pullquote

It's yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility.

All hail the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre for this genius bit of programming:

Wednesday, July 9 – 7:30 PM

Double Feature:

VALLEY GIRL, 1983, MGM Repertory, 99 min. Dir. Martha Coolidge. Perky teenage Valley girl Deborah Foreman falls for unkempt punk rocker Nicolas Cage, and the young lovers struggle to stay together amidst the disapproval of their peers and their own cultural prejudices. In director Martha Coolidge’s hands, what could have been just another teen exploitation film becomes a winning romantic comedy with charming heroes and a gallery of beautifully drawn supporting characters (Frederic Forrest and Colleen Camp are particular standouts as Foreman’s parents.)

REAL GENIUS, 1985, Sony Repertory, 108 min. Dir. Martha Coolidge. After their pompous professor takes advantage of their skills, a pair of brilliant science students (Gabe Jarret and Val Kilmer) decide to use their knowledge to get revenge in this irresistible comedy. Once again director Coolidge demonstrates her flair for simple but expressive gestures that define character, and her ability to capture the social insecurities of adolescence is evident in Jarret’s subtle, endearing performance.

Discussion in between films with director Martha Coolidge.

And that's why keeping your repertory prints safe from fires and floods is so important, boys and girls. Because you can't tell me the studios would prioritize two 1980s teen comedies by a woman director when triaging which damaged or destroyed prints to restrike and when.

Over there

Hizzoner reduces his carbon footprint with a little armchair travel overseas.

Elsa & Fred

A gem of a picture about two elderly people who live in Spain.

Seventy-eight-year-old Fred (Manuel Alexandre) moves into an apartment building after the death of his wife, where he meets Elsa (China Zorrilla), who is about the same age. Each has a family concerned about their well being. Fred's family consists of his bossy and argumentative daughter, her husband, and their 12-year-old son. Elsa has two sons. One is a successful businessman who takes care of her needs, and the other is an artist to whom Elsa gives money to help him along.

Fred is a quite and reserved man while Elsa is very exuberant. She sometimes exaggerates about her life, and she continues to drive her car despite being involved in numerous auto accidents. Elsa wants to go to Rome and repeat the scene in La Dolce Vita when Anita Ekberg walks into the Fontana di Trevi and her lover, Marcello Mastroianni, wades in after her, a scene replayed several times by Elsa for Fred.

The escapades between Elsa and Fred are wonderful to behold as their relationship warms to that of lovers. Some of those scenes are simply cute while others are over the top. I won't reveal any of them to you, which are all a joy to behold, so that you will have the pleasure of watching them unfold on the screen. If you are about the age of Elsa & Fred watching them interact will undoubtedly cause you to reflect on your own life and relive past moments as well. Don't miss this beautiful, modest film which is currently playing at both The Paris Theater and the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan. (In Spanish, with English subtitles)

Brick Lane

The story is about a 17-year-old Bangladesh woman, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), whose parents arrange for her to marry Chanu (Satish Kaushik), who is 20 years her senior. Formerly from Bangladesh, Chanu now lives in London.

When we see the couple in their London home 20 years later, it is clear that their marriage is a loveless one. Chanu is a foolish man and somewhat of a bully to his own family which now includes two teenage daughters. Nazneen takes up sewing in her home to help support the family and also to save funds for a visit to Bangladesh. She meets and has an affair with Karim (Christopher Simpson), the handsome son of a clothing manufacturer. Karim is a leader in the Muslim community who advocates militancy. The balance of the story deals with how the affair is resolved and the impact it has on the entire family.

The acting in Brick Lane is fine, but I was never enthralled with the story. It's a good but not a great film.

Science!

What an example of interdisciplinary scholarship: Film Content, Editing, and Directing Style Affect Brain Activity, NYU Neuroscientists Show. Ferreals! It's pretty cool. [OK, also creepy.] Here's a longish excerpt.

Using advanced functional imaging methods, New York University neuroscientists have found that certain motion pictures can exert considerable control over brain activity. Moreover, the impact of films varies according to movie content, editing, and directing style. Because the study, which appears in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, offers a quantitative neuroscientific assessment of the impact of different styles of filmmaking on viewers' brains, it may serve as a valuable method for the film industry to better assess its products and offer a new method for exploring how the brain works.

