PFA Film Notes for September-October, 1995


Friday September 1 Alf Sjöberg

Alf Sjöberg was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and curated by Jytte Jensen. Newly subtitled prints are made possible by The Swedish Ministry of Culture, The Swedish Film Institute, The Swedish Institute, The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs, The Swedish Ministry of Education, The Consulate General of Sweden in New York, and Absolut Vodka.

The Road to Heaven 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1942)

(Himlaspelet). "Wise and poignant, The Road to Heaven may well be the greatest Swedish film of the 1940s." (Peter Cowie, Swedish Cinema) Sjöberg revived the great visual tradition of the Swedish silents in this parable set in the eighteenth century. When a girl accused of witchcraft is burned at the stake, her fiancé, Mats, strides off along the "road to heaven" in an effort to prove her innocence. Along the way, he falls in with prophets and kings, and, in a beautifully imagined episode, spends Christmas with Joseph and Mary. When he meets Satan, he forgets his lofty mission. The film subtly identifies with the landscape and folklore of its rural locale, and owes much to the performance by Rune Lindström, who co-authored the script based on his modern morality play. "The morality of the play, however, is far from naive: utterly skeptical, its underlying world image is an absurd and existentialist one..." (Edgardo Cozarinsky, in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Richard Roud, ed.)

* Written by Sjöberg, Rune Lindström, from the play by Lindström. Photographed by Gösta Roosling. With Rune Lindström, Eivor Landström, Anders Henrikson, Holger Löwenadler. (106 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Miss Julie 9:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1951)

(Fröken Julie). The fitful, sadomasochistic affair between the upper-class Miss Julie (Anita Björk) and her father's valet, Jean (Ulf Palme), draws class warfare into the sexual realm. Sjöberg's daring cinematic experiments would seem to propel this stunning production of Strindberg's play far from the proscenium arch--but in fact remain faithful to the theater's notion of unity of space, as Edgardo Cozarinsky notes: "Strindberg's single act explodes in all directions--memories of the characters' past, as well as their dreams, and even intimations of the future, are worked into an exacting structure of flashbacks (and one flashforward), where the past is always pressing upon the present. The camera pans or tracks away from the characters to find them in the same space as they were long before, and later goes back to them, [all] without cuts;...figures from the past walk by those of the present in the same static shot. This method...reinforces, paradoxically, the tragic, almost Dionysiac drive towards destruction found in Strindberg's characters..."

* Written by Sjöberg, from a play by August Strindberg. Photographed by Göran Strindberg. With Anita Björk, Ulf Palme, Anders Henrikson, Inger Norberg. (113 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, permission Kino)

Saturday September 2

Alf Sjöberg

Torment 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1944)

(Frenzy/Hets). Torment takes us into the claustrophobic world of a prepschool student (Alf Kjellin) in his first encounters with evil. Terrorized by a sadistic schoolmaster, he becomes involved with a shopgirl (Mai Zetterling) who is also mysteriously threatened by a figure whom she refuses to name. The film chronicles the couple's pathetic attempt to hide from evil in love. Ingmar Bergman's first produced screenplay was a devastating portrait of a schoolteacher he loathed in his youth, but, as Bergman said, Sjöberg "transformed it into a nightmare"--one relevant to the times, bringing into cinematic play the nuances of a totalitarian environment along with his concern for the individual in that environment. Bergman: "He made Caligula, the Latin master, into a crypto-Nazi and brought home the point that the actor Stig Järrel should be blond and insignificant, not [dark] and diabolical....Sjöberg and Järrel gave the character inner pressure, which in the end became decisive for the whole movie."

* Written by Ingmar Bergman. Photographed by Martin Bodin. With Stig Järrel, Alf Kjellin, Mai Zetterling. (100 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, permission Kino)

Iris and the Lieutenant 9:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1946)

(Iris Och Löjtnantshjärta). "This lovely film is Sjöberg's warmest, most tender work." (Elliott Stein, Village Voice) Alf Kjellin and Mai Zetterling proved to be such a successful pairing in Torment that Sjöberg brought them back for Iris and the Lieutenant. A frivolous young officer, Robert Motander, enrages his family and particularly his domineering father by falling in love with his aunt's housemaid, Iris. Peter Cowie suggests that "Sjöberg detested the immobile class system represented by the Motander family in Iris, and sees in the young lovers some hope for a future that's more egalitarian in terms of both money and emotions. But there's an aching, melancholic tinge to the affair.... Underlying it all runs a note of guilt as a consequence of Sweden's somewhat sanctimonious neutrality during World War II. Perhaps it's also the presence of Kjellin and Zetterling from Torment, although they transcend the symbolic nature of their roles and come across as vivid, vulnerable personalities."

* Written by Sjöberg, Olle Hedberg, from the novel by Hedberg. Photographed by Gösta Roosling. With Mai Zetterling, Alf Kjellin, Holger Löwenadler, Ingrid Borthen. (85 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Sunday September 3

Alf Sjöberg

Only a Mother 5:30

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1949)

(Bara En Mor). "This is a film about loneliness--no theme is more adequate for our times: our total, individual helplessness." (Alf Sjöberg, 1949) Of Sjöberg's central themes, perhaps none is so strongly developed as that of the contempt for women in modern society. Only a Mother today seems a remarkably contemporary analysis of a woman's life wasted by prejudice. A willful young woman, Rya-Rya (Eva Dahlbeck), part of a community of (traditionally oppressed) itinerant farmworkers, takes a break from her harvesting chores for a nude dip in the lake: a simple act that changes her life. The community seethes with the news of such boldness; her fiancé publicly rejects her at a dance and she reacts by going home with another man, leading eventually to a joyless marriage and a life haunted by a desire for a way out. "[This] Zola-esque chronicle...is the revelation of the series...Dahlbeck's Rya-Rya is one of the greatest performances in European cinema." (Elliott Stein)

* Written by Sjöberg, based on the novel by Ivar Lo-Johansson. Photographed by Martin Bodin. With Eva Dahlbeck, Ragnar Falck, Hugo Björn, Ulf Palme. (99 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Wild Birds 7:30

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1955)

(Vildfåglar). "In Sjöberg's more personal films men and women are led by their instincts and respond positively to temptations. They are anxious not to be affected by social conventions. Wild Birds is a kind of purified Torment..." (Peter Cowie) A young sailor, Nisse, wandering the docks in a drunken stupor, is taken in hand by a prostitute and lured into the activities of a band of petty criminals. He meets a middle-class girl, Lena, who falls in love with Nisse while her fiancé is at sea. The story of young people hoping to evade their place in the social strata by crossing class lines in (doomed) love has links with Iris and the Lieutenant and The Last Couple Out, not to mention the sexual/class machinations of Miss Julie. Wild Birds was marred, according to critics, by its long stretch toward tragedy, but the atmosphere of a quayside petty underworld, and some extraordinary set-pieces of erotic frenzy, permeate the film, giving particular impact to the theme of love that is "swift, violent, and beautiful" (Variety).

* Written by Sjöberg, Bengt Anderberg, from the novel by Anderberg. Photographed by Martin Bodin. With Per Oscarsson, Maj-Britt Nilsson, Gertrud Fridh, Ulf Palme. (100 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Tuesday September 5

Avant-Garde Film

Tuesday evening programs during the UC Berkeley fall semester are presented in association with the Film Studies course, Avant-Garde Film, taught by Ernie Gehr.

Reconstructing the 1920s Avant-Garde Films 7:30

Introduced by Author/Collector William Moritz

This program hopes to promote a reconsideration of the seminal experimental films of the 1920s. On the one hand, it presents an alternate view of the canon of avant-garde films, exhibiting some rarely seen key works and not including some films and filmmakers that receive disproportionate attention. On the other hand, some familiar classics are seen here, restored to their original form: hand-tinted, with original soundtracks, and shown at silent speed. This reveals a strong belief in and reliance on craftmanship and musicality as structural principles for these hopeful artists exploring a new terrain that they believed could be revelatory and healing.--William Moritz

William Moritz, who restored these prints, will also show slides and "gossip about the filmmakers." Moritz is on the film and video faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. The author of numerous articles on abstract film, Moritz also is a filmmaker.

Light-Play Opus I by Walther Ruttmann. Music by Max Butting (1921, 10 mins, Tinted). The Smiling Madame Beaudet by Germaine Dulac (1923, 40 mins, Silent with French intertitles/live English translation, B&W). Entr'acte by René Clair, with Francis Picabia. Music by Erik Satie (1924, 20 mins, B&W). Return to Reason by Man Ray (1923, 2 mins, B&W). Five Minutes of Pure Cinema by Henri Chomette (1925, 5 mins, B&W). Ballet Mécanique by Dudley Murphy, with Fernand Léger, Man Ray. Music by George Antheil (1924, 18 mins, B&W/Tinted, 35mm). Theme and Variation by Germaine Dulac (1928, 8 mins, B&W, 35mm).

* (Total running time: 103 mins plus discussion and intermission, 16mm unless indicated, From the Collection of William Moritz)

The Decade Between: American Video Art, 1978-1988

Throughout the fall, The Decade Between offers one-person and thematically organized screenings of American video art from a crucial period in the medium's nascent history. Allied with a course offered by UC's Film Studies, this survey of seminal videoworks gives the viewer an intimate knowledge of the critical issues, art practices, and formal genres that dominated a generation of media artists. Through this "decade" are visible video art's earliest roots in sixties conceptual and performance art, as well as its eventual evolution into a more socially engaged movement in the late eighties. Videoworks by key artists, such as Dara Birnbaum, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Ilene Segalove, Juan Downey, Joan Braderman and others, will be considered for their formal innovation and technological interventions, as well as their alignment with marginalized cultural and aesthetic communities.

Join us every other Wednesday, September 6 through November 29.

--Steve Seid

Wednesday September 6

The Decade Between

Presented on alternate Wednesday evenings during the fall semester in association with the UCBerkeley Film Studies course taught by Steve Seid.

American Video Art, 1978-1988: Doug Hall 7:30

Artist in Person

Doug Hall's explorations of power and its icons have led him from a grassy knoll in Dallas to the halls of the Stasi. Working often on a grand scale, Hall has compiled a "theory of the spectacle," enumerating the ways in which political authority permeates the culture of images. As a member of the collective T. R. Uthco, Hall created The Eternal Frame (1975, 23:50 mins), the legendary re-enactment of the J.F.K. assassination in Daley Plaza, which satirically analyzed the way in which a loaded event evolves into myth. In 1980, collaborating with Chip Lord of Ant Farm fame, he completed The Amarillo News Tapes (25 mins), an astute dissection of the media's reductive artifice. A later series of short works, among them This Is the Truth (1982, 3:30 mins) and These Are the Rules (1983, 4:39 mins), debunked the rhetoric and pageantry of contemporary politics. With Prelude to the Tempest (1985, 15 mins), Hall began a lyrical study that involves Man's conception of Nature as a technologized metaphor for our civilized failings. Alongside these single-channel works, Hall also will show slides of his many video installations and discuss their genesis.--Steve Seid

* (Total running time: c. 90 mins, 3/4" video, From the artist)

Laughter through Tears: Yiddish Film

Usually in these columns we mourn films that have been lost to the ravages of time; in the case of Yiddish cinema, a world disappeared and it is the films that survive. Each year the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University preserves a few more of these Yiddish language films made in the U.S. and Eastern Europe in the twenties and thirties--and even after the war, when Jewish filmmakers in Poland and Germany declared "we are still alive."

Yiddish cinema`s home in the U.S. was of course New York, whose Second Avenue was host to a thriving Yiddish stage tradition. Maurice Schwartz (the quintessential Tevye, and a revelation in Uncle Moses); Ludwig Satz, a Sid Caesar of the thirties in films like His Wife's Lover; the inimitable Molly Picon (Yiddle with His Fiddle) and other great actors lit up the Yiddish cinema yet remained marginalized in the larger cultural picture of America.

To say, as the subtitle of J. Hoberman`s seminal book Bridge of Light does, that Yiddish cinema is "between two worlds" is no mere metaphor; just as the actors of New York`s Yiddish Art Theater toured Europe, so Jewish-American directors such as Joseph Green went back to their native Poland to give a location flavor to films like the Molly Picon vehicle Mamele and the melodrama A Letter to Mama. Such films exist now as a haunting record of the last vestiges of Polish-Jewish life before the war, and indeed were rushed to completion in expectation of the debacle to come. Meanwhile, back in U.S.A., Edgar Ulmer was building makeshift shtetls in rural New Jersey, the bucolic poverty of Green Fields.

Whether comedy or tragedy, filmed in Manhattan or Lodz, there are treasures to be discovered in our current series, from Old World irony to a very new world of labor revolts, spousal desertion, and keeping up with the folks on "Allrightnik Row."

Thursday September 7

Laughter through Tears: Yiddish Film

Presented in cooperation with The National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University, and with the generous support of The Bernard Osher Jewish Philanthropies Foundation.

We gratefully acknowledge the curatorial assistance of Sharon Pucker Rivo, Executive Director, The National Center for Jewish Film; Adrienne Mancia, Film Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and J. Hoberman, Village Voice film critic and author of Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds. This book is sold in the UAM/PFA Bookstore.

The selections in this series are based on the original exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., titled Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds.

Films and videos have been provided by The National Center for Jewish Film's Rutenberg and Everett Yiddish Film Library, which is dedicated to the collection, preservation, restoration, and circulation of Yiddish cinema.

