Fundamentals of Cinema: Danaos Cinema presents Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia”

The screening section Fundamentals of Cinema: New Classics, following its official launch during the 66th Thessaloniki International Film Festival with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a first screening of Magnolia on 19/11 at Stavros Tornes Hall, is now coming to Athens.

Specifically, the masterful Magnolia (1999) by Paul Thomas Anderson will be screened on Thursday, November 27 (20:00) at Danaos Cinema.

This year’s screenings of the acclaimed series come with a special surprise: in the foyer of Stavros Tornes Hall and Danaos Cinema, a specially designed area will host free XR film viewings from the Immersive: All around Cinema section-each time a different one-expanding our perception of the boundaries and identity of the cinematic image-language.
The XR screenings will begin one hour before the Fundamentals of Cinema: New Classics feature (19:30 at Stavros Tornes Hall and 19:00 at Danaos Cinema respectively). The XR program will open with the film that won the Golden Alexander Immersive Award at the 27th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, The Sweet End of the World! by Stefano Conca Bonizzoni.

This year’s refreshed Fundamentals of Cinema focuses on contemporary cinematic masterpieces from the late 20th and early 21st century-works expected to become future landmarks in cinephile culture as well as in academic and theoretical discourse.

Having received effusive praise from both Ingmar Bergman (who lauded it as “a resounding proof of the power of American cinema”) and critic Roger Ebert (who ranked it as the second-best film of 1999), Magnolia stands among the elite films that radically redefined the narrative and stylistic course of American cinema at the end of the 1990s.

Riding the success of Boogie Nights (1997), Paul Thomas Anderson found himself in a privileged position. On one hand, he received a blank cheque-along with the right to the final cut-from New Line Cinema for his next project, without even needing to submit the script for initial approval. On the other hand, he secured a major star for the cast: Tom Cruise, who went on to win a Golden Globe and receive an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Initially intending to tell a simple story about everyday people-a quiet love letter to the San Fernando Valley in California-Anderson gradually developed a sprawling tapestry inspired by personal experience and stories from his youth. The film evolved into an epic mosaic in which the fates, doubts, lives and guilt of ten seemingly unrelated individuals intertwine in countless ways. The result is a polyphonic work that seeks-futilely and yet redemptively at the same moment-answers to grief, loss, forgiveness, mortality and the vanity of human existence.

Paying homage to Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), and with Aimee Mann’s songs setting the melancholic tone, Magnolia resembles its namesake: a beautiful flower voluntarily shedding its petals one by one.

FUNDAMENTALS OF CINEMA: NEW CLASSICS

Magnolia
(USA, 1999)

Director–Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, Jason Robards, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Baker Hall, John C. Reilly
Languages: English, German, French
Color, 181’

A meticulous mosaic of coincidences, intersections and interdependencies-at once a complex tribute to Robert Altman’s Short Cuts-that masterfully interweaves the destinies of ten disparate characters into a cinematic meditation on reconciliation and disappointment, guilt and omission.