BV Cinemas proudly hosts screenings & lectures from New Film Curators & other guest programmers, including:
VCLA Presents the Opposable Eye Series (Film #1):
LE VAMPIRE DE DUSSELDORF
(Robert Hossein dir; France; 1965; 90 min)
Before becoming a successful director of French crime and noir films and a dramatic or romantic leading actor for such cinematic luminaries as Jules Dassin, Julien Duvivier, Roger Vadim, Édouard Molinaro, André Hunnebelle, Henri Verneuil, Bernard Borderie and even Sergio Leone (as a “mascot” Leone asked Hossein to play a member of Henry Fonda’s gang in a flashback sequence in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST!) Hossein spent years acting and directing for the notorious Theatre Grand Guignol in Montmartre. That training ground bears a marked impression on this film, Hossein's extremely perverse, ghoulish exercise in stylized subjectivity. A creepy, swirling, altogether mischievous score by André Hossein (the director’s father), rapturous, ever-prowling widescreen camerawork from Alain Levent and a crunched, hunched, psychologically, spiritually and sexually dwarfed expressionist performance by Hossein compliment and conspire to create one of the most shadowed and disturbing examinations of crippled national esteem ever put on film.
Appropriated from the true story of slithering, life-long psychopath Peter Kürten -- often (mistakenly?) referred to as the basis for Fritz Lang's child murderer in M -- facts are tailored to sharpen the political metaphor, but the horror hasn't been altered a bit. This film was originally released in the US as THE SECRET KILLER in a distractingly dubbed version in the mid-1960’s (prints of which are near impossible to find and those that have surfaced have had the elegant 2.35:1 Franscope ratio callously cleaved in half!!!) — THE OPPOSABLE EYE FILM SERIES is proud to screen a beautiful full widescreen transfer for the first time in it’s original language and subtitled in English (not commercially available). Truly a forgotten masterpiece of French cinema!!!
Opposable Eye Series info
THE OPPOSABLE EYE FILM SERIES promises to screen only extraordinary, essential, influential and inspirational international cinema that time forgot. Most of these films have either never been screened in any format in the US or, once-upon-a-time had seen a brief moment of vitality in it’s era only to see commercial viability diminished and disgraced by modern corporate domination of domestic mainstream video and theatrical distribution. The screening series is an offshoot of curator (filmmaker, author and digital archivist) Howard S. Berger’s OPPOSABLE EYE FILM SOCIETY — a private online group dedicated to viewing and discussing this obscure cinema in a zero-negativity forum — designed to open closed minds and strengthen the focus of viewership towards the achievement that is actually on the screen as opposed to what any one individual may PREFER to see on the screen. The Society accepts films for what they are and not for what it coulda, woulda, shoulda been. This philosophy is strongly shared by Kyle Vannoy and VCLA (Video Collective Los Angeles) of which he is a founding member and who has enthusiastically partnered with Opposable Eye for this very special film series
Directed By Robert Hossein
Dec. 19 at 6:30 pm
Tickets $10.00
at BVC