Laughter through Tears 7:00

Grigori Gricher-Cherikover (USSR, 1928)

Introduced by Sharon Rivo, Executive Director, The National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University

Bruce Loeb on Piano

(Motl Peyse dem khazns/Skvoz Slezy). Based on Sholem Aleichem's stories of "Motl Peyse, the Cantor's Son," this is a portrait of prerevolutionary shtetl life that, like its source, is funny, earthy, skeptical, and sorrowful. Motl Peyse is an irrepressible lad, an orphan whose wonderings and wanderings make him emblematic of a generation of Jews. Motl's misadventures in kheyder (primary school) offer a typically mischievous satire on this institution. A darker sequence based on "The Enchanted Tailor" tells of a fellow who finds himself in a crazy-making nightmare, the result of a prank perpetrated by the innkeeper. The canvas of Jewish life presented in this Soviet-made film set during tsarist times is anything but nostalgic, stressing instead the unyielding poverty of a dusty hamlet and the anti-Semitism of the era. But Sholem Aleichem's characters are, above all, literary creations, beautifully realized by actors from the Moscow Art Theater and the wunderkind Moshele Silberman as Motl.

* Based on stories by Sholem Aleichem. With J. K. Kovenberg, A. D. Goritcheva, M. D. Sen-Elnikova, S. J. Silberman. (92 mins, Silent, English intertitles, B&W, 35mm)

Friday September 8

Alf Sjöberg

They Staked Their Lives 7:30

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1940)

(Med Livet Som Insats). They Staked Their Lives, completed just after the outbreak of the war, was immersed in a fatalistic realization of its time. In the guise of an adventure story, the film deals with tyranny and resistance in an unspecified Baltic country that is obviously a police state. Frequent quarrels among the resistance agents do not bode well for eventual liberation. The film, as Peter Cowie points out, compares with the poetic realism of the Carné-Prévert films in France, and with Graham Greene's books of the period. But its theme of individuals inadvertently caught up in a net of power, and the realization of this dilemma in visual terms, is purely Sjöberg. Here, "Sjöberg reveals himself a master not only at composing his shots, but also at asserting the rhythm of the film." (Cowie) "...eclectic and brilliant..." (Edgardo Cozarinsky)

* Written by Theodor Berthels, Christen Jul, Sjöberg, based on a novel by Runar Schildt. Photographed by Harald Berglund. With Aino Taube, Åke Ohberg, Anders Henrikson, Holger Löwenadler. (85 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, 35mm)

Flowering Time 9:10

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1940)

(Den Blomstertid/Blossom Time). A sense of fatal sublimation was also to be found in Flowering Time. The light and shade of the Stockholm archipelago form the setting for the story of a teacher (Gerd Hagman) who struggles to maintain a nostalgic bond with her ghostly sailor-lover, ultimately to marry a land-bound colleague. "Both [Flowering Time and Home from Babylon, see September 15] deal with Bovary-like cases of self-delusion; both are ironical in espousing conventions of cheap fiction only to expose them, as it were, between quotation marks; both present Sweden as an island, diseased with the very neutrality that protects it." (Edgardo Cozarinsky)

* Written by Sjöberg. Photographed by Harald Berglund. With Gerd Hagman, Sture Lagerwall, Arnold Sjöstrand, Ragnar Falck. (99 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Saturday September 9

Alf Sjöberg

Miss Julie 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1951)

For program notes, please see September 1.

Karin Månsdotter 9:10

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1954)

The real-life Cinderella story (with a real-life ending) of Karin Månsdotter, a commoner who became the consort of Erik XIV, and later his queen, would hold a wealth of interest for Sjöberg, anti-monarchical, proto-feminist, and fascinated by cross-class love. Erik was a Hamlet-like figure on the Swedish throne, a gifted renaissance prince who retaliated for a royal refusal of marriage by marrying his mistress, Karin, thus unleashing the wrath of the nobility against him. Sjöberg's remarkable film is divided into three parts. The first is a Brechtian fantasy drawing on the implied fairy-tale of a soldier's daughter being cast as the king's mistress, color fading to black-and-white when Karin realizes the implications of her position. The second plays with theatrics while Karin becomes a pawn in a game not her own; the third deals with Karin's exile and flight. The tenderness of the acting contrasts with the dynamic narrative, photographed (amid the castles of Sweden) by the young Sven Nykvist.

* Written by Sjöberg, from the play Erik XIV by August Strindberg. Photographed by Sven Nykvist. With Ulla Jacobsson, Jarl Kulle, Ulf Palme, Per Oscarsson. (106 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, Color/B&W, 35mm)

Sunday September 10

Yiddish Film

Introduced by Sharon Rivo

Little Mother 3:30

Joseph Green (Poland, 1938)

(Mamele). Ten years after her stage success in Mamele, Molly Picon was still able to pull off the role of Khavtshi, who promises her dying mother she will look after her four older siblings and perpetually unemployed Papa (Max Bozyk). The "little mother" exercises her creative impulses by selecting her sisters' suitors and acting as advice-central for the tenement. Though unappreciated by all (but us), she's both vivacious and self-aware: in one of the film's high points she sings her way through the stages of a woman's life, from girlhood to old age. Transposed from the stage play's Lower East Side to Lodz, Poland, director Green's hometown, and edited just in time for its makers to leave Warsaw for friendlier ground, "Mamele embraces prewar Polish-Jewish life in all its diversity, including tenements and unemployment, nightclubs and Jewish gangsters, and religious Jews at Succoth, the harvest festival." (National Center for Jewish Film)

* Technical director/Written by Konrad Tom, based on the play Mamele by Meyer Schwartz. Photographed by Seweryn Steinwurzel. With Molly Picon, Max Bozyk, Edmund Zayenda, Gertrude Bullman. (95 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Yiddle with His Fiddle 5:50

Joseph Green/Jan Nowina-Przybylski (Poland, 1936)

(Yidl mitn fidl). The first truly international Yiddish hit. Molly Picon's vaudeville antics are backed by some of the most enchanting music of any Yiddish film, in the tale of itinerant klezmorim and the girl (Molly at 37!) who disguises herself as a boy to join them. The plot takes them through countryside to town and the Warsaw stage, even to Second Avenue, New York, and is not without romance nor a feminist touch: Yiddle gets it all, her man and a musical career. The film "offers a still-fresh collection of Picon's characterizations and routines--ranging from the tipsy yeshive boy to the overexcited chatterbox to the pert gamine." (J. Hoberman) Joseph Green filmed on location in Warsaw and Kazimierz (where he employed shtetl inhabitants as extras) and the result is a wonderful folk comedy that has the authentic feel of small-town and urban Polish-Jewish life, affirming both in a period of growing anti-Semitism.

*Written by Konrad Tom, Joseph Green. Photographed by Jacob Jonilowicz. With Molly Picon, Max Bozyk, Leon Liebgold, Simcha Fostel. (92 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Monday September 11

Third World Cinema

Monday evening programs during the fall semester are presented in association with Professor Albert Johnson and the African-American Studies Department.

These Hands 7:00

Flora M'mbugu-Schelling (Tanzania, 1992)

Preceded by short:

A Skirt Full of Butterflies (Ellen Osborne, Maureen Gosling, U.S., 1993). A tribute to the Isthmus Zapotec women of southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Five women describe what it is like to live in a community where women run the economy and the marketplace, and live in mutual respect and partnership with men. Their female ancestors displayed imaginative spunk in war and political resistance; today, they describe the role of cultural pride in women's self-esteem and sense of purpose. Their stories are interlaced with scenes of work and resplendent festivities, music, poetry, and paintings of the region. (15 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From Osborne/Gosling Productions)

These Hands centers on the working day of Tanzanian women whose livelihood is stone crushing--digging out and breaking rocks used by the construction industry to make concrete. Their dangerous work replicates that of machines. At the same time, they care for their children and each other, and break the monotony of the physical and mental labor by an occasional song or dance. The film does not dehumanize the women with morbid sentimentality. Employing an extremely spare style, without dialogue or narration, These Hands is hypnotically engaging, and necessarily reflexive, leaving the viewer to ponder the meaning of someone who goes to movies, and someone else who crushes rocks, day in, day out.

* Written by M'mbugu-Schelling. Photographed by Suleiman Kissoky. (45 mins, In Swahili, Kimakonde, with English subtitles, Color, 16mm, From California Newsreel)

Tuesday September 12

Avant-Garde Film

This Shared Voices project is made possible through the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative.

The Soviet Eccentrics: The New Babylon 7:30

Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg (USSR, 1929)

Bruce Loeb on Piano

Preceded by short:

Interplanetary Revolution (Mezhplanetnaya revolutsiya). (E. Komissarenko, Y. Merkulov, N. Khodatayev, USSR, 1924). In this delightful cartoon satire on Aelita, a Red warrior from the Komsomol carries on the fight against the bourgeoisie in outer space. Photographed by V. Alexeyev. (11 mins)

The New Babylon represents a culmination of the experimental workshop FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), organized by two self-styled "engineers of the spectacle," Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. FEKS sought a distinctively modern idiom in the still infant art of cinema. The story of The New Babylon is set in the 1871 Paris Commune and centers around a posh department store modeled after that found in Emile Zola's novel Au bonheur des dames, which in turn satirized the circus of consumer fetishism represented by the Paris emporium Le Bon Marché. The extroverted acting style that FEKS developed pushed away feelings in a kind of pre-Brechtian carnival of alienation; caricature replaced character. But the inspiration for the photography came from the impressionists, and there are some magnificent scenes shot in fog, shadow, and moonlight, while the choreography of shots approaches that of ballet.

Bruce Loeb's accompaniment is inspired by works of the period, including the original Shostakovich score.

* Written by Kozintsev, Trauberg. Photographed by Andrei Moskvin, E. Mikhailov. With Elena Kuzmina, Piotr Sobolevski, David Gutman, Sophie Magarill. (85 mins at 20 fps, Silent with Russian intertitles and English subtitles, both films B&W, 35mm, From PFA Collection)

Wednesday September 13

The New Child

"The Child Learns" 7:00

Works by Ericka Beckman and Mike Kelley, Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen, Helen DeMichiel, Jean-Luc Godard

Learning always takes place within a setting, a context. Several imaginative works examine the child's formative education, underscored by a larger social resonance: In Beckman and Kelley's absurdist tale, Blind Country (1989, 20 mins), a young man (Kelley) leaves his phallocentric land, arriving in a feminine, sensual realm. Stripped of his authority, he must re-learn the rules of the body, literally come to his senses. Millner and Larsen's Out of the Mouth of Babes (1986, 24 mins) parallels a young child's language acquisition with the perpetuation of U.S. foreign policy. The enforced repetition, the rote ingestion of words echo the complacent gullibility of the citizenry. Envisioning a feminist future, DeMichiel's Consider Anything, Only Don't Cry (1988, 22 mins) goes about sorting through the past for markers and mementos of self-empowerment. Throughout this highly literary incantation of choice, a young girl is tutored about the technical tools needed to find her own artful voice. Patterned after a classic French primer, Godard's France/tour/detour/deux/enfants (movement 11) (France, 1978, 26 mins) teaches of the child Camille's invisibility within the family and of humanity's two greatest inventions: sex and death.--Steve Seid

* (Total running time: 92 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From Electronic Arts Intermix, Video Data Bank)

Les Enfants 8:50

Marguerite Duras (France, 1984)

Preceded by short:

En Rachachant (Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, France, 1982): Written by Duras based on her children's book, this film questions the importance of school, "because in school they teach me things I am ignorant of." Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, "It is like a judicious encounter of Dennis the Menace with Straub, Eraserhead with Huillet." Photographed by Henri Alekan. (10 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm, From New Yorker)

(The Children). A marvelous piece of absurdist cinema, Les Enfants concerns a seven-year-old boy, Ernesto, who is portrayed by a forty-year-old man (Axel Bougousslavsky). In his child's wisdom, Ernesto decides to quit school, since knowledge can count for nothing in a meaningless world. His lament concerning Creation ("Everything was there and it wasn't worth it"), his refusal to learn "what I do not know" have shades of Woody Allen's bespectacled youth who stops studying because "the universe is expanding." But in Marguerite Duras's universe a soulful mother, although bemused, will never deny support to her precocious child, while the father is befuddled. Within the stark framework of Duras's oeuvre, rarely have the nuances of character been given such free play--nor the human condition been decried with such warm, sad humor.

* Co-directors: Jean-Marc Turine, Jean Mascolo. Written by Duras, based on her novel Ah Ernesto!. Photographed by Bruno Nuytten, et al. With Axel Bougousslavsky, André Dussollier, Daniel Gélin, Tatiana Moukhine. Narrated by Duras. (94 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, Courtesy of the Bureau du Cinéma, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris; and of the Consulate General of France)

Thursday September 14

Yiddish Film

Yizkor 7:00

Sidney M. Goldin (Austria, 1924)

Bruce Loeb on Piano

(Jiskor/Prayer of Remembrance). A period piece retelling the legend that inspired the Jewish prayer of remembrance, Yizkor is "a solemn, albeit colorful, tribute to Jewish heroism (and noncompliance) in the face of irrational Gentile behavior." (J. Hoberman) A young Jewish woodsman, Leybke (Maurice Schwartz), attracts the attention of the local count, who takes him into employment, and of the count's daughter, who pursues the handsome lad obsessively. Leybke, engaged to be married to the Jewish innkeeper's daughter Kreyndl, goes into hiding to evade the machinations of the countess, but when the safety of the community is threatened in his name, he feels obliged to surrender, becoming the martyr of legend. Filmed with Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater, in Austria on a European tour, the film is revealing in its attention both to Jewish ritual and the rituals of coexistence.

