The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 7-13
Bérénice (1983)
Directed by Raúl Ruiz
The first act of this “straight” adaptation of the play by Jean Racine is one of the most gorgeous sequences in the history of cinema and my choice for the best twenty minutes that Ruiz ever filmed. It’s a shadow-play where the characters don’t appear on the screen except as specters, as if they were mourning their own death and leaving their traces on the walls, doors and hallways of the mansion where Bérénice was filmed. Among the images that can be found here are a shadow that “leaves” a room after a door opens; Bérénice tracing the profile of a doomed lover’s shadow with a bloody finger, leaving the trace, like ink, imprinted on the wall; her face not just reflecting her own feelings, but serving as a canvas for the shadows of the other characters, as if the history of her betrothed’s people colored her face as she confronted the prospect of becoming his empress. An unforgettable visual experience. Jaime Grijalba (December 10, 5pm; December 14, 4:30pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Ruiz retrospective)