Pacific Film Archive

Film Notes for July and August 1995


Saturday July 1

Buster Keaton Series
The films in our series are 35mm prints from the Rohauer Collection, Douris Corporation, except as noted on July 30. Thanks to Tim Lanza and Richard Gordon at the Douris Corporation. The series is presented in cooperation with the Castro Theater, S.F.
The Navigator and Short Films 7:00
Jon Mirsalis on Piano
Convict 13 (1920). Buster, the eponymous inmate, escapes from Death Row only by becoming the executioner. A circus atmosphere surrounds his hanging, which, when bungled, deprives the prisoners of a gruesome entertainment. With Keaton, Sybil Seely, Joe Roberts.
The Playhouse (1921). In an homage to the vaudeville of Keaton's youth he plays the audience, the orchestra, and the performers of a small playhouse. "The mixture of memory and magic is potent: The Playhouse is the most dreamlike of all Keaton's films" (David Robinson, Buster Keaton). With Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts.
Cops (1922). Pity the schlemiel who accidentally destroys the annual police parade. "The working-out of this film has the inevitability of tragedy....Buster's 'working man, and honest' is thrust by fate and in perfect, ignorant innocence, into the role of a criminal, forced into opposition with the entire New York police force" (David Robinson). With Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts.
¥ Shorts: Directed, Written by Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline. Photographed by Elgin Lessley. (20 mins each, Silent, B&W, 35mm)
The Navigator
Buster Keaton, Donald Crisp (U.S., 1924)
A young millionaire and the young millionairess he hopes to marry find themselves on an empty ocean liner, adrift in the Atlantic. Two more useless citizens there never were, and now they are faced with the reverse-Robinson Crusoe challenge of setting up housekeeping in the hyper-technical environment of a ship built for thousands-and not a servant in sight. Part of The Navigator's enduring greatness lies in the depth and grace of Keaton's very modern vision of a man and a woman, "drifting off to nowhere in the dark," who throw themselves into the world of machines and somehow survive.
¥ Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joseph Mitchell. Photographed by Elgin Lessley, Byron Houck. With Keaton, Kathryn McGuire. (63 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Sunday July 2

Buster Keaton Series
The Three Ages with Keaton/Arbuckle Shorts 5:30
Bruce Loeb on Piano
Fatty Arbuckle Shorts: Keaton gave up a lucrative Broadway contract to join Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in his studio. From day one, recalled Arbuckle, Keaton "lived in the camera," and in these Arbuckle two-reelers, in which he plays foil to Arbuckle's dexterous fat clown, we can see him learning all he needed to know about physical comedy. In Keaton's first film appearance, in The Butcher Boy, "what we see is the perfect vaudevillian at work...his solitary calm already rivets attention" (David Robinson).
The Bell Boy (1918, 22 mins), Back Stage (1919, 20 mins), The Cook (1918, 16 mins), and The Butcher Boy (1917, 22 mins): Directed by Roscoe Arbuckle. Photographed by Elgin Lessley. With Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Al St. John, Alice Lake. (Silent, B&W, 35mm)
The Three Ages
Buster Keaton, Eddie Kline (U.S., 1923)
Keaton's rendition of Intolerance follows Buster's trials of manhood from the Stone Age, to the Roman Forum, to the Roaring '20s ("the age of speed, need, and greed")-and back again. Three sets, three stories-three two-reelers, essentially-are ingeniously interwoven into a first feature for Keaton. In each, Buster is pitted against the larger, craftier, more sophisticated Wallace Beery for the love of the beauteous Margaret Leahy. Comic anachronism reigns (as opposed to the poetic period realism of his very next film, Our Hospitality). Love will always out, but no matter what the age, or the film, a guy like Buster first has to massage the lion's paws.
¥ Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joseph Mitchell. Photographed by Elgin Lessley. With Keaton, Wallace Beery, Margaret Leahy, Joe Roberts. (60 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Wednesday July 5

Greetings from Out Here
Plain Talk & Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) 7:00
Jon Jost (U.S., 1987)
Preceded by short:
Democracy in America: Or, Everyone Is Welcome (Dan Boord, Greg Durbin, U.S., 1986): Karl Rossman, the protagonist of Kafka's America, meets Alexis de Toqueville, the eighteenth-century author of Democracy in America. One witnesses the end of the Oklahoma oil boom, the other the end of interest in history. (14 mins, Color, 3/4" Video, From the artist)
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Essentially a patchwork of quotations ranging from the Whitmanesque sublime to the Nixonite ridiculous, Plain Talk gets right to the heart of Americana, both physically (a round-about road movie with "no particular place to go") and ideologically (what Americans think of themselves and what they think other people think). As usual the soundtrack plays a specially complex role and enriches the ironic texture of the images, which are conceived as a series of juxtaposed "blocks" addressing a series of subjects. Caustic and polemical as ever, this is quintessential Jon Jost for the connoisseurs. How's that for plain talk & common sense?-Don Ranvaud
¥Written, Photographed by Jost. (117 mins, Color, 16mm, From the artist)


Thursday July 6

25th Anniversary PFA Benefit!
Premiere Revival:
Belle de Jour 7:30
Luis Bu–uel (France, 1967)
Special admission: $10 general; $8 members, UCB students.
To inaugurate PFA's 25th Anniversary celebration we are proud to present the premiere revival of Belle de Jour, a Luis Bu–uel masterpiece that has long been out of distribution. A portion of the price of each ticket will be placed in the Pacific Film Archive endowment to ensure long-term support of the Archive's activities.
In Belle de Jour Catharine Deneuve's beauty is a thing in itself: Deneuve was a collaborator in Bu–uel's vision and gives a knowing performance as SŽverine, a bored-cold bourgeoise who discovers how good evil can be on afternoons spent in a high-class brothel, where fantasy itself is a fetish object. The film is as endlessly mysterious and fascinating as the Chinese lacquer box into which SŽverine peers-and what does she see? Don't quit your day job, SŽverine. It takes violence, the more fantasized the better, to make any sort of crack in the lacquer. Belle de Jour is L'Age d'Or updated and in color. As Raymond Durgnat wrote, "Glittery, cool and urbane, Bu–uel's film looks just like Lubitsch ˆ la mode-almost a design for living in the Playgirl era. But underneath it's a bleak and sharp surrealist object that one can't touch, or even think about afterwards, without bleeding."
¥ Written by Bu–uel, Jean-Claude Carrire, from a novel by Joseph Kessel. Photographed by Sacha Vierny. With Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Genevieve Page, Michel Piccoli. (100 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

We wish to thank Miramax and Cynthia Schwartz, and Leslie Cotes of Bill Lanese Associates. We gratefully acknowledge the kind support of Tom Sternberg.


Friday July 7

Greetings from Out Here
Ruby in Paradise 7:00
Victor Nu–ez (U.S., 1993)
"The incandescent Ruby (which won the grand prize in the 1993 Sundance Film Festival) [is] a work of regional realism. Ruby is as much about the landscape of Panama City, Florida, as it is about its twenty-year-old hero [played by Ashley Judd]....At the opening of the film, Ruby Lee Gissing hightails it out of Tennessee....She heads for a dream of paradise and winds up living in a cheap motel on the gulf and working in a souvenir shop that caters to college students on spring break. What Ruby is really looking for-and finds-is herself. 'It's the desire, come hell or high water, to act in a way that life will have been worth it. It's about trying to survive with your soul intact,' says Nu–ez. [Ruby is] extraordinarily specific in its depiction of female subjectivity (the trouble women have in locating and following their own desire, in seeing through their own eyes)..."-Amy Taubin, Village Voice
¥ Written by Nu–ez. Photographed by Alex Clacos. With Ashley Judd, Todd Field, Bentley Mitchum, Allison Dean. (115 mins, Color, 35mm, From October Films)

Gas Food Lodging 9:10
Allison Anders (U.S., 1992)
Preceded by short:
You Can Drive the Big Rigs (J. Leighton Pierce, U.S., 1989). An impressionistic documentary on small-town cafes which captures the beautiful stillness of the rural Midwest in the hum of a dripping air conditioner. Winner of awards at the Sinking Creek and Bucks County film festivals (not to mention Oberhausen, Atlanta, and Athens!). (15 mins, Color, 16mm, From Leighton Pierce)
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With her first feature, Allison Anders had a niche of one's own-the place of place in women's lives. What Mi Vida Loca would do for the girls of an L.A. barrio, Gas Food Lodging did for those of the drained-of-life town of Laramie, New Mexico, where a family of women are tenuously dedicated to the proposition that their lives are not a truck stop. "Anders, a protegŽe of Wim Wenders, is committed to a different view of America. Nora (Brooke Adams)'s easygoing, semi-hardscrabble life is one Thelma and Louise would recognize, or any of Gus Van Sant's yodeling wanderers....Anders prefers to dabble in reality, magic reality at times, but with a smack of the world about it, in a place where lovers spend the night in caves, a young girl learns to dance from a deaf-mute matron, and someone is always looking for a tampon."-Kelly Vance, Express
¥ Written by Anders, based on the novel Don't Look and It Won't Hurt by Richard Peck. Photographed by Dean Lent. With Brooke Adams, Ione Skye, Fairuza Balk, James Brolin. (100 mins, Color, 35mm, Courtesy Columbia)


Saturday July 8

Buster Keaton Series
The General with Sherlock Jr. and Short 7:00
Jon Mirsalis on Piano
Hard Luck (Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline, 1921). Keaton's own favorite among the two-reelers. Buster, weary of life, tries and fails every method to end it all, until the Scotch he takes instead of poison gives him a new outlook. Thus renewed, he takes on the challenges of country-club life with predictable aplomb. Written by Keaton, Cline. Photographed by Elgin Lessley. With Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts. ( mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)
Sherlock Jr.
Buster Keaton (U.S., 1924)
Andrew Sarris called it Keaton's 8 1/2, and in the end Sherlock Jr.will be Keaton's most enduring commentary on the art of cinema, which has the power to make artists of us all. Buster plays a projectionist who dreams his way onto the screen and into a movie in which he resolves the conflicts of his own life. As early as 1925 Sherlock Jr. was recognized by RenŽ Clair for its Pirandello-like dramatic structure, and it was much admired by the French Surrealists. The film is equally impressive for Keaton's brilliantly modulated acrobatics-offscreen, the hapless hero hoists himself on his own banana peel, but on, he can ride on the handlebars of a motorcycle with no rider, make a boat out of a car, and perform any number of cinematic miracles without special effects.
¥ Written by Clyde Bruckman, Joseph Mitchell, Jean Havez. Photographed by Elgin Lessley, Byron Houck. With Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Ward Crane. (45 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)
The General
Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman (U.S., 1926)
Lyric and comic and, by its very setting, tragic, The General ranks as one of the most authentic evocations of the Civil War on film, and one of the greatest comedies of all time. Keaton brought Matthew Brady-like images to brilliant life in a story based on a true incident of the war. Buster is an engineer who is rejected by the Confederate Army and thought a coward by his girlfriend. When a small band of Union soldiers penetrates far beyond Confederate lines to steal a locomotive, he sets off in hot pursuit. The title refers to the engine that figures prominently in one of the most harrowing and hilarious chase scenes ever filmed-in fact it takes up seven of the film's eight reels. Buster's relationship to the train is at least as touching as his love for Marian Mack, and both get rather rough treatment in this wartime setting. A little kiss from Buster makes it better.
¥ Adapted by Al Boasberg, Charles Smith from a story by Keaton, Bruckman. Photographed by J. Devereux Jennings, Bert Haines. With Keaton, Marian Mack, Glen Cavander, Jim Farley. (85 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Sunday July 9

Buster Keaton Series
The Saphead with Keaton/Arbuckle Shorts 5:30
Bruce Loeb on Piano
Fatty Arbuckle Shorts: More of Buster's comic apprenticeship with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (see notes for July 2). Coney Island (1917, 22 mins), The Garage (1919, 18 mins), Goodnight Nurse (1918, 18 mins), and The Hayseed (1919, 18 mins): Directed by Roscoe Arbuckle. Photographed by Elgin Lessley. With Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Al St. John, Alice Lake. (Silent, B&W, 35mm)
The Saphead
Herbert BlachŽ (U.S., 1920)
Douglas Fairbanks suggested Buster Keaton for The Saphead's Bertie the Lamb, a role Fairbanks had played on stage and in an earlier screen version. Bertie, the delicate, pampered scion of The Wolf of Wall Street, tries in vain to become a Sportin' Life to win the love of The Modern Girl. And to prove himself to a rejecting father (Steamboat Bill, here we come), Bertie buys a rather expensive "seat" on the Stock Exchange. But he doesn't know one end of a cigar from the other, and his weakness is seized upon by the overgrown College boys of Wall Street who torment him. Peter Sellers-like, Bertie thinks it's fun. Buster is equally charming in Chinese silk pajamas or with a hot towel over his face. "He is one of the few comedians who has ever managed to be shy, stoic, and dashing at the same time" (Penelope Gilliat).
¥Written by June Mathis, based on the play The New Henrietta by Winchell Smith, Victor Mapes. Photographed by Harold Wenstrom. With Buster Keaton, William H. Crane, Irving Cummings, Beulah Booker. (70 mins, Silent, Tinted, 35mm)


