The modern feminist movement is barely 60 years old, and three chronicles of its early days will be on display Friday at the Harvard Film Archive’s “Growing Up Female, Second-Wave.” The centerpiece is Julia Reichert and James Klein’s “Growing Up Female” (1971), which interviews an array of young women across the American Midwest as a sort of snapshot of the state of American womanhood. Liane Brandon, now a UMass Amherst professor emerita, will introduce her 1972 documentary “Betty Tells Her Story,” in which a woman recounts shopping for the perfect dress — first as comedy, then as tragedy. Finally, Norma Abrams’ “…And Everything Nice” (1974) features Gloria Steinem, Margaret Sloan-Hunter and other formative members of the movement commenting on the changing role of the woman in America. The program provides a stark counterpoint to another movie screening Friday, Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 version of “Lolita,” part of the HFA’s ongoing retrospective of the director’s work.
Friday also sees the Somerville Theatre‘s repertory programming swing back into full force, juxtaposing Hollywood power player Mervyn LeRoy’s “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), which he produced, with the very different killer-kid classic “The Bad Seed” (1956), which he directed. On Saturday, the theater welcomes filmmaker Elric Kane to celebrate the blu-ray release of his eerie streaming hit “The Dead Thing” (2024); co-writer Webb Wilcoxen will also be on hand. They’ll also introduce the movie they cite as a key influence, Stuart Gordon’s cult Lovecraft adaptation “From Beyond” (1986). On Sunday, it will feature two Sidney Poitier thrillers: “Pressure Point” (1962), in which Poitier’s psychiatrist must treat a deranged neo-Nazi (played by singer Bobby Darin!), and the Oscar-winning “In the Heat of the Night” (1967). All six films will be projected on beautiful 35mm film in the Somerville’s main house.
Continuing the weekend extravaganza of innovative filmmakers, Alain Kassanda, a Congolese-French documentarian and 2026 McMillan-Stewart fellow, will be at the Harvard Film Archive Saturday screening his feature-length debut “Colette et Justin” (2022). The film centers on his grandparents, who were freedom fighters in Congo’s struggle for independence from Belgium. Kassanda returns on Monday to introduce “Coconut Head Generation” (2023), which follows the members of a weekly film club in Ibadan, Nigeria as they become increasingly politically active. For lovers of the short-form doc, Sunday afternoon sees RPM Fest return to the Brattle Theatre with “Between Breaths”: Films by Kalpana Subramanian. The 10 films, ranging from 2 minutes to 13 minutes, focus on the poetics of breath. The experimental filmmaker-artist will be part of a post-screening Q&A.
The great comedic actress Catherine O’Hara died last month at the age of 71, and no two obituaries seemed to agree on her greatest accomplishment — as utility player on the Canadian sketch comedy show “SCTV,” the prickly moms of “Beetlejuice” (1988) and “Home Alone” (1990), the indomitable Moira Rose on “Schitt’s Creek.” For me, her work in the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest remains unparalleled. On Monday, the Brattle offers a free screening of Guest’s “Waiting for Guffman” (1996) as part of its ongoing Elements of Cinema series. “Guffman” features O’Hara as the flamboyant wife of Fred Willard’s smarmy travel agent-turned-amateur actor; the scene in which she drunkenly spills her husband’s most embarrassing secrets to their uncomfortable castmates is a tour de force of comic improv. While there will almost certainly be more tributes to O’Hara to come, “Guffman” is as fine a place as any to start.
Tuesday is February 24th, and some of you are now thinking “Diane, it is 11:30 a.m., February 24th. Entering the town of Twin Peaks.” So said Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in the pilot episode of “Twin Peaks” (1990-91), David Lynch’s pioneering TV mystery. The Brattle will mark Twin Peaks Day with a marathon of the show’s entire first season. Passes are available for the entire program (the feature-length pilot and all seven regular episodes), or in individual two-episode blocks, with an encore presentation of the pilot at 10:00 p.m. The shows will start, of course, with Agent Cooper delivering his first line at exactly 11:30 a.m. It is, as Cooper himself might say, a damn fine way to spend a Tuesday.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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