If you’re yearning for a good flick, the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center offers a wealth of choices year-round, annually screening more than 200 feature and short films to more than 60,000 patrons every year. There are daily shows of first-run movies, but Founder/Executive Director Richard Paradise includes monthly special events, and this spring is no exception.
Metropolitan Opera Live is back on March 23 with “Roméo et Juliette,” featuring two singers at the height of their powers — radiant soprano Nadine Sierra and tenor sensation Benjamin Bernheim coming together as the star-crossed lovers in Gounod’s sumptuous Shakespeare adaptation, with Met Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium to conduct one of the repertoire’s most romantic scores. Bartlett Sher’s towering staging also features baritone Will Liverman and tenor Frederick Ballentine as the archrivals Mercutio and Tybalt, mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey as the mischievous pageboy Stéphano, and bass-baritone Alfred Walker as Frère Laurent.
A free screening of “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is set for March 27 with guest speaker neurologist Dr. Andrew E. Budson, who will give a presentation and afterwards sign copies of his new book, “Why We Forget and How to Remember Better: The Science Behind Memory,” as part of the Film Center’s Science on Screen program. The film tells the story about how after a painful breakup, Clementine (Kate Winslet) undergoes a procedure to erase memories of her former boyfriend Joel (Jim Carrey) from her mind. When Joel discovers that Clementine is going to extremes to forget their relationship, he undergoes the same procedure and slowly begins to forget the woman that he loved. Directed by former music video director Michel Gondry, the visually interesting film explores relationships and the pain of loss.
Paradise shares, “The whole point of the series is not to show a documentary on science. It’s to screen a popular movie and then pull out some science relevance from it, followed by a related presentation. Memory has become a big part of our thinking; for instance, when we think about Alzheimer’s, music helps people.”
Sprinkled throughout April is this year’s Film Noir series consisting of three late 1940s movies shot by John Alton, who organizer, cartoonist, and educator Paul Karasik believes “is the architect of Noir and one of the greatest of all cinematographers.” On April 10 will be “T-Men,” a semi-documentary and police procedural style film noir about United States Treasury agents. On April 17 it’s “Raw Deal,” about a man who has taken the rap for another, who then double-crosses him with a flawed escape plan and other means to get rid of him. The series concludes with the April 24 showing of “He Walked by Night,” also shot with a semi-documentary tone. It is loosely based on Erwin “Machine-Gun” Walker, a former Glendale, Calif., police department employee and World War II veteran who unleashed a crime spree of burglaries, robberies, and shootouts in the Los Angeles area in 1945 and 1946.
The spring season ends with the Exhibition on Screen showing of “John Singer Sargent” on April 27, which revels in the glittering world of fashion, scandal, and shameless self-promotion that made Sargent a portraitist who captured the spirit of a vibrant and rapidly changing age. Hailed as the greatest portrait artist of his era, Sargent had remarkable power over his sitters, what they wore, and how they were presented. Through interviews with curators, contemporary fashionistas, and style influencers, Exhibition on Screen’s film will examine how the artist’s unique practice has influenced modern art, culture, and fashion.
For more information and tickets, see mvfilmsociety.com.
