The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, September 9-15
Girl with Hyacinths (1950)
Directed by Hasse Ekman
Ekman came from a family of actors and himself appeared in around fifty films. From the 1940s through the 1960s he also directed films in his native Sweden that spanned a variety of genres, and frequently forged intimacies with the actors at those films’ cores. Among his most potent leads was his second wife, Eva Henning, who starred in several of Ekman’s films, including his personal favorite among his own works. Henning’s character in Girl with Hyacinths is Dagmar Brink, an urban young woman who kills herself and leaves her belongings to her building’s older caretaking couple next door. The writer husband (Ulf Palme), troubled by the death, inquiringly interviews people Dagmar knew, including a painter who had her pose for the film’s titular portrait, towards which characters sometimes stare. While people speak, flashbacks reveal the open-faced, carefully posed woman’s financial troubles and amorous encounters gone wrong. Perspectives on her are assembled piecemeal as the film becomes a mystery less about what happened than about why something did. The solution—if one exists to be found—lies reflected in a person’s eyes. Aaron Cutler (September 9, 18, 7pm at MoMA’s Ekman retrospective; September 9 screening introduced by Swedish film scholar and series co-programmer Frederik Gustafsson, alongside the filmmaker’s widow Viveka Ekman and Fan Ekman, the daughter of the filmmaker and star Eva Henning)