The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 1-7
Red Hollywood (1996)
Directed by Thom Andersen and Noël Burch
“You gotta show that the rich are shitty and the poor are beautiful.” Although Red Hollywood falls back on some of the more standard documentary apparatuses than its successor, Los Angeles Plays Itself, it is no less a display of Andersen’s remarkable discursive skills. Perhaps the greatest video essayist, he understands that an extreme position must be taken and argued, and that the cinematic evidence needs to enter a dialogue with each other to prove the point—namely, that the pictures written and directed by those blacklisted in 1950s Hollywood did indeed contain radical left-wing content, providing a corrective to decades of indifferent dismissal. Andersen gives the blacklisted a platform to reminisce and state their positions in talking head sequences that stay lively by being effectively edited with the footage. In addition to being an engrossing essay, Red Hollywood takes on an identity of its own, a push forward in filmic language and cinema as activism. Eric Barroso (June 4, 9:15pm; June 10, 6:30pm at Anthology Film Archives’s Andersen series, complementing the release of his The Thoughts That Once We Had)
