OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

New York-based filmmaker Ramin Bahrani’s third feature film, Goodbye Solo, opened this week in a limited Bay Area run. Ramin takes an approach to cinema that many people would call “low-budget,” but which I prefer to think of as economical: doing only what the story requires, no more and no less. He’s produced three feature films in five years, working outside of the Hollywood system. Goodbye Solo has been lauded by reviewers including the New York Times‘ A.O. Scott, who cited the film as exemplary of a refreshing new realist milieu.

Ramin’s approach to filmmaking resembles that of a novelist more than a director, in that he begins with real people whom he gets to know in depth as he fictionalizes their stories for the screen. Solo is based on a Senegalese taxi driver from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that Ramin met and befriended some years back. He is played by an actor, Souleymane Sy Savane, who is an engaging and natural onscreen presence. Ramin generally uses non-professional actors, such as in his first film, Man Push Cart, in which the real subject of his story played a fictional character that resembled himself.

Ramin’s interest is in telling real, if not entirely true, stories. Blurring truth and fiction, he captures the emotional complexities of a range of working-class and immigrant experiences with a raw and poetic sensibility. Disappointment is par for the course in his films. This is in part because real life is so often disappointing, and also because commercial American cinema so rarely deviates from archetypes of success and affluence.

With a MoMA retrospective (nearly unheard of for such a young director), two Times write-ups in as many weeks last month and a Charlie Rose interview that airs this week, Ramin is poised to break big with Goodbye Solo. Nonetheless it was a lucky few who took the opportunity to meet and talk with him at this past weekend’s screenings. Landmark Theaters’ Clay Theater in San Francisco and Shattuck Theater in Berkeley are screening Goodbye Solo for another week or two. Film fans won’t want to miss this opportunity to support a genuine artist of the cinema.

[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…

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