Friday, October 27

Americans Abroad

Friday, 10:00AM, Vinegar Hill

From the Journals of Jean Seberg

With Rock Hudson's Home Movies, presented by the director at last year's Virginia Film Festival, Mark Rappaport invented a new genre in which celebrities, played by actors, assist in the playful deconstruction of their movie roles. From the Journals of Jean Seberg is a great leap forward from the Rock Hudson movie, featuring dazzling insights into the construction of a female Hollywood star, and a remarkable performance by Mary Beth Hurt as Jean Seberg. Seberg was catapulted into stardom by Otto Preminger, who cast her at 17-years old as Saint Joan. She was a Hollywood has-been at 19, but was snatched by French director Jean-Luc Godard for his first movie, Breathless, in which she made an indelible impression. Seberg married French writer Romain Gary, appearing in demeaning roles in his films (a humiliating tradition which ties her to actress-wives Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, as Rappaport ironically demonstrates) and became active in the Black Panther movement. This infuriated FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who set about destroying her reputation, until Seberg committed suicide. Rappaport's movie is an imaginative autobiography by the actress which uncovers the broader cultural and political contexts of Jean Seberg's career, while leading the audience to appreciate and care deeply about her talented and tragic life.

Producer Lewis Allen, a friend of Jean Seberg's, will discuss Seberg and this film at the panel on "Artists as Emigres" which begins at 1:00pm in McLeod Hall Auditorium.

Friday, 10:00AM, County Office Building

Chang

Cooper and Schoedsack, who brought us the classic King Kong, spent 18 months in the jungle filming a Lao tribe in their struggles against man-eating tigers, leopards, and rampaging elephants. Although they had no shooting script, the film is carefully choreographed and builds to the climactic capture of an elephant herd. A monkey called Bingo and a bear cub provide comic relief, and particular delight for children. The film, according to film historian Kevin Brownlow, is "spellbinding...Sequence by sequence, the picture was planned to seize an audience by the hair, to excite them as no ordinary film had ever excited them. And the magic works today. Chang is the audience picture supreme...Chang, overshadowed in Cooper and Schoedsack's career by King Kong, was cast aside to join the ever growing legion of lost films." In 1988, however, Dennis Doros and David Pierce tracked down the rights and a preservation copy of the film, and rereleased the film. Doros, an authority on the travelogue, or "exploration" genre of films which flourished during the silent era, will introduce this program.

Friday, 1:00PM, Vinegar Hill

TOURISTS

with directors Robb Moss and Miranda Devin

The Tourist

Robb Moss's "home movie" documents his public life as a free-lance cameraman traveling all over the Third World, and his private sorrow: his and his wife's inability to have a child. The image that juxataposes these two worlds are pictures of his wife, longing to have a child, and pictures of starving children from fertile parents. Moss travels and records events as an outsider, a tourist. "I would think how lucky I was to be able to visit these parts of the world so far from my ordinary life," says Moss. "Beneath such bliss, however, was the lurking knowledge that I often had no idea what I was really filming, and that my camera and I often resorted to easy ironies, superficial visual 'poetry,' or images of violence to mask my ignorance." And then there was the misery of miscarriage after miscarriage for four years. Here, too, Moss is an outsider in the world of families. This patchwork of the public and the private are connected, and Moss captures life, whether poignant or horrific, poetically.

Rendezvous in Puntarenas

Miranda Devin portrays, and is, an American filmmaker who goes to the poorest region of Costa Rica to film a documentary about street children. In the fascinating fishing village of Puntarenas, she meets a young boy named Luis, who becomes her guide, and she finds herself more and more entwined in the lives of those she encounters. Devin calls Rendezvous in Puntarenas a "genre-bender." In fact, her film won the Boston University Redstone Film Festival because of the way it "blended the best of the documentary tradition within the realm of a narrative film."

