"Films, after all, are like those grandparents in The Blue Bird who remain dead in their graves until their children think of them and bring them back to life, at least for a while."--William K. Everson
We take the occasion of PFA's 25th Anniversary to celebrate William K. Everson, who has been as much a part of our twenty-five years as anyone, and whose vision and guidance have greatly influenced our course.
As early as 1973--and from 1976 to the present, on an annual or semi-annual basis--Everson has presented films from his collection at PFA. William K. Everson is known internationally as the most generous film collector, sharing not only his personal prints, but his encyclopedic film knowledge with colleagues, students, historians, and audiences. He is there for everyone
Everson's film collection reflects his enthusiasm for all of cinema. He has introduced Berkeley audiences to a world of "old," sometimes forgotten films looked at anew from an angle that combines fastidious history with oblique observation and wry humor. This wedding of knowledge and nuance is how film history is made, as Everson's books (Love in Film, The Detective in Film, The Western, among many others) attest. More importantly, both to Everson's devoted audience at PFA and his students at New York University and The New School, it is how film culture thrives.
William K. Everson is unable to join us for this January's long-planned film series. In his stead we have programmed an eclectic sampling of the films he introduced over the years--from the luminous silent Peter Pan with Betty Bronson; to films by Michael Powell and Alberto Cavalcanti, two masterful directors whose reputations Everson has helped keep alive; to mysteries by Everson's adopted namesake William K. Howard and by Mitchell Leisen--as well as introducing recent acquisitions to his collection
For their valued assistance in preparing this program we wish to thank Alex Gordon, Dennis Jakob, Rob McKay, Jon Mirsalis, and David Shepard.
Presentation of The Small Back Room and, on January 8, Madonna of the Seven Moons is made possible through the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative.
"The Small Back Room was Powell and Pressburger's only really serious look at the contemporary British scene in the 1940s...dealing with the latter days of the war....As a piece of filmmaking it was one of their best, and as a dramatic thriller it was realistic, moving, satiric, and (particularly in its prolonged climax of the defusing of a bomb, a tour-de-force) almost unbearable in its suspense..." (William K. Everson) Another British scholar in America, David Thomson, writes: "This war is an ordeal seemingly designed to test and torture the repressed emotions of the central character, Sammy Rice (David Farrar), a wounded romantic...who is the nation's best dismantler of insidious enemy mines washed up on England's pebbly shores....Powell understood [Farrar's] darkness and put it next to the burning eyes of Kathleen Byron: their glances of desire are like a fuse and a flame, trying to touch."
Written by Powell, Pressburger, Nigel Balchin, from the novel by Balchin. Photographed by Christopher Challis. With David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Jack Hawkins, Leslie Banks. (108 mins, B&W, 16mm, PFA Collection)
Made at the height of the invasion scare in England, Went the Day Well? concerns the infiltration of an unsuspecting British village by sixty German paratroopers. "Cavalcanti was Britain's only real noir specialist, and in the forties he turned out both traditional and unorthodox noir subjects. This wartime propaganda film, written by Graham Greene, is rather like a Hitchcock script suddenly turned over to Buñuel to direct, full of beauty, black humor, and sudden savagery. An important film, still insufficiently known and appreciated."--William K. Everson
Written by John Dighton et al., from a story by Graham Greene. Photographed by Wilkie Cooper. With Leslie Banks, Elizabeth Allan, Frank Lawton, Mervyn Jones. (82 mins, B&W, 16mm)
This low-budget B film is a very early example of film noir, one that shows the overt influence of German Expressionism in its dark, angled street scenes, its mood of foggy dread, and in the presence of Peter Lorre himself as the mysterious stranger pursued through those dreary streets. The story is decidedly Dostoevskian (the director in any case was Russian): a reporter whose testimony helps convict a taxi-driver of a brutal murder has second thoughts after the man is sentenced to die. While his fiancée pursues a possible real killer, the reporter broods over his inaction in his small apartment, where his next-door neighbor torments him and provokes thoughts of murder. An imaginatively done dream sequence in which he becomes the murderer effectively blurs nightmare and waking-world. But for all its European influence, it is Edward Hopper who is evoked by this claustrophobic corner of urban America where the familiar diner is a sad and vaguely sinister outpost for who knows what.
Written by Frank Partos. Photographed by Nicholas Musuraca. With Peter Lorre, John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, Elisha Cook, Jr. (64 mins, B&W, 35mm, From The Library of Congress, permission Paramount)
"In 1939 Roy Kellino teamed with James Mason to make the entirely non-studio I Met a Murderer, one of the first British film noirs. A decade later, with a bigger budget that allowed for nightmarish dream sequences, and full studio facilities, he returned to the genre to make another study in murder and guilt against a similar background of rural English farm life. Elizabeth Sellars, something of a British noir icon in both victim and villain roles, accidentally kills her no-good husband, played by Peter Reynolds who briefly enjoyed a fling as a kind of English Richard Widmark. Lacking the initiative of I Met a Murderer, it is still a stylishly done if somewhat contrived melodrama."--William K. Everson
Written by Ivan Foxwell, Kellino, John Gilling, from a novel by Peter Curtis. Photographed by William McLeod. With Patrick Holt, Elizabeth Sellars, Peter Reynolds, Lana Morris. (86 mins, B&W, 16mm, From WKE)
"Mr. Dynamite, one of the last films directed by the great Alan Crosland, [is] a virtually forgotten Dashiell Hammett story, made in the wake of the success of The Thin Man, and clearly an attempt to repeat the popular concoction of crime, cocktails and comedy--yet in no sense a rip-off. Edmond Lowe [as detective T. N. Thompson] is more of a maverick (and undomesticated) private eye than William Powell. The mystery is a good one and typically complicated, and it's all so slick and fast-paced it's hard to realize that it's all told in sixty-nine minutes. What a pity that the economics of today's movie business and the total dissolution of the old studio system make it impossible for such solidly crafted and thoroughly entertaining `little' pictures as this to be made today...even for television."--William K. Everson
Written by Doris Malloy, Harry Clark, from the novel by Dashiell Hammett. Photographed by George Robinson. With Edmund Lowe, Esther Ralston, Jean Dixon, Victor Varconi. (69 mins, B&W, 16mm, Permission Universal/Swank)
William K. Howard (U.K., 1937)
(U.S. release title: Murder on Diamond Row). Based on an Edgar Wallace mystery, "The Squeaker is an extremely handsome production, benefiting from a good cast, fine photography from Georges Perinal (Cocteau's favorite cameraman), and polished, efficient direction from Hollywood's William K. Howard. Howard was a veteran and expert craftsman when it came to high-powered and stylishly mounted thrillers, and he worked with star Edmund Loew much as John Ford worked with John Wayne. Actually, in this case the production mountings are somewhat superior to the script....But if the story holds few surprises, the treatment is constantly interesting, full of moments of real visual excitement--the killer writing his demands on the mist of his car window while his face remains unseen, or later, the nightmarish Fritz Lang-like sequence of the climactic police trap."--William K. Everson
Written by Bryan Wallace, Edward Berkman, based on the novel by Edgar Wallace. Photographed by Georges Perinal. With Edmund Lowe, Ann Todd, Alistair Sim, Sebastian Shaw. (78 mins, B&W, 16mm)
The Spider and the Fly
Robert Hamer (U.K., 1949)
In pre-World War I Paris, a brilliant safecracker (Guy Rolfe) is recruited by an admiring adversary--the chief of police (Eric Portman)--to undertake a dangerous espionage mission. "What starts out seemingly as another Arsene Lupin imitation develops into a far more complex, almost Sartre-like melodrama of irony. A handsomely-mounted film."--William K. Everson
Written by Robert Westerby. Photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth. With Eric Portman, Guy Rolfe, Nadia Gray, Edward Chapman. (95 mins, B&W, 16mm, From WKE)
Dave Unwin, Mike Stuart (U.K., 1993)
Recommended for age 3+. Enjoy these delightful British productions of The Tale of Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddle Duck and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or the Roly-Poly Pudding. (30 mins each) For more Beatrix Potter, see January 21. Preceded by the Czech animation Caterpillar (Zdenek Miler, 16 mins). (Total: 76 mins, Color, 35 mm from TV Cartoons Ltd., 16mm from PFA Collection)
Tribute to William K. Everson
George King (U.K., 1940)
"One of many adaptations of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, this is certainly the most exuberant, and also the definitive showcase for Tod Slaughter's jovial, lecherous villainy."--William K. Everson.
"Maybe my personal favorite of all Everson's films is Crimes at the Dark House with Tod Slaughter. The Slaughter performance is like nothing in sound cinema--it is the way Victorian actors (fine ones) must have been when hamming it up outrageously. It is incredible. I love this picture and could see it every day."--Elliott Stein, critic, Village Voice
Written by Edward Dryhurst, Frederick Hayward, H.F. Maltby, based on the novel by Wilkie Collins. Photographed by Hone Glendinning. With Tod Slaughter, Hilary Eaves, Sylvia Marriott, Hay Petrie. (69 mins, B&W, 16mm)
Bulldog Jack
Walter Forde (U.K., 1935)
In the same year as Hollywood's Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, the British released this superb satire on the then-popular Drummond films. "The genuine satire has to succeed on two levels: it has to be subtly funny, without ridiculing its inspiration, and it also has to be a good enough example of the genre it is kidding to stand up to the particular demands of that sort of film. [In Bulldog Jack] the villainy was in the experienced hands of Ralph Richardson (a wonderfully satiric portrait, yet one fraught with real menace too), a top-heavy opposition to the zaniness of Jack Hulbert, who replaces the real Bulldog Drummond in a case involving kidnapping and the looting of the British Museum....The action scenes carry real thrill too....With brother Claude Hulbert backing up Jack, and Fay Wray playing the lady in distress with all the earnestness she displayed when being chased by Lionel Atwill or King Kong, the film is a little gem."--William K. Everson, The Detective in Film
Written by H. C. McNeile, Gerard Fairlie, J.O.C. Orton, Sidney Gilliat, based on the book by McNeile. Photographed by H. Greenbaum. With Jack Hulbert, Fay Wray, Claude Hulbert, Ralph Richardson. (72 mins, B&W, 16mm)
An escaped convict (John McCallum) is sheltered by his former mistress (Googie Withers), now the discontented wife of a middle-aged man. "More related to the French postwar films like Such a Pretty Little Beach than the more dynamic Hollywood noirs, It Always Rains on Sunday, with its petty crime, drudgery, and the continued hardships that existed in Britain well after the end of the war, is very much a mirror of its time. It is one of the best films from the tragically short career of Robert Hamer (Kind Hearts and Coronets, Dead of Night)."--William K. Everson
Written by Hamer, Angus McPhail, Henry Cornelius, from the novel by Arthur La Bern. Photographed by Douglas Slocombe. With John McCallum, Googie Withers, Edward Chapman, Jack Warner. (92 mins, B&W, 16mm, From WKE)
"James Whale's substantially reshaped adaptation of the last of Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga. Not only the most British movie ever made in Hollywood--and possibly, in terms of his unique cine-theatrical style, Whale's ultimate masterpiece--but also, like Renoir's La Grande Illusion, a unique reflection of a changing social milieu. A beautifully crafted film that couldn't hope to get its money back--and didn't--but which remains one of the unsung high spots of the thirties."--William K. Everson
Written by R. C. Sherriff, based on the novel by John Galsworthy. Photographed by John Mescall. With Diana Wynyard, Colin Clive, Lionel Atwill, Jane Wyatt. (84 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Swank)
Arthur Crabtree's Madonna of the Seven Moons is both spicy and grim, with the best elements of passion, frankness, and cheap psychology offered by the Gothic romance genre. (It was the most extravagant of the "Gainsborough Gothics," period romances which Gainsborough Pictures supplied the English as a counter to wartime and postwar austerity.) Phyllis Calvert plays MadalenaLabardi, the wife of a wealthy wine merchant, given to philanthropic pursuits and the meditative life in their beautiful Italian villa. A docile paragon of virtue, Madalena does have a problem: every six years, she suffers a complete change of personality, becomes the gypsy Rosanna, and runs off to her lover Nino (Stewart Granger) who possibly operates on a similar schedule, as he is always waiting for her. At the root of this schizophrenia is a childhood trauma, giving this excellent costume melodrama its basis in medical case history.
