The Screengrab : pacific film archives

The Rep Report (April 14 - April 22)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:30:00 GMT

NEW YORK: So far as Western critics and film historians were concerned for most of the past half century, the writer-director Satyajit Ray was that country's film industry, a personal artist whose working methods and concern placed him very much at odds with the Bollywood factory. And as Bollywood films have acquired an exotic cachet in the West in recent years, Ray has slipped into perhaps the greatest chasm of neglect of any long-canonized film artist, a man whose vast body of work is seldom seen in retrospectives and next to nonexistent in terms of representation on home video. "First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy" (April 15-30) at Film Society of Lincoln Center provides a rare chance to catch up with the master's work through the early 1970s, starting with the films that make up the legendary " Apu trilogy" (Pather Panchali, Aparjito, and The World of Apu) and concluding with the lesser-known "Calcutta trilogy", an attempt to portray an India changing not necessarily for the better, The Adversary, Company Limited, and The Middleman. Also included are such rarely screened but highly cherished films as Three Daughters, Devi, and Days andf Nights in the Forest, as well as Shyam Benegal's 1982 documentary Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker.

The Museum of Modern Art hosts a retrospective of the films directed by Mike Nichols, from his first, hugely successful films, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate through to his more recent Closer and Charlie Wilson's War. Also included are his theatrical adaptations for HBO, Wit and the two-part Angels in America, both starring Emma Thompson. The program runs from tonight through May 1.

BERKELEY: On Thursday, April 16, Pacific Film Archives screens the camp classic cautionary exploitation film Reefer Madness sweetened with a "Live musical soundtrack by UC Berkeley student DJs. Plus shorts and reefer rolling contest!" We make no judgements here at the Screengrab. Now shut up and pass the brownies.

ALBERTA, CANADA: The Calgary Underground Film Festival runs from tonight through April 19. The lineup includes Azazel Jacobs's Momma's Man, the documentaries Nerdcore Rising, Veer, and Monsterland, and the omnibus flick Tokyo!. Plus a number of shorts, including the seasonal horror comedy Treevenge, which can be sampled in the clip below:

The Rep Report (February 27 - March 5)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.

Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster. The retrospective, which runs for a couple of weeks, also includes Alan Rudolph and writer Bud Shrake's joyously entertaining Songwriter, in which Rip demonstrates that he may be the only man alive who can turn Willie Nelson into his straight man; the little-seen 1970 Tropic of Cancer, starring Rip as Henry Miller; Milton Moses Ginsburg's Coming Apart, a virtual one-man show with Rip as a demented psychiatrist filming himself in a mirror; Beyond the Law, another Mailer psychodrama; and the more recent 40 Shades of Blue, starring the grizzled older Torn as a legendary Southern music producer. There's also a special program labeled "A Rip Torn Miscellanea", consisting of "rare footage of Torn, including documentation of some of his renowned stage performances, forgotten talk-show appearances, excerpts from some of his lesser-known film and TV work," including a half-hour TV film from 1976 in which he plays Walt Whitman.

SAN FRANCISCO: At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Fearless: Strand Releasing Turns 20" is in full swing and continues through Saturday and continues from March 6 through March 8. This celebration of the risk-taking distributor's films includes a double feature from the neglected French director-actor Jacques Nolot, Before I Forget and Porn Theater.

BERKELEY: "Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran" at Pacific Film Archives (March 1 - April 29) is a "celebration of women filmmakers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the diaspora in Europe" that offers "a remarkable geographic, cultural, and stylistic range. In documentaries, features, and experimental works, the directors depict urban attitudes and rural traditions, the dream of escape and the isolation of exile, and the comforts and entrapments of family." Director-actress Niki Karimi will be present at the opening-day screenings of her One Night and A Few Days Later... The program also includes Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini's wrenching The Day I Became a Woman and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated memoir Persepolis.

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI: The True/False Film Festival, which kicked off last night and runs through the weekend, is an international documentary festival with a fast-growing reputation based on the breadth and quality of its selections, which last year included this year's Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, Man on Wire. indieWIRE has an interview with festival founders David Wilson and Paul Sturtz.

