The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 9-15
Story of Night (1979)
Directed by Clemens Klopfenstein
This hour-long poetic masterpiece will screen at MoMA on DCP in a new restoration realized by the Cinémathèque suisse in collaboration with Basel University; its director will introduce Friday’s screening. Story of Night emerged in the 1970s from nighttime walking tours that the Swiss filmmaker Klopfenstein would take around Rome while shooting on sensitive black-and-white film stock. He eventually expanded his work into a record, shot over 150 days, of 50 European cities between the hours of 2 and 5 A.M. The journey begins with a quotation describing Leopold Bloom’s nocturnal sojourns in Joyce’s Ulysses, and from there traverses not only Dublin, but also Belfast, Helsinki, Istanbul, and numerous unidentified other locales, with subtle hints continually dropped as to where we might be now. The sound and image editing, associative in nature, is often linked to vehicle and foot movement, and the compositions linger on streetlamps, suggesting how cityscapes are often transformed by light or the lack thereof. Something spooky and beautiful emerges throughout the mood of the film; a viewer, in searching for glimpses of people within the deserted spaces shown onscreen, can find traces of life everywhere. Aaron Cutler (November 11, 6:30pm; November 22, 4:30pm at “To Save and Project: The 14th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation”)