* Written by Harry Sekler, based on his play. With Maurice Schwartz, Oskar Beregi, Dagny Servaes, Fritz Strassny. (100 mins, Silent, English intertitles, B&W, 16mm)

A Vilna Legend (Tkies kaf) 8:55

George Roland (U.S., 1933)/Zygmund Turkow (Poland, 1924)

(Dem rebns koyekh). This is the 1933 American sound adaptation of the Polish silent Tkies kaf (1924), featuring two of Poland's best-known Yiddish divas, Ida Kaminska and her mother, Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (the latter's only film appearance here preserved). A fashionably expressionistic, rather more lighthearted precursor to themes in The Dybbuk, set in early twentieth-century Jewish Lithuania, Tkies kaf addresses the classic conflict between traditionalism and modernism in a tale of frustrated love and spiritual intervention. Two young people, a yeshiva student and a poor fruitseller, though promised to each other before birth, can fulfill their love only through the miraculous intervention of the prophet Elijah, who appears in a variety of disguises. Popular, and critically controversial--accused of playing into the Gentiles' image of Jews as uninhibited gluttons (in the humorous wedding scene), as uncanny (its thesis)--the film fascinates with on-location scenes in old Vilna, where local beggars became extras and Jewish landmarks were worked into the plot.

* Written by Henrik Bojm (1924), based on a play by Peretz Hirshbein; and by Jacob Mestel (1933). Photographed by Seweryn Steinwurzel. With Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, Ida Kaminska, Zygmund Turkow. Narrator: Joseph Buloff. (60 mins, Yiddish narration with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Friday September 15

Alf Sjöberg

The Road to Heaven 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1942)

For program notes, please see September 1.

Home from Babylon 9:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1941)

(Hem Från Babylon). "An adventurer returns home after running for his life in war-torn China and a Paris full of exiles and spies, only to find his patient fiancée eager to embark on the same life of danger and excitement he is impatient to abandon...[In Home from Babylon as in Flowering Time, see September 8] novelettish material was turned inside out in search of ideological overtones, for the play of light and shadow as well as for narrative legerdemain...Both films deal with Bovary-like cases of self-delusion; both are ironical in espousing conventions of cheap fiction only to expose them, as it were, between quotation marks; both present Sweden as an island, diseased with the very neutrality that protects it."--Edgardo Cozarinsky

* Written by Sjöberg, Sigfrid Siwertz, based on a novel by Siwertz. Photographed by Karl-Erik Alberts. With Gerd Hagman, Arnold Sjöstrand, Georg Rydeberg, Anders Henrikson. (107 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Saturday September 16

Yiddish Film

Laughter through Tears 7:00

Grigori Gricher-Cherikover (USSR, 1928)

Bruce Loeb on Piano

For program notes, please see September 7.

Yiddle with His Fiddle 8:50

Joseph Green/Jan Nowina-Przybylski (Poland, 1936)

For program notes, please see September 10.

Sunday September 17

Yiddish Film

East and West 3:30

Sidney M. Goldin/Ivan Abramson (Austria, 1923)

Bruce Loeb on Piano

(Ost und West/ a.k.a., Mizrekh un Mayrev/Mazel Tov). "East and West features classic scenes of Molly Picon lifting weights and boxing, teaching young villagers to shimmy, and stealing away from services to gorge herself before sundown on Yom Kippur. [`Ach! That American shikse!'] Underlying these hijinks is veteran filmmaker Sidney Goldin's affectionate appreciation of differences, for good-natured comedy shapes his portrayal of worldly Jews encountering traditional shtetl life. Morris Brown (Goldin), a New Yorker better acquainted with his checkbook than his prayerbook, returns to Galicia with his daughter for a family wedding. The bride, daughter of his traditionally observant brother, and Morris's Mollie, [of the] exuberant antics, could not be more different. But Mollie unexpectedly meets her match in an engaging young yeshiva scholar who...joins the secular world to win her heart." (National Center for Jewish Film) "Anticipating Clara Bow by three years, Picon's hyperactive flapper is almost a force of nature." (J. Hoberman)

* With Molly Picon, Jacob Kalish, Sidney M. Goldin, Saul Nathan. (85 mins, Silent, English and Yiddish intertitles, B&W, 16mm)

The Unfortunate Bride (Broken Hearts) 5:10

Henry Lynn (U.S., 1932)/Maurice Schwartz (U.S., 1926)

(Di umgliklekhe kale). The 1926 silent Broken Hearts, notable for capturing New York through the eyes of a new immigrant, was framed by sound sequences in 1932 and the new package called The Unfortunate Bride. A granddaughter's query concerning whether to follow her heart or the teachings of the Torah provokes this tale: A writer, forced to emigrate from Russia, and believing his wife in the old country has died, takes a new wife, only to be shunned by her class-conscious family whose eyes are on another prize: "Allrightnik Row." Apart from the film's stark naturalism of the slums, a common theme of immigrant life (and movies)--desertion--is treated in the twists of plot that send our hero back to Russia, leaving his wife alone and pregnant. Interestingly, the earlier film's happy ending is supplanted in the newer version by a more cautionary conclusion. Maurice Schwartz directed and plays the lead, alongside fellow stars from the Yiddish Art Theater, and Hollywood's Lila Lee as the new wife.

* Written by Frances Taylor Patterson, based on a play by Zalmen Libin. Photographed by Frank Zucker (1926)/Sam Rosen (1932). With Maurice Schwartz, Lila Lee, Isidore Cashier (1926)/Michael Rosenberg, Lillian Karen, Bernard Holtzman (1932). (68 mins, Yiddish and English intertitles, added music and dialogue, B&W, 35mm)

The Dybbuk 6:35

Michal Waszynski (Poland, 1937)

(Der Dibuk). In The Dybbuk, as in mysticism and love, the past has a magnetic pull on the present, and the dead are as alluring as the living. Khonnon (Leon Liebgold) and Leah (Lili Liliana), betrothed before birth, meet, knowing nothing of the vows. Khonnon becomes obsessed with Leah and begins to dabble in the kabbala. Leah is betrothed to a wealthy man, and Khonnon offers her his body, soul and intelligence--via Satan--and dies. Leah's father invites the spirit of her dead mother to the wedding; Leah invites Khonnon from the grave. The film is filled with haunting, unforgettable scenes that verge on the surreal, set to choreography by Judith Berg. Jewish mysticism links with expressionism--as in Nosferatu or Vampyr, man is an insubstantial presence in the cinematic ether. Ansky's play was written during the turbulent years of 1912-1917, Waszynski's 1937 film made during another period of prewar unease; shot on location in rural Poland, it captures a rich folk heritage.

* Written by Alter Kacyzne, Andrzej Marek, based on the play by S. Ansky. Photographed by A. Wywerka. With Abraham Morewski, Leon Liebgold, Lili Liliana, Isaac Samberg. (123 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Monday September 18

Third World Cinema

Hyenas 7:00

Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal, 1992)

(Hyènes). The village of Colobane is emblematic of post-colonial Africa--in a state of stunned decay. To this once charming village returns a once charming woman, Linguère Ramatou, now fabulously wealthy, and never mind that her limbs are false: they're gold. Ramatou will open her purse to her former townspeople, save the village and even the country, for a price: the life of Draman Drameh, the lover who betrayed her as a pregnant sixteen-year-old, causing her expulsion from the village and ensuing life as a prostitute. Initially outraged, the people very soon have rationalized the trade-off: a life for a lifestyle. Director Mambety satirizes every institution in sight in this cautionary tale. But his source material was less caustic, mixing his fantasies about the fate of a character he knew many years ago in Dakar, a prostitute who fed the poor; and a play by Dürrenmatt, The Visit, in which a woman returns to her Swiss village with vengeance in heart, and money in hand.

* Written by Mambety, based on the play The Visit, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Photographed by Matthias Kälin. With Mansour Diouf, Ami Diakhate, Mahouredia Gueye, Issa Ramagelissa Samb. (110 mins, In Wolof with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Kino International)

Tuesday September 19

The New Child

"The Age of Innocence" 7:00

This program includes works of the American avant-garde by Joseph Cornell, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, and Bruce Conner which attempt to represent the consciousness or dream world of children. While this state is lyrically, even nostalgically, represented as simple and longed for, innocence is shown to have an edge, and this is explicitly explored in more contemporary works in the program that demystify the association of innocence with children. Brakhage has characterized his Scenes from Under Childhood as an attempt to remember what childhood is like; Conner's collage film Valse Triste has been described as an autobiographical evocation of his Kansas childhood, while Cornell's collage film Children's Party was intended to be both for and about children. More recently, Matthias Mueller's Alpsee, Lewis Klahr's Cake Excerpt, and Laurie McDonald's Dreamtime represent childhood as complicated by fears, desires, and longings, as an age that may not have experienced evil but suspects its possibility.--Kathy Geritz

Valse Triste by Bruce Conner (1979, 5 mins). Dreamtime by Laurie McDonald (1988, 6 mins). Scenes from Under Childhood, Part 1 by Stan Brakhage (1967, 25 mins). This Is It by James Broughton (1971, 10 mins). Under the Brooklyn Bridge by Rudy Burckhardt (1953, 15 mins, B&W). Pharoah's Belt (Cake Excerpt) by Lewis Klahr (1993, 9 mins, 3/4" video). Children's Party by Joseph Cornell (1940s; edited by Larry Jordan, 1968; Silent, B&W/Color/Tinted). Alpsee by Matthias Mueller (Germany, 1994, 15 mins).

* Total running time: 93 mins, 16mm and Color except as noted, From the artist, Canyon Cinema, Film-makers' Cooperative, PFA Collection)

Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills 8:50

Brian Gibson (U.K., 1979)

Preceded by short:

Identity Crisis (Mindy Faber, U.S., 1990). A seven-year-old girl tries on several female stereotypes in a ritual of dress-up, but this feisty child proves too expansive for her limited role. (3 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From Video Data Bank)

The Dennis Potter television drama Blue Remembered Hills grasps with precision the tribal passions of childhood. Potter envisions an ordinary day in bucolic England during the Second World War, as seven children begin an afternoon's wandering through the woods. Adult actors, clothed in ill-fitting, almost comic outfits, portray the children whose activities often reflect the torment and cruelties of the distant war. Their savage games result in petty rivalries, betrayals, and eventually, tragic consequences. Potter wrote of his decision to cast the film with adults: "Our culture has long since acknowledged that childhood is not transparent with innocence, and that its apparent simplicities are but the opacities of the very anxieties and aggressions which we occasionally seek to evade by means of misplaced nostalgia for those `blue remembered hills' of Housman's aching little verse."

* Written by Dennis Potter. With Helen Mirren, Michael Elphick, Colin Welland, Janine Duvitski. (72 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From the Museum of Television and Radio, permission Kenith Trodd. Special thanks to Kenith Trodd, Ron Simon, Brendan O'Malley.)

Wednesday September 20

The Decade Between

American Video Art, 1978-1988: Appropriate Appropriations 7:30

Works by Dara Birnbaum, Joan Braderman, Jeanne Finley, Chip Lord

The efficacy and ideology of mainstream media images have been important preoccupations within video art. Though the critiques appear in diverse manifestations, their host has often been the appropriated image. Birnbaum led the charge with her provocative, straight-on deconstructions of pirated TV footage. Through arrest and repetition, Pop-Pop Video (1980, 9 mins) analyzes the gestures and codes of televised syntax, revealing hidden frustration, embedded stress, and subtle corporate alignments. Lord's brilliant Abscam (Framed) (1981, 10:17 mins) allows the artist to literally colonize a politically charged media event. Returning to the site of the Abscam sting, Lord melds new footage with old, keying himself into the original FBI tapes. In Finley's satiric Common Mistakes (1986, 15 mins), vintage fifties footage, rife with presumed naivete, plays counterpoint to social misdeeds such as racism and sexism. Clips from a children's educational film stand in for early social inculcation and complacency. A classic of feminist deconstruction, Joan Does Dynasty (1986, 35 mins) has an electronic Braderman romping through episodes of America's favorite nighttime soap. With unabashed wit and insight, the artist discloses the implicit biases of the show while actually upstaging the other Joan, Collins.--Steve Seid

* (Total running time: 70 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From Electronic Arts Intermix, Video Data Bank)

Thursday September 21

Yiddish Film

Bruce Loeb on Piano

Jewish Luck 7:00

Alexander Granovsky (USSR, 1925)

(Yidishe glikn/a.k.a. Yevreiskoye Schastye/Menakhem Mendl). Based on the Menakhem Mendl stories of Sholem Aleichem, filtered through Isaac Babel, who wrote the intertitles; photographed by Eduard Tissé before his work with Eisenstein; directed by Alexander Granovsky with the Moscow Yiddish State Theater; and starring Solomon Mikhoels in his screen debut, Jewish Luck represents an extraordinary meeting of Russian-Jewish talent. Sholem Aleichem made Menakhem Mendl a classic Jewish figure of tsarist Russia, the luftmensch--literally, a man who lives on air--whose schemes are only dreams, and whose dreams are of something vaguely if universally understood as Jewish luck. From one doomed strike-it-rich scheme to the next, and "refusing to concede to tsarist Russia's oppressive restriction of Jews, quixotic persistence transforms him from schlemiel to hero as Granovsky and Mikhoels uncover the tragic underpinnings of Sholem Aleichem's comic tales." (National Center for Jewish Film)

* Based on stories by Sholem Aleichem (original Russian intertitles by Isaac Babel). Photographed by Eduard Tissé, Vasili Khvatov. With Solomon Mikhoels, Tamara Edelheim, T. Khazak, M. Goldblat. (100 mins, Silent, English intertitles, B&W, 35mm)

His Excellency (Seeds of Freedom) 8:55

Grigori Roshal (USSR, 1928)

(Yevo Prevoshoditelstvo/a.k.a. Hirsh Lekert). Centering on a Jewish community in early twentieth-century Vilna, His Excellency is based on the life of Hirsh Lekert, shoemaker and activist member of the Jewish Labor Bund. The struggles of a community torn between the threat of pogroms and the need for change asserted by the Jewish socialists are escalated by Lekert's shooting of the Vilna Governor General to avenge the flogging of workers who participated in a May Day rally. The film carefully builds a thesis based upon the class struggle within the Jewish community: class divisions and loyalties supersede shared religious history and persecution (in a telling scene, religious Jews pray in the synagogue while working-class Jews are beaten by armed soldiers). To bring home the point, Moscow Art Theater's Leonid Leonidov plays both the Governor General and the counterrevolutionary rabbi who supports his policies. (Note:one reel remains lost.)