Written by Roland Pertwee, based on the novel by Margery Lawrence. Photographed by Jack Cox. With Phyllis Calvert, Patricia Roc, Stewart Granger, Peter Glenville. (88 mins, B&W, 16mm, PFA Collection)
White Gold
William K. Howard (U.S., 1927)
Set on an Arizona sheep ranch, where a Mexican dance-hall girl joins her new husband and his embittered old father, White Gold is a mood piece in the vein of Seastrom's The Wind, which it preceded. "The film that established William K. Howard's reputation as a major director, White Gold was a tremendous critical success in 1927 and prompted one trade critic to write, `...Deeper psychology is revealed in this film than in any other ever produced in America.' Inevitably, White Gold has lost some of its luster through the years [but it] does hold up rather well today. At first one suspects that this is a film with an unjustly inflated reputation, but as the film proceeds its power grows, and its climax is a real bombshell. To discuss it in detail would be to rob it of its essential element of surprise, but in at least one respect, which will be readily apparent, Howard anticipates one of Hitchcock's tricks in Psycho."--William K.
Written by Garrett Fort, Tay Garnett, based on the play by J. Palmer Parsons. Photographed by Lucien Andriot. With Jetta Goudal, Kenneth Thompson, George Bancroft, George Nicholls. (c. 60 mins, Silent, B&W, 16mm)
In this tale of cattlemen trying to run farmers off the land, Harry Carey, as an outlaw brought in by the cattlemen, and Hoot Gibson, as a cattleman who disapproves of the reign of terror, "make a good and offbeat team. Straight Shooting is Ford's first feature [and] it is in many ways a very remarkable film. Curiously, it is not at all what one would expect of an early Ford [based on] his later penchant for slam-bang roistering action and low comedy. The William S. Hart influence can be seen in the general austerity and in the characters themselves--good and bad intermingled among both the good guys and the bad guys. The sheriff is a nebulous and ineffectual character, and it is a gang of `good' outlaws who provide the posse for the traditional last-minute rescue. But there is also a showmanship and a production polish more typical of the later Ford. It really and deliberately builds its excitement and is unusually smooth in terms of camera set-ups, locations, and lighting."--William K. Everson
* Written by George Hively. Photographed by George Scott. With Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, John Douglas, Ruth Ford. (c. 70 mins, Silent , B&W, 16mm, From George Eastman House)
"Based on fact, this carefully reconstructed story of espionage in Belgium during World War One was one of the biggest British films of its year, and from the peak period of its director, Victor Saville. Though more concerned with characterization and suspense than with spectacular action, it holds interest throughout and is an unusually handsome production. An unusually strong cast is headed by Madeleine Carroll, Conrad Veidt, and Herbert Marshall."--William K. Everson.
Carroll portrays the Belgian nurse Marthe Cnockhaert, who spied for the Allies and attempted to blow up an arms dump to prevent a German gas attack.
* Written by W. P. Lipscomb, Ian Hay, from a book by Marthe Cnockhaert McKenna. Photographed by William Van Engen. With Madeleine Carroll, Herbert Marshall, Conrad Veidt, Edmund Gwenn. (90 mins, B&W, 16mm)
"The F.P. of the title is a gigantic mid-Atlantic floating aerodrome designed to solve the then apparently insoluble problem of Atlantic air travel without refueling. (In 1937, in Britain's Non-Stop New York, the theme still had to be treated in a futuristic fashion.) The original German version (F.P. 1 Antwortet Nicht/F.P. 1 Doesn't Answer), with Hans Albers and Peter Lorre, was admittedly better, because the Germans always took these things so seriously. Needless to say, there was a Mabuse-like super-criminal whose worldwide organization seeks to wreck the whole project! The British version [Secrets of F.P. 1], shot in Germany at the same time and on the same sets, eliminated [the] rousing air force opening that must have delighted Hermann Goering while the American version--the one we're showing tonight--shortened it still further, editing it into a tight adventure melodrama. However, all of the highlights and its serial-like structure remain. Arguably Conrad Veidt's performance is superior to that of Hans Albers--although Conrad doesn't exactly turn his back on the histrionic potential..."--William K. Everson
* Written by Kurt Siodmak, Walter Reisch, Robert Stevenson, Peter Macfarlane, from a novel by Siodmak. Photographed by Gunther Rittau, Konstantin Tschet. With Conrad Veidt, Jill Esmond, Leslie Fenton, George Merritt. (c. 70 mins, B&W, 16mm, From WKE)
"Richard Barthelmess' last starring film, and one of the best of the earlier films directed by Mitchell Leisen. Something of a minor-league Grand Hotel (with a theater substituting for the hotel), this is a surprisingly powerful and poignant melodrama. Barthelmess plays a convicted murderer on his way to execution and managing to square accounts with his betrayer first! Sundry other dramatic and romantic problems are likewise cleared up in the four hours that he has `to kill' before being transported back to prison. Barthelmess gives an excellent performance, tough and sensitive at the same time....As befits a film made by a former art director, Four Hours to Kill is handsomely designed, exploiting the limitations of a stage property rather than grudgingly accepting them. This is a surprisingly elaborate and glossy film for its relative commercial unimportance."--William K. Everson
* Written by Norman Krasna. Photographed by Theodor Sparkuhl. With Richard Barthelmess, Helen Mack, Ray Milland, Gertrude Michael. (75 mins, B&W, 35mm, From UCLA Film & Television Archive, permission Universal/Swank)
This tale of ex-flyers in Paris is "a curious little minor classic that has never achieved the reputation it deserves. On first viewing, it has a stunning impact--although it is also quite a fragile film and needs a sensitive audience, too. It certainly translates into filmic terms the Hemingway-Fitzgerald fever and tragedy of the `lost generation' far more poignantly than any of the `official' attempts to do so, such as the much later adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, with which it has striking parallels. Richard Barthelmess's quiet sincerity is well deployed, and Helen Chandler does a fine job as the rather weird heroine. The Last Flight is notable as the first American film of William Dieterle. Apart from being an extremely well directed film, it also indicates how quickly Dieterle had acquired an understanding of American mores of the twenties."--William K. Everson
* Written by John Monk Saunders. Photographed by Sid Hickox. With Richard Barthelmess, Helen Chandler, John Mack Brown, David Manners. (80 mins, B&W, 16mm, permission MGM/UA Classics)
(U.S. release title: Masquerade in Vienna). An utterly delightful film, worthy of comparison to Max Ophuls. "Possibly Willi Forst's most celebrated pre-war film, Maskerade is a bittersweet romance concerning an unsophisticated young woman who falls in love with a social celebrity. Essentially adult and lightly cynical in its relationships, it evokes a turn-of-the-century Vienna, with its artists' balls, secret assignations, and visits to the opera. The playing, too, has considerable charm and feeling, notably by Paula Wessely (controlled yet vulnerable) and Anton Walbrook (superbly suave and steely as he searches for conquests among the fluttering hearts of the city)."--John Gillett, National Film Theatre, London
* Written by Walter Reisch. Photographed by Frantz Planer. With Paula Wessely, Anton Walbrook, Peter Petersen, Hilde von Stolz. (80 mins, In German with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From George Eastman House)
"A remake of Pola Negri's outstanding German success, Mazurka. Although in many ways a typical Kay Francis Madame X-derived vehicle [with singer Francis recounting events leading up to her murder of Basil Rathbone], Confession still has a stylized, European look to it. The costumes and decor are much more carefully created than usual, the narrative structure--in a Wellesian manner--is unusually complex for this kind of film; and the photographic treatment, with its extreme mobility of the camera and its frequent forays into near-expressionism (especially the last scene), is most impressive. It is certainly the most ambitious Hollywood film of German director Joe May, who started out as Fritz Lang's boss, remained one of the key German directors of the silent period, and followed Lang to Hollywood. The Rathbone character, by virtue of the complex construction, seems to veer between villainy and sympathy. It's a fascinating film undeserving of its obscurity."--William K. Everson
* Written by Julius Epstein, Margaret LeVino, from a play by Hans Rameau. Photographed by Sid Hickox. With Kay Francis, Ian Hunter, Basil Rathbone, Donald Crisp. (86 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)
A free-spirited man (Gene Raymond) who has spent his life tending a zoo falls in love with a runaway (Loretta Young) hiding in the zoo grounds. "Long considered lost, rediscovered some twenty-five years ago, and shown surprisingly little since. A lovely, almost Disneyesque fairy-tale of love, orphans, and animals with the background of a Budapest zoo--already it sounds a little like Snow White, and indeed some images remind one of that later film. A mixture of Gothic romance and melodrama, it doesn't really need its wild-animals-on-the-loose climax, but then Fox always believed in a bang-up finish, no matter what the subject matter. Easily one of Rowland V. Lee's finest films, though a great deal of the credit must go to Lee Garmes for his superb camerawork; lyrical in the love scenes, exciting in the animal footage."--William K. Everson
Written by Dan Totheroh, Louise Long, Lee, from a story by Melville Baker, Jack Kirkland. Photographed by Lee Garmes. With Loretta Young, Gene Raymond, O. P. Heggie, Paul Fix. (85 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Films Inc.)
Edmond T. Greville (U.K., 1937)
As its title (quite accidentally) indicates, both an echo of Ecstasy and a forerunner of Brief Encounter. As William K. Everson notes, Graham Greene had the wit to recognize the maturity of this remarkable and virtually unknown British B-movie (by the French director Greville) when he wrote, "The subject is sexual passion, a rarer subject than you would think on the screen, and the treatment is adult; there isn't, thank God, any love in it. [A] young man picks up a girl, sleeps with her, goes to India; she marries a middle-aged scientist and four years later the young man turns up; the story is of the struggle between tenderness and sexual desire." Everson adds, "Economical in the extreme, it rarely shows it: small sets are cunningly designed and framed to make them look more opulent, and the beautiful camerawork [is by] Ronald Neame. [Brief Ecstasy] will prove, in the long run, to be a film you'll remember."
* Written by Basil Mason. Photographed by Ronald Neame. With Paul Lukas, Linden Travers, Hugh Williams, Marie Ney. (71 mins, B&W, 16mm)
Hoopla!
Frank Lloyd (U.S., 1933) Archival Print!
"Hoopla spelled a total finis to [Clara Bow's] career. Today it's hard to see why, apart from the fact that Clara then seemed a mild anachronism, still rooted in the twenties, playing straight the roles that Mae West was kidding. Too, sleazy carnival stories were fairly commonplace and lacking in novelty. But it's still a good, solid, well-mounted film, peppered with good performances and dialogue and dominated by Clara. She acts well and looks great. Certainly there's nothing here to suggest a fading talent; quite the contrary, it's sad and ironic that the final shot in the film--a shimmering full-screen clasp of a radiantly happy Clara who has just achieved, in the plot, both marital happiness and stardom--should be her last film scene ever. But at that, it's a great shot to go out on! With its ménage-à-trois climax, the film is morally a little odd but no more so than many other pre-Production Code movies."--William K. Everson
* Written by Bradley King, Joseph Moncure March, from the book by John Kenyon Nicholson. Photographed by Ernest Palmer. With Clara Bow, Preston Foster, Richard Cromwell. (80 mins, B&W, 35mm, From George Eastman House)
Recommended for age 4 and older. Jon Mirsalis on Piano. "A perfect blend of fairy-tale magic with Sir James Barrie's special kind of whimsy and pathos. Though essentially theatrical (deliberately and sincerely so, out of respect to the form of the original), this enchanting film also takes advantage of the possibilities of the cinema (as in the shots of mermaids lolling off the Catalina coastline, or the incredibly lovely shot of the galleon taking off from the water and flying back to London). Most of all, the film owed its success to the energetic, sprightly, dancing, joyous performance by Betty Bronson as Peter. It is a radiant performance, capable of shifting from joy to sadness with the slightest change of expression or nuance of body movement."--William K. Everson. Written by Willis Goldbeck, from the play by Sir James Barrie. Photographed by James Wong Howe. With Betty Bronson, Ernest Torrence, Cyril Cadwick, Anna May Wong. (101 mins, Silent, B&W with tinting, 35mm, From George Eastman House)
In William Wellman's pre-Depression Era silent, adapted from a book by hobo writer Jim Tully, Louise Brooks plays a young girl on the run from rural poverty, domestic violence, and a murder rap, having killed her brutal foster father in self-defense. Dressed as a man, she joins a hobo friend (Richard Arlen), hops the freights, and braves the hobo camps, which are inevitably invaded by detectives and plagued by their own internal squabbles. Brooks's performance illustrates the impressive range of her acting abilities during her years in Hollywood in the silent era. And in Wellman's treatment of this American road story of tramps and boxcars, Kevin Brownlow (The Parade's Gone By) finds "a style of astonishing elegance--an elegance which seem[s] out of place in such a picture. This] did not destroy [Wellman's] natural flair for filmic storytelling. Beggars of Life is brilliantly thought out and superbly made."
