Yasijiro Ozo's That Night's Wife

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…

Finally, the San Francisco Cinematheque presents Apparent Motion, a full weekend of live cinema/projector performance at the Mission’s Victoria Theatre (San Francisco’s oldest live/cinema theater?)  This art/performance/experimental film genre is increasingly gaining traction as a major territory of contemporary art practice, and these

Untitled Super-8 film by Paul Clipson

Jacques Tati shooting _Playtime

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…

Yerba Buena: Playtime @ 7:30 p.m.

I read about this film for many years in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s obsessive articles before I was able to finally see it at the PFA a dozen or so years ago. Quite prepped, you couldn’t have found a happier camper than yours truly as the reels unspooled. I could easily relate to Tati’s Modernist love/hate obsession with Modernism (tho my own neurotic fixation veers to the post-Mod… Modernism – the world into which I was born and by which I was imprinted—I just love.). The only way Tati could deal with the unfortunately evolving Paris of the late 60’s was to create his own version in an open-air studio in which he could manufacture and control gorgeously stylized takes on the ever-encroaching skyscrapers driving him crazy:

Photographed in 70mm at a vast expense, Tati’s gargantuan vision, which (if I remember correctly), Rosenbaum lauds for its strides towards a Bazin-ian, democratic experience by its viewers, can be a bit overwhelming. The only time I’ve been able to see it in 70, I found this “comedy” harsh, almost totalitarian,

even sick-making…

Some relief is provided by an on-going gag, which has tourist posters for various locations dominated by semi-uniform semi-skyscrapers:

This image is a perennial favorite – Tati’s M. Hulot as Odysseus cast adrift in a bewildering maze of islands, or Theseus in search of Ariadne…

A hilarious take on computers…

So this is

….?!!

I often think of this scene when walking the streets at night, and see back-to-back (or, as in this case, front-to-front) households tuned in to the global village idiot…

On the other hand, at

SFMOMA: The Europeans: Creating a Context @ 7:00 p.m.

The Smiling Madame Beudet, Germaine Dulac (1922)

is the first show of 75 Years in the Dark: A Partial History of Film at SFMOMA, and the first of three curated by Scott MacDonald, one of the few titans among what could be classified as “avant-garde moving image historians” currently working. MacDonald, famous for his A Critical Cinema series of interview books with experimental “makers”, also recently wrote THE BOOK on SFMOMA’s own major contribution to the development of film art in the form of Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema program (which, believe it or not, is more or less responsible for the ENTIRE visual/moving image world we live in today—more on this later—Yes, I’ll undertake to prove that not Paris, but in fact SFMOMA is the true Center of the Universe, and no, I’m not being paid to say this, the reality is I’ll probably get in trouble for revealing the TRUTH, but it shall be told….)

Rain, Joris Ivens (1929)

So now that I’ve got your attention, who needs Playtime? (Besides, I just saw it again a couple of weeks ago at the PFA, where the woman sitting next to me kept nodding off half the time.) This show is where it’s really at in the Bay Area 2/11/02—the beginning of countless revelations to unfold over the next year. Those who attend contemporary experimental moving image shows with a non-historical or auteurist (so to speak) basis might have heart attacks when confronted by these brilliant/superb/Genius pieces, one after the other descending with the flash and impact of lightning bolts from Zeus…

A Colour Box, Len Lye (1935)

We have here The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922) of Germaine Dulac—visually stunning early feminist insanity, two major works by GIANT figures of experimental documentary: Joris Ivens’ Rain (1929—which I haven’t seen, but just look if you’ve eyes in your head at the corresponding image!), and Jean Painlevé’s The Vampire (1945—the real deal—Bats!+Parasitic insects! incredible film…), and an orgasmic smorgasbord of 5 (count ‘em!) works of mostly abstract animation: Oskar Fischinger’s—Study No. 7 (1931) + Composition in Blue (1935), Lotte Reininger’s Carmen (1932—the non-non-objectivist here, her incredible animated silhouette narratives are probably the 7th wonder of the Cinema World)—and finally 2 by Len Lye —A Colour Box (1935) + Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1940)—that Kiwi maestro of the animation stand, whose motto, ever since I heard it eight or so years ago, has been adopted as my own:

“INDIVIDUALITY. HAPPINESS. NOW.“

Swinging the Lambeth Walk, Len Lye (1940)

How can you improve on that? (My true Self is in being a copy-cat.) And since true INDIVIDUAL HAPPINESS depends on knowing when (NOW?) to make a clean exit—¡A los barricados, compañeros!