Tuesday July 11

Greetings from Out Here
A Whole Lot of Nothing Going On: Images from Rural America 7:30
Curated by Lissa Gibbs
Lissa Gibbs is Director of Film Arts Foundation's Annual Film Arts Festival.
Simply put, the five works included in this program are about everything and nothing all at once. They are about the rich fullness of rural life-seemingly boring and without event when viewed by outsiders, but with a complex sense of time, purpose, and belonging as seen through the eyes of these makers, all of whom have chosen to live and work within the communities they have documented. Each speaks about the cultural and geographic fringes which she or he inhabits-places of tremendous natural beauty, financial hardship, eccentricity, and banality. From a profile of Steven Olpin's grandfather and the family mortuary business in Fillmore, Utah; to a rarely screened film by photographer Danny Lyon on a New Mexican village and its inhabitants; with stops in Iowa and Wyoming in between, these works reflect a way of living and working which is not always attractive, sometimes ridiculous, but always eloquently forthright.-Lissa Gibbs
The Cooling Board by Steven W. Olpin (1994, 10 mins). On the Road Going Through by Leighton Pierce (1987, 15 mins, video). Remembering the Windby Amy Brakeman (1993, 8 mins). Beartooth Catch by Amy Brakeman (1993, 4 mins). Llanito by Danny Lyon (1971, 51 mins) (Total running time: 88 mins, 16mm except as noted, From the artists)

Weather Diary 1 9:15
George Kuchar (U.S., 1986)
Preceded by short:
A Visit to Indiana (Curt McDowell, U.S., 1970). The late Curt McDowell returned to his Midwestern roots to satirically observe this play of picnic tables and tempestuous skies. (10 mins, Color, 16mm, From Canyon)
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Year after year George Kuchar returns to the Motel Reno, twenty miles outside of Oklahoma City. "It's kind of like lakeside property," he muses-there are so many puddles. Before long we are into some real weather, courtesy of the Tornado Report on the 24-hour weather channel that links George and his wet mutt Runt with the rest of this weather-beaten community, hiding out in trailers and towns until TV tells them to head for higher ground. Kuchar's fascination with the microcosm (he sees the eye of a tornado in the flushing of a toilet) equals his passion for the tempest in the heavens. He is supremely uncomfortable here on earth, and then the mosquitoes come-"Aren't I miserable enough?" Weather Diary 1 is a brilliant portrait of a small panhandle town, from the greasy spoons to the sickly cats, and like the weather, it won't go away.
¥ Written, Photographed by Kuchar. (81 mins, Color, 3/4" Video, From Video Data Bank)


Wednesday July 12

Greetings from Out Here
Butte, Montana-the abandoned town 7:00
Thomas Schadt (Germany, 1992)
Montana is a place in the imagination. It's where the West wasn't won. Big sky above, the ranches of the rich and famous below. In Butte, things are otherwise. Once a boomtown of serious proportions, Butte thrived on its copper-rich landscape. The town was unruly, scandalous, a center for Rocky Mountain commerce. Now, the open pits are mined out and the smelters have moved elsewhere. What remains, along with the dross of deserted industry, are the failing businesses, the crusty oldtimers, and the lingering memory of prosperous times. Director Schadt wanders the streets of Butte trying to reconcile the heyday with the present-day. His chief tour guide is Al Hooper, an eighty-year-old man who runs the World Museum of Mining, a dilapidated archive of mining memorabilia. Once called the "The Richest Hill on Earth," Butte is a living parable of opportunity in the late twentieth century.
¥ Photographed by Schadt. (87 mins, Color/B&W, 35mm, From Wild Okapi). Special thanks to Ingrid Eggers and the Goethe-Institut, S.F.

Bell Diamond 9:15
Jon Jost (U.S., 1987)
Marshall Gaddis in Person
Staged in Butte, Jost's seventh feature has at its core a stark image: the twisted remains of the abandoned Bell Diamond mine, cast away like many of the town's inhabitants. Improvised acting in the Cassavetes vein-but low-key, closer to the ground-and a real-time narrative work towards the slow unfolding of the story. It tells of a Vietnam veteran, Jeff (Marshall Gaddis) whose wife, Cathy (Sarah Wyss), is leaving him in frustration. There is no loving this seemingly insensate man, yet Bell Diamond captures him at a moment of awareness, thus of hope. Despite the rigor of Jost's style, the film is a moving portrait, particularly in directing our attention toward the pain of Jeff and his equally inarticulate male friends. Detailing the emotional topography of a place, Jost, a roving regionalist, mined the town for actors-all but the lead, Marshall Gaddis, are Butteans.
¥ Dialogue/story developed by Jost in collaboration with cast. Photographed by Jost. With Marshall Gaddis, Hal Waldrup, Sarah Wyss, Dan Cornell. (96 mins, Color, 16mm, From the artist). Special thanks to Marshall Gaddis.


Thursday July 13

Kiarostami: Life Is a Film
This series is presented in cooperation with The Farabi Cinema Foundation, Tehran.
Close-Up 7:30
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1990)
Preceded by shorts:
In 1970 Kiarostami established the filmmaking department of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (where he and other key directors made films until very recently). He produced a series of internationally acclaimed shorts, many of which use children as subject and actors. Kiarostami creates young characters who are sophisticated and aware, constantly developing their sense of moral priorities to which adults are unwitting obstacles. The Bread and Alley (Nan Va Kucheh, 1970, 10 mins, B&W): A boy finds the road blocked by a frightening stray dog, with no adult passerby offering assistance. Break Time (Zange Tafrih, 1972, 14 mins, B&W): The adventures of a rascal. Solution Number One (Rah-e Hall-e Yek, 1978, 11 mins, Color): A man coping with a flat tire devises his own solution when no one stops to assist him. The Chorus (Hamsoryan, 1982, 17 mins, Color): Children locked out of their house attempt to make themselves heard by their grandfather. (All: Abbas Kiarostami, Iran; In Farsi with English subtitles, 35mm). Plus: Abbas Kiarostami ( , France, 199 ), an interview with the director and his associates-and a trip to the village sites of his films-made by French television. ( mins, In Farsi with French subtitles, Color, Video)
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(Nama-ye Nazdik). A newspaper article caught Kiarostami's eye: an unemployed young film buff had wormed his way into the home and hearts of a well-to-do family by impersonating the well-known film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Peddler). From this story Kiarostami made an offbeat film about cinema, the swindle and the dream. He enters the story cinŽma vŽritŽ style, recreating events leading up to the imposter's exposure and arrest, then following the actual court proceedings. In droll re-enactments by obliging real-life protagonists, and in its pathetic hero, the film at times plays like Take the Money and Run ("Let him have his lunch!" the mother says to the arresting gendarmes.) Certainly, Ali Sabzian's accusers attribute to him a craftiness he doesn't possess. His failing is a naivetŽ that is shared by many: Close-Up is a very moving and surprising film about anomie and the creative responses to it.
¥ Written by Kiarostami. Photographed by Ali Reza Zarrindast. With Ali Sabzian, Hassan Frazmand, Abolfazi and Mehrdad Ahankhah. (100 mins, In Farsi with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)


Friday July 14

Greetings from Out Here
Last Night at the Alamo 7:30
Eagle Pennell (U.S., 1983)
Preceded by short:
Betty's Corner Cafe (Anthony Buba, U.S., 1976). Betty's is a small bar in PA that caters to drinkers who start in the AM. The regulars tell their stories with a casual candor that is an homage to director Buba's ingratiating style. (11 mins, 16mm, From the artist)
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The Alamo, a seedy redneck bar in Houston, is just about ready for the wrecking ball. The night before the doors swing closed at this ornery western saloon, the regulars get together for a final swill-out. Cowboy (Sonny Davis), a local hero with a big mouth and a bigger strut, figures he can hold back the bulldozers. This is not just the coming of condos-a cowpoke needs his watering hole. Like None But the Brave before it, Last Night at the Alamo augurs the end of the trail for the cowboy. Pennell's rich and ridiculously riotous character study is a disquieting glimpse of a fading culture: macho Texans holding on to their Tony Lamas in an age of Doc Martens.
¥ Written by Kim Henkel. Photographed by Brian Huberman, Eric Edwards. With Sonny Davis, Louis Perryman, Steven Matilla, Tina-Bess Hubbard. (80 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Pinell)

Chulas Fronteras 9:05
Les Blank (U.S., 1976)
Preceded by shorts:
Recuerdos de Flores Muertas (Willie Varela, U.S., 1982): A poetic study of the Concordia Cemetery by the El Paso-born filmmaker Varela. (5 mins, Color/B&W, S-8mm, From Canyon). Pretty Vacant (Jim Mendiola, U.S., 1995): A young Chicana living in San Antonio publishes Ex Voto, a fanzine dedicated to the Sex Pistols. This day-in-the-life sketch roars along like her mimeo'd 'zine, cutting up stereotypes. (32 mins, B&W, 16mm, From the artist)
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"Beautiful Borders," as Chulas Fronteras translates, is a zesty introduction to Nortena music and culture that exists along the Texas-Mexico border. This culture is distinct, having its own Spanish dialect, Tejeno, and music that is a fusion of traditional Mexican harmonies, German dancehall rhythms, and a little something extra. From soulful, lively dance tunes to political work songs, Musica Nortena has evolved since the turn of the century into a unique Mexican-American hybrid. Featured are such "traditionalists" as Narciso Martinez, Flaco Jimenez, Los Alegres de Teran, and Lydia Mendoza. Filmmaker Blank links the music's spirit and vitality to the strong family bonds of the Tejenos. The plight of migrant workers adds a sobering backbeat to a generally joyous film.
¥ Conceived, Produced by Chris Strachwitz. Photographed, Edited by Les Blank. (1976, 58 mins, Color, 16mm, From Flower Films)


Saturday July 15

Buster Keaton Series
The Cameraman 7:00
Edward Sedgwick (U.S., 1928)
Bruce Loeb on Piano
A newsreel by Buster Keaton of a newsreel by Buster Keaton: with Sherlock, Jr. The Cameraman is his most self-reflexive film. Trying to "make it" in the Hearst Newsreel Company, Citizen Keaton finally photographs a Tong War in Chinatown and a boating accident, and astonishingly forecasts the issues of contemporary documentary theory. Along the way we are treated to sublime Buster Bits: a one-man baseball game, acrobatic competitions with mass transportation, and a change into a bathing suit in, to say the least, straitened circumstances.- William Nestrick
¥ Written by Clyde Bruckman, Lew Lipton. Photographed by Elgin Lessley, Reggie Lanning. With Buster Keaton, Marceline Day, Harry Gribbon. (66 mins, Music track, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Spite Marriage 8:25
Edward Sedgwick (U.S., 1929)
Spite Marriage is one of the most neglected of Keaton's films. In a way it does for the theater what Sherlock Jr.does for film: Keaton's Elmer Edgemont, pants presser extraordinaire, haunts a Broadway theater for love of the actress Trilby Drew. Catapulted onto stage, he turns a Civil War drama into the vaudevillian comic-disaster that is his life. Jilted by her fiancŽ, Drew draws the willing Elmer into a marriage for spite; only on his wedding night does he realize his true position. Dorothy Sebastian is a marvelous foil for Keaton as an inert and inebriated bride impervious to his ingenious machinations to get her into bed.
¥Written by Ernest S. Pagano from a story by Lew Lipton. Photographed by Reggie Lanning. With Keaton, Dorothy Sebastian, Edward Earle, Leila Hyams. (77 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)


Sunday July 16

Buster Keaton Series
Seven Chances with Short Films 5:30
Jon Mirsalis on Piano
One Week (1920). Buster and his new bride have one week to build a house from an assemble-it-yourself prefab kit. But even the best-laid plans have to be read right-side-up. This is an exercise in deconstruction. And an amazingly clever little film that, among other things, tries on for size Steamboat Bill's famous house a'falling stunt. Buster straddles two runaway motorcycles years before John Wayne did it with horses. With Keaton, Sybil Seely, Joe Roberts. (20 mins)
The High Sign (1920/21). This fellow who "came from nowhere, is not going anywhere, and was kicked out of somewhere" is more crafty than the typical Buster. But then he's keeping rather mean company in The High Sign: a mini-Mafia whose secret-signing members seem to be everywhere. With Buster Keaton, Al St. John. (20 mins)
The Electric House (1922). Keaton, wrongly diplomaed as an electrical engineer, demonstrates the miracles of an all-electric house in a film that looks forward equally to Jacques Tati and Woody Allen. With Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Keaton. (25 mins)
Shorts: Directed, Written by Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline. Photographed by Elgin Lessley. (Silent, B&W, 35mm)

Seven Chances
Buster Keaton (U.S., 1925)
In order to live up to the terms of a windfall inheritance, Buster has one day to find a bride. Confidence leads to desperation and finally panic as he is reduced to "proposing to anyone in skirts, including a Scotsman." Seven Chances builds to an outrageous sequence of events which were too absurd even for Keaton's taste and it ranked relatively low in his estimation. But the film is all the more contemporary for its wild conceits. Keaton's influence on Monty Python is nowhere better seen than in the set-piece chase: 500 angry would-be brides of all stripes, some of them even women, pursuing Buster hither and yon into an open field and the heart of a rockslide. Be prepared, however, for racist sight gags of the sort common in many silents and all too many talkies.
¥ Written by Jean Havez, Joseph Mitchell, Clyde Bruckman, based on a play by Roy Cooper Megrue. Photographed by Elgin Lessley, Byron Houck. With Keaton, Ray Barnes, Snitz Edwards, Ruth Dwyer. (60 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Tuesday July 18