Written by Benjamin Glazer, Jim Tully, from the novel by Tully. Photographed by Henry Gerrard. With Wallace Beery, Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen, Edgar Washington Blue. (84 mins, B&W, Silent, 16mm, From George Eastman House)
"A serious--perhaps too serious--study of displaced persons and refugees clustered in a disused German theater after World War Two, The Lost People was a commercial failure in its day. Despite a good cast and an intriguing melodramatic framework, British audiences were still too concerned about the long-delayed return of normalcy to their own lives to care too much about the plight of still-antagonistic factions among the freed but homeless Europeans. `Democracy is what you fought for and democracy is what you're going to get!' states the British officer (Dennis Price) rather threateningly. Curiously, the film is much more interesting today as a retrospective prophecy of what is happening now in Bosnia and elsewhere in Europe. It offers no solutions because there were none, least of all Western intervention. One can well understand its failure forty-six years ago but as a mirror to current political problems, and the reasons for them, it is invaluable."--William K. Everson
* Written by Box, Bridget Boland, from Boland's play Cockpit. Photographed by Jack Asher. With Dennis Price, Mai Zetterling, Richard Attenborough, Siobhan McKenna. (88 mins, B&W, 16mm, From WKE)
Presentation ofTreasures from the Archive, including programs of avant-garde film and video preservation and international features from the collection of the Pacific Film Archive, is made possible through the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative.
From 1970, when the modern film preservation movement began in earnest, until about 1990, the problem of preservation was thought to apply almost exclusively to the nitrate-base films made before 1951. In the last five years archivists have come to understand that all film is endangered, and this includes many of the films produced and exhibited in the last forty-five years. Michael Friend, director of the Academy Film Archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, will make a short presentation on technical and aesthetic issues of film preservation with special reference to independent films. A selection of PFA's most recent avant-garde and independent film preservation efforts will be presented. The program includes works by two artists, Bruce Baillie and Gunvor Nelson, who had long associations with the Bay Area film community--Valentin de las Sierras (1966, 10 mins) and All My Life (1966, 3 mins) by Baillie, andSchmeerguntz (1966, 15 mins, B&W) by Nelson--as well as the virtually unknown Pickett's Charge (1958, 60 mins), a re-creation of a Civil War battle by a unique independent filmmaker, John R. McDermott. PFA's preservation projects were funded by AFI/NEA Preservation Grants and an AFI Challenge Grant for Film Preservation.
(Total running time: c. 110 mins, Color, 16mm, PFA Collection)
January 17 through May 1 - Wednesdays at 3:00
For the fourth year, PFA and the UC Berkeley Group Major in Film join to offer you an opportunity to enjoy classics of world cinema preceded by lectures by distinguished Berkeley faculty. UAM/PFA members and the general public are invited, as space permits, to the lecture/screenings for Film 50, an undergraduate course for non-film majors. The course is taught by Professor Marilyn Fabe with guest lectures by her Film Studies colleagues. Each program will consist of a lecture followed by a film. All programs are held in the UAM/PFA's George Gund Theater; regular PFA prices apply. Advance tickets are available for this popular film/lecture series.
Alternative Visions
This Shared Voices program is made possible through the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative.
Michael Friend, who curates the Whitney collection at the Academy Film Archive, will introduce the program. A selection of the Whitneys' visual experiments, special effects and title sequences for Hollywood movies, as well as their own remarkable films, will be presented, in memory of John Whitney.
(Total running time: c. 90 mins, 35mm/16mm, From Academy Film Archive, PFA Collection)
"She is all. She is the drunkard's vision and the hermit's dream."--Guillaume Apollinaire
Perhaps no film star inspired such poetry of response as did Asta Nielsen, "the silent muse" whose gaze lit up film screens around the world in the teens and twenties. PFA and The Museum of Modern Art are proud to present the first U.S. retrospective of the extant works of this actress who, before Gish and Garbo, defined the film actor's art as one of minimal gesture for maximum character, the natural communication of the human spirit. If Nielsen's films from 1910 on "are modern and immediate in a way that resists cliché," as Janet Bergstrom writes, this is largely because Nielsen herself created a style of acting that was not imported from stage but was of the cinema.
With her first film, made in her native Denmark with first-time director Urban Gad, Asta Nielsen became an international star. Nielsen and Gad (who would become her first husband) were soon lured to Germany where she made over seventy films between 1911 and 1932. By 1914, "die Asta" was the most popular star in Germany, where one could find Asta cigarettes and pastries. She was the WWI pin-up, and Asta Nielsen cinemas existed in Germany, Japan--and San Francisco! Involved in all aspects of her craft, Nielsen formed her own production company in 1920 and selected Hamlet as her first project, with herself in the title role.
Nielsen, who had invented silent film language; who was, in Eisner's words, "the quintessence of her era," was reluctant to act in the talkies. Following her retirement from cinema (although not from theater, painting, and writing), Asta Nielsen was granted the anonymity that Garbo sought--she was indeed left alone and her death in May 1972 went unreported in the New York Times and Variety.
We thank Ib Monty, Director, and Janus Barfoed, The Danish Film Museum; Paolo Cherchi Usai, Senior Curator, and Phil Carli, The George Eastman House; Jonathan Dennis; Diane Pivac, New Zealand Film Archives; and Professor Mark Sandberg for their invaluable advice and assistance.
A catalog, Asta Nielsen, written and translated into English by Marguerite Engberg, and published by the UAM/PFA, is available at the PFA Box Office and at the Museum Store.<> Asta--The Tenth Muse is a touring series co-organized by Jytte Jensen, Assistant Film Curator, The Museum of Modern Art; and Edith Kramer, Film Curator, the Pacific Film Archive; in collaboration with Marguerite Engberg; The Danish Film Museum, and The George Eastman House. The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Novo Nordisk A/C, Scandinavian Airlines, The Danish Film Institute, and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Prints are courtesy The Danish Film Museum and The George Eastman House.
Sources cited frequently in our notes include Robert C. Allen, "The Silent Muse," Sight & Sound Jan.-Dec. `73 and National Film Theatre notes; Janet Bergstrom, "Asta Nielsen's Early German Films," in Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895-1920, ed. by Paolo Cherchi Usai, Lorenzo Codelli; Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen
Dance of Death (Der Totentanz). While her industrial engineer husband hovers between life and death following an explosion, Bella (Nielsen) makes the acquaintance of a composer whose attentions allow her to realize her first success as a singer but whose composition, Dance of Death, foreshadows their relationship. With Asta Nielsen, Oskar Fuchs, Fritz Weidemann. (incomplete, 35mm)
As the Mask Drops (Wenn die Maske fällt). Nielsen plays a minor actress who saves a man-about-town from ruin and suicide. Apart from her riveting performance with its many costume changes, the film is notable for a series of entertaining episodes depicting metropolitan life, including society's masked ball. With Asta Nielsen, Reginald Pasch, Fritz Weidemann. (c. 33 mins [incomplete], 35mm)
Girl Without a Country (Das Mädchen ohne Vaterland/ U.S. release title: A Romany Spy). On its release in the U.S., the film was hailed as "a masterpiece" and Nielsen's performance "inspiration which amounts to genius." She portrays a gypsy girl who naively agrees to secure military secrets from her officer boyfriend in exchange for cash. "The sense of naturalness in the mise-en-scène carries over into the unselfconscious, thoughtful quality that is so appealing in Nielsen's acting in this period. [Playing] a gypsy...allows her a number of freedoms from middle-class behavior....Her sexiness is natural, innocent...although powerful, it is nevercoarse or vulgar." (Janet Bergstrom). With Asta Nielsen, Paul Meffert, Max Wogritsch. (35mm) Written by Gad. Photographed by Guido Seeber. (Total running time:( 106 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W)
The Great Moment (In dem grossen Augenblick). Nielsen plays a starving young mother who gives up her child for adoption, then steals the child back three years later. "[The] story gives her opportunities to show a very physical expressiveness. Her aggressive, physical responses are reactions that seem natural to her but that...are rarely seen in female characters." (Janet Bergstrom)
With Asta Nielsen, Max Obal, Hugo Flink, Emil Albes. (35mm)
The Strange Bird (Der fremde Vogel/U.S.: The Course of True Love). As often, Nielsen plays a woman doomed by cross-class love. She is the daughter of a rich American and falls in love with a peasant barge-man. "Nielsen's tomboyish behavior--as if she has to be schooled constantly on how young ladies are supposed to act--is seen [here]. The scenes showing Nielsen standing in her boat, poling it down the river, are a pleasure to see. Once again, her sensuous body movements have found a narrative premise that allow her to display her unusual physical skills in a lovely outdoor environment." (Janet Bergstrom)
With Hans Mierendorff, Asta Nielsen, Eugènie Werner. (35mm)
Both: Written by Gad. Photographed by Guido Seeber. (Total running time: c. 70 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W)
As part of Pacific Film Archive's 25th Anniversary celebrations we pay tribute to two individuals, Nagamasa Kawakita and Madame Kashiko Kawakita, who were largely responsible for introducing Japanese cinema to the rest of the world. If today's audiences take for granted their access to the riches of this national cinema, we are in fact all indebted to these two visionaries who saw their role in life as cultivating international understanding through the medium of cinema.
In the 1930s the Kawakitas began importing European cinema to Japan; this endeavor flourished again after the war when Madame Kawakita also was able to pursue her personal mission of introducing Japanese films abroad, reaching out to curators, critics, and festivals. Her efforts launched the international appreciation of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa, and the Kawakitas' involvement in the Art Theatre Guild brought attention to the new generation including Oshima and Shinoda. In 1960 Madame Kawakita established the Japan Film Library Council, which has become an inexhaustible resource for scholars and exhibitors. The Council was renamed the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute to honor Nagamasa Kawakita after his death in 1981. The film world suffered a great loss when, in 1993, their daughter Kazuko Kawakita-Shibata, herself an important film distributor and "ambassador," died, and a month later Madame Kawakita passed away at age 85.
Among the many film series we have shown at PFA organized and sponsored by the Institute are Japan: History through Cinema; Before Rashomon, 1930-50; Postwar Japanese Society through Film; and homages to many great directors including Mikio Naruse, Heinosuke Gosho, and Hiroshi Shimizu. The work of the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute goes on, and so does ours, as we continue to be inspired by their commitment to bringing Japanese cinema to light.
We are fortunate to have in the PFA Collection a number of films that they were instrumental in introducing to the West. Including the only subtitled print in the U.S. of Gosho's Fireflies; Ichikawa's illuminating film The Outcasts, and several that show the versatility and mastery of Keisuke Kinoshita, the films in our tribute do precisely what the Kawakitas wanted cinema to do: provide a window on Japanese society, history, and culture. This series is made possible through the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative.
(Onna ga kaidan o agaru toki). Hideko Takamine portrays the consummate Naruse heroine: high minded, determined, and out of her element in a sordid world. Here it is the back-street bars of Tokyo's Ginza district which Naruse recreates in all its busy detail and poetry. Keiko is a Mama-san or bar hostess, a modern, lower-scale incarnation of the geisha. A widow at thirty, and exploited by her selfish family, she realizes that she must either remarry or strike out on her own in the face of furious competition from other Mama-sans. A devastating courtship with a longtime customer only reveals the true vulnerability of Keiko's position. Naruse's approach, like his protagonist, is never indelicate yet always unsentimental and direct. In an extraordinary opening few minutes, he lays out all the themes and problems of the film in the quick telling brush strokes of a master. Make no mistake: lives are in the balance.
Written by Ryuzo Kikushima. Photographed by Masao Tamai. With Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Reiko Dan, Tatsuya Nakadai. (110 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, `Scope, From Milestone)
(Hotarubi). Fireflies features Chikage Awashima in a compelling portrayal of Tose, proprietress of the Teradaya Inn. An unhappy marriage without the consolation of children forces Tose to concentrate on business, through which she establishes her contacts with the ronin and samurai of the Satsuma clan, leaders of the movement to restore the Emperor to rule. But it is through her relationship with Ryoma Sakamoto, the ronin whom she protects and hides, that she comes to realize the relationship between her own desperation and that of the country on the whole as a result of the political repression of the Tokugawa shogunate. Fireflies is a woman's film but an unusual film--one of the very few to discuss the problem of women under feudalism in a Tokugawa setting....Tose's problems not only define her as the traditional heroine, but they also define the world against which she is traditionally pitted....This extraordinary film [is] a truly political work in the subtle delineation of the relationship between political structure and the individual.--Frank Motofuji
Written by Toshio Yasumi, based on a novel by Sakunosuke Oda. Photographed by Yoshio Miyajima. With Chikage Awashima, Junzaburo Ban, Miki Mori, Ayako Wakao. (123 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Shochiku)
(Dom na Trubnoi). Boris Barnet's perceptive satires are filled with the minutiae of everyday life, eccentric characters (especially spunky women) vividly captured in location environments. His broadly innovate style is propelled less by traditional Soviet montage than by robust humor and an instinctive eye for human behavior. In The House on Trubnaya Square a country girl, Parasha (Vera Maretskaya), lands a job as a servant in Moscow and gets her first taste of the middle classes when she becomes entangled in the lives of residents of an entire block of flats. (In a movement that perhaps signals Godard of many years later, the downtrodden girl becomes transformed when she sees a play about Joan of Arc.) An observant, essentially loving character sketch of a community that never seems to stop to catch its breath, the film is spiced with some well-placed antibureaucratic barbs and filled with cinematic surprises, from surrealism to stop-motion, and burlesques of other Soviet stylists--Eisenstein and his crowds, Vertov and his tramcars.