* Written by Sofya Roshal, Vera Stroeva. Photographed by N. Koslovski. With Leonid Leonidov, J. Untershlak, Tamara Edelheim, M. Sinelnikova. (76 mins, Silent, English intertitles, B&W, 35mm)

Friday September 22

Alf Sjöberg

Torment 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1944)

For program notes, please see September 2.

The Royal Hunt 8:55

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1944)

(Kungajakt). A swashbuckler, set in the eighteenth century: Russia is seeking to overthrow Swedish King Gustav III, and has its envoy and a Swedish traitor tamper with the royal hunting rifle in hopes of a fatal accident. A little wartime escapism from Sjöberg? or, more to the point, another veiled attack on totalitarianism: "Sjöberg, like Marcel Carné [Children of Paradise] in occupied France, resolved to comment on the disturbing issues of the present through the device of setting his art in the past. Like Carné, too, he brought to the cinema the intelligent lighting and flamboyant performances of the theater. The Royal Hunt paints a vivid [picture] of eighteenth-century life [and] provides further evidence of Sjöberg's graceful, felicitous gift for directing exteriors. The `hunt' itself [is] a Watteau canvas come to life..." (Peter Cowie)

* Written by Karl Ragnar Gierow, Sjöberg. Photographed by Åke Dahlquist. With Inga Tidblad, Holger Löwenadler, Lauritz Falk, Erik "Bullen" Berglund. (92 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Saturday September 23

Yiddish Film

Little Mother (Mamele) 7:00

Joseph Green (Poland, 1938)

For program notes, please see September 10.

The Dybbuk 8:50

Michal Waszynski (Poland, 1937)

For program notes, please see September 17.

Sunday September 24

Alf Sjöberg

The Strongest 5:30

Alf Sjöberg, Axel Lindblom (Sweden, 1929)

Bruce Loeb on Piano

(Den Starkaste). "After seeing two films of Sergei Eisenstein... [Sjöberg] entered the world of cinema in 1929 with passionate convictions. His first work, The Strongest, was the last important Swedish silent movie. One of the great debut films, at no point does it appear the work of a novice. This remarkably composed and photographed romance and survival saga set in the world of seal and bear hunters of the Greenland Sea makes Flaherty's Nanook look like a Blackglama ad." (Elliott Stein) Made in collaboration with Axel Lindblom, who directed and photographed the location work, the film has a strong flavor of documentary while telling a fictional tale of Greenland farmers on a seasonal hunt, their rivalries for dominance and jealousies over love played out in the snowy landscape that is itself a protagonist of the film. Widely praised for its characterizations and the beauty of its images and rhythms, it would be Sjöberg's last film for a decade.

* Written, Photographed by Axel Lindblom. With Bengt Djurberg, Anders Henrikson, Gun Holmquist. (105 mins at 22fps, Silent with Swedish intertitles and live English translation, B&W, 35mm)

They Staked Their Lives 7:30

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1940)

For program notes, please see September 8.

Monday September 25

Third World Cinema

Ermo 7:00

Zhou Xiaowen (China, 1994)

Ermo is a simple noodlemaker in a rural collective whose horizons grow before our eyes like dry noodles set to boil. She is smart enough to be dissatisfied with her too-old husband who is flaccid in politic and body; canny enough to know that something's going on with her neighbor, Fat Lady, and that big fat television of hers; and rebellious enough to begin commuting to town to sell her noodles and see what real money feels like. Inner Mongolian actress Alia plays Ermo straight, the better to set off the absurdity of her fellow characters--and the emotional sterility of her (tunnel) vision. "Ermo is a delicious, unexpectedly wry comedy about keeping up with the Joneses. Like the best comedies of manners it works because it operates on the universal level of petty annoyances, competition, and jealousy. With a light touch, the film allows the cultural theme of modernization to grow from its hilariously small-minded characters." (Caryn James, New York Times)

* Written by Lang Yun, based on the novel by Xu Baoqi. Photographed by Lu Gengxin. With Alia, Liu Peiqi, Ge Zhijun, Zhang Haiyan. (93 mins, In Mandarin with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Arrow Entertainment)

Tuesday September 26

The Avant-Gardes: Film/Lecture Series

This Shared Voices project is made possible through the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative.

Avant-Garde Film in Los Angeles 7:30

Curated and Introduced by David E. James

David E. James's writings on the American avant-garde include Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties. He teaches in the School of Cinema at University of Southern California.

Los Angeles has commonly been marginalized in accounts of the American avant-garde. The pre-eminence of Hollywood, on the one hand, and on the other, a tradition of commentary that defines the avant-garde and the commercial film as entirely separate enterprises, have combined to conceal the actual richness of art film in the city. When we recognize that the extensiveness of the entertainment industry has made it inevitable for almost all modern art to negotiate with mass culture in one way or another, then the traditions of films made in Los Angeles appear to represent the avant-garde in a quintessential way. This program introduces these other ways of thinking about the avant-garde and attempts to restore to visibility some seminal works.--David James

Life and Death of 9413--A Hollywood Extra by Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich (1928, 11 mins, B&W). Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren (1943, 18 mins, B&W). Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome by Kenneth Anger (1954, 37 mins, Color). Saugus Series by Pat O'Neill (1974, 18 mins, Color).

* (Total program: c. 120 mins, 16mm, From PFA Collection and David James)

Wednesday September 27

The New Child: "The Family"

Obsessive Becoming 7:00

Daniel Reeves (U.S., 1995)

West Coast Premiere

Preceded by shorts:

Mother's Tongue (Irina Leimbacher, U.S., 1991). A daughter revisits her haunted past, dwelling on her overbearing mother. A fragment of film relentlessly repeated mirrors this subtle tyranny. (4 mins, B&W, 16mm, From the artist).

Passage à l'acte (Martin Arnold, Austria, 1993). Excerpting a dinner scene from a Hollywood feature, Arnold adamantly replays gestures until this family gathering becomes a purgatory of social indoctrination. (12 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Canyon Cinema)

Daniel Reeves's evocative Obsessive Becoming is a reconciliatory return to formative memories, buried deep in the marrow of a once-innocent child. At first we think Reeves, known for his beautifully crafted poetic works, is unspooling the photographic history of a family's roiled past. Revelations of child abuse, of shadow parents and missing siblings surface like distorted reflections in water. An image of abuse, captured by chance in mid-fifties family footage, recycles like a brutish ghost. But Reeves rises above his wounded childhood to embrace a notion of familial lineage. Though there is a universality to these painful lives, there is also the sweet conviction that love traces our paths. In one stunning sequence, portraits of Reeves's ancestors are morphed, generation to generation, revealing the persistence of a bloodline and a history. Obsessive Becoming sees in the child and the man a coming peace with the future. (54 mins, Color/B&W, 3/4" video, From Electronic Arts Intermix)--Steve Seid

* (Total running time: 70 mins)

Mono Playhouse 8:25

Zig Gron (U.S., 1992)

Preceded by shorts:

Family Tyranny (Paul McCarthy, 1987). A classic McCarthy table-top performance has him rudely kneading, massaging, and malforming dolls as he instructs them on proper familial conduct. (8 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From EAI)

Let's Play Prisoners (Julie Zando, 1988). This brilliant work enacts the stories of two nine-year-old girls, exploring the formation of sadomasochistic relationships. Mothers, like the director herself, don't get off easy. (22 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From Video Data Bank)

A kinky soap opera, complete with claustrophobic sets and queerly attired cast members, Mono Playhouse follows little Tommy Downey (played by full-size Zig Gron) from early childhood to adulthood as he accumulates a kooky array of sexual fetishes. Mommy's first spanking sets Tommy's perversity meter ticking with cruel and unusual pleasure. Even grandpa (Gron, again), a real pisher, is no better, adding damp humiliation to Tommy's growing list of lumpy relationships. Turning away from people, he finds fulfillment in the long braids of a rope--yes, non-judgmental, pliable rope--and from then on it's twine time. The uproariously wacky Mono Playhouse is like a Freudian case-study dictated by a cross-dressing Jerry Lewis. The family is a polymorphic cauldron, brewing the twisted concoctions we call people. When the snickers subside you'll agree "There's no place like home." (46 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From the artist)--Steve Seid

* (Total running time: 76 mins)

Thursday September 28

Yiddish Film

Two Sisters 7:00

Ben K. Blake (U.S., 1938)

(Tsvey shvester). Second Avenue diva Jennie Goldstein brought to her only film appearance all the emotion that made her the queen of shund--Yiddish popular theater, where "outburst, expression...vast outpourings of creative energy made the performance...an occasion for communal pleasure" (Irving Howe); in other words, "Yiddish kitsch" (J. Hoberman). "The film wastes no time assaulting the tear ducts," notes Hoberman, in telling of Betty Glickstein, a girl of the Lower East Side (and then the Grand Concourse), who fulfills her mother's dying wish that she take care of her younger sister by sacrificing her own youth and, finally, her marriage. In her portrait of a premature matron, thrust into middle age and thereby the middle ages, Goldstein embodies the crazy-making stresses of a generation with one foot in tradition, the other surfing assimilation's daily demands and promise.

* Story by Samuel H. Cohen. Photographed by George F. Hinners. With Jennie Goldstein, Celia Boodkin, Sylvia Dell, Muni Seroff. (82 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Uncle Moses 8:40

Sidney M. Goldin/Aubrey Scotto (U.S., 1932)

"Maurice Schwartz, the monarch of New York's Yiddish theater, plays a sweatshop owner in Uncle Moses.... Patriarch and exploiter, cunning businessman and dazzled suitor, Moses is a symphony of contradictions, which Schwartz orchestrates brilliantly." (Richard Corliss, Time, 1992) A portrayal of life on the Lower East Side, Uncle Moses depicts transplanted Jews whose values are not so much unraveling as transmogrifying before our eyes in the sweatshops and crowded tenements. Moses--in Poland, a lowly butcher, in America, the benevolent despot of Orchard Street--would seem the apotheosis of change, but not really. He himself represents an old order, the patriarch who asserts that his workers are mishpokhe (family--but they're not buying it), whose vanity produces sundry progeny, whose deep pockets buy him a bride (or rather, her family). Change only comes when he realizes that, as a human being, he is powerlessness in pressed pants. Then Schwartz's delightfully comic ham transforms into that thing that had him known as "the Olivier of the Yiddish stage."

* Written by Maurice Schwartz, based on the novel by Sholem Asch. Photographed by Fred Zucker, Buddy Harris. With Maurice Schwartz, Judith Abarbanel, Rubin Goldberg, Zvee Scooler. (87 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Friday September 29

Alf Sjöberg

Iris and the Lieutenant 7:30

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1946)

For program notes, please see September 2.

The Journey Out 9:10

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1945)

(Resan Bort). Sjöberg's eye for the dark sexual aspect of the thriller was evident in Torment, and reappears, along with a penchant for Hitchcock and Pabst, in his next film, The Journey Out. This tightly constructed story of cowardice and its consequences takes place in a small town on Sweden's west coast but sets its story in the larger world of a society out of joint. Two parallel plots develop, one a thriller/romantic triangle, and the other the story of a young Norwegian refugee trying to reach England and the RAF. As always, Sjöberg creates marvelous atmosphere and thematics with light and composition. The bank-robbery scene near the beginning is a knock-out.

* Written by Sjöberg. Photographed by Martin Bodin. With Holger Löwenadler, Gunn Wållgren, Sture Lagerwall, Maj-Britt Nilsson. (96 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Saturday September 30

Yiddish Film

Bruce Loeb on Piano

Jewish Luck 7:00

Alexander Granovsky (USSR, 1925)

His Excellency 8:55

Grigori Roshal (USSR, 1928)

For program notes for both films, please see September 21.