Kenneth Anger, Rabbit’s Moon (1950/1971), still; image courtesy and copyright of Kenneth Anger

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.

Kenneth Anger, Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), still; image courtesy and copyright of Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising (1963), still; image courtesy and copyright of Kenneth Anger

My first encounter with Anger’s cinema occurred in a small but crowded Austin, Tx. theater in 1985. A featured work in a show of experimental films emblazoned with the eye-catching title Sex and Blasphemy in the Avant-Garde, Scorpio Rising swiftly proved itself an intoxicating tonic to the college-age post-punk scenesters of various stripes who surrounded me. This was something we’d been looking for. Scorpio’s sorcerer’s brew of black leather and cocaine, reefer and parodies of Jesus, erections and motorcycles, sexually aggressive movie stars and early 60’s pop and rock hits—not to mention swastikas and skulls—as revealed in a sometimes-frenzied orgy of light and color, hit someplace deep, connecting us to earlier eras and previous generations of decadence and rebellion. The swirl of conflicting responses, of both confusion and pleasure, was palpable. When, a few months later, I was able to see Invocation of My Demon Brother several times, it became clear I’d been caught on Anger’s hook. This eerie and beguiling melange of multiple incarnations of Lucifer (such as Bobby Beausoleil, Mick Jagger, and Anton LaVey), set loose amongst a roiling vortex of exuberant ritual magick as collectively practiced in the Haight-Ashbury circa ‘67, is photographed and edited by someone obviously possessed by a daemon of Satanic majesty. Without a doubt, Anger was one of the GREAT creators in cinema. The ensuing years revealed him to have had a far greater influence on contemporary culture than I could have possibly known: His use of pop songs passed through Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Goodfellas, and the George Lucas of American Graffiti, to become the personal world of every ipod user dancing away in his or her own private movie. Can there be any question that the release in 1947 of the sadomasochist, homoerotic Fireworks (made by Anger at sweet seventeen!) caused the floodgates to be opened to the Beat, Hippie, and Punk movements, not to mention the sexual revolution and Gay Liberation? After all the chaos he has willed into being, it seems likely the 21st will be known as the Century of ANGER.

This shapeshifting alchemist works in mysterious ways, but whenever his spirit is invoked, the tenebrous Self will be confronted, and the muck stirred… Ten or so years ago, I’d come to a critical juncture in my analysis at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. My therapist had delicately guided me to the point at which I’d have to come to terms with my dark side. Kenneth Anger was much discussed. From the perspective of my Marxian matrix, he was indeed a disturbing spectre. Didn’t my evident intoxication by the art and persona of one so clearly consumed by EVIL mean I was EVIL, too? My therapist seemed unfazed, but I reasoned this was due to her not having seen Scorpio or Invocation of My Demon Brother. How could she understand the reality with which we were dealing?

Demon Brother was much on my mind as for some years (and to this day) I’d lived in a house half a block away from the Westerfield House, famous to locals as the “Russian Embassy”, in which Anger had lived in the late 60’s. Much of Demon Brother had been photographed there, including shots of Bobby Beausoleil as Lucifer, shortly before he left for southern climes to murder Gary Hinman under the aegis of his new guru, Charles Manson. It was rumored that Beausoleil’s association with Anger had somehow set him off on his downward spiral… I could see the Westerfield House throughout the day from my desk window. The whole matter weighed heavily on my frame. It was a psychological Rubik’s cube from which there could be no deliverance.

One day, having some time to kill before work, I popped on the TV to a random public station which was playing a documentary on Busby Berkeley. Ah, I thought, as a student of cinema, it was high time for attention to be paid to this reputed master about whom I knew so little. After being regaled with several examples of his brilliantly geometric and gloriously plastic dance sequences, I was presented with one of his fans being interviewed at his grave, a fan who generously explained how Mr. Berkeley was just too much of an artist to be understood or tolerated in Hollywood. What a sweet and gentle soul, I thought. How nice that the maestros still had their loyal partisans… And then the words “KENNETH ANGER” flashed on the screen right under this “sweet and gentle” man. Tidal waves of cognitive dissonance trampled my skull like elephants. The cosmos retreated, shrinking to the size of an atom, before exploding in yet another Big Bang, and then realigning itself in a bizarre, unfamiliar scheme, solar and planetary systems askew in the heavens… This was MR. EVIL??!!! By the time I set off for work, I realized I’d been victim and beneficiary of yet another of Anger’s spells… This beguiling wizard had served as a figure on which to project the secret Self who held me in thrall and terror. It was a Self which could no longer be repressed, and must be invoked for his turn to cavort in the light… As I passed the sun-dappled “Russian Embassy”, I brushed my hand against its wood siding, the first instance of what would become a repeated ritual. I couldn’t wait to tell my therapist—maybe more of the magick would rub off on me…

__________________________________________________

Four films by Kenneth Anger, restored, pristine, and on the big screen:  this Thursday. KENNETH ANGER IN PERSON. The marvelous Gina Basso conducts the Q&A. 7pm, Wattis Theater

Woody Allen, Interiors (still), 1978; photo courtesy of United Artists/Photofest © United Artists

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.

Woody Allen, Interiors (still), 1978; photo courtesy of United Artists/Photofest © United Artists

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.

Woody Allen, Interiors (still), 1978; photo courtesy of United Artists/Photofest © United Artists

Interiors is another exception, albeit of a variant variety. Allen’s first “serious” film—I’m talkin’ DEADLY—and his first in which he didn’t appear as an actor, Interiors was greeted with collective shock by audiences and critics. Studio executives no doubt had the same response when they first got a gander at the script. To this day, no Hollywood studio has ever financed anything as remotely austere—funereal, in fact—at least by an American director. But what could the bigwigs do? Allen’s films didn’t cost that much, and he’d just won a mitt-full of Oscars for Annie Hall. Many critics pronounced it a masterpiece, while others scratched their heads. Audiences quickly got the word, and skipped it. Over the last thirty-one years, collective amnesia has taken hold, and it’s almost as if Interiors never existed. Stunningly photographed by the legendary Gordon Willis (The Godfather films, and all of Woody Allen’s from 1977 through 1985), Interiors plunges Allen’s audience into an alien universe signaled by the virtual absence of music—only two of Allen’s signature classic Dixieland jazz numbers find their way into the film—and relatively late, at that. The aliens are a family of doom-laden wealthy WASPs who rotate around a mother, Eve, possessed of a black hole-esque gravitational pull. Eve has had a brilliant career as an interior decorator for several decades, but at some point things snapped, and the severity of her minimalist vision seeped into every nook and cranny of her family’s psychic life. A period of institutionalization complete with shock therapy was followed by a return to the family’s center, and her bumpy ride ever since has left the whole clan emotional wrecks. Towards the beginning of the film, the father’s decided to take a powder, and it’s hard not to sympathize—his three daughters have spent their whole lives in a world of trying to make sense of it all, and he doesn’t have much time left. The middle daughter, Flyn (Kristin Griffith) has found anxious success as an actress in “terrible” TV movies. The youngest, Joey (Mary Beth Hurt), flits from job to job, art to art, in an attempt to capture her mother’s power. The eldest, Renata (Diane Keaton), is the only one of the three to reach artistic expression—as a poet—at a level equivalent to her mother’s, but she’s coming apart at the seams: “My impotence set in a year ago,” she tells her therapist, “…my paralysis. I suddenly found I couldn’t bring myself to write anymore… Increasing thoughts about death just seemed to come over me.” These lines, which Allen would previously have delivered himself, played for comedy, are spoken here in dead earnest. Just as it would appear impossible for things to get worse, father returns with a new fiancee, and all hell breaks loose…

Woody Allen, Interiors (still), 1978; photo courtesy of United Artists/Photofest © United Artists

Since its release, Interiors has been described as being in the manner of Allen’s idol, Ingmar Bergman. While this is true on the face of it, Allen has interiorised many of Bergman’s own influences: Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg, and has added a couple of his own—Eugene O’Neil  and Tennessee Williams. All this haute-powered theater culture background might make Interiors a little pretentious, but I’m not one to say. My own childhood experience of 70’s Manhattan white-walled minimalism and memories of a few matriarchal figures in my own family, which, if combined, would, I’m certain, prove a dead-ringer to Eve, render my response to this film too viscerally personal for me to lay down some pat judgment. I believe, however, compared to other Allen films of this period, Interiors’ script is stillborn. Every situation, every line is so damn on-the-money. Like the world it portrays, this script is airless. So how can I be clearly on the road to rating the film made from it highly?  Modern American film is based on the tyranny of the script. Most film productions (including most of Allen’s) attempt to resuscitate the inspiration that went into their writing, then freeze-dry the results on celluloid. Allen’s filmmaking in Interiors, however, is highly disciplined, yet organic. His camera is precise, but he allows performances to come alive and take shape before it. If I’d space and time I could write a page or two on the superlative performances which populate this film, not least by its men—Richard Jordan, and a fairly young Sam Watterston as two of the sisters’ husbands, and E.G. Marshall, in his most sensitive screen performance as the father, Arthur. Geraldine Page, often cited as the major stage actress of her generation, delivers a portrayal as Eve as subtle, complex, and mysteriously involving as any I’ve ever encountered, but astonishingly, when Arthur returns with her replacement, Pearl, Maureen Stapleton’s appearance in this role immediately evokes a life force so vital that it’s instantly clear Eve’s match has been met. Similar to his treatment of his performers, Allen allows decor, land and sea-scape to become palpably alive in front of his camera. His use of symbols and human and natural archetypes—such as the sea—will be uncomfortably obvious for some, but what is lost in nuance is more than made up in raw force.

The print of Interiors SFMOMA will be showing Thursday night is a studio archival print—one of the few, or possibly THE ONLY, known to exist—and procured for this screening by the intrepid and diligent efforts of Public Programs Associate Gina Basso. Those of us in attendance will likely be simultaneously horrified and enthralled—these are the sorts of responses impelled by Allen’s best film.

[Interiors screens Thursday October 29th, as part of Vincent Fecteau selects..., with George Kuchar's Temple of Torment (2006). Vincent Fecteau and George Kuchar in person. 7pm, Wattis Theater.]

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.

I left my hometown, spent some time in Colorado and in NYC, ending up in SF years later. One night down at the Kilowatt bar in the Mission (back when the Kilowatt had live music) a friend of mine, also from Indiana, recognized Pat in the crowd. We met, acknowledged our mutual friends back in Bloomington and became fast friends ourselves. I was starting to make films more seriously and Pat became my collaborator, scoring soundtracks for some of my films. He was also coming into more of his own as a musician, writing his own songs, recording himself singing, playing guitar, bass, and getting into all sorts of cheap keyboards, toys, junk– anything that made an interesting sound. This started a regular pawnshop/thriftstore hound routine: we went out 2-3 time a week for a couple of years, obsessed with finding musical gear for him, and movie gear for me at bargain prices. During one of these visits I was testing a Bolex 16mm camera I was hoping to buy, and shot a couple of rolls of film right there in the store. I wanted to see if the camera was working properly and asked Pat to act natural and wander the store as usual. I didn’t buy the camera, but the film looked great, and I was happy to have a document of our weekly habit. Little did I know back then that I would eventually dig these rolls out and incorporate this little scene into D tour, exemplifying Pat’s perseverance pursuing music.

Before I started the film, I knew a little about Pat’s history. I knew he had a kidney transplant in 1994 and that it was a huge undertaking, especially for a 25-year-old college student and aspiring musician. Transplanted kidneys don’t last forever. The body is constantly trying to reject the organ and it’s inevitable that recipients will go through another transplant at some point down the road. But, Pat, like many other organ recipients, never really talked about it. He carried on with his life, pursuing his goals like the rest of us. I never considered that Pat would have to go through that again or that even after the next transplant, he’ll have to go through it again… and again… for the rest of his life.

Pat found out in early 2006 that it was time to go down that road again. His 1994 kidney still had some function left but it was inevitable he’d need a new one. This time he more than just talked about it; he felt the urge to share his story with others. Pat called me just before starting dialysis and asked if I wanted to make “a video” about his experience. The “hook” was that he was to going stay with Rogue Wave, by now the most serious and promising band he had been in, and continue touring and performing, while on dialysis! Pat wanted to show others in the same predicament that you can go through this, and still live your life the way you want to. Our original idea was to do a ten-minute piece showing Pat going through dialysis, finding a donor, and finally, getting the transplant. What started out with some simple interviews or demos on peritoneal dialysis ballooned into scenes from a risky and restless tour, an epic quest for a potential living donor and a memorable benefit concert for Pat. Almost three years later, I’ve ended up with about 80 hours of footage.

With the driving force of music behind him, Pat strives to share his exclusive outlook and experiences with an audience that may not have had the opportunity to think about the importance of organ donation, or about what one person goes through in dealing with a rigid health care system. I certainly learned a lot along the way.

-Jim Granato
Director & Producer, D tour

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…

Luis Buñuel, Las Hurdes aka The Land Without Bread (still), 1932.

Land without Bread is last, but not least, of Buñuel’s triumvirate of early Surrealist masterpieces. The first two of this cycle, Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’or, are easily amongst the most sensational and scandalous in the history of the celluloid medium. Land without Bread, the first film Buñuel made in his native Spain, documents a mountainous region so impoverished that the folkloric tradition has been lost, the inhabitants have forgotten how to sing, children lie in the streets dying of malaria, and yes, bread and all other wheat products are unknown. These are lives in which absurdity reigns supreme. The villagers eat one of their precious goats only when it takes an accidental tumble off a cliff, while schoolchildren are taught to write at a chalkboard by means of such exhortations as “Respect the property of others.” Buñuel brings the full corrosive force of his Surrealist vision into documentary terrain, subtly lampooning the conventions of a genre then only in its nascency. Financed by anarchists, this work’s potential contribution to Spain’s on-going turmoil was recognized, and was very much not appreciated. Banned for two years by the Republican government, it earned Buñuel a warrant by the right-wing Nationalists (fortunately never served) for him to be immediately escorted to Generalissimo Franco were he to be captured.

George Franju, Hotel des Invalides (still), 1951

The Hôtel des Invalides is a vast complex in Paris containing a hospital and retirement home for veterans, as well as a military museum. It also serves as the resting place for many French military/political figures, including Napoleon. Before Georges Franju’s compassionate expressionist vision of a sadomasochist universe made its way to features like Eyes Without a Face, it had already found full expression in such works as this eponymously titled documentary portrait. Likely his most scathing work, Hôtel des Invalides draws all basic humanist tenets into question. Its opening shots capture a flock of birds swooping in and out of formation amongst the complex’s buildings, suggesting human militarism springs from a similar herd instinct. Menace lurks behind the most lustrous evidence of human innocence: from a close-up of a beautiful museum visitor’s summery laughter, Franju cuts to an atomic explosion’s mushroom cloud. This filmmaker’s perspective is anything but simplistic, however. A gallery of armor comes to life with the ghostly evocation of the battlefield’s fallen, a scene which includes a brief meditation on the armored suit made for a small child. At a later point, a hideously deformed veteran partakes of services in the chapel, his identity proudly, anxiously displayed on a chest swathed by a brace of gaudy medals.

Alain Resnais, Le Chant du Styrène (still), 1958.

Unquestionably the greatest “industrial” film ever created, Le chant du Styrène was the last short made by Alain Resnais before embarking on a career in features beginning with the immediately legendary Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad. Styrène’s opening images are stunning. In abstract space, strange, unearthly flowers suddenly bloom. Brightly hued alien beings spring instantaneously to life. Never before or since have shots of such plastic beauty been devoted to the documentation of—well, plastic. Styrene demonstrates itself an astoundingly versatile material, capable of being molded into toy cars, badminton-rackets, record players, babies’ sippy cups. Urged on by a stridently declaimed mock-heroic verse narration, we are ushered through all phases of these product’s spawning, from finished consumer item back through to its source material’s origins. Counterpointed by a dissonance-inflected modernist score, Styrène presents us with a jaw-dropping, gorgeous vision of industrial/consumerist visual culture rivaled only by Red Desert and Zabriskie Point. In a contemporary world given over to unlimited valorization of consumerism, Resnais’s film may be, via its detournment of each and every item spied by its camera away from commercial purposes, the most incendiary film currently possible.

By journey’s end, it’s clear what Clipson’s up to. This program of rare European documentaries is of a piece with his own formidable aesthetic project, as revealed by his work in Super-8. From the depths of his hidden lair, this latter-day Fantômas seeks to convert audiences to a cult of orgasmic beauty, in which mind, eyes, body, and soul are united in ecstatic trance. Thoroughly subversive, Clipson is guilty as charged. He has produced a show easily amongst the most exciting of the season.

———– Paul Clipson presents subversive documentatries at noon on September 1st, as the free tuesday program. Museum and program admission are free.

“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.

Jason Holliday, née Aaron Payne, in Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason

Jason Holliday has no sooner introduced himself, than he immediately drops the sketched-in veneer of glamor to announce his handle is a nom-de-plume: hidden behind this jaunty persona is the all-too-revealing birth name Aaron Payne.   Shields of swish and jive cover over the deal he’s made to worship the golden calf to distract himself from inner torment. This isn’t a difficult task for Jason Holliday, for he is one very beguiling personality. A self-described “hustler”, whose métier may or may not involve prostitution and thievery, he claims to do anything necessary to support himself with ease: “I’ll come on as a maid, or a butler, or a flunky—anything to keep from punching the clock.” His shady brand of lazy is hard to trust, however, for he’s riddled with self-repressed ambition: “What I really wanna do is what I’m doing now, (that) is: perform.” The drama of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait concerns the nature of Jason’s performance(s) and an attempt to tear off the masks behind which this “real swingin’ hip cat” hides.

Jason has been promising for years to anyone who’ll listen he’s on the verge of developing a night-club act. But it’ll be necessary to engage musicians, and so on. This’ll take money, of course, and money gets taken. Things must be done in the style to which he’s accustomed. With his observations of the bizarre antics of rich employers serving as models, Jason has built a complex inner labyrinth by which to escape forty-something years of racism and queer-hating, and from which he justifies countless attempts to get his own back. After many charming yet disquieting tales of revenge and rough trade, of confinement in the “nut-house” and “ballin’ from Maine to Mexico” (with San Francisco, of course, not left out), the viewer might be forgiven for wondering if this “male bitch” has got the goods. But from the moment he effortlessly slides into dead-on impressions of Mae West, Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, Vivien Leigh and Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind, the cast of Carmen Jones, and the aristocrat Katherine Hepburn plays in Stage Door,  it’s clear Jason’s stories and the complex pantheon of personae he assumes brilliantly serve to force into the public arena a psychodrama which for his sanity must be shown and seen.

Carl Lee and Shirley Clarke

Towards the beginning of Portrait, Jason is comfortable. Lounging in Clarke’s Chelsea Hotel apartment, supplied from a bottomless well of booze, and toking from a joint the size of a small cigar, Jason is performing for friends. Aside from the three-member film crew, Jason and Clarke are joined by  black actor Carl Lee (friend of Jason’s and her long-time lover, who had appeared in her earlier landmark productions, The Connection and The Cool World and worked as her main collaborator on the latter), and another member of their circle, Robert Fiore. Jason’s ready to roll: “This is my chance to really feel myself, and say: ‘I’m the bitch’… This is a picture I can save forever…I will have one beautiful thing that’s my own.” From off-camera Lee and Clarke cue him to launch into routines familiar to them from a well-rehearsed repertoire. Jason responds ebulliently, punctuating his tales with “finger-poppin’ ” and the ironic refrain “I’ll never tell.” As the remnants of the twelve-hour shoot roll on, however, it becomes evident his interlocutors very much mean for him to tell, prodding him to reveal the sordid details of his upbringing by a muscle-bound gambler, his bootlegger father, Brother Tuff. None of this goading pierces Jason’s armor until things get personal, when in film’s last minutes Lee unloads a series of hateful accusations, causing tears to stream down Jason’s face.

I haven’t as yet been able to discover the source of Clarke’s professed hatred of her subject; and indeed, while editing the film,  she “grew to love” him. Perhaps it was Jason’s open lust for her partner of the previous half-dozen years, or an irritation natural for a filmmaker craving male privilege at Jason’s casual misogyny (which in turn betrays an envy of female power), or collective fatigue for Jason’s incessant jive amongst their set. At any rate, the “love” is easy to get—Clarke had a strong affinity for outsiders. “I always felt alone and on the outside of the culture I was in… I identified with black people because I couldn’t deal with the woman question and I transposed it.” The product of a wealthy Jewish family, she married after college to escape the yoke of an abusive father. After a serious foray into the world of modern dance, Clarke switched over to film, to which she brought a dancer and choreographer’s rhythm, dynamism, and self-conscious orientation to performance. Subsequent to becoming a major figure in the American experimental film movement with such films as the brilliant (and fantastically beautiful) Bridges-Go-Round, Clarke, under the influence of Rossellini, became fascinated with issues of “truth” and “reality” as related to cinema. The three feature films she made in the 60’s openly sparred with the tenets of the simultaneously-developing cinéma-vérité movement, especially her friend Ricky Leacock’s contention that truth in front of the camera could only be recorded, never created.

Portrait of Jason was Clarke’s major contribution to the cinéma-vérité canon. Given the Promethean nature of this artist, a wholly new conceptualization of the form was to be expected—by forcing the audience to negotiate the self-conscious insertion of the behind-the-camera reality into cinéma-vérité, Clarke injected drama into the form, bringing it closer to originator Jean Rouch’s concept: “the truth of cinema, not the cinema of truth.” Doing this aligned documentary to Sam Fuller’s famous dictum “a film is like a battleground. There’s love…hate…action…violence…death. In one word: emotions.” The results were very much of a piece with the nature of filmgoing in the 60’s, for the cinema was arguably THE place people congregated in search of catharsis in those most tumultuous times. Portrait of Jason (like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls of the previous year, whose “beauty and power” Clarke claimed to be “haunted by”) is a key artifact of the 60’s psycho-dynamics of stardom-lust, self-exposure and ego-breakdown which have come down to us in the devolved versions of Jerry Springer, reality TV, and American Idol. “People love to see you suffer”, Jason delightedly observes early in his Portrait. Even though Clarke regularly defocuses Jason’s image to remind the viewer of her camera’s mediation, his infectious personality in all its dimensions dominates her film. Though Shirley Clarke was often designated the “Queen of the Chelsea”, on that winter night in 1967 Jason shared her throne, and does so again every time her portrait of him hits the silver screen.

Portrait of Jason screens this Thursday (7pm) and Saturday (3pm) in the Wattis theater, as part of the Richard Avedon: Notes on “Nothing Personal” film series.

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.

My best conversations of late, both in class and among friends, have been about cinema. And so I find myself wanting to talk here about movies. Not so much the movies on view in theaters – less and less is that how I see anything, there just isn’t the time – but films passed along to me by friends, watched on planes or in hotel rooms.

I was advising this semester a masters’ thesis on the subject of modernization, documentary and realism in contemporary China. The writer, Xiaoyu Weng, discussed paintings by Liu Xiaodong and the film Dong (2006) by the director Jia Zhang Ke, to argue that the concept of reality has become seriously troubled in a spectacle-obsessed Chinese culture. Intrigued by her ideas I have been making my own way through Jia’s filmography, with The World (2004) – the director’s mordant survey of the World Park in Beijing – being of particular fascination. Listless attendants kill time in the wings of the gesamtkunstwerk; time moves with a wonderfully deranged slowness. “In China we have a saying,” Jia told Senses of Cinema, “‘A day is as long as a year.’ In fact a day might well be longer than a year, or a day could actually be a year.”

In New York in April, the artist Fia Backström described a project she’d done for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, called Studies in Leadership (a family affair) (2009), which was partly inspired by the film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968). The director, William Greaves – whose position Backström adopted in Saint Louis – set up a confounding improvisatory system of multiple cameras and crews, with himself as a kind of absent presence at the center of things.

From Greaves’ personal notes, reproduced in Criterion’s booklet: “Refuse to give a total explanation of the film! After all, it is impossible anyway, due to its complexity.” “Rumors of unrest and revolution in the crew should develop,” he continues, “should lead to encounters with the director.”  The resulting film is a hilarious and touching poem about misbehavior and social organization, in a situation where authority refuses its own conditions. It’s certainly instructive for anyone who works as a teacher or curator, or anyone whose quixotic job is getting anyone else to do anything.

Robert Frank, Pull My Daisy (still), 1958; photo courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Robert Frank

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.

Pull My Daisy, written and narrated by Jack Kerouac (whose voice-over commentary includes all the cast’s dialogue), and featuring Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Alice Neel, Larry Rivers, and Delphine Seyrig, among others, is easily the most famous and celebrated of Beat films. Based on an incident from Kerouac’s relationship with Neal and Carolyn Cassady, Frank and co-director Alfred Leslie create the illusion of spontaneity and improvisation in their depiction of the clash between the free and easy Beats and those encumbered by petit-bourgeois convention. While form and content seem fused, Daisy followed its script, and was rehearsed and photographed via conventional means. The results, unveiled in a double-premiere withJohn Cassavetes’ Shadows in November 1959, were hailed by Jonas Mekas in the Village Voice as the “most alive and the most truthful of films”.

The Sin of Jesus, based on a story by Isaac Babel, is the tale of a pregnant farm wife whose man abandons her for the army. With no other apparent desire, aside from her child, but companionship, she is rendered disconsolate. Taking pity on this simple soul, Jesus informs her he will lend her one of his angels to keep her company, but with whom she mustn’t reproduce. After a “wedding party” celebrated with her new companion’s brethren, she is left alone with a creature more beautiful than any she’s ever encountered, and in the darkened house the warnings of Jesus are forgotten… Through low-budget, but flamboyantly expressive cinematic means, Sin brilliantly evokes a private dreamscape, made the more convincing by contrast with its indigent setting. Featuring the first film performance by “Telli” Savalas, this film confronts the duplicity at the heart of Judeo-Christianity when its newly-emboldened protagonist turns the tables on Jesus and His laws, demanding to know “Who”, after all, “made me this way?!”

OK End Here amalgamates the stylistics of Antonioni and cinéma vérité to portray a day in the life of a New York couple on the verge of middle-age. It’s clear the time of carefree dreaming is over. As they lie in bed one morning, the woman asks: “Deus ex machina… what does that mean?” “It means”, the man says, “it’s time to get up”. Through fluidly floating movement by a seemingly “independent camera”, and fragmented editing, Frank conveys in a nonpareil manner the disassociation and disconnect experienced by the woman, and through her, by the man. By turns heavy and whimsical, OK is graced by several superlative performances, Martin La Salle as the man not least among them. For those familiar with La Salle only through his immortalizing, but deliberately uninflected appearance as star of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, the sensitivity and lightness of his performance in OK will come as a frisson-laden shock. A gorgeously crafted work, OK End Here is a major entry in the cycle of films dealing with female ennui and alienation which would play out over the next decade, whose highlights include Godard’s Vivre sa vie, Antonioni’s Red Desert, and Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence.

The strength of these three works augurs well for this retrospective. Though Frank’s interest in narrative payoff is tenuous, as with The Americans it was immediately clear to those of vision that his films were imbued with an emigre’s acute sense of a country in an on-going and tormented process of evolution. Keep alert to the developments of this series—those familiar with Frank’s work solely via his still photography only know part of this wide terrain.

The Robert Frank Retrospective is showing in conjunction with Looking in: Robert Frank’s America. These three films comprise Program 1, showing tonight.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (still), 1979. Courtesy of Kino International

“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.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (still), 1979

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…

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (still), 1979. Courtesy of the Ronald Grant Archive

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.