Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation

3/5/10 to 4/16/10

A masterly director who spent most of his career in exile from red-baiting America, Joseph Losey pursued an ethical cinema that investigated the limits of personal freedom. We survey his work from impressive noirs like The Prowler and M on through his years in Britain, including his remarkable collaborations with Dirk Bogarde.

Read full description

The Servant, March 21

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

M
Friday, March 5 8:40 pm
Joseph Losey (U.S., 1951). A shadowy Los Angeles becomes the id-like setting for Losey's remake of Fritz Lang's Weimar classic, offering a chilling study in the pathology of the mob. With short Youth Gets a Break. (108 mins)
View Details
M
Saturday, March 6 6:30 pm
Joseph Losey (U.S., 1951). With short Youth Gets a Break. See March 5. (108 mins)
View Details
The Big Night
Saturday, March 6 8:45 pm
Joseph Losey (U.S., 1951). A shocking act of violence sends teen John Barrymore Jr. into a nocturnal adult netherworld in this complex coming-of-age melodrama, which presents trenchant commentary on love, shame, fatherhood, and race relations. “Losey's energetic, almost nervous direction keeps the film bristling throughout.”-The Auteurs (75 mins)
View Details
The Boy with Green Hair
Sunday, March 7 3:00 pm
Joseph Losey (U.S., 1948). Twelve-year-old Dean Stockwell comes up against the forces of conformity in this uneasy fable. “Imagine a cozy Disney feature crossed with an allegory on war and racism, and you have some idea of the bizarre flavor of Losey's first feature.”-Time Out. With short Pete Roleum and His Cousins. (102 mins)
View Details
The Sleeping Tiger
Wednesday, March 10 7:00 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1954). In Losey's first British film, criminal Dirk Bogarde is invited to move into a psychiatrist's home, and soon puts the moves on the good doctor's wife. “A masterpiece that argues that as far as film directing is concerned, style is content.”-Senses of Cinema (89 mins)
View Details
The Servant
Sunday, March 21 5:00 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1963). Let's play master and servant! Dirk Bogarde is a conniving Jeeves to James Fox's helpless member of the idle class in this striking parable, Losey's first collaboration with Harold Pinter. (115 mins)
View Details
These Are the Damned
Sunday, March 21 7:20 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1965). Losey envisions a world of mad scientists, irradiated children, and Teddy Boy toughs in a hybrid sci-fi thriller pervaded by Cold War pessimism. (96 mins)
View Details
Eve
Friday, March 26 7:00 pm
Joseph Losey (France/Italy, 1962). As shameless temptress Jeanne Moreau toys with novelist Stanley Baker, Antonioni cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo makes Venice and Rome look far from Edenic. (119 mins)
View Details
Time Without Pity
Friday, March 26 9:20 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1957). In this white-knuckle thriller, Michael Redgrave plays a barely-on-the-wagon father racing the clock to prove the innocence of a son soon to be executed for murder. Cinematography by the great Freddie Francis. (85 mins)
View Details
Accident
Sunday, March 28 5:45 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1967). Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker star in a study of masculine malaise among the scholarly set. “A coldly funny puzzle movie, about the erotic entanglements of Oxford as superbly entangled by scenarist Harold Pinter.”-Chicago Reader (105 mins)
View Details
Blind Date
Friday, April 2 7:00 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1959). A hep young painter finds himself a murder suspect in this jazzy whodunit that highlights Losey's eye for art and his preoccupation with interior space. (95 mins)
View Details
Modesty Blaise
Friday, April 2 9:00 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1966). Miniskirted super-agent Monica Vitti battles criminal mastermind Dirk Bogarde in Losey's stylish spy sendup that skewers the generals as well as the genre. (119 mins)
View Details
King and Country
Sunday, April 4 5:45 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1964). Army lawyer Dirk Bogarde is assigned to defend deserter Tom Courtenay in this antiwar masterwork set in the grim trenches of World War I. Repeated on April 8. (86 mins)
View Details
King and Country
Thursday, April 8 7:30 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1964). See April 4. (86 mins)
View Details
Boom!
Friday, April 9 9:00 pm
Joseph Losey (U.K., 1968). In a camp classic written by Tennessee Williams, “professional guest” Richard Burton descends upon the Mediterranean mansion of declining dowager Elizabeth Taylor. “Losey and cameraman Douglas Slocombe make it look gorgeous in a pile-up of baroque detail.”-Time Out (110 mins)
View Details
Mr. Klein
Saturday, April 10 8:20 pm
Joseph Losey (France, 1976). Alain Delon plays an art dealer pursuing a Jewish alter ego through Nazi-occupied Paris. Losey's French-language thriller investigates the price of apathy in the face of war's horrors. (122 mins)
View Details
The Prowler
Friday, April 16 9:10 pm
Joseph Losey (U.S., 1951). “A rivetingly cool, clean thriller about the trap that inexorably closes on a woman unhappily married to a rich husband, and a cop on the make. . . . (With) superb performances from Evelyn Keyes and Van Heflin . . . and direction that grips like a steel claw.”-Time Out. With short A Gun in His Hand. (111 mins)
View Details

Joseph Losey: Pictures of Provocation

3/5/10 to 4/16/10

Joseph Losey was a contradiction. Even before his first feature, The Boy with Green Hair (1948), was completed, this young stage director turned filmmaker had been tagged a red-leaning troublemaker by the House Un-American Activities Committee. During the production of his fifth film, The Big Night (1951), which followed on the heels of two bleak but impressive projects, The Prowler and M (also released in 1951), Losey was subpoenaed to testify before HUAC. Rather than do so, he left for Europe, never to return. What followed was a difficult career of artistic creation in exile, never quite settled, never quite recognized, but always advancing his masterful skills in the medium, eventually abandoning genre for a more personal cinema. So where's the contradiction? Throughout his forty-year career, Losey seemed preoccupied with the limits of personal awareness and the freedom that arises from it. His fully faceted characters confront ethical dilemmas-hypocrisy, personal weakness, moral fallibility-and more often than not fail to retain their integrity. Losey's characters lack the very freedom he sought throughout his own life. From darkly rendered noirs like The Sleeping Tiger (1954) and Time Without Pity (1957), through the critiques of war's infernal price, These Are the Damned (1965) and King and Country (1966), to his superlative portraits of battered egos in Eve (1962), The Servant (1963), and Accident (1967), Joseph Losey never erred from ethical forthrightness. Instead he proffered what he called “pictures of provocation,” pictures that engage our self-awareness.

Less

Series curated by Steve Seid and Peter Conheim. PFA wishes to thank the following individuals and organizations for their contributions to this series: Patricia Losey; Fleur Buckley, BFI; Delphine Selles, French Ministry of Culture; David Pendleton, Harvard Film Archive; Daniel Rooney, National Archives; Marie-Pierre Lessard, Cinémathèque Québécoise; Jared Sapolin and Helena Brissenden, Sony Pictures; May Haduong, Academy Film Archive; Todd Wiener and Steven Hill, UCLA Film and Television Archive; Mary Keene, MOMA; and Laurence Berbon, Tamasa Distribution.