The Screengrab : shirley clarke

The Rep Report (April 22 -- April 29)

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: An unnamed but prominent runner-up in our recent list of notably unexpected movie reunions, Luis Bunuel's Viridiana (1961) marked the director's homecoming to the country of his birth, Spain, from which he had exiled himself before beginning his movie career rather than live under the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Bunuel was invited to return and launch his first production made on Spanish soil at a time when Franco, or somebody, was apparently feeling sore about the Generalissimo's international reputation as a stifler of creativity who presided over a country that his regime had sucked dry of all life and spirit. The Spanish Film Board duly okayed the script and sent the finished product off to the Cannes Film Festival, cheerfully oblivious not just to its sacrilegious content but also to the possibility that there just might be a hint of a rebuke to Franco in such details as the title heroine's line, "The weeds have taken over the past 20 years... And beyond the second floor, the house is overrun with spiders."

The movie won the Palm d'Or at Cannes that year, but it was also denounced by the Vatican as an affront to the church. In response, Bunuel shrugged, "I didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous, but then Pope John XXIII is a better judge of such things than I am." Franco dismissed all the members of his Film Board and burned every print of the movie that he could get his hands on, and Bunuel had to get along as best he could, making his movies somewhere else on the planet, for the rest of his career. Viridiana wasn't shown again in Spain until 1977, two years after Franco's death, and if you'd been living there, you too would have wanted to give it a while to make sure that the silver bullets really worked. I saw it several years ago in New Orleans, in a theater that was full of Jesuit priests, and all the way through it, those guys laughed their heads off at stuff that I'm guessing I didn't have a thorough enough religious education to appreciate. Then the movie ended and the lights came on, and they scuttled out of there as if were afraid of being caught by their mothers at a porno flick. Starting this Friday, Film Forum brings Viridiana back for one week to see if it still has the power to spook the pious. Buneul's last word on the subject was to declare, famously, that he was "still an atheist, thank God"; Franco, his total life achievements accurately summed up in the words of Chevy Chase, is still dead.

For five days starting tonight, Anthology Film Archives hosts a retrospective of the work of Shirley Clarke, a maverick independent filmmaker whose work dates back to that moment when "independent cinema" in America seemed to be an offshoot of the Beat movement. Clarke's first film, the 1961 The Connection, was based on the Living Theater's production of Jack Gelber's New York play about junk and jazz, with a cast that includes Warren Finnerty, Carl Lee, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Garry Goodrow, as well as an onscreen musical combo that includes Jackie McLean. Clarke followed that up with the j.d. drama The Cool World (1964), doubly valuable today as a time capsule of Harlem, and the verite monologue documentary Portrait of Jason (1967). Anthology is showing them all, as well as some of her lesser-known work, including her final film, a 1985 portrait of Ornette Coleman.

The 8th annual Tribeca Film Festival runs from tonight through May 3. In its earliest years, Tribeca was a sprawling mix of international and indie films and big, glossy Hollywood fare that commanded a lot of attention but seemed in no immediate danger of developing its own coherent identity. Last year they scaled way back and were rewarded for it with a minor breakthrough: the top prize winner, Let the Right One In, emerged as a cult hit and counts as the closest that Tribeca has come to putting its stamp on a emerging success, which is seen by many as the mark of a major festival. This year Tribeca has scaled back even further, which people are hoping will result in a tighter focus. The opening night selection is Woody Allen's Whatever Works.

SAN FRANCICSO: The The San Francisco International Film Festival runs from April 23 to May 7.

DVD Digest Special: Unearthed "Treasures"

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

In the decade-plus since the introduction of DVD, many cinematic classics have been released in the format. However, the work of avant-garde and experimental filmmakers has been woefully underrepresented thusfar. Admittedly, avant-garde cinema has something of a niche audience, and a collection of experimental works on DVD would never make the splash of a classic narrative film’s debut in the DVD format. Still, despite some notable exceptions like Criterion’s impressive By Brakhage: An Anthology, most of the classics of the various avant-garde cinema movements remain “underground” to this day, available only in battered copies (many of these works exist in a single print) to be seen at museums, festivals, and educational institutions. Because of this, the new DVD set Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film 1947-1986 is a cause for celebration.

