The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 1-7
Day of the Dead (1957)
Directed by Charles and Ray Eames
The Eameses, known best for interior design, made 125 short films together between 1950 and 1978. Many were educational and promotional films commissioned by IBM, with a number relying upon animation to playfully illustrate their themes. The couple’s great theme was the value, both functional and symbolic, given by human beings to objects through which they could express themselves. In this regard, their marvelings at advances in computer science prove kin to their luminous fifteen-minute-long film about the annual preparations for and celebrations of a traditional Mexican holiday. Edgar Kauffman, Jr. narrates and Laurindo Almeida provides the lyrical guitar score for Day of the Dead, a work commissioned by Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art. The film begins in a field of yellow flowers and moves through a succession of still photographs of bazaars as the narrator describes how, in Mexico, death is welcomed as part of the life cycle. We are told that the dead are beings to be honored and cherished while stand-alone skulls and full skeletons appear in candy, effigy, toy, and piñata form. At a certain point, the skeletons begin to move, offering what the narrator calls “warm companionship.” A preserved 35mm print of Day of the Dead will screen with seven other Eames films also preserved by the Library of Congress in a session introduced by Amy Gallick, who holds the title there of Moving Image Preservation Specialist. Aaron Cutler (June 5, 1pm at the Metrograph’s “Old and Improved”)