Greetings from Out Here
Greetings from Out Here 7:00
Ellen Spiro (U.S., 1993)
Preceded by short:
Diana's Hair Ego: AIDS Info Up Front (Ellen Spiro, U.S., 1990). DiAna DiAna is a South Carolina hair stylist and safe-sex activist whose program of education emanates from her salon, where she gets down to the roots, so to speak. (29 mins, Color, 3/4" video, From Video Data Bank)
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Our view of gay culture is often dominated by the urban centers. But out there, beyond the boundaries of metropolitian life, is a rich, diverse, and surprisingly thriving gay culture. In Greetings from Out Here, a colorful whirlwind tour of gay Dixie, videomaker Ellen Spiro captures the people, places, politics, and queer roadside signs of life in the South. In a series of vivid picture postcards, Spiro visits landmarks, events, and just plain characters, including: the Gay Rodeo, Mardi Gras, Gay Pride in Atlanta, the Rhythmfest women's music festival, the Short Mountain Radical Faerie sanctuary, Dollywood, and The Monk's (of Monk Magazine) World Headquarters. Interviews along the way convey the range of Southern lives-from Isis, a black lesbian living in a bus in the Ozarks; to Rita, a retired military officer, now a drag queen in New Orleans.-Steve Seid
¥ (58 mins, Color, 3/4" Video, From Video Data Bank)


Wednesday July 19

Greetings from Out Here
The Plan 7:00
Diane Orr, C Larry Roberts (U.S., 1980)
Preceded by short:
Wind Grass Song: The Voice of Our Grandmothers (Jana Birchum, Tori Breitling, U.S., 1989). Based on interviews with Oklahoma women age 85 to 101 years. (20 mins, Color, 16mm, From Women Make Movies)
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"The Plan follows the daily life of 1978 Utah Young Mother of the Year, Michele Meservy. For approximately an hour (much of it harrowing), the viewer watches and listens to an intelligent, articulate, and committed Mormon mother attempt to organize and subdue the chaos which surrounds her in the form of five extremely young children and a husband who walks softly and carries a big smile....Given their subject matter, the filmmakers have been wisely non-judgmental in approach. In her apparent 'unmodern' and willing subjugation to home and family, to a goal of familial perfection that seems not only unattainable but also faintly coercive and reminiscent of The Stepford Wives, Michele might have been an easy target for editorial ridicule, irony, or polemic. Instead, she is revealed as a complex person-bewildering and interesting as both a stereotype and a cipher. One cannot simply write off her commitment, belief, and admirable energy."-Vivian Sobchack, Network
¥ Photographed by Roberts. (54 mins, Color, 16mm, From the artists)

Lillian 9:00
David Williams (U.S., 1993)
Lillian is a rarity....[T]he lead character is played by the woman on whom this portrait is based....It's a practically flawless real-life depiction of a fifty-seven-year-old black woman living in the South, whose life consists of caring for her granddaughter, several other foster children, and three elderly patients. Williams has composed an entirely unsentimental view of a woman whose day-to-day existence is all but overwhelming, and yet whose persona is unfailingly serene and caring....The film feels authentic as much as it seems spontaneous. It is a hybrid of fiction and reality, utilizing documentary techniques to effect an emotionally touching, yet somewhat austere, illustration of nurturing and self-sacrifice....Lillian is a small film in the best sense of that word. On a minuscule budget, this film illustrates the originality and truth that so-called regional filmmaking can bring us.-Geoffrey Gilmore, Sundance Film Festival (Special Jury Award for Distinction, 1993)
¥ Written by Williams. Photographed by Robert Griffith. With Lillian Foley, Wilhamenia Dickens, Ricky Green, Steve Perez. (87 mins, Color, From the artist)


Thursday July 20

Kiarostami: Life Is a Film
Homework 7:00
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1990)
(Mashgh-e Shab). Only Kiarostami could turn a documentary about homework into a delightful, absorbing, and stirring portrait of the "human condition." The style is simplicity itself: the film consists of a series of interviews with several little boys (and, occasionally, with their parents) about the Iranian school system and its methods of assigning homework. Beleaguered by their rigorous work load, the boys complain of adults' insensitivity and rigidity, or parents who will not or cannot help them because of illiteracy or poverty. Though the boys' woe is palpable and rending, the film closes with a moment of soaring Kiarostamian grace: a boy reciting a poem he loves from memory as his friend looks on. "Homework does not follow the rules. One learns the rules but reaches a moment when one has to throw them away and approach the whole concept of filmmaking with one's heart and feelings" (Kiarostami).-James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario
¥ Written by Kiarostami. Photographed by Iraj Safavi. (89 mins, In Farsi with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Where Is the Friend's Home? 8:45
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1987)
(Khaneh-ye Doust Kojast?). Inspired by a poem by Iranian philosopher Sohrab Sepehri, Where Is the Friend's Home? is a beautiful picture of the life of a child in a northern Iranian village-a child for whom an afternoon becomes an odyssey into and beyond the mysteries of adult behavior. Young Ahmad feels he must return an all-important notebook to his friend, Mohammad, who will be expelled from school if he shows up one more time without his homework. Defying his parents, Ahmad sets out to find his friend's home in the neighboring village. Continually derailed and misguided by conflicting directions from adults, he searches through winding alleys with identical-seeming houses, and covers the barren territory between the two villages over and over with Sisyphean inevitability and Keaton-like stoicism. In his caring and his wisdom, Ahmad casually defines what humanity might be if the wonder remained.
¥ Written by Kiarostami. Photographed by Farhad Saba. With Babak Ahmadpour, Ahmad Ahmadpour, Khodabakhsh Defaie, Iran Otari. (81 mins, In Farsi with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)


Tuesday July 21

Greetings from Out Here
Loose Ends 7:30
David Burton Morris, Victoria Wozniak (U.S., 1975)
"A low-budget fiction feature shot in Minneapolis in 1974 [Loose Ends deals with] the relationship between two working-class men and their desire to escape from their depressing lives....As a first feature, the film is an impressive achievement....Eddy and Billy work together in a garage. Eddy is married with a four-year-old son, and his wife is pregnant. Billy is divorced and unhappy with his life. What follows amounts to a courtship between the two men [who set] off on a trip to Denver to start a new life....One of the film's strengths is that the sexual undercurrent in the men's relationship is both obvious and muted." (Jump Cut, 1976) "More lucidly than most of the Easy Rider cycle, Loose Ends makes the essential connections between the male relationship, the desire for flight, and the increasingly manifest strains in Western society....Distinctly anti-romantic, it invites comparison with the English essays on working-class life made in the sixties." (Robin Wood)
¥ Written by Morris, Wozniak. Photographed by Gregory M. Cummins. With Chris Mulkey, John Jenkins, Linda Jenkins. (100 mins, B&W, 16mm, From )

River of Grass 9:25
Kelly Reichardt (U.S., 1993)
"An outlaw-lovers-on-the-run saga in which the leads don't commit a crime, fall in love, or ever hit the road, River of Grass works [best] as a piece of genre revisionism...a modern, ennui-laden film noir turned inside out and filmed in bright colors under the Florida sun....New York writer-director Kelly Reichardt returned to her native area of suburban Miami to make [this ultra-low-budget indie] and she clearly knows her way around the neighborhood as well as around film conventions....A terminally bored housewife and mother...Cozy (Lisa Bowman) doesn't know what to do with herself until she meets Lee (Larry Fessenden), an entropy specialist....When Cozy accidentally fires [a pistol], she and Lee believe they've shot a man and bolt to a motel to decide what to do....[With] the perfect opportunity to become wild, even legendary outlaws on the lam, they can't get it together to do a thing."(Variety).
¥ Written by Reichardt. Photographed by Jim Denault. With Lisa Bowman, Fressenden, Dick Russell, Michael Buscemi. (85 mins, Color, 35mm, From Strand Releasing)


Saturday July 22

Kiarostami: Life Is a Film
Close Up 7:00
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1990)
For program notes, please see July 13. (Close-Up is shown tonight without the short films.)
Homework 9:00
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1990)
For program notes, please see July 20.


Sunday July 23

Buster Keaton Series
Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Short Films 5:30
Jon Mirsalis on Piano
The Boat (1921). In this strange and surreal comedy, Buster, his wife and kids are all adrift at sea on a boat called "Damfino" that refuses to stay afloat. "The Boat can rank with Keaton's great feature-length comedies. No Keaton film previous to it was quite so sustained in its melancholy, or provided such continuous laughter" (David Robinson). With Keaton, Sybil Seely. (20 mins)
Daydreams (1922). Another exercise in surrealism with Buster playing doctor, Wall Street mogul, and Hamlet in his efforts to prove himself marriage material. In the end, he is just material, delivered parcel post. With Keaton, RenŽe AdorŽe. (20 mins)
My Wife's Relations (1922). Keaton's satire on the Melting Pot. Drawn into court for breaking a window, Buster winds up married to his accuser by a Polish-speaking judge. His attempts to negotiate a meal with his wife's many Irish brothers looks forward to Woody Allen's classic one-liner: "Dynamite ham!" With Keaton, Kate Price, Monty Collins, Wheezer Doll. (25 mins)
Shorts: Directed, Written by Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline. Photographed by Elgin Lessley. (Silent, B&W, 35mm)
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Charles F. Reisner (U.S., 1927)
The authentic Mississippi River setting (filmed along the Sacramento River delta) is but one of Steamboat Bill, Jr.'s many pleasures. The film seems to have a direct line to Keaton's youth and soul in the tale of a sensitive, effeminate lad trying to figure out the mettle of manhood in his overbearing dad. Buster with an umbrella against the fearsome storm that rips the houses off people's lives; Buster drawn, as if in a dream, to an abandoned vaudeville theater: "Keaton's most entertaining balance of the instinctual and the cerebral" (Sarris & Allen, The Village Voice). The climax is one of Keaton's most dangerous and carefully planned stunts: Noting that the hospital in which he lies, and indeed the whole town, has flown away, he runs to stand in the street. A wall comes crashing down on him but he passes, untouched, through an open window. Keaton was the true he-man among matinee idols-the scene was done unfaked, with a real wall.
¥ Written by Carl Harbaugh. Photographed by J. Devereux Jennings, Bert Haines. With Keaton, Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, Tom Lewis. (70 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Tuesday July 25

Greetings from Out Here
This Is Our Home, It Is Not for Sale 7:00
Jon Schwartz (U.S., 1987)
"One hundred and ninety minutes of people standing on their front lawns talking about their neighborhood might seem a bit much even for the most civic-minded. But...Jon Schwartz's oral epic exerts a fascination that is both amiable and eerie. The neighborhood in question is Houston's Riverside, a residential area that in its sixty-year history has been a microcosm of urban change in America. Originally an attractive upper-middle-class area marked by an idyllic ethnic heterogeneity, it brushed against integration in the fifties, nearly succumbed to white flight in the sixties, and has since become the elegant home of Houston's richest and most prominent blacks. Though the complexion of the residents interviewed alters, the values of family and community remain the same....By the end of the film the anxieties murmured by current black residents about whites moving in chillingly echo those of the original white dwellers about the first blacks....From the genial buzz of voices and faces one recognizes...the unfolding pattern of history itself."-Peter Keogh, Chicago Reader
¥ Photographed by Levie Isaacks. (190 mins, Color, 16mm, From the artist)


Wednesday July 26

Greetings from Out Here
Wildwood, New Jersey 7:00
Ruth Leitman, Carol Weaks Cassidy (U.S., 1994)
Preceded by shorts:
"Anything I Catch..." the Handfishing Story (Charles Bush, Patrick Mire, U.S., 1990): In the Louisiana bayous, the vanishing custom of catching catfish and turtles by hand is revived. (25 mins). Spreading Beauty Wherever I Go (Rick Tejada-Flores, U.S., 1994): The art of car styling is detailed by New Mexico low riders. (20 mins) (Both: Color, 16mm, From the artists)
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Wildwood, N.J., "the last great American blue-collar seaside carnival town," is warmly observed by the tough and spunky women who return year after year to spend their summers on the boardwalk. Filmmaker Carol Cassidy said, "I made the pilgrimage to Wildwood every summer of my life. The town is in my blood....I am a lifelong witness to the pick-ups, make-outs, come-ons, drug deals, fist fights, and family dramas of Wildwood," a familiarity apparent in the rapport she and Ruth Leitman establish with the working class girls and women they interview. In overlapping overflowing conversations, young and old women talk of never-ending friendships, first sexual experiences, and dreams searched for in Wildwood, where "you never know what will happen," and your mother worries about what you will do.
¥ (60 mins, Color, 16mm, From the artists)

To Render a Life: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the Documentary Vision 9:00
Ross Spears (U.S., 1992)
For this study of rural poverty in America, inspired by that of James Agee and Walker Evans in 1941, Ross Spears and co-producer Silvia Kersusan spent three years with the family of Obea and Alice Glass, who live in Virginia in a self-made wooden house. The hardworking Glasses survive but do not thrive. They are among America's disenfranchised, having inherited illiteracy and any number of diet-related diseases, yet ineligible for government aid. Why, and how, are the Glasses our business? This is the subject of Spears's film, and he offers Agee's prose, as well as interviews with others, to examine the ethical issues in creating art-even art with the goal of compassion and awareness-from the misery of others. The Glass family's life is rendered, as surely as Alice renders the lard for an evening's meal, and whether they become more real or less human as a result is each viewer's call.
¥ Written by Silvia Kersusan. Photographed by Spears. (88 mins, Color, 16mm, From The James Agee Film Project)