* Written by Boris Zorich, et al. Photographed by Yevgeny Alexeyev. With Vera Maretskaya, Vladimir Fogel, Anna Sudakevich, Yelena Tyapkina. (85 mins, Silent, Live translation of Russian intertitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)
This program is made possible through the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Museum Collections Accessibility Initiative.
Recommended for age 3+. Have a tea party with Tom Kitten and join Pig-wig on a grand adventure in The Tale of Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddle Duck and The Tale of Pigling Bland. (30 mins each) Preceded by Pigs!, a humorous look at the real animals. (Caroll Ballard, U.S., 1969, 10 mins) (Total: 70 mins, Color, 35mm from TV Cartoons Ltd., 16mm from PFA Collection)
Recommended for age 8+. In the land of Genghis Khan, a shaman guides a young boy in the search for his destiny. Share the incredible adventures of this lucky boy as he travels with his teacher across the breathtaking Mongolian Steppes. (100 mins, In Mongolian with English subtitles read aloud, Color, 35mm, From Norkat Co., Ltd)
Asta--The Tenth Muse
Monty and Marguerite Engberg in Person
Ib Monty is Director of The Danish Film Museum. Asta Nielsen scholar Marguerite Engberg's monograph is translated for our catalog. Ms. Engberg also has written the definitive two-volume book on Danish silent film, and is former Chair of Cinema Studies, University of Copenhagen.
(Dirnentragödie/U.S.: Women Without Men). In one of her most eloquent tragic roles, and the last of the famous German Expressionist "street" films, Nielsen at forty-six portrays an ageing prostitute who falls in love with a young middle-class man and spends her life savings trying to gain a modicum of respectability before he is stolen away from her by a younger prostitute. Director Rhan's avant-garde techniques translate the heroine's confusion, passion, joys, and disenchantment into cinematic terms.
* Written by Ruth Goetz, Leo Heller, based on the play by Wilhelm Braun. Photographed by Guido Seeber. With Asta Nielsen, Hilde Jennings, Oskar Homolka, Werner Pittschau. (81 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W, 35mm)
Sins of the Fathers (Die Sünden der Väter/U.S.: The Devil's Assistant). Nielsen felt that this was one of her best and most challenging roles. She portrays the daughter of a man who is rapidly drinking away the family's money. Taking a job as an artist's model, she falls in love with a painter and who soon forgets her. When he needs a dissipated model he finds one in his former lover, now an alcoholic herself.
Photographed by Guido Seeber. With Asta Nielsen, Emil Albes, Fritz Weidemann. (35mm)
S.1. As the daughter of a general who is trying to acquire an inventor's plans for an air defense system, and the lover of a baron who wants the same plans, Asta must choose between love and country. Unlike her gypsy in Girl Without a Country, here she knows the many meanings of "fatherland."
With Asta Nielsen, Paul Meffert, Charly Berger, Siegwart Gruder. (35mm)
The Suffragette (Die Suffragette/U.S.: The Militant Suffragette). An Englishwoman from a good family becomes a militant suffragette, eventually called upon to place a bomb in parliament.
Photographed by Emil Schünemann. With Asta Nielsen, Mary Scheller, Max Landa. (fragment, 16mm)
* All: Written by Gad. (Total running time: c. 119 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W)
American Cultures is presented on Monday evenings throughout the UC Berkeley spring semester in association with Professor Albert Johnson and the African-American Studies Department. All programs are open to the public.
Black Is...Black Ain't is the late Marlon Riggs's bold and richly textured exploration of Black American identity. In this final work (completed by colleagues after his death), Riggs shows how this issue has shaped relationships among African Americans, and how people who haven't "fit" because of color, region, sexuality, gender, even speech, have felt excluded. Commentary includes cultural critics Angela Davis, bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Barbara Smith, and Cornel West; and performances by Essex Hemphill and choreographer Bill T. Jones. Across the U.S., African Americans from all walks of life discuss family experiences and communal identity. Their remembrances are touching, funny, at times painful. A critique of patriarchy and homophobia emerges as a central focus. When AIDS forces his hospitalization, Riggs's struggle with his impending death makes his call for a more inclusive African American community all the more urgent.--Cornelius Moore
Co-directed by Christiane Badgley. Written by Riggs. Photographed by Robert Shepard. (87 mins, 16mm, Color, From Tara Releasing)
Co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut, San Francisco.
German experimental filmmaker Christoph Janetzko's two new exquisite, impressionistic films emerged from his time spent in Thailand, where he has been making films and teaching since 1988. River Colors (Vom Fluss, 60 mins) is a sensuous journey down a Thai river in the swamp regions of Nonthaburi. Gliding past houseboats and small houses along the riverbanks, details of everyday life flow by--the glow of a TV, the rhythmic gesture of hair brushing, a conversation in progress--"unrolling like a cinematic equivalent of Monet's Water Lilies panorama." (N.Y. Film Festival). Its companion piece, Sisom (30 mins), takes its title from "the Thai word for the color orange, the color of monks' robes, a color never used in a secular connection in Thailand. The film show pictures of the everyday activities of Buddhist monks in Wat, and the grounds of the Temple Monastery. Janetzko's image development and the sound montage created by the composer Makin Fung Bing Fai from synchronic original sounds, trivial noises and compositional elements, spur each other on, giving the film its unique sense of restrained drama and sometimes even complete abandonment of reality." (Berlin Film Festival)
(Total running time: 90 mins, Color, 16mm, From the artist and Friends of the German Film Archive, thanks to Karen Moeller, Dorothee Werner)
Video
Presented with support from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Endowment.
Bob Kaputof tells stories, usually about himself or his friends. They are simple stories, compelling in their honesty, endearing in their warmth. And they are poignant in that the stories, generally accompanied by Bob's own voice, somehow humanize the medium that carries them forth. With clarity, grace, and economy, he makes himself heard, but perhaps more importantly, felt. In Sleeping Bag (19??, 10 mins), Bob encounters a homeless man who has stolen his down bag. All the misgivings, misfortune, and missteps of such a confrontation are clearly described and accounted for. His most conceptual work, Four Rooms (1995, 4:30 mins) uses curious props and peculiar time schemes to establish the psychological legacy of his childhood home. A later tape, Everyperson I Met in Brazil (1995, 10:30 mins) is just that, a cataloguing with comments of friends made in a recent trip to Brazil. Also included in the program: Things Happen Once (1992, 4:30 mins), Mimi's Letter (1979, 7:30 mins), By Myself (1992, 2:30 mins) and TV Light (1995, 59 sec). A former Bay Area resident, Bob Kaputof will also screen works by friends who have influenced him through their advice, collaboration, working method, or their own creative voices. Welcome to Bob's neighborhood!--Steve Seid
(Total program: 75 mins plus discussion, 3/4" video, From the artists)
(Jinruigaku nyumon). The film's full title, The Pornographers: An Introduction to Anthropology only hints at Imamura's incomparable wit and appreciation of the perverse. But, as Donald Richie notes in Japanese Cinema, it does not indicate "the extent of his compassion" for his protagonist, Ogata, a small-time pornographic filmmaker who is shocked by the degenerate morality that surrounds him in his seedy Osaka neighborhood. Ogata is a do-gooder who feels it is his duty to restore to mankind some of the harmless pleasures that civilization denies it. Scenes of his making 8mm films cast with sub-amateurs are some of the funniest in Japanese cinema. Before long, however, our hero becomes saturated with lechery--his own and that of his clientele--and, foresaking his fellow man, he sails off into a lonely retreat. The Pornographers is a technical tour-de-force: the camera constantly takes on the role of voyeur, peeking through windows, keyholes, fishtanks, anything peekable--most obviously, a movie lens.
Written by Imamura, Koji Numata, from a novel by Akiyuki Nosaka. Photographed by Shinsaku Himeda. With Shoichi Ozawa, Sumiko Sakamoto, Keiko Sagawa, Masaomi Kondo. (128 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, `Scope, 35mm, From Milestone)
Keisuke Kinoshita (Japan, 1957)
(Fuzen no tomoshibi). Contemporary films like The Funeral have nothing on this cynical comedy of middle-class avarice by Kinoshita, who was among other things a masterful director of humor who used physical space ingeniously. The rooms, screens, and yard of a modest house in a still very rural suburb become the site of endless comings and goings, brilliantly choreographed. The day that a couple, whose chief occupation is waiting for wily old grandma to pass on so they can inherit, win a big prize, the extended family descends on them for the proverbial free lunch. Meanwhile, three juvenile delinquents scout the house all day long, waiting for a moment ripe for breaking and entering. But they have the least chutzpa of any and in the end slink off, perhaps to some taiyozoku ("sun-tribe") film (see The Rose on His Arm) where they can get some action. Those who have soaked their hankies in the shomin-geki will appreciate the tear-fest Kinoshita provides at the film's close, when the dowager's new clothes have been revealed.
Written by Kinoshita. Photographed by Hiroshi Kusuda. With Hideko Takamine, Keiji Sada, Akiko Tamura, Shinji Nambara. (79 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Shochiku)
The fun begins at 8 p.m., with live musicians playing music of the movies; a hosted bar; light buffet, and sumptuous desserts in a festive club setting at the museum. Dress as a favorite film star or character! Prizes for best costume will be awarded in several categories. The tax-deductible ticket price is $50 per person, with proceeds supporting the University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. UAM/PFA Founding Trustee Roselyne Swig is Honorary Chair of the event.
At 6 p.m., preceding the Ball, Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien will host a private dinner at University House in honor of the Pacific Film Archive. Scheduled to attend are Bay Area filmmaking greats Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Wayne Wang and others. Dinner tickets are $250 per person, with special benefits and recognition for gifts at higher levels.
For your ticket to the celebration, and more information about the dinner, please phone Ginevra Tehin at (510) 642-3072.
The Ballet Dancer (Balletdanserinden) (August Blom, Denmark, 1911). A theatrical setting is the backdrop for a convoluted story of art and love.
* Written by Alfred Kjerulf. Photographed by Axel Graatkjaer. With Asta Nielsen, Johannes Poulsen, Valdemar Psilander. (16mm)
The Abyss (Afgrunden/U.S.: A Woman Always Pays) (Urban Gad, Denmark, 1910). A landmark for being the film that made Asta Nielsen internationally known, simultaneously promoting the idea of film as art. ("A new light seemed to shine from the screen," Apollinaire wrote.) It was shot under the most primitive conditions on sets constructed in a prison yard. She plays a young music teacher who is lured into the nomadic life of the circus by a performing cowboy with a roving eye. In an extraordinary scene, she literally lassos him, then performs "what for 1910 must have been a scandalously erotic dance [in which] she declares both her passion and her desperation....Her style was in direct opposition to the reigning technique of exaggerated gesticulation...a restrained, naturalistic style...riveting attention on her expressive face." (Robert C. Allen)
* Written by Gad. Photographed by Alfred Lind. With Asta Nielsen, Poul Reumert, Robert Dinesen. (31 mins, 35mm)
The Black Dream (Den sorte Drøm/Der schwarze Traum) (Urban Gad, Denmark, 1911). Nielsen's second Danish film again displays both a screenplay and acting style surprisingly mature in comparison with other films of the time. She plays a circus star who is blackmailed by a wealthy jeweler.
* Written by Gad. Photographed by Adam Johansen. With Asta Nielsen, Valdemar Psilander, Gunnar Helsengreen. (35mm)
(Total running time: c. 113 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W)
The Film Prima Donna (Die Filmprimadonna). A drama that is also a wonderful document of the cinema of the teens, with Nielsen portraying the title role so that we see her evolving before and behind the camera, following all steps of production as she must have done in real life.
