The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, August 12-18
Spring Night, Summer Night (1967)
Directed by J.L. Anderson
The first and only feature by director J.L. Anderson, this progressive and prophetic midwest familial drama confronts the taboo with uncommonly topical sweep and insight. With measured, empathetic attention to the social and political particulars of small-town, midcentury America, Anderson chronicles the plight of a pair of siblings caught between illicit passion and an ambiguous lineage which together threaten to ostracize the young lovers from a community ill-equipped to negotiate a post-war youth culture which was then being forced to find refuge in more metropolitan, coastal confines. Captured on location in southeast Ohio, in rich shades of 35mm black-and-white, the film at once preserves a bygone vision of virginal Americana and predicts the personal, uncompromising projects of regional micro-budget cinema, forging an unlikely continuum from its counterculture contemporaries such as Faces and The Last Picture Show, to the coming likes of Killer of Sheep, Stranger Than Paradise, and The Color Wheel. Jordan Cronk (August 14, 16, 7pm; August 19, 9pm at Anthology Film Archives’s “One-Film Wonders”)
