DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The Seventh Seal is one of those films that serves as a reminder of what a shame it is that film, in the United States anyway, tends to be ghettoized as little more than a vehicle for entertainment. Without getting into a whole debate over the declining status of arts and literature in schools, there’s no reason that curricula that do still have room for Shakespeare, Mozart, and Van Gogh shouldn’t have space for films like this as well. Ingmar Bergman’s best known work (based on his own play), has just as much elegance, importance, and philosophical heft as the works of any of those masters of their mediums. A very young and stoic Max von Sydow plays a knight just returned from the Crusades, which have sorely tested his faith, to find that the Sweden to which he has returned has been ravaged by the Plague. Wanting only to see his wife again, he finds that Death (personified as the pale figure in a black cloak that we now readily associate with the character in pop culture) has come for him as well. The Knight challenges him to a game of chess for his life, during which the country around them deals with the constant presence of death among them. There’s no denying the allegorical connections to the Cold War, but Bergman’s extraordinary story transcends attempts to date the work in much the same fashion as Camus’ The Plague. His vision of humankind’s struggle with its own mortality is breathtaking and utterly essential viewing.
View the trailer.
Playing tonight through Tuesday at the AFI.
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Bringing Home the Anacostia — Restoring the People’s River:
The conditions in and around the Anacostia are a frequent topic of discussion around these parts, and is the subject of a short documentary produced, in part, by the Anacostia Watershed Society. Local director Todd Clark tells the history of the river and the communities that grew up around it, as well as their subsequent downfall, in an effort to both educate us on what we’ve lost by allowing the river itself (and, by extension, the surrounding communities) to deteriorate, and to give direction on how the situation can be turned around. The screening will be used as a springboard for a discussion of the renewal of the river, led by AWS president Robert Boone, after the screening. We only wish they could have found a more opportune time than a Wednesday morning to do so.
Screens March 5 at 10:30 a.m. at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum. Free, for reservations, call 202.633.4844.
