Saturday | March 8, 2014 9:00 pm

I Shot Jesse James

Screening on Film

Directed by Samuel Fuller.
With Preston Foster, Barbara Britton, John Ireland.
US, 1949, 35mm, color, 81 min.

Sam Fuller’s first film belongs to an ensemble that includes Henry King (Jesse James, 1939), Fritz Lang (The Return of Frank James, 1940), and Nicholas Ray (The True Story of Jesse James, 1957). Countering the myth of a six-gun Robin Hood, closer to the grain of Shock Corridor, Fuller treats the robber as a psychopath, driven to die. Varying on the iterations of the “picture-hanging sequence” the director suggests that James almost invites his own demise. Fuller’s claim to make films of intense visual emotion finds its early expression in this masterwork.

February 14 – March 22, 2014

Fortunes of the Western

June 19–August 30, 2015

The Complete Samuel Fuller

July 5–October 27

Melville et Cie.

September 6–November 7

Psychedelic Cinema

September 29–December 1

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

October 18–November 3

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

November 8

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

November 9–December 9

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

November 10–24

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

November 11

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

November 23

Wings of a Serf