[snip]

"In cinema, some films lead most viewers through a similar sequence of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive states," the researchers wrote. "Such a tight grip on viewers' minds will be reflected in the similarity of the brain activity-or high ISC-across most viewers. By contrast, other films exert--either intentionally or unintentionally--less control over viewers’ responses during movie watching. In such cases we expect that there will be less control over viewers' brain activity, resulting in low ISC.

"To stimulate subjects' brain activity, the researchers showed them three motion picture clips: thirty minutes of Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"; an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents "Bang! You're Dead"; and an episode of Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm." To establish a baseline, subjects viewed a clip of unstructured reality: a 10-minute, unedited, one-shot video filmed during a concert in New York City's Washington Square Park.

The results showed that ISC of responses in subjects' neocortex--the portion of the brain responsible for perception and cognition--differed across the four movies:

-The Hitchcock episode evoked similar responses across all viewers in over 65 percent of the neocortex, indicating a high level of control on viewers' minds;
-High ISC was also extensive (45 percent) for "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly";
-Lower ISC was recorded for "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (18 percent) and for the Washington Square Park, or unstructured reality, clip (less than 5 percent)

"Our data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers' brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film’s sequence through aesthetic means," the researchers wrote. "The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds. Hitchcock often liked to tell interviewers that for him 'creation is based on an exact science of audience reactions.' "

Frickin' Hitchcock.

Information about the original study may be found here. Now the cinetrix is wondering how she can use this power for awesome in the classroom....

Ghobadi at MoMA

Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi is depressed. He's been waiting two years for permission from the Iranian government to begin work on his next film, and the U.S. gov't goons denied his recent application for a visa.

Yet! Via Skype and the agile translation skills of his girlfriend, freelance reporter [and former Miss North Dakota] Roxana Saberi, Ghobadi managed to address the participants at the Flaherty Seminar not once but twice last week. What a lovely fellow.

If you're in New York, hie thee to MoMA to see his films, running now through July 7. From the program:

Bahman Ghobadi was born in 1969 in Baneh, a city near the Iran-Iraq border in the province of Iranian Kurdistan. When he was twelve, civil disputes forced his entire family to immigrate to the provincial capital of Sanandaj. Ghobadi studied industrial photography and film directing at the Iranian Broadcasting College, but he honed his filmmaking skills shooting short documentaries on 8mm film as he traveled and collected stories among the Kurdish people. By the mid-1990s, Ghobadi's short films had begun to receive recognition in Iran and abroad. His short film Life in Fog—the true story of a fourteen-year-old boy who provides for his siblings after the death of their parents on the Iran/Iraq border—was a landmark in Iranian documentary cinema and formed the basis for his full-length narrative feature A Time for Drunken Horses (1999). The first Kurdish feature film in the history of Iranian cinema, Drunken Horses brought Ghobadi recognition as the country's foremost Kurdish director. Ghobadi's dramatic and documentary films explore the resilience and culture of the Kurdish people who live in the border areas of Iran and Iraq. Filled with scenes of beautiful yet extreme and harsh landscapes, the films tell poetic stories of people facing life and hardship with courage and joy.

Flaherty at MoMA: The Films of Bahman Ghobadi takes place on the occasion of the fifty-fourth Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, "The Age of Migration." The annual Flaherty Seminar focuses on the art of nonfiction film, and each year MoMA presents a selection of the titles discussed. All films written and directed by Ghobadi, made in Iran, and in Farsi with English subtitles.

Flaherty followup

Now where was I? Ah, yes. Tuesday. A week ago. Whatever.

Tuesday night: My America... or Honk If You Love Buddha (1997), Renee Tajima-Pena

Wednesday morning: A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), Bahman Ghobadi

Wednesday afternoon: In Vanda's Room (2000), Pedro Costa

Wednesday evening: Squiggle (2005), Oliver Husain; Dan Carter (2006), Alison Kobayashi; Monument of Sugar: How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers (2007), Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan

Thursday morning: False Friends (2007), Sylvia Schedelbauer; A Short Film for Laos (2006), Allan Sekula; On That Day (2008), Babak Amini; The Piggy Bank That I Found (2008), Arsham Naghshbandi; War Is Over! (2003), Bahman Ghobadi

Thursday afternoon: Contained Mobility (2004), Ursula Biemann; This Shall Be A Sign (2007), James T. Hong; Border (2004), Laura Waddington

Thursday night: Green Dolphin (2008), Oliver Husain; Calavera Highway (2008), Renee Tajima-Pena

Friday morning: Casa de Lava (1994), Pedro Costa

Interrupting the interruption in service

In a few moments, I'm heading out for this:

Are you here to fix the cable? Do you see what happens, Larry? Are you surprised at my tears, sir? What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?