Sunday October 1

Yiddish Film

His Wife's Lover 3:30

Sidney M. Goldin (U.S., 1931)

(Zayn vaybs lyubovnik). His Wife's Lover "resurrects Molière at the corner of Orchard and Rivington" in a musical comedy of a misogynist wager that backfires nicely on its perpetrators. When handsome Second Avenue matinee idol Eddie Wein (Ludwig Satz) seeks a wife, his cynical uncle and backer (Isidore Cashier) uses the opportunity to prove his theories about the faithlessness of women. But the object of their wicked wager, the ingenuous costume-deliverer Golde Blumberg (Lucy Levine), surprises them both. Popular comic Satz, a make-up master with a gallery of characters, is in his element as Eddie impersonates a rich old "monkey." Set against a backdrop of sweatshop labor disputes, His Wife's Lover is a film of "wit and ribald contemporaneity...Filmed in New York by and for the generation of Jewish New Yorkers that'd pretty much just come off the boat, [it] demonstrates just how twentieth-century a crowd this was. No remote them but an us." (Ken Jacobs)

* Story by Shin Ra-Chell, based on the play. Photographed by Frank Zucker. With Ludwig Satz, Lucy Levine, Isadore Cashier, Lillian Feinman. (80 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

The Jester 5:05

Joseph Green/Jan Nowina-Przybylski (Poland, 1937)

Preceded by short:

Yosl Cutler and His Puppets (U.S., 1935). (Kotlers Marionetn). This short preserves a performance by the popular and intriguing puppet artist Yosl Cutler: "Half modernist, half folk artist...contemporaries remember him as a raw, unharnessed talent, bursting with charm and ideas." (J. Hoberman) Several skits poke fun at Old World Jewish stereotypes. (18 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

(Der Purimspieler). "Set in a Galician shtetl before World War II, this musical comedy focuses on three characters: the sad vagabond peasant jester, Getsel; a vaudeville performer in a traveling circus; and a shoemaker's daughter, whose father tries to marry her into a prominent family. The climax is a traditional Purim festival during which the performers drive off the rich suitor's family..." (National Center for Jewish Film) "A wistful romance that's interspersed with songs but rooted in the wisecracks and banter of oral Yiddish culture. Green's films are always part documentary--much of [The Jester] was shot on location in the crooked streets and ancient marketplaces of southern Poland, and even the studio scenes are populated by an army of Old World Jewish extras." (J. Hoberman)

* Written by Chaver Pahver, J. Victor. Photographed by Seweryn Steinwurzel. With Zygmund Turkow, Miriam Kressyn, Hymie Jacobson. (88 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Green Fields 7:10

Edgar Ulmer, Jacob Ben-Ami (U.S., 1937)

(Grine felder). An ascetic-quixotic yeshiva student sets out in search of "true Jews"--those whose spirit is the more profound for their connection to the land, unadulterated by the evils of city life. He finds that and more, as he becomes the quarry of two farm families who want him for their children's tutor. Quite in spite of himself the dreamy pedant (Michael Goldstein) inspires a variety of desires including a lust for learning in the irrepressible Tsine (Helen Beverly) and her wide-eyed brother Avrem-Yankl (Herschel Bernardi). Theater director/actor Jacob Ben-Ami is credited with giving the film its "authentic flavor." On the other hand, who but Edgar G. Ulmer--Hollywood's stylish, expressionist "King of the Bs"--could have transformed New Jersey locations and a New York studio set into bucolic-rustic Old Russia, with its delicately balanced relationships? "Green Fields celebrates a vanished world of tribal wholeness and stubborn piety.... Sweet but unsentimental, the film exudes a dreamy pantheism unique in Yiddish Film." (J. Hoberman)

* Written by Ulmer, Ben-Ami, based on the play by Peretz Hirschbein. Photographed by J. Burgi-Contner, William Miller. With Michael Goldstein, Helen Beverly, Isidore Cashier, Anna Appel, Herschel Bernardi. (95 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Monday October 2

Third World Cinema

Rocking Popenguine with The Franc 7:00

The Franc

Djibril Diop Mambety (Senegal, 1994)

(Le Franc). The Franc is a folkloric slice of modern life in Senegal. Marigo is a down-and-out musician who is chronically unable to pay rent. After his landlady takes revenge by destroying his congoma, his beloved instrument, Marigo decides to enter the lottery. Laced with Marigo's richly colored dreams of fame, wealth, and huge orchestras, The Franc is simple and impressionistic while drawing on Mambety's ironic views of the social and economic problems that breed alienation in present-day African societies. Best Short Narrative, S.F.I.F.F.

* Written by Mambety. Photographed by Stephan Oriach. With Dieye Ma Dieye, Aminta Fall, Demba Bâ. (45 mins, In Wolof with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From California Newsreel)

Rocking Popenguine

Moussa Sene Absa (Senegal, 1994)

(Ça Twiste à Poponguine). Rocking Popenguine (better known by its literal title Twisting in Popenguine) deals with teenagers--an age with one foot in the future, the other in the past--in Senegal of the sixties, like so much of Africa, coping with the transition between colonialism and modernity. It's the proverbial coming-of-age story without the proverbs: a fresh, charming, fast-paced film about teens on the beach. Not Frankie and Annette, but close: the "Ins" (for Inseparables) have adopted the names of French pop stars, Johnny Halliday, Sylvie Vartan, et al, while the Kings have styled themselves after American R&B legends Otis Redding, Ray Charles, and James Brown. The Ins go to school and have all the girls; the Kings work as fishermen, but they have a much-coveted record player. What the Inseparables really want is separation: they want out of this village which seems hopelessly constrained by tradition. Their desire engulfs the village, pitting those who dream against those who remember.

* Written by Sene Absa. Photographed by Dominique Gentil. With Ousmane Boye, Patrice Nassalang, Coura Bâ, Jean François Balmer. (90 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 3/4" video, From California Newsreel)

Tuesday October 3

The New Child

"The Child Plays" 7:00

Children's play, filled as it is with inventive games, fanciful personas, rule-bending pranks, and dreamy musings, often connects with artists' more purposeful re-imaginings of the world. For some, children's creativity inspires a sense of wonder at the world, means by which to see it anew; for others it suggests subversive ploys, strategies by which to turn the established order topsy-turvy. Marjorie Keller, filmmaker and author of The untutored eye: childhood in the films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage, creates a transformative dance from an 8mm home movie in She/Va, while Joseph Cornell's Bookstalls conjures the imaginary voyages instigated by books. In Todd Haynes's Dottie Gets Spanked, a young boy's fantasies about his favorite TV star release family tensions. Both Leslie Thornton (Peggy and Fred in Hell) and Peggy Ahwesh (Ode to the New Prehistory) have depicted their neighbors, nieces and nephews over a number of years, finding in their play tensions between learning the rules (of games, of society) and anarchic resistance to such socialization.--Kathy Geritz

She/Va by Marjorie Keller (1971, 3 mins, Silent, Color). Teasing the Gardener by Lumière Brothers (1895, c. 3 mins, Silent, B&W). Peggy and Fred in Hell (Prologue) by Leslie Thornton (1987, 21 mins, B&W). Splash by Thomas Allen Harris (1991, 7 mins, Color). Bookstalls by Joseph Cornell (11 mins, Silent, B&W). Ode to the New Prehistory by Peggy Ahwesh (1984-87, 22 mins, Color, S-8). Dottie Gets Spanked by Todd Haynes (1993, 28 mins, Color).

* (Total running time: c. 95 mins, 16mm except as noted, From Canyon Cinema, Drift, MOMA, Video Data Bank, Zeitgeist)

Art for Teachers of Children 8:50

Jennifer Montgomery (U.S., 1995)

Avant-garde filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery's first dramatic feature is a low-budget film drawing on her affair as a fourteen-year-old with photographer Jock Sturgis. Fifteen years later, she was re-involved when he stood accused of being a child pornographer in a case that generated much publicity and debate. The majority of the film is set in an East Coast boarding school where twenty-eight-year-old John Goddard (Duncan Hannah) is Jennifer (Caitlin Grace McDonnell)'s dorm head. He photographs her; she watches him watching her. The roles of artist and model undergo complex permutations within the narrative and through the making of the film. At age fourteen, Jennifer "chooses" John to lose her virginity to; now she chooses him as the subject of her film. He is now her model, used to raise questions about consent, about who acts on whom in relationships and in art.--Kathy Geritz

Art for Teachers of Children will open at the UC Theater, Berkeley (See UCTheater).

* Written, Photographed by Montgomery. With Caitlin Grace McDonnell, Duncan Hannah, Coles Burroughs. (82 mins, Color, 35mm, From Zeitgeist)

Wednesday October 4

The Decade Between

American Video Art, 1978-1988: Ilene Segalove 7:30

Artist in Person

Since the early 1970s, Ilene Segalove has comically pursued a singular subject, her own upbringing in southern California. Often mocking television genres, Segalove's tapes read as a bewildered, desperately aching homage to a life riotously infested with stardom, hormones, and adolescent fears. The Mom Tapes (1974-78, 28 mins), a series of short vignettes, casts her mother as a celebrity whose mundane affairs seem as worthy of airtime as those of any full-fledged Hollywood star--at least to her cheerful, secretly savvy daughter. Bloated art direction and all, Why I Got Into TV and Other Stories (1983, 10 mins) recounts several wry tales about Segalove's formative moments with TV which she discovers has the power to attract, a power any adolescent girl would crave. In one witty story she tells of breaking the set's remote, bringing the TV repairman, her prince charming, back for a house call. Whatever Happened to the Future? (1987, 17 mins) contrasts her childhood optimism with the shoddy spectacle of a life filled with fakery--appliances, environments, even experience. As lightly humorous as many of these works may appear, beneath their grinning surface lies an aghast disillusionment. This is where Segalove's art resides.--Steve Seid

* (Total program: c. 90 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From the artist)

Thursday October 5

Yiddish Film

A Letter to Mother 7:00

Joseph Green (Poland, 1939)

(A brivele der mamen). "...arguably the most artful and shameless of Yiddish weepies." (J. Hoberman) "Set in the Ukraine before World War I and in New York afterwards, this was one of the last films made in Poland before the Nazi invasion. Its tale of loss, family disintegration and poverty serves director Joseph Green as a metaphor for the displacements and difficulties facing European Jews in 1939. Lucy Gehrman's performance as the storekeeper-mother, whose heroic attention to the everyday eventually rewards her travails, stands out, as do Max Bozyk and Chane Levin's comic interludes." (National Center for Jewish Film)

* Written by Mendel Osherwitz, Green, et al. Photographed by Seweryn Steinwurzel. With Lucy and Misha Gehrman, Gertrude Bullman, Max Bozyk. (106 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Without a Home 9:00

Alexander Marten (Poland, 1939)

(On a heym). The film's title resonates on many levels: This was the last Yiddish feature made in Poland before the war, and it is in fact already set in New York, taking a hard look at the lives of turn-of-the-century immigrants. The film deals with "the hardships of a people cast adrift in urban America with little hope of preserving their traditional family patterns.... The antics of comedy team Dzigan and Shumacher work in counterpoint to the story's otherwise unrelieved difficulties.... First separated and then reunited by immigration, the Rivkin family finds no respite either way. Real threats posed by both the Nazis and increasing anti-Semitism in Poland itself [during the film's making] heighten Without a Home's sense of apprehension, and Ida Kaminska's touching performance as Bat-Sheva epitomizes it." (NCJF)

* Written by Alter Kacyzne, based on the play by Jacob Gordin. Photographed by Jacob Jonilowicz. With Ida Kaminska, Alexander Marten, Shimon Dzigan, Yisroel Shumacher. (88 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Friday October 6

Alf Sjöberg

Only a Mother 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1949)

For program notes, please see September 3.

Barabbas 8:55

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1953)

Clearly prompted by the recent European experience of World War II, Barabbas is based on Pär Lagerkvist's novel about the imaginary fate of Barabbas, the thief whose life was spared in exchange for that of Jesus Christ. Product of a violent childhood, "He is seen as a sympathetic, doomed character, born, like Erik XIV [subject of Karin Månsdotter], out of tune with his time...The paradox of the novel and the film is Barabbas's change of faith, which takes place during his imprisonment in the copper mines. At the end, he is unable to reconcile the strange non-violence of the new faith with the more instinctive practices of his upbringing." (Peter Cowie) "For Sjöberg, Barabbas is not a story about faith and doubts...but more a film about the search of a human being.... The destiny of Barabbas is actually timeless; he could just as well represent the human of today, who is pulled into important situations but not able to master them." (Gerd Osten, Sweden, 1956)

* Written by Sjöberg, based on the novel by Pär Lagerkvist. Photographed by Göran Strindberg, Sven Nykvist. With Ulf Palme, Inge Waern, Olof Widgren, Eva Dahlbeck. (119 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Saturday October 7

Yiddish Film

Uncle Moses 7:00

Sidney M. Goldin/Aubrey Scotto (U.S., 1932)

For program notes, please see September 28.

His Wife's Lover 8:45

Sidney M. Goldin (U.S., 1931)

For program notes, please see October 1.

Sunday October 8

Mill Valley Film Festival Co-presents:A Tribute to Peter Schamoni

Max Ernst 5:30

Peter Schamoni (Germany, 1991)

Peter Schamoni in Person

Introduced by Peter Selz

Peter Selz, founding director of the University Art Museum and Professor Emeritus, History of Art, UC Berkeley, introduces the work of Peter Schamoni. Schamoni is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker best known for his art-films about art (we recently revived his 1960 film with Alexander Kluge, Brutality in Stone). Niki de Saint Phalle screens next Sunday.

