CAIN TONIGHT AND FRIDAY; CARLITO ALSO FRIDAY AT LINCOLN CENTER
The Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York began a series on Friday (December 16th) titled "Going Steadi: 40 Years of Steadicam." Brian De Palma's Raising Cain screens tonight at 8:45 as part of the series, and again on Friday December 23rd, at 4:30pm. On Friday, you can make it a De Palma double feature by sticking around for the 6:30pm screening that day of Carlito's Way, also part of the series."Combining the freedom of a handheld camera with the stability of a dolly," reads the series program description, "Steadicam made its groundbreaking debut in Hal Ashby’s 1976 film Bound for Glory, which won the Oscar for best cinematography. Since then, it has become an essential tool of filmmaking and has allowed cinematographers to execute some of their most iconic, astonishing camera movements. And while Steadicam has left an indelible mark on Hollywood filmmaking (especially in the films of Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, Brian De Palma, and Quentin Tarantino), it has also been used to striking effect in works by international filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Béla Tarr, Bertrand Tavernier, and many others. Steadicam enabled the camera to move with the same grace as the bodies, objects, and spaces that it films, expanding the medium’s visual possibilities in ways that many of the key filmmakers of the past four decades have found indispensable. The Film Society is proud to celebrate 40 years of Steadicam’s usage, with Steadicam inventor and cinematographer Garrett Brown appearing in person."
Here is the program description of Raising Cain:
"Brian De Palma’s darkly comic, hall-of-mirrors thriller stars a deliciously deranged John Lithgow in a diabolical double role: as a mild-mannered child psychiatrist and his evil twin brother, who both take to kidnapping and murder in order to procure toddlers for a bizarre psychological study. Out-of-left-field plot twists, electrifying set pieces, and Hitchcockian doubles (and triples and quadruples) abound, while the film’s labyrinthine plot and disorienting, dreamlike tone are enhanced by the intricate, maze-like Steadicam shots."
I'll do a couple more brief posts centered around this fest in the next couple of days.