The Rep Report (November 14--21)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to the late, great Manny Farber with the kind of celebration every film critic (every film nut, for that matter) has probably dreamed of being held in his honor: a couple week's worth of movies that inspired Farber to kick the theater seat in front of him in happy excitement, and to kick out the jams when he sat down to transfer that excitement to his writing about them. Any enthusiast of Farber's will notice something missing that's essential to their own conception of The Manny Farber Experience, but the programmers have certainly done an admirable job of indicating the wide range of Farber's taste, from the grungy crime movies (Howard Hawks's Scarface, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground) and suggestive scare flicks (the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie) and motor-mouthed comedies (His Girl Friday, Preston Sturges's Christmas in July) that Farber pegged as the pride of old Hollywood to such art-house fare as Resnais's Muriel, Godard's Two or Three Things I know About Her, and experimental films by Michael Snow and Jean-Marie Straub. The double bill of the season just might be Don Siegel's The Lineup, a charged thriller based on a forgotten TV series and starring Eli Wallach as a demented hit man, with the classic Chuck Jones cartoon One Froggy Evening. This Sunday, the program also pairs up two short documentaries inspired by Farber's work: Chris Petit's 1999 Negative Space, which includes interviews with both Manny and his soul brother Dave Hickey, and Untitled: New Blue, Paul Schrader's five-minute look at one of Farber's paintings. Schrader will be on hand to introduce the film, and as an associate of Neil Young's once said of another associate of Neil Young's that boy can flat yap.

Film Forum begins a week-long tribute to director Les Blank, a documentarian whose range of subjects--mainly food, filmmaking, music, and wild women--clearly designate him as one of God's better ideas. Included are Blank's classic tribute to Mardi Gras Indians, Always for Pleasure (1978), whose title could also apply very nicely to his career, as could his 1968 God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance. Other films included cover the life and work of bluesmen Lightinin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Louisiana musicians CLifton Chenier and Michael Doucet, and Flaco Jimenez, as well as garlic, polka, Tex-Mex, and Werner Herzog, seen in the double bill Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and the short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is literally about what it says it's about. To gorge on this stuff is to come to a fresh understanding of just how thoroughly you've misspent most of your own life.

Also dropping in at the Forum for a week: Charlie Ahearn's 1982 Wild Style, in a spanking new 35-mm. print. Starring a celebrated graffiti artist, Lee Quinones, and shot in New York back in the day when the city had graffiti, Wild Style was a mainstay of cable TV's Night Flight in the late 1980s, and it seems to come back about once every ten years. To be honest, I've never been able to remain focused on it for all of its 82 minutes. But its hardcore fans don't worship at its altar because Ahearn was a master filmmaker or any kind of storyteller; they revere the movie, which includes glimpses of Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew, the Cold Crush Brothers, artist Sandra Fabara, and onetime "downtown scene queen" Patti Astor, because it's a living record of a moment just before hip hop broke wide open, and because Ahearn had the taste, or the good luck, to capture that moment in a way that seemed to anticipate what was about to come. It's practically a federal law that any mention of the movie include the phrase "time capsule."

More pieces of time can be found at Anthology Film Archives, where they're kicking off an eight-film retrosepctive to 86-year-old director Arthur Penn, who I once referred to at this site as "the late" Arthur Penn, only to turn on TCM's Brando documentary to see him chattering away, still alive and looking more like Iggy Pop than ever. The AFA will be running his groundbreaking Bonnie & Clyde as well as some of the less heralded earlier films that offer tantalizing hints of the triumphs to come--The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman as Billy the Kid and the excellent film version of The Miracle Worker, but also his film maudit and first collaboration with Warren Beatty, the fascinating, unclassifable failure Mickey One (1965)--and the ambitious, sometimes fumbling attempts to follow it up (Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves.)