You have received this invitation because you roll on Shabbos. You have the necessary means for a necessary means for a higher education. Racially, you are pretty cool. Your art has been commended as being strongly vaginal. Obviously, you are not a golfer.

Help me celebrate my special lady friend's 30th birthday! Enter a world of pain on Sunday June 29, as Harvard Square's historic Brattle Theater* graciously hosts our private screening of the Coen Bros. immortal 1998 classic The Big Lebowski.** We will start the film at 11:30 AM, but get there early so you can grab a slice of cake and pour yourself a White Russian. Yeah I know it's early for some of you, but you can get your goldbricking ass there. Don't make me send the Nihilists out to cut off your Johnson!

Admission is free, but if you'd like to pitch in I'll accept your personal check for $.69, made out to [redacted]. Also, there will be Creedence tapes, and other party favors that are as yet to be determined.

*While you're there you might consider making a small donation to the Brattle Film Foundation, and help save movies. Okay. Commercial over.

Flaherty 2008: Almost there

The cinetrix greeted the dawn this morning and is on pace to beat all previous records for sleep deprivation. Here's what we've been watching, and when:

Monday morning: The Backyard Border (2008), Lee Wang; Grossraum (2004-5), Lonnie van Brummelen; Sahara Chronicle (2006-7), Ursula Biemann

Monday afternoon: Lottery of the Sea (2006), Allan Sekula

Monday evening: From Alex to Alex (2006), Alison Kobayashi; Memories (2004), Sylvia Schedelbauer; The Betrayal (Nerakhoon, 2007), Ellen Kuras & Thavisouk Phrasavath

Tuesday morning: special sneak preview of The Exiles (1961) by Kent MacKenzie in a beautifully restored print thanks to Milestone. Out July 11th.

Tuesday afternoon: Shorts. Lessons of the Blood (work in progress), James T. Hong; Tarrafal (2007); Pedro Costa; Remote Intimacy (2007/8), Sylvia Schedelbauer; Life in Fog (1995), Bahman Ghobadi; 731: Two Versions of Hell (2006-7), James T. Hong

It's cookout-and-outdoor-screening night tonight. Pray the weather holds....

Pressed words

The cinetrix was about to make a Sing Along with Mitch reference and then realized she only feels--but is not actually--geriatric.

Anyway, for those of you interested in playing the Flaherty home game, there's a blog. See the parallel arguments develop in cyberspace here.

It's colossal!

Greetings from the 53rd annual Flaherty Seminar, the Age of Migration, curated by Chi-hui Yang. The cinetrix hasn't yet had her first cup of essential, life-sustaining coffee, so a word on what we've seen thus far. Not sure whether I've yet arrived at a place where I could say what I think anyhow, but perhaps releasing the pressure with this trephine they call the Internet will help.

Saturday evening saw only one session but three films: Q (2002) by Oliver Husain, Cargo (2001) by Laura Waddington, and God Is My Safest Bunker (2008) by Lee Wang.

Sunday morning we got into the full swing. Do note, it is Flaherty tradition not to announce the film you're about to see until asses are in seats in the theatre. Chi-Hui's upped the ante a bit more by not telling us the titles--only the running times. It is also traditional to screen a work by Robert Flaherty sometime during the seminar. And so it was that a rarely seen jawn he put together for the extension service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture called The Land (1942) unspooled, followed by Ursula Biemann's Black Sea Files (2005), and, as a lagniappe, Skate Manzanar (2001), by Renee Tajima-Pena.

The afternoon began with another Oliver Husain piece, Shrivel (2005), a short by James Hong called The Form of the Good (2006), and our first feature, Bahman Ghobadi's Half-Moon (2006). [He'd been invited to attend but got tripped up by visa snarls.]

And then there was the evening screening. Given the presence of one Pedro Costa at the cocktail hour before dinner and our half-hour-earlier start time, my money was on Colossal Youth (2006). So it was written, etc. etc. It was the first Costa film I've seen, but not the last, I suspect, and it has been seeping slowly into the crenellations of my brain ever since.

