Staff Pick: Secret Ceremony (35mm)

Zach’s Staff Pick!

May is a month for mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers, and Secret Ceremony (1968). By turns absurd, sad, comic and unnerving, Joseph Losey’s baroque family tragedy whirls like a dismantled nesting doll in a box of mirrors. An ornate house of mystery filled with wondrous fragments from an unknown past serves as the mythic backdrop for the transgressive tableau of shifting identity and protean intensity that is SECRET CEREMONY. Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow form a wounded duet that is interrupted by perverse emblem of patriarchy Robert Mitchum. Beautifully photographed by Gerry Fisher. Come gather nuts in May– with Taylor, Farrow and Mitchum in the existential disquiet of spring, at the Roxie. – Zach Von Joo

“SECRET CEREMONY invokes a lot for me, but most of all it just reminds me of sitting in the dark at the Castro.”

Directed by Joseph Losey. Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Mitchum, Mia Farrow, Peggy Ashcroft, Pamela Brown & Robert Douglas.