boyfriend Joe while scheming to get back on welfare and "be respectable" again. Infused with transvestite Holly Woodlawn's irrepressible charm and deadpan nonsequetors, Trash became Morrissey's richest work, "a brilliant, funny, tragic, moving film."—Rolling Stone.

Preview Screening: Potiche
Tuesday, March 8 | 7:30 pm | In person: Catherine Deneuve
Bing Theater | $10 general admission. $7 museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID.
2010/color/103 min. | Scr/dir:  François Ozon; w/ Catherine Deneuve; Gérard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard, Judith Godreche.
Based on a stage play set in a provincial French town in the 1970s, writer/director François Ozon's newest film stars Catherine Deneuve as Suzanne Pujol, a submissive and housebound 'trophy housewife' (or "potiche") who steps in to manage the umbrella factory of her wealthy husband (Fabrice Luchini) after the workers go on strike and take their tyrannical boss hostage. To everyone's surprise, Suzanne proves herself a competent and assertive woman of action, and it is only a matter of time before she runs into a former union leader and ex-beau (Gérard Depardieu) who still holds a flame for her.  But when her husband returns to the factory, rested and in top form, things get complicated.

Preview Screening: The Black Tulip
Thursday, March 10 | 7:30 pm | In person: Sonia Nassery Cole
Bing Theater | $10 general admission. $7 museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID.
2010/color/116 min. | Scr: Sonia Nassery Cole, David Michael O'Neill; dir: Sonia Nassery Cole; w/ Sonia Nassery Cole, Haji Gul Aser, Walid Amini.
Shot on location in war-torn Afghanistan by American director Sonia Nassery Cole, an Afghan expatriate, The Black Tulip tells the story of a Kabul family that, after the fall of the Taliban regime, opens a restaurant called "The Poet's Corner," where artists and writers are encouraged to make use of an open mic. But the family soon learns that their window of freedom is fleeting and pays a high price for daring to embrace culture again. Director Cole, who plays the role of a passionate mother in the film and is the founder and CEO of the Afghanistan World Foundation, will be present for a Q&A following the screening.

Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane
Saturday, March 26 | 7:30 pm | Introduction by: Cindy Keefer, archivist and curator, Center for Visual Music.
Bing Theater | $10 general admission. $7 museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID.
Born in Chicago and raised in the Bay Area, Jordan Belson trained as a painter before turning his attention to filmmaking after discovering the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and Hans Richter. Since 1947, Belson has explored consciousness, transcendence, and light in a visionary body of work that has been called "cosmic cinema": brimming with vibrant color, mandalas, liquid forms and mesmerizing rhythms. Starting in 1957, Belson collaborated with sound artist Henry Jacobs on the Vortex Concerts, multimedia events that combined new electronic music from around the world with Belson's visual effects projected on the 65-foot dome of the California Academy of Science's Morrison Planetarium. Tonight's program features rarely screened films including Caravan (1952), Séance (1959), a new preservation print of Chakra (1972), and more, including Belson's latest film, Epilogue (2005), funded by the NASA Art Program and commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum. Presented in association with Center for Visual Music.

Family programs

Andell Family Sundays—Tour of Europe
Sunday, March 6, 13, 20, and 27 | 12:30–3:30 pm
LATCC | Free, no reservations
Join us on Sundays for programs designed especially for families. Make art, explore the museum, or join a bilingual gallery tour. Most of all—have fun! Imagine yourself traveling to Italy or France as you tour the newly installed European art galleries. Be inspired by Mediterranean landscapes, the Venice canals, or decorative objects to make your own Europe-inspired art in workshops.
Children must be accompanied by an adult. Andell Family Sundays is supported by Andrew and Ellen Hauptman and the Hauptman Family Foundation.

 

special event

Nowruz Celebration
Saturday, March 13 | 11 am–5 pm
Director's Roundtable Garden, Bing Theater, LATCC, BP Grand Entrance | Free, tickets required and available the day of the event.
Sponsored by the Art of the Middle East Council and the Farhang Foundation.
Celebrate the Persian New Year with a full day of activities throughout LACMA's campus, including live music, film, dance performances, and a traditional Nowruz display called Haft Sîn.

 

 

Education programs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art are supported in part by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund for Arts Education.

Arts for NexGen is supported in part by the Employees Community Fund of Boeing California. Additional support is provided by Shirley & Burt Harris Family Foundation and the Louis and Harold Price Foundation.

Andell Family Sundays is supported by Andrew and Ellen Hauptman and the Hauptman Family Foundation. Outreach and transportation for Andell Family Sundays are supported by Tally and Bill Mingst. 

About LACMA
Since its inception in 1965, LACMA has been devoted to collecting works of art that span both history and geography and represent Los Angeles's uniquely diverse population. Today, the museum features particularly strong collections of Asian, Latin American, European, and American art, as well as a contemporary museum on its campus. With this expanded space for contemporary art, innovative collaborations with artists, and an ongoing Transformation project, LACMA is creating a truly modern lens through which to view its rich encyclopedic collection.

Location and Contact: 5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax Avenue), Los Angeles, CA, 90036 | 323 857-6000 | lacma.org
 
Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: noon-8 pm; Friday: noon-9 pm; Saturday, Sunday: 11 am-8 pm; closed Wednesday

General Admission: Adults: $15; students 18+ with ID and senior citizens 62+: $10

Free General Admission: Members; children 17 and under; after 5 pm weekdays for L.A. County residents; second Tuesday of every month; Target Free Holiday Mondays