Made on the 100th anniversary of Max Ernst's birth, Max Ernst adds a new dimension to our understanding of Ernst's revolutionary and visionary work. The film "is as extraordinary and contradictory as its subject: the restless, vagabond life of Dadaist and Surrealist, Max Ernst. Schamoni was a friend of Ernst from the early 1960s to Ernst's death in 1976, and was closely involved in his work.... The film...brings to life not just the work itself [but] the enigma of Ernst as a man and an artist.... It contains some remarkably hypnotic sequences, such as the artist's dream-dance through empty city streets. These have a poetry of their own, evoking a remarkable existence somewhere between dream and reality." (Stuttgarter Zeitung)

* Written by Schamoni. Photographed by Ernst Hirsch, Peter Rosenwanger, Victor Schamoni. Music by Igor Stravinsky. (101 mins, In German and English, Color, 35mm)

Monday October 9

Third World Cinema

Life on a String 7:00

Chen Kaige (U.K./China/Germany, 1990)

(Bian Zou Bian Chang). "Once upon a time there was a blind boy who inherited a secret prescription from his master. He was promised that the prescription had the power to restore his sight, but only if he devoted his life to music and broke a thousand strings on his banjo. He traveled from village to village singing ballads, and each time he broke a string, he tied a knot in a long rope. As the years went by he became known as the Saint, and like his master, took on a disciple, a young blind boy. With each broken string the suspense increases. Chen's tale deals with physical adversity and fate, but on a deeper level, it explores both the dangerous seductiveness of leaders who set themselves up as godlike authorities and the mythologies they tend to spin around themselves. As visually stunning as it is profound, Life on a String tells a cautionary tale about the perils of naively surrendering to intoxicating ideologies and charismatic leaders."--Helga Stephenson, London, Toronto Festivals '91

* Written by Chen, from a story by Shi Tiesheng. Photographed by Gu Changwei. With Liu Zhongyuan, Huang Lei, Xu Qing, Zhang Zhenguan. (110 mins, In Mandarin with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Kino International)

Tuesday October 10

Presented with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Endowment.

Alternative Requirements: Works from Bay Area Film Schools 7:30

Artists in Person

This year's Alternative Requirements film and video program focuses on works of an experimental nature, featuring a selection of recently completed (1994-1995) films and videos by Bay Area students. These artists demonstrate a commitment to the tradition of formal experimentation, on a material as well as structural level, expanding the possibilities of visual expression. While serving as excellent examples of craft, these films transcend pure experimentation for its own sake in the interest of giving appropriate form to deeper personal and/or cultural explorations. Tonight's program, curated by Brian Frye, Jennifer Lovvorn, Steve Polta, and Julie Stone--all past or present Film Studies students at Cal--features works from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley.--Steve Polta

Brenda, I'm Coming by George Andrews (1994-5, 3 mins, Color/B&W, VHS). Project 2 by Luis Recoder (6.5 mins, VHS). 01912-196 by David Glover (3 mins, 1994-95, Color/B&W). Madeleine by Kemala Karmen (1994, 8 mins, ColorB&W). Particle Physique by John Turk (8.5 mins). Untitled by Kerry A. Laitala (10 mins). Penumbra by Hilary Morgan (1994, 14 mins). Revision by Chana Pollack (4.5 mins, B&W). The Leash Men by Kurt Keppeler (1994, 9 mins, B&W). Talking to a Stone by Inger Lise Hansen (1994, 6.5 mins). The Purloined Letter by Kota Ezawa (U-Matic, 15 mins).

* (Total running time: 88 mins, 1995, Color, 16mm except as noted, From the artists)

Wednesday October 11

The New Child

"When the Child Is More Than a Child" 7:00

Works by Mia Lor Houlberg, John Orentlicher, Martha Rosler, Mary Scott, Kate Wrobel

The abused child, the fantasized child, the contested child--the child limited or qualified by an adjective. Orentlicher's the (Mass) (1987, 11 mins) captures a delirious county fair event in which parents pose their children as life-size Hummel figurines. The costumed kids are never as cooperative as their ceramic counterparts. World-wise and awkwardly adult, the battered children in Houlberg's A Is for Abuse (1993, 10 mins) are vessels for society's darkest failures. Usually surrendered to the rubric of "children of divorced parents," the subjects of Scott's Miss Somebody (1995, 10:30 mins, 16mm) resist such numbing classification. This fanciful essay shows kids bearing the unfortunate burden of self-knowledge. Denying self-knowledge seems to be a right-wing ploy as evidenced in Wrobel's disturbing yet unusually even-handed glimpse of an anti-abortion rally, How I Spent My Summer Vacation (1994, 10 mins), in which children used on the front lines are interviewed. A child becomes convenient chattel in a judicial process dominated by gender and class bias in Born to Be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $ M (1988, 35 mins). Rosler employs jocular re-enactments and stinging wit in her analysis of the Mary Beth Whitehead case. Here, parenthood becomes a battle between dollars and sense.--Steve Seid

* (Total running time: 77 mins, Color, 3/4" video except as noted, From The Kitchen, Video Data Bank, the artists)

Lord of the Flies 8:35

Peter Brook (U.K., 1963)

A planeload of English schoolboys marooned on a remote Pacific island unite to build shelter and fire. But over a period of time, the boys revert to a state of savagery which seems to be motivated not by a sense of animal survival, but by a specifically human sadism. Peter Brook uses the film medium to great advantage to evoke what is truly terrifying in William Golding's well-known parable of the beast within us: namely, that the fiend emerges in the simplicity of broad daylight, on an island paradise, among a group of playful young boys unaware of their own cruelty. Brook elicits remarkable performances, and his focus on details of boyish expression and gesture adds to the seeming absurdity of the fear that mounts inexorably.

* Written by Brook, based on the novel by William Golding. Photographed by Tom Hollyman. With James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards, Roger Elwin, Tom Gaman. (90 mins, B&W, 16mm, From PFA Collection, permission Films, Inc.)

Thursday October 12

Yiddish Film

Children Must Laugh 7:00

Aleksander Ford (Poland, 1936)

(Mir kumen on/a.k.a. Here We Come). One of the few surviving film documentaries about Jewish life in prewar Poland--and the only feature-length Yiddish documentary--Children Must Laugh was made as a fund-raiser for a Jewish Labor Bund-run sanitarium devoted to the care and education of tubercular children. In the sanitarium's spacious grounds, children garden, care for animals, participate in science lessons, sports, and singing, and even politically organize. By contrast, the squalid conditions of the Warsaw Ghetto are shown in their profound hopelessness. The sanitarium's optimistic theme song "Here We Come" took on another resonance when the Nazis transported its residents to Treblinka in August 1942. A few escaped and fought in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Bundist underground. Directed by Aleksander Ford, who would head the Polish film industry after the war, the film was banned by the prewar Polish government as a Communist-propaganda vehicle.

* Written by Wanda Wasilewska, Jacob Pat. Photographed by S. Lipinski. Introduced by David Dubinsky of ILGWU. (63 mins, In English, Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Our Children 8:20

Natan Gross (Poland, 1948)

(Undzere kinder). "Not only among the first films about the Holocaust, it is also the first to critique its representation." (J. Hoberman) Suppressed by the postwar Communist government as too "pro-Zionist," then lost for over thirty years, Our Children features the comedy duo Shimon Dzigan and Yisroel Shumacher. Recently returned to Poland from the Soviet Union, they explore the impact of the Holocaust on survivors, particularly the children of an orphanage/school near Lodz. Performing for the children, the comics are told in no uncertain terms that they have oversentimentalized the wartime conditions that these kids survived by their own wits. In the most delightful scene, the duo stage a playlet based on Sholem Aleichem's "Kasrilevke Is Burning," in which they take all the roles including the women. The children themselves perform in this film that explores the healing possibilities of song, dance, and storytelling, and the question of whether it is more therapeutic to remember or to forget.

* With Shimon Dzigan, Yisroel Shumacher, Nusia Gold, children from Helenowek Orphanage. (80 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Friday October 13

Alf Sjöberg

Wild Birds 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1955)

For program notes, please see September 3.

Karin Månsdotter 8:55

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1954)

For program notes, please see September 9.

Saturday October 14

Filipino-American Film andVideo Festival Co-presents:

Philippine Film: On/By Women

The Filipino American Film and Video Festival is part of Filipino American Arts Exposition `95. We wish to thank Mauro Feria Tumbocon, Jr., Director of Programming.

Once a Moth 6:30

Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara (Philippines, 1976)

In Person: Director Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara, producer Digna Santiago; program introduced by Mauro Feria Tumbocon, Jr.

(Minsa'Y Isang Gamu Gamo). The late seventies and early eighties saw the emergence of socially aware women filmmakers in otherwise male-dominated Philippine cinema. Tonight's program features two of these directors, and focuses on the impact of their work on the industry and on popular debate. Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara's Once a Moth, with superstar Nora Aunor, tells of a Filipina nurse, Corazon, who dreams of working in the United States but whose illusions about that promised land are shattered as she witnesses the indignities suffered by Filipinos at nearby Clark Air Base. When her brother is shot by a base guard who claims to have thought he was shooting a boar, the absurdity of the situation is surpassed only by its tragedy. Corazon's dreams had opened the dialogue about America in her family; her battle for justice--as "a moth that dared to challenge the eagle"--brings the debate into the public.

* Written by Marina Feleo-Gonzalez. Photographed by Jose Batac, Jr. With Nora Aunor, Jay Ilagan, Gloria Sevilla, Perla Bautista. (122 mins, In Tagalog with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Moral 9:15

Marilou Diaz-Abaya (Philippines, 1982)

Marilou Diaz-Abaya's Moral, with a "bright, hard-headed screenplay" by Ricardo Lee (who wrote Lino Brocka's Jaguar), skates a path between pulp fiction and feminist politics in telling of four middle-class women who had been friends in college. In the years between 1979 and 1982, a period of growing social unrest in the country, "each is trying to find her own way in an apparently modern, but still fundamentally feudal-colonial society.... [The film] falls into shape beautifully and builds a good deal of earned sympathy for the characters." One woman's ambitions are frustrated by the everyday machismo of her husband; another is a failing nightclub singer; a third, drawn to the counterculture, becomes a drug addict; and a fourth clings to her affection for a now-gay husband. The stuff of soaps, but not here; censored for its political content on its release in the Philippines, "Moral charts a brave course of dissident sympathies." (quotations from Elliott Stein, Film Comment)

* Written by Ricardo Lee. Photographed by Manolo Abaya. With Lorna Tolentino, Gina Alajar, Sandy Andolong, Anna Marin. (130 mins, In Tagalog with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Sunday October 15

Mill Valley Film Festival Co-presents:A Tribute to Peter Schamoni

Niki de Saint Phalle: Who Is the Monster--You or Me? 5:30

Peter Schamoni (Germany, 1995)

Please see introduction to Peter Schamoni, October 8. This is a dramatic documentary with the French-American artist Niki de Sainte Phalle and her Swiss husband Jean Tinguely (who died in 1991). De Saint Phalle talks about her life, her work, and her collaboration with Tinguely, famous for his kinetic art ("I invent machines which aren't useful at all"). The film begins with Niki's "shooting paintings" of the early sixties ("instead of becoming a terrorist, I became a terrorist in art"). It shows her work on the voluptuous, colorful Nana figures; on The Devouring Mothers; on giant architectural sculptures including the Cathedral Woman Hon (Stockholm), Golem (Jerusalem), and the Stravinsky Fountain (Paris); and the construction and opening ceremony of the enormous sculpture garden in Tuscany, where the artist optically depicts the twenty-two main tarot cards. Highlights are clippings from Niki's own experimental films Daddy and A Dream--Longer than the Night with various grotesque performances by her and her husband.

* (100 mins, In English, Color, 35mm)

Monday October 16

Third World Cinema

Latcho Drom 7:00

Tony Gatlif (France, 1993)

This gorgeous, exuberant, and moving paean to Gypsy music and history is neither documentary nor fiction: it falls wondrously between the cracks, like Rom (Gypsy) culture itself in its many enclaves from India to Spain. Latcho drom means "safe journey," and that is what director Tony Gatlif wishes his people (he is French, Algerian-born, with Rom roots). But the odyssey his film chronicles--without narration, and only the songs to tell the tale--has been anything but safe. Amid the lyrics about love and wanderings are those about a common fate of the world's scapegoats, well before Auschwitz and Ceausescu, and continuing today in the "new" Eastern Europe. Gatlif traveled to a dozen countries--including India, Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France, and Spain--to film the superlative singers, dancers, and musicians whose lives are performance, and whose stage is the landscape they roam.

* Written by Gatlif. Photographed by Eric Guichard, Claude Garnier. (103 mins, In Romany with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From New Yorker)

Tuesday October 17

The New Child

"The Child Grows" 7:00

The depiction of childbirth as something to be seen and celebrated was central to the sixties avant-garde. Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving heralds the birth of his daughter. Later works place birth and childhood in a network of social and economic determinants, exploring the acquisition of language by the child, the awakening of sexuality, and the transition from protected childhood into the larger social world. Messages beautifully and simply uses Piaget's writing and filmmaker Guy Sherwin's daughter's questions about the world; Ralph Arlyck's Sean is an extraordinary interview with a four-year-old Haight-Ashbury resident who smokes pot and is afraid of the dark; in Peggy Ahwesh's Martina's Playhouse, playful child and adult role reversals reveal the complexity of socialization.--Kathy Geritz

Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1959, 12 mins, Silent). Feeding the Baby (Lumière Brothers, 1895, c. 3 mins, Silent, B&W). Sean (Ralph Arlyck, 14 mins, B&W). Messages (Guy Sherwin, 1981-84, 35 mins, Silent, B&W). Martina's Playhouse (Peggy Ahwesh, 1989, 20 mins, S-8mm).

* (Total running time: c. 85 mins, 16mm and Color except as noted, from Canyon Cinema, Film-makers' Cooperative, MOMA)

35 Up 8:40

Michael Apted (U.K., 1991)

"Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man."--Jesuit maxim

35 Up is the fifth in a series of remarkable documentaries that began with the 1963 film for Granada TV, 7 Up, in which seven-year-olds from widely variant backgrounds were interviewed. The same children were filmed at seven-year intervals into adulthood. The feature film 35 Up incorporates footage from past interviews, so as to compare the progress of these lives which are extraordinary only in being compellingly real. And sometimes dubious progress it is; in one case, the bright child who wanted to be a tour-bus guide and became a vagabond, it is a tragic progression toward the edge. In another, humorous upper-class twitlet grows into insufferable barrister. 35 Up, like its predecessors, is a film about the British class system, and it is almost by degrees of class that the confident world views expressed by the children have metamorphosed into the settled, the almost-secure.

