Muppets™, Music & Magic: Jim Henson’s Legacy / Fridays in July
"Through his work, [Jim Henson] helped sustain the qualities of fancifulness, warmth and consideration that have been so threatened by our coarse, cynical age." - James Collins, Time Magazine
In conjunction with The Jim Henson Legacy and the Jane Henson Foundation, The Cinefamily pays tribute to one of the world's most inspired and innovative film and puppetry artists, Jim Henson. A visionary TV producer and a world-class puppeteer, Henson and his team created indelible, hilarious, vulnerable and crazy characters like Kermit The Frog, Bert and Ernie, the Gelflings and the Skeksis, and The Swedish Chef (one of our personal favorites), and brought a unique combination of childlike wonder and adult sophistication to their groundbreaking work. This month-long series will explore all facets of Henson's prolific output, including experimental work, rarities and some of his most beloved feature films.
7/10 @ 8pm & 10pm / SERIES: Jim Henson Jim Henson Commercials and Experiments
A mind-blowing collection of shorts, crazy commercials, and other rarities from the Henson vault. Highlights include: an industrial film for Wilson’s Meat that must be seen to be believed, commercials featuring the LaChoy Dragon (a full-body character that caused Frank Oz to swear off doing any others), animation utilizing techniques ranging from stop-motion to early computer animation, excerpts from The Cube and Youth 68, the two episodes Jim and company created for NBC's "Experiment in Television", and a 35mm print of Time Piece, an Academy Award nominated 8-minute masterpiece that showcases Henson’s talent for making music out of everyday sounds. When we featured this 90-minute Commercials and Experiments program back in 2008, it sold out three showings, so be sure to get your ticket early for this one-of-a-kind event!
Watch the Muppet 1960s commercial featuring the "La Choy Dragon"!
Tickets - $12
8:00PM SHOW
10:00PM SHOW
7/10 @ Midnight / SERIES: Jim Henson The Dark Crystal
The last thing anyone expected from the creator of The Muppets, Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal was its creator's ambitious bid for status as a serious filmmaker and a pioneer in fantasy storytelling. Those who see it will never forget the completely fresh, exciting new world created entirely through puppets and creative art design. In an undefined land and time, a hulking, repulsive dragon-like race called the Skeksis have stolen a large, damaged purple crystal which provides them power and knowledge, and it's up to Jen, a young elfen creature whose race is destined to heal the crystal, to accept his quest. The Dark Crystal is not really a children's film per se, as its naive, childlike protagonists are thrust into a bewildering and dangerous set of circumstances they don't understand--but like most of the overlooked entries in cinema fantastique for the amazing year of 1982 (Blade Runner, The Thing, Conan the Barbarian, Videodrome, etc.), this film has found a steadily growing audience over the years more receptive to its complex, challenging attempts to depict the relationship between good and evil. Oh, yes--and it also completely rocks. Dirs. Jim Henson & Frank Oz, 1982, 35mm, 93 min.
Watch the trailer for "The Dark Crystal"!
Tickets - $10
7/17 @ 8pm / SERIES: Jim Henson Muppet Fairy Tales shown with
Labyrinth
What happens when you kiss a frog? What if the elves who come to the aid of the shoemaker are actually Elvises? What would go down if Rapunzel appeared on Sesame Street? Get ready for the answers in tonight's program, a treasury of legends retold in the Muppet tradition, featuring Kermit the Frog and Robin the Frog. The Frog Prince, an early '70s Henson TV special, features an early role for Kermit, who appears as narrator to the story of Robin, a frog who claims to be a human prince under an evil spell. Befriending the Princess Melora (under an evil spell of her own), the two band together to fight the witch that cursed the pair of them. Also showing is The Elves and the Shoemaker, with Kermit as a avant-garde shoemaker in hot water with his banker. Robin's prayer for help is answered by three mini-Elvises who churn out blue suede shoes that sell like hotcakes!
