Only one screening this week because of the Memorial Day holiday.
Thursday, May 21 (7:30 p.m.)
Far From Heaven (Focus Features, 2002)
A 1950s suburban homemaker (Julianne Moore) is ostracized because of her friendship with an African-American man (Dennis Haysbert) while coping with her deeply closeted gay husband (Dennis Quaid) in Todd Haynes’ homage to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), which we showed last month, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), screening on May 30. Haynes liberally appropriated the look and feel of All That Heaven Allows–especially its color palette, lighting and music–while employing Ali‘s more formally disruptive editing style. The result is a sensitive melodrama that invokes the genre’s tropes in a sincere, non-ironic manner, making explicit what Douglas Sirk could only hint at in his movies.
For more information on our programs, please visit the web site at www.loc.gov/avconservation/theater/.