Event

LETTERS FROM ELIA: A LETTER TO ELIA & VIVA ZAPATA! (Double Feature!)

DOUBLE FEATURE!!
September 13, 7:30 PM
A LETTER TO ELIA (dirs. Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones, U.S., 2010, color and b&w, 60 min. digital)
Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones' A LETTER TO ELIA is a heartfelt declaration from one great American filmmaker to another, as Scorsese speaks candidly and passionately about one of his formative filmmaking influences: the late Elia Kazan. Utilizing precisely chosen clips from Kazan's signature films, and interview footage of the director himself, Scorsese and Jones recount the director's tumultuous journey from the Group Theatre to the Hollywood A-list to the thicket of the blacklist. But most of all, they make a powerful case for Kazan as a profoundly personal artist working in a famously impersonal industry.

VIVA ZAPATA! (dir. Elia Kazan, U.S. , 1952, b&w, 113 min., 35mm)
Novelist John Steinbeck wrote the screenplay for this biopic of Mexican Revolutionary Emilano Zapata. Marlon Brando, recognized as Best Actor at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival stars in the title role of the modest but determined hero of the revolution, and Anthony Quinn, who earned a Best Supporting Actor ACADEMY AWARD®, co-stars as Emilano 's hard-living brother, Eufemio. Despite his efforts to give the film authenticity—Kazan reportedly studied Agustin Casasola's period photographs—the film contains such historical inaccuracies as depicting Zapata as illiterate.