Row House Cinema presents Poetry of Images week, 11/24-11/30: four stunning works in which the images are the essence of the film.

– Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
– Colossal Youth (Costa)
– Stalker (Tarkovsky) – New Restoration
– Ugetsu (Mizoguchi) – New Restoration

Showtimes/Tickets – http://bit.ly/PoetryofImages

About the films:
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966)
————————————-
A little donkey is suckled by its mother, then baptized “Balthazar;” a girl and boy say goodbye at the end of summer: a vision of paradise. Years pass and the now-teenaged Marie finds herself drifting into more and more destructive situations, including involvement with a local juvenile delinquent; while Balthazar moves from owner to owner, some relatively kind, some cruel, some drunkenly careless. “Bresson’s supreme masterpiece and one of the greatest movies ever made!”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Colossal Youth (Costa, 2006)
——————————
Many of the lost souls of Ossos and In Vanda’s Room return in the spectral landscape of Colossal Youth, which brings to Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films a new theatrical, tragic grandeur. This time, Costa focuses on Ventura, an elderly immigrant from Cape Verde living in a low-cost housing complex in Lisbon, who has been abandoned by his wife and spends his days visiting his neighbors, whom he considers his “children.” What results is a form of ghost story, a tale of derelict, dispossessed people living in the past and present at the same time, filmed by Costa with empathy and startling radiance.

Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
————————–
One of the most immersive and rarefied experiences in the history of cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker embarks on a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic post-apocalyptic landscape. A hired guide—the “Stalker” of the title—leads a writer and a scientist into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, where the three men eventually zero in on the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires. Adapting a science-fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and making what would be his final Soviet feature, Tarkovsky created a challenging and visually stunning work, his painstaking attention to material detail and sense of organic atmosphere further enriched by this vivid new digital restoration.

Ugetsu (Mizogushi, 1953)
————————–
“Quite simply one of the greatest of filmmakers,” said Jean-Luc Godard of Kenji Mizoguchi. And Ugetsu, a ghost story like no other, is surely the Japanese director’s supreme achievement. Derived from stories by Akinari Ueda and Guy de Maupassant, this haunting tale of love and loss—with its exquisite blending of the otherworldly and the real—is one of the most beautiful films ever made.