Schedule of Events:

1:30pm: Beauty and the Beast at Walter Reade Theater

Jean Cocteau, 1946, France, 35mm, 96m
French with English subtitles

Among world cinema’s greatest fairy tales, Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1757 story endures as one of the medium’s most beloved and influential fantasies. Jean Marais (as the feral Beast) and Josette Day (as the young Beauty who transforms his heart) turn in historically romantic and utterly magnetic performances that, combined with a delirious array of exquisite sets and costumes and Cocteau’s penchant for harnessing the artifice of filmmaking to conjure a world beyond and yet within our own, cohere into a timeless reflection on wonder, romantic desire, and death.

3:45pm: Great Expectations at Walter Reade Theater

David Lean, 1946, U.K., 118m

Perhaps the definitive film adaptation of Charles Dickens, David Lean’s classic 1946 rendition endures as one of the all-time great (and most faithful) transfigurations of literature into cinema. The timeless story of orphan Pip (Anthony Wager and John Mills) as he grows up in 1810s London with the help of an unknown benefactor, Great Expectations—the first of Lean’s signature takes on Dickens, the other being 1948’s Oliver Twist—is powered by an astonishing ensemble cast, assembled by production company Cineguild, including Valerie Hobson, Jean Simmons, Alec Guinness, William Currie, Martita Hunt, and others. But most pertinent here: the film’s graceful, dimensional depiction of 19th-century England, expertly photographed by DP Guy Green.

6:15pm: The Innocents at Walter Reade Theater

Jack Clayton, 1961, U.K., 100m

A seminal gothic chiller, Jack Clayton’s second feature (following his Oscar-nominated debut, Room at the Top) draws its plot from Henry James’s 1898 novella A Turn of the Screw, adapted for the occasion by William Archibald and Truman Capote. Deborah Kerr stars as Miss Giddens, a woman working her first job as a governess for a rich bachelor (Michael Redgrave), moving to his country estate to look after two orphans who are in his custody. But as time passes, Miss Giddens increasingly believes that the estate is haunted, and that the children’s outbursts are evidence of spectral possession…. A touchstone work examining the relationship between the paranormal and the psychological, The Innocents endures as one of cinema’s finest ever ghost stories.

8:30pm: The She-Butterfly / Leptirica at Walter Reade Theater

Đordje Kadijević, 1973, Serbia, 63m
Serbian with English subtitles

A consummate work of cinematic folk-horror, Đordje Kadijević’s 1973 feature follows a young man who, in the hopes of persuading a rich, stern landowner to accept his bid to marry the landowner’s daughter, takes a job as a miller in the rural village Zaroshje. But no sooner does he start the job than a series of eerie events takes place at the flour mill, and it becomes increasingly apparent to the villagers that the mill has become home to a legendary vampire, Sava Savanović. Drawn from Milovan Glišić’s story “After 90 Years”—among the earliest modern treatments of vampires, predating Stoker’s Dracula by 17 years—and from regional folklore, The She-Butterfly is a visually and aurally rich example of an approach to horror cinema that is refreshingly distant from Hollywood’s genre conventions and tropes, and perhaps even more unsettling.