Treasures IV, available on DVD today, is the latest in the National Film Preservation Foundation’s “Treasures” series, spotlighting little-seen works in the cinematic medium. But while the first three sets spotlight mostly silent-era and early sound-era works, this one moves forward in time to four key decades in American avant-garde cinema. Pulling from their own archives and those of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Anthology Film Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, and even the New York Public Library’s Donnell Media Center, the NFPF selected 26 key films for this collection, most of which were previously unavailable on DVD. In addition, they’ve painstaking cleaned up and restored the films, and commissioned resident composer John Zorn to write new scores for three of the works. Topping it all off is a book that includes information on each of the films, plus a new foreword by Martin Scorsese.

The results are first-rate. The filmmakers included in the set represent a Murderer’s Row of avant-garde greats: Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Joseph Cornell, Jonas Mekas, George Kuchar, Shirley Clarke, Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, Bruce Baillie, Robert Breer, Paul Sharits, Ron Rice, Marie Menken, Harry Smith, and even Andy Warhol. Most of these filmmakers are making their DVD debuts, and that in itself is a reason to pick up Treasures IV. But beyond that, it’s simply an invaluable one-stop overview of this important era in avant-garde cinema. While no single DVD set could possibly encompass the entire spectrum of American experimental film, the films here are a surprisingly diverse lot, ranging from seminal works like Frampton’s (nostalgia) to long-unseen classics like Cornell’s By Night With Torch and Spear, and from the haunting style of Baillie’s expressionistic newsreel about a school for emotionally disturbed children Here I Am to the pomposity-deflating humor of Robert Nelson and William T. Wiley’s The Off-Handed Jape… & How to Pull It Off. Here are three of my favorite works in the set:

Go! Go! Go! (Marie Menken, 1962)- my first exposure to Menken’s work, this film takes newly-shot footage of early-1960s New York City and speeds it up to a frantic pace. The film encompasses a broad spectrum of activity, from a wedding and a graduation to boats sailing up and down the Hudson. But most memorable of all are the shots of people simply going about their business. One wouldn’t think that footage of cars moving and people crossing the roads would make for vivid cinema, but Menken shoots them from high above the streets to emphasize the waves of activity, and by speeding up the footage, she takes it out of the realm of the everyday. One can’t help but marvel at the delicate balance that allows society to run smoothly every day, with everyone presumably acting independently yet seemingly guided by some greater force. Go! Go! Go! accomplishes one of the oldest and most noble goals of art- it allows us to see the familiar through fresh eyes.

Necrology (Standish Lawder, 1969-1970)- one of the more obscure filmmakers in this box, Lawder was a film scholar who made Necrology while studying experimental film. The film consists primarily of dozens or even hundreds of people moving in front of the camera lens- people who, as it turns out, were covertly shot by Lawder as they were riding down an escalator while leaving work one day. Lawder then ran the footage the footage backwards through a projector, to eerie effect. But Lawder saved his most brilliant conceit for the end credits. Shifting his musical score from the funereal strains of Sibelius to an upbeat march, Lawder then proceeds to “Credit” every “Cast member” in the film- apocryphally, as it turns out. Listing such characters as “Pederast” and “Embezzler (at-large)”, Lawder cheekily subverts the audience’s desire to give these people exciting back stories, while simultaneously commenting on the way cinematic representation can turn ordinary people into characters and, in doing so, grant them a measure of immortality.

New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals and Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (Owen Land, 1976)- as with Menken, this was my first exposure to the work of Land (born George Landow), and I hope it won’t be my last. This film, a revised version of his early film Institutional Quality- hence the title- takes as its starting point a test being administered to a middle-aged, stern-looking subject played by Art Gower. As the test progresses, the subject imagines himself in the world of the test, brandishing a giant pencil and writing numbers on random objects in keeping with the questioner’s request. Finally, the subject’s mind begins to wander, and the images become ever more surreal- an enormous woman’s shoe, an approximation of a “China Doll” (right) cribbed from a previous Land film, and an alien carrying a sign reading “This Is a Film About You.” New Improved Institutional Quality, like most of Land’s films, deals with language, but it does so in a way that’s visually inspired and often hilarious. A self-important “Art film” this isn’t.

Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film 1947-1986 would not have been possible without the ongoing efforts of the National Film Preservation Foundation. Click here to visit their official site.

The Rep Report (April 15--21)

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

NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life. At the simplest level, music by Miles Davis or by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet can do wonders for a thriller such as Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows or Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, with Robert Ryan as a racist crook and Harry Belafonte as his unhappy partner in crime. At the other extreme, there's Arthur Penn's Mickey One, a fascinating, incoherent, art-damaged movie that seems to be trying to take its cues from Stan Getz's saxophone improvisations on the soundtrack--bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch just for the visions it gives you of the studio executive's heads melting when they first saw it--and such artifacts as Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, with music by Ornette Coleman, and Shirley Clarke's off-Broadway verite films The Cool World and The Connection, reminders that the American independent film movement once seemed to be an offshoot of the Beats' world. There are also some international obscurities that sound better than intriguing, notable Dilemma, a 1962 film made in apartheid-era Johannesburg by the Danish director Henning Carlsen (Hunger), starring Zakes Mokae and with music by Max Roach.

LOS ANGELES: Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film" at the Linwood Dunn Theater will include screenings of the two great military documentaries that Huston made during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light. Although made with the cooperation of the U. S. military and officially intended as part of the war effort, San Pietro--which is both a strikingly clear and cogent account of a battle and a nonfiction war poem composed on film--met with some grumblings from the higher-ups, and Light, a harrowing visit to a medical ward full of soldiers suffering from the psychological effects of war, was actually kept from public view until the early 1980s. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King makes the point that Huston had to deal with much more interference than some of the people now making documentaries about the Iraq war, but many of those current filmmakers could still learn a lot from his work. She also reminds us that Huston had a ready answer for the jarheads who clucked that his movies seemed "anti-war': ""Whenever I make a film that's for war, you can take me out and shoot me." The screening will be introduced by Huston's son Tony and followed by a panel discussion including Dr. Charles Wolfe, Dr. Betsy McLane, and Richard E. Robbins, the producer-director of the Oscar-nominated doceumentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Screengrab Review: Chop Shop

Peter Smith — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Review by Bilge Ebiri.

With 2006's Man Push Cart and his latest, Chop Shop, Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani has made a good case for himself as the neorealist poet laureate of New York's immigrant underside. Shot with breathtaking immediacy and featuring casts of non-professionals in real-life locations, Bahrani's films give narrative shape and compelling character shadings to documentary worlds. The result is something that feels like a new language being born, even though it owes a conscious debt to both non-fiction filmmakers like Shirley Clarke and realist narrative masters like John Cassavetes and Vittorio De Sica. Which is all just a fancy way of saying you really, really should not miss Chop Shop.

Bahrani trains his camera on parentless street kid Alejandro, aka Ale (Alejandro Polanco, in what must surely be the performance of the year, so far), who lives with his teenage sister Isamar above the auto-body shop where he often works. Both fiercely loyal and persistent, he's a street-hustling capitalist in training (see if you can spot the eerie similarities between this and There Will Be Blood), except that he's trying mainly to just keep his head above water. What dreams he has — and he does have them — are expressed with a poetic spareness that is both haunting and evocative. There isn't really that much plot to speak of — and yet the film is riveting, in part because Bahrani stays so focused on Ale's unflinching desire to stay ahead of the game.

Even so, the director still manages to effectively convey the broader world of the chop shops of Queens, so that a portrait of a community emerges from the film's accumulation of detail, character, and incident. And despite all the gritty despair and documentary intensity of Chop Shop, there's something lovely and almost mystical about Bahrani's vision: Like the best fairy tales, it is at heart a harrowing story about an innocent child in a scary world. Just don't look for any happy endings this time around. — Bilge Ebiri