As a chronicler of the contemporary south, independent filmmaker Ross McElwee has a great deal to tell us that gets factored out of most other accounts. This gives a particular interest to this rather loosely structured 1984 film (shot in 1976) that describes one of the filmmaker’s visits home to Charlotte, North Carolina. While we learn about his uneasy relationship to his conservative father and his curiosity about the family’s black servants, McElwee doesn’t offer himself as a comic focal point as he does later in Sherman’s Marchalthough he does emphasize his troubles filming his father’s activity as a surgeon to indicate his squeamishness. (JR) Read more
Rosa von Praunheim’s AnitaTanze des Lasters alternates between two versions of nude dancer Anita Berber, a star of Berlin cafe society of the 20s: an elderly woman today who claims to be Berber (Lotte Huber) and is confined to a mental ward (in black and white), and her imagined version of Berber in the 20s (in color, portrayed by Ina Blum). Von Praunheim uses some striking expressionistic intertitles and on the whole does some interesting things with period evocation, but after a while his procedures become mechanical and repetitive (1987). (JR) Read more
No, not the Paddy Chayefsky/Ken Russell film of 1980, but a selection of ten shorts on the same theme: drugs, mainly hallucinogenic, and the mind-altering experiences they impart. Chronologically, the survey will extend all the way from Tod Browning’s 1916 Mystery of the Leaping Fish (with Douglas Fairbanks as Coke Enniday) to Mark Nugent’s recent Manual Labour. The others: Tony Conrad’s The Flicker (with a La Monte Young stereo sound track), John Hawkins’s LSD Wall, Steve Arnold’s Liberation of the Mannique Mechanique, Daina Krumins’s Babobilicons, Adam Beckett’s Heavy-Light, Heather McAdams’s Black Coffee, Bob Cowan’s Rockflow, and Chick Strand’s Waterfall. The Experimental Film Coalition promises free acid at the door, which one assumes is not lysergicbut who knows? Read more