Labyrinth, Henson's final directorial effort, is a towering technical achievement that just gets better with age. A wicked mix of whimsical beauty and the depths of the grotesque, Labyrinth features a fantasy world so chock-full of outrageous puppet goblins and creatures that it could only be lorded over by Davie Bowie. In a highly memorable and slightly kinky turn as Jareth The Goblin King, Bowie does battle with spoiled brat Sarah (Jennifer Connolly), who finds herself dropped into a reality where everything seems possible, nothing is as it seems, and her goal is to outsmart the Goblin King in order to rescue herself and her baby brother. In addition to Henson's heady dreamscape palate (influenced here by such avant-garde artists as M.C Escher), his monumental attention to the detail of his crew's puppetry had never been finer, culminating in an irresistible explosion of eye candy, and one of the most fondly remembered family films of the 1980s. Labyrinth Dir. Jim Henson, 1986, 35mm, 101 min.
Watch the trailer for "Labyrinth"!
Tickets - $10
7/24 @ 8pm / SERIES: Jim Henson Dog City shown with
The Great Muppet Caper
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Watch the musical number "Happiness Hotel" from "The Great Muppet Caper"!
Tickets - $10
7/31 @ 8pm / SERIES: Jim Henson Muppet History 101 shown with
Muppet Music Moments
This unique slate of Muppet rarities examines the origins of Henson's pioneering puppeteering, and includes early live TV appearances, unusual commercials, guest spots by Rowlf The Dog on The Jimmy Dean Show, Muppet surprises on The Dick Cavett Show, and much more. Plus, this program contains the rarely-seen 1975 The Muppet Show pilot, under the provocative title The Muppets: Sex and Violence, which featured a tribute to the Seven Deadly Sins, and gave TV audiences their very first introduction to The Swedish Chef, Sam The Eagle, Statler and Waldorf, and the always-awesome Dr. Teeth!
Practically through osmosis, those who grew up with the Muppets gained a serious amount of musical education, as Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and the Muppet films all presented a world of song in a wide variety of genres, always with a sense of humor and a smile. From "Mah Nà Mah Nà" to "The Rainbow Connection", "C Is For Cookie" to the repertoire of Dr. Teeth And The Electric Mayhem and beyond, some of the most funniest and most moving Muppets material has shone through during melodic moments--and for this evening's show, we've assembled a collection of classic music numbers interpreted as only the Muppets can. This compilation also includes performances by guest stars Harry Belafonte, Elton John, and Linda Ronstadt. Muppeteer Dave Goelz ("Gonzo", "Dr. Bunsen Honeydew" and many, many others) will be in person to share his Muppet memories!
Watch "Visual Thinking" from "The Ed Sullivan Show"!
For the the artist, nature can be many things--a source of sensations, a religion and vehicle for self-consciousness, a place to search for true self, and a provocation to imagination and inspiration. This world we all share is seen with unique and personal visions through the eyes of the talented filmmakers in this series. Where some some see lost edens, others see alien landscapes--where some pull out their view to encompass every creature under the Big Sky, others zoom in on the tiniest leaf-riding insect. Each unearths their art out of the flora and fauna of our Mother Earth, from the chaotic free jazz of Darwinian survival to the godly Bach-like architecture found in the skeleton of a single-cell organism. Awe-inspiring, intellectually stimulating, and truly majestic--come spend your late summer nights with us drinking in Nature's symphony.
8/07 @ 8pm / SERIES: Nature's Symphony Le Monde Du Silence shown with
Le Monde Sans Soleil
Description coming soon...
Watch a clip from "Le Monde Sans Soleil"!
Tickets - $10
8/14 @ 8pm / SERIES: Nature's Symphony Proteus shown with
The Hellstrom Chronicle
Man's dream of uniting nature and art forms the subject of Proteus, the first feature from avant-garde filmmaker David Lebrun. Proteus is a one-of-a-kind investigation into 19th-century artist/biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose major work "Art Forms in Nature" synthesized his two disparate passions by presenting gorgeous hand-drawn lithographs of 4,000 species, all of which were previously unidentified single-celled sea creatures called radiolarian. Lebrun, who reportedly spent two decades making the film, found the ideal way to convey Haeckel's unique images: by taking the actual drawings and animating them in ways that make the splendiferous orbs and tentacles dance in carefully choreographed arrays. In the end, Lebrun makes us contemplate the majestic vastness of the natural universe and its complex artistic perfection in ways that only Haeckel could have imagined.
