BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.
Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)
NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.