Sunday, July 21 - Monday, July 22 File on Thelma Jordon (1949) Director: Robert Siodmak The wonderfully evil Barbara Stanwyck plays Thelma Jordon, a woman who late one night shows up in the office of married Assistant DA Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey). Before Cleve can stop himself, he and Thelma are involved in an illicit affair. But Thelma is a mysterious woman, and Cleve can't help wondering if she is hiding something. Thelma has a plan up her sleeve that will ruin Corey if his love for her and his own weakness win out. Siodmak directs with his usual skill and polish, but the film really belongs to Stanwyck who is magnificent as Thelma. Unlike the usual cold, passionless femme fatale of film noir, Thelma has a heart and a conscience. She comes to love Cleve, and has concern for his life and his future. Despite her wish that her life could be different, she realizes that she belongs in a lawless world. A romantic, unusual mystery, with a great performance and superior direction. 7/21/-7/22 Sunday 9:15 P.M. Monday 8:00, 10:00 P.M.

Sunday, July 28 - Monday, July 29 L'Age D'Or (1930) Director: Luis Buñuel A year after surrealist painter Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel made Un Chien Andalou, they collaborated on Buñuel's first feature, the scandalous L'Age d'Or. Using dream-like scenarios, writer Dali and director Buñuel staged a frontal assault on the social order and organized religion. The overwhelming erotic desires of a government official (Gaston Modot) and a high-society woman (Lya Lys) are treated as crimes by civic and church authorities. Buñuel uses wild incongruity — a cow in the woman's bed, the murder of a child at a formal party — to satirize the hypocrisy of societal conventions. Buñuel later said that L'Age d'Or "in its day was a militant film that aimed at raping clear consciences." In that respect, it was a success. After a few showings in Paris, right-wing youth organizations rioted in the theater, throwing ink and acid at the screen. The 62-minute film was banned in France for 59 years, was frequently seized or banned elsewhere, and became a cause célèbre of the Surrealist movement. Scenes considered blasphemous included the founding of a Christian church-state on a pile of feces, lovers sucking toes and fingers, and a follower of the Marquis de Sade as a Christ figure. Later Buñuel films may be more subtle and nuanced, but the style and themes of L'Age d'Or would remain the staples of Buñuel's filmmaking for the next half-century. 7/28/-7/29 Sunday 9:15 P.M. Monday 8:00, 10:00 P.M.

Sunday, August 4 -- Tuesday, August 6 SURREALISM ON FILM Anemic Cinema (1925/26 Marcel Duchamp/Man Ray) Surrealism and Dada Fall Of The House Of Usher (1928/Jean Epstein) Un Chien Andalou (1928/Luis Bunuel) Un Chien Andalou Fledging director Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali create this ultimate surrealist film, which is essentially a barrage of striking and irrational images designed to shock and provoke. We witness a close-up of a woman's eye being slashed open with a razor; a man dragging a piano, two bishops, and a pair of rotting asses across a room; ants swarming around a hole in a man's palm; and sundry severed limbs and gratuitous slayings. Though this was originally a silent film, Buñuel later added a recorded score consisting of Liebestod from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde and a number of popular tangos of the time. Fall of the House of Usher This silent version of the Poe classic studiously avoids cheap shocks in a tale of hereditary madness, choosing instead a tightly controlled, spookily subtle technique. The hero, having indirectly caused the death of his beloved, stubbornly tries to resurrect her spirit by devoting himself to painting and sculpture. Epstein conveys the twilight zone between life and death with lingering dissolves and brilliant utilization of slow motion. Luis Bunuel was an assistant director. Anemic Cinema A seven-minute film with contracting and expanding spirals of ten optical discs alternating with nine verbal discs. 8/4/-8/6 Sunday 9:15 P.M. Monday and Tuesday 8:00, 10:00 P.M.