NEW YORK: Since last Thanksgiving, Village audiences have been turning out in force at the Film Forum for I'm Not There, so the theater shouldn't have too much trouble drawing an audience for a week-long showing (February 1-7) of D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, the documentary record of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of the United Kingdom, complete with Joan Baez singing away in her own little bubble, Dylan's notorious manager Albert Grossman auditioning for Tony Hendra's role in This Is Spinal Tap (and maybe Joe Pesci's role in GoodFellas), drop-in appearances by Donovan and Alan Price, and one of the all-time great pre-MTV music videos, with Dylan standing in the street flipping cue cards while Allen Ginsberg standing off to the sidelines looking as if he knows deep and ancient truths, even if he was really just wondering about the location of the buffet table. Released in 1967, Pennebaker's movie established Dylan as an icon of movie cool, much more effectively than his early attempts at actual movie "acting" (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Renaldo and Clara). If you've never seen it, you'll want to check it out to decide for yourself how the man himself compares with Cate Blanchett.
On February 1, as part of its "Golden Silents" program, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is hosting a special one-night event, a rare screening of Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, a 1927, sixty-seven-minute film by the men who made King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The simple story about a family farm in a jungle setting is a pretext for the exciting natural wildlife footage; the movie includes fights with big cats and a bang-up elephant stampede — make no mistake, animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. But its mixture of awe in the face of natural beauty and man-on-safari edginess will help you understand why everyone in Hollywood understood that the jungle-raping showman in King Kong was a Cooper self-portrait. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by the Alloy Orchestra.