BERKELEY: "Discovering Teuvo Tulio" (November 15-December 4) at Pacific Film Archives offers those looking for something different and obscure (in our neck of the woods, anyway) the chance to catch up on "the wild and willful director of Finnish melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s." Tulio was an actor in silent films, earning the designation "Finland's Valentino." According to the PFA, when Tulio turned director, "he poured an erotic passion worthy of Valentino into the act of filmmaking itself. In his early 'haystack dramas,' Tulio paid homage to the spectacular nature cinematography of Scandinavian silents and retold classic coming-of-age stories, embellishing these with outrageous use of orchestral music and editing to rival Eisenstein (he produced and edited all his films of this era). As war approached, his themes and imagery became considerably darker, more urban and expressionistic. The thread that runs through all these films is the sexual frankness that overturns the very conventions Tulio so consciously resurrects. Surely if every woman who innocently engaged in premarital sex went down the road Tulio maps, prostitution would have accounted for half of Finland’s GDP." Not having seen any of the four films in the program, I can't vouch for any of this, but it sure caught my attention. Apparently Aki Kaurismaki is a big fan, and for all I know, Tulio may turn out to be the Douglas Sirk to his Fassbinder. So if you love The Man Without a Past, The Match Factory Girl and La Vie de Boheme--and if you don't, to hell with you, I say--here's your chance to see where their roots may lie.

The Rep Report (October 24-30)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: A dependable highlight of the Museum of Modern Art's film programming, "To Save and Project: The Sixth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation" (October 24–November 16) opens with Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Other seldom-seen, painstakingly restored and preserved items on the menu include Marco Ferreri's scandalous Dillinger Is Dead (1969); Ernst Lubitsch's 1025 version of Lady Windermere's Fan; the 1934 James Cagney-Bette Davis vehicle Jimmy the Gent; D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World; Anthony Mann's Korean War classic Men in War, and the 1947 musical That Man of Mine, "featuring a young Ruby Dee, who will appear after the screening in a discussion with historian Pearl Bowser." All in all, "baadasssss" is putting it mildly.

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to one of the lesser known fixtures of the "Fifth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers, serving this fall as artist in residence at PFA, with "I Love Beijing: The Films of Ning Ying" (October 23, 2008 - October 27). Educated in Italy and employed by Bernardo Bertolucci as his assistant director on The Last Emperor, Ning began her own directing career in 1992 with For Fun, which, along with On the Beat (1993) and I Love Beijing (2000), form her "Beijing trilogy", films in which she considers the current state of her native country with an informed, ironic sensibility and great affection. The PFA will be showing all these films, as well as Ning's most recent feature, Perpetual Motion (2005) and her documentary Railroad of Hope (2001), with the director in attendance.

The Rep Report (October 3 - October 10)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Jean Eustache has a solidly grounded reputation as a great director that is based mostly on one film: 1973's The Mother and the Whore, a three-hour, forty-minute sexual drama that he shot, in grainy black and white, in his own Paris apartment. Its admirers tend to speak of in the kind of hushed tones one might normally reserve for the second coming, but it's rarely screened, and most of Eustache's other work--he made one other feature, Mes petites amoureuses ("My Little Loves") and a handful of dramatic and documentary shorts before his suicide in 1981, a few weeks before what would have been his forty-third birthday--is much less well-known here. So "No Wave: The Cinema of Jean Eustache" (October 4--October 22) at Pacific Film Archives amounts to a real public service. In addition to both of Eustache's feature films and several of the shorts (including his debut film, the 1963 Bad Company), it includes Angel Diez's 1997 profile of the director, The Lost Sorrows of Jean Eustache.

CHICAGO: The 19th Annual Festival of Films from Iran opens at the Gene Siskel Fim Center this weekend, October 5, and runs through November 4. Iranian cinema started getting a lot of ink in the West about ten years ago with the arrival of Abbas Kiarostami and was widely reported to be the next big thing, but after a few years coverage of the "Iranian New Wave" started being slipped to the back burner. So if you're one of many who found the country's movie culture tantalizing before you started forgetting it existed, here's your chance to catch up. Most of the films are new, though the festival kicks off with two showings of Dariush Mehrjui's 1990 Hamoon, as a tribute to its star, Khosro Shakibai, who, it says here, "could be considered the Robert De Niro of Iran." Mehrjui himself will be in attendance at the screenings.

