The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 23-29
Beauty Knows No Pain (1972)
Directed by Elliott Erwitt
Erwitt has made very few films, and has instead worked primarily as a still photographer. The France-born child of Russian parents has built a career out of candid captures of seemingly absurd surfaces, often found in the culture of the country where he has long lived—the USA. Two decades after completing American military service, Erwitt made Beauty Knows No Pain, a documentary short that reflects how militaristic attitudes crop up in everyday American life. The film focuses on the nation’s first dancing drill team, the Texas-based Kilgore College Rangerettes, whose regimen and work habits seem stricter than those of virtually any athletic team. Beauty offers sequences containing present-day Rangerette practice rituals and repeated slogans, including the title phrase, which the girls tell themselves as they strive to match the standardized appearance desired for each individual group member. Through interviews with people earnestly connected to the troupe—including the Rangerettes’ demanding longtime director and a hopeful new member-in-training recently arrived from North Dakota—we come to understand the Rangerettes’ space as a training ground for life. Erwitt’s film will screen at Light Industry together with another great study of American pedagogy: Frederick Wiseman’s Basic Training. Aaron Cutler (September 29, screening time TBA at Light Industry)