With Asta Nielsen, Paul Otto, Fritz Weidemann, Fred Immler. (fragment, English intertitles, Tinted, 35mm)
The Little Angel (Engelein). "The character that emerges from her comedies...is the unstoppable extrovert, constantly plotting...[She] usually invades a stuffy, middle-class environment and turns it on its ear--not through burlesque or slapstick but by behaving more or less normally for the character she is playing." (R. C. Allen) Here, at age thirty-four, she plays a seventeen-year-old who must masquerade as a twelve-year-old (which would make her legitimate) in order for her family to gain an inheritance from a rich uncle. But she falls in love with the uncle, adding a bizarre sexual conceit to her no-holds-barred tomboy antics.
With Alfred Kühne, Asta Nielsen, Max Landa, Fred Immler. (35mm)
Zapata's Band (Zapatas Bande). In another comedy, a spoof on location shooting, Nielsen and company go to Italy to film a story about a band of robbers and are forced to become robbers themselves.
With Asta Nielsen, Fred Immler, Senta Eichstaedt. (35mm)
* All: Written by Gad. Photographed by Axel Graatkjaer, Karl Freund. (Total running time: c. 87 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W)
Darnell Martin's debut feature is a tale of life on New York's 167th street, where Lisette (Lauren Vélez), mother of three, "hates her life" but hangs on to it with a comic vengeance. Lisette's sweet-talking husband, Chino, seems barely older than his kids and his by-the-book machismo is a batting board against which she measures her love. Much like Paris Is Burning, this comedy has people trying anomie on for size just to get by in la vida loca. Just as her brother Alex has long since become Alexis (and is a sister to her), the practical-minded Lisette remakes herself into a knock-out chick to land a record-company job (where her practical mindedness is her ticket after all). When she transforms two hot Latino recording artists into the image of her Chino, identity comes full circle, and comes home. I Like It Like That manages to be earthy and effecting without being remotely down-to-earth--in its fever-pitch (the pitch of Lisette's life), neorealism meets Lucy Ricardo.
* Written by Martin. Photographed by Alexander Gruszynski. With Lauren Vélez, Jon Seda, Griffen Dunne, Tomas Melly. (105 mins, Color, 35mm, Courtesy Columbia Repertory)
Collage and sculptural works featured in some of the videos of Erik Saks and Patrick Tierney will be exhibited at REFUSALON, 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco. Opening reception January 4th and closing reception February 1st. Gallery hours by appointment only: 415/546-0158.
Touch Tone (1995, 28 mins). Coin Tone (1995, 5 mins). Copper Connection (1993, 8 mins). Fax Attack (1992, 3 mins). Fax Jam (1996, 5 mins). You Talk/I Buy (1991, 10 mins). Encryptile 1 (1995, 5 mins). Straight Talk About Deserts (1994, 15 mins) (Total running time: 79 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From the artist)
Treasures from the Archive
Video is an endangered species. The fragility of the medium accounts for only part of its tenuous existence; added to this a general disaffection with the past. As a result, PFA's efforts to preserve seventies video art from the Bay Area retrieves not just dusty objects but a potentially forgotten history. Tonight's program highlights rarely seen works dating back to 1969 that have been preserved from open-reel formats. George Bolling's Phase (1972, 6:28 mins, B&W) is a strident feedback exploration created by the Bay Area's first video curator. Joel Glassman's Rattling Outside, Banging Inside (1972, 16 mins, B&W) declares the artist's intimacy with his material environment. Peter d'Agostino also ritualizes his physical terrain in the Walk Series (1973-74, B&W, excerpt) by staking out parcels of San Francisco landscape. Secret Spill (1974, B&W, excerpt) finds Theresa Cha in a sylvan performance that culminates in the release of feminine fecundity. Part of the ground-breaking Dilexi Series, Terry Riley and Arlo Acton's Music with Balls (1969, 23:52 mins, Color) displays Riley's hypnotic music within a multi-layered, colorized extravaganza. Curator Steve Seid will provide anecdotal commentary about the preservation of the above works.
(Total running time: 75 mins, 3/4" video, PFA Collection)
Tonight's program of rare Danish silents comes from a wonderful teaching collection of the Department of Scandinavian Studies, UC Berkeley, made possible by a grant from the Bernard Osher Foundation, and on deposit at PFA.
Benjamin Christensen is best known for the 1921 film Witchcraft through the Ages. His earliest films, however, in which he also plays the leads, reveal an artist who, as John Gillett wrote, "like Sternberg ten years later saw the screen initially as an area which had to be painted with light....[In The Mysterious X] the photographic texture was immensely rich....Christensen was also the first filmmaker to realize that a single set-up can often hold a greater atmospheric charge than a whole sequence if all its elements are carefully judged. Thus [a] long-held shot of...guests waving goodbye to a group of cadets driving off in an old car in a sunny, leafy country setting...somehow symbolizes all the false confidence of a Europe soon to be catapulted into war....When Christensen made The Mysterious X, the only element which was unmistakably of its time was the melodramatic narrative...about a master spy who compromises the wife of a loyal naval lieutenant but is outwitted by the faith and perseverance of the lieutenant's son.
"With his second film, Night of Revenge (1915), he really came to grips with an elaborate storyline....Most startling of all is the camera style, with its stressing of detail in close-ups and gradual revelation of what the characters are doing....The story, in fact, is seen through the camera and not merely recorded by it, not least in the climax with its veritable flurry of cross-cutting as the avenging convict stalks the mistress of the house from room to room. Here Christensen's flair for making a sequence come alive is seen at its most sophisticated...and melodrama is transmuted into art." (Sight & Sound, Spring 1966)
For an introduction to Prof. Sandberg, who will both introduce tonight's show and read the intertitles, please see January 28.
Night of Revenge (Hævnens Nat): Written by Christensen. Photographed by Johan Ankerstjerne. With Christensen, Karen Sandberg, Peter Fjelstrup, Charles Wilken. (c. 93 mins, Silent, English flash titles read aloud, B&W, 16mm)
The Mysterious X (Det Hemmelighedsfulde X): Written by Christensen. Photographed by Dinesen. With Christensen, Karen Sandberg, Otto Reinwald, Fritz Lamprecht. (??mins, Live translation of Danish intertitles) (Total running time: mins, Silent, B&W, 16mm)
(Hakai/ The Sin). This is an anguished, revealing film about the buraku minority in Japan which has faced discrimination similar to that endured by outcastes in India, and which recently has become a more visible focus for political activism. Burakumin are those whose ancestors include butchers, leather workers, gravediggers, and others who performed tasks considered unclean by Buddhists or who provided services deemed lowly by the ruling classes. The story, taken from a controversial 1906 novel that became a classic of Japanese literature, concerns a young teacher (Raizo Ichikawa) in a small mountain community who is torn between his father's dying commandment, "Hide your identity as an outcast," and his sense of the injustice of the system. Painfully, his allegiance becomes diverted from his father to another figure of respect, a well-known author who has "come out" as an outcast. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa's breathtaking compositions move from dark, bleak imagery to snow-covered mountains and forests as the story unfolds.
Written by Natto Wada from the novel by Toson Shimazaki. Photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa. With Raizo Ichikawa, Hiroyuki Nagato, Eiji Funakoshi, Shiho Fujimura. (119 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, `Scope, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Daiei)
(Nogiku no gotoki kimi nariki). An old man, Masao (Chishu Ryu), is being rowed up the river to the place of his youth. "Life is a short dream," he muses. The barren, rocky shore where he disembarks, a no-man's-land, and the house to which he walks, a ghost house, are something other than life, perhaps death. Life, in this film, is something framed by the distance of memory, tiny figures etched into a cameo, moving fervently about a glistening world of cotton and chrysanthemums, captured in long-shot and punctuated by an old man's poetic voice-over. Kinoshita sustains this mood using iris frames and still images, horizontal pans and startling shadows, drenching his screen with sun and then with rain. The dream that is the old man's life is of childhood sweethearts--Masao and his older cousin Tamiko, whose friendship reaches an epiphany in the fields where they work together. But they are torn apart by local gossip and a mother's ambitions for her son. In Kinoshita's films, morality consists not of prevailing winds but of pure emotions. We recommend at least two handkerchiefs.
Written by Kinoshita, based on the novel by Sachio Ito. Photographed by Hiroshi Kusuda. With Noriko Arita, Shinji Tanaka, Chishu Ryu, Keiko Yukishiro. (92 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Kino International)
Pirosmani deals with the life of the great Georgian primitive artist Niko Pirosmanishvili, who worked prior to 1920. Shengelaya avoids the usual clichés of films about artists' lives, successfully experimenting with color control techniques based on the painter's style. Avtandi Varazi plays the gentle, uncompromising artist who sold his paintings to bars and restaurants for food and drink, and worked mostly in solitude. After its American premiere at PFA in 1974, this delicate and poetic film won the Grand Prize at the Chicago Film Festival and went on to play in New York to critical acclaim. In 1978 a New Yorker review called it "a splendid and innovative work of poetic biography....Shengelaya understands an unusual amount of the creative process."
Written by Shengelaya, Erlom Akhvlediani. Photographed by Konstantin Apryatin. With Avtandi Varazi, David Abashidze. (85 mins, In Georgian with English subtitles, 35mm, Color, PFA Collection, permission Kino)
Preceded by short:
The Seasons (Arthur (Artavazd) Peleshian, Armenia, 1975). (Vremena goda/Tarva Yeghanaknere). Winter in Armenia: shepherds slide perilously down a snow-covered mountain, one after the other, cradling their fleecy charges. A kind of chivalry inhabits The Seasons, a breathtaking depiction of the hardships and vigor of rural life, set, not incongruously, to Vivaldi. It is one of the cinematic poems of Arthur Peleshian, a master of montage who is a true descendant of Vertov and Eisenstein (and contemporary of Bruce Conner). Yet his "distance montage," the counterpoint over time of images and sounds, effects rhythms and moods his predecessors never attempted. Photographed by M. Vartanov. Edited by Peleshian. (30 mins, no dialogue, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)
Pastorale, Ioseliani's lyrical and eccentric portrait of rural Georgian life, hangs on a slim narrative thread having to do with the visit of a string quartet to a remote village, the encounter between town and country. The film's subtext is a bold look at the conditions of women in the village. Albert Johnson writes: "The determination to convey Georgian life in the most truthful manner possible is indicated with cinematic understatement....Pastorale is very much a tone-poem. Iosseliani's sharp perceptions are constantly aimed toward sardonic juxtapositions...to establish those wistful ironies of human behavior that exist when cultural patterns coexist behind invisible barriers....The village is not at all cozy-cute, but unflinchingly grubby; the mud, poverty, insouciant pigs, goats and chickens, plus the eternal outhouse, are just there---the labor, too, for the women do everything without modern conveniences."
Written by Rezo Inanichvili, Otar Mekshrichvili, Ioseliani. Photographed by Abessalom Maisuradze. With Rezo Tsarchalachvili, Lia Tokkadse-Djiegueli, Marina Kartzevadze. (95 mins, In Georgian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)
Recommended for age 14+. Sokly Ny (a.k.a. Don Bonus), an 18-year-old Cambodian refugee living with his family in San Francisco, was assisted by veteran San Francisco filmmaker Spencer Nakasako in making this compelling video documentary. Bonus records his own struggle to get through his senior year at Galileo High despite family crises, peer pressures, and an increasingly dangerous environment. His camera becomes a means for understanding his frustrations, and of exploring the realities of daily life for many refugee children. (55 mins, 3/4" video, From NAATA)
Asta--The Tenth Muse
The ABC of Love (Das Liebes-ABC). Cross-dressing came naturally to Nielsen. "In a performance that brings to mind both Chaplin and Max Linder, Nielsen plays a strong-willed girl determined to transform her Caspar Milquetoast beau into a man-of-the-world, even if she has to become a man-of-the-world to do it....Had she decided to concentrate on comedy rather than tragedy and melodrama, Nielsen might well have developed into one of the finest comediennes of her age." (R. C. Allen)
With Asta Nielsen, Ludwig Trautmann, Magnus Stifter. (35mm)
Dora Brandes. With money from her former admirer, Dora furthers the political career of her new lover, a journalist. As in other films in which the Asta character crosses love (woman's world) and politics (man's), she loses the love of both men, whose allegiance is to the political.
* With Asta Nielsen, Ludwig Trautmann. (35mm)
Both: Written by Louis Levy, Martin Jörgensen. (Total running time: c. 100 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W)
The Eskimo Baby (Das Eskimobaby). Nielsen plays an Eskimo girl introduced by an Arctic explorer into the vastness of his aristocratic home. "The Eskimo Baby is funny enough to rank beside the best of American silent comedy. It provides a vehicle for Nielsen's most successful type of comic character, the outsider who invades a stuffy, middle-class world and promptly sets about puncturing inflated pretensions." (R. C. Allen) Note that the film has racist and stereotyping material.