* Photographed by George Jesse Turner. (128 mins, Color, 35mm, From Goldywn Films)

Wednesday October 18

The Decade Between

American Video Art, 1978-1988: Fighting Words 7:30

Works by Juan Downey, Gary Hill, and Peter Rose

As part of an oppositional practice, video artists often dwell on the power of language systems, visual or otherwise, to influence everyday life. This doesn't mean investigating television, "video art's frightful parent," but rather the larger cultural context of all iconographic models. Invented languages, ideographic subtitles, and mercurial text supply the core of Rose's Pressures of the Text (1983, 17 mins), a somewhat jocular work about the construction of meaning. Using digital video techniques, Downey's formidable Information Withheld (1983, 28:30 mins) draws analogies between ancient hieroglyphics and contemporary signs, throwing in such things as Michelangelo's paintings for good measure. Hill's astounding Incidence of Catastrophe (1987, 43:50 mins) deploys an acute pictorial regime in which a speechless protagonist finds voice through redolent images. Inspired by Maurice Blanchot's novel Thomas the Obscure, the tape wades into the murky waters where consciousness and language mingle. Overwhelmed by the limitations of words, Hill's hero retreats into a sub-lingual stupor, the last refuge of imbeciles and saints. Incidence of Catastrophe is a muted testament to a man witnessing his own senses.--Steve Seid

* (Total running time: 90 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From Electronic Arts Intermix, the artist)

Thursday October 19

Yiddish Film

Introduced by J. Hoberman

Author, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds

The Return of Nathan Becker 7:00

Boris Shpis/Rokhl M. Milman (USSR, 1932)

(Nosn Beker fort aheym). Written by the poet Peretz Markish, The Return of Nathan Becker is a paean to the Five Year Plan cloaked in what Variety called "a definite strain of the native Jewish sense of humor." In the story of bricklayer Nathan Becker, who after twenty-odd years in America returns home to Russia with his black friend Jim ("you, too, are going home"), the film promotes movement away from the shtetl and its traditions, and from American capitalism and assimilation, in equal measures. But it also realistically asserts that you can't go home again, at least not without the mixed blessings of such a return. Moscow Yiddish State Theater director Solomon Mikhoels, at age forty-two, steals the show as Nathan's elderly father using a unique mixture of Russian and Yiddish, clicks and clucks. Mikhoels and Markish (both of whom appear in the short film that follows) fell victim to Stalin's postwar anti-Semitic purges. J. Hoberman's introduction will place this complex film, with roots in FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor) and in Yiddish folk culture, in context.

* Written by Peretz Markish. With Boris Babochkin, David Guttman, Solomon Mikhoels, Elena Kashnitzkaya. (85 mins, In Yiddish, Russian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Followed by:

An Appeal to the Jews of the World (USSR, 1941). A news broadcast from a public meeting where prominent Russian-Jewish artists Solomon Mikhoels, Peretz Markish, and Sergei Eisenstein call on Jews world-wide to join the war against fascism. Their expression of Jewish national unity was opportunistically and fleetingly blessed by the government. (6 mins, In Russian, Yiddish, English with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Friday October 20

Alf Sjöberg

The Last Couple Out 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1956)

(Sista Paret Ut). With a screenplay by Ingmar Bergman (and featuring actresses who would play key roles in Bergman's own films--Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and Eva Dahlbeck), The Last Couple Out updates the generational warfare depicted in Torment, another Bergman screenplay. A young student, the son of a prominent lawyer, discovering his mother's illicit affair, becomes disenchanted with his bourgeois milieu and girlfriend. He becomes drawn to a less decorous friend, Anita, who views herself as an outcast from society. "The Last Couple Out has not altered the young man's fear [as portrayed in Torment] of adults' betrayal, and has also added a common middle-age dilemma: the grown-ups have renounced a great deal of the dictatorship they held over their children and therefore can no longer hide their own weaknesses. Yet their almost-adult children don't want to, cannot or dare not, face the truth." (Bent Petersen, Sweden, 1957)

* Written by Ingmar Bergman. Photographed by Martin Bodin. With Björn Bjelvenstam, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck. (106 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

The Judge 9:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1960)

(Domaren). Based on a true case of embezzlement in Sweden, this is the tale of a poet driven mad by corruption in the name of the status quo. The young man returns home after a trip to find that his legal guardian, a prominent judge, has engineered his financial ruin. His protests lead him to be judged insane and put away. His girlfriend endeavors to bring the case to court, despite the inviolability of judges in Sweden. "It is a film about invisibility. It has always been the duty of theater and film to provide access to the secret chambers where the real changes happen to mankind and the world. In tonight's film, we will see how a man, on an ordinary day, seems to have been grabbed by the arms of a giant. Everything he owns disappears, and finally--in front of the careless eyes of the world--he, himself, disappears.... Like salt in the eye of contentedness: that is how we want our film to be received." (Sjöberg)

* Written by Sjöberg, Vilhelm Moberg, based on Moberg's play. Photographed by Sven Nykvist. With Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Hellström, Per Myrberg, Georg Rydeberg. (113 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Saturday October 21

Yiddish Film

Tevye 7:00

Maurice Schwartz (U.S., 1939)

When the restored Tevye was re-released in 1979-1980, critics felt they had found the screen Tevye in Maurice Schwartz, the great Yiddish actor-director. Tevye the Dairyman is a kind of Jewish Everyman, struggling to hold on to that which defines him against the winds of change. The film, adapted from a stage play written by Sholem Aleichem based on his famous stories, focuses on two crises in Tevye's life: the conversion of his daughter Khave (Miriam Riselle) to Christianity in order to marry a Russian intellectual, and the expulsion of the Jews from the small Russian town that was Tevye's birthplace. Critic Rob Baker wrote, "Tevye is a pastoral gem comparable to much of the best of Pagnol [and] Renoir.... Filmed in Long Island, the film's accuracy in capturing the cultural patina of the day-to-day life of Russian Jews is striking."

* Written by Schwartz, adapted from the play by Sholem Aleichem. Photographed by Larry Williams. With Maurice Schwartz, Rebecca Weintraub, Miriam Riselle, Leon Liebgold. (96 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Green Fields 8:55

Edgar Ulmer, Jacob Ben-Ami (U.S., 1937)

For program notes, please see October 1.

Sunday October 22

Yiddish Film

Introduced by J. Hoberman

Benya Krik 3:30

Vladimir Vilner (USSR, 1926)

Bruce Loeb on Piano

Preceded by short:

Scenes from Jewish Life (Prerevolutionary Russian-Yiddish) A belly dancer seduces a young man in a rather explicit and erotic sequence for the time; he returns to his small town and Jewish society, is scorned by both family and society with tragic results. (Silent, c. 20-30 mins, Synopsis provided [intertitles and some early scenes missing], B&W, 16mm)

Based on two Odessa Stories by the great Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel (who added a third original sequence), Benya Krik is a romantic portrayal of the Jewish underworld in prerevolutionary Odessa. The eponymous protagonist is a swashbuckling and ruthless crime king. When an ambitious policeman prepares a raid against his organization on the evening of his sister's wedding (a singularly over-the-top wedding scene in a cinema that specializes in them), he has the police headquarters set on fire. When his men mistakenly kill a worker during a raid on a bakery, he punishes the man responsible and prepares a frighteningly elegant funeral for both victims. During the Revolution, he joins the Bolsheviks, leading to his demise (this section, according to Hoberman, based on Benya Krik's real-life model, "Mike the Jap" Vinitsky). Written for Sergei Eisenstein, alas directed instead by theater director Vilner, Benya Krik was almost immediately banned and remained virtually unseen until The Museum of Modern Art's 1992 revival.

* Written by Isaac Babel, based on his stories. (60 mins, Silent, Russian intertitles with live English translation, B&W, 16mm)

Our Children 5:45

Natan Gross (Poland, 1948)

For program notes, please see October 12.

Monday October 23

Third World Cinema

The Story of Qiu Ju 7:00

Zhang Yimou (China/Hong Kong, 1992)

(Qiu Ju Da Guansi). "A radical departure from the elegiac period imagery of [Zhang's] Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. Gong Li plays the title heroine, a simple farmwoman in Northern China who goes on a rampage of justice-seeking when her husband is beaten up by a local prefect. She drags her case to an endless hierarchy of indifferent legislative offices, meeting stone walls of bureaucracy and indifference at every turn. The film becomes a quixotic mixture of desperate drama and black comedy as she eventually attains her objective, but at an inevitable price of humanity.... Zhang takes us on a journey through present-day China that is at once documentary-like in its depiction of life in the countryside as well as the teeming cities, and deeply affecting as human drama.... Gong Li...here transforms herself from the flowerlike courtesan of Raise the Red Lantern into a veritable Asian Mother Courage..."--David Noh, The Film Journal

* Written by Liu Heng, based on the novel by Cheng Yuanbin. Photographed by Chi Xiaoning, Yu Xiaoqun. With Gong Li, Lei Laosheng, Liu Peiqi, Yang Liuchun. (100 mins, In Mandarin with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From New Yorker)

Tuesday October 24

Avant-Garde Film

Light Cone: Experimental Film Distribution in Europe 7:30

Introduced by Yann Bauvais

Tonight's two-part program will give Bay Area audiences an opportunity to view a selection of films distributed by Light Cone, in Paris. Light Cone accepts experimental films on deposit, with the filmmakers retaining ownership. Filmmaker Yann Beauvais, founder of Light Cone, will discuss Light Cone and, in the program's second part, present a selection of his recent films.

From Light Cone, "two found-footage films, La Peche miraculeuse and Acidfilmda, question the materiality of the medium. Seven Landscapes, Bouquet, and Broken Blossoms deal with landscape, investigating the ways in which light and color shape our perceptions, while Shimmer questions the imaginary territory belonging to memory."--Yann Beauvais

Formally rigorous, often working with text as a visual element, Beauvais's films range from the diaristic to the socially committed discourse. Included are Amoroso, which is both a film journal of Beauvais's visit to Rome and Tivoli and an evocation of Kenneth Anger's earlier representation of Tivoli in Eaux d'Artifice, and New York Long Distance, in which postcard images are combined with autobiographical fragments to trace the distance memory travels.

Seven Landscapes by Scott Hammen (1995, 10 mins, Silent). La Peche miraculeuse by Cécile Fontaine (France, 1995, 10 mins, Silent). Shimmer by Nelson Henricks (Canada, 1994, 7 mins, B&W/Color). Bouquet 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 by Rose Lowder (France, 1994-95, total 8 mins, Silent). Acidfilmda by Metamkine (1992, 5 mins @18fps*). Broken Blossoms by Miles McKane (France, 1992, 6 mins @18fps*). Films by Yann Beauvais (all France): Spetsai (1989, 15 mins @18fps*). SID A IDS (1992, Silent, 5.5 mins). New York Long Distance (1994, 9 mins). Amoroso (1983-86, 14 mins @18fps, Silent). *sound on audio-tape

* (Total running time: c. 90 mins, plus discussion; 1995, 16mm, Color, unless indicated otherwise; From Light Cone)

Wednesday October 25

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival

Presented under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, New York, and in association with the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology and the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. PFA thanks Festival programmer Elaine Charnov.

Presented in conjunction with the course on Ethnographic Film taught by Thor Anderson.

When Billy Broke His Head...and Other Tales of Wonder 7:00

David E. Simpson, Billy Golfus (U.S., 1994)

Cosponsored by Corporation on Disabilities and Telecommunication, Northern California Chapter.

In memory of Ed Roberts. Billy Golfus, an award-winning radio journalist, was brain damaged as a result of a motor scooter accident ten years ago. In this irreverent first-person road movie he travels the country to meet people with disabilities and witness first-hand the strength and anger that are forging a new civil rights movement. When Billy Broke His Head blends humor with politics and individual experience in a chorus of voices to explore what it is really like to live with a disability in America. As Billy says, "This ain't exactly your inspirational cripple story."

* (56 mins, Color, 3/4" video)

Tales of the Unexpected 8:15

The Trials of Telo Rinpoche (Tenzing Sonam, Ritu Sarin, U.S./India/Kalmykia, 1994). This tells of a Philadelphia boy who was recognized as a reincarnate lama and sent to a monastery in southern India to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. His dilemma: to rebuild Buddhism in the newly independent republic of Kalmykia, his ancestral home, or to hang out in Philly with his friends. (49 mins, Color, 3/4" video)

The Vegetable Mob (Carla Drago, Australia, 1993). First-generation Sicilian immigrants to suburban Australia have carried on the tradition of their rural forefathers--the playful but serious sport of cultivating the superior tomato. They'll make you a salsa you can't refuse. (7 mins, Color, 35mm)

State of Weightlessness (Maciej Drygas, Russia, 1994). A rare look at the Soviet space program. Cosmonauts raise philosophical questions about our place in the universe and responsibility to our own planet--a world of difference from the hypo-scientific approach of American space travelers. Stunning space footage, and some candid talk about the psychological effects of weightlessness. (60 mins, In Russian with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

* (Total running time: 116 mins)

Thursday October 26

Yiddish Film

Long Is the Road 7:00

Herbert B. Fredersdorf, Marek Goldstein (Germany, 1948)

(Lang ist der Weg). Shot almost exclusively on location, with extensive use of newsreel footage, this fiction film has with the passing of time become a historical record emblematic of the suffering of families during the Holocaust. Set in Poland and Germany, it is the chronicle of a family separated on their way to a concentration camp. The son, David, manages to escape and joins the Jewish partisans, while of the others, only the mother survives the camps. Along with Distant Journey (Terezin Ghetto), Long Is the Road "was one of the first fiction films to attempt to represent Nazi concentration camps from the point of view of the inmates [in] scenes of Auschwitz, starkly evoked in the studio through the use of stylization and close-ups." (J. Hoberman) Shot in 1947 in U.S.-occupied Germany, the film was based on writer-actor Israel Becker's own experiences during the war.