Thursday July 27

Kiarostami: Life Is a Film
And Life Goes On 7:00
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1992)
(Zendegi Edame Darad). In the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in northern Iran that killed some 50,000 people, Kiarostami returned to the setting of Where Is the Friend's Home? seeking to find out the fate of his non-professional child stars. In the devastated landscape, expecting to find death, Kiarostami found life, and proceeded to transform it into cinema. A filmmaker and his son go along the destroyed road, meeting people who have lost relatives and helping those they can; in a makeshift tent city, an aerial is raised to catch the World Cup match. Kiarostami blocked out every apparently unplanned shot, scripted the seemingly improvised dialogue; where reality had imposed its devastating logic, he imposed his own creativity, and, amazingly, people were willing to go along with his game. It took a kind of cynical courage to be that positive but Kiarostami took his cues from his actors' commitment to their fate: reconstructing their lives.
¥ Written by Kiarostami. Photographed by Homayun Pievar. With Farhad Kheradmand, Pooya Pievar, and the inhabitants of Koker and Poshteh. (91 mins, In Farsi with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Through the Olive Trees 8:50
Abbas Kiarostami (Iran, 1994)
"We are like fishermen," Kiarostami said of filmmakers, and for those who bought And Life Goes On, hook, line, and sinker, there is Through the Olive Trees, the third film set in Koker and Poshteh, which unravels the fictions of the other two and necessarily sets up some of its own. This one is about a film crew from Teheran shooting in an earthquake-ravaged village using the local inhabitants as actors. But life goes on, bringing the show to a stop. It seems Hossein, the actor chosen to portray a young bridegroom, is smitten with his on-screen bride. Earthquake or no, through graveyard and forest glade he has asked her to be his wife but she ignores him. Hossein is the hardest working actor-philosopher in showbiz and much of the humor and wry pathos of Through the Olive Trees is at his expense. Or is it? We'll probably find out in part four...
¥ Written by Kiarostami. Photographed by Hossein Djafarian and Farhad Saba. With Hossein Rezal, Tahereh Ladania, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, Zarifeh Shiva. (108 mins, In Farsi with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Miramax)


Friday July 28

Greetings from Out Here
Vernon, Florida 7:00
Errol Morris (U.S., 1981)
Preceded by shorts:
Ben Lee, the Turkey Man (Jon Alpert, U.S., 1983): Ben is probably the world's greatest turkey caller, but he's taken his gift for gobbling and turned it into a business that ain't chicken scratch. Alpert at his delightful best. (6 mins, Color, 3/4" Video, From Downtown Community Video). Venom in a Jar, a Kiss from the Queen (Gretchen Stoeltje, U.S., 1990): Every year in Sweetwater, Texas the famous rattlesnake roundup is staged. Stoeltje concentrates on a recent addition, the Miss Rattlesnake Queen contest, the winner of which gets to enter the pit of live rattlers. A meaty portrait you can sink your fangs into. (22 mins, Color, 3/4" Video, From the artist)
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"Vernon is a small town in northwest Florida. Nothing ever happens. A police officer, a wild turkey hunter, a farmer, a minister, and the oldest inhabitant discuss wrigglers, garfish, gopher turtles, and vultures; they also harbor profound suspicions that life may be very different from what it seems. The first film about metaphysics in the swamp..." (New York Film Festival). "This is a visionary film [with an] unblinking fix on surreal daily life...Each sequence leaves an unsettling residue in the mind: a sense of waiting or expectation, a hint of paranoia, a suggestion of disorder....Beautifully photographed, hypnotically edited, and often very funny" (Telluride Film Festival).
¥ Photographed by Ned Burgess. With Claude Register, Albert Bitterling, Henry Shipes, Snake Reynolds, et al. (60 mins, Color, From New Yorker Films)

Space Coast 9:15
Michel Negroponte, Ross McElwee (U.S., 1979)
Preceded by short:
Voices from a Steeltown (Tony Buba, U.S., 1983): Buba's penetrating depiction of the decline of his hometown, Braddock, PA draws on the spunky and humorous observations of its citizens. (28 mins, Color, 16mm, From the artist)
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With the winding down of the American space program following the moon landing missions of the late sixties, Cape Canaveral, Florida, slipped into an unprecedented economic depression from which the community has yet to recover. Curious about the effect of this boom/bust phenomenon on people who were not directly involved in the space industry, but who nevertheless lived in close proximity to it, filmmakers Michel Negroponte and Ross McElwee focused their cinema veritŽ cameras on three unusual individuals...who had lived in the area since the forties....The film alternates episodes from the threesome's daily lives, documenting one American gothic detail after another in what the Village Voice has likened to a "neorealist version of The Gong Show."--Douglas Edwards, Filmex 1980
¥ (90 mins, Color, 16mm, From First Run/Icarus)


Saturday July 29

Dos Santos: Spirit of Light
This series is presented in cooperation with the Foreign Ministry of Brazil and Consulate General of Brazil, San Francisco. Special thanks to Jo‹o Almino, Consul General, and Tarc’sio Costa, Deputy Consul; Wendy Keys and Film Society of Lincoln Center; Gerald O'Grady; Klaus Eder, Munich Film Festival; and Christopher Horak, Munich Filmmuseum. All prints are 35mm from the foreign Ministry of Brazil.
Copies of Nelson Pereira dos Santos: Cinema N™vo's "Spirit of Light", a collection of essays and interviews edited by Gerald O'Grady and published by Film Society at Lincoln Center and Harvard Film Archives, are available at PFA.
Rio 100 Degrees 7:00
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1954/56)
(Rio, 40 Graus). A hot summer day in the life of five young peanut vendors who descend from the favelas (slums) and fan out to well-known locales-Copacabana Beach, Sugar Loaf, etc.-to make a living. Dos Santos's first film wiped the picture-postcard image of Brazil off the screen-the one that made turistas out of viewers-and followed instead a neorealist mode that brings Rio alive with its actual denizens. As a result, the film is "rough, homespun and impertinent"-a film with an attitude: "Rio was once a very cool movie, and it shows: the fractured story line, the jive street scene, the samba, the cars, the clothes..."(Village Voice, '87). In their peccadillos, dilemmas, and rebellions the black protagonists careen through a cross-section of Brazilian society and bump into machismo, love, and solidarity. Too down, too dirty for the censors, an international crusade forced its release.
¥ Written by dos Santos. Photographed by Helio Silva. With Jece Valadao, Glauce Rocha, Roberto Batalin, Claudia Moreno. (100 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

Rio Northern Zone 9:00
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1957)
(Rio, Zona Norte). The ebullient Grande Otelo, a black actor best known for his roles in the chanchada musicals, plays a working-class sambista (composer of sambas) trying against all odds to make it in the music business. The story of Espirito da Luz ("Spirit of Light") Cardosa is told through a series of dramatic flashbacks as the composer lies injured, having fallen from a train. For dos Santos, popular culture, as the people's art, is of paramount importance, even a political force for reform. Rio, Zona Norte works as a powerful criticism of the exploitative aspects of Brazil's popular culture as emblemized by the chanchada genre (light musical comedy with a notably idealizing view of Brazilian society). Dos Santos opts for reality over artifice in this exposŽ of the seamier side of Rio's festive carnival world.-Kathleen Murphy, Film Society of Lincoln Center
¥ Written by dos Santos. Photographed by Helio Silva. With Grande Otelo, Malu, Jece Valadao, Maria Petar. (90 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)


Sunday July 30

Buster Keaton Series
Battling Butler with The Railrodder and Buster Keaton Rides Again 5:30
Bruce Loeb on Piano
The Railrodder (Gerald Potterton, Canada, 1965). This film offers a double treat: Keaton's physical humor and Canada's gorgeous scenery from coast to coast. One of Keaton's last films, The Railrodder has him crossing Canada in a railroad handcar. He brings along an apparently bottomless box in which he finds everything needed for the trip. Not a word is spoken, and Keaton's sight gags are as spry and ingenious as they were in the days when not a word was spoken. Winner of several film-festival awards including Berlin. Produced by National Film Board of Canada. With Buster Keaton. (25 mins, Color, 35mm, From NFBC)
Buster Keaton Rides Again (John Spotton, Canada, 1965). Filmed during the making of , in the specially appointed passenger coach where Buster and Mrs. Keaton reside during their Canadian film assignment. In this informal study the comedian regales the film crew with anecdotes of a lifetime in show business, illustrated by excerpts from his silent films. Seven festival awards, including Venice, New York. With Buster Keaton. (55 mins, B&W, 16mm, Produced by/From NFBC)
Battling Butler
Buster Keaton (U.S., 1926)
Keaton remarked on occasion that Battling Butler was his best feature. Based on a Broadway play, the story revolves around a case of mistaken identity between two Alfred Butlers--one, an effete millionaire (Keaton, with Snitz Edwards a delight as his valet); the other, the heavyweight champion of the world (Francis McDonald). Coincidence brings them to the same backwoods Kentucky hamlet where Butler-the-fop finds love with a mountain girl, but not before antagonizing Butler-the-brute into a Madison Square Gardens grudge match. Commentators have noted that the very unfunny climactic fight sequence draws on Keaton's memories of being battered on stage by his father. Luis Bu–uel wrote about Battling Butler:"A wonderful film. Aseptic. Disinfectant....Here is a great specialist in treating the disease called sentiment."
¥ Written by Al Boasberg, Paul Gerard Smith, Charles Smith, Lex Neal, based on a play by Stanley Brightman, Austin Melford. Photographed by J. Devereux Jennings, Bert Haines. With Keaton, Sally O'Neil, Snitz Edwards, Francis McDonald. (70 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Tuesday August 1

Blaxploitation's Back!
This series is presented in cooperation with the Red Vic Theater, S.F. Special thanks to Kit Parker; Bruce Goldstein and Steve Grenyo of Film Forum II, N.Y.; and Harvey Bernard. is co-programmed for PFA by Edith Kramer and Doris Worsham, journalist/film critic and UAM/PFA Community Liaison, who has written the program notes.
Cotton Comes to Harlem 7:00
Ossie Davis (U.S., 1970)
Ossie Davis's 1970 comedy-action hit deserves equal credit along with Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 smash, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, for spawning the early 1970s blaxploitation film boom. The screenplay is based on the stories of legendary expatriate writer Chester Himes. In his directorial debut, Davis demonstrates an affinity for satire with this fast-paced adventure of two Harlem detectives-Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques)-attempting to retrieve $87,000 stolen from a "Back-to-Africa" organization. Cambridge and St. Jacques emerge as a dandy team with quicksilver timing as they preside over the comic lunacy of a stellar cast of Harlem denizens, from Calvin Lockhart as a con-man reverend, and Frederick O'Neal, cast against type as a numbers racket hoodlum; to Redd Foxx, who nearly steals the film as an eccentric homeless person. A major box office hit with a rollicking score by Galt MacDermot.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Arnold Perl, Davis, based on the novel by Chester Himes. Photographed by Gerald Hirschfeld. With Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, Calvin Lockhart, Judy Pace, Redd Foxx. (97 mins, Color, 16mm, From MGM/UA Classics)

Super Fly 8:55
Gordon Parks Jr. (U.S., 1972) New 35mm Print!
Ron O'Neal in person
Note: Actor Ron O'Neal will appear in person as his production schedule allows.
Controversial in 1972 and controversial today, Super Fly emerged as the archetypal gangster film, with the charismatic Ron O'Neal in the role of Priest, a Harlem drug dealer with a penchant for long duster coats and broad-brimmed hats. Driven by the melodious Curtis Mayfield score, which yielded several hits including the haunting "Freddy's Dead," the hit action-drama was primarily financed by black businessmen. However, it was denounced by both black and white critics of the film's hero, a character they argued was the wrong role model for black youth. Gordon Parks Jr. (son of Life photographer/film director Gordon Parks) made an impressive directing debut with this film, which offers no apologies for the morality of the protagonist. In one of his best roles, O'Neal plays the conflicted Priest with conviction and depth, and he is very believable as a man determined to make one big score to get out of the profession he has grown to hate. Philip Fenty's compelling screenplay is laced with humor and a few clever plot twists. O'Neal is capably supported by Sheila Frazier as his long-suffering girlfriend, Carl Lee (son of famed 1940s actor Canada Lee) as his disloyal partner, and Julius W. Harris as his "mentor."-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Phillip Fenty. Photographed by James Signorelli. With Ron O'Neal, Carl Lee, Sheila Frazier, Julius W. Harris. (96 mins, Color, 35mm, From Kit Parker)


Wednesday August 2

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
This series is presented with assistance from Physicians for Social Responsibility. Thanks to Chris Beaver, Mick Broderick, Stephanie Fraser, Kyoko Hirano, Jerry Honda, Pearl Leonard, Mona Nagai, Rebecca Solnit, Chuck Stephens.
The Bed-Sitting Room 7:30
Richard Lester (U.K., 1969)
It is three years since the shortest war in history: two minutes, twenty-eight seconds, including negotiation of the peace treaty. Now London's glowing and twenty-odd survivors are grubbing through the ruins of an atomized city, trying to resurrect even a parodic semblance of the old order. Penelope (Rita Tushingham), seventeen months pregnant, lives in a deserted subway with her parents who are mutating into, respectively, a dressing cabinet and a parrot. Floating overhead in a balloon, policemen Peter Cook and Dudley Moore enjoin everyone to "keep moving," while below, Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson) fears he will soon metamorphize into a shoddy antechamber. Richard Lester's absurdist comedy looks at the monstrous possibilities of survival after a nuclear holocaust while taking punchy swipes at the government buffoons who could bring such devastation to pass. The Bed-Sitting Room ends on an optimistic note as the BBC announces that England is, once again, a world power.-Steve Seid
¥ Written by John Antrobus, from the play by Antrobus, Spike Milligan. Photographed by David Watkin. With Rita Tushingham, Ralph Richardson, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Spike Milligan. (90 mins, Color, 16mm, From MGM/UA)

Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 9:20
Stanley Kubrick (U.K., 1964)
Believing that Commie-instigated water flouridation has made him impotent, Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launches a big S.A.C. attack against the Soviet Union. Pretty soon President Muffley (Peter Sellers) is sitting around the War Table with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a gaggle of gimcrack generals lead by "Buck" Turgidson (George C. Scott), fielding doomsday scenarios. Desperate, the prez turns to ex-Nazi physicist Dr. Strangelove (Sellers, again) who calculates that the gene pool can survive such a theoretical annihilation. Kubrick's brilliant farce rejects our fear of fail-safe-mechanical insurance that the bombs will be deployed-and instead views human snafus as the more probable terror. Whether it's Turgidson pridefully advocating restrained nuclear war, or Herr Doctor speculating about underground stud farms, the real threat orbits around a nucleus of unstable personalities. Dr. Strangelove asks, "Where are the safeguards against the militarized ego?" -Steve Seid
¥Written by Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George, based on the novel Red Alert by George. Photographed by Gilbert Taylor. With Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Slim Pickens, Keenan Wynn. (94 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Columbia Repertory)


Thursday August 3

Blaxploitation's Back!
Trouble Man 7:00
Ivan Dixon (U.S., 1972)
A great Marvin Gaye score highlights this formulaic 1972 drama starring Robert Hooks, co-founder of the prestigious Negro Ensemble Company acting group. Produced by Joel D. Freeman (who also made Shaft), it features Hooks as Mr. T., a sharp-dressing, tough-talking detective who is known as the inner-city Robin Hood. The story focuses on how Mr. T. gets caught up in and escapes from a feud between rival gangsters, played by Paul Winfield, Ralph Waite, and Julius Harris. Veteran television actor Ivan Dixon directed. Paula Kelly, William Smithers, and Bill Henderson are also featured.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by John D. F. Black. Photographed by Michel Hugo. With Robert Hooks, Paul Winfield, Paula Kelly, Ralph Waite. (99 mins, Color, 16mm, From Films Inc.)

Three the Hard Way 8:55
Gordon Parks Jr. (U.S., 1974)
Here's the plot of this 1974 action-drama starring Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and Jim Kelly: a white fascist group plans to exterminate the black populations of Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Detroit. How, you ask? By dropping a secret lethal potion-"something like sickle cell anemia" says the inventor-into the water supplies of the three cities! I'm not making this up, folks. This script is an excuse to bring together three of the leading macho heroes of the blaxploitation era-Brown (as a record producer), Williamson (as a public relations specialist), and Kelly (as a martial arts expert)-in a James Bond-like fantasy drama energized by several songs performed by the Impressions. The film kicks into high gear when Brown's girlfriend (Sheila Frazier) is kidnapped by the fascists. Car chases, gunfights, and assorted incidents of mayhem follow, all resulting in a body count rivaling several Sam Peckinpah films.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Eric Bercovici, Jerry Ludwig. Photographed by Lucien Ballard. With Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly, Sheila Frazier. (93 mins, Color, 35mm, From Kit Parker)


Friday August 4

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
Rhapsody in August 7:00
Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1991)
(Hachigatsu no kyohshikyoku). A dread of nuclear catastrophe is not new to Kurosawa. In 1955 he directed Record of a Living Being, a powerful film about an aging patriarch obsessed by the imminence of war. Later, Dreams (1990) forever fused a nuclear power plant disaster to the image of Mt. Fuji: nature in upheaval. Kurosawa sets Rhapsody in August in contemporary Nagasaki as four teenage cousins visit their grandmother, a survivor of the blast. Repelled but curious, the teenagers search through Nagasaki for remnants of the event, while the grandmother fascinates them with chilling stories of water-imps and ghosts. The devastation of Nagasaki, at least for the adults, has passed into the realm of safely remote folklore. But it is Kurosawa's central metaphor, the twisted wreckage of playground equipment, that focuses the film's intent. The delicately serene Rhapsody in August speaks to today's youth who, after all, are not insulated from the errors of their elders.-Steve Seid
¥Written by Kurosawa, from the novel Nabe no naka by Kiyoko Murata. Photographed by Taikao Saito, Masaharu Ueda. With Sachiko Murase, Hisashi Igawa, Narumi Kayashima, Richard Gere. (98 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From New Yorker)

Black Rain 9:00
Shohei Imamura (Japan, 1989)
(Kuroi ame). Displaying impeccable restraint, Imamura's Black Rain depicts the bombing of Hiroshima and its tragic aftermath by observing the psychological toll rather than the wholesale carnage. The film begins with the blast; the city is devastated by rolling thunder, and on a ferry nearby, Yasuko, her aunt Shigeko, and her uncle Shigematsu are splattered by radioactive droplets. Five years pass and Yasuko is now of marrying age, but each successive suitor rejects her when rumors surface that she is tainted by "black rain." Yasuko soon comes to think of herself as a pariah. Imamura touches upon a rarely addressed issue, the onus of survival. Yasuko and her ailing guardians are bound by this pitiful stigma: "Yasuko, my wife, and I are a community based on the bomb," Shigematsu writes in his diary. Exquisitely photographed, Black Rain is about the descending time-bomb of death and discrimination.-Steve Seid
¥ Written by Imamura, Toshiro Ishido, from the novel by Masuji Ibuse. Photographed by Takashi Kawamata. With Yoshiko Tanaka, Kazuo Kitamura, Etsuko Ichihara, Shoichi Ozawa. (123 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Angelika Films)


Saturday August 5

Dos Santos: Spirit of Light
Barren Lives 7:00
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1963)
(Vidas Scas). Based on a famous novel by Graciliano Ramos, Vidas Scas is a chronicle of the day-to-day existence of a family of migrants who trek along the drought-ridden dusty roads of the northeast's vast sert‹o, heading to the urban south. They briefly become squatters on a cattle ranch before circumstances force them to move on. And on. Their oppression by landscape and landowners alike is viewed in the stark and simple tones of great tragedy. One has to look to Bu–uel's Land Without Bread for a film as pitiless in its refusal to sentimentalize or romanticize poverty, as uncompromising in its documentation of a culture of hunger and despair. In this setting, bathed as it is parched in light, dos Santos finds a cinematic equivalent for the novel's empathic approach to point-of-view for the largely inarticulate Fabiano and Vit—ria and their children-even for their dog, who "has her own universe, her own vision" (NPS).
¥ Written by dos Santos from the book by Graciliano Ramos. Photographed by Jose Rosa, Luiz Carlos Barreto. With Atila Iorio, Maria Ribeiro, Orlando Macedo, Jofre Soares. (135 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, permission New Yorker)

Hunger for Love 9:30
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1968)
(Fome de Amor). "Hunger for Love took a long time to be liberated but was finally released as the censors felt that no one would understand it anyway. Ironically, it is the one film that depicts a call for revolution..."-dos Santos
In 1964 a military coup turned the cultural climate cold and dangerous with censorship and repression. Hunger for Love (subtitled Have You Ever Bathed Completely Naked?) represented a new aesthetic tack for dos Santos in its nearly allegorical, improvised narrative-the second stage of Cinema N™vo or cinema lixo ("garbage cinema"). Set on an island off the coast, Hunger parses out a critique of Brazil's failed revolution in a communal microcosm consisting of two spouse-swapping couples. Conflicts and self-delusions climax at a La Dolce Vita-like masquerade party. With this wonderfully subversive expression of an Eden gone terribly wrong, dos Santos exchanged neorealist grit for the stylistic discontinuities of Godard, Resnais, and Fellini.-Kathleen Murphy ¥Written by dos Santos, Luiz Carlos Ripper, inspired by the romance, Story to be Heard at Night, by Guilherme Figueiredo. Photographed by Dib Lutfi. With Leila Diniz, Arduino Colasanti, Irene Stefania, Paulo Porto. (73 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, permission New Yorker)


Sunday August 6

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
Children of Hiroshima 7:00
Kaneto Shindo (Japan, 1952)
(Genbaku no ko). Just days after the U.S. occupation of Japan was terminated, director Shindo and crew arrived in Hiroshima to begin shooting the first uncensored film about the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945. Also known as "Atom Bomb Children," this wistful film is based on a popular collection of stories written by children who survived the devastation. Following suit, Shindo's cast includes many youthful hibakusha (A-bomb survivors). The pitiable reality of life after the catastrophe is seen through the eyes of a kindergarten teacher who returns to Hiroshima to seek out her former students and make a brief pilgrimage to the site of her home beside Kokutaiji Temple-better known as ground zero. The individual stories of the children are tearful, but Shindo's delicate hand accentuates hope, stressing life over death. Never angry, never scolding, Children of Hiroshima is a plea for peace rendered in the ashes of ruin.-Steve Seid
¥Written by Shindo, based on essays by Hiroshima children. Photographed by Takeo Itoh. With Nobuko Otowa, Osamu Takizawa, Takashi Itoh, Miwa Saitoh. (85 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 16mm, Courtesy of The Japan Foundation and Kindai eiga kyokai). Special thanks to Kyoko Hirano.


Tuesday August 8

Blaxploitation's Back!
Cleopatra Jones 7:00
Jack Starrett (U.S., 1973)
This handsome Warner Bros. production starred statuesque newcomer Tamara Dobson as haute couture-garbed, high-kicking, hard-loving special agent Cleopatra Jones. One of the few films of the early 1970s to have a black heroine, the 1973 action-adventure (co-scripted by actor-director Max Julien) arrived during the waning years of the blaxploitation era. Still, moviegoers kept the turnstiles clicking to see Dobson take her drug-busting crusade from the poppy fields of Ankara, Turkey to the 'hoods of southern California. Cleo's chief antagonist is Shelley Winters, in the embarrassingly over-the-top role of "Mommy," a lesbian drug dealer out to destroy the neighborhood rehab house operated by Cleo's lover, ably played by Bernie Casey. Director Starrett paces the film nicely, weaving in action sequences with Cleo zooming around in her sleek black Stingray Corvette equipped with an arsenal 007 would envy. The solid supporting cast also includes Dan Frazier ("Kojak") and Antonio Fargas (Huggy Bear in "Starsky and Hutch"). Dobson also starred in the 1975 sequel, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Max Julien, Sheldon Keller from a story by Julien. Photographed by David Walsh. With Tamara Dobson, Shelley Winters, Bernie Casey, Brenda Sykes. (89 mins, Color, 35mm, From Kit Parker)

The Mack 8:45
Michael Campus (U.S., 1973)
Michael Campus's 1973 tale of drugs, prostitution, and pimps is notable for its Oakland location footage (recognizable are Jack London Square and East 14th Street) and an early film appearance by a young and gifted Richard Pryor-subsequently a major force in 1980s film and comedy. At the center of The Mack (slang for pimp) is the clash of wills of two brothers: Max Julien is Goldie, an ex-con turned mack who returns home to Oakland to build an empire based on prostitution; Roger E. Mosely is Olinga, a community activist vehemently against his brother's profession. Several cinema verite scenes still fascinate for the documentation of certain dubious aspects of Oakland history, specifically the "Player's Ball," which depicts the macks and their women stylin' and profilin' in silks, satins, furs, and hot pants during the evening's festivities, all set against a soulful Willie Hutch score. If the screenplay isn't as forceful as it could be, it still conveys a familiar but compelling message about corruption and amorality.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Robert J. Poole. Photographed by Ralph Woolsey. With Max Julien, Don Gordon, Richard Pryor, Carol Speed, Juanita Moore. (110 mins, Color, 16mm, From Harvey Bernhard)


Wednesday August 9

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
Traces and Other Works by Peter d'Agostino 7:00
Artist in Person
Philadelphia-based artist Peter d'Agostino was born in 1945 "between the bombs"-that is, between the first test at Alamogordo in July and the bombing of Hiroshima less than a month later. His new work, Traces, which also appears as a two-channel installation in the Theater Gallery, collides the public history of the Atomic Age and the personal memory of growing up in its shadow. The tape is a melange of recognizable cultural images-the Enola Gay, Life Magazine, Robert Oppenheimer-interspersed with personal fragments: home movies and a return to his childhood neighborhood. Woven throughout this assemblage are glimpses of the annual Peace Conference Ceremonies at Hiroshima in which paper lanterns are set afloat on the rivers, each inscribed with the name of someone who died as a result of the bombing. Traces is a litany for a past that could nurture as well as destroy. Several other works will also be screened.-Steve Seid
Traces(1995, 15 mins). The Walk Series (1973-74, 60 mins [excerpt]); TransmissionS (1985-90, 28 mins); VR/RV: a recreational vehicle in virtual reality (1993-94, 11 mins). (Total running time: 114 mins plus discussion, 3/4" Video, From the artist)
Bell of Nagasaki 8:30
Hideo Oba (Japan, 1950) Preceded by short:
Nagasaki Journey (Chris Beaver, Judy Irving, U.S., 1995). While researching material for Dark Circle, a documentary about nuclear issues, Beaver and Irving came across confiscated footage of Nagasaki shortly after the bombing. They have woven this footage into several criss-crossing stories that offer a rare glimpse of Nagasaki fifty years ago. A fitting companion for Oba's heavily censored film. (27 mins, B&W/Color, 16mm, From the artists)
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(Nagasaki no kane). In making Bell of Nagasaki, the first Japanese film to address the A-bombings, Oba was forced to omit many crucial scenes when the U.S. Occupation government rejected the first two script synopses. The result is an intriguing, somewhat sentimental melodrama about a Nagasaki radiologist whose early work with X rays had already exposed him to a fatal dose of radiation before the bomb dropped on August 9, 1945. Based on an essay by Dr. Takashi Nagai, the film follows the scientist's conversion to Catholicism amidst the turmoil of the "fifteen year war." Nagai's duty to his wife and children is tempered by his dedication to medical research. The destruction of Nagasaki occurs in the final third of the film and Oba, as required by civil censors, portrays the spirited survivors as they bravely go about rebuilding the city. When the eponymous bell finally peals, it is a hopeful sound, but one cannot disregard an undertone of alarm.-Steve Seid
¥ Written by Kaneto Shindo, based on an essay by Dr. Takashi Nagai. With Masao Wakahara, Yumeji Tsukioka, Keiko Tsushima, Osamu Takizawa. (94 mins, In Japanese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission of Shochiku)


