Made the year after Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1965), Basilio Martin Patino’s touching first feature, set mainly in the university town of Salamanca, Spain, echoes and parallels that film in many respects, although here the loss of religious faith plays the role of a betrayed Marxism. Cast in the form of nine letters written to a young woman met by the hero (Emilio Gutierrez Caba) during his only trip abroad, the film has a loose, episodic structure built around various chapter headings (The Family Rosary, One Sunday Afternoon, A World of Happiness, etc.), and like many of the other youthful and sensitive European movies of this period, the impact of the French New Wave is salutary in the fresh use of film language: fast editing, slurred motion, and a freezing and unfreezing of certain images that makes them reverberate like pictures pasted into a scrapbook. Delicately acted and directed with a keen affection for the characters, this is surely one of the best Spanish films of the Franco period. (JR) Read more
Filmmak-er Michael Maziere of the London Filmmakers Co-op will introduce his own selection of recent British experimental work. The concerns of these filmsby John Smith, Pier Wilkie, Sandra Lahire, Anna Thew, Jean Mathee, Moira Sweeney, Nik Gordon-Smith, and Maziere himselfrange from sexuality, cultural identity, history and subjectivity to more psychological concerns about humor, madness and death. It’s not often that work of this kind crosses the Atlantic; if earlier programs from the co-op that I’ve seen are anything to go by, these filmmakers are involved more rigorously and consciously in film materiality and ideology than most of their American counterparts. Read more
Allan Francovich’s new documentary feature about the history of U.S. involvement in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, recently served as an important reference point in the U.S. congressional hearings on contra aid. Running about three hours, the film contains interviews with people of every political persuasion about Central America, and, according to Francovich, tells the story behind what Oliver North was really up to. Read more
Carlos Saura’s first feature, Los golfos (1959), follows a teenage gang that plans to burglarize a large factory in order to finance a friend’s bullfighting career. A key early work in the new Spanish cinema whose impact was partially blunted by the government censors, who eliminated about ten minutes; with Manuel Zarzo and Luis Marin. Read more
An Australian soap opera reuniting the director (Gillian Armstrong) and lead actress (Judy Davis) of My Brilliant Career eight years later. This time they’re teamed in a somewhat protracted tale of a backup singer (Davis), temporarily stranded in a trailer park in a coastal fishing town, who accidentally encounters the daughter she abandoned many years ago (Claudia Karvan), now living with her grandmother (Jan Adele). While the acting is uniformly competent and Davis is especially good, Laura Jones’s screenplay never gets beyond the obvious and familiar. (Davis’s part was originally written for a man, and while Davis makes the character suggestively travel scarred, she can’t really transcend a part that seems somewhat hackneyed for either sex.) The results are watchable enough, though not nearly as good as Housekeeping (1988). (JR) Read more
The Beatles’ second feature with director Richard Lester gallivants all over the place, with a plethora of inventive sight gags and songs. The plot resembles a 60s anticipation of the Indiana Jones epics, with a religious sect attempting to recover a sacred ring from Ringo. Most critics called this a comedown from A Hard Day’s Night when it first came out (1965), but in some ways it’s even more exhilarating. (JR) Read more
American hippies (including Danny Stone) on the isle of Ibiza learn about LSD from George Montgomery, leading to a crime spree that ends in murder. The main gimmick of this 1966 exploitation item written and directed by one Edward Mann (actually Santos Alcocer) is that the main action is in black and white, the trip sequences in color. A presentation of the Psychotronic Film Society. Read more
A rather loose grouping of four experimental works by women; Leslie Thornton’s extraordinary Adynata (1983)a nonnarrative meditation on the East as viewed and imagined by the Westis alone worth the price of admission. Also included are Shirley Clarke’s Bridges Go Round (1958), Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1967), and Sharon Couzin’s Deutschland Spiegel (1980). Read more
A rather intriguing, thematically organized, but varied selection of shorts: D.W. Griffith’s The Unchanging Sea (1910), Germaine Dulac’s seminal The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923), Chicago filmmaker Adele Friedman’s Untitled 1981, Bruce Conner’s Vivian (1965), and Richard Leacock’s 1970 documentary about a New Orleans ball queen, Queen of Apollo. Read more
Roberto Rossellini’s 1961 historical romance. By all reports, it’s a key film in Rossellini’s career, marking the turning point between his early neorealist style and the austere historical studies of the late period. Read more
The late Trevor Howard costars with Ben Cross, Hal Holbrook, Ned Beatty, and William Russ in a horror film that pits a New Orleans priest (Cross) against forces of evil that have brutally murdered two of his predecessors at the same parish. Ace screenwriter Philip Yordan (Johnny Guitar, House of Strangers) collaborated on the script with Fernando Fonseca; the Cuban Camilo Vila directed. Read more
Maurice Pialat’s high-powered adaptation of Georges Bernanos (whose fiction has previously provided the basis for two Bresson films) won the best film award at the Cannes film festival in 1987, which occasioned a great deal of controversy. A dark film both literally and figuratively, it follows the spiritual crisis of Father Donissan (Gerard Depardieu) and his curious relation to a young woman named Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire); Pialat himself plays the father superior. Uncompromisingly rigorous and harsh, Pialat’s remarkable film isn’t for every tasteacceptance of Bernanos’ world isn’t an easy matterbut it is certainly a major work by a major filmmaker, with one of Depardieu’s strongest performances. (JR) Read more
A mawkish and fairly ludicrous drama set during World War II and its immediate aftermath, scripted by producer Anna Thomas and director Gregory Nava (who teamed up on El Norte). It has the novelty of allowing us to see William Hurt do his damnedest at playing a psychothe rejected son of an Italian immigrant family with a lot of grudges on his mind; Timothy Hutton plays the fellow soldier he’s after (who had the temerity to marry his sister). Nava’s direction strains after fancy effects without ever suspending our sense of incredulity at these contrived goings-on; the photography is nice, but can’t really do much more than gild a rather desiccated lily. With Stockard Channing, Francisco Rabal, and Melissa Leo. (JR) Read more
Made for the unthinkable sum of $7,000, Paul E. Garstki’s independent black-and-white Chicago-based feature both profits and suffers from its impoverished budget. On the plus side, a largely postdubbed sound track allows the filmmakers to tell parts of the story through the ingenious economical device of using answering-machine messages and imaginary phone conversations offscreen. A thoughtful use of local talent (stage actors John Ellerton, Warren Davis, and Diana Zimmer as the three leads and lots of local independent filmmakers in secondary parts) and locations also makes the best use of William Holst’s somewhat minimalist script, adapted from a story by Garstki. A reclusive art critic hires a young protege, who moonlights as a surveillance photographer, to go to work on a young woman (an odd plot with faint echoes of The Draughtsman’s Contract and Paul Bartel’s The Secret Cinema, without much of the humor connected to either). The main budgetary drawback is the nearly nonexistent social context; the stilted art-world talk generally fails to convince because there isn’t enough of a world in the film to establish it as either parody or the genuine article, and the characters themselves seem at times excessively limited by the exigencies of the plot. The result, then, is uneven but singulara quirky, rather disturbing little film about voyeurism and loneliness. Read more
Despite a hilarious early sequence, Michael Snow’s 1981 feature isn’t quite the revelation it hopes to beat least in relation to his three previous films about camera movement, Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La Region Centrale. But all of Snow’s films are packed with interesting ideas, and this one is no exception. 90 min. (JR) Read more
