Xan Cassavetes (daughter of John, her first name short for Alexandria) assembled this troubling video documentary about Jerry Harvey, a fanatical Los Angeles film buff who spent eight years programming the legendary pay-cable outlet the Z Channel. Seriously bipolar, Harvey killed his wife and himself in 1988, and Cassavetes performs the difficult task of reconciling his tragic personal life with his professional legacy (a highly adventurous programmer, he helped establish the contemporary audience for directors’ cuts and in the process befriended such filmmakers as Sam Peckinpah and Michael Cimino). Both the clips and the talking heads are well chosen, providing a fascinating look at a particular subculture in Cassavetes’s hometown. 122 min. (JR) Read more
Chicago-based Kartemquin Films has added a 25-minute update and a subtitle to its documentary masterpiece (1988) about the Chicago-born leftist painter Leon Golub. I’m grateful for the new material, which documents the fatalistic yet playful later phase in Golub’s work up to his death in 2004 and fills another gap by better conveying the paintings of his wife, Nancy Spero. But I’m somewhat dismayed by the way the overall emphasis of the original has shifted away from the social reception of Golub’s political paintings toward a more conventional biographical approach. Tom Sivak’s music throughout remains striking and original. 80 min. (JR) Read more
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s major work (1988) consists of ten separate films, each running 50-odd minutes and set mainly around two high-rises in Warsaw. The films are built around a contemporary reflection on the Ten Commandmentsspecifically, an inquiry into what breaking each of them in today’s world might entail. Made as a miniseries for Polish TV, these concise dramas can be seen in any order or combination; they don’t depend on one another, though if you see them in batches you’ll notice that major characters in one story turn up as extras in another. One of Kieslowski’s best ideas was to use a different cinematographer for each film (with the exception of the third and ninth), though the script is more important here than the mise en scene. In Polish with subtitles. (JR) Read more
