Once upon a timein 1959, to be preciseSoviet director Josef Heifits filmed a lovely, exquisite, and by now all but forgotten adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s story The Lady With the Dog, which wisely restricted itself to Chekhovian dimensions, giving the plot and characters their full due but never any more. By grotesque contrast, writer-director Nikita Mikhalkov’s elephantine set piece for Marcello Mastroianni (1987)which came about through Mastroianni’s desire to work with the Soviet filmmakerloosely adapts that Chekhov story along with elements from three others (My Wife, The Birthday Party, and Subjugated Anna) to produce a film so sprawling and ungainly that Chekhov is turned into chopped liver. Atrociously out-of-sync dubbing, shameless mugging and prancing from Mastroianni, and an unearned (and decidedly un-Chekhovian) grandiosity are the main elements on the bill of fare, all working overtime to register life’s little ironies; Elena Sofonova, Marthe Keller, Silvana Mangano, and a cute little dog are on hand to teach Mikhalkov and Mastroianni a few lessons in restraint, but alas, to no avail. (JR) Read more
The most famous silent Spanish film, this 1929 feature directed by Florian Rey, La aldea maldita, is a melodrama whose political overtones made it a favorite among progressive critics of the period. The plot concerns the diastrous forced separation of a family from their idyllic country life and from each other; when they finally reachieve this stability, the romantic notions of their earlier life are thrown into question. Filmed largely on location with many nonprofessionals in the cast. Read more
Although William Holden stars in this wartime spy story of an oil importer blackmailed by the Allies into becoming a double agent, George Seaton’s direction is so limp and his dialogue so long-winded that this might be billed as a counterfeit thriller. With Lilli Palmer, Hugh Griffith, and Eva Dahlbeck (1962). (JR) Read more
Taking advantage of a favorable populist political climate in 1936, Spanish director Florian Rey filmed this interracial love story in which a prominent young judge falls in love with a Gypsy servant (Imperio Argentina). The film proved to be an enormous box office success, established Argentina as a star, and continued to be screened for both Republicans and rebels after the Spanish civil war broke out. (JR) Read more
A Spanish-German production of 1938starring Imperio Argentina, the biggest Spanish star of the period, and directed by Florian Reythis version of the famous Carmen plot, spruced up for the Spanish censors, allowed Germany to break into the Latin American film market. A very popular and successful movie when it came out, the film reportedly features Argentina’s singing and dancing at its most effective. Read more
An interesting parallel to Hollywood’s recycling mania is the much more fruitful phenomenon of the found-footage filma practice within independent cinema of working creatively with already existing film footage. In recent years, many of the most inventive experimental filmmakers in the U.S. ranging from Ken Jacobs and Leslie Thornton have worked in this mode, but there is almost certainly no figure who has done more with the form than Bruce Connor. This program features 11 of his best shorts and two other major examples by other filmmakers, Joseph Cornell’s remarkable Rose Hobart (1939) and J.J. Murphy’s more recent Print Generation (1974). The Connor films to be shown: A Movie (1958), Cosmic Ray (1961), the extraordinary Report (1967the best film treatment to date of the assassination of John F. Kennedy), Vivian (1964), The White Rose (1967), Breakaway (1967), Permian Strata (1969), Marilyn X 5 (1973), Mongoloid (1978), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1975), and Valse Triste (1977). Connor works wonders with nostalgic and historical materials of various kinds, reshuffling and juxtaposing media fragments into mosaics that are simultaneously analytical and evocative. If you’ve never encountered his work before, this program offers a superb introduction to his very special talent. Read more
