A screening of four summer holiday films.

In August (2009) Cinema Sunset presented a special summer holiday programme. Four movie classics, loosly connected to the theme of a summer trip, were screened on Thursday evenings at sunset on ADA’s spacious balcony.

August 6: Death in Venice: at 21:21
Release: 1971

Runtime: 125 min.

Director: Luchino Visconti

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Martc Burns, Björn Andrésen

The depressed avant-garde composer Gustave Aschenbach (loosely based on Gustave Mahler) travels to a Venetian seaside resort in search of repose after a period of artistic and personal stress. He finds no peace there, for he soon develops a troubling attraction to the adolescent boy, Tadzio. The boy embodies an ideal of classical beauty that Aschenbach has long sought and he becomes infatuated. Haunted by memories of the past Aschenbach feels defeated in both his personal and his professional lives. In the meanwhile the city is dying of a secret pestilence that represents the corruption that compromises and threatens all ideals.

August 3: Paris Texas at 21:08
Release: 1984

Runtime: 148 min.

Director: Wim Wenders

Cast: Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell, Nastassja Kinski

Travis has been presumed dead for four years, he reappears from the desert on the Mexico border, world-weary and an amnesiac. 
He traces his brother Walt who is bringing up Hunter, his seven-year-old son, his ex-wife Jane having abandoned him at Walt’s door several years before. 

As virtual strangers, Hunter and Travis begin to build a wary friendship and conspire to find Jane and bring her back to be a real family. 

With extraordinary performances from Harry Dean Stanton as Travis and Natassja Kinski as Jane, the film also boasts a soundtrack by Ry Cooder, ideally suited to the film’s sun-bleached landscapes and melancholy undertones.

August 20: Plein Soleil at 20:51
Release: 1960

Runtime: 115 min.

Director: René Clément

Cast: Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet, Marie Laforêt

Tom Ripley has been sent to Italy to persuade his wealthy friend, Philippe Greenleaf, to return to the United States and take over his father’s business. While spending time on a boat trip together, Tom is fixated on Philippe, wanting his life, girlfriend, and confident, cocky personality for himself. Tom hatches a plan to kill Philippe and steal his identity. Out of all the actors who have played Ripley in movie adaptations of books in Highsmith’s “Ripliad” series, many critics have called Delon’s characterization the closest to her personal vision of the character: a charismatic sociopath who lies, murders, and manipulates without a shred of remorse.


August 27: Weekend at 20:38
Release: 1967

Runtime: 105 min.

Director: Jean Luc Godard

Cast: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-piere Kalfon

An unhappily married Parisian couple, travel through the French countryside to collect an inheritance. A supposedly idyllic weekend trip turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations. What ensues is a confrontation with the tragic flaws of the over-consuming bourgeoisie. The film contains some of the most written-about scenes in cinema’s history. One of them, a ten-minute tracking shot of the couple stuck in an unremitting traffic jam as they leave the city, is often cited as a new technique Godard used to deconstruct bourgeois trends. Weekend’s enigmatic and audacious end title sequence, which reads “End of Cinema”, appropriately marked an end to the narrative and cinematic period in Godard’s film making career.