paratext

This is totally late, but this is my blurb for The Cinefamily’s screening of Peter Watkins’ pseudo-doc about the US-as-police-state Punishment Park. 

An astonishing all-American dystopia that’s both terrifyingly realistic and fantastically hyperbolic, Peter Watkins’ masterpiece Punishment Park melts down the righteous anger of Vietnam protest politics into a nail-biting flow of pure narrative propulsion. In the film’s chilling “what-if” scenario, a uniformly groovy panoply of subversives (featuring pacifists, feminists, professors, draft dodgers and pop stars) stand in resistance against repressive establishment squares at a lethal government-sponsored kangaroo court — but survival soon trumps articulateness, as the prisoners are plunged into the deepest levels of hell right in the open air: a grueling, Most Dangerous Game-style desert death race with no food or water, but plenty of ticked-off cops. Shot guerilla-style on 16mm in a Mojave Desert dry lake bed, this docudrama trailblazer is unforgiving, raw, and scorching, and features shocking performances from its non-professional actors, who were cast primarily for their ability to speak on-camera about their real-life political beliefs. While insightfully awash in Seventies counterculture, Punishment Park is no time capsule, for what’s most terrifying is how relevant its alternate-reality police state still feels forty years later.

I blurbed the underdog masterpiece of French New Wave, Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating. 1 week run in LA, starting June 8th. There’s so much to say about the film: it’s a surreptitiously feminist, impossibly stylish, 3 hours long, conceptually ambitious, yet super easy to watch. And those actresses.

Like a Borges story swathed in a silk kimono, the maze-like turns of the epic-length Céline and Julie Go Boating are so welcomingly sensual, you’ll be just as likely to laze in the film’s warm beauty as you will be to decipher its Byzantine puzzles. Librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) and cabaret magician Céline (Godard regular Juliet Berto) are the mysteriously linked protagonists who spontaneously form a friendship, one that rivals Daisies for playful absurdity and Mulholland Dr. for alternate dimensions. The other realm in question here is the psychodrama of a Parisian household from a bygone era, revealed to the duo in fragmented film-within-a-film memories brought on by magical candies. Director Jacques Rivette’s 1974 exploration of the nature of narrative is the most mischievously immersive of the French New Wave, casually bending our perceptions of both time and space even as it keeps us fully aware of its richly-rendered world. Céline and Julie Go Boating was Rivette’s biggest commercial hit in France, yet remains sadly unreleased on DVD in this country, so seize the chance to catch this master stroke of whimsy and wonderment on the big screen! Brand-new 35mm print!

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/celine-and-julie-go-boating/

6/5 at Cinefamily. One of my favorite films of the 00s, with director Andrew Bujalski in person. Here is my blurb.

A decade ago, a young director named Andrew Bujalski made one of cinema’s politest call-to-arms with Funny Ha Ha, his generation-defining D.I.Y. debut about post-college indirection. Like Linklater’s Slacker did for the ’90s, Funny Ha Ha definitively captures aimlessness in the Aughts with humor, compassion, and incisiveness as it follows recent grad Marnie (the luminous Kate Dollenmayer) as she meanders through temp jobs, crushes, and to-do lists. A graduate of Harvard’s hands-on and documentary-heavy film program, with a faculty advisor none other than Chantal Akerman(!), Bujalski’s indisputable film buff cred shines through every warmly rough-hewn frame and naturalistic line of dialogue. A true crowd-pleaser that began as a word-of-mouth phenomena and went on to single-handedly inspire not only countless imitators — from current in-theater dramedies to HBO series - but an entire filmmaking movement (so-called “mumblecore”), few debuts have had such an impact on the landscape of current American filmmaking. With a gorgeous 35mm restoration of its original 16mm print, there’s never been a better time to see what sets Funny Ha Ha apart. Andrew Bujalski will be here in person for a Q&A & reception after the film!

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/special-events-june-2012/#funny-ha-ha-10th-anniv-screening-filmmaker-andrew-bujalski-in-person

Cinefamily’s doing a Studio Ghibli retrospective next month. It’s pretty much the only major studio animation worth watching. Here’s my blurb for the incredible Ponyo, but the entire series is worth watching.

One of cinema’s most visually striking evocations of the ocean’s ineffable, mercurial magic, Hiyao Miyazaki’s final feature film is a boy-meets-goldfish tale whose charm is as vast as the sea itself. Gently exploring friendship and familial love, the story is as timeless as the Hans Christian Andersen “Little Mermaid” fable that inspired Miyazaki’s script, yet Ponyo also deftly dives through contemporary themes — particularly humanity’s strained relationship with nature. Both a triumphant return to tradition and an experimental leap forward, Miyazaki abandoned all computer animation for Ponyo’s dramatic coastal landscapes and typically-bizarre characters, relying on hand-drawn lines and watercolored textures that are unmatched in their warmth, fluidity, and inventiveness. The director even reportedly drew much of the film’s many waves himself to ensure their texture and movement was just right. Whether you’re an animation connoisseur or a casual cartoon watcher, that kind of big-heartedness shines through in every frame. Our screening of Ponyo is presented with an English-dubbed audio track.