Thursday August 10

Blaxploitation's Back!
Thomasine & Bushrod 7:00
Gordon Parks Jr. (U.S., 1974)
Max Julien (who co-produced and wrote the screenplay) and Vonetta McGee team up as a western-style Bonnie and Clyde in this unusual 1974 western-comedy that follows their criminal exploits in 1912 Southwest. McGee is a bounty hunter, Julien a cowpuncher who becomes the target of an evil marshall (played by George Murdock) obsessed with capturing him. When Julien avenges the death of his sister, he discovers that he has a hefty bounty on his head. The two subsequently embark on a crime spree as bank robbers-stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, all the while dreaming of living well in Mexico.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Max Julien. Photographed by Lucien Ballard. With Max Julien, Vonetta McGee, George Murdock, Glynn Turman, Juanita Moore. (95 mins, Color, 35mm, From Columbia Repertory)

Blacula 8:50
William Crain (U.S., 1972)
Distinguished stage actor William Marshall seems an unlikely choice for the role of eighteenth-century African prince Mamuwalde, who seeks Count Dracula's support to end the slave trade but is transformed into the vampire Blacula after a first bite from the Count. But the cape-clad Marshall is devilishly entertaining as an inner-city "prince of darkness" in this AIP production directed by African American television veteran William Crain. When Blacula is inadvertently transported to twentieth-century Los Angeles, he searches for his long-lost wife but along the way manages to sink his teeth into a string of unsuspecting victims: Elisha Cook, Jr.; loud-mouthed taxi driver Ketty Lester (who popularized the 1960s hit, "Love Letters"); and leading blaxploitation star Vonetta McGee, as the woman Blacula believes is his wife reincarnated. This PG-rated horror film was one of the most successful of the blaxploitation genre, thanks to Crain's stylish direction, the solid storytelling of the screenwriting team, and the commanding screen presence of William Marshall, also the star of the 1974 sequel, Scream, Blacula, Scream. A highlight: the Hues Corporation musical trio-dressed in classic 1970s retro-shimmying and shaking to several Gene Page tunes.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Joan Torres, Raymond Koenig. Photographed by John Stevens. With William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, Denise Nicholas, Thalmus Rasulala. (92 mins, Color, 35mm, From Kit Parker Films)


Friday August 11

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
Ladybug, Ladybug 7:30
Frank Perry (U.S., 1963)
The serenity of a rural elementary school is shattered when the Civil Defense alarm warns that a nuclear attack is imminent. But before any bombs, the slow-burn of panic arrives as the children are sent scurrying home. The follow-up to the Perrys' successful David and Lisa, Ladybug, Ladybug traces with almost documentary cool the unraveling of the assumed civility that coheres a community. One of the children, a cruel twelve-year-old named Harriet, invites several classmates to share her family's bomb shelter. Harriet emerges as a sort of "lady of the flies" and when another girl, Sarah, asks for admittance to the shelter, Harriet refuses. Not popular at the time of its release, Perry's film looks at the consequences of the Atomic Age-the irrational fears and corrosive anxiety. According to Ladybug, Ladybug, the first casualty is our humanity.-Steve Seid
¥ Written by Eleanor Perry, based on an article by Lois Dickert. Photographed by Leonard Hirschfield. With Jane Connell, William Daniels, James Frawley, Richard Hamilton. (81 mins, B&W, 16mm, From MGM/UA)

Desert Bloom 9:10
Eugene Corr (U.S., 1985)
Desert Bloom is about the lost innocence of an adolescent girl, her family, and an entire country. Set in early 1951, the film chronicles the tumultuous coming-of-age of a thirteen-year-old (Annabeth Gish) in an unsettled household roiling with an alcoholic stepfather (Jon Voight), traumatized by memories of WWII; a frustrated mother (Jobeth Williams) seeking comfort in the vacuity of fifties optimism, and a worldly aunt (Ellen Barkin) who brings a frankness of feeling to this nuclear unit. On the outskirts of their dusty Nevada town, the government is preparing Yucca Flats for A-bomb testing. Director Corr uses the bomb as a metaphor, almost a character, that parallels the disruption of the family but also suggests a generalized sense of cultural helplessness. As the mushroom cloud rises above the horizon, we are reminded of the fragility of the single family dwelling.-Steve Seid
¥Written by Corr, from a story by Linda Remy, Corr. Photographed by Reynaldo Villalobos. With Annabeth Gish, Jon Voight, Ellen Barkin, Jobeth Williams. (106 mins, Color, 35mm, From Columbia Repertory)


Saturday August 12

Dos Santos: Spirit of Light
The Alienist 7:00
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1969/71)
(Azyllo Muito Louco). With the increased repression of a new military regime in 1968, political necessity became the mother of cinematic invention-indirection and allegory. Azyllo Muito Louco (literally "a very crazy asylum") was a clever subversion of a classic novel by Machado de Assis. The story concerns a priest/psychiatrist who convinces the powers-that-be in a small Brazilian town that the mental health of its citizens must be attended to-then keeps changing the criteria for admission to his hospital so that, in the end, all are candidates for the loony bin. Echoing Brazil's ever-elastic political blacklist, the film also is a witty dissection of what happens when an institution loses direction and usefulness, but carries on regardless. Only then is it clear where the real powers be. In a film of radical experimentation, dos Santos uses the electronic music of Guilherme Magalhaes Vaz like an alienist-in the Brechtian sense.
¥Written by dos Santos, adapted from The Psychiatrist by Machado de Assis. Photographed by Dib Lutfi. With Nildo Parente, Isabel Ribeiro, Arduino Colasanti, Irene Stefania. (100 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)

How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman 9:00
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1972)
(Como era Gostoso o Meu Francs). A slyly entertaining mixture of anthropology, black humor, gorgeous color photography, 16th-century history, political allegory, ubiquitous nudity, and unsettling prophecy. A Frenchman captured by Indians tries nobly to integrate himself with the savage mind, but true incorporation into the tribe is ultimately possible only in one way: through the stomach. Dos Santos's film nearly caused a riot when shown at Cannes and finally had to be withdrawn-officially for reasons of "excessive nudity," although many observers felt that the problem was the naked lunch with a French entree. This is a wicked metaphor of European cultural and economic cannibalism turning to genocide, but also, as Robert Stam points out, a commentary on the dictatorship's own Transamazonian Highway that provided an "escape valve" for the northeast's poor (as seen in Vidas Scas) to move south and help exploit the Amazon region and its previously unknown peoples.
¥Written by dos Santos. Photographed by Dib Lutfi. With Arduino Colasanti, Ana Maria Magalhaes, Eduardo Imbassahy Filho, Manfredo Colasanti. (84 mins, In Portuguese and Tupi with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, permission New Yorker)


Sunday August 13

Buster Keaton Series
Our Hospitality and Short Films 5:30
Jon Mirsalis on Piano
Neighbors (1921). Tenement lovers separated by a tall backyard fence and Buster nonchalantly performing acrobatic feats on clotheslines, teeter-totter boards, and telephone poles to reach his beloved. The intertitles offer biting jabs at lower-class family relations but the neighbors will go to any height to help these lovers. The film contains a blackface routine common to the times. Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Keaton, Joe Roberts. (25 mins)
The Haunted House (1921). Perhaps the most absurd of the Keaton shorts, at the same time resembling the French serial Les Vampires with its mixture of hyper-reality and diabolical costume play. In a booby-trapped house, villains dressed as phantoms mix with members of a traveling opera company doing . Buster takes a stairway to heaven-and a neat slide to the other place. With Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts, Cline. (20 mins)
The Frozen North (1922). Keaton does William S. Hart. "Two-Gun Bill" emerges from a subway kiosk to find himself in the middle of nowhere. With Keaton, Freeman Wood, Bonnie Hill. (25 mins)
Shorts: Directed, Written by Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline. Photographed by Elgin Lessley. (Silent, B&W, 35mm)

Our Hospitality
Buster Keaton, Jack Blystone (U.S., 1923)
Buster, heir to an Appalachian estate and, along with it, the Hatfield-McCoy-type feud that killed his father, finds the ancestral abode ever so humble, and no place like home. While courting the daughter/sister/daughter of his hulking rivals, he takes full advantage of their hospitality since Southern chivalry prevents them shooting a guest. But it's like an umbrella against a waterfall. Our Hospitality is an American masterpiece, at once lyric and frenetic, and a sly satire on the very period setting it creates with painstaking accuracy. "The weekly visit of the kindly parson" alongside other quaint customs like wife-beating gleefully give the lie to Griffith's nostalgia for the Old South. The climactic chase over mountain crest and tor-with a raging river rescue which gently satirizes and finally tops Way Down East-is a breathtakingly beautiful observation of the fact that we are all tied to our enemies.
¥ Written by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez, Joseph Mitchell. Photographed by Elgin Lessley, Gordon Jennings. With Keaton, Natalie Talmadge, Joe Roberts. (70 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Tuesday August 15

Blaxploitation's Back!
Friday Foster 7:00
Arthur Marks (U.S., 1975)
Pam "Ms. Blaxploitation" Grier starred in a half dozen black action films during the 1970s blaxploitation era. Typically Grier played take-no-prisoners women who retaliate against those who harm her or those in her orbit. However, Grier's image was softened in this AIP release. She plays fearless Glance Magazine photographer Friday Foster (based on the comic strip character), and she's a charmer as the inquisitive camerawoman who rarely follows the admonition of her exasperated editor (nicely played by Julius Harris): "Don't get involved." Well, of course Friday does get involved with a black billionaire (Thalmus Rasulala), and stumbles onto a white supremacist group's plot to murder all of the country's black leaders (Orville Hampton is responsible for this script!). Friday pulls out all the stops in her zeal to sabotage the plot-she even hijacks a hearse and a milk truck to stop the massacre. The all-star supporting cast includes Yaphet Kotto as Friday's buddy; Eartha Kitt and Godfrey Cambridge, both overacting to the hilt, as rival clothing designers; Jim ("Mr. Magoo") Backus as a mob boss; Ted Lange ("Love Boat") as a jive-talking pimp; and Carl Weathers, pre-Rocky, as a mean hitman.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Orville Hampton, from story by Marks, based on the comic strip "Friday Foster." Photographed by Harry May. With Pam Grier, Yaphet Kotto, Godfrey Cambridge, Thalmus Rasulala. (90 mins, Color, 35mm, From Kit Parker)

Truck Turner 8:45
Jonathan Kaplan (U.S., 1974)
Isaac Hayes, composer of the seminal soundtrack for the 1971 hit Shaft, added acting to his repertoire with this modest action-drama. Hayes is often better than his material in this film. He plays a skip-tracer nicknamed Truck ("because his methods usually carry a violent impact"), out to avenge the death of his buddy (Alan Weeks). Hayes plays Truck as a wise-cracking, swaggering good guy who finds himself in a to-the-death battle with local crime syndicate head Harvard Blue (menacingly played by Yaphet Kotto). The action is cartoonish, Jonathan Kaplan's direction is often clumsy, and the script is predictable at best, but Hayes is fascinating to watch. The fun of the film is the parade of unusual supporting players, including Nichelle Nichols ("Star Trek's" Uhura) as the vengeful girlfriend of a pimp killed by Truck Turner, Scatman Crothers as a retired pimp, and best- and worst-dressed list creator Mr. Blackwell as a street drunk.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Oscar Williams, Michael Allin, from a story by Jerry Wilkes. Photographed by Charles F. Wheeler. With Isaac Hayes, Yaphet Kotto, Alan Weeks, Annazette Chase. (91 mins, Color, 16mm, From Kit Parker)