The films of the London-based American twins provide an interesting test case for someone like me who resists both puppet films and the gallows humor of eastern European animation. In a selection of films made between 1986 and 1993, ranging from their magnum opus Street of Crocodiles to their Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, one certainly encounters a good deal of invention and unkempt activity built around their distinctive brand of nostalgic old-country surrealism. As critic Raymond Durgnat points out, the theoretical implications of this work are fascinating, because puppetry knows so many (and such heterogeneous) syntheses of realistic and nonrealistic elements as to blur all possible elements between them. But most of the esoteric quasi-narrative structures employed by the brothers Quay and their collaborator Keith Griffiths make their movies closer to work than to play: arcane intertitles that usually seem to have a vague or tenuous relation to the action are flashed on the screen so quickly that one often feels at a loss trying to follow the obscure meaning structures, and the thematic bases of these shortswhich also include The Comb (1985) and Anamorphosis, among other itemsoften seem to get in the way of their free-floating pleasures. At their best, as in Street of Crocodiles, these films give off some of the eerie mood and texture of a David Lynch film, and one clearly can’t accuse the Quay brothers of predictability. Read more
Louis Malle’s polished, sentimental memory piece (1987)about his glancing brush with the Nazi holocaust while attending a French Catholic boarding school in 1944works mightily to flatter the audience’s sense of compassion and virtue. The plot involves the hero’s growing friendship with a brilliant Jewish boy hiding incognito at the school (along with a few other Jews and members of the French resistance), whose identity is uncovered by the gestapo. In keeping with the more enlightened, liberal brand of French anti-Semitism, which depicts Jews as cute, lovable, and exotic rather than venal and sinister, the featured victim is treated as a rare objet d’art rather than an ordinary kid. Malle is certainly sincere in his efforts to describe the overall milieu accurately, and the film is less obnoxious than his pious Lacombe, Lucien (1973), which dealt with a related theme. With Raphael Fejto and Gaspard Manesse, especially good as Malle’s alter ego. In French with subtitles. 103 min. (JR) Read more
While it lacks the controlled energy and the sense of closure found in She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s second feature-length “film joint” is much more innovative, ambitious, and exciting: a full-scale tackling of class warfare within the black community, set in a mainly black college in Atlanta, that explodes in every direction. The conflicts are mainly between the light-skinned, upwardly mobile Wannabees, who belong to fraternities, and the dark-skinned Jigaboos, who feel more racial pride; the issues between them range from the college’s investment in South Africa to straight versus nappy hair (the latter highlighted in a gaudy, Bye Bye Birdie-style musical number). Lee, who seems slightly closer to the Jigaboos, takes care not to stack the deck on either side (although he’s less than friendly to the college administration); the movie’s address is basically to the black community, but white spectators looking for an education in black issues could do a lot worse than visit this movie and get pointers from the diverse factions in the black audience, who follow it almost like a sporting event. The film runs about two hours, and like Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, it’s definitely ragged around the edges; the musical numbers (scored by the writer-director-producer’s father Bill Lee) are extremely variable, and the overall continuity is fairly choppy. Read more
A stirring and informative account of the Sandinista struggle, made up almost exclusively of personal testimonies from Sandinistas, this documentary by Deborah Shaffer–who won an Oscar in 1985 for her Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements–is loosely based on Omar Cabezas’s book about his own training as a guerrilla fighter in response to the Somoza dictatorship. The physicality and mythical dimensions of the guerrillas’ experiences in the mountains are an important part of the story here, but the film includes much more: newsreel footage and Nicaraguan witnesses speak of American invasions throughout this century, and the commentaries of Cabezas (now vice-minister of the interior of the new Nicaraguan government) and others are intelligent and pointed, moving beyond slogans to give a detailed portrait of their history, problems, and aspirations. Music is provided by bassist and composer Charlie Haden. (Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, February 26 and 27, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, February 28, 5:30 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, February 29 through March 3, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114) Read more