* Written by Louis Levy. With Louis Levy, Asta Nielsen. (incomplete, 35mm)
The Guinea Pig (Die Erste Patient/Das Versuchskaninchen). Asta plays the naughty and interfering daughter of a widower who is attracted to his housekeeper. The latter arranges to have her sent to a boarding house but, due to a mix-up, she lands in one run by a professor who hopes to earn an income by opening a home for the mentally retarded children he studies. She is his "first patient." (35mm)
(Total running time: 86 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W)
Hoop Dreams follows the basketball careers of two Chicago schoolboys with the pensive thoughtfulness of a good character study and the narrative trajectory of a good game--its ups and downs are excruciating, its turnarounds unpredictable. For William Gates and Arthur Agee and their peers, the game is far from a romp on the local park court; childhood's buoyancy is weighted with the pressures of inner-city poverty, and basketball as a way out. Both boys are scouted for scholarships to a suburban parochial school whose god is superstar alumnus Isiah Thomas; as the pressure of objectification--to remake themselves in Thomas's image--begins to take its toll, all bets are off as to the fates of these lads. The filmmakers offer intimate portraits of two very different boys, and of their families whose own dreams are now touchingly out of touch, now painfully on target. By the end what we wish for Arthur and William may actually be the anti-sports: to get a life.
Produced by James, Peter Gilbert, Frederick Marx. Photographed by Peter Gilbert. (171 mins, 35mm, Color, From Fine Line)
According to conventional wisdom, culture resides on the two coasts. But what of the coastally challenged Midwest? A close look at Chicago reveals a thriving, influential community of women who make tapes, and not just of late but with a history threading back fifteen years. The Chicago Seven is a two-part program showcasing the established artists who first plowed the video prairies, alongside a new crop of emerging artists reaping a harvest of their own. The Windy City has a fermentatious culture nurtured by a complex ethnic community, grand universities and museums, and an influx of artists who have found themselves drawn to the great plains. Representing only fifteen women artists, this two-part program excludes as much as it includes. But The Chicago Seven does afford a vivid look at a community of women artists who prove you can't coast on assumptions.--Steve Seid
Works by Lyn Blumenthal, Leah Gilliam, Barbara Latham, Christine Tamblyn, Julie Zando Challenging the dominant cultural texts of our time marks off one area of activity for The Chicago Seven. Blumenthal's Doublecross (1985, 8 mins) takes on sexual difference via Hollywood films like The Women, an askance trial starring Yvonne Rainer, and slices of pornography. Resisting what she calls "'his' culture," Blumenthal displaces male desire with lesbian attraction. In Chained Reactions (1982, 9:55 mins), Latham and Tamblyn offer up the clichés of the gothic romance, always hinting at some haunting resolution but never delivering. Lacey costumes, absurd associations, and a whisper-riddled soundtrack build to suspense that isn't there. Gilliam's Sapphire and the Slave Girl (1995, 18 mins, premiere) trumps the problematic representation of race, spinning off of a late '50s British film, Sapphire, in which a woman is found murderedwho had been passing for white. Gilliam problematizes identity by refusing to normalize her textural strategies and references. Zando investigates sadomasochism by restaging the Story of O in her all-female tale Uh-Oh! (1994, 38 mins). Sexual and spiritual submission emerge as the restrained expression of ecstasy.--Steve Seid
Artist Maria Troy works with the Chicago-based Video Data Bank.
(Total program: 85 mins, 3/4" video)
Preceded by short:
Kitchen Goddess (Annette Barbier, 1993). Duties around the kitchen, heightened by the scouring of gleaming surfaces, are ritualized and, briefly, transcended in a work that combines computer-generated images and real dirt. (12 mins)
Based in part on the public personae of Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, A Man's Woman injects a TV-styled docudrama with a heavy dose of post-feminist theory. Clovis Kingsley, a powerful, anti-feminist ideologue and author of "The Power of Total Submission" is assassinated. A TV news reporter, Connie Yu, is assigned to uncover the mystery of Kingsley's life, which is reconstructed in fractured and contradictory flashbacks. In her effort to unravel the often conflicting truth of Kingsley's politics, Yu has to come to terms with her own preconceptions about the women's movement. What she discovers--and what Kipnis daringly asserts--is that Kingsley's seemingly retrogressive ideas about "total submission" are actually subversive grabs for female power. A Man's Woman offers a more inclusive view of feminist politics, uniting left and right through its relationship to male hegemony.--Steve Seid (54 mins)
(Total running time: 66 mins, 3/4" video, from the artists, Video Data Bank)
The memories of the soldier Ivan set the elegiac tone for this tribute to the Ukrainian peasants' struggle against the Nazi invaders. Ivan is the ultimate patriotic hero--he is the Ukraine, he saves himself. But Julia Solntseva (actress, director, wife and collaborator of Alexander Dovzhenko), in the spirit of Earth, transcends polemics with poetry: just as Dovzhenko interpreted both the Revolution and the war in terms of the Ukraine, so she brings every image, every idea back to the human, the personal. She does so through extraordinary montage sequences and superimpositions. A soldier walks on moonlit water; the door of a hut opens to an unknown world of horror; a love sequence has such an ethereal otherness as to make the Surrealists weep. "That was war," we are told in the end, "this is life." That was life, we might add; this is cinema.
Written by Alexander Dovzhenko. Photographed by F. Provorov, A. Timerine. With N. Vingranovsky, S. Igoun, B. Andreev. (120 mins, In Russian with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, PFA Collection)
(Voskhozhdyeniye). Byelorussia, 1942: exhausted villagers accompany partisan fighters on a trek through deep snow in retreat from Nazi invaders. It is a frozen hell in which each figure seems cast into his own separate universe, and such is the goal of the special German forces assigned to divide and conquer the partisan resistance. In this setting Larissa Shepitko develops a psychological drama centering around three men: a Russian collaborator, a partisan who attempts to capitulate, and another who makes his own death a profound moral defeat for the Germans. The Ascent goes beyond a religious allegory of martyrdom; it is a work of art that speaks to moral questions that were very much alive and unresolved in Soviet society in the 1970s. It is a haunting film, the more so since it proved to be the last by this very talented Ukrainian director who was killed in an auto accident in 1977.
Written by Yuri Klepikov, Shepitko. Photographed by Vladimir Chukhnov. With Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostiukhin, Anatoly Solonitsin, Sergei Yakoviev. (110 mins, In Russian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)
(Nemuri Kyoshiro shobu). Even more than the blind Zatoichi, Kyoshiro Nemuri, the lone-wolf full-moon swordsman, is darkly estranged from the mainstream of Tokugawa society. As portrayed by Raizo Ichikawa throughout the sixties, this auburn-haired Eurasian casts himself as the anti-hero, a brooding existentialist haunted by his rootlessness. Nemuri resists any attempt to glorify the swordsmanship for which he is renowned; nevertheless, the films are a swordplay buff's delight. The question, "What's your style?" precedes any duel. Nemuri's style is the Engetsu or "full moon cut"; no one has survived the completion of the arc, which has as much to do with the "fatal inward draw" of his obsession as with anything else. Here he is shadowed by five enemies, each with his own style, in a delightfully detailed Edo period setting. Stylized, gorgeous color cinematography does more than bring out Nemuri's red highlights; it helps distance us, like Nemuri, from any stray emotions.
Written by Seiji Hoshikawa, based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata. Photographed by Jishi Makiura. With Raizo Ichikawa, Miwa Takada, Yoshi Kato, Shiho Fujimura. (82 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, `Scope, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Daiei)
(Zatoichi monogatari). He cuts a lone, pathetic figure in his scruffy clothes and straw sandals, feeling his way along country roads with the help of a wooden cane. But inside the cane is a sword, and inside the man an uncanny talent for survival. In the last decades of the Tokugawa, blind masseurs were at the bottom of the caste system, the frequent object of derision from peasant and samurai alike. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, Zatoichi, the blind masseur, is the most popular character in any Japanese action serial. Faced with the contempt of men, Zatoichi answers with a dazzling, ruthless display of swordsmanship. Surprised by the love of some shy young woman, he demurs but for a moment. Zatoichi Monogatari with its gang bosses, straying samurai, and downtrodden innocents, introduces the mood of corruption that drew the basically peaceloving Zatoichi into action in some thirty films. Shintaro Katsu portrays Zatoichi with shaved head and hollow eyes, and all the pathos and the irony embedded in his humble hero. The humility, like the cane, is a sheath for a profound detachment.
Written by Minoru Inuzuka, based on a story by Kan Shimozawa. Photographed by Chishi Makiura. With Shintaro Katsu, Masayo Banri, Shigeru Amachi, Ryuzo Shimada. (95 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, `Scope, PFA Collection, permission Daiei)
(La maman et la putain). The idea that there is one Woman, and she is mother, saint, and whore, is a subtext in much of cinema. In Jean Eustache's masterpiece, it is text. Set in Paris, this is the mammoth account of three not-so-young castaways from the sixties and the sexual revolution. Jean-Pierre Léaud is at the center of the maelstrom for nearly the entire 210 minutes as a perpetually unattached café denizen who waffles between two women--his girlfriend, with whom he lives, and a free-and-easy nurse he brings home. And he dangles between two conceptions of Woman, the mother and the whore; it is his particular cross, although Eustache hardly deifies him. Rather, the film makes an important statement on sexism and is not afraid to implicate itself in all the questions and condemnations that this evokes. This is a film about language, and about sex as a language. The talk is funny, sad, scatological, monological, confessional, conversational, philosophical, electric, and essential.
Written by Eustache. Photographed by Pierre Lhomme, Jacques Rénard, Michel Cinet. With Bernadette Lafont, Françoise Lebrun, Jean-Pierre Léaud. (210 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)
Stories from Africa, Israel, and Mexico 3:30
Recommended for age 8+. Set in Senegal, Umbo & Samuel tells the story of an unlikely friendship and communication between a lost French boy and a man who speaks only Wolof. (Olivier Sillig, Belgium/Switzerland, 1995, 17 mins) The documentary Yehuda presents an engaging portrait of a Chasidic boy and his life in Jerusalem. (Beverly Shaffer, Canada, 1994, 25 mins) Plus two animations from Mexico: The ecological tale Careful with Boots; and Raramuri Light Foot, an Indian tale about the rain dance for corn. (Dominique Jonard, Mexico, 1993, 10 mins each) (Total: 62 mins, English subtitles read aloud, Color, 16mm from World Sales: Brussels Ave, National Film Board of Canada; mm from Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia)
Asta--The Tenth Muse
Based not on Shakespeare alone but upon a variety of sources--including an American professor's theory that Hamlet was in fact a woman forcibly raised as a man so as to succeed to the throne--Hamlet provided an extraordinary role for Nielsen. She plays it as a tragedy of sexual ambivalence and thwarted desire--hence the frustration of Hamlet's love for Horatio, and the opposite frustration of Ophelia. The sets for this moody film range from lavish spectacle to dimly lit expressionist interiors, perhaps reflecting the duality of the character him/herself. Roger Manvell wrote in Shakespeare and the Film: "This striking, if implausible, adaptation of the Hamlet story is by far the most interesting film of the 1920s to have any link with Shakespeare's work." The director Sven Gade was Nielsen's second husband.
* Written by Erwin Gepard, based on Shakespeare; The Mystery of Hamlet by Dr. Edward P. Vining; Historicae Danicae by Saxo Grammaticus; and the German play Fratricide Punished. Photographed by Curt Courant, Axel Graatkjaer. With Asta Nielsen, Paul Conradi, Mathilde Brandt, Eduard von Winterstein. (c. 100 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W, 35mm)
Frontstairs-Backstairs (Vordertreppe-Hintertreppe/U.S.: Vertigo). An officer courts the young cleaning lady of his apartment building, knowing that she has won a big take in the lottery, and tries in vain to turn her into a woman of the world. "Between the acting power of Nielsen and the mastery of mise-en-scène of Gad, a style completely appropriate and self-sustaining emerged. For example, Vordertreppe-Hintertreppe, in particular through the technique of lighting and stylized decor, shows the contribution of their relationship to the development of a type of worldly drama which foreshadowed what would be seen much later as 'Lubitsch's touch.'" (M. S. Fonseca, International Dictionary of Films & Filmmakers)
Photographed by Axel Graatkjaer, Karl Freund. With Asta Nielsen, Paul Otto, Fred Immler. (incomplete, 35mm)
White Roses (Weisse Rosen). This love story doubles as a film policier, as the key to a lady's jewelry box disappears, then becomes the key to her marriage prospects as well.