Wednesday August 16

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
Eclipse of the Man-Made Sun 7:30
Nicolette Freeman/Amanda Stewart (Australia, 1990)
Preceded by shorts:
Involuntary Conversion (Jeanne Finley, U.S., 1991). Finley's wry work is a contemporary look at how "official" language is used to obscure the true significance of military actions. The Gulf War becomes a sci-fi site where "soft targets" (cities) absorb "collateral damage" (civilian casualties). (9 mins, 3/4" Video, From Video Data Bank)
About Fall-Out (Wilding Productions, U.S., 1963). This Civil Defense doc attempts to neutralize the threat of radiation by making it friendlier. Through repetition, understatement and omission, it lulls you into thinking fallout is a nasty inconvenience, like a big bad-hair day. (24 mins, Color, 16mm, From Peter Conheim)
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The dust had barely settled when the atomic bomb passed into myth with its implications of succor, progress and inevitability. Eclipse of the Man-Made Sun astutely examines the imagery and language associated with nuclear weaponry and power. Forced to cloud the terrors of the Atomic Age, science, industry and government aligned the debate over nuclear technology with promises of abundance, health and security. The A-bomb became our "protector," the atom our "friend." A religiosity entered the discussion as man's ability to harness nature took on the proportions of the divine. Clean energy, propelling the family into the future, would insure continued prosperity as we unlocked the secrets of the universe. Using a rich archive of period footage, animation and commentary by media analysts, Eclipse alerts us to the blinding glare radiated by the nuclear myth.-Steve Seid
¥ (50 mins, Color/ B&W, 3/4" video, From The Video Project)

Nine Days of One Year 9:10
Mikhail Romm (USSR, 1961)
A young Soviet physicist is dangerously exposed to radiation during an experiment. Despite warnings from his medical advisers and the pleas of his wife, he decides to continue his research into thermonuclear fission-until the new reactor breeds discontent. Beautifully photographed in chilling black and white, Nine Days of One Year offers a provocative glimpse of the conflicts between men and science. The philosophical weight of this unusual Cold War film is seen in the nondescript corridors, endless control panels, impregnable steel doors, and bulky machinery that dwarf the physicists. However, director Romm humanizes his themes by constructing complex and enigmatic characters who are vulnerably moral. Lively and often humorously staged scenes of the scientists talking shop air the necessity for human need over historical imperative. Anything but didactic, Nine Days of One Year is a surprising artifact from the glory days of the arms race. -Steve Seid
¥Written by Romm, Danily Khrabovitski. Photographed by Gherman Lavrov. With Alexei Batalov, Innokenti Smoktunovski, Tamara Lavrova, Nikolai Polinikov. (110 mins, In Russian with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection)


Friday August 17

Blaxploitation's Back!
Foxy Brown 7:00 New 35mm Print!
Jack Hill (U.S., 1974)
Neither the mediocre script and uneven direction, nor a very, very low budget, could overshadow Pam Grier's spirited portrayal of a woman out to avenge the murder of her federal-agent lover (Terry Carter), who is fingered for murder by her drug-addicted brother (Antonio Fargas). Reminiscent of her 1973 feature Coffy, the film's ensuing action involves Foxy in a dual crusade: to stop a major heroin shipment from reaching her neighborhood and to avenge her boyfriend's murder. The scenes that follow involve death by fire, knives, and castration. Strictly a film for Grier devotees, in which she is required to symbolize an action heroine with a social conscience. Very violent, very bloody, and very much the kind of film that earned Pam Grier the title, "Queen of the B's."-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by Hill. Photographed by Brick Marquand. With Pam Grier, Antonio Fargas, Peter Brown, Terry Carter. (94 mins, Color, 35mm, From Kit Parker)

Shaft 8:50
Gordon Parks (U.S., 1971)
Richard Roundtree was a popular Ebony Magazine model and he caused many a moviegoing female to swoon as the macho fashion-plate New York detective John Shaft. Superbly directed by Gordon Parks (who makes a Hitchcockian onscreen appearance), Shaft was one of the seminal black dramas of the 1970s and is notable for its mesmerizing Oscar-winning Isaac Hayes score (embellished by Hayes's trademark wah-wah guitar and thumping bass lines), seamless action sequences, the uniformly fine acting of the film's ensemble, and an absorbing script about the Mafia abduction of a Harlem mob boss's daughter. Roundtree surprised the critics with his complex portrayal of the confident black private eye, capable of holding his own with a white police detective (skillfully played Charles Cioffi), or going eyeball-to-eyeball with formidable Harlem underworld king Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) over how to rescue his kidnapped daughter.-Doris Worsham
¥ Written by John D. F. Black, based on the novel by Ernest Tidyman. Photographed by Urs Furrer. With Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn, Gwenn Mitchell, Christopher St. John. (100 mins, Color, 35mm, From MGM/UA Classics)


Friday August 18

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
Five 7:30
Arch Oboler (U.S., 1951)
Arch Oboler was an oddball innovator: he created Bwana Devil, the first 3-D movie; a color process called Space-Vision, and a film genre that imagined the unimaginable. Five is the original post-apocalypse film, tracking the lives of all those who survive after a war has vanquished the world's population but left the cities intact (the neutron bomb?). Dazed and pregnant, Roseanne finds her way to a mountaintop cabin where Michael, a former New Yorker, is stalwart in his solitude. They are joined by three others: a bewildered bank manager, a sneering European adventurer, and the last black man on earth. Ensconced in their Frank Lloyd Wright digs (!), the "five" try to talk themselves into a brighter tomorrow, free from yesterday's misdeeds. Alas, jealousy and discord, holdovers from the old order, make their presence known. Five is quite a blast from the past.-Steve Seid
¥ Written by Oboler. Photographed by Louis Clyde Stoumen. With William Phipps, Susan Douglas, James Anderson, Charles Lampkin, Earl Lee. (93 mins, B&W, 16mm, From Kit Parker)

Panic in Year Zero! 9:20
Ray Milland (U.S., 1962)
Just two hours after departing Los Angeles for a vacation, Harry Baldwin (Ray Milland) and family discover that Tinsel Town is glow-in-the-dark: a nuclear attack has demolished the city of now-ascended angels. Stoically pragmatic, Harry declares, "When civilization gets civilized, I'll rejoin." His tight nuclear family, which includes Frankie Avalon as brother Rick, gathers provisions and holes up in an isolated cave for protection against the looters and assorted hooligans. This defensive posture is trumpeted by the president's emergency radio bulletin: "There are no civilians. We are all at war." The ensuing violent encounters, including the brutal rape of Harry's daughter, are handled with cruel efficiency. Harry, it turns out, is an A-one civilian soldier. Overlooking peripheral devastation from nuclear war, Milland's film suggests that individual cunning is enough to win the day-an ironic prescription for survival after the Big One.-Steve Seid
¥Written by Jay Simms, John Morton. Photographed by Gil Warrenton. With Ray Milland, Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon, Mary Mitchell. (92 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Kit Parker)


Saturday August 19

Dos Santos: Spirit of Light
The Amulet of Ogum 7:00
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1975)
(O Amuleto de Ogum). Dos Santos moved away from the increasing avant-gardism of Cinema N™vo with this film made "for the people." It is both a gangster film and a celebration of the Afro-Brazilian religion umbanda, shot entirely in Caxias, a growing working-class city near Rio de Janeiro. A young man, Gabriel (played by dos Santos's son, Ney Sant'anna), from the impoverished northeast, becomes a denizen of Rio's violent outskirts. Protected from harm by a ritual amulet given him by an umbanda priest, the bullet-proof boy catches the attention of the local crime boss. Gabriel's odyssey from innocence to underworld, death, and resurrection is told in the form of a popular ballad whose singer announces the film's magical-realist premise: "I'm going to tell you a story that really happened and which I just invented." Dos Santos: "The camera is a believer."
¥ Written by dos Santos based on original story by Francisco Santos. Photographed by Helio Silva. With Jofre Soares, Ney Sant'Anna, Anecy Rocha, Emmanuel Cavalcanti. (112 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, permission New Yorker)

Tent of Miracles 9:05
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1977)
(Tenda dos Milagres). The carnival of cultures that make up Bahian society is celebrated in this delightfully oddball film based on a novel by Jorge Amado, who collaborated in the screenplay. A Citizen Kane-like investigation of a folk hero produces a film-within-a-film about one Pedro Archanjo, janitor in a medical school, musician, dancer, prodigious lover, and, above all, radical anthropologist who promoted the social value of miscegenation based on the observed success of his own Afro-American culture of Bahia. Archanjo's Tent of Miracles is much like Nelson Pereira dos Santos's "tent"-his screen: "...a meeting place for black artists, craftsmen, musicians, white bohemians-in short, all deemed marginal by the town's status-obsessed elite. In his strength, dignity, subtle humor, and, above all, in the reciprocated tenderness he bears his community, Archanjo is a moving figure who evokes cultural integrity and intellectual power." (Robert Stam, Film Comment)
¥ Written by Jorge Amado, dos Santos, based on the novel by Amado. Photographed by Helio Silva. With Hugo Carvana, Sonia Dias, Anecy Rocha, Wilson Jorge Mello. (132 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, permission New Yorker)


Sunday August 20

Buster Keaton Series
Go West and Short Films 5:30
Bruce Loeb on Piano
The Paleface (1921). Buster is the Indians' friend but convincing them of this is another matter. In this film Keaton begins to replace the sight gag with the kind of hair-raising stunts that would characterize the features-all, remember, performed without benefit of special effects or fakery of any kind. Just Keaton and the camera. (20 mins)
The Blacksmith (1922). Buster, a unique sort of village smithy, shoes horses and repairs cars. And vice versa. With Keaton, Virginia Fox. (20 mins)
The Balloonatic (1923). A hot-air balloon sets Buster out in nature, which is decidedly unwelcoming, as is Nature Girl Phyllis Haver. Don't try and make sense of it. Just enjoy it as a plotless practice run for the features. Though we can't help seeing a bit of .L'Age d' Or... With Keaton, Phyllis Haver. (25 mins)
Shorts: Directed, Written by Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline. (Blacksmith: Keaton Malcolm St. Clair). Photographed by Elgin Lessley. (Silent, B&W, 35mm)
Go West
Buster Keaton (U.S., 1925)
Keaton plays a melancholy midwesterner, name of Friendless, who hops a freight train for Arizona, intent on becoming a cowboy. His dream is realized, in a quiet sort of way, when he removes a pebble from the foot of a limping cow, Brown Eyes, and she becomes his constant companion. When Brown Eyes is to be shipped to Los Angeles, Friendless inadvertently accompanies her on a train barreling west. Keaton makes the most of the comedy inherent in a herd of livestock wandering the streets of Los Angeles, exploring department stores and beauty parlors, but for the most part, Go West is memorable for more lyrical images such as Keaton and cow walking across a vast plain. Ol' brown eyes finally found a co-star with a soul to match his own.
¥ Written by Raymond Cannon, based on an idea by Keaton. Photographed by Elgin Lessley, Bert Haines. With Keaton, Howard Truesdall, Kathleen Myers. (70 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Tuesday August 22

Into the Labyrinth: The Films of Jan Svankmajer, Program I 7:00
(Czechoslovakia)
To enter Svankmajer's universe is akin to entering a labyrinth of surreal logic, childhood fantasies and the eternal mysteries of the real....One vital aspect of Svankmajer's appeal as a filmmaker is his eclecticism: he works with drawn animation and found-footage, marionettes, pure live-action, documentary, puppets, and trick photography. This magpie aesthetic can be partly explained by his surrealism which esteems the creative and explosive juxtaposing of materials and objects, the wonder and mystery of the found object, and the debt all surrealists owe to the remarkable achievements of past art. However, the influence of Czechoslovakia's native tradition of Mannerism, reaching back to the 16th century...cannot be overestimated...echoed in the Baroque detail...exotic, breathless excess...richly detailed texture, and underlying aggression.-Notes by Michael O'Pray for the British Film Institute
The Last Trick (1964, 12 mins, Color): Influenced by his early years with the Magik Lantern Theatre in Prague: puppets, malicious wit, and aggressive energy in a battle between two rival magicians intent on bodily harm. Punch and Judy (1966, 10 mins, Color): An almost modernist homage to the traditional puppet show featuring Punch, Merry Andrew, a guinea pig....19th century illustrations, baroque angels, collages of old newspaper cuttings [and] a brilliantly orchestrated soundtrack. The Flat (1968, 13 mins, Color): A live-action/ trick photography-a menacing room of malevolent animated objects that conspire against an unfortunate young man. Jabberwocky (1971, 14 mins, Color): An homage to childhood and Lewis Carroll...teetering between a repugnant dream and the innocent joy of the nursery. Dimensions of Dialogue (1982, 13 mins, Color): Visually astonishing and pessimistic comment on the possibility of dialogue that depicts the very materiality of existenc-the Sartrean sticky viscosity of being itself. The Ossuary (1970, 10 mins, B&W): Baroque macabre record (with impeccable rhythms and a wonderful jazz score) of a curious Sedlec church.The Fall of the House of Usher (1981, 15 mins, B&W): Fascination with Gothic fantasy...for their imaginative and fantasy-laden treatment of inanimate nature-stone, wood, mud, walls, furniture, coffins, etc. Down to the Cellar (1983, 15 mins, Color): The twin virtues of innocence and experience. A young girl descends into the cellar to collect potatoes and enters an aggressive world of rat-like shoes, strange people, and live potatoes.
¥ (Total running time: 102 mins plus intermission, 35mm, From Kino International)


