NEW YORK: The Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembene, who died last summer, gets his first major posthumous respective at Film Forum from November 30 to December 12. The series kicks off with Xala, the 1974 satire that climaxes with a memorably ghastly, well, spitting scene, and includes the early works that put Sembene on the map (Black Girl, Emitai) as well as the more recent films (Faat-Kine and his last movie, Moolaade) that showed that he was still in strapping form. This is a rare chance not just to pay tribute to a fallen master but to catch up with the work of a major filmmaker who remains sorely underrepresented on DVD.
Pier Paolo Pasolini has been dead for a good long time now, but doesn't seem to have become much less controversial, an accomplishment that might have put a smile on his face. The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Heretical Epiphanies: The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 28 – December 4) covers his career from the neo-realist debut film Accattone to the hyper-scandalous, posthumously released Salo. On December 4, Lincoln Center also presents the U.S. premiere of Accattone in Jazz, a live presentation in which "Pasolini's celebrated screenplay for Accattone is revisited by Italian movie star Valerio Mastandrea, as he weaves a unique interplay of words and music together with Italian jazz legends and longtime collaborators Roberto Gatto and Danilo Rea."
The Brooklyn Academy of Music's twelve-film Max Ophuls retrospective begins on November 28 with a week-long run of a new print of the 1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman, the best work done in Hollywood by an artist who got too few opportunities to work at anything like his full capacities. It ain't The Earrings of Madame de. . . , but boy, will it do. . .
SAN FRANCISCO: From November 27-30, the Castro salutes director Hal Ashby, with three nights of double features, starting with the 1979 Being There, paired with the cult classic Harold and Maude. The real keeper may be on the 30th, when the theater shows the masterful, Robert Towne-scripted Shampoo and Ashby's amazing, unavailable-on-DVD debut film, The Landlord (1970).
— Phil Nugent
