Warsaw Bridge (October 3rd at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[WARSAW BRIDGE screens Monday October 3 rd at 7 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum will be on hand to introduce and discuss the film.]

Distilling a film like this into words for a review is no easy task. There isn't really anything that could be called a plot in WARSAW BRIDGE, but that doesn't mean it isn't about anything. It's essentially a meditation on the arts – literature, sculpture, classical music, opera, photography, film, even cooking all get their due – and the ways in which they effect and are effected by outside forces. The one element that recurs through the film is a writer who has written an award winning book called Warsaw Bridge. He discusses his work with various people, telling a journalist that he cannot give a synopsis of it, and debating with a friend about the merits or lack thereof in modifying a work to reach an audience.

Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Cleveland Cinematheque October 3rd

[Press release from the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of America’s most prominent film critics, will appear in person on Monday, October 3, at 7:00 pm at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Boulevard in University Circle.

Rosenbaum will introduce and discuss one of his favorite films, WARSAW BRIDGE, a 1990 feature by Catalan underground filmmaker Pere Portabella. Rosenbaum describes the movie as  an “opulent post-Franco color film [that] threads its own dazzling anthology of attractions (including operas, concerts, a lecture, a novel, a swank party, a forest fire, and sex) into something resembling (though never quite arriving at) a single narrative.” Tickets, at the door only, cost $9; Cinematheque members and CIA and CWRU I.D. holders $7; ages 25 & under $5 (with proof of age).