NEW YORK: Founded in the mid-'90s, Gen Art is a company "dedicted to showcasing emerging fashion designers, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists." The annual Gen Art Film Festival, whose slogan is "7 Premieres. 7 Parties", is a weeklong, streamlined affair that consists of seven feature films, each of which is paired with a short. Screenings to select the lineup of the 2009 festival begin October 21, and Gen Art is accepting applicants for volunteers to serve on the screening committee through October 10. I've served on screening committees myself in the past and have always found them a stimulating way to see what's going on out there just under the radar while meeting other people who care about movies and making bitter enemies who'll last a lifetime. Everybody bitches about the programming at film festivals but nobody does anything about it. If you live in New York and have four hours a week to spend looking at movies, here's your chance.

The Rep Report (June 5 --11)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:06:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives honors the late work of the consummate entertainer of twentieth-century Hollywood movies, Howard Hawks, with a series devoted to the movies Hawks directed from his 1948 classic Western Red River, with John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, through his later masterpiece with Wayne, Rio Bravo, down to their final collaborations (1967's El Dorado, featuring Robert Mitchum and a young James Caan, and the 1970 Rio Lobo, where you get to see Wayne beat up George Plimpton; the cast also includes Jack Elam and later Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox studios chief Sherry Lansing in her starlet days), which were assembled from parts scavenged from their predecessors. For Hawks fans, the series offers a chance to re-evaluate some works not usually ranked among his finest efforts, notably Land of the Pharoahs with Joan Collins, which proved that Hawks was no more a natural at getting English actors to look unembarrassed while pretending to be ancient Egyptians than any other mortal (even, or maybe especially, when he had William Faulkner working on the script) and Man's Favorite Sport?, starring Rock Hudson as an "expert" author of fishing book who thinks fish are disgusting. (The movie receives an extensive subtextual reading in Mark Rappaport's 1992 Rock Hudson's Home Movies.) In fact, the only Hawks feature from 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to the director's death in 1977 that's not included is his ambitious, personal, and disastrous 1965 race-car movie Red Line 7000. Maybe the programmers were afraid to screen it for fear that it still wouldn't look a lot better than Speed Racer.

"Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" (June 6-12) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center showcases the work of what the programmers see as "a new generation of Italian filmmakers .. defined by neither a political position nor an aesthetic approach but unified through a spirit of independence that has allowed them to break away from old models and genres." It includes Biùtiful Cauntri, an eco-minded drama that is being shown in conjunction with the Film Society's "Green Screens" program, and The Waltz, which tells its multi-character story in a single, continuous ninety-minute shot.

Opening today and running through June 15th: "NewFest 2008: The 20th Anniversary NY LGBT Film Festival". On tap and buzzed about: Affinity, Meadowlark, and the documentary SqueezeBox!, a movie whose accompanying party at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival took no prisoners.

BERKELEY: Through June, Pacific Film Archives presents a quartet of punk concert clips and documentaries just in time for anyone looking to get nostalgic over the fortieth anniversary of the summer when London punk in particular was in full, frothing snarl mode. The schedule begins tonight with The Blank Generation, which captures such New York bands as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Television when they were young, loud, and snotty. Still to come: D.O.A., in which Johnny Rotten does not spend the Sex Pistols' "terminal" American tour desperately looking for the man who's fatally poisoned him, and Penelope Spheeris's first and finest document of noisy West Coast alientation, 1981's The Decline... of Western Civilization.

The Rep Report (23--May 1)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: One of the strangest and most intriguing new filmmaking talents to emerge in recent years, the Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk gets his first complete U.S. retrosepctive, courtesy of the Museum of Modern art, running from April 23 to May 8. Originally typed as a bit of a sickie on the basis of his 2000 film The Isle, with its isolated, watery setting, creepy eroticized atmosphere, and creative use of fishhooks, Kim has continued to turn out deluxe midnight-movie fare (such as Samaritan Girl) while also revealing a more restrained, meditative side in such films as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring and the weird, mute romance 3-Iron. The MOMA show will be of special interest to old fans eager to get a look at some of his movies that haven't gotten much play here before, including his 1996 debut picture Crocodile.