Wednesday August 23

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
Beginning or the End? 7:00
Norman Taurog (U.S., 1947)
This docu-drama about the development of the A-bomb reveals itself as a Pentagonal apologia. Introduced as a documentary to be buried in a time capsule no less, this flim-flam film claims its place in history, factual distortions and all. Brian Donlevy plays Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the man who supervised America's best-kept secret. Under his watch, entire populations are relocated and mega-labs rise in a frenzy of research. It's all men in lab coats pursuing the power of the universe: Oppenheimer and Fermi, Lawrence and Szilard, even Einstein gets a look-alike cameo. Behind the exhilaration of discovery come the little falsehoods-that Japan was developing its own bomb, that we warned the citizens of Hiroshima to flee. Louis B. Mayer explained in a 1946 letter to Einstein, "dramatic truth is just as compelling a requirement...as veritable truth is on a scientist." A revision-free film for carefree viewing.-Steve Seid
¥Written by Frank Wead. Photographed by Ray June, Warren Newcomber. With Brian Donlevy, Robert Walker, Tom Drake, Audrey Totter. (110 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA)

Above and Beyond 9:10
Melvin Frank/Norman Panama (U.S., 1953)
The marriage of Colonel Tibbets (Robert Taylor) and wife Lucy (Eleanor Parker) is on the rocks. Why? Beyond his obsession with his new Air Force assignment, Tibbets won't even tell his wife what it is. Such is the unstable core of Above and Beyond, a glamorized bio-pic about the crew of the infamous Enola Gay. The film moves forward with well-oiled efficiency when concentrating on the training of a bomber crew for a top-secret mission. The strain of working under severe security is delivered with tense drama, leading to a startling re-enactment of the fatal flight over Hiroshima. One would surmise that the gravity of this historic mission would satisfy the dramatic appetite of any film. Not so in a sanitizing cinema that sacrificed veracity for virility. In this recounting, the domestic squabbles of husband and wife are more explosive than the bomb. -Steve Seid
¥Written by Frank, Panama, Beirne Lay, Jr., from a story by Lay. Photographed by Ray June. With Robert Taylor, Eleanor Parker, James Whitmore, Larry Keating. (121 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM/UA)


Thursday August 24

Films of Jan Svankmajer
Alice 7:00
Jan Svankmajer (Czechoslovakia, 1987)
Preceded by shorts:
Manly Games (1988, 14 mins): A soccer match in which balls bang off coffins more often than goalposts, and "taking out a man" is literal. Darkness, Light, Darkness (1989, 7 mins): Svankmajer takes creation into his own hands in clay animation. Death of Stalinism (1990, 10 mins): Summing up a lifelong struggle against Communism: an iconoclastic and humorous look at the myth and mythic downfall of Stalinism in Czechoslovakia. (All Color, 35mm, From First Run)
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Svankmajer fulfilled a lifetime ambition in this personal interpretation of Alice In Wonderland. When screened at the Bristol Animation Festival, Zuzana Princova noted: "Alice acknowledges its debt to Lewis Carroll, but it is far more than just a version of the proto-surrealist story. Familiar themes of magic, cruelty, and childhood are explored by young actress Kristinka Kohoutova and a cast of beautifully animated and sinister puppets."
¥ Written by Svankmajer. Photographed by Svatopluk Maly. With Kristinka Kohoutova. (84 mins, In Czech with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From First Run)


Friday August 25

Dos Santos: Spirit of Light
Memories of Prison 7:30
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1984)
(Mem—rias do C‡rcere). "The prison in my film is a metaphor of Brazilian society...the jail of social and political conventions that still represses the Brazilian people."-dos Santos
In the thirties, the Vargas dictatorship's witch hunts captured many a leftist, including the writer Graciliano Ramos (Vidas Scas), who was Secretary of Education in his home state of Alagoas. Vargas's autobiographical novel, and dos Santos's film, charts a writer's nightmare descent into hell-first among other political prisoners in Rio de Janeiro, then with common criminals in an island concentration camp. But it is also a transformation, a liberation of sorts, as the solitary, aloof author evolves into a more committed human being. Now his writing, hard-won, is a part of the life of the prison, and therefore of life. Interestingly, during this time, Ramos's wife undergoes a similar evolution of commitment to her husband and the politics of his imprisonment.
¥ Written by dos Santos, based on the novel by Graciliano Ramos. Photographed by Jose Medeiros, Antonion Luiz Soares. With Carlos Vereza, Gloria Pires, Jofre Soares, Paulo Porto. (174 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)


Saturday August 26

Dos Santos: Spirit of Light
On the Road of Life 7:00
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1980)
(Na Estrada da Vida). One of the cheekiest and most exciting parodies of populism in film history, brilliantly balanced on the knife-edge between a celebration and a corrosive critique of "popular culture." (Richard Pe–a). Two poor would-be singers migrate to Sao Paolo with a dream: to become rich and famous by singing to the people. They form a duo called Milionˆrio and ZŽ Rico (after the most popular singing team in Brazilian country music) but success eludes them. In despair, they implore the Holy Virgin for assistance, placing their album at the altar. Naturally, a radio deejay discovers it there, plays it on his show, and a meteoric career is launched. This lively Road story draws on a long tradition in Sao Paolo cinema, the caipira genre, based on the culture of the rural inhabitants of the state. (Kathleen Murphy)-Film Society at Lincoln Center
¥ Written by Chico de Assis. Photographed by Francisco Botelho. With Romeu J. Mattos, Jose A. Santos, Nadia Lippi, Silvia Leblon. (103 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)

Jubiab‡ 9:00
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil/France, 1986)
Set amidst the songs, dance and scenery of Bahia, heart of the African influence in contemporary Brazil, this film, based on a novel by Jorge Amado, penetrates the realities of a society supposedly without racial prejudice. A black man and a white woman, both raised in the bourgeois household of her parents, share a passionate love, the more obsessive because it cannot be consummated. Separated by the suspicious paterfamilias, they go their separate ways-into an amazing sea of experiences-but look for each other ceaselessly until tragedy brings them together, too late. Writing for the London Film Festival, Derek Malcolm noted, "Chiefly, this is a film not about racial prejudice as much as social and cultural inhibitions"; while dos Santos said, on adapting a novel written in 1935, "Society has changed a lot but relations between blacks and whites, poor and rich, have not changed much. I find the novel very modern..."
¥ Written by Jorge Amado, dos Santos, Henri Raillard, based on the novel Jubiab‡ Bahia de Todos los Santos by Amado. Photographed by JosŽ Medeiros. With Charles Baiano, Franoise Goussard, Grande Otelo, Raymond Pellegrin. (100 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)


Sunday August 27

Buster Keaton Series
College with Short Films 5:30 Bruce Loeb on Piano
The Scarecrow (1920). "What Is a Home Without a Mother?" reads the sign on the wall of Buster and Big Joe Roberts' bachelor pad-a marvelously inventive mechanical house designed for effortless living. The two guys also share the same gal, and her father disapproves of both of them. With Keaton, Joe Roberts, Sybil Seely.
The Goat (1921). One of the most brilliant and resonant of the shorts. Buster as a marginal figure (poor, hungry, presumably homeless) becomes a cipher for a criminal identity-his face is plastered on every wall and billboard as the current Public Enemy #1. Keaton is not above making a Christ figure out of his hero, though not for long: there's a hilarious chase to attend to. With Keaton, Joe Roberts, Virginia Fox.
The Love Nest (1923). Keaton does Melville: love-sick Buster joins a whaling ship with a fearsome captain. With Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Roberts.
Shorts: Written, Directed by Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline (The Goat: Keaton, Malcolm St. Clair). Photographed by Elgin Lessley. (20 mins each, Silent, B&W, 35mm)
College
James W. Horne (U.S., 1927)
Following on the rigor of The General, Keaton offered College to his many fans as a pure laugh-riot, and it is, the more so if you identify (as you must) with Buster's Little Man on Campus: an egghead freshman in an exclusively jock college who, unlike his monied classmates, has to work his way through school. A dreamlike proscenium arch opens onto Buster's field of nightmares as he gamely goes out for baseball, pole vaulting, discus, and crew, all of which will have their practical applications as the film vaults forward on the sheer physical elegance of its gags. Keaton holds no illusions about male bonding or male privilege (nor, we suspect, about that "happy ending"), and College remains as current* as the day it was made.
*With one exception: Buster in blackface is hounded out of the cafeteria by the black kitchen staff, the point being that he is everywhere the outsider. The use or implication of blackface was an all-too-common holdover from vaudeville. ¥ Written by Carl Harbaugh, Bryan Foy. Photographed by J. Devereux Jennings, Bert Haines. With Keaton, Ann Cornwall, Harold Goodwin, Snitz Edwards. (65 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm)


Monday August 28

Third World Cinema
The first program in our fall series, Third World Cinema, presented on Monday evenings in association with Professor Albert Johnson and the UC Berkeley Department of African-American Studies.
The Jar 7:00
Ebrahim Foruzesh (Iran, 1992)
(Khomreh). The sunbaked landscape of Iran is the setting for a parable of daily life in a remote desert village. Despite the tyrannical heat there are no water fountains, and the only place to get water is the dangerous river nearby. The students of the local school drink from an ancient communal terra-cotta jar that sits in the schoolyard. When the water jar suddenly springs a leak, the teacher and students try to involve the community in various solutions, but at every turn are thwarted by indifference and inefficiency. Each day a new solution comes and each day brings inevitable disappointment. But the children are heartbreakingly persistent, and willing to try any far-fetched scheme. Like Abbas Kiarostami, Foruzesh has deeply moving insights into his young characters and their frustrations with their authority figures.-Lisanne Skyler, San Francisco Int'l Film Festival '95
¥ Written by Foruzesh. Photographed by Iraj Safavi. With Behzad Khodaveisi, Fatemeh Azrah, Alireza Haji-Ghasemi, Ramazan Molla-Abbasi. (86 mins, In Farsi with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From Artistic License)


Tuesday August 29

Films of Jan Svankmajer
Faust 7:00
Jan Svankmajer (Czech Republic/ U.K., 1994)
Preceded by short:
Food (Jan Svankmajer, Czech Republic/U.K., 1993): A series of delicious vignettes-grey-suited men as human vending machines, a couple at dinner devouring the restaurant, and a tour of a cannibalistic banquet. (14 mins, 35mm, Color, From Zeitgeist)
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Svankmajer's Faust (movingly incarnated by one of Czech Republic's finest actors, Petr Cepek) is an inquisitive Everyman who, upon exiting a Prague subway station, is handed a map that draws him to his doom. With breathtaking rapidity Faust's journey takes him to the tops of mountains, drops him in the middle of lakes, and sends him out onto the unsuspecting streets of Prague-peopled with shape-changing demons and puppet-versions of Goethe's characters. A tour-de-force, alternately hilarious and shocking.
¥ (97 mins, Color, 35mm, From Zeitgeist)


Wednesday August 30

Becoming Death: Cinema & the Atomic Age
Them! 7:00
Gordon Douglas (U.S., 1954)
Them! is the first of the big-bug movies. Here, it's ants the size of picnic tables, found along a barren stretch of New Mexico dessert -- curiously close to Alamagordo. The entomologist assigned to the case (Edmund Gwenn) quickly determines the strange killers with a sweet tooth are "a giant mutation ... engendered by lingering radiation from the explosion of the first atomic bomb." What has (human) nature wrought? The nest of mutated monsters is destroyed, but the ants have been antsy: the queens have moved on. Undaunted, the army will make sure that they are only queens for a day. Timorously terrific, Them! is a syrupy concoction of fifties camp and catastrophe. Them R Us -- Steve Seid
¥Written by Ted Sherdeman, from a story by George Worthing. Photographed by Sid Hickox. With James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness. (93 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Kit Parker)

Free Admission!
Atomic Drive-In 9:00
Featuring Bruce Conner's Crossroads
Join us in the University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive sculpture garden (at the PFA/Durant Avenue entrance to the museum) for an off-the-wall on-the-wall screening of short films about the Atomic Age. Expect to be blown away by radiating messages from the avant-garde, as well as artifacts from the atomic dustbin of history. At the core is Bruce Conner's brilliant and funereal Crossroads (1976, 36 mins, B&W, 16mm, from Canyon Cinema), a re-choreographing of footage from "Operation Crossroads," the first underwater A-bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The repetitive detonation, originally recorded by over five hundred cameras, is offered as a lethal but eerily majestic specter of American might. Around this visual nucleus we'll present brief experimental films, ephemeral propaganda, and other light particles from America's fissionary filmmakers. An evening full of anti-matter-because anti matters.-Steve Seid
(Total running time: c. 75 mins)


Thursday August 31

Dos Santos: Spirit of Light
The Third Bank of the River 7:30
Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Brazil, 1993)
(A Terceira Margem do Rio). Dos Santos ingeniously weaves five separate stories by Guimaraes Rosa, a character from one story giving birth to one in the next, who is visited upon by someone from the next, and so on. What evolves is a magical-realist tale of a man who abandons his family to live on a boat in the middle of a river; the son, Liojorge, leaves him food each night. Liojorge is led by an enchanted cow to his future wife, and they produce a child who can create miracles. Eventually they must flee the country to the squalor of Bras’lia. Dos Santos brings in motifs from his own works, from the sert‹o of Vidas Scas to the urban setting of Rio 100 Degrees and the "believing camera" of Amulet of Ogam. As Robert Stam notes, "The film reveals a pessimistic undercurrent within the magical solutions....Dos Santos's vision retains its passionate integrity, and ruefully testifies that even saints aren't safe anymore..."
¥ Written by dos Santos, based on short stories by Jo‹o Guimaraes Rosa. Photographed by Gilberto Azevedo, Fernando Duarte. With Ilya Sao Paulo, Sonjia Saurin, Maria Ribeiro, Barbara Brant. (98 mins, In Portuguese with English subtitles, Color, 35mm)