The Last Waltz – Screening at the Ridgefield Playhouse

Martin Scorsese’s Award Winning Rock Documentary “The Last Waltz” Returns to Theaters with a Screening at The Ridgefield Playhouse on January 26

“It started as a concert. It became a celebration.” Martin Scorsese’s award winning documentary returns to the big screen!  More than just one of the greatest concert films ever made, The Last Waltz is an at once ecstatic and elegiac summation of a vital era in American rock music. The Last Waltz screens at The Ridgefield Playhouse on Thursday, January 26, 2023 at 7:30pm as part of the Cohen and Wolf P.C. Movie Series, Pepsi Rock Series Driven by North American Motor Car, and WPLR Films That Rock Series. Invited to document the farewell performance of the legendary group The Band at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving, 1976, Martin Scorsese conceived a new kind of music documentary. Enlisting seven camera operators (including renowned cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond, László Kovács, and Michael Chapman) and art director Boris Leven to design the strikingly theatrical sets, Scorsese created a grandly immersive experience that brings viewers onstage and inside the music itself. That music—as performed by The Band and a host of other generation-defining artists, including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, the Staple Singers, Muddy Waters, and Neil Young—lives on as an almost religious expression of the transcendent possibilities of rock and roll. The documentary features standout performances by these rock legends, as well as interviews tracing the group’s history and discussing road life. The Last Waltz is hailed as one of the greatest documentary concert films ever made. In 2019, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.