"Creatively Speaking" (April 25-27) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is a series, curated by Michelle Materre and co-curated and produced by Neyda Martinez, that seeks to showcase "realistic, universal portrayals of people of color." It includes documentaries about the culture and political activism of South Africa, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, a concert honoring what would have been Bob Marley's sixtieth birthday, the African-American activist Robert F. Williams, and the roots and spread of hip hop culture, along with a number of dramatic short films. Each screening will be accompanied by a Q & A session afterwards.

FESTIVAL NEWS: In spring, the film geek's heart turns to thoughts of film festivals, where the hardcore faithful can seal themselves up in dark screening rooms to take refuge from all that sunshine and pollen. The Independent Film Festival of Boston, which was founded in 2003 and is already well-established as perhaps the city's premier yearly film event, kicks off on Wednesday, April 23, and runs through the 29th. This year's week-long bash includes new features from Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Harmony Korine (Mister Lonely), Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World), and the Hoop Dreams, Steve James and Peter Gilbert (At the Death House Door), as well as documentaries on Joy Division, Harlan Ellison (Dreams with Sharp Teeth), and George W. Bush's home away from home, Crawford, Texas. From April 25 through May 8, Pacific Film Archive will be running standout attractions from the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, including Ermanno Olmi's One Hundred Nails, Bela Tarr's The Man from London, Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut in Two, Roy Andersson's You, the Living, and Mock Up on Mu, the latest "pulp serial-cum-political tract" from Bay Area filmmaker and "culture jammer" Craig Baldwin. Across the border, Toronto's fifteenth annual Hot Docs Candaian International Documentary Film Festival begins on Thursday and spends eleven days showcasing the best in nonfiction filmmaking, including more than a hundred new pictures and retrospectives devoted to the work of Richard Leacock and Canada's own Jennifer Baichwal. And New York's youthful-and-still-growing counterweight to the city's fall festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, begins Wednesday and continues through May 4, with a handsome spread of independent and international films sandwiched in between the premieres of Baby Mama and Speed Racer. We'll have more to come on Tribeca as soon as it lands.

The Rep Report (April 8--18)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: Anyone who's had the aurally disheartening experience of watching a silent film with one of those canned, rinky-dink organ accompaniments that used to predominate public-television broadcasts should want to tip his hat to the Club Foot Orchestra, the San-Francisco-based ten-piece group that, starting in 1987, has composed and performed a whole string of new scores for various silent classics. On April 12, the Castro Theatre presents three great movies with live music from Club Foot: Buster Keaton's perfect comedy Sherlock Jr. as a special "discount-priced matinee", and an evening double bill of two peerless nightmares from Germany, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated vampire film Nosferatu. It's hard to think of a better way to treat your eyes and ears on a Saturday night.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives gets its goofy on with "American Nonsense: Frank Tashlin" (April 11--18), a retrospective of the work of the onetime Warner Bros. animation director who saw his years working with Bugs, Elmer, and Daffy as a mere apprenticeship for handling Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. In his most distinctive work, Tashlin used his "living cartoons' and color and the Cinemascope screen as tools with which to create a Silly Putty universe. Things kick off with Tashlin's rock and roll movie, The Girl Can't Help It, a Mansfield vehicle that includes performances by Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Platters, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, Abbey Lincoln, Eddie Cochran, and Julie London. Part of the humor now comes from the film's cluelessness about the staying power and the sound of rock; between that and the exaggerated sleaziness of its show business milieu, it's a movie in which Little Richard comes across as practically the most rational person on screen.

NEW YORK: The Fifteenth New York Annual Film Festival opens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on April 9 and runs through the 15th. This year's festival, which includes forty features from across the continent, includes a special focus on the emerging phenomenon on female African filmmakers, including Osvalde Lewat-Hallade, Ngozi Onwurah, Katy Léna Ndiaye, and Zina Saro Wiwa. The festivities will also include receptions honoring Charles Burnett, the director of Killer of Sheep, and Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soynika, to be held at the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery, adjacent to the Walter Reade Theater.