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/studio-ghibli/#ponyo

Cinefamily’s doing a retrospective of one of the most mind-blowing living filmmakers, Hungarian director Bela Tarr (including the insane, 7.5 hour Satantango and his latest and last film Turin Horse). Here’s my blurb for his dreamlike masterpiece, Werkmeister Harmonies.

A masterpiece of bone-chillingly stark beauty, Béla Tarr’s breakthrough film about chaos descending onto a small Hungarian village is an intellectual and visual juggernaut of near-unmatched power. Through unforgettable imagery that intertwines hope and despair as inseparably as the black and white of the film’s bleakly stunning compositions, Tarr melds all the unalterable monumentality of the cosmos with the small rhythms of our human routines and intrigues. A bar full of haggard drunkards beautifully recreates the dance-like rotations of the solar system — and the stuffed corpse of a whale interrupts the bustling life of the village square with the inescapability of decay, both physical and societal. Throughout it all, Tarr’s trademark long shots (the film is comprised of a mere 35 long-takes), along with his solemnly gliding camera, transform the screen into the equivalent of an oversize hourglass that both mourns and celebrates the unavoidable progress of time, and our place in it. Ultra-rare 35mm print!

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/the-films-of-bela-tarr/#werckmeister-harmonies-49-730pm

La Femme Publique. 3/16 at Cinefamily. This movie has the best naked dance scenes ever put to film. 

A rare film about filmmaking that’s fleshy as it is brainy, La Femme Publique is an eloquently effed love letter to cinema that could have only been created by a director for whom romance is synonymous with delirium. A physically stunning Valérie Kaprisky stars as an aspiring actress whose efforts in a wild film adaptation of Dostoevsky keep her (barely) sane amongst the literal grind of nude photography dancing(!). Long drawn to the cinematic concept of doubles, Zulawski casts one for himself here, in the guise of the expat director (an intense Francis Huster) who shares Zulawski’s own obsession for extracting extreme, unorthodox performances from the cast. As Huster directs Kaprisky both on and off the set (and into his bedroom), his production remains one of cinema’s most self-reflexive and most aggressive films-within-a-film, viscerally exploding the boundaries between performance and life, and between director and directed. An essential companion piece to The Important Thing is to Love, this is required viewing for anyone looking for insight into the creative mind of one of the 20th century’s most inventive auteurs.

Impossibly funneling all of Zulawski’s violent, expansive energy into the delicate, cramped indoor spaces of the heart and well-furnished Parisian apartments, The Important Thing Is To Love charts a precarious, slow-burning love triangle between an actress-turned-porn starlet (Romy Schneider, in a career-defining performance), her jester-like husband (pop star Jacques Dutronc), and an admiring photographer (Fabio Testi) that explores the tension between passion and duty, as well as art and trash. Here, Zulawski is at his most rigorously restrained, mirroring the unconsummated smoldering between the luminous Schneider and moody Testi, a relationship unfazed through a sensualist hailstorm of grandiose orgies, pet bats, morose clowns, loan sharks, and geriatric drug addicts. As if that’s not enough, Klaus Kinski himself plays an overly intense thespian with a hair-trigger anger problem, thanks to one of history’s most awesomely self-aware casting choices. A tremendous Euro arthouse smash upon its release in the mid-’70s, The Important Thing Is To Love is not only essential Zulawski viewing, but essential viewing period.

Hitting an off-the-charts level of subversive allegory, Zulawski’s second feature is a blood-splattered rampage through a war-charred 1790s Poland that turns the historical epic inside out, and dances on its carcass. Immediately banned in the director’s Communist Poland for over a decade and a half, The Devil writhes with nonstop demonic energy as it follows an nobleman who, after escaping from prison, swandives into insanity and mass murder. Returning home to his once-rich family — one now reduced to savages — and manipulated by a black-cloaked Satanic stranger at the center of a web of political treachery, the nobleman eventually enacts a Hamlet-like pyrrhic revenge on just about everyone in sight. But The Devil’s most spectacularly intense violence is all emotional, with near-constant outbursts of grief, and desperation of a seizure-like intensity that is downright mesmerizing. You won’t be able to look away, and with the way Zulawski’s gloriously restless camerawork captures all the detail, you’ll never want to.

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/the-unbelievable-genius-of-andrzej-zulawski/#the-devil