Nitehawk’s Art Seen Series Presents Bluebeard in 35MM!

Nitehawk Cinema has teamed up with Absolut to bring you another installment in the Art Seen series—the mission being to show the relationship between film and visual art by showcasing works that are most often screened in a gallery setting. Introduced by Noah Isenberg, author of the new critical biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, the next movie to be screened will be Bluebeard.

If you haven't heard of Bluebeard, here's what Caryn Coleman, Nitehawk's senior film programmer, had to say:

Art and horror make a perfect marriage in cinema. From Albert Lewin’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, artworks in film history have imbued a killer instinct. But rarely has the murderous spirit of artistic failure been presented as beautifully ominous as in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard (1944).

Featuring one of film’s first serial killers, the narrative in Bluebeard is a mixture between Jack the Ripper and the other notorious woman killer, Bluebeard. It contains Ulmer’s signature style of continuous background music, contrasting light and shadow, and a slight dose of humor to unfold the Faustian tale of Gaston Morel, an artist doomed to murder every woman whom he paints. Morel (played by the iconic actor John Carradine in one of his few leading roles) has experienced romantic disappointment so deeply that he’s developed a rather nasty lethal habit. And while he’s moved on to sculpting marionettes as a way to fulfill creative urges and to not indulge in murderous impulses, Morel’s desire to paint still overwhelms him as his nefarious art dealer continues to pressure him for artworks to sell. When a lovely innocent woman enters into his life, not ironically after a remarkable scene depicting Morel’s marionettes in a performance of Faust, Morel recognizes how truly flawed he is. Regardless, his desire to paint overwhelms him even as police investigators are hot on his trail. You get the sense that he quite enjoys getting away with it all.

With its story of sex, murder, and greed (not bad for a film in the early 1940s!), Bluebeard was unsurprisingly a commercial success upon release. Today, however, it gets lost in the discussion of director Edgar G. Ulmer’s better known films, like The Black Cat (1945), Ruthless (1948), and the quintessential noir classic, Detour (1945). Operating mostly outside of the Hollywood system, Edgar G. Ulmer (the original King of the B’s) is a fascinating character whose rather notorious mysterious life is somewhere between fact and fiction. All of this is explored and solved (at least in that we learn to resign to the uncertainties) in scholar Noah Isenberg’s brilliant new critical biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins. He’ll be offering these insights on Ulmer and Bluebeard in his screening introduction to the best horror film you’ve never seen this Thursday night.

Nitehawk Cinema's Art Seen Screening
February 20 at Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
7:30 PM 

Tickets are only $15 and are available through Nitehawk Cinema's website.