This month, Metrograph in New York will be exclusively showing new restorations of four of Radley Metzger’s finest films.
Presented in person by Ashley West (The Rialto Report) and Rob King (author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger)
Saturday 18 April, 10.15pm
Naked Came The Stranger (1975)
Sunday 19th April, 7.30pm
Therese and Isabelle (1968)
Friday 24th April, 9.30pm
The Image (1975)
Saturday 25th April, 10.30pm
Maraschino Cherry (1977)
“The name Radley Metzger has long stood for a particular auteurist promise in adult film of the 1960s and 1970s: European-inflected settings, Ophulsian technique, and a canny sense of the permeable boundaries between art cinema and sex film. But that promise is shadowed by his divided career—split between 1960s softcore and 1970s hardcore, between films released under his own name and those under his nom-de-porn ‘Henry Paris,’ as well as between literary fidelity and cinephile invention. This short series groups together four new restorations that speak across these divides: two ‘Radley Metzger’ softcore (or quasi-softcore) films—Therese and Isabelle (1968) and The Image (1976)—and two ‘Henry Paris’ hardcore entries—Naked Came the Stranger (1975) and Maraschino Cherry (1978). Together, they reveal a filmmaker whose pursuit of auteurist legitimacy in adult film was enlivened by a counter-impulse toward masks and mischief.”
—Rob King, series curator, film historian and author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger
