OPEN SPACE

………………………………. "Only dull and powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity" —Kazimir Malevich……………………………………..

As part of tomorrow night’s Long Play: Bruce Conner & the Singles Collection screening in the Wattis: we’re happy to host the premiere of  Kota Ezawa’s brand-new Beatles Über California. PLUS beautiful 16mm prints of Bruce Conner’s BREAKAWAY and MEA CULPA! and many others, including one from another artist well known to the bay, Anne Colvin.

But also, tomorrow’s  NOW PLAYING event looks to be xlnt all around:  meat & coffee with Meatpaper & Blue Bottle in the Rooftop Garden at 6; My Barbarian at 9; drinks, music, projections throughout the eve. Films start at 7.

Details.

Just a quick note to appraise all and sundry of at least a portion of the cream of this week’s Bay Area rep film offerings:  This Thurs (that is, Tonight) graces us with the second program of Scott MacDonald’s 3-part contribution to 75 Years in the Dark:  A Partial History of Film at SFMOMA: Some American Experiments. This rather underwhelming title masks an over-stuffed sausage of a program composed of excitingly disparate parts, including early animation classics like Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), and the Ub Iwerks/Disney Steamboat Willie (1928), as well as major Avant-Garde classics such as Man Ray’s Le retour à la raison and Maya Daren’s Ritual in Tranfigured Time. Great as these all are, I’m especially anxious to see Frank Stauffacher (mastermind of the museum’s legendary Art in Cinema series)’s incredibly rare Zig-Zag, and The Bells of Atlantis by Ian Hugo (one-time husband of Anïs Nin, who was incarnated by Richard E. Grant [He of the Bulging Eyes] in Philip Kaufman’s Henry and June).  All-in-all, this show promises 80-or-so minutes of alternating or intertwined sublimity and surprise—like a canister of snakes, only 100% pleasurable.

I became aware of Judith Rosenberg rather slowly.  During my somewhat frequent attendance of silent film at the Pacific Film Archive, I began noticing a strange sensation—a growing excitement at the anticipation of films she was scheduled to accompany (to give some background—I’ve been known to beat a hasty retreat when confronted by music I found to have a deleterious effect on the event as cinema.).  My vocabulary of musical terms is limited, but I believe her improvisatory work incorporates elements of French Impressionism, Wagnerian thunderbolts, and the occasional bit of Modernist dissonance to produce the most intoxicating musical melange I’ve ever encountered in conjunction with silent celluloid.  I haven’t encomiums enough to describe the rapture she imparts—go experience it for yourself, and feel free to write back angrily if you disagree.  The film she plays to Friday night at the PFA, Ozu’s That Night’s Wife, should work perfectly with her twinkling magic:  it’s a little-known fact that the American-influenced early works of Ozu give his stateside maestros a run for their money in the entertainment dept, while fully displaying the seeds of the transcendent genius of Transcendental Cinema Ozu was to become… (more…)

As an exclusive service to OPEN SPACE readers, I’m adapting the approach of my Film on Film Foundation blog, “Highly Recommended!” of last year, in which I attempted to dispense opinions and advice re. every (to my mind) worthwhile show in the Bay Area repertory film scene (you can see why it only lasted seven months!) as a semi-regular feature in these pages for the duration. So that I may retain a hold on my demi-sanity, I’ll be limiting myself to writing about 2-3 shows per week, on a totally arbitrary basis… To give an idea of the tone of 2009’s 33 columns, Now It Can Be Told! – My original title was actually “HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!”, which my bully of an editor refused to countenance… (In point of fact, he did a reasonably good job, enough so that I grew to appreciate the affection in his diminutive nick-name for the column, Recs). Have no fears, tho—I’ll tone things down for OPEN SPACE. Without further ado:

Today, Thursday, February, 11th

presents us with yet another Yerba Buena Center for the Arts/SFMOMA death-match with the two programs mentioned in this blog’s title. I’ve no idea why this is allowed to happen – don’t you programmers talk to each other? (I mean, when are you gonna get together in those back rooms, and smoke your cigars, and make all those deals?) Last time this happened, SFMOMA’s Kenneth Anger show (with Kenneth bleepin’ Anger in person!) happened at the very same time as Yerba Buena’s super-rare Curt McDowell show. Lovers of kinkily homoerotic experimental cinema must have felt as if stretched on a rack (maybe they enjoyed this, now that I think about it…)… At any rate, out of chivalry, I’ll be dealing with the Yerba Buena program first…

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Pity the artist who works in celluloid. If compelled towards story-telling and the budgets typically commensurate with such, one must first bed down with tycoons and their retainers, then run a gauntlet of various ideological hit-squads in order to promulgate the work. Film has a diabolic power which sits uneasily on the collective psyche of this increasingly conceptual/rationally oriented era, and efforts to shuck off celluloid for once and all are on-going. (There has been, for example, a recent attempt to kick movies out of museums.) Artists in film who forgo the props of narrative realism fare little better. Photographic prints are accepted as art, but film prints accrue a little wear and tear every time they’re run through a projector, decreasing their collectibility—one of the reasons they’ve never caught on in the art world.

Artists in collectible mediums who have had the cultural impact of Kenneth Anger usually wind up rich as Croesus. For the better and/or worse of us all, this Magus of the Medium has had other concerns. After, in his youth, becoming an adept of Aleister Crowley—the 20th C’s most famed practitioner of the Magickal Arts—Anger embarked on the lifelong project of The Magick Lantern Cycle, a scheme of literal cinematic sorcery performed as occult rituals, and experienced, consciously or not, as spells of enchantment by audiences, who find themselves in thrall to his viral psychic attack. Films such as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Scorpio Rising, and Invocation of My Demon Brother further the Crowleyian agenda to redress the imbalance built into the fiber of our Judeo-Christian/Manichaean culture. Demonized pagan gods are restored to their pantheons, and 20th C. pop icons are celebrated as their contemporary incarnations. A current of overt sadomasochist homosexual phallic-worship ripples through Anger’s work, leaping out into the brains of his viewers like an electrickal charge. Masculine vigor and aesthetic beauty are reveled in, violence and aggression celebrated. In short, Anger’s films conjure up the whole gamut of anti-social forces. To one enmired in the spiritual blindness of Western man, this work comes off as EVIL, no doubt about it. Anger employs the panoply of malefic archetypes as the fisherman makes with his rod and lures, enticing the innocent into an unconscious reevaluation of values and identity. Like students of Crowley, Anger’s viewers are lead to the realization that GOOD and EVIL are not stratified, fenced-off realms, and that human psychic reality operates on a chromatic scale better represented (if only in symbolic form) by Pagan Pantheons than Moses and Monotheism and all their attendant madness.

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It’s been many years since I’ve called myself a Woody Allen fan. By the early 80s—when I began my hardcore cinephiliac tour of duty—the critical darling of the late 70s had begun churning out such lighter and slighter fare that I was tempted to write him off entirely. By the time he’d entered a run of serious mid-career revitalization with such major works as Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Husbands and Wives, I routinely appraised his works sight-unseen with the assured jaundiced eye so characteristic of the post-adolescent. Unfortunately, the ensuing years have provided scant cause to knock me off my high horse, and now even Allen’s supposedly great works of the 70s have, for me, deflated to bagatelles, their former importance seemingly an effect of mass-hallucination. Yes, there’s much charm in Annie Hall, say, but the movie’s largely strung together by the most brazen ziggurat of intellectual referencing and name-dropping ever erected. I gotta admit I took mental notes watching these films which informed my reading and aesthetic explorations for quite a while, but now, almost at the end of the 00’s—the most nonintellectual era yet known to modern man—they can be seen for what they are: products of a largely anti-visual sensibility with a talent rooted in a brilliant display of absurdist verbal pyrotechnics better suited to the satirical mock-essay. “Look how much I know, how much I’ve read!“, they seem to scream. “Nebbish jokester that I am, I still must be taken seriously! I’m not just a funnyman! I’ve read Proust, Kafka, Freud, and Flaubert, my favorite director is Jean Renoir, and how ’bout that Sol LeWitt!” Etc, etc.

The financial success of this approach is a testament to the social basis of comedy—surely there weren’t hoards of graduate students making these films hits. Those who got the references laughed to inform everybody they were in the know, and those who didn’t laughed to disguise their ignorance. All this semi/pseudo-erudition set to laughter made audiences happy to plunk down the cash, but also for unfortunate aesthetic results. Love and Death applied the formula strictly to 19th Century Russian literature (plus a healthy dollop of Seventh Seal references thrown in for good measure), while the much-lauded Manhattan combined Annie Hall with coffee table photography book to produce one of the oddest amalgams in cinema history: it’s both a gorgeous orgy of widescreen black-and-white cinematography informed by a deep knowledge of still photography art, and an astoundingly non-visual dramatic romantic-comedy: while it’s true that much of its emotional palette is expressed by images, most of its dramaturgical and comedic highlights can be gleaned solely by listening to its soundtrack.

The gods overfilled Woody’s cup-o’-talent, however, and there are exceptions to the rule—works which find their home squarely within the Temple of True Cinema. Sleeper is one such film. Blending slapstick—a genre ever-threatening to petit-bourgeois inclinations towards decorum and social stability, and hence looked down upon by newspaper critics – with science-fiction and romantic comedy, and laden with references more topical than arch-intellectual, Allen evokes in Sleeper something close to the anarchic spirit of his beloved Marx Brothers. Brimming with visual inventiveness—whether in terms of its jaunty art direction, physical comedy, or the certain but unfussy manner in which Allen creates shots and puts them together—Sleeper is cinematically alive.

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[This Thursday we're showing San Francisco-based Jim Granato's feature-length documentary debut, D Tour. The film follows musician Pat Spurgeon, drummer for the Oakland band Rogue Wave, as the group embarks on a tour. Spurgeon struggles with a failing kidney, mobile dialysis, and his friends' responses to the competing claims of art and life. D-Tour won the 2009 SF Film Society Award for best Bay Area documentary feature. A little backstory here from Jim:]

Pat Spurgeon and I have been good friends for more than a decade and we both come from Indiana. Pat is from Michigan City, up near Chicago, and I grew up much further south in the college town of Bloomington; we didn’t meet and become friends until landing in San Francisco in the mid-late 90’s, just a few months apart. But I’d known of Pat years before: he was a popular drummer playing in various bands around Bloomington. Like many kids from the midwest, Pat came down to attend Indiana University or to hang out and take part in the vibrant music scene happening there. For a small town that nearly doubled in population when school was in session, we were living in an oasis. IU has one of the biggest music schools in the world and on nearly every weekend lots of talented musicians would fill the clubs and basements, doing shows and turning us on to different sounds. I used to see Pat play, beating the skins with the likes of Steve Kowalski’s Army and Antenna. The energy was always a buzz all by itself (especially SK Army, who were like a hopped up Jam, only twice as fast) and the shows were always intimate. Nobody stood around with their arms folded either. Everybody was cool, always dancing, and the bands were good most of the time.

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[This Sept 1 is Free Tuesday (first Tues of the month = FREE) & for the special noontime program, experimental filmmaker (and SFMOMA's own head projectionist) Paul Clipson screens high-art takes on low subjects.]

Have SFMOMA’s gatekeepers taken leave of their senses? Inviting subversion into any institution portends a slippery slope. Filmmaker Paul Clipson, head projectionist/AV tech of the museum’s Wattis Theater, might seem an innocuous figure in which to place our trust. It is always such types who lure us to our destruction. What harm, you ask, could there be in charging this manifestly benign cinephile with curatorial powers to assemble a brief survey of mid-century European documentary shorts? It’s true these are arguably the finest flowers in this corner of cinema: Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread is the master’s claim to fame in this realm, while Georges Franju’s Hôtel des Invalides and Alain Resnais’s Le chant du Styrène are the crowning achievements of two of the great names in French documentary of the 1950’s.  Many of us who have worked with Clipson have long suspected a lurking danger beneath his affable exterior. This trio of seditious works reveals an alien intelligence, poised, like the masked Fantômas looming over Paris, dagger elegantly clutched to his side, to strike terror in the heart of San Francisco. Hyperbole? Perhaps. But prudence would urge a proper sifting through the evidence to hand…

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“I started out that evening with hatred, and there was part of me that was out to do him in, get back at him, kill him,” Shirley Clarke said in 1983.   In 1967, when Clarke’s documentary Portrait of Jason hit the theaters, it was undoubtedly a shock. While gay films of the exuberantly campy, fantastical variety had been bubbling up from the 16mm Underground, Jason was the first of these to “get serious”. Adopting the mantle of cinéma-vérité (truth film), and appearing in art houses blown up to 35mm, Jason confronted adventurous viewers with a wholly new cinematic experience: 100 minutes on the silver screen of a talented, tortured, yet unabashed black queen more than ready for her close-up in the one-woman show of a lifetime. The film’s proceedings have lost none of their power to enthrall and disturb. (more…)

I am the last among my contributor-cohort to post, I must sheepishly confess. Suzanne gave us the simple remit of San Francisco in the present, which remit has nevertheless been singularly difficult for me to fulfill. I don’t live today, as they say. As the Spring semester at CCA has wound down, my teaching and writing has located me decisively in multiple pasts: 1993, 1983, 1978, 1975, 1974, 1969, 1930, 1928, 1924, 1921, 1919, 1917, 1905, 1872, 1849. These are times I can say something about.  Ask me about Vitebsk, Dublin, Bern, Odessa, Dresden, Vancouver, Detroit. N’importe où hors du monde.

This is what it is to be an art historian sometimes. San Francisco is not on my mind. But perhaps this is one version of this city: periods of privacy and labor, thinking, writing, watching movies and dreaming of other places. Wallace Berman was never more himself than when he was making work and listening to “Baby Love” thirty times in a row. These introversions are then punctuated by spells of sociability and coalescence, when everything seems to be charged and happening. Presence is differential if it is anything. It is invisible and unspeakable if it is constant.

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The first program of the extensive Robert Frank retrospective has arrived—prepare yourself for a turbulent voyage. The Americans evinced an underlying interest in narrative, and before it had been released in book form, Frank had made the leap into filmmaking, in the process helping to launch the spectacular era of “Underground Movies”. This movement, rising from the intensely passionate world of New York cinephilia in what might be termed its “alternative” forms, would swell to become one of the dominant fixtures of the New York scene for more than a decade, before long making its influence felt around the world. Made at a time when it still seemed possible to propose a self-sustaining “counter-cinema” to the established genre forms of Hollywood features, Frank’s beginning forays were short, but were nonetheless major salvos towards the creation of a renewed cinematic culture.

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“What was it? A meteorite that fell to earth? Or a visitation from outer space? Whatever it was, there appeared in our small land a miracle of miracles: the ZONE. We sent in troops. None returned. Then we surrounded the ZONEwith police cordons… We did right… Although I’m not sure…” –From an interview with Prof. Wallace, Nobel Prize winner, on RAI.  (epigraph to Stalker)

With every passing year the legend of Andrei Tarkovsky grows more intense and intoxicating. In a career spanning a quarter-century, Tarkovsky fought a heroic struggle to make his seven feature films — the first five in his native Russia, the remaining two as an exile in the west.The Russian films are largely accepted as canonical masterpieces of modern cinema, with Stalker (1979) last, but far from least, among them.

For all of Tarkovsky’s life, Russia was the central power of a Soviet Union which discouraged and at times punished with exile, thus inevitable death under the most brutal conditions, overt displays of religiosity or explorations of the “Russian soul.” Somehow — probably through a mixture of personal charm, obvious talent, and an incredible force of will — Tarkovsky managed every several years to persuade the powers of the Soviet film industry to grant him a contract to make yet another film, despite little chance of positive payback for its sponsors. His cinema was possessed of a bracing lure: similar to the final image of his penultimate work, Nostalghia, each film was analogous to a dacha, the Russian family summer-cottage which for Tarkovsky served as symbolic repository of the Russian soul, surrounded by the hovering technocratic Soviet superstructure. Tarkovsky’s films, possible only in the post-Stalin era, served as beacons to the spiritually and mystically inclined, standard-bearers of a realm of no small interest and importance within Russian history and culture.

Rather than the rigorously sparse means of expression Paul Schrader has identified as intrinsic to the “transcendental style” of the films of Ozu and Bresson, Tarkovsky plunges us into a Russian-inflected shamanic realm of over-abundant visionary experience. Via a surfeit of lyrical, dream-toned imagery photographed in alternating color and black and white; soundtracks suffused with allusive (and sometimes eerie) effects and music; shapeshifting narratives; and tortured, Dostoyevskian characters whose traumas mirror the confusion of an audience’s attempt to puzzle out the promise of meaning lurking around every corner, Tarkovsky transports those viewers so-inclined into instant spiritual ecstasy. Though experience of the numinous is the point of Tarkovsky’s work, the evocation of the ecstatic dimension wouldn’t be possible without the tension of contradictory social themes: the weight of Russian history in Andrei Rublev and in Mirror, or the perils of technocratic man confronted with imperatives of soul and psyche in Solaris and Stalker.

Stalker is often considered Tarkovsky’s most profound exploration of the spiritual alienation endemic to modern man. Although its characters and milieu couldn’t be more Russian, there’s enough internal evidence to indicate we’re in an abstract pan-European territory (La Marseillaise emanating from a passing train at the film’s opening, or the clues provided by the epigraph above with which the film begins), representing more a state of mind than concrete nation-state. This territory is beneficiary and victim of a phenomenon known as the ZONE: a region taken over by a mysterious force which upends the laws of physics, conveying those who dare enter it into a dreamscape of magic and terror. Most who enter are never heard from or seen again. In the center of the ZONE is reputed to be the Room, in which anyone who enters is granted the deepest desire at the core of his or her psyche. Those who have made their way through its doors and returned home have had immediate worldly success, gone insane, or committed suicide.

Suffering the anomie appropriate to their respective professions, a “Writer” and “Scientist” are guided into the ZONE by the eponymous “Stalker” in an apparent search for much-needed rejuvenation. To accomplish this, the group must first detach themselves from the Stalker’s long-suffering wife, who desperately wants her husband to give up his dangerous profession, and then make it through a no-man’s-land patrolled by machine-gun wielding troops serving a gargoyle-like, “abandon all hope ye who enter here” function. Having penetrated the ZONE, the trio find themselves in an area that at first seems like the one from which they’ve just traveled, and Writer and Scientist set to bickering, revealing themselves jaded cynics who have come to the ZONE merely to disprove its powers. The Stalker, a figure with analogs to Christ and Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, Prince Myshkin, is brought to the brink of despair by their acrimonious antics, but soldiers on: it is his vocation, his life’s purpose, to bring those who seek his guidance to the portals of the Room. As their trek proves ever more precarious and hallucinatory, Stalker leads Writer and Scientist deep into the labyrinth, to a confrontation with their secret hopes, demons, and the infinite…

Details of Stalker’s narrative and the ZONE are as allusive and obdurately mysterious as the novels of Kafka, and the film is similar to them in tone and structure. The ZONE has been interpreted variously as a metaphor for the soul, the subconscious depths of the psyche, or the private inner realm divorced from outer social reality — all domains in relation to which contemporary consciousness has lost its bearings. The Stalker is a would-be shaman who denies himself full access to the potentialities of his talents by allowing his fear to prevent him from entering the Room himself. Because of the ZONE’s influence, however, by Stalker’s end we are witnesses to the evolution of a “new man” possessing powers capable of transcending the Stalker’s limitations.

Tarkovsky approached his work on Stalker with a fanatical devotion perhaps even leading to his death at age 54, felled by the same form of cancer which also took his wife (who acted as assistant director on Stalker) as well as Anatoli Solonitsyn, who plays the Writer. They are said to have been exposed to toxic chemicals in the evocative landscapes serving as Stalker’s exteriors, an unfortunate legacy of the injudicious Soviet treatment of the environment. Despite whatever hardships (including unnatural death as an exile) Tarkovsky endured as an artist from the Soviet Union, however, it’s difficult to imagine what other country or political system would have financed such abstruse work at such high budgets. The Andrei Rublev budget, to my eye, looks almost unlimited, and he was allowed to make Stalker twice — after a year spent on location, it was discovered the lab had ruined the negative. Western studios probably would have junked the disastrous production as a tax write-off, but Tarkovsky was allowed to reshoot his film in its entirety.

Tarkovsky decried the corrupt commercialism he found in the West. Such a figure’s spiritual thematic would be seen as naïve, even primitive, by contemporary standards. The transformative gravity he ascribed to the means and purpose of art might now seem quaint. To be part of a group slowly becoming enthralled by such a film as Stalker, however, is an intoxicating experience. The members of Tarkovsky’s audience, if only subconsciously, are brought to awareness of their own hidden depths, of the calling of the soul, of the imperative quest for the sacred. To see his films is to experience the process the Russian filmmaker described as “scales falling from the eyes”.

Stalker screens in the Wattis Theater TONIGHT (April 9th) and SATURDAY (April 11th), as part of our Utopia/Dystopia film series. Russian with English subtitles. For a fantastic teaser: see this dream sequence on YouTube.

[The film series The Future of the Past, starting this Saturday, explores the rich cinematic history of imagining the future. Released from 1965 through the iconic Orwellian year 1984, the films present not-too-distant worlds that reflect extremes in the social, moral, and political trends of their time.]

A few months ago Frank Smigiel, associate curator of Public Programs, and I discussed creating a film series loosely connected to Patterns of Speculation: J. Mayer H. Frank proposed a utopian theme, centered on 1970s films such as Logan’s Run. With that I was off and running…and compiling this list of titles was like a dream fulfilled! I remember many of these films from a childhood spent watching countless hours of television (unsupervised!), encountering these films first either as the late-night movie, on cable TV, or on VHS.  So it’s certainly a thrill for me to see them now on the big screen at SFMOMA.

As the program began to take shape and I became more engaged with ways the plots, places, structures and characters of these films might serve my theme, the utopian fantasies soon revealed themselves to be just the opposite: dystopic realities. In these visions of possible futures, the systems ostensibly set in place to uphold pleasurable worlds of harmony and desire fulfilled are soon called into question. And as the systems break down, assumptions about their beneficial or well-intentioned functions also begin to break down: metaphorically, psychologically, socially, technologically. For example, in Westworld (which opens the series this afternoon) a completely manufactured world operates as a place for people to live out their innermost desires without consequence. At the $1000-a-day resort called “Delos” vacationers can safely immerse themselves in historical times and places — the Roman Empire, for example, or medieval England–and the resort is populated with androids programmed to react and respond appropriately to the whims and desires of the paying human visitors who, being far removed from their everyday social and moral restrictions, take advantage of an anything-goes mentality:  sex and murder without regret, moral conflict, or fear of punishment.  The “Westworld” of the film’s title  is the lawless American ‘old west’ visited by two pleasure seekers, played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin, who give in to the allure of this supposed freedom and are seduced by saloon girls and get in to a shoot-out with the black-clad Gunslinger (played by Yul Brynner in a conscious nod to his character Chris in the Magnificent Seven). However, the technological system supporting the Delos resort begins to fail, and the androids get hostile, refusing sex and fighting back, and the promise of utopia without consequence is shattered in a technological meltdown.

And that’s just the series beginning! Shady totalitarian regimes wielding unchecked power; constant surveillance; thought control (love is a big no-no in these worlds!); and social conformity are the salient themes of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Alphaville. Logan’s Run investigates troubling solutions to overpopulation, while Soylent Green grapples with a global food shortage with a gruesome plan to resolve the crisis. A Clockwork Orange examines the role of behavior control through the eyes of a teenage criminal in a world without law. Woody Allen’s Sleeper adds comic relief to what is otherwise a series full of dire messages! And, the otherworldly Fantastic Planet, the only animation we’ve included, reveals life on both sides of the divide, suggesting that what may be utopia for one group, is dystopia for the other.

The Future of the Past series spans three decades of beautifully crafted works that portray the range of the human condition caught up in the paradox of moral, social and political extremes, played out in highly constructed terrain. The series could have gone on and on, too: for example, I would have loved to also include Shivers (dir: David Cronenberg, 1975), The Stepford Wives (dir: Bryan Forbes, 1975), La Vie est un Roman (dir: Alain Resnais, 1983), or Archigram and Superstudio films. Many of my colleagues here also had great suggestions for extending the series! and I encourage everyone to chime in with thoughts on films you would have liked to see so that perhaps the series can continue remotely…

On behalf of the Public Programs Department and SFMOMA I’m sorry to announce that a family emergency prevents Chantal Akerman from joining us this Saturday,  February 28. She sends many regrets.

We will, of course, still screen the new 35mm print of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at 1pm.  B. Ruby Rich will introduce the film, and we’ve also added a small post-screening reception to celebrate the conclusion of the Akerman series. Hope you can join us for both.

Very sorry to report this news, as we were quite excited to host Chantal — but we certainly understand the necessity of her cancellation.

You can read more on Chantal Akerman and this film below.

Also, acclaimed film/media theorist Kaja Silverman will screen and discuss some of Akerman’s recent film and installation work Sunday at the PFA.

Getting a purchase on Chantal Akerman, the Paris-based film and video artist, who over the last forty years has created a monumental body of work from ignored and abandoned images, and the hidden rhythms of the everyday, is no small or easy task. There are many routes of approach, and almost as many identities and communities to claim her. The daughter of displaced Polish Jews, born and raised in Belgium, Akerman came of age chronologically and artistically in the social and political tumult of the late sixties. Though her work is inherently feminist, and evinces a polyvalent sexuality which has attracted great interest in the Bay Area, it eludes neat categorization, being based in direct experience beyond rational thought or verbalization. Starting as an experimental filmmaker, she quickly ventured into art-cinema features and experimental documentary, and has most recently become a gallery-based video installation artist, beginning in 1995 with the SFMOMA debut of Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est.” Her exposure since has included an exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and a retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2004. Her video installation work Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space is currently touring the US.

Akerman’s work measures the weight of millennia of Jewish and European history like no other: although interacting with a dizzying variety of genres, and pitched in multiple registers, from dark and heavy to evanescently light, it is an oeuvre made coherent by Akerman’s constant awareness of the tragic dimension, leading to a Zen-like appreciation of the depth and gravity of the present moment. Some of these genres and registers include: inner landscapes of solitary compulsion, as in Jeanne Dielman or the voyeuristic, Vertigo-influenced Proust adaptation, La captive (2000); forays into the comic like Toute une nuit (1982), a film poised somewhere between performance art and romantic comedy; or the nonpareil experimental documentaries which might be termed “materialist,” in that they foreground their anti-illusionism, and yet give a profound sense of the physical and psychic totality of the places they portray, such as News from Home (1977), Sud (1999), and D’Est, which captured fleeting images of an “unspoiled” Russia and Eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain. D’Est was redeployed as the above-mentioned video installation Bordering on Fiction.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the capstone to SFMOMA’s current fourteen-work retrospective, and the object of cult veneration over the decades since its release, is a towering Mater-horn of modern cinema, and without doubt Akerman’s greatest work. Its title informs us precisely what we’ll be experiencing: the film is largely about a woman, her apartment, and, to a lesser extent, the surrounding environs of Brussels in which these are located. Living alone, aside from a sourish, prune-faced high school-age son who sleeps on a sofa-bed in the living room, Jeanne both inhabits and haunts her living quarters: the majority of the film’s shots take in with unprecedented detail and duration the various domestic duties which tie her to her environment, but she exhibits a psychic remove as palpable as all the apartment’s delicately, exquisitely photographed objects. To support this domicile, every afternoon she receives a male client into her bedroom for paid sex. The film takes place over the course of three days, and we are not allowed to see the goings-on in her bedroom until the climax of the third day, after the magic of her obsessive-compulsive household rituals has begun to wear off, and routine and the psychic composure it generates have begun to unravel…

Jeanne Dielman’s three days are dealt with leisurely but inevitably over the course of three hours and twenty-one minutes. We are treated to the panoply of her obsessive activities: making coffee, preparing veal early in the day for the night’s supper, bathing, and scouring the bathtub afterwards, writing letters to relatives in Canada, going to the post office, storing her son’s bed away, etc. Each of Jeanne’s precise actions tends to be covered from beginning to end — when she makes coffee, or bathes, she really makes coffee or takes a bath, often in a single shot. This manner of miniature domestic drama, brilliantly rendered by Akerman, has caused Jeanne Dielman to be regarded as the first, greatest, and perhaps only masterpiece of “real-time” cinema, that is, narrative films whose scenes take place over the actual amount of time the actions in them would really take, these scenes being often shot from one camera position as proof of their “reality”:  No cutting = no gimmicks. Descriptions of this technique regularly scare away curious would-be viewers, adding a forbidding element to an otherwise seductive reputation. In discussing her methodology, however, Akerman stresses how she intuitively molded the moments of her film, and I can attest from many viewings that it’s a completely crafted work, simmering with precision, elegance, and narrative vigor. Although its sense of time is informed by Akerman’s early exposure to films by Andy Warhol and Michael Snow, the last time I saw it I was astonished by the amount of Hitchcockian suspense created by its long takes, expressionist use of sound (in fact, one could make a case for the whole film as an expressionist work), and its focus on telling details of Jeanne’s relationship to objects, especially as things go awry.

The centerpiece of Jeanne Dielman is the performance by Delphine Seyrig in the title role. Most famous in the US for Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (though one of her earliest screen roles had been in the New York-set Beat film Pull My Daisy, co-directed by Robert Frank and co-starring Allen Ginsberg), Seyrig was one of the iconic European stars of her generation, embodying a heady mix of mystery, glacial glamor, and an alluring, inwards-directed sensuality. Seyrig lends all of this to Jeanne, whose character was based on Akerman’s observations of her mother, an Auschwitz survivor. Together Seyrig and Akerman collaborate in creating one of the great enigmatic screen apparitions, and a film whose ultimate drama is the slow posing of the unanswerable riddle of Jeanne’s nature both to the audience and herself.

The full impact of the sensual intensity of Jeanne Dielman can only be experienced via a 35mm print projected onto the big screen, an event which hasn’t occurred in the Bay Area for many years. I’m told that the rare, pristine new print SFMOMA is showing has previously made its way through a projector only two or three times, and this, plus Akerman’s appearance at Saturday’s screening, constitute exciting opportunities for fan and neophyte alike to encounter this work and its creator. It’s become something of a parlor game for ambitious critics to anoint various thirty and forty-somethings as “greatest living filmmaker” (this while Godard, Resnais, and Rivette, say, are still kicking!). While not fully joining in such hyperbolic absurdity, I will nonetheless allow myself a bold claim — there is no more important film and video artist alive and working today than Chantal Akerman.

[Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, screens tonight and Saturday. Chantal Akerman will be here on Saturday to introduce the film, and for Q&A post.] [UPDATE: We've just gotten word that, due to unforeseen family circumstance, Ms Akerman will NOT be in San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned for further details and other potential guests--SS]

[This Saturday, as part of our "Vegas Highs, Vegas Lows" film series, and timely to our winter holidays, we'll be screening Bay Area filmmaker Caveh Zahedi's I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. Winner of the prestigious Critic's Prize at the Rotterdam International film festival, this real-life documentary comedy follows Zahedi on a road trip to Las Vegas with his father and half-brother, in an attempt to prove the existence of God. When it isn't going in the direction he would like, he attempts to force God's hand by trying to persuade his father, half-brother and a heart-sick sound recordist to take Ecstasy with him. All thanks to Caveh for this backstory introduction to the film:]

When my first feature, A Little Stiff, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, I took the opportunity to pitch a dozen or so ideas to film producer James Schamus (now co-president of Focus Features). Of all the ideas I pitched him, his favorite (which he offered to produce) was also the least commercial — a film about taking a road trip to Las Vegas with my gambling-addicted Iranian father and teenage half-brother. Career-wise, it was so counter-intuitive to make that my next film that I decided it must be the right thing to do.

Since I didn’t really know how to write a script, I decided to travel to Las Vegas with my father, my half-brother, and a tape recorder. I figured I could just record our conversations for three days, transcribe those conversations, edit them down to a ninety-page script, and voilà. Which is exactly what I did.

I submitted the script to James Schamus who tried but failed to raise the $200,000 needed to make it. After two years of rejection letters, I finally got a grant from the American Film Institute for $20,000 to shoot the film. Because much of the film took place in a Las Vegas casino and some of it took place underwater (in the casino’s swimming pool), it wasn’t possible to shoot the script that I had written (or, more accurately, transcribed) on that budget. What to do?

I called the American Film Institute and explained my predicament. I also explained to them that while waiting for the funding to come through, I had written another script entitled I Am A Sex Addict which I would rather shoot instead, if it was okay with them, simply because it was more recent and seemed more commercially viable. They explained to me that I could depart from the original script as long as I kept the title and the original premise — in this case, a weekend road trip to Las Vegas.

I was broke at the time and didn’t want to say no to $20,000. So I agreed to shoot a film with that title and premise, and set about trying to figure out how to do it for $20,000. What I decided to do was to throw out the script and just re-enact anything interesting that happened on the trip, immediately after it happened. This quickly proved impossible to pull off, mostly because it became clear almost immediately that my father couldn’t act.

So the film became a kind of documentary about this second trip, although this time there was a camera crew who became the secondary characters in the film. I brought some Ecstasy along to spice things up just in case nothing interesting happened, and what actually did happen I never in a million years could have imagined.

I spent two years editing the film (which was shot in 3 days) and submitted it to the Sundance Film Festival. Because I shot and edited on film, the tape splices broke during the projection and the Sundance programmer, angry that I had wasted his time, called to tell me that I would have to send him a VHS copy. I later heard through the grapevine that he HATED the film, and that he spoke vituperatively about me and the film for years afterwards. I soon learned that he would not be the only person to HATE my movie.

Whereas my previous film had been bought by both the Sundance Channel and German Television, this film never made a penny. It basically destroyed (irrevocably?) my once-promising film career. Despite winning the Critic’s Prize at the Rotterdam International Film Festival when it premiered there, the film was panned by almost every single American film critic and reviewer. One rather eminent critic called me a “twerp.” I was depressed for a year.

A few years later, I met Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M.  I told him how much I loved his songs, and he asked me if I was the guy who made I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore. “You’ve seen it?” I asked him. He told me that he had, and that it had become a cult film in Athens, Georgia. That was the first time I’d heard anyone talk about that film as a cult film, but I heard it again and again over the years.

The film is almost impossible to find. It has never been released on DVD, and it has long since been out of print on VHS (the company that distributed it eventually went broke). I couldn’t even get the master back from the lab because the distributor never paid them and they were holding my film as ransom.

But time has a way of changing things. What is unquestionably my least successful film ever is, in the eyes of many, the best film I ever made. Many people who hated the film when they first saw it have since come around and now like it. I’m not sure how to explain this. Was it ahead of its time? Has the world caught up to it? Was it just bad timing?

In any case, it’s a film that is very close to my heart. I started dating my current wife after she saw the film and fell in love with it. Without this film, my life would have been completely different.

San Francisco
December 2008

Caveh Zahedi received a B.A. in Philosophy at Yale University and an M.F.A. in Film Production at the UCLA School of Film and Television. His feature-length films include A Little Stiff (1991), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994), In The Bathtub of the World (2001), and I Am A Sex Addict (2005).

[This Saturday! As part of our "Vegas Highs, Vegas Lows" film series, and in conjunction with the exhibition Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas, we're screening Viva Las Vegas (1pm) and Showgirls (3pm). Not to be missed!]

Never have there been two films so ripe for reassessment as George Sidney’s Viva Las Vegas, and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Made thirty years apart, they both reside in that basket reserved for the culturally unsanctioned. Maybe it’s due to the stain of Vegas — that fata Morgana that has traditionally made the highfalutin see red. Now, in the true era of anything goes, in which the Vegas aesthetic has established itself as the norm, it’s just possible their time has come…

Why reassess an Elvis movie? ‘Cause this one’s so damned fun! There are a few decent Elvis movies. Viva is the only great one. The King is as close as the United States ever came to producing an autochthonous deity. The lack of a worthy consort might explain the fallowness of the rest of his cinematic terrain. In Viva, Elvis meets his match, Ann-Margret. The plot of this film is a pretext for their sacred union, bringing with it the promise of fulfillment to the magical kingdom of Vegas — that ultimate flowering, refinement, end-point of the American mythos. Elvis plays an up-and-coming race-car driver, always a dice-toss away from attaining the motor of his dreams. Ann-Margret is a young goddess on the unconscious make for the proper consort. Together they will play, flirt, bicker, argue, make up, as well as sing and dance the rock-n-roll over the course of eighty-five increasingly ecstatic minutes. They inhabit a world of widescreen neon, in which every desire is attainable, and every dream has merely to be fantasized, and it’s suddenly reality — all without repercussion. Yes, this is the true American Dream.

I believe somewhere in the pages of Cahiers du cinema in the 1950’s, a proto-French New Wave director mused on the revolutionary concepts he hoped to enact in celluloid: gone would be artificial notions of plot and character not derived from action. Film was about the eternal now. Each moment would create its own reality, its own urgency. Life would be experienced by the glance, the gesture, the drama of expressions across the face, from second to second, shot to shot. If a character desired to sing, he’d sing. If she wanted to dance, she’d dance. If angry, they’d shoot to kill. If lusty, they’d go to town… Desire, thought, and action would again be one — and paradise regained. Each scene would exist for itself, build to a new shuddering climax, then be dismissed, in an endless quest for the new now now now…

This article must have been amongst the earliest of its kind to be translated from the French, and transported to Hollywood, for George Sidney, prince of the MGM musical-comedy, apparently read it and instantly put its principles into action. As an example of this New Wave genre, it has never been surpassed. Sidney was just the man for the job, having built an extensive body of work poised somewhere between primitive surrealist and naive absurdism, which had a long history of sending the literati into uncontrollable spasms of collective horror and outrage, and of gracing the faces of the average Jane or Joe with smiles of pleasure. There is something seriously strange about Sidney’s work, an unhinged yet vital deliriousness, a quality emitting from some now deep-buried, disclaimed and abandoned fold of the American Grain, which, I must admit, I find intoxicating.

Jonathan Rosenbaum once proposed Gentleman Prefer Blondes as the capitalist Potemkin, but for me this title goes to Viva Las Vegas. Though Blondes is arguably brilliantly embedded with capitalist ideology, Viva cuts to the chase by offering an unsurpassable platter of delights for our ecstatic delectation. This is the field of argument to which capitalism is best suited. Examples of what’s on offer: Elvis performing “What I Say” in a sequence that gives both Ray Charles and Bruce Conner runs for their money, the most mind-blowing first date in cinema history (not counting Last Tango in Paris), and, at the film’s climax, the most viscerally exciting auto race I’ve ever seen in a movie.

But this film is far more than capitalist apologia, for its convulsive beauty contains a religious dimension — an ecstatic vision, a mystical union of opposites, Viva Las Vegas presents such a profoundly affirmative view of the American psyche, that it suggests it’s capable of (witness the “fate” of Cesare Danova) transcending death itself.

If Viva is Vegas as utopia, the Vegas of Showgirls is a dystopia worthy of Blade Runner, or Brecht’s Mahagonny. Ambition, manipulation, corruption, the quest for power — these are the issues on this film’s agenda. Though its Vegas is as beautiful as that of Viva (in a 1995 kinda way), this work is a large and bitter pill — ultimately to your benefit, but scary for those in search of a quick and easy tease.

Showgirls follows the exploits of Nomi Malone, a dancer who seeks to protect her integrity while crawling to the top of the Vegas food-chain. Young, vital, infinitely ambitious, yet willfully naive, charming but profoundly undereducated in all but a modicum of the street-smarts she desperately wants to shed, Nomi is a mass of contradictions, a woman in severe need of Reichian analysis, in which every element of being is treated as neurotic symptom. All of her talents and symptoms will come into play as she battles her way from strip-club nymph to full-fledged Goddess of show business on the Vegas strip. Arrayed against her is a virtual network of the devious and duplicitous, all of whom want either to prevent her from attaining her rightful pedestal in the Pantheon, or gain access past her g-string. As she powers her way through power-mad would-be seducers (club and show managers, a choreographer manqué, the reigning Vegas Goddess, a sexually violent Michael Bolton doppelganger), she comes ever-so-close to a confrontation with her own heart of darkness, but like America, to which her character is an analog, Nomi will stop at nothing to protect her remaining shreds of innocence. Over the course of the film, the trail of self-deception and chaos in her wake reveals a latter-day incarnation of Inanna, Sumerian Goddess of passion, war, and destruction.

Paul Verhoeven’s audacity is seen in the way he vacuum-packs contrary elements into seemingly irresolvable structures. Dealing in a largely heterosexual eros, but in a self-consciously high-camp manner, relishing ambiguity and reveling in primal force, proffering both satirical social critique and an appreciation for the permutations of undying archetypes, and working in a style marked for its mixture of raw garishness and cold European aestheticism, it’s no wonder the works are so often misunderstood. Their aim tends both above the head and below the belt.

The difficulty of these films is compounded by Verhoeven’s open embrace of that despised form, melodrama. This isn’t a problem for his macho melodramas — Robocop and Starship Troopers — but the mode has become somehow threatening when applied to a female world view. Showgirls refers back to the genre of “women’s pictures”, now for the most part sadly defunct, which dealt with troublesome emotions — hysteria, say, or unrequited love — and were often centered around sympathetic portrayals of outsider women. They served as societal safety valves, providing catharsis, allowing for an imaginative exploration of a realm of extravagant emotionality, touching parts of the psyche now repressed. This instinctive, working-class genre has lost its currency, due, in part, to the intertwining rise of PC strictures and upwardly mobile aspirations, and their concomitant code of rigid decorum. Guy Maddin, in a recent, spirited defense, said “melodrama isn’t true life exaggerated — that would be bogus. It’s true life uninhibited, just like our dreams.” And uninhibited emotion in the classically “feminine” mode just ain’t in fashion.

In dream-like style, Showgirls (like Viva) romps through other genres (musical, soft-core porno, over-the-top exploitation film, martial-arts action) as well, in the best meta-Hollywood manner, making for a narrative and dramatic short-hand in which complex ideas and feelings are suggested with ruthlessly efficient, effortless speed. Genre play in a film overloaded with painful realities is, in fact, the most transgressive element of this radical work — and the cause of the emotional gag-reflex it has so often inspired. Ultimately, Showgirls is a “women’s picture” made for men, and therefore disturbing to just about everybody.

[Hello all. A small group of us have been having the occasional post-screening discussion in response to the Jarman retrospective now on. As I noted yesterday, none of us have been quite sure how to gauge our encounter with Derek Jarman. Weighing in below are Brecht Andersch, our projectionist, and Stephen Hartman, film-loving psychoanalyst! (You may remember them from our summer of Alexanderplatz). If you have thoughts, we'd love to hear them.]

Stephen Hartman:

So fond of techno am I that I have always refused to listen to—I’m sure I’ve even said “hated”—opera without knowing much about it. Then, recently, a dear friend set out to convert me. We spent a wonderful evening listening and comparing. As I write now, my new heroine Régine Crespin is belting out Verdi. Alas, me…a convert?

Unfortunately, diving back into Derek Jarman after many years had the opposite effect. Where I was once an Act Up boy overwhelmed by the poetry of The Garden and in tears at the New York premier of Blue (which, I hope, will still reduce me to rubble), I left Caravaggio mildly interested, The Last of England bored, and The Garden all but obtunded. People change. And the films and music that give us identity age. I embraced Jarman in the 1980’s because the lush sensibility mixed with righteous indignation and a certain academic veneration of beauty had operatic strength. Why now, I wonder, does Jarman’s vision seem dated dull? Postmodern without punch? Operatic in its hysteria but without a unifying beat?

There are so many magnificent images. Yet, in the way they knit together, something seems lacking, unmetabolized. It was, of course, a very different time. People were dying of AIDS everywhere with no end in sight and WMD’s were circling around the American southwest on train tracks, set to launch at any moment. It was a jittery time: melancholic even in advance of death. Jarman captured thanatos well—if not with a kind of aesthetic hyperbole that could be hypnotic or off-putting relative to your anger at the unassimilated thud of yet another death.

At some point, though, the fat lady sings and there is resolution. I’m afraid that for Jarman, at least in the films we have seen so far, the tragedy is still pending. I’m going to try to go back to that time of waiting for the inevitable. But it is rubbing me the wrong way now that my heroes are the ones armed with hope rather than despair.

Brecht Andersch:

While I must confess my previous encounters with Jarman’s work didn’t make me a fan, and this extensive retrospective has not been a conversion experience, I’ve nevertheless found some elements in the work to admire and enjoy, such as:

1) This is an artist of confidence and audacity – Jarman is a man full of feeling and passion, and whatever fears he faces regarding the difficulties of expressing a complex and thorny vision are met face-on and dispatched.

2) His work is deeply personal – each film seems to tell a version of his own story, or provide an update as to how events have affected the development of his vision. Many of my favorite filmmakers, writers, and artists work in this mode.

3) The filmmakers he emulates and to whom he pays repeated homage are artists I admire immensely: Michael Powell, Cocteau, Pasolini, Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos. At one point in The Last of England, a rapid-fire montage of black and white imagery alternating with shots dominated by red or blue (in a manner clearly influenced by Anger and Markopoulos) is immediately followed by a homage to the ending of Pasolini’s Salo: two soldier/terrorists dance near a fire burning in the middle of the street, machine-guns slung over their shoulders as they waltz…

4) Jarman has a bold and unusual sense of color and film form in general, and the results are often beautiful. One technique he employs repeatedly is to blow up super-8 Kodachrome to 35mm. As a lover of this now almost defunct “home movie” stock, I find it very exciting to encounter its deep, saturated reds and blues on the big screen, though, as I’m also something of a film purist, the pixels acquired from the video intermediate of The Last of England are a bit disconcerting. More to my taste is that super-8 Kodachrome moment in Jubilee—blown up directly to 35mm—in which a ballerina performs, out-of-doors and nearby a fire. Through deft in-camera editing and graceful camera movement and zooms (Jarman no doubt operating the camera himself) Jarman becomes his dancer’s partner, and the film and the world come alive…

5) Jarman is unyieldingly honest, his work over-stuffed with contradictory impulses and ideas. Just when I’m ready to write him off as an unredeemable chiliast, for example, he makes a whole film—Wittgenstein—dedicated to the story of a man who must learn to live with all of life’s roughness and confusion. As alluded to above, each of Jarman’s films is a chapter in a too-early concluded spiritual autobiography, and this kind of rigorously honest self-appraisal—in a quest for a deeper encounter with Self—is extremely attractive to me.

[We're a lot about Derek Jarman on the blog of late. It's been for many of us in the theater a process of discovery and rediscovery, and if the conversations I've participated in and overheard are a good barometer, even for those who are more familiar with Jarman's oeuvre it isn't as much meeting an old friend as re-encountering a familiar stranger you're not quite sure what to do with. James Mackay, who produced numerous films with Jarman, writes here about the production of The Angelic Conversation, the first feature they made together, detailing especially the development of Jarman's signature use of lo-fi film mediums including Super 8 mm and video. Mr. Mackay has also sent some fantastic snapshots taken on location during the shooting of The Angelic Conversation. We'll be screening that film this Saturday at 3pm. Enjoy.]

Left to right: Derek Jarman, Philip Williamson, Ken Bolton. Taking a break from filming The Angelic Conversation (1985). Photo: James Mackay.

The first I heard about Derek Jarman was at an exhibition of Expanded Cinema at the ICA in 1974. They were showing a three-screen version of In the Shadow of the Sun. I didn’t meet Derek until much later, however, at the London Filmmakers Co-op in the late 70s, when I invited him to show some of the many Super8mm films he’d made. That night Derek showed some twenty films, projecting them himself from two small Bolex projectors he’d brought with him, and accompanying the films with a selection of music from commercial audio cassettes – like a DJ really. He kept the audience enthralled for almost three hours.

During the prep for that show we’d discussed the merits and disadvantages of working in Super8mm, especially the problem of fragility, and when we met again it was mainly to talk about preservation of his S8mm films. At the time however Derek was also very excited about the two features he had in development – Caravaggio and Neutron – and every time we met he would read aloud from each revision.  Using my contacts in Europe, I was able to raise funding to have a 16mm negative made from the Super8mm original of In the Shadow of the Sun. This was Derek’s first magnum opus and the result of four years of filming and many layered composites.

As we spent more time together I was slowly drawn into the production process, from script consultant to development producer on Caravaggio. However, as that film was proving difficult to get off the ground Derek continued to work on other projects with the more accessible medium of Super 8 mm. TG Psychic Rally in Heaven (1981) was our first film conceived to be shot on S8mm but then completed on a more distributable format, in that case, 16mm. This was followed by a series of films mixing S8mm and 16mm. Our first foray into large-scale production started during a session at the ICA, where we were preparing a selection of Derek’s early S8mm films for a run in the cinema by transferring them to video. We were doing this by projecting the S8 films onto a white wall and reshooting them with a video camera. Halfway through the second day we started to get a bit bored with this process and began to experiment with a large tarnished mirror and the projectionist, Steve Randall. Derek projected the image on to Steve and the mirror while filming the scene with the video camera. This was an exciting new departure, and the material we filmed that day was the first step in making The Angelic Conversation.

Derek Jarman, Ken Reynolds. On location for The Angelic Conversation, Somerset. Photo: James Mackay.

With Agfa selling off its colour stock cheap – £2.5 for a cartridge, including processing – it was decided that our new project should be something more ambitious than a short. The combination of low-cost stock and Derek’s preferred shooting speed of 6fps meant that a little stock went a long way. There were to be two central characters. Derek had met Paul Reynolds at the Bell in King’s X and somehow I found Phillip Williamson. The idea was to create a free-form love poem with these two young men at its center.

We filmed the sequences for the new work gradually over the course of a summer. As our resources were very limited – neither of us had any real income at that time – we could only afford to film one or two days at a time. Derek chose all the locations. I devised the smoke and flares. Ken Bolton or another friend would drive and as there was only room for four, with a driver, Derek, & myself there was space for only one of the principal actors on each location shoot! The only time the actors were filmed together was for the bed scene in Derek’s Charing X Road flat.

Other scenes, with extras, were filmed in the ICA cinematheque. A video-only sequence was filmed in Derek’s flat. After each shoot the film was sent off for processing. As soon as it came back we would borrow a U-matic recorder from the British Film Institute on the other side of Charing X Road and then video the films off the wall. It all sounds a bit amateurish but we were deadly serious. (more…)

[Taking a cue from Michael Buitron at Leap Into the Void (via MAN), rather than marking the 19th annual (but now somewhat invisible?) "Day Without Art" by shrouding an artwork or going dark for the day, I leave you with these wonderful stills from some of Derek Jarman's earliest Super 8 mm films, with thanks to producer James Mackay, who provided them. Jarman was probably as well known for his very public homosexuality & his outspoken demand for gay rights as he was for his films. He died on February 19, 1994, of complications from AIDS.]

Derek Jarman. Still from Fire Island, 1974, S8mm. Courtesy James Mackay.

Derek Jarman. Still from A Journey to Avebury, 1971, S8mm. Courtesy James Mackay.

Derek Jarman. Still from Studio Bankside, 1970, S8mm. Courtesy James Mackay.

Derek Jarman. Still from Ashden’s Walk on Møn , 1973, S8mm. Courtesy James Mackay.

We have a fantastic pair of Jarman films this Saturday for your holiday weekend, and I have to say that, for my part, I can think of no better method of recovery from over-familial holiday indulgence than a good dose of hours in the Wattis theater watching movies. Plus, nearly four hours with Tilda Swinton? Who would refuse?

The line-up is: The Garden (1pm) and Wittgenstein (3pm). Gina Basso tells me the pairing is partially a matter of print-traffic timing and partly an oblique reference to “home”. Many readers will know that philosopher L. Wittgenstein also took a foray into architecture, designing a house for his sister, with architect Paul Engelmann, at the sister’s behest. Jarman, on the other hand, was a gardener as well as filmmaker: when he was diagnosed HIV-positive, he bought a fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness, Kent, and spent the years from 1986 until his death in 1994 designing and building the garden which surrounds it, and where the The Garden was shot.

Thanks to one Lady Vervaine for this picture I lifted from Flickr, of Jarman’s real garden (LV describes the picture as a recreation of an important scene in the film, so if you’re here Saturday, look out for it).:

There’s also a cool Flickr set of the whole garden here, by someone named Angus Fraser. I was surprised to see the pictures, as in my ill-traveled American ignorance I never think of any part of England as looking so inhospitable & bleak as a Southern California desert. There’s a lot of rock, stone, and cactus here, and it’s illuminating to note that Jarman set his film here as a garden of Eden. And keep an eye out for the greying hull of some sort of small ship, set against an awfully blue & wonderful sky.

As to Wittgenstein, this is Jarman’s depiction of the life and philosophy of. IMDB describes the film thus:

A dramatization, in modern theatrical style, of the life and thought of the Viennese-born, Cambridge-educated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), whose principal interest was the nature and limits of language. A series of sketches depict the unfolding of his life from boyhood, through the era of the first World War, to his eventual Cambridge professorship and association with Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The emphasis in these sketches is on the exposition of the ideas of Wittgenstein, a homosexual, and an intuitive, moody, proud, and perfectionistic thinker generally regarded as a genius.

Original screenplay by literary critic Terry Eagleton was heavily reworked by Jarman during production.

A review of the film is here (at my favorite cinema blog, Only the Cinema) and here you’ll find a review of both screenplays, which were published together by the British Film Institute.

If you want to do a little prep but don’t feel like trying to get through the Tractatus after your turkey and stuffing, you can watch a nine-part mini YouTube course (a bit weird) re Wittgenstein on language & logic here.

And here’s a short clip from the film itself, which gives a great sense of the mood, the style, the discomfort, the themes, AND Jarman’s humor, all in under two minutes:

We’ve been promising roundtable discussion on the Jarman films, and will give you a dose of it starting early next week with a lovely essay by James Mackay, producer of many Jarman films, and further conversation as the week continues. Come join us in the theater and talk a bit with us here on the blog. You can find all the postings on Jarman (including a week’s worth of music videos) here.

The last of my week of Derek Jarman music videos. Jarman made this video for Throbbing Gristle’s “TG Psychic Rally in Heaven” in 1981. Fair warning, it’s quite violent and explicit in language & content.

I think Jarman’s broken flashes of images complement TG’s challenging, avant-garde music.  Peter Christopherson, who played what we could call the percussion for the band, later went on to form the band Coil, which Jarman employed for soundtracks to many of his films.

More Jarman videos! This is one of several he made for The Smiths, Ask, from 1986.

Derek Jarman’s films and The Smiths’ songs share similar motifs; this video is a prime example. Both reflect on a fractured world. While Morrissey croons, “If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” Jarman’s video depicts romantic encounters in front of an abandoned warehouse. The skeleton dance partner makes the entire scene into a dance macabre: the youth celebrate but the world falls to pieces.

For your dose of intense and stunning war images, here’s the video Jarman directed for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English (1979).

A week of Jarman vids, continued! Jarman made three videos for the Pet Shop Boys: Rent, It’s a Sin and a set of projections for the band’s live shows. Today I have posted the video for Rent but I encourage you to seek out the others, as they are phenomenal as well.  I love the lyrics of this song, they are so to the point.

Hi, it’s Megan. We’ve got a Derek Jarman film series on right now, continuing through November and much of December. Some of you will know that, especially early in his career, Jarman made a lot of music videos. All this week, I will be posting some of my favorites.

To complement Jarman’s rebellious attitude, I thought I’d start off the week with the rebel Marianne Faithfull. Jarman created this video for her song “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” (1979). It’s a beautiful and haunting video. As an added plus, she’s a babe.

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[A special election-week Collection Rotation by San Francisco-based artist & curator Chris Sollars, whose experimental documentary C RED BLUE J will be screening in the Wattis theater Nov 4. All works collection SFMOMA & listed in detail at the bottom of this post.]

At Home in Red & Blue Brother Sister America

Growing up, my sister Jennifer was Red and I was Blue, between the colors of objects in our rooms, beds, clothes, and backpacks. Looking back, I think it’s strange that growing up during the 70s and 80s Reagan’s Republican America appropriated Socialist RED from the USSR.

The opening dream of my recent film C RED BLUE J was a playful way to study the color red used in politics: A Red Phone rings and alerts us of the Enemy—the British Red Coats, The Red Man (not Karl Marx, but he is next), Soviet Red, Red China—and is intercut with a Red finger painting from my childhood, Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds, and Red USA Olympic Athlete Jackets. The USA Formal Athlete Jackets, ironically, are from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, boycotted by the Soviet Union. I almost think it was a conscious decision to appropriate the “Enemy’s” color as a way to diffuse or re-appropriate it.

In the title C RED BLUE J,  C is for Christopher, J is for Jennifer and the RED & BLUE is between us. It also is a play on words: to See a Red Blue Jay, something you would never see but could imagine. Here to coincide with the election I am using C RED BLUE J as a model and method for selecting works from the SFMOMA collection.

I’ve squeezed some of my favorite artists from the collection into the mix. Gordon Matta-Clark, Hans Haacke, Pipilotti Rist, Phillip Guston, Robert Gober, and Edward Kienholz. New favorites from recent visits include Untitled [Man holding eagle with spread wings] and Tim Gardner’s Untitled (S with Mt. Robson). (Not only is “S” holding a Mt Beer can in front of a mountain, the beer is a BUScH!)

I’ve included Nauman’s Study for Hologram, in part because of his influence (along with William Wegman’s)  both on my work and my voice in C RED BLUE J.  There my voice is presented by cutting back and forth between close-ups of my eyes and mouth while talking. Here, Nauman’s Study suggests to me ideas of self-censorship in America. Friedlander’s House on Highway and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (one of my favorite works of all time) have changed for me, both from reconsidering the construction and deconstruction of my childhood homes, and since the housing market collapse. It’s great that these works are so accessible and constant but continuously shifting and changing in meaning as the world does.

The personal narrative in this sequence of works is further activated for me through the inclusion of children. Boys and Girls as Brother and Sister add a playfulness to the RED & BLUE pairings. This also allows for my sister and I to be included in the series of works selected from the collection.

Enjoy,

Chris Sollars

[Works, in order of appearance: Mathew B. Brady, Untitled (Portrait of a Brother and Sister) ca. 1850; Ellsworth Kelly, Blue/Red-Orange, 1970-1972, © Ellsworth Kelly; Bill Owens, 4th of July Parade, Livermore, California, 1970s, © Bill Owens; Hans Haacke, Blue Sail, 1964-1965, © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Unknown, Untitled [Baby on Red Velvet Chair] ca. 1870; Ann Hamilton, Indigo Blue, 1991/2007, © Ann Hamilton; Barry McGee, Untitled, 1996, © Barry McGee; Thomas Frederick Arndt, Inauguration Parade, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1989, 1989, © Thomas Frederick Arndt; Tim Gardner, Untitled (S with Mt. Robson), 2002, © Tim Gardner; Pipilotti Rist, Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, 2004, © Pipilotti Rist; Philip Guston, Blue Light, 1975, © Estate of Philip Guston; Shiro Kuramata, Cappellini, Manufacturer, Revolving Cabinet, 1970; Rineke Dijkstra, Odessa, Ukraine, August 4, 1993, 1993, © Rineke Dijkstra; Bill Owens, Tidy Bowl, Walnut Creek, 1979, © Bill Owens; Anna Atkins, Ceylon, ca. 1850; Edward Kienholz, Tomorrow’s Leaders Are Busy Tonight, 1961, © Edward Kienholz Estate; William Heick, Thomas, Red Arrow Dump, 1949, © William Heick; Robert Gober, Rat Bait, 1992, © Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Gerhard Richter, Spiegel, blutrot (Blood Red Mirror), 1991, © Gerhard Richter; Robert Gober, Newspaper, 1992, © Robert Gober, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Karim Rashid, V-Soul, 1999, © Karim Rashid; Emmet Gowin, Elijah and Donna Jo, Danville, Virginia, 1971, © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York; Bruce Nauman, Study for Hologram, 1970, © 2008 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Lee Friedlander, Colorado, 1967, © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Lee Friedlander, House on Highway, 1975, © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting,1974, © 2008 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Unknown, Untitled [African American Woman with Two White Children], ca. 1860; Alexander Girard, Salt and Pepper Shaker for La Fonda del Sol Restaurant, New York, ca. 1960; Unknown, American, Untitled [Man holding eagle with spread wings] * n.d.]

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Chris Sollars‘ work revolves around the reclamation and subversion of public space through urban interventions, the results of which are integrated into mixed media video installations. Chris is also director and curator of 667Shotwell, which he started in 2001, during the wake of disappearing San Francisco art-spaces. The recently completed C RED BLUE J is an experimental documentary featuring his sister, who works for the Bush Administration, his Born Again father, and his Lesbian mother to illustrate the complications of division during the 2004 Presidential election.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………Photo: Ramona Labat

On November 4, we’ll be screening two democracy-themed projects by Bay Area artists. Chris Sollars’ documentary C RED BLUE J explores the red state/blue state divide of 2004, as Chris juggles his beliefs with those of a sister working for the Bush administration, a born-again Christian father, and a lesbian mother. I Want You (Auditions) is Tony Labat’s new work, culled from footage of the original I WANT YOU performances. I asked them to interview each other for the blog & they typed their conversation together in real time in Tony’s studio Weds afternoon. Chris & Tony, thanks! and xxxooo, SS

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2:00 PM Chris leaves his house at 21st and Shotwell. Tries to go to the Mission post office to mail a DVD of C RED BLUE J to Kentucky and Portland, Oregon.

2:03 PM At the post office.  Only two postal workers and all self-service equipment disconnected and missing. Worst post office in the city and possibly the country.

2:09 PM Chris rides past construction at Mission and Cesar Chavez (Army) on the sidewalk where Tony Labat recorded immigrant workers from his studio across the street. The workers are no longer here but there is an ISO container with pipes attached.

2:11 PM Chris rings the Buzzer for Tony’s Studio and enters the building.

2:13 PM Tony offers Chris a beer and sits down to complete an email. Chris picks up the California Biennial Catalogue. It includes imagery of Tony’s surveillance of immigrant workers, a video still of a tank passing on a train (Blur 2007), and a photo of Tony standing next to a Wax Museum sculpture of Fidel Castro.

2:15 PM Tony “NO MORE JFK!” I am coordinating my flight with a gallery I am showing at in January and the last time I flew into JFK it cost me five grand for holding a Cuban passport and an American green card.

2:20 PM As Chris types Tony unloads a clip from his Black pellet gun, firing around the studio.

2:25 PM The phone Rings. Chris laughs…Tony shouts “TIMMY what do you think of Chris? Chris and I are think-tanking for this writing about both our projects for SFMOMA.“

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Just a quick reminder that tonight’s screening of Huang Shuqin’s Woman Demon Human will be on beautiful 35mm sans subtitles! Which seems like a lot of fun, and kind of a don’t-miss opportunity, whether you understand the language or you don’t.  Considered China’s “only genuine feminist film”,  Woman Demon Human stages an unorthodox biopic of famed Beijing Opera star Pei Yanling, whose career was noted for her portrayal of male roles, especially the male underworld god, Zhong Kui.

For a quick gloss on both the narrative and the why of a screening sans subtitles, see Gina Basso’s post of last week.

Rediscovering the Fourth Generation: Woman Demon Human
Huang Shuqin, 1987, 106 min.
35mm, screened in Mandarin
7:00 p.m., Phyllis Wattis Theater
$5 general; free for SFMOMA members or with museum admission
(requires a free ticket, which can be picked up in the Haas Atrium).

Greetings readers, this is Gina Basso, Public Programs Associate and semi-regular OPEN SPACE contributor. I’m about to delve right in to my first ever post….here I go…

You may have read Megan Brian’s post last week about the print traffic woes getting films from the China Film Archive for the films scheduled in the Rediscovering the 4th Generation series currently underway. And the saga continues: one of the films arrived sans subtitles (Mandarin, anyone?). Despite the myriad ways to handle such a predicament, we decided the print would have to be replaced with a subtitled DVD (thanks Facets Multimedia the print didn’t come all this way for nothing and we’re showing it anyway, on October 30, in Mandarin, NO subtitles! Once you know the story, just relish in the opportunity to see a visually stunning work that captures the vivid colors of the costumes and the make-up, and the performative elements of Chinese opera.

Woman Demon Human is the only film in this series to be directed by a woman, Huang Shuqin. It’s an imaginative bio-pic of famed Beijing Opera actor, Pei Yanling, who was best known for her portrayal of male roles and who stars in the film, playing a fictional version of herself, Qiu Yun. (Didn’t Richard Pryor do that in Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling?) With the opera as its backdrop, the film follows the rise of the young opera star as she experiences love, loss, tragedy, and the trappings of gender conventions. In fact, the real drama lies backstage where tears flow, tempers flair, and performers share gossip with hushes, whispers, and knowing looks. The backstage scenes convey the frenetic energy of the opera’s inner-workings, from the laborious process of applying make-up and getting into costume to the “limbering up” (stretching and contorting)— painful reminders of the physical lengths the performers must endure for their art.

Qiu/Pei’s defiance of traditional roles in the face of public ridicule is at the heart of the story, and  the catalyst that allows her to sink more deeply into her art. Cutting her hair short – “she looks more boy than boy” remarks a character – she raises suspicions from those who gasp at her will to no longer play female roles and to be “nobody’s bride.” Cross-dressing in Chinese opera is age-old (Yuan Dynasty), but it’s more common for men to adopt female roles (dan). This female-to-male reversal illuminates Pei Yanling’s real-life controversy as an opera performer. In the film, her onstage performances as the mythical Zhang Kui, the underworld god and vanquisher of ghosts and demons, act as a meta-text for her life off-stage, mirroring her desire to chase the ghosts haunting her life and challenging traditional customs in modern opera. Director Shuqin also uses the literal mirror, not only as a way to suggest the character’s identity formation, its fragmentation and merging of multiple selves into one, but also as a device to move the story along. Woman Demon Human spans Pei Yanling’s career from the late 1950s to the 1980s and each chapter in her life is signaled by her pondering her reflection in the mirror and seeing two selves – in costume as Zhang Kui and without. As she gazes into the mirror you’re whizzed off into the next dramatic epoch.

[Hi. I'm Megan. I work in the education department and thought I'd introduce myself as I'll be a semi-regular contributor. I was interviewed here when I co-curated the staff art show, and have already written a little for the blog. It's a pleasure to meet you.]

We have a new film series on this month, Rediscovering the Fourth Generation, which includes four films from the post-Mao era in China. Gina Basso, our public programs associate, has been coordinating this series since July, working closely with a distributor in China to make sure the films got here on time. So when the prints still weren’t here a week before the first screening, and Gina couldn’t get her Chinese contact on the phone, everyone started to worry. As it turns out, it was Golden Week in China, EVERYONE was on holiday, and we had no way of knowing if the films would turn up.

After a few frantic days on the phone, we located the prints at SFO and had them rushed over, however by this time it was only one day before the first screening. Paul Clipson, our projectionist extraordinaire, generally has a week to look through the films, checking the prints to make sure they’re in good condition and learning each film’s personality. Last week he just had a day. To add panic to panic, the four films arrived in SIX boxes, sealed with thick metal wire, which Paul had to cut open with wire cutters. Those six boxes revealed over forty short reels, meaning that each film was divided up into at least ten sections which, of course, were all labeled in Mandarin. Paul spent the day matching Mandarin characters to each other in order to put each film together.

When I got a chance to see the prints and shipping materials I was fascinated by their personality and how tactile they were. Growing up in the digital age, I haven’t had much opportunity to see real film, especially real film in real canisters that have just traveled across the globe. The steel boxes and canisters are a reminder of the tangible and human aspect of film.

Paul Clipson, checking the reels for subtitles. Not all the films seemed to have them.

On Saturday Rick Danielson and Brecht Andersch, our projectionists for the day, arrived. I felt a wave of relief as the first scene began. The saga of putting together this film series reminds me that, as Paul put it, “Art isn’t convenient. The impracticality is part of its magic.”

And so at last we bid our beloved friend Franz Biberkopf goodbye. It’s been a long but wonderful month watching, thinking, and talking together with everyone about all things Berlin A & RWF. Farewell Mieze, farewell Lina, farewell Franzë, Cilly, Ida, Pums, Meck—look, even in a blogpost I’m loathe to wish “fare well” to those awful villains Rheinhold & Luders!—

Dominic & I both want to thank all of our round-table-ees: Brandon, Cynthia, Julian, & Stephen, as well as Brecht our projectionist, Dana Ward our Cincinnati correspondent, and everyone else who’s been along with us in the theater on Thursdays and Saturdays, and in the comment boxes all along the way.

It seems kind of sweetly fitting to close with this last post in from Dana Ward, who didn’t quite make the summit with us:

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“…What a shame for me that just as I had calibrated the pace of my reading with the bundles of your viewing, I was ‘laid low’, (to use a favorite phrase of Döbin’s) by a monstrous toothache. I abandoned writing and reading for distractions more befitting one in constant pain and deprived of sleep: cooking the softest of possible meals, watching copious amounts of baseball, and, if awoken by the nagging tooth, wandering about in the yard, staring at my neighbor’s mimosa tree, damp and sparkly in the sunrise, Codeine just starting to numb me up some. So this is an interruption story. And a boo-hoo story, but don’t cry for me! During most of these hours I was thinking of Biberkopf. I thought a lot too about Döbin’s Berlin, of the myriad intimate tragedies derived from enforced economic stratification, a stratification that’s so like our own, and how these wounds make a polity available to the most malign cures, how National Socialism exploited all that pain. Perhaps it’s redundant to say so. But that causality, obvious as it is, felt unbearable in its revivification as I paced in the yard waiting for my molar nerve to scream itself hoarse.

Its ironic that just as I entered into a few days of mild phantasmagoria, Döbin’s novel had arrived in a similar state. The juxtaposition of set pieces was growing more disturbing. Franz’s vision of the slaughterhouse was seen through a lens of creepy paternalistic gangster benevolence, as if to say “sorry little piggies, it’s just business”. He was almost Ronald Reagan! Then his uber-maudlin Job lament, which, in its Christianized bathos was like a tonal prophecy of something out of Kerouac. It was that evening, not long after the disembodied voice revealed itself as Satan, that the toothache arrived and I left behind the book.

At work I’ve kept up with the discussion on the blog, and wished terribly that I’d been reading along. I’ve got a root canal in the morning, and my neighbor is outside right now trimming branches away from her mimosa, scaling back my little narcotic totem which I hope I won’t need for comfort at dawn, as I should be asleep. So I’m down here halfway to the top of Mt. Everest. Sorry I didn’t get to the top with y’all. Once I’ve made it to the summit and back down again, maybe later we’ll all compare notes on the view.”

[Another illuminating post from Brecht Andersch, our projectionist and Berlin Alexanderplatz expert-in-residence, as we wind our way down:]

Hanna Schygulla has said that Fassbinder told her he identified profoundly with all three main characters of Alexanderplatz; “I am Biberkopf, Reinhold, and even Mieze, too.” He had discovered the novel at the age of fourteen, and it served as a mirror to this budding genius, reflecting back the splits within his own psyche. He used his experiences as petri-dish experiments in order to acquire both self-knowledge and an understanding of his world, and his findings became increasingly disturbing: humans, through their own natural needs – love, security, self-protection, etc. – were, consequent to their acquiescence to the powerful, or to the power of the collective, the source of their own oppression. The only answer lay in further, deeper self-knowledge – but how to achieve this in a nation of “Stupidheads” (with whom he by no means disassociated himself), in which the previous two generations (to which his parents and grand-parents belonged) had been participants in mass-murder? His solution to this conundrum was to make films (often for television) which would deliver shocks to the psyche, by means of stirring up subconscious energies, which would be forced to emerge as psychic boils in need of painful laceration, or, for those more self-aware, a forcing of the viewer into direct confrontation with Self.

Franz, Mieze, and Reinhold are all aspects of the collective German psyche. Franz, our sometimes squishy-soft and sweet every-man, does everything in his power to prevent true self-knowledge, which eventually leads to setting his two loves (the halves of his split personality) on collision course. That these two are so oppositional in nature – Mieze, a pure spirit of sorts, “gentle as a feather”, whose self-willed innocence prevents her from assuming responsibility for herself – and Reinhold, who has given himself over to an evil psychotic misogyny (he has an anvil tattooed to his chest because “someone must lie on it”) – indicates a failure of integration, a collective psyche at war with itself, and, deep inside, a center that cannot hold. The later crimes of Germany, and fascism in general, like Mieze’s murder, have their root causes in failures and/or refusals to see. The response to the trauma of WWI - an attempt to stay “strong” (one of the many charges repeatedly hurled at Franz in the dream-play Epilogue), a wide-spread holding on to a simplistic and self-pitying national identity/ideology, would cause Germany to fall prey as a collective to its latent psychoses.

[Continue reading this post: (more…)

[Or, the other side of the mountain. The BA roundtable/support group on the last round of Fassbinder's epic masterpiece. We'll wind down our discussion over the next few days. Ms. Heidi at Engineer's Daughter says everyone deserves a t-shirt; I'm like to agree that all of you readers do too.]

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Brandon Well, we watched Berlin Alexanderplatz.

I found everyone’s responses last week to be, to varying extents, trying to come to terms with the violence Franz displays against Mieze. The violence and initial recuperation took place at the very end of our screening. Even if indeed some of the bloggers may have been “tip-toeing” around it, everyone (including commenters) seemed to be trying to situate the crisis in terms of Franz’s character. Was it jealousy that provoked his outburst? Does Franz have enough of a subject position to really comprehend “jealousy” and act accordingly? Is Franz’s brutality derived from an abandonment complex, a repetition compulsion?

The epilogue to Berlin Alexanderplatz, “My Dream from the Dream of Franz Biberkopf”, far from providing reductive, controlled answers about Franz, instead infinitely complicates those (and other) issues. I find it so compelling, about the finale, that at the very moment that the film departs from the detached narrative frame, we go into the interior of Franz’s psyche. What we find there is Franz, yes, but moreover we find all the others. And part of what all the other characters of the film reappear to enact is a detailed history of brutality, with reference to Western civilization from ancient (say, biblical) to contemporary (and contemporary with Fassbinder, not “Franz”) times; but very specifically what we find in Franz Biberkopf’s psyche is a history of German violence.

Throughout the film there are several rebirths by blood. The rape of Minna which somehow restores “Franz Biberkopf” after prison, the Abraham/Isaac sacrifice motif, the “new” old Franz who emerges only after his arm is severed; Franz himself is sacrificed over and over again in the dream. Franz, who has meted out violence throughout the film and laughs loudly at reports of violence done to others, is now the object of violence. He is crucified, humiliated over and over again by Reinhold, slaughtered in a slaughterhouse/concentration camp, and is even the medicalized object of the psychiatrists.

What strikes me about these sacrifices is that the “rebirth” for which sake they are supposedly committed is very simply the entry of Franz Biberkopf into the repetitive worldlessness of laboring. It’s as if the central problem for Franz, both at the beginning of the film (what “work” will he do) and throughout (“what can you do with one arm?”) really is an inability to work, both in the sense of “function” and “labor for wage.”

It is obvious for anyone who has seen the last two episodes and epilogue that there is far too much to say, and that the tone of reconciliation I’ve displayed in this post is actually impossible. I really look forward to other observations and trajectories!

Julian I suppose I’ve found the question of whether Franz “can have enough of a subject position…to act,” to be somewhat circular. Franz is a character in crisis, but I am not convinced that his crisis is best articulated in psychological – as opposed to political, moral, or ethical – terms.

Can Franz act? Of course he can. I imagine Fassbinder answering this question in the epilogue. During a flight of madness in Buch mental facility, Franz is confronted with Ida, who is cringing and limping as if she is being beaten. Distressed, Franz asks her, “What is causing your pain? Who is beating you?” She replies, “You are Franz. “You are beating me. “You killed me.”

In your discussion of the epilogue I find more to agree with, especially in your observation that Franz’s central problem may be “an inability to work.” It’s a reading that helps me understand why Franz’s encounters with Communism and Syndicalism, ideologies in which labor is anything but “repetitive worldlessness,” are so fraught. I’ll watch that playground debate with renewed attention next time.

Episode thirteen I had a hard time with. After Mieze’s murder – an enervated fairytale starring Reinhold as the ambivalent Big Bad Wolf – I thought the last episode veered into TV cliché: in particular Meck’s confession and that final scene, where the sad pimp “goes mad” and kills the bird Mieze gave him (the stunted symbolism is Franz’s, but still).

By contrast the epilogue was wonderful: psychotic, crass, bizarre, gaudy, and macabre. Where Brandon saw it as a history of violence I saw it instead as a flash-forward, to the war, the Holocaust, the bomb, the GDR, gay liberation, sex clubs, televised boxing, Kraftwerk, Elvis and disco. The appearance of Margit Carstensen (her of Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant), as an angel of death, was a treat. I can’t imagine a better, weirder, or more profound ending.

Perhaps from the top of this “Mount Everest of Modern Cinema,” it might be fun to look back at where we began. It’s a long way down!

Stephen Wow! This has been an amazing ride. Thanks to Dominic and Suzanne for organizing the film and discussions. I agree with Brandon that the epilogue launches the psychological investigation of Franz into the public realm.

I can’t resist commenting on the scene where the three psychiatrists are debating whether to treat Franz. We have a well-meaning, if not naïve, psychoanalyst intent on Franz’s submission to the talking cure to address his mental block, a nay-saying, smug, pharmacologist who wants to zap him with ECT to reign in psychosis (and then relax into his newspaper), and a vain nose-hair trimming behaviorist who argues that trash is trash, so why bother? (It could be the scene at any HMO). None of them is ready to entertain Franz’s experience. No one thinks about the social construction of Franz’s condition. No one really takes responsibility. This debate among “critics” precedes the most outrageous, campy, hallucinatory shenanigans yet to come in the film.

The three doctors could just as well be commenting on the film’s narrative/visual arc. They would reserve “two thumbs up” for the costume drama that preceded the epilogue, and they would like to return Franz to an agreeable if not gauzy frame. They are also, in the diagnoses of Franz, cynically noting—but passively accepting—Germans’ strategy to account for the holocaust (and Americans Hiroshima). How dissociated and barely capable of assuming responsibility for the horror is the post-war industrial giant—blocked, medicated, why bother…wouldn’t a Hollywood ending be nicer than the glossy operatic mess we are forced to deal with when we allow ourselves to fall apart? “Come close to the light and see death so that you can become human,” says the reaper Martin Luther / Abe Lincoln impersonator. Try as he might, this is something that Franz can’t yet do, saddled still with the burden of his own guilt and Reinhold’s off-loaded evil. (He is barely getting by in Bush America). Our every German dies before he can be cured for our sins.

Cynthia I want to take what Julian says regarding episode thirteen to revel in its soap opera qualities. But also because, as someone points out, B.A starts with a murder and ends with a murder. If the epilogue is chaotic, impressionistic, “bizarre, ” the episodes leading up to it, pound the same problems between authorities and power, impotence and murder, playfulness and aggression, etc. Episode 12 begins with Mieze washing underneath Franz’s bedclothes, right at his groin. We bask in Mieze’s ways of being the playful coquette. Never so clear as to what she wants or how far she will go. Following, she makes an appointment to go to the countryside with Meck, eventually finding Reinhold in the place she fell in love with Franz (the soap opera narrative line). But she is not sure how to lure information out of him. “How long have you known Franz? Reinhold asks, “is he still yours… Who am I? Who is this Mieze? She tackles him. Is Franz so enigmatic to her that she may sleep with Reinhold to find out about him? It appears she will go all the way for his information, although she says, “okay Reinhold. Let go of me…you’re lying on me so heavy again.” Reinhold is like a political oppressive body, one can get up temporarily, only to be seduced and overtaken again.

It’s hard to separate the psychology of individuals from group psychology, of how people just fall into line; as Mieze says, “everything’s getting dirty.” Reinhold exchanges information for sex and so when he does not get what he bargained for, and because he doesn’t “assault women,” he lamely suffocates her. Before this happens: Mieze is laying on Reinhold, licking his chest. I am reminded that Franz has both Mieze and Reinhold in his heart. Reinhold so poignantly says, “I was just considering what you are doing to me.” It is the tragedy of B.A. that people cannot take this question to its furthest point, cannot recognize how social and political forces are acting on them, how their own autonomy is being divested with meaning, and more simply how the other impacts them.

I want to reemphasize the gross value of this, in both an economic and political sense (of trading dead, lifeless, objects, “goods”) and the psychological sense of losing oneself, the intolerance (we see in Franz/Reinhold) of their desire and the delay in the fulfillment of those desires. In both the case of Franz and Reinhold, they must snuff the Other out. And while the murder of Mieze is elaborated in episode 13, we see its tricky progression, Reinhold is even more impotent, in a way, than Franz. He annihilates Mieze with the same questionable cluelessness/cruelty as Franz does with the bird. This is the more dangerous form of murder, we’ll see in the larger political movement, of a numb form of annihilation, as individuals conform to group illusions ‘to create the pure man.’

Dominic
I finished the book. There is no epilogue, but the final phase of the novel that corresponds to Fassbinder’s epilogue begins on page 319 (in the Continuum paperback). The story of the epilogue is very much carried over from the book, and Franz’s madness is similarly represented as a terrible clash of all the forces that have brought him to this point. And he dies, and is reborn. There are also the intimations of war we see in the film (by the way, Julian’s idea that Franz’s dreams the post-war world made the whole epilogue make sense to me). A major figure in Döblin’s last 50 pages is a personification of Death. In the film the figure who comes closest to this role is Fassbinder himself. The book is every bit as compelling as the film. But I find that Döblin’s ending is hard to take. His introduction (which I read out at the first screening) foretold that Franz would emerge the other side of his suffering with an understanding of the meaning of his life. What is this understanding? It’s an awareness of the need for solidarity with others. And the awareness comes through work. Franz gets a job.

Suzanne “Mieze, Mieze, Mieze” and “bitte, bitte, bitte” are the refrains I keep hearing in mind since Thursday’s screening. At a complete loss for a method, in a just a few words’ time, of encapsulation of my experience of the last overwhelming round of BA, I’ll name a few of many moments still very present with me now, on Saturday morning, and let us get on into the comment boxes. These are: the long shot of the just-strangled Mieze lying limp on the forest floor, like a lost blond doll or child; Mieze curled up in the too-small wooden box they buried her in, looking so much like a sleeping, but cold, but dead, but dirty, child-prostitute-doll, the gold-dust effect we’ve seen previously only in the whore-of-bablyon sequences (and when Franz is playing cards with Satan) sparkling over her face and shoulders; Franz on his knees in the dirt in the opening street-scene of the Epilogue underworld/fantasy, trying to embrace the as-if-just-dead body of Mieze; and Reinhold’s embodied, sensual and gentle embrace of his gay prison lover, so different from the dead (and deadening) suffocating grasp of Mieze that Cynthia describes above.

[Continuing our month-long discussion of Berlin Alexanderplatz]

Brandon, Dom, Suzanne,

Forgive me for saying so, but I think you’ve been tiptoeing around what all of us experienced as a profoundly disturbing passage of film – the last forty minutes of episode eleven, wherein Franz tries to murder Mieze, the person he loves most, in exactly the same way, in exactly the same place, as he murdered Ida. Indeed Fassbinder insists on this disconcerting repetition, replaying Ida’s murder three times in the previous episodes, investing it with an ominous and totemic power.

If these scenes don’t erase my great enjoyment of the series so far, they certainly transform, violently, the terms of that enjoyment. It’s not just the beating that Franz inflicts. Unbearable as it is, we at least know it is coming. What is so horrible is first the character of Mieze’s anguish – a strangulated screaming that goes on for what feels like minutes. Is any moment in cinema so raw and devastating? Perhaps only Michael Haneke has come close.

Worse still is what happens next. Choking on blood, Mieze immediately forgives him, and they embark for the countryside where first they fell in love. The scenes here verge on the blackest of comedy – Mieze, with split lip and clawed neck, defiantly orders ice cream from her stunned waitress. The profound horror of these moments is in Mieze’s choosing to share in Franz’s crime – her deciding that somehow, to follow Suzanne’s phrasing, their suffering was mutual.

Even as I understand that this is a fiction, I simply cannot bear her choice. Yet it speaks to the power of Fassbinder’s mini-series, that it gets so under my skin.

To answer quickly a question Dom posed to me during the screening, about the character of the political rally Franz and Willy attend in episode nine: Could it be that these strange creatures were anarcho-syndicalists? Syndicalism was a going concern in Germany in the late 20s, though many like Rudolph Rocker and Milly Witkop fled the country in the early 30s, after the Nazis came to power.

–Julian

[Joining our ongoing discussion of Berlin Alexanderplatz is BRECHT ANDERSCH, our projectionist, who is seeing the film with us for THE SIXTH TIME. Brecht has, not surprisingly! a lot to say, please click "more" below for the full article. Welcome Brecht!]

Palo Alto, 1984. I’m employed for the first time as a projectionist at the Bijou Theatre, a repertory cinema run by two hippie-era utopians who grant full rein to this young cinephile’s incipient madness, with 24-hour access to booth and screen. Late into the night, I’m able to project films on the big screen for myself alone, and one of the first is Berlin Alexanderplatz, a film I’d initially avoided as being merely “made for TV”, and therefore of minor interest. A few episodes into it, I find myself beguiled, seduced, then totally transfixed. I watch it over the course of several very late nights, and by the end, it’s become my favorite film for – among other reasons – its ability to venture into every cinematic terrain I find interesting: classic Hollywood narrative, European Art Cinema, Experimental Film.

As I project it at SFMOMA, I’m now seeing it for the sixth time, and after 24 years of it being a part of my life, I’m taking the time to re-read the novel and study the film in an attempt to delve even deeper into its hallucinatory, ecstatic, murky depths.

On Fassbinder: Biberkopf means “Stupidhead”. Fassbinder read the novel as a teenager, and casually identified with it, eventually realizing later that it had filled-in much of his world-view. He played the lead in his first feature film, Love is Colder Than Death, as a character named “Franz Biberkopf,” repeating this homage later in Fox and His Friends. Fassbinder’s films are riddled with various Franzes; and cut together by another: editor “Franz Walsch” – is a pseudonym for Fassbinder, combining Döblin’s character with one of Fassbinder’s filmmaking idols, the great Hollywood director of Westerns and gangster pictures, Raoul Walsh. Clearly Fassbinder had taken Döblin’s German underworld everyman to heart. And Fassbinder needed an everyman to get to the issue which haunted him all his life, and which is behind his many works laden with resentment against his parent’s generation: how does one get to be a Nazi, anyway? Fassbinder saw fascism everywhere, including within himself – this led him on the path towards melodramatic empathy. If one could understand these drives within the human psyche, first by filmmaker, then by audience, it might be possible to transcend, transform…

(more…)

Hi readers! It’s Brandon, just here in small print to say how happy I am that this conversation is continuing here on OPEN SPACE, pertaining to Fassbinder’s epic (and ever more enjoyable) Berlin Alexanderplatz. Comments are not only welcomed but highly encouraged. Enjoy!