While it lacks the range and analytical bite of his previous Images of Germany (1983), Hartmut Bitomsky’s 1986 feature documentary about the enormous auto route built by the Nazis does create some interesting reflections on this massive and monumental project. Alternating archival footage of the construction and contemporary interviews with some of the workers with kitschy propaganda films made by the Third Reich, which attempted to “sell” the Autobahn to a recalcitrant public, Bitomsky puts together a kind of cultural history that may be long-winded and dry in spots, but that still adds up to an absorbing document about a monument designed to provide “not the shortest but the noblest connection between two points.” (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, February 19, 6:00, and Saturday, February 20, 6:00 and 8:00, 443-3737) Read more
One of Roberto Rossellini’s supreme masterpieces, and perhaps the greatest of the TV films that mark his last period. Made in 1966, the film chronicles the gradual steps taken in the Sun King’s seizure of power over 21 years; the treatment is contemplative, wise, and quietly humorous, and Rossellini’s innovative trick shots to integrate the real decor of Versailles are deftly executed. The color photography is superb. (Univ. of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th St., Sunday, February 14, 8:00, 702-8574) Read more
An unusually ambitious effort from horror movie specialist Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street), filmed on location in Haiti (as well as the Dominican Republic), this genuinely frightening thriller follows the efforts of an anthropologist (Bill Pullman) sent by a U.S. pharmaceutical company to find the chemical mixture used in “zombification”–the voodoo practice that renders victims apparently dead while still alive and conscious. Depending largely on hallucinations and psychological terror (as in Altered States), and working from a screenplay by Richard Maxwell and A.R. Simoun inspired by Wade Davis’s nonfiction book of the same title, Craven is better with atmosphere and creepy ideas here than with fluid story telling. But it’s nice for a change to have some of the old-fashioned virtues of horror films operative here–moody dream sequences, unsettling poetic images, and passages that suggest more than they show–rather than be splattered exclusively with shocks and special effects (the latter are far from absent, but a bit more economically employed than usual). Cathy Tyson, the prostitute in Mona Lisa, plays the hero’s Haitian guide–a psychiatrist alert to some of the cultural ramifications of voodoo–and Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield, and Brent Jennings, as other agents of the hero’s dark education in prerevolutionary Haiti, are effective as well. Read more
Chris Marker’s 1982 masterpiece, whose title translates as Sunless, is one of the key nonfiction films of our time–a personal and philosophical documentary that concentrates mainly on contemporary Tokyo, but also includes footage shot in Iceland, Guinea-Bissau, and San Francisco (where the filmmaker tracks down all of the original locations in Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Difficult to describe and almost impossible to summarize, this poetic journal of a major French filmmaker (La jetee, Le joli mai) radiates in all directions, exploring and reflecting upon many decades of experience all over the world. While Marker’s brilliance as a thinker and filmmaker has largely (and unfairly) been eclipsed by Godard’s, there is conceivably no film in the entire Godard canon that has as much to say about the present state of the world, and the wit and beauty of Marker’s highly original form of discourse leave a profound aftertaste. A film about subjectivity, death, photography, social custom, and consciousness itself, Sans soleil registers like a multidimensional poem found in a time capsule. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, February 7, 6:00 and 8:00, 443-3737) Read more
One of those films that has to be seen to be disbelieved. Music video director Mary Lambert draws on the themes rather than the forms of her metier to give us an art movie that promises the satisfactions of a thriller, but delivers instead a kind of allegory out of Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The story follows five days in the misadventures of a daredevil acrobat (Ellen Barkin) who runs out on a scheduled publicity stunt in the U.S. in order to see a former lover (Gabriel Byrne) in Spain, suffers a bout of amnesia, and then has to piece together the missing days, with the help of a few decadent jet-setters she runs into, including Julian Sands and Jodie Foster (the latter of whom provides the film with some much-needed verve). Martin Sheen, Isabella Rossellini, and Grace Jones are also around in secondary parts, and Miles Davis provides a score that is a bargain-basement version of his Sketches of Spain album. The screenplay by Patricia Louisianna Knop, based on a novel by Patrice Chaplin, is an embarrassment, but Barkin and Lambert both dive into it as if it were food for thought and caviar to be savored. Read more