* Written by Karl Georg Kulb, Israel Becker, based on a story by Becker. Photographed by Franz Koch. With Israel Becker, Bettina Moissi, Berta Litwina, Jakob Fischer, Alexander Bardini. (60 mins, [80 mins if restoration is complete by showdate], In Yiddish, German, Polish, with English narration and subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

We Who Remain 8:20

Natan Gross (Poland, 1947)

(Mir lebn geblibene/We Are Still Alive). One of a series of newsreel-style documentaries on postwar Jewish life that were evidently the first films made in Poland after the war, We Who Remain is a fascinating survey of the scene. Apart from a ballet mécanique celebration of "productivization," it focuses entirely on a broad range of Jewish culture, from holiday celebrations to the dance of Felix Fibich and Judith Berg, Fania Rubina's songs of the Warsaw Ghetto, an exhibition of paintings depicting the Uprising, and of course Yiddish theater, with Ida Kaminska et al. In the spirit of socialist-realism, the film looks forward with optimism. (Notes based on material in J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light)

* Photographed by Adolph Forbert. (80 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 3/4" video)

Friday October 27

Alf Sjöberg

The Island 7:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1966)

(Ön). Considered to be Sjöberg's most personal film, The Island is an allegorical drama set in the Stockholm archipelago, where inhabitants learn that their island home is to be evacuated and turned into an army gunnery range. In the crisis, the local nobleman feels isolated and moreover is accused of murder when the pastor disappears, having gone into hiding to rejuvenate his faith. Sjöberg wrote, "One day the central character realizes that he is speaking to deaf ears; no one understands the significance of his message. He gets the impression he is living between two dead continents, between the culture and the tradition he has inherited and whose language he speaks, and the living dead who move around him like sleep-walkers without suspecting or being irritated by their isolation.... The violence in the world, which until now had been at a safe distance, is suddenly on his doorstep."

* Written by Sjöberg. Photographed by Lars-Göran Björne. With Per Myrberg, Bibi Andersson, Karin Kavli, Marian Grans. (106 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

The Father 9:00

Alf Sjöberg (Sweden, 1969)

(Fadern). Strindberg's play dealt with an unhappy marriage in which a couple's only daughter becomes a wedge and a weapon. Sjöberg regenerated the play, using the cast from his staged version at the Royal Dramatic Theater, and techniques familiar from Miss Julie. Georg Rydeberg plays the father, "The Captain," an officer, scientist, and representative in the shared world of Strindberg and Sjöberg of the patriarchal system. Gunnel Lindblom is his wife, Laura, whose corresponding lack of social status is compensated for with an arsenal of psychological armaments. The Captain, an atheist whose only hope for immortality lies in his daughter, is slowly driven mad by his wife's insinuations that he is not the child's father. Sjöberg's Strindberg adaptations draw their strength from the director's view of Strindberg as a prophet who framed today's problems well ahead of his time: at the core of The Father is an interplay of racial hatred, contempt for women, and the masculine superman complex.

* Written by Sjöberg, from the play by August Strindberg. Photographed by Lars-Göran Björne. With Gunnel Lindblom, Georg Rydeberg, Lena Nyman, Sif Ruud. (98 mins, In Swedish with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Saturday October 28

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival

Tribute to George Stoney: Uprising of '34 7:00

George Stoney, Judith Helfand (U.S., 1994)

George Stoney in Person

We are pleased to welcome George Stoney, an Emmy award-winning social documentarian and Professor of Film and Television at New York University. Stoney's work in journalism dates back to the thirties, and in film, to the forties. He worked in England on the famous documentary film units of the forties; in the U.S., working mostly in the field of the sponsored educational film, he has focused largely on his native South. In an arena where facts are not easily gleaned (nor accepted), behind every film is a story and Mr. Stoney is a master of the anecdote, lending an important dimension to the films we will see.

Uprising of '34 is a rare exploration of the forces that shape economic relations in the American South, and an inquiry into the myths that have traditionally kept southern working people divided and powerless. In 1934, southern mill workers organized forces of nearly half a million to protest inhumane working conditions in the company-controlled mill villages. The largest labor revolt in southern history culminated in bloodshed and murder. Then, silence. Sixty years later, participants and their descendants talk.

* Edited by Susanne Rostock. (90 mins, Color/B&W, 16mm)

All My Babies and The Shepherd of the Night Flock 9:15

George Stoney (U.S., 1952)/ George Stoney, James Brown (U.S., 1978)

All My Babies, Stoney's best-known film, is a powerful, accessible, educational, surprisingly controversial film on midwife training that represented a breakthrough in candidness at the time it was made. It centers on Miss Mary, a dedicated African American midwife in Albany, Georgia, whose gentle narration carries the action. The film follows two parallel stories, one of a confident expectant mother and the other of a young woman who comes close to losing her child out of ignorance. An actual birth provides a moving and instructive dramatic climax. Photographed by Peaslee Bond. (54 mins). The Shepherd of the Night Flock is an affectionate portrait of Manhattan pastor John Garcia, who befriended many jazz musicians and held jazz vespers in his church. The musicians in turn see him as a "shepherd of modern time...helping to educate people to their own music." Duke Ellington and many other jazz personalities are featured in the film. (58 mins)

* (Total running time: 112 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Museum of Modern Art)

Sunday October 29

Yiddish Film

Overture to Glory 3:30

Max Nosseck (U.S., 1940)

(Der vilner shtot khazn/The Vilna Town-Cantor). The Singing Blacksmith's Moishe Oysher (see below) here portrays a cantor who faces a rather different sort of "B" temptation--Beethoven and Bach, the world of Gentile music. Leaving his family for Warsaw and the opera, he is drawn by the attentions of a countess (Helen Beverly) before tragedy brings him back to the Vilna synagogue he had deserted, to sing one last Kol Nidre. Telling an allegedly true story that had become the stuff of orthodox Jewish folklore, the film did what it set out to do: The New York Times wrote, "designed...to tug upon the heartstrings susceptible to plaintive ritual singing, religious ceremonials, touches of filial piety...the sweet smile of a dying child or the face of a wandering father outside a candlelit window on a rainy night. All are generously provided."

* Written by Ossip Dymow, Jacob Glatstein (dialogue), based (uncredited) on the play Der Vilner Balebesl by Mark Arnshteyn. Photographed by Sam Rosen. With Moishe Oysher, Florence Weiss, Helen Beverly. (82 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

The Singing Blacksmith 5:10

Edgar G. Ulmer (U.S., 1938)

Preceded by short:

Cantor on Trial (Sidney M. Goldin, U.S., 1931) (Khazn af a probe). A novelty featuring the oft-filmed Cantor Leibele Waldman, "the American-born, baseball loving `microphone cantor'" (J. Hoberman), who wins over a skeptical congregation with a pop song. (10 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 3/4" video)

(Yankl der shmid). The Singing Blacksmith was a vehicle for the talents of cantor and matinee idol Moishe Oysher (who works a little "scat" into the repertoire). Shot on the cheap in a "shtetl" created in New Jersey, using extras from a nearby monastery (they had beards), The Singing Blacksmith looks more like Edgar Ulmer's Hollywood B films than his better-known Green Fields, but "it was probably modeled on the Soviet musicals of the period: folkloric, montage-filled, and thoroughly class-conscious" (National Film Theatre). Though set in the old world, it speaks to anxieties of the transplanted Jew in the character of Yankl, a proletarian-identified smithy who is tempted by drink and women until centered by the love of a progressive young woman. "This colorful romantic melodrama brims with stock comic characters--a matchmaker, peasants, a suspicious mother-in-law, a seductive woman, and a pious weak husband--but their activities pale before Oysher's splendid voice and presence, and Ulmer's poetic direction." (National Center for Jewish Film)

* Written by David Pinski, based on his play. Photographed by Bill Miller. With Moishe Oysher, Miriam Riselle, Anna Appel, Herschel Bernardi. (95 mins, In Yiddish with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm)

Tevye 7:10

Maurice Schwartz (U.S., 1939)

For program notes, please see October 21.

Monday October 30

Third World Cinema/

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival

Mother Dao, the Turtlelike 7:00

Vincent Monnikendam (Netherlands, 1995)

(Moeder Dao De Schildpadgelÿkende). Unfolding without narration, this is a spare and elegant film constructed entirely from archival footage shot between 1912 and 1932 in the former Dutch East Indies. Luminous nitrate images are set against a simple soundtrack of birdcalls, bells, and murmuring voices, punctuated occasionally by native poems and songs. The film's careful construction reveals the face of systematic colonization and the effect of economic expansion on a culture. There are stunning moments--a child leaves off breast feeding to drag on a cigarette; crocodiles are lassoed in a round-up.... Much of the footage, shot by white Dutchmen and meant as propaganda for their colonial causes, now seems both comical and ominous.... The natives' songs and poems, on the other hand, are full of regretful laments against hunger and the drive for profit.... Mother Dao is both an informative time capsule and a moving tribute to a lost world."--Rachel Rosen, S. F. Int'l Film Festival

* (88 mins, In Indonesian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Zeitgeist)

Three Media Collectives: A Tribute 8:45

Struggle on Coon Branch Mountain (Mimi Pickering, U.S., 1972): Residents of a small West Virginia community fight local government for improvements in roads, schools, and services. From Appalshop, a prodigious media arts center in the small town of Whitesburg, Kentucky, dedicated to the empowerment of Appalachian people through their art and culture. (13 mins, Color, 16mm)

The Box (Amber Production Team, U.K., 1986). An animated short expressing urban fear, isolation, and alienation as seen through the eyes of an elderly woman. (10 mins, Color, 3/4" video)

Byker (Amber Production Team, U.K., 1983). Shot over twelve years, this film documents and dramatizes feelings in the working-class town of Byker in Northeast England as it is transformed by urban development. Newcastle-based Amber collective, with roots in the British documentary movement of Grierson, produces films about the lives of working-class people. (43 mins, Color, 16mm)

Home Away from Home (Maureen Blackwood, U.K., 1994, 11 mins). An African woman living in London worries that her family will unravel in this western society. From Sankofa Film and Video, a groundbreaking group of black British filmmakers whose works include Passion of Remembrance. (11 mins, 35mm, From Women Make Movies)

* (Total running time: 77 mins)

Tuesday October 31

Avant-Garde Film

Metaphors of Vision: Films by Stan Brakhage 7:30

Selected by Ernie Gehr

We present a selection of films by Stan Brakhage, one of the most influential avant-garde filmmakers, dating from his earliest work to his recent exquisite hand-painted films, and including both silent and sound films. Since 1952 he has made over 200 films ranging in length from a few seconds to a few hours. Included in tonight's program are Star Garden, which Brakhage describes as depicting "(as Brancusi puts it): `One of those days I would not trade for anything under heaven'"; The Garden of Earthly Delights, a delicate collage film composed of montane-zone vegetation and an homage to Hieronymous Bosch; and the haunting Murder Psalm, which pays tribute to Dostoyevsky's The Devils. Brakhage's writings on film include Film at Wit's End, Film Biographies and Metaphors of Vision, from which we borrowed tonight's program title.

Desistfilm (1954, 7 mins, B&W). Fire of Waters (1965, 10 mins, B&W). Star Garden (1974, 22 mins, Silent, Color). Murder Psalm (1981, 16 mins, Silent, Color). Garden of Earthly Delights (1981, 2.5 mins, Silent, Color). Stellar (1993, 2.5 mins, Silent, Color). Black Ice (1994, 2.5 mins, Silent, Color). Three Homerics (1994, 3 mins, Silent, Color).

* (Total running time: 66 mins, 16mm, From Canyon Cinema)

Whale of a Halloween

The Old Dark House 9:00

James Whale (U.S., 1932)

A party of travelers--including Charles Laughton as a Manchester magnate accompanied by a chorus girl--seek refuge in a forbidding mansion in which there is more than one screw loose. They are greeted by a brother-and-sister lunatic team and their singular household: a brute, lecherous butler, played to the hilt by Boris Karloff; a bedridden 102-year-old head-of-household, and a younger brother who plays with fire. The guests' attempts at lightheartedness in the face of this intensity are underscored by the film's scenario which, as William K. Everson notes, "pits the five inhabitants of the house against the five guests. In a very rough kind of way, each has an opposite counterpart--and the night of terror brings out the best (or worst) in all of them..." Whale mixes a quasi-realistic atmosphere (his monsters are decidedly human, his guests ever-so-civilized) with high Hollywood Gothic: a tremendous thunderstorm, swirling roads, and the eerie house with its imbedded horrors.

* Written by Benn W. Levy, based on the novel by J. B. Priestly. Photographed by Arthur Edeson. With Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart. (70 mins, B&W, 35mm, From the Rohauer Collection/ Douris Corporation)

Movie Image in Berkeley has generously provided videotapes for our research.