"From childhood nightmares to adult schizophrenia, the insect is a common fixation on the human mind--partly because his face seems so evil, partly because he is so indestructible." So says the theatrical Dr. Nils Hellstrom (played with hammy gusto by actor Lawrence Pressman), who narrates The Hellstrom Chronicle, a documentary in the same alarming tone of a '50s "Red scare" film, rendering the oddest of nature film concoctions--a piece of anti-insect propoganda! His tone is deadly serious, except when laughing at our futility in the face of the murder bugs that surround us at all times, ready to take over at the first sign of our weakness. Hellstrom's obsessive, mind-blowing arguments are also supported by spaced-out microphotography and a switched-on Lalo Schifrin jazz-funk score, making the film into an incredible head movie, an audio-visual bug-out on the bug world that's informative and entertaining at the same time. Best Documentary winner at the '71 Oscars and '72 BAFTAs, as well as the recipient of the Technical Grand Prize at Cannes, it's the best way to prepare for the welcome of your inevitable insect overlords. And that's not science fiction--that's science FACT, baby!
Watch a clip from "The Hellstrom Chronicle"!
Tickets - $10
8/21 @ 8pm / SERIES: Nature's Symphony The Great Adventure shown with
Louisiana Story The Great Adventure is the subtlest of coming-of-age stories, an ode to dual "lost paradises": the childhood of Man and every man's childhood. Nature is seen as a beautiful but cruel Eden we have left behind forever, and this is reflected through one boy's passing friendship with an young otter, a connection as passing as the seasons. This enchanting film could only have been made by one man, Arne Sucksdorff: as a child raised near the pastoral forests of northern Sweden, Sucksdorff had an innate feel for nature, and was a child prodigy of animal wrangling. His films are populated with the otters, foxes, and other wild fauna he befriended and tamed. Mixing his cast with indigenous animals, and filming them with award-winning photographic skill, he was able to capture the images and scenes he needed for his poetic vision--a fox playfully teasing an otter, or an owl silently, quickly and ferociously catching a mouse. His view is magical, but not sugarcoated. Nature is a dangerous place, where life and death hangs in the balance, and also a place of wonder. A great adventure.
As in The Great Adventure, Louisiana Story presents the natural world as experienced through youthful eyes, this time in the form a young Cajun living in the bayou. Director Robert Flaherty--the pioneer who virtually invented the documentary feature with Nanook of the North--was a nature boy himself; as a 19th-century child in the fading Old West, Flaherty would join his explorer father on month-long canoe trips and Arctic snowshoeing runs. His identification with this film's hero is clear, and he shares the young boy's sensitivity to the peaceful beauty of his surroundings. Louisiana Story later takes a fascinating turn, when that same curious gaze is turned upon the new machinery and derricks the oil industry has built in those same swamps. The camera stares at these various metal giants without judgement, but with simple curiousity--their function is irrelevant, their images reduced to abstractions. In this way, Flaherty's final feature treats both man and nature with the same legendarily skilled and sensitive eye.
Watch a clip from "Lousiana Story"!
Tickets - $10
8/28 @ 8pm / SERIES: Nature's Symphony Ape and Super-Ape
Bert Haanstra, a legend in the Netherlands and one of the greatest of nature documentarians, delivered his magnum opus with Ape And Super-Ape. The scope of the film is massive and encompassing on numerous levels--artistically, intellectually, and geographically. Haanstra travelled to the literal farthest corners of the world, covering over 150,000 miles, and taking over three years to collect stunning footage of the animal kingdom, which demonstrated his thesis of the survival of all species on this planet. Before shooting, Haanstra lived like a hermit, studied dozens of books on the subject, and meditated upon how to make this film appeal to a wide audience, and not just a few biologists. The final result is a masterpiece. Ape and Super-Ape is both serious, even savage, in subject matter, yet often playful in treatment--full of witty montages and clever crosscutting between human and animal behavior, a killer jazz score, and a laconic voiceover commentary that both add to the images and sometimes undermines them. It is visually beautiful, moving, entertaining, thought-provoking, humorous--but above all, remorseless. Tickets - $10
Jim Henson Commercials and Experiments
The Dark Crystal
Muppet Fairy Tales
Muppet History 101
Proteus
The Great Adventure
Ape and Super-Ape