By my count, that makes two mentions of the ol' cranium, which may be its subtle way of telling me it'd like some coffee. More anon.

I still don't understand how you knew I wanted lovebirds.

Oh, my.

Alfred Hitchcock + Barbie = Awesome
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Together at last! In a pairing nobody saw coming, Mattel married two classics together to make the Alfred Hitchcock The Birds Barbie Doll. As you can see, the doll is being assaulted by a trio of angry avian attackers, making this one of very few products to be both awesome and classy. We love it, and we're sure you-- or someone you know-- will, too!

Alfred Hitchcock The Birds Barbie Doll Description:
Based on the classic movie!
Includes real fake birds!
High-quality head looks scared and has awesome hair!
This Barbie is for The Birds! Actually, this Barbie from The Birds is for you! Celebrating Alfred Hitchcock's classic film, this incredible collector's doll features our heroine being attacked by a trio of fine feathered foes, just like in the movie. Will these plastic birds damage her delightful handbag or her carefully styled hair? We certainly hope not! Be sure to let Barbie into your home and pray that the birds don't come in with her! [via]

Flaherty countdown

The cinetrix is sure that SilverDocs, P-Town, and Nantucket are all very nice. That said, one more day....

The film teaches itself to you.

Roger Ebert uses Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will to plug the benefits of shot-by-shot analysis:

I began in about 1970, on the advice of John West, a Chicago film exhibitor, teacher and historian. "You know how coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to go through game films?" he asked. "Do the same thing with a feature movie. You don't stop after every frame, of course, but you stop at anything interesting, and discuss it, and you can back up and look at it a frame at a time."

This I did, to begin with, during U of C classes. The rules were simple: Anyone in the audience shouted out "Stop!" and we did, and discussed why they wanted us to stop. Beginning with Hitchcock, who remains the most fruitful director for such analysis, I worked my way over the years through the work of Welles, Bunuel, Bergman, Herzog, Truffaut and many others. I found that with a large group, there would always be one member with the expertise to settle the question at hand: A Hungarian speaker, for example, or a psychiatrist, or a specialist on Japanese medieval history. The Colorado groups often numbered 1,000 students and locals, and over the years we formed a community.

Of course the introduction of the laserdisc, and later the DVD, made this process infinitely easier.

Amen. Allelujah!

White heat

You'll forgive the parochialism* if I say, "TOP OF THE WORLD!"

Made it, ma!

*It's what we do best. Also, fuck you, Judd Apatow.

Histoire(s) du Cinema

A stretch of travel has prevented the cinetrix from consuming anything cinematic,* but she did stumble into a fascinating conversation with the Fesser's uncle, also a professor [of French history], visiting the east coast from his home in northern California for his 50th reunion at Harvard. Which means he started in 1954, the year after the Brattle launched as an art house. He chuckled and said he'd actually written some film reviews for the student paper back in the day.

The subject of film originally came up because the Fesser's uncle mentioned working in a visit with his old pal Tom Scott while he was here. The same Tom Scott who pretty much designed the sound stuff at Skywalker Ranch and worked with Walter Murch on Apocalypse Now. Squee! And off we went.

Over the course of the conversation that followed, he asked me whether I thought Harvey and Haliday had modeled their theatre after the Cinematheque. Bien sur! Here's why he asked: Turns out after he graduated he headed to Paris to do graduate work and lived, you guessed it, across the street from the Cinematheque in the early 60s. Langlois in the maison! Good times.

Later, said uncle confessed to the Fesser that he'd enjoyed our talk but was used to teaching history, not being it.

*Though she ate lunch at a diner in Mayberry and toured the cash-strapped Twain house within a single 24-hour period.

Plague

There are so many awful stories coming out of Iowa that the cinetrix wanted to share this. Somewhere Rick Altman is smiling.

NATION
Rare Manuscripts Saved From Rising Floodwater

Listen Now [3 min 24 sec] add to playlist
All Things Considered, June 14, 2008 · A brigade of rescuers formed a human chain to protect a cache of rare manuscripts from rising waters at the University of Iowa. Film material used for cinema classes were also saved by the group. NPR's Andrea Seabrook talked with Nancy Baker, the university's director of libraries, who organized the rescue. According to Baker, hundreds of community volunteers showed up to help with the three-day effort.

UPDATE: A heartbreaking Flickr set, forwarded by FOC/U of I alum ...something slant, may be found here.