When Lia van Leer founded the Jerusalem Cinematheque 50 years ago, she was passionate about bringing the best movies of all time to the Israeli public and conducted a critics’ poll to select the first program.
Now, as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations for the Cinematheque, some of the winners of this poll will be screened again, starting on April 13 and running for a little over a week, while others will be shown in the coming months. The details of the program can be found here: https://jer-cin.org.il/en/lobby/cinematheque-50-first-program
Van Leer was a passionate movie lover and she wanted all Israelis to have access to the greatest films from all over the world. All film buffs will be excited about the opportunity to see these treasures on the big screen.
The movies include Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), an epic portrait of a rich man who becomes a newspaper publisher, a populist politician, and a megalomaniac. The 25-year-old director also cowrote (with Herman J. Mankiewicz) and starred in the film, which tops most polls of the greatest films of all time.
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) is the director’s best-known work and tells the story of a knight (Max von Sydow) who must play a symbolic game of chess against a figure who represents death in plague-ravaged Europe.
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) by Alain Resnais is an intense romance about a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who has an affair with a Japanese actor (Eiji Okada) while she is in Japan to make an antiwar film in Hiroshima, and they find that their love is overshadowed by the memories of the bombing of that city during World War II.
Movies from a wide variety of genres will be aired
Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963) is a wildly inventive, surreal story of a stressed film director who tries to make a movie as he retreats into his fantasies and memories of the women in his life. It’s one of Marcello Mastroianni’s most iconic roles and features a cast that includes Anouk Aimee and Claudia Cardinale.
Jean Renoir’s 1937 movie, The Grand Illusion, about French soldiers who become prisoners to the Germans in World War I, is considered one of the most important war films of all time. Erich von Stroheim plays their German captor, and Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, and Marcel Dalio portray the captives.
Ugetsu (1953), also known as Ugetsu Monogatari, by Kenji Mizoguchi, an epic of love and war in 16th-century Japan, is one of the masterpieces of Japanese cinema.
Sergei Eisenstein’s great cinematic achievement, Battleship Potemkin (1925), a rousing historical film about a 1905 sailors’ rebellion against inhumane conditions and subsequent protests in Odessa in solidarity with the rebels, will be accompanied by live music from the musician Eran Tzamit, who performs under the name Reseketz. Battleship Potemkin contains cinematic set pieces that are considered among the best ever made.
More programs commemorating the cinematheque’s 50th anniversary will be presented in the coming months, including a tribute to Chris Marker, whose short film La Jetée inspired the movie 12 Monkeys.