And we couldn't let this pass without a salute: tonight, at 7 P.M., the Film Society presents Erik Nelson's documentary profile of our man, Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which includes an original score by another living god, Richard Thompson. Both Nelson and Ellison his own bad self will be in attendance.

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 2)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: "The Clash of '68" (March 27 - April 23) at Pacific Film Archives commemorates the fortieth anniversary of May 1968, a time of intense political unrest across the globe and, what seems even more remarkable now, a time when those tensions were reflected in a series of high-profile movies. In its efforts to convey the full range of "revolutionary" political cinema at the time, the programming mixes some especially choice examples (including Alain Tanner's 1975 comedy Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, from a screenplay by John Berger; Bertolucci's Before the Revolution and Godard's La Chinoise; Costa-Gavras's torn-from-the-headlines thriller Z, which rewrote the rules on packaging political content in a commercial form; and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers required viewing at the Pentagon for those trying to learn how to fight an insurgency, and its controversial follow-up, Queimada! (better known here as Burn!) starring Marlon Brando) with such obscurities and oddities as The Revolutionary (1970), an allegorical look at campus activism starring young Jon Voight as a fellow called "A." (Attention, Steve Ditko!) Especially notable: A Grin without a Cat, one of the documentarian Chris Marker's obsessive yet playful meditations on where the heck we've been and how we all ended up here. Show up twenty minutes ahead of screening time and listen to Pacifica Radio's "Revolution Rewind Moments", aural montages of high points from 1968 as captured by news radio microphones. (The program is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg", at Berkeley Art Museum.)

Also at PFA: "Heinz Emigholz: Architecture as Autobiography" (April 1 - April 17) brings together five of the German filmmaker's "Photography and Beyond" documentaries, focusing on such architects as Louis Sullivan, Bruce Goff, and Rudolph Schindler. Emigholz will be in attendance at several of the screenings.

NEW YORK: Starting March 26, the Anthology Film Archives dusts off two of the early comedies of writer-director-star Albert Brooks. Like Woody Allen's earliest stuff, these movies are spotty, erratic, and not always so easy on the eyes, yet keep hitting wild streaks of comic inspiration that could have come from nobody else. Brooks's first film as a triple threat, the 1979 Real Life, in which he plays a documentarian who invades a "normal American family" household, was once a parody of the PBS series An American Family and now looks like a prescient vision of a time when it would seem as if nobody could walk to the bathroom without tripping over a camera cord. 1981's Modern Romance, about a malfunctioning love affair (between Brooks and Kathryn Harrold) that proves too dysfunctional to simply die, features a Qualuude-fueled routine by Brooks that's as funny as any five minutes of footage from the '80s.

The Rep Report (January 15 - January 22)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to the actor who, with no small degree of justice, can claim to be the face of the French New Wave with "Jean-Pierre Léaud: The New Wave and After" (January 18 - February 29). Leaud made his film debut at fifteen when Francois Truffaut cast him as Antoine Doinel, his youthful alter ago in the 1959 The 400 Blows. That would turn out to be a pretty steady gig, as he went on to reprise the character in three more features made between 1968's Stolen Kisses to the 1979 Love on the Run. All of them are included here, along with Truffaut's Day for Night and Two English Girls and Leaud's work for Godard (La Chinoise, Masculine Feminine, and Weekend, in which he has a cameo), Jacques Rivette (Out 1: Spectre), and Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore). The more recent films include Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep, which finds Leaud once again involved in making a movie within a movie, and another cameo appearance in La Vie de Boheme, arguably the funniest movie by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.

Also at PFA: "Vegetable, Mineral: Recent Experimental Documentaries" (January 15 - February 26) will include evenings devoted to the work of James Benning, Maryam Kashani, Rene Daalder, and the radical media collective Paper Tiger TV. On February 5, the program will also incorporate a presentation and booksigning by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, authors of the news study F Is for Phony.

LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art spends the weekend trying to get to the bottom of that sweet mystery of life that is David Lynch. Friday night, the museum screens Lynch's short films, while Saturday it celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of Eraserhead with a showing of a restored print of the film, a bad dream we never get tired of hearing recounted. On both nights, they're showing the strange new documentary Lynch, in which our hero can be seen directing Inland Empire, explaining to Laura Dern why she should be flattered when he calls her "tidbit", talking about the bad old days in Philadelphia, and letting the cigarette butts pile up on the concrete floor of his office. Maybe if enough people show up, the museum will have a heart and buy the guy an ashtray.

NEW YORK: For two weeks starting January 18, Film Forum brings back Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, the icy, beautiful 1961 film that did its part to make European cinema seem like a stylish thing to puzzle over. A style-setter in the area of fashion as much as in filmmaking, it has the not inconsiderable distinction of being the only film to win both the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and inclusion in Harry and Michael Medved's The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.

The Rep Report (January 11-15)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives launches a wide-ranging new retrospective, "The Medieval Remake" (January 11 - February 16), devoted to the many different flavors of medieval fantasy on film. (The series "was inspired by The Contagious Middle Ages in Post-Communist East Central Europe, an exhibition on view at the Townsend Center for the Humanities on the UC Berkeley campus through January.") We're not talking Robert Taylor and George Sanders jousting in tin costumes here; the whole program is strictly high end, with Takovsky's Andrei Rublev, Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, both Dreyer's and Bresson's takes on the story of Joan of Arc in the dock, a pair of Ingmar Bergman's flashbacks to the Dark Ages (The Seventh Seal and Virgin Spring), and Fritz Lang's two enormous, silent Nibelungen, baroque visual extravangas so large-scaled that Wagner himself might have wondered if maybe the director were laying it on a little thick. It's striking to be reminded of how many great directors of wildly varying ranges and styles have been drawn to this period and these stories, and it promises to be an amazing series. But you might want to stick Ivanhoe or Excalibur in your Netflix queue just to help you lighten up afterwards.

Hepcats, zoot suiters, and beboppers can usher in the new year at PFA with "Cool World: Jazz and the Movies" (January 12 - February 6), a series that mixes well-known films with jazzy scores and settings (such as The Man with the Golden Arm, featuring Frank Sinatra's great performance as a junkie poker dealer) and relative obscurities. Notable among the latter category are Sweet Love, Bitter, a low-budget 1967 drama that features a strong performance by the comedian-activist Dick Gregory as a character modeled on Charlie Parker, and All Night Long, a 1962, modern version of Othello set in London, that features Charles Mingus in an acting role as himself. (A clip from it appears in the documentary Mingus.)

NEW YORK: "John Ford at Fox" (January 12-February 2) spotlights the glory period that was the director's time at "the Hollywood studio closest to being Ford’s base." (It's the same body of work honored in the new DVD box set Ford at Fox.) There are films here, such as The Iron Horse, Young Mr. Lincoln, and My Darling Clementine, where the director defined the popular version of key chapters of American history; others, such as the folk comedies Steamboat 'Round the Bend and Judge Priest, which preserve the performance style of Will Rogers, now are American history. The series begins with the new documentary Becoming John Ford, featuring interviews with Ford biographer Joseph McBride and Peter Fonda.

The Rep Report (Dec 6 - 14)

Peter Smith — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual Spanish Cinema Now begins on December 7 and runs through the 27th. The schedule this year includes a special program devoted to the works of the late Pilar Miro, one of the rare women to make a filmmaking career for herself in the wake of Franco's death. Seven of her features will be shown, including her last movie, the 1996 version of Felix Lope de Vega's The Dog in the Manger.

BERKELEY: The Pacific Film Archives' Ingmar Bergman: Light and Shadow (December 6 - 20) gives admirers of the late director, whose death last summer was one of the supreme, sad film events of the year, to remember some of his proudest achievements (including Persona, The Seventh Seal, and Shame) in handsome prints on the big screen. The final selections, wisely, are The Magic Flute and Fanny and Alexander, either of which can serve as a timely rebuttal to the idea that Bergman has nothing to offer in the way of holiday festivity.

— Phil Nugent