* With Asta Nielsen, Max Landa, Ernst Hofmann. (35mm)
Both: Written by Gad. (Total running time: c. 85 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W)
"J. J. Johnson (Michael Boatman) the hero of Charles Burnett's extraordinary The Glass Shield, is an eager young black cop who, on graduating from the academy, is assigned to a Los Angeles County Sheriff's station; he is the first black man ever to serve there [but] he discovers that making history is tougher than it sounds....Burnett's script, which was inspired by the true story of an L.A. deputy...is staggeringly ambitious, but the film's style is patient, unhurried, even contemplative. Although The Glass Shield is consistently tense and engrossing, it doesn't have the slam-bang action of a conventional police thriller. And although this picture is one of the most penetrating explorations of institutional racism ever made, it isn't merely accusatory; Burnett knows that the enemy is too large, too complex, too slippery to be defeated by pointing a finger....The truth that informs all the action in the movie is simple and profoundly political: you can't know yourself until you know what you're a part of."--Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker
* Written by Burnett, from a screenplay by Ned Welsh. Photographed by Elliot Davis. With Michael Boatman, Lori Petty, Ice Cube, Michael Ironside. (108 mins, 35mm, Color, From Miramax)
Co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut, San Francisco.
Both Written, Photographed, Edited by Hein. The Uncanny Women (Die Unheimlichen Frauen): With Mora Mattuschka, Claudia Gehrke, Nina Hein, Biddy Pastor. (63 mins, In German and English, Color). Baby I Will Make You Sweat: Music by POL. (63 mins, In German with live English translation, Color) (Total running time: 126 mins, plus discussion; Color, 16mm, From the artist)
Works by Mindy Faber, Vanalyne Green, Margaret Stratton, Elisabeth Suberin, Ayanna Udongo
Whether veiled or unvarnished, autobiography proves fertile ground for many of Chicago's most revealing artists. Faber's The Man Within Me (1996, 3 mins, premiere) tries to penetrate the artist's body to unearth the "twitch" inside, "an untapped market" of shifting desire. Green's ironic Home on the Range (1996, 15 mins, premiere) is a lovelorn reminiscence about the wilds of Wyoming where a cowboy's soiled embrace breaches the tidy sheen of romantic longing. In Green's painful confession, herpetic eruptions mark the consequences of fulfillment. Childhood trauma initiates Stratton's Kiss the Boys and Make them Die (1994, 30 mins), a querulous work that pits lesbian love against sexual formation within the family. Never quite trustworthy memories recount a past where love seeks a host, now the mother, now the father, and then their negation. Suberin's cross-texting Swallow (1995, 28 mins, premiere) portrays the artist as a young anorexic, bombarded by the contradictory messages of a malign culture. Personality disorders find their formal equivalents in a work that clouds the borders of the bio-pic, by shifting voices, legitimizing accounts, and skillful layerings of social history. Refusing to be marginalized, Udongo discards her "good girl" status in Edges (1993, 4:45 mins), a celebration of self-possession.--Steve Seid
(Total program: 90 mins, 3/4" video)
Preceded by short:
How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Kate Wrobel, 1994). Wrobel's disturbing yet unusually even-handed glimpse of an anti-abortion rally where children are used on the front lines as political ramrods. (10 mins)
Jane: An Abortion Service reads like a fairy-tale of activism. In 1965, an undergraduate at the University of Chicago referred a pregnant friend to a safe abortionist. A young civil rights worker, "Jane" conceived of access to abortions as an issue directly related to self-determination. By 1969, the informal referral had grown to a well-organized women's health collective, offering safe illegal abortions performed by the volunteer staff. With no formal medical training, members of the collective completed almost 12,000 flawless procedures. Directors Kirtz and Lundy have amassed archival footage, personal documents, and interviews with both members of Jane and their many patients. The story that emerges tells of an underground railroad, shuttling women to secret clinics where medical supplies were stockpiled, counseling offered, and a community gathered to resolve a common plight. The Chicago-based health service ended in 1973 with the arrest of key members and the subsequent legalization of abortion. Jane is a rousing testament to the commitment of ordinary people who fought for the sanctity of their own bodies.--Steve Seid (56:30 mins)
(Total running time: 67 mins, 3/4" video, From the artists, Video Data Bank)
(Szelerem). The heroine of this love story is an extraordinary old lady portrayed by Lili Darvas, the famed stage actress who worked with Max Reinhardt. A bedridden matriarch enters into an unspoken pact with her daughter-in-law which will allow her to live proudly and die happily. The young Luca, whose husband Janos has been seized by the secret police, concocts a story of his voyage to America and imminent success as a filmmaker. Luca delivers airmail letters filled with Hollywood gossip; Mother devours them. After a while, only Janos really exists in the present, and when he is suddenly sprung from prison, it is too late for the mother, who has opted for the comforts of the past and the hope of the future. What is Love? "...always exact, sad, and noble...a marvelous film, made with a precision of eye and spirit....Of neurosis and perfidy it knows nothing." (Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker)
Written by Tibor Dery. Photographed by Janos Toth. With Lili Darvas, Mari Torocsik, Iván Darvas. (92 mins, In Hungarian with English subtitles, 35mm, PFA/George Gund Collection)
(Eltávozott nap). Few filmmakers have achieved the depiction of personal needs and relationships within a finely observed political context as Marta Mészáros did with her debut feature. In Girl a lonely young working-class woman who has grown up in an orphanage seeks her real mother, only to find herself being passed off as a niece. Told in intuitive vignettes, the story has autobiographical elements that would appear in other of the director's films. Mészáros, born in 1931, grew up an orphan and a perpetual foreigner after her parents (the sculptor László Mészáros and his wife), who had emigrated to the Soviet Union, perished in Stalin's concentration camps. In her films she often depicts a profound restlessness and a search for personal truth among not one but two generations of women, and examines the stratifications within Hungarian society that leave youth of both sexes alienated.
Written by Mészáros. Photographed by Tamas Somlo. With Kati Kovács, Teri Horvath, Adan Szirtes. (80 mins, In Hungarian with English subtitles, 35mm, PFA/George Gund Collection, permission Kino)
(Buta to gunkan). Shohei Imamura's Japan is a raw, sensuous, and often cruel universe untouched by the tea ceremony, Zen, or conventional gentility. Pigs and Battleships is set in the harbor town of Yokusuka, host to the U.S. Naval base, along narrow streets with prostitutes, pimps, and assorted yakuza, all lurking for the Yankee dollar. Kinta is a young street punk who joins the small-time Himori gang in their ambitious scheme to sell black-market hogs to the American fleet. In the gangland-style war that ensues, Kinta finds himself the fall guy for those he trusted. Allegory is too kind a word for Imamura's brilliant protest against the American military presence in Japan. His compositions emphasize evidence of American paraphernalia in even the most intimate details of Japanese life. Lives human and porcine are equally expendable, and if the Americans he depicts behave like pigs to the Japanese, the local thugs in turn follow their example. The shot of pigs thundering down the narrow streets must be unique in cinema.
Written by Hisashi Yamauchi. Photographed by Shinsaku Himeda. With Hiroyuki Nagato, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Masao Mishima, Tetsuro Tamba. (108 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, `Scope, From Milestone)
Keisuke Kinoshita (Japan, 1956)
(Taiyo to bara). Kinoshita's response to the mid-fifties taiyozoku ("sun-tribe") films about nihilistic youth was a cut apart and above, stylish and literary, and showing a problem whose roots are deep in the postwar moment. Kiyoshi, the son of a widowed servant who makes paper flowers to make ends meet, loses himself in a fast crowd of would-be gangsters. But he is continually drawn by the pull of his mother's sorrow, his late sainted father (who actually was a black-marketeer), and the family's poverty. Mother and her memories are an anchor for his self-hatred and a springboard for his violence. The son of her wealthy employers takes an interest in him, like a spider toward a fly, and he becomes entwined in the machinations of a Sirkian western-style household run on secrets and sexual innuendo. As in its Hollywood counterpart Rebel Without a Cause, it's the parents, stupid, whether poor and long-suffering or rich and oblivious. Postwar youth wear their elders' experience, which they will never understand, like a rose tattoo.
Written by Kinoshita. Photographed by Hiroshi Kusuda. With Akira Ishihama, Katsuo Nakamura, Yoshiko Kuga, Noriko Arita. (82 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Shochiku)
After her husband leaves her for his bridge partner, Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) devotes her energies and talents to providing for her elder daughter, Veda, who suffers from perpetual dissatisfaction. Veda prefers her lifestyle untainted by work, and disdains her mother, a waitress turned restaurant owner, for earning their living. In a disquieting mixture of the dark, unsettling world of film noir and the open, daylit world of melodrama, Mildred Pierce's obsessive love for her daughter ends in a murder which begins the film. In flashbacks the murder emerges as one of many interconnected crimes--crimes born, not of physical violence, but rather of emotional and psychological needs, crimes rooted in the family. Mildred's loving too much is inseparable from her working too much in a classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don't, damned if you are a mother.--Kathy Geritz, "What Freud Forgot: The Mother-Daughter Plot," PFA 1992
Written by Ranald MacDougall, based on the book by James M. Cain. Photographed by Ernest Haller. With Joan Crawford, Jack Carson, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden. (109 mins, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission MGM/UA Classics)
(Victimas del Pecado). The film that was a hit of our 1994 series on Mexican cinema and at the Telluride Film Festival. Victims of Sin is a tour-de-force for Ninón Sevilla, rumba dancer first and foremost, and incidentally an over-the-top actress. She portrays a cabaret dancer trying to raise a kid and forced into prostitution. "Victims of the Social Structure" doesn't make a very good title but that's what it's all about; the social drama, exploited in the rumberas to the point of high camp, is nevertheless a dark aspect of the genre. Rodolfo Acosta is Sevilla's perverse pimp/artistic director and his zoot-suited dance will bring down the house. Meanwhile, Tito Junco as her enigmatic would-be savior walks the streets with his sorrows and ever-present mariachi music in tow. Also discover here the rhythms of Perez Prado and urban chanteuse Rita Montaner. Director, Emilio Fernández, was a keen practitioner of Cuban rhythms.
Written by Mauricio Magdaleno, Fernández. Photographed by Gabriel Figueroa. With Rodolfo Acosta, Ninón Sevilla, Tito Junco, Rita Montaner. (85 mins, In Spanish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection/Tom Luddy Deposit)
Recommended for age 9+. Through the eyes of a young boy, this beautifully mounted film brings to life Bach's music and his intense passion for composing. The boy helps the composer as he challenges his powerful patron for the freedom to create. (52 mins) Preceded by Spheres, in which Glenn Gould plays Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" while we see a unique animated ballet of translucent spheres (Norman McLaren, Canada, 19 , 8 mins); and The Concert, imaginatively shot in the streets of London where a mime performs a concert. (Claude Chagrin, U.K., 1974, 12 mins). (Total: 72 mins, Color, 3/4" video from Devine Entertainment, 16mm from PFA Collection) Asta--The Tenth Muse
(Erdgeist/Loulou). Asta Nielsen starred in a film adaptation of Wedekind's tragedy before the now better-known Pabst version with Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box). Nielsen incarnated the femme fatale but in a manner completely different (if more menacing) than that of Brooks. The great theorist Béla Balázs wrote of this film in a 1923 article titled "Asta Nielsen's Eroticism": "Nielsen's gestures, the wealth of her mimic expressions, is fascinating....The extraordinary artistic standard of Asta Nielsen's eroticism stems from its absolute intellectual quality. It is the eyes, not the flesh, that are of most importance....This spiritualized eroticism is dangerously demoniacal as it comes through all clothing." The director, Leopold Jessner, was a pioneer of expressionist theater and imposed a style on this tragedy that brought it close to the claustrophobic neighborhood of Caligari, while exploiting its implicit voyeurism.
* Written by Carl Mayer, based on the story by Frank Wedekind. Photographed by Axel Graatkjaer. With Asta Nielsen, Albert Bassermann, Carl Ebert, Rudolf Forster. (c. 95 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W, 35mm)
(Das gefährliche Alter). "Nielsen plays a mature woman who loves and is loved by one of her husband's students. But terrified by the difference in their ages, torn by jealousy and the negative image she has of herself, she will destroy this love. This film takes up the theme of the impossible love of a woman for a younger man, as in Joyless Street [showing in March] and Tragedy of the Street. But here, the subject takes an original turn in that the love is not opposed by outside forces, but only by internalized stereotypes: the interior prison finally is as destructive as the conventions imposed by society."--Musée d'Orsay, Paris
* Written by Bobby E. Lüthge, based on a novel by Karin Michaelis. Photographed by Johannes Männling. With Bernhard Goetzke, Asta Nielsen, Walter Rilla, Hans Wassmann. (c. 77 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W, 35mm)
Assistant Director, Photographed by Mikhail Kaufman. (c.80 mins, Silent, Russian intertitles with live English translation, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)
(Die alte neue Welt). East German documentarists Annelie and Andrew Thorndike began their series of classic compilation documentaries in the early 1950s. The films, which treat the problems of then-recent German history, are considered highly important in the development of the socialist compilation film and exemplary in the field of documentary filmmaking. The Old New World is based on the famous statement by Karl Marx, "For socialist man, the entire history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis."
