BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to the actor who, with no small degree of justice, can claim to be the face of the French New Wave with "Jean-Pierre Léaud: The New Wave and After" (January 18 - February 29). Leaud made his film debut at fifteen when Francois Truffaut cast him as Antoine Doinel, his youthful alter ago in the 1959 The 400 Blows. That would turn out to be a pretty steady gig, as he went on to reprise the character in three more features made between 1968's Stolen Kisses to the 1979 Love on the Run. All of them are included here, along with Truffaut's Day for Night and Two English Girls and Leaud's work for Godard (La Chinoise, Masculine Feminine, and Weekend, in which he has a cameo), Jacques Rivette (Out 1: Spectre), and Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore). The more recent films include Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep, which finds Leaud once again involved in making a movie within a movie, and another cameo appearance in La Vie de Boheme, arguably the funniest movie by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.
Also at PFA: "Vegetable, Mineral: Recent Experimental Documentaries" (January 15 - February 26) will include evenings devoted to the work of James Benning, Maryam Kashani, Rene Daalder, and the radical media collective Paper Tiger TV. On February 5, the program will also incorporate a presentation and booksigning by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, authors of the news study F Is for Phony.
LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art spends the weekend trying to get to the bottom of that sweet mystery of life that is David Lynch. Friday night, the museum screens Lynch's short films, while Saturday it celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of Eraserhead with a showing of a restored print of the film, a bad dream we never get tired of hearing recounted. On both nights, they're showing the strange new documentary Lynch, in which our hero can be seen directing Inland Empire, explaining to Laura Dern why she should be flattered when he calls her "tidbit", talking about the bad old days in Philadelphia, and letting the cigarette butts pile up on the concrete floor of his office. Maybe if enough people show up, the museum will have a heart and buy the guy an ashtray.
NEW YORK: For two weeks starting January 18, Film Forum brings back Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, the icy, beautiful 1961 film that did its part to make European cinema seem like a stylish thing to puzzle over. A style-setter in the area of fashion as much as in filmmaking, it has the not inconsiderable distinction of being the only film to win both the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and inclusion in Harry and Michael Medved's The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.