Friday, 1:00PM, County Office Building

A Foreign Affair

Post-war Berlin was an unlikely setting for a comedy, and perhaps only the extremely successful team of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder could have pulled off this black comedy about the "moral malaria" affecting the American occupation forces in Berlin. Even the victors are corrupted by the black market and the allure of vanquished Germany's sirens, especially sirens such as Marlene Dietrich. Upon its release, some critics labeled A Foreign Affair "tasteless." As American forces occupied Berlin at the time and patriotism was still running high, the film's probe of what happens when national interest conflicts with self interest drew the ire of many. Jean Arthur is Congresswoman Phoebe Frost, investigating American G.I. behavior and ready to be shocked by black market profiteering and fraternization with the enemy. John Lund as Capt. John Pringle is assigned to show Arthur Berlin. He's reluctant at first, put off by Arthur's straitlaced personna, as well as the fact that he's profited from the black market and has ex-Nazi Dietrich as his mistress. With such tension between the two Americans, naturally, true love is inevitable. Dietrich initially refused the role of Erika von Schluetow, nightclub chanteuse, because she was concerned about being identified as a Nazi. However, this was the role that pulled her career out of a slump.

Discussion: Billy Wilder's Germany and America
Cynthia Baughman, Assistant Professor of Film and Photography, Ithaca College

Richard Moran, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University

Friday, 3:00PM, Culbreth Theater

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch is the movie that made Sam Peckinpah's name synonymous with violence-albeit beautifully choreographed violence. More importantly than "the blood ballet," however, Peckinpah chronicles the end of an era that's become mythic in American books, films and consciousness: the Old West. His characters, led by the older and wearier William Holden, are common thieves and murderers. Peckinpah doesn't glamourize their failings and doesn't hide their self-doubts. Yet in the end, they are able to act heroically and we mourn their passing. And that is why The Wild Bunch remains a great American Western long after its contemporaries, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or True Grit, are remembered as merely good entertainment. Set in 1913, the movie opens with a temperance parade and a shootout. Holden's gang has been set up by his old partner, Robert Ryan, who now leads a posse of lowlife bounty hunters for Holden's arch-enemy, railroad baron Albert Dekker. The gang escapes to their hideout in Mexico, and there becomes involved in the Mexican government's war against revolutionary Pancho Villa. Peckinpah said that The Wild Bunch was about "what happens when men go to Mexico." At the time of its release, some would substitute Vietnam for Mexico. In another country, men cut loose. "In another country," writes Georgia Brown for the Village Voice "we become...ourselves."

Speaker Michael Bliss, who teaches at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, is also the author of Doing It Right: The Best Criticism on Sam Peckinpah and Justified Lives: Morality and Narrative in the Films of Sam Peckinpah (Southern Illinois University Press).

Friday, 4:00PM, Vinegar Hill

Mr. Freedom

With comic books the source of so many current films, William Klein was very much ahead of his time when he filmed Mr. Freedom in 1968. Mr. Freedom, a cross between Superman, James Bond and John Wayne, and his friends, the foam rubber Moujik Man and inflatable Red China Man, are out to save the world as comic book heroes do. Mr. Freedom is not a documentary, nor can it in any way be called realistic. However, the French government was so convinced that it was "about" the May 1968 riots that it held up its release until 1969. Reportedly, Mr. Freedom was a major influence on the visual style of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. In primary colors, William Klein captures the turbulence and radicalism so prevent in the late 1960s. "A lot of French critics said it wasn't realistic," says Klein. "The idea of grotesque stylization wasn't accepted. But now, if you want to win an argument about a film, you can always say it's a comic strip reference." The print being shown restores the shots excised by Klein's American distributor, and is therefore the American premiere of the director's cut. Shown with Bambi Meets Godzilla, a cartoon which also embodies the 1960s, and represents a particularly dramatic encounter between the U.S. and Them.

Friday, 4:00PM, County Office Building

Welcome Mr. Marshall

This hilarious, 1952 satirical Spanish comedy complements Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair with a postwar European perspective on America the liberator. Amazingly, it was made during the Franco regime, which was not known for its artistic tolerance. Set shortly after World War II in the tiny Andulusian village of Villar del Rio, the film's villagers are told that an American committee for the Marshall Plan is coming and to prepare a grand welcome. The villagers, although mostly uneducated, find the idea that someone would give away something for nothing suspicious. The little bit they learn about America in a town meeting makes the United States sound more barbaric than benevolent. Still, they are obedient and plan an elaborate fantasy welcome for the Americans. They sell their valuables to pay for it. After all, the Americans are coming to give away money, so their investment should pay off many times over. Many of the villagers indulge in fantastic daydreams about the coming Americans. Jose Isbert, the town's mayor, imagines himself a cowboy in a bar in a surreal Old-West-meets-Andulusia sequence. "Although more than 40 years old, this funny, compassionate little fable has an ebullience and freshness that transcend its historical context," notes The New York Times.

Discussion: America in Post-War Spain
Elizabeth Scarlett, Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of Virginia

Friday, 7:00PM, Vinegar Hill

EAST EUROPEANS THROUGH AN AMERICAN LENS

with directors Myra Paci and Daniel DeLoach

Tryptych

"Sadistkye kupleti" is a genre of Russian poetry and black humor that citizens used to cope with the unrelenting optimisism of Soviet communism. Danny DeLoach's Tryptych is based on a trilogy of sadistic couplets, and demonstrates how the absurd can combat the horrific.

Portrait of a Boy With Dog

It was as the first American exchange students at the internationally renowned VGIK film school in Moscow that Robin Hessman and James Longley met 13-year-old Gosha, the subject of their award-winning documentary. In America, Gosha would be called a throwaway child. Abandoned by his parents and institutionalized in an uncaring system, Gosha describes his career goals (hired killer), his travails, his boredom, and his dreams. Fact mingles with fantasy in Gosha's account, and the only stability in his short life is his dog Blek. Gosha's commentary reflects the changes occurring to himself and to his country.

XXXTASY: Two Days in the Life of a Saint

A Polish immigrant go-go dancer dreams of Hollywood. A homeless man dreams of redemption. They meet for a comical, at times brutal, look at the American dream.

Friday, 7:00PM, Culbreth Theater Virginia Festival Award

An American in Paris

with Robert Osborne (Turner Enrtertainment), Jeanine Basinger (Wesleyan University), and Jean Firstenberg (American Film Institute)

Gene Kelly stars as a GI who's stayed in Paris after the war to study painting. He falls in love with Leslie Caron, who's engaged and feels obligated to marry her fiancee, despite her attraction to Kelly. From this simple plot, director Vincente Minnelli used lavish color, costumes and sets to make one of the most critically acclaimed musicals ever. "Minnelli's musicals are the most elegant and polished of the MGM musicals," says Jeanine Basinger, "and his flair for camera movement, elaborately constructed long takes, and richly styled backgrounds contribute much to the film." And then there's the music, which has permeated the consciousness of Americans whether they've seen the film or not. Twenty-two Gershwin tunes were used, including "Embraceable You," "I Got Rhythm," "'S Wonderful," and "Our Love Is Here to Stay," which debuted in the movie. But perhaps it is Gene Kelly who stamped the most indelible mark on An American in Paris. Not only is he the star and principal singer and dancer, but he also choreographed the film. His tour-de-force is the film's grand finale, a 17-minute ballet. In addition to the seven Oscars An American in Paris won, Kelly received a special Academy Award "in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and especially for his brilliant achievement in the art of choreography on film."

Once Upon A Time...When We Were Colored

with director Tim Reid and actors Phylicia Rashad and Richard Roundtree

Before integration, there was the world of Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored. That was the world of segregation and the humiliation of racial barriers. That was the world of the "colored town." But hidden along with the "juke joints" of muddy water blues was a black community in which the people nurtured, protected each other and celebrated life together. Charlottesville resident Tim Reid makes his directorial debut with this bittersweet story of love, community and family.