"In The Old New World the Thorndikes forge bits and pieces of archival footage into a powerful pedagogical tool relating the history of civilization. The film presents socialism as the progressive new way to world peace and prosperity fighting for its life against the old, outmoded system of capitalism, which is presented as the cause of much of the misery in the world. The Old New World offers a fascinating and illuminating vision of capitalism from the perspective of a rival ideology." (Marilyn Fabe)
Music by Hans-Dieter Hosalla. (105 mins, English narration, Color, 35mm, PFA Collection)
Media and the Former Yugoslavia
Primetime in the Camps (Chris Marker, France, 1993). Politically direct, Primetime looks at the function of media for a community of Bosnian refugees. What they know of world events comes not from Belgrade television, or even Radio Sarajevo, but from a video workshop run by fellow refugees. Pirating signals from CNN, Radio Sarajevo, and Sky News, the workshop compares the ideologies of their news sources, tailoring interpretation to the needs of their companions. (27 mins, In French and Bosnian with English subtitles and voice-over, 3/4" video, PFA Collection)
The maxim "truth is the first victim of war" finds its confirmation in the conflict engulfing the former Yugoslavia. Official coverage of the war in the Balkans has relied heavily on the manipulation of news as part of the apparatus for governing world opinion. Gladsjø and Borgers's Truth Under Siege chronicles the heroic endeavors of independent journalists from Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia who have resisted the state's grip on national media. Often possessed by a rebellious glee, writers, reporters, editors, and even disc jockeys testify to both the political and logistical difficulties of producing alternative views of the war. Surprisingly frank interviews with bureaucrats from state-run television reveal that the official media in the former Yugoslavia is little more than an agit-prop machine. Whether the Balkan conflict is resolved or not, Truth Under Siege forces us to look homeward at our own mass media and reflect on who is being served.--Steve Seid (68 mins, English subtitles, 3/4" Video, From the artists)
(Total running time: 95 mins plus discussion)
Jean-Pierre Gorin is a filmmaker and professor of cinema in the Visual Arts Department, UC San Diego. His films since 1979 include Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasures, My Crasy Life (see February 26), and Letter to Peter. From 1969 to 1977 he collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard on six films including Wind from the East and Tout Va Bien.
Satyajit Ray (India, 1961)
Ray's Two Daughters was originally three--based on three stories by Rabindranath Tagore--however, one story was excised from the print for overseas distribution. Our print of Monihara thus offers a rare opportunity to see the third (actually the middle) "daughter." Set in the late nineteenth century, it tells of a beautiful, childless woman's infatuation with jewels, and is Ray's soul venture into the realm of the macabre. "Monihara soon becomes a tragedy of greed and passion, with ghosts to terrify the living--one need not know more, except that this neglected gem of Satyajit Ray's work still retains its dramatic glow, and should not be missed." (Albert Johnson, SFIFF '71)
*Written by Ray, based on the story by Rabindranath Tagore. Music by Ray. Photographed by Soumendu Roy. With Kali Bannerjee, Kanika Mozumdar, Kumar Roy. (57 mins, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)
Ikiru
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1952)
(To Live). Ikiru is a searing portrait of modern society in which individual will is the vassal to an impotent bureaucracy. It tells of a municipal government functionary, Mr. Watanabe (the marvelous actor Takashi Shimura), who wraps red tape around the most urgent entreaty: a mother's plea for a park where a cesspool now exists. Watanabe is looking at his watch when we meet him, a habitual gesture that gains new meaning when he learns he has terminal cancer. Watanabe's metamorphosis from Mummy (his office nickname) to conscious being is one of the great transformations in cinema, with no special effects required. As he begins to reject his past, into his life comes a curious novelist, a sort of kinder, gentler Mephistopheles who shows Watanabe a night on the town, dazzling in its possibilities, but also gleaming in mirrored reflections. A cinematic tour-de-force that travels in and out of time-frames like a camera of the mind, Ikiru's most basic challenge is contained in its title: to live.
Written by Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni, Kurosawa. Photographed by Asakazu Nakai. With Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Miki Odagiri, Yunosuke Ito. (140 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Films Inc.)
Tarkovsky was the mentor of Alexander Sokurov, and his masterpiece Solaris exemplifies the strain in Russian filmmaking that finds, in art, a kind of secular metaphysics. The story follows psychologist Chris Kelvin on a voyage to the planet Solaris where, scientists believe, the ocean's surface has an intelligence that can absorb human memory and materialize the objects of our thoughts. When Kelvin joins the Solaris project's veteran cosmonauts he finds them maddened from years of cohabitating with their unconscious desires. Kelvin himself becomes host to the presence of his dead wife and seems doomed to relive both the passion and the loss associated with her memory. "Outer space" plays almost no part in Tarkovsky's science fiction, which relies on widescreen composition to paint a landscape of the mind. Tarkovsky initiates us into the secret of Solaris: that, like the oceans of the distant planet, the cinema serves up the most poetic longings of the human imagination.
Written by Tarkovsky, Friedrich Gorenstein, based on the book by Stanlislaw Lem. Photographed by Vadim Yusov. With Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Yuri Jarvet. (165 mins, In Russian with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Kino)
Recommended for age 10+. While doing their medieval history homework, a group of imaginative kids discovers Arthur's sword, Merlin the magician (played by Malcolm McDowell), and the honor of the Knights of the Round Table. (88 mins, Color, ??mm, From Malofilm Distribution)
Asta--The Tenth Muse
(Das Haus am Meer). An example of the work Nielsen did in collaboration with her third husband, the Russian, Stanislavsky-trained Grigori Chmara. Here they are the owners of a remote seaside inn whose tranquility is ruptured by the arrival of a company of mercenary soldiers bound for America. One of them recognizes her, threatening terrible revelations about her past.
* Written by Bobby E. Lüthge, Kaufman, Stefan Zweig, based on a novel by Zweig. Photographed by Erich Waschneck, Alfredo Lenci. With Asta Nielsen, Grigori Chmara, Carl Augen, Alexandra Sorina. (92 mins, Silent, English intertitles, B&W, 35mm)
By the director of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, this is the Passion embedded in a contemporary story. An anarchist jailed for an attempted assassination is told the Passion story by the prison chaplain, who seeks to convince him that it is better to sacrifice one's own life than take the life of one's enemy. The framing story, taken from a novel, is believed to have been intended to give the Biblical story an anti-Bolshevist propaganda function. In any case, it was added without the knowledge of the actors in the Passion story, who included some of the major stars of the period--Nielsen as Mary Magdalene, Henny Porten as Mary, Grigori Chmara as Jesus, and Werner Krauss as Pontius Pilate.
* Written by Wiene, based on a novel by Peter Rosegger. Photographed by Axel Graatkjaer, et al. With Grigori Chmara, Henny Porten, Asta Nielsen, Werner Krauss. (c. 85 mins, Silent, Live translation of intertitles, B&W, 35mm)
* Written by Daniel Marks, Gorin. Photographed by Babette Mangolte. (95 mins, Color, 16mm, From the artist)
Joseph Cornell's exquisite By Night With Torch and Spear (19??, 9.5 mins, Silent @16fps), moves forward, backwards, and upside down, between an exotic world of tribes and the industry of a steel foundry. In On Cannibalism (1994, 6 mins), Fatimah Tobing Roy uses her parents' Indonesian heritage as a starting point to examine exploration and displacement. Using a collection of what artist Roddy Bogawa terms "pre-images" of the landscape, The Imagined, The Longed-for, The Conquered, and the Sublime (1994, 8 mins) charts different constructions of the land, from the exotic to the mythical. In Work and Days (1969, 12 mins, Silent, B&W), a film found by Hollis Frampton in a junk shop, the making of a vegetable garden "blossoms into overarching metaphor." Mark Street literally reshapes images from pornographic films, and together with poetry by Anaïs Nin, shifts our reading of Blue Movie (1995, 5 mins). Julie Murray describes her Anathema (1995, 6 mins): "Doubt is a shadow cast upon the doctor and his assistants who, through ritualized posturing, admit themselves to the arena of abject violence and inherit the disease they believe to be death." Ken Jacobs's The Doctor's Dream (1978, 23 mins, B&W) revealingly reworks a TV movie. In (Dung Smoke Enters the Palace) (1989, 16 mins, 16mm and video simultaneously), Leslie Thornton shifts between the play of Peggy and Fred, turn-of-the-century footage of foundries, and NASA moon shots.--Kathy Geritz
(Total running time: 85 mins; Color and 16mm unless indicated otherwise, From the artists, Drift Distribution, Film-makers' Cooperative, NAATA)
Visual Fission: UCB Documentaries 7:30 Fission is the process of splitting into parts, a rupture that often allows for the emergence of something new. The plasticity of the definition of "documentary" creates an opportunity for students to redefine the genre for themselves, on their terms, a fission of sorts. This evening's work showcases new documentaries from UC Berkeley students in Film, Anthropology, and Visual Studies. While excerpts from longer works, Pan Francisco and Re-labeling Death, employ an anthropological structure, Real Love and Every Age Has Its Myths aggressively challenge documentary conventions. A single man's habitat is the subject of a comic investigation, Home Alone, and the nostalgic Home traverses the terrain between past and present. Listening to Myself is a close-up point of view piece that literally invites one into the home and head of the maker; Through the Secret Window plays with fractured memories of a childhood reality/fantasy. Finally, Haveahandout mixes still photography, poetry, and straightforward documentary style to craft compelling portraits of panhandlers.--Jennifer Paige
Real Love by Tamao Nakahara (7 mins). Pan Francisco by Francisco Ferrandiz, Shannon Dudley (15 min excerpt). Home Alone by Richard Hom (7 mins). Through the Secret Window by Ananda Esteva (7 mins). Every Age Has Its Myths by G. P. Seski (7 mins). Intermission.
Listening to Myself by Rima Anosa (7 mins). Re-labeling Death by Tiffany Romain, Jia Chin Chen (15 min excerpt). Home by Charles White (7 mins). Haveahandout by Daniel Moulthrop, Corey Cohen, AnnaBrown Griswold (25 mins, B&W).
(Total running time: 97 mins plus intermission, 1995, Color except as noted, 1/2" video, From the artists)
(Shizi jietou). Scott Meek and Tony Rayns wrote for Electric Shadows, the 1981 touring show of classic Chinese cinema: "A funny, inventive Depression comedy about the trials facing unemployed young graduates in thirties Shanghai. The central fraught romance comes straight from Hollywood, but the overall realism and the hints of looming political turmoil are purely Chinese....As in other May 4th Movement films of the period, location shooting on the streets of Shanghai is used whenever possible, and the film enhances its sense of direct contemporary relevance by inserting several brief documentary sequences." Chinese films of the thirties that dealt with serious subjects such as unemployment and exploitation of women faced heavy censorship by the Kuomintang government, and Shen Xiling's script, based on his own experience and that of several unemployed friends, was no exception. This popular film marked the emergence of Zhao Dan and Bai Yang as major stars. Shen's promising career was cut short by his early death in wartime Chongquing in 1940.
Written by Shen. Photographed by Zhou Shimu, Wang Yuru. With Zhao Dan, Bai Yang, Lu Ban, Ying Yin. (108 mins, In Mandarin with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection/Francis Ford Coppola Deposit)
(A.k.a., Don't Play With Fire/Diyi Leixing Weixian). "The hard-edged third feature from the director who has since become known for his extravagant and kinetic approach to fantasy and pan-Chinese patriotism reveals an auteur's eye. Intense, violent, colored by rage yet strangely distanced, the story concerns a suicidal young woman who exerts a sinister mind control over three boys who have accidentally committed a murder. Stylistically, Tsui is trying on ideas for size, from film noir to horror, but the film's strange energy is all his, due in part to his bravura compositions and obsessive use of close-ups. For Tsui Hark fans, this is a rare opportunity to see a long unavailable film from the director who has been in the vanguard of his generation's reshaping of the Hong Kong cinema."--Barbara Scharres, Film Center, Art Institute of Chicago
Written by Szeto Cheuk-Hon. Photographed by Chung Chi-Man. With Lo Lieh, Lin Chen-Chi, Albert Au, Paul Che. (100 mins, In Cantonese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, PFA Collection)