A middle-aged Wall-Street broker, Mark likes spending time in the Vermeer galleries at the Met when he’s off work. One day, he meets a French actress named Anna, who looks exactly like The Girl with a Pearl Earring and leaves her his number. The story about the impossible romance between the world of money and the world of art by the important American experimental filmmaker Jon Jost won the Caligari Film Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1991. Garage Screen will present the premiere of the restored version.
Anna lives with two flatmates: an opera singer who rehearses arias day and night and a girl from a wealthy family who collects contemporary painting. Overcome by financial difficulties, she turns to Mark for help, causing a comical and painful misunderstanding between them: Mark sees their relationship as pure and sublime, while Anna does not want to become a kept woman. Narrative scenes are intermingled with pan shots of the harbor, the museum, and the girls’ apartment to a soundtrack of avant-garde jazz. In All the Vermeers, the rich, insatiable, and breathtakingly beautiful New York of the late 1980s, shot on 35mm film during the golden hour, is almost always seen through windows. Trying to relax amidst art, its characters are locked inside rigid geometric shots and suffer, not knowing what they want from life.
For an experienced viewer, Jost’s comedy will present a special treat—a cinephile feast with references to Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras, and Chantal Akerman, and starring Emmanuelle Chaulet of Éric Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
All the Vermeers in New York
Director: Jon Jost
USA, 1990. 87 min. 18+