Friday, 10:00PM, Vinegar Hill

The Little Richard Story

Flamboyant rock 'n roller, a sometimes cross-dresser with a penchant for the gospel-this is the Little Richard we think we know. It took an American expatriate to capture another Little Richard, one who is a victim of American culture and greed. Photographer and filmmaker William Klein caught up with Little Richard during a relatively sedate religious incarnation. Little Richard was selling Bibles geared toward an African-American readership-until God told him he wasn't getting paid enough. Little Richard refused to cooperate further with Klein and with the white Bible publishers. But that didn't prevent Klein from telling his story. "The Little Richard Story turns a gratifyingly deadpan eye on the more outrageous aspects of Richard-selling and Richard-worship," wrote The New York Times. Scads of Little Richard impersonators underscore his cult status, while the Bible publishers exploit it. Klein, who's lived in Paris since the late 1950s, doesn't merely make documentaries. His films on Eldridge Cleaver, Little Richard and Muhammed Ali have been called "documentary expressionism" by Jonathan Rosenbaum. "Klein has taken an ostensibly objective form-the documentary-and infused it with a highly subjective blend of reportage and editing," elaborates Katherine Dieckmann in Art in America. "His expressionistic documentaries, rich in wild digressions and plunging camerawork, create exuberantly loose essays on their subjects."

Friday, 10:00PM, Culbreth Theater

Moana

If the success of a documentary depends on how well it captures the soul and spirit of its subject, then it is no wonder Flaherty's Moana has become such a classic. In Moana Flaherty captured the poetic beauty of Polynesian tribal life so well that subsequent to viewing the film the high chiefs of Somoa requested that it be preserved as an official document of the past, citing that "it so authentically represents the old customs of Somoa, already unknown to many of the present generation, that its value as a record in future years would be incalculable." Flaherty achieved this success, as Jonathan Rosenbaum comments, by utilizing an appropriate combination of "artifice and actuality." The characters in the film, although all native Somoans, were cast not by blood but rather for their photegenic qualities. Some of the rituals performed in the film were somewhat obsolete at the time of the filming as well, but were used in order to create a vision of the Somoan way of life that sufficiently captured their appreciation of the past. Over fifty years after Robert Flaherty released Moana, his daughter Monica released a sound version of the film, complete with ceremonial songs, dances, and dialogue. Ms. Flaherty's work is a masterpiece as well. Without changing a single frame of her father's film, Monica Flaherty managed to perfectly synchronize both song and dialogue with the original silent version of Moana.

Friday, 10:00PM, County Office Building

Shaft in Africa

This American abroad is John Shaft, the super detective of the 1970s who was immortalized in the theme song by Isaac Hayes. And Shaft himself-Richard Roundtree-will be present at the screening. Shaft in Africa was the third and final Shaft film, aside from a short-lived television series. Shaft is hired by an emerging African nation to stop an international ring that is smuggling cheap labor out of Africa to work in Paris. Undercover in native garb, Shaft travels by camel, by ship and by truck to track down the leader of the smugglers, Frank Finlay. Shaft also has an interlude with Finlay's mistress, Neda Arneric, before she dies. Her death occasions "a brief and curiously gentle exchange of regrets" between Finlay and Shaft, "the kind of gallantry that sometimes enters action movies and complicates them in surprising and wholly gratifying ways," commented The New York Times. There is some debate about whether the Shaft movies are blaxploitation films. On the one hand, they depict a gritty street life and have a great soundtrack. Yet critic Rob Edelman weighs in against putting Shaft in the blaxploitation genre, describing Shaft as "suave, romantic, brave, streetwise, and indestructible in the best tradition of the Hollywood private detective." Shaft is a hero who "just happens to be black, and he also happens to win." In a recent interview, Roundtree stated: "By the third film, Shaft in Africa, I was becoming comfortable in front of the camera. It was one of the best but no one could relate to Shaft being in Africa at the time. Maybe Shaft in Detroit or Los Angeles..."