Conjuring Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Presents

Sunday, Feb 9, 2025 at 2:00pm

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Schedule of Events:

5:15pm: The Queen of Spades at Walter Reade Theater

Thorold Dickinson, 1949, U.K., 95m

Drawing from Alexander Pushkin’s short story of the same title, Thorold Dickinson’s stunning, baroque fantasy conjures a sense of the supernatural that verges on the surreal. Set in 1806, the film follows a Russian military officer (Anton Walbrook) who seeks to learn the secret of a countess (Edith Evans) who purportedly sold her soul in exchange for learning the secret to winning high-stakes card games. He (along with a friend and fellow officer) begins courting the countess’s young ward in the hopes of getting closer to the countess, but soon enough his scheme goes badly sideways—and, perhaps, supernatural. An object lesson in the power of cinema to evoke atmosphere and the sense of an invisible world beyond the veil of the visible.

2:00pm: Andriesh at Walter Reade Theater

Yakov Bazelyan, Sergei Parajanov, 1954, USSR, 63m
Russian with English subtitles

Sergei Parajanov’s feature debut was this mesmerizing fairy tale adaptation, drawn from the work of Moldavian writer/poet Emilian Bukov. The story concerns a young shepherd boy who dreams of becoming a knight and receives an enchanted flute, which assists him in his journey to the castle of an evil wizard known as Black Whirlwind. Shot by The Color of Pomegranates DP Suren Shahbazyan and expanding upon one of his earlier student films, Andriesh affords us a fascinating glimpse at Parajanov’s artistry at the very beginning of his career, his mastery of cinematic pictorialism already in evidence. Courtesy of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre.

7:30pm: 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.

3:30pm: The Eve of Ivan Kupalo at Walter Reade Theater

Yuri Ilyenko, 1968, USSR, 71m
Ukrainian with English subtitles

Loosely based on a story of the same title by Nikolai Gogol, Yuri Ilyenko’s 1968 adaptation is a visually astonishing work on the borderline between cinematic narrative and pure poetry. Humble farmer Piotr wishes to marry the beautiful Pidorka, but, of course, her father disapproves. But a mischievous demon who lives somewhere in the countryside might hold the key to Piotr being able to obtain the object of his desire, setting the stage for a Faustian bargain with otherworldly consequences. A beguiling and transfixing work in which images overflow with symbols, theological and folkloric motifs, and visual touches ranging from the surreal to the ethnographic, The Eve of Ivan Kupalo is one of Ilyenko’s richest films. Courtesy of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre.


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