Brandon
Much of our discussion of the first episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz explored Franz’s character as a subject from psychoanalytic and socioeconomic perspectives. A crucial point of departure for all the bloggers and commenters is the fact of Franz in relation to others, which overwhelmingly take the form of social/sexual violence. It’s difficult to imagine a conversation about this work that doesn’t center on Franz to the moderate exclusion of the other characters, though one viewer last night suggested to me that the conversation on the blog was, in her view, excessively judgmental of Franz as a character in a narrative. I noticed some sense of that concern in the comment box, where a marked effort to discuss other characters emerged. I am also interested, back to Franz, to know what our more psychoanalytic-minded commenters and bloggers will have to say about the very explicit themes of castration and impotence as they emerge in the dialogue and, indeed, in the physical tribulations of Franz and others.

The second round of episodes, screened last night, seemed very different than the opening ones. In these four episodes, Franz has to negotiate with an oath, the promise-to-self he makes in the opening of the film to “never again” return to his former role as a pimp. That this oath will be subject to intense temptation and finally reversal is adumbrated in the Job story, with Franz clearly representing Job. His companion, despite the fact that he takes the name “Satan,” actually plays a stabilizing role, attempting to help Franz emerge from drunken chaos.

Job, tempted to deny the power of God, maintains his faith in a sort of given promise. Franz’s relationship to his own oath tends toward complication in these episodes. The triangulations he negotiates with Reinhold are at first determined as behaviors of loyalty and friendship, but when Franz asserts his desire to end the series of “handovers,” Reinhold’s mode of persuasion centers completely upon what material objects he can tempt Franz with (a silver watch, etc.) Franz then plays the role of prostitute, or one (vast) step removed from breaking his oath.

Likewise, he refuses the overtures of Pums, despite his apparent naiveté as to the true nature of Pums’ “fruit” business; but, again, under the flag of “loyalty” to his friend Reinhold, finds himself dangerously close to trespassing. The moment that is truly interesting to me, however, comes at the end of this set of episodes. The thief in the bar, whom David Brazil accurately described as a “sophist,” demonstrates that language is a tool of power, and that power has, well, the power to determine names, and therefore meanings, for any given worldly presence, “arms” as much as “oaths.” This sophistry works like a charm on Franz, who through his tribulations did not consider that the meaning of his oath might be subject to reappraisal in terms of its very words. The reversal which seems to have taken place at the end of episode seven is a classic mode of sophistry, in which Franz has found a way to both break his oath and not break his oath at the same time.

Dominic
My quick comment for now is related to Dana’s question from Thursday — does the film leave Franz and wander around Berlin, capturing aspects of Weimar era life, as the novel does? No, not really, as someone else said already, and in fact I have been struck by just how little Fassbinder tries to emulate the 1920s ‘portrait of a city’ genre that includes Doblin’s novel, Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Ulysses, and aerial films like Man With a Movie Camera, and Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. I like that it doesn’t. The portrait of city became a cliché long ago (one of the few great later examples is Wenders’ Wings of Desire). The frame of Fassbinder’s film is very narrow, and the staging is theatrical rather than cinematic. This is partly to do with him having had a low budget (in fact the sets were left overs from an Ingmar Bergman production), and perhaps partly to do with being made for TV — although we’ve since seen how TV mini-series can be quite as cinematic as theatre films (e.g. Angels in America). In B. A. the action is almost always closely walled in, even in the exterior scenes. It’s a story played out in a set of boxes. It’s like a puppet theatre, draped in gauze curtains and lit from outside (off-stage) in amber and rose. The one scene that stands out as being not boxed, wide-screen, full-scale, open-air and day-lit, is the scene in the square right outside (or was it inside?) Tegel jail – the first scene of the film – just before we see Franz dodging traffic (a standard “portrait of a city” cliché). I think there was a flash-back to the scene in a recent episode. It seemed as if it was spliced from a different film.

Stephen
So much of our discussion has questioned Franz’s ability to apprehend the other and to experience something like empathy, not to mention self. I suspect Franz’s episodic depersonalization foreshadows the immanent colossal implosion of German culture and the dissociation from violence that will attend it. As in so many of his movies, I suspect Fassbinder wants to draw our attention to the disavowal of psychic trauma in postwar West Germany.

I noticed last night just how often Franz is dissociated. He seems to drift into a vacant (sometimes violent) clownish state every time he has to take in the experience of an other. This can be mild dissociation: when he reads the headlines (mimicking the radio always on in the background) but doesn’t ingest them. (Eva says, “how can you read that!” But it makes no impression on him). Or massive dissociation, years of lost time in prison after killing; a crazy (amazing to watch) drinking binge after imagining Otto raping the woman Franz betrayed. Indeed, he spends so much time betraying women that one can imagine he is a complete jerk. But it isn’t clear that he can take their experience in sufficiently to warrant contempt so much as pity. And, to his credit, he is struggling to take the other in bit by bit so as to reckon with himself. He has had more success with alcohol, so far, than women!

In walks Reinhold, a borderline who (to use jargon) evacuates everything bad about himself into the object of his desire. Though, since the feminine object of his desire is really the hated feminine part of himself, he needs to enlist and, ultimately, destroy a male accomplice to love/hate. Will this doppelganger somehow teach Franz to learn to take others in by being, himself, expelled. Once thrown out of the moving car, and having lost an arm, will he become more human? Why does he ask Meck about losing his father? Is he beginning to comprehend loss?

Suzanne
I’ve been reflecting on my experience in the theater the other night: Franz’s story becomes this quickly moving sojourn through so many allegorical theater sets (and set pieces?), that somewhere into the second hour I found I wasn’t reading the narrative (literally, the subtitles) attentively anymore, but wandering back and forth between episodes even while they were unfolding. Doblin’s novel’s so often called kaleidescopic, (and so often compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, on which it was partly modeled), & I think more than one of us has already asked how or how not Fassbinder’s film is representing that. We’ve talked among ourselves, at the bar, and maybe here online, about the fact that Fassbinder shot the whole film with a ‘lady’s stocking’ over the camera lens, and what effect this has on the look of the thing. Most particularly, it’s the way light gets refracted in goldish sunbursts off of any reflective surface: bottles (of which there are infinite number), windowpanes, mirrors, glasses, teeth, sweat, the human iris, all shine with this incredible glinting melodramatic, sultry, dangerous light. We talked at the bar especially about the scene where (is it ‘Otto’?) visits Franz with payback money for the amputated arm: Otto’s spectacles are thick orbs that make his eyes look enormous (bug-like), but half-hidden behind multiple—yeah, kaleidescopic—infinitely repeating reflections. I think that the narrative too has “just” (over the last four hours) done the same infinite breakup/refraction. And there’s so much structural and visual doubling and redoubling and refracting: Franz & Reinhold, Franz & Franze (the girlfriend who’s doppelganger for Franz) Franz as ‘dead ringer’ for the widow’s dead man; I feel there are a hundred threads I could take up to follow, in structure, in plot, in set, in allegory. Our conversation in the blog posts and the comment boxes and in the bar is starting to look like this too. How great. More in coming days. xo

Cynthia
Episode 4, beginning the second installment of Berlin Alexanderplatz, depicts the emergence of the social narrative in the form of gossip through the mouth of a salon owner. This voice over continues while the camera’s voyeuristic gaze watches Franz’s progressively destructive drinking binge, his deprivation and isolation from the outside world, although not without its humor (Franz throws his empty
beer bottles across the room, crawls around the floor. A real pig sty). Not only do these gossip lines create more overtly the “types” of characters we’ll see in Fassbinder’s films, e.g. “She’s just looking for a man. You know what I mean,” but the themes of vulgarity, excess, stinginess, fats/nutrition, bodily infections, cheating, indulgence, divorce, and the exploitation of the other. Gossip streams out, disseminating knowledge like Franz’s toxic sweat, always the problem of the other-”she’s a real gossip,” always referring to someone else. And, I think, Frantz responds, “whose business is it what I do?”

Franz cannot remain a separate entity from these social forces for long. He is soon folded into the gossip stream, implicated. Gossip frames (or in the sense of Franz’s pleasure in eavesdropping, “commingles” with) the slaughter scenes. I hadn’t realized until looking at my notes that the voice over is interrupted by the poetic and/or didactic montage of stills on how to slaughter a bull (is this Fassbinder’s voice now?) and the allegorical slaughter of the lamb. But then the gossip returns, in which Franz is now the object. It is reported a woman returns. Eva. He exclaims he doesn’t want to be a pimp anymore. Is this his resistance to the exchange of commodities for human emotion?

But some of us have strange pleasures—how about fifteen and half hours of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s legendary BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ?

Beginning this Thursday and continuing each week the month of June, we’re showing (in collaboration with the PFA & the Goethe Institut-SF) the West Coast premiere of the remastered, brand-new 35mm version of Fassbinder’s retelling of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel: optimistic but explosive criminal Franz Biberkopf leaves a prison stint with a hope for making the straight life, and with ‘an absurd faith in love.’ The dark epic serial of Berlin Alexanderplatz chronicles the destruction of that hope and that faith.

Called the “Mount Everest of modern cinema” by Andrew Sarris, Dominic Willsdon & I have been saying that the 15-and-a-half-hour endurance test of Berlin Alexanderplatz will be fun in the way mountain-climbing is fun: grueling, terrifying, emotional, and exhausting; but also fantastic, exhilarating, & great for a chat with your cohorts once you’re done. So, together with my friend the poet Brandon Brown, we’ve been working on getting a group together for a Berlin Alexanderplatz film-club for the duration. We’ll watch the four-hour program each Thursday night and then head out from ‘the literal and moral darkness’ (that’s Dominic) for the well-deserved drink. And we’ll see if we can follow up Friday afternoons with a group discussion here on the blog.

Would you like to join us?

If you can’t turn out every Thursday, the programs repeat on following Saturday afternoons, and you can still keep on with the conversation.

Program One, this Thursday June 5 at 6:30pm in the Wattis Theater, and again on Saturday at 2pm: Part 1 —The Punishment Begins — Part 2 — How Is One to Live If One Doesn’t Want to Die? — Part 3 — A Hammer Blow on the Head Can Injure the Soul — Part 4 — A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence

More detailed info on Fassbinder and on the film below. We’re looking forward to seeing/meeting/watching with you—

SS, DW, BB

——

There’s a shortish piece on Fassbinder’s life & work here; here’s A.O. Scott’s NYTimes piece on the film; and if you don’t mind a plot spoiler, there’s a discussion, and lengthy synopsis, here.

Here’s the PFA’s description of the film:

“Restored in 2006, Berlin Alexanderplatz is the summa of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s art, and the culmination of his lifelong relationship to Alfred Döblin’s monumental novel of Berlin in the 1920s-a book the filmmaker said was “embedded in my mind, my flesh, my body as a whole, and my soul.” Fassbinder pours knowing tenderness into the characterization of Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht), an unemployed lumpen worker who earns his living as a thief and pimp following a stint in jail for murdering his mistress. Franz is a jovial if explosive figure in the Alexanderplatz district of Berlin, a man with optimistic dreams, a determination to “go straight,” and an absurd faith in love. Berlin Alexanderplatz chronicles the destruction of this faith, amid the poverty, hypocrisy, and violence of Berlin in the years just before Nazism took full hold. Unable to find work, Franz takes up with the hustler Reinhold (Gottfried John), who becomes his “best friend” and then betrays him in a number of important ways. Franz is also involved with several women during the course of the drama, but when he meets the young prostitute Mieze (Barbara Sukowa), he declares her “his most beloved in all the world.” It is upon losing her that Franz succumbs to despair-and allows himself to be transformed into a “useful member of society.” The film’s famous epilogue is Fassbinder’s comment on that.

With a hundred leading and supporting actors, including members of Fassbinder’s excellent stock company (along with Lamprecht, John, and Sukowa, Hanna Schygulla is featured as Franz’s friend Eva and Volker Spengler as the gang leader Pums), Berlin Alexanderplatz is filled with the characters and stories of Döblin’s Berlin. And at fifteen and a half hours, it comes closer than most film experiences to the engagement that a good novel offers. The beauty, richness, and cohesion of Fassbinder’s style can here be fully appreciated as it links one chapter to the next.”

&, Fassbinder on politics and Berlin Alexanderplatz:

Tonight at 6:30 & again Saturday at 1pm in the Wattis Theater—

Les Amants Réguliers (Regular Lovers)
Philippe Garrel, 2005, 178 min., 35mm

“A love letter both to French New Wave cinema and to late 1960s French youth culture, Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers stars the director’s son (Louis Garrel, of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers) as a Parisian student revolutionary. At a lolling pace, the film explores art, bohemia, revolution, and sex in May 1968 and after. While both director and audience know the historical outcome of these youthful acts, Regular Lovers points to their poignant appeal.”

Irresistible. See you then/there—