Film on Film Foundation

Events

Otto Preminger's roadshow epic The Cardinal

7:30pm Sunday, December 6
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley

Admission: $8

Otto Preminger was a titan of Hollywood's Golden Age. He lived large, on set he was God—strictly Old Testament—and he fought tooth-and-nail to make films his way, with ambition, showmanship, and controversy. From script development to casting and staging, Preminger always knew what he wanted and he thrived on total control. One of the first directors to tear loose from the shackles of a weakening studio system, he became an independent producer-director par excellence.

A born provocateur, his films broke through barriers of race (Carmen Jones) and sexuality (Advise and Consent). They dared to challenge contemporary mores with their frank treatments of sex (The Moon is Blue) and drugs (The Man with the Golden Arm), and he relished the controversy and attendant publicity they would generate. Numerous times he battled the Production Code Administration head on, and with each victory lessened its reactionary grip on Hollywood. And he was the first to break the blacklist in 1960 by crediting writer Dalton Trumbo for his work on Exodus.

The bravura sophistication of Preminger's mise-en-scène derived from a theatrical background in Vienna and on Broadway. He favored the mounting tension of a performance-heightening long take, but cultivated performances appropriate for the big screen: understated and subtly emotive. Expert use of the moving camera counterbalanced his restrained but effective montage. Manifest already in his early masterpiece Laura, these qualities would come to full fruition with Preminger's embrace of the new widescreen processes of the 1950's, which allowed him to realize his compositions and movements on a grand scale. This mature period spawned a remarkable string of epic-scale works, among them Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus, Advise and Consent, and The Cardinal.

"Otto is a dear man, sort of a Jewish Nazi, but I love him." --Joan Crawford

Though his family had narrowly escaped the holocaust, Preminger would moonlight as a Nazi in several films during his career--he had the look, the accent, and above all the temperament. Just ask any actor on a Preminger shoot who failed to ignite, before the rolling camera, the spark that had landed him the role. Ask Tom Tryon, star of The Cardinal, who absorbed the brunt of Preminger's vitriol on this difficult production: "To go on that set was like getting into the tumbrel and going to the scaffold.... Day after day after day."

The Cardinal portrays the ascension through the priestly ranks of one Stephen Fermoyle (Tryon), but Preminger's fascination with the workings of movements and institutions ensures that the film is as much about the Catholic Church itself, its internal politics laid bare, and its interaction with the world around it. Indeed, over the course of its 30-or-so year storyline, the film is a veritable compendium of the major problems of the 20th century, some of which Preminger faced firsthand: religious bigotry, fascism, and racism, addressed earnestly and intelligently.

John Huston gives a standout performance in his acting debut, while Romy Schneider, Carol Lynley, Burgess Meredith, Ossie Davis, Dorothy Gish, and Chill Wills round out a first-rate cast. But most impressive is Tryon, whose serene bearing belies the agony of his working relationship with Preminger.

Above all, The Cardinal is beautiful, epic entertainment. With its cultural and historical sweep, the film is by turns refined and earthy, depicting everything from stately Vatican ritual to tawdry dance-hall spectacle, while locations in Boston, Rome, and Vienna lend their picturesque color to Leon Shamroy's fluid photography. There is something for everyone in The Cardinal.

1963 35mm Cinemascope
Dye Transfer Technicolor
175 min. + intermission

Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.

In memory of Natasha Richardson, we invite you to a FREE screening of Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst.

7pm Sunday, June 28
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley

With her Redgrave pedigree, Natasha Richardson was destined to act. She would eventually marry fellow actor Liam Neeson and earn the respect and friendship of many others in her profession. In the years before her recent death she devoted much time and energy to humanitarian efforts.

In this early breakout role, perhaps the best of her career, as the titular newspaper-heiress-turned-urban-guerrilla, Richardson must carry a narrative centered almost entirely on Patty Hearst's subjectivity. With a carefully measured performance, she maintains throughout the compelling enigma of her character's psychology and allows us to see humanity in the face of the cruel circus of her captivity.

In the SLA cell, strong performances are also turned in by William Forsythe, Dana Delany, and especially Ving Rhames who, as leader Cinque, shows the psychotic charisma that he would later perfect as Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction.

Schrader's explorations of the claustrophobic spaces of the mind are paralleled by the movements of his camera as it roves around dark, confined interiors: those of the terrorists' safehouses and of the courtrooms and institutions of the "bourgeois pigs" they hope to bring down. And if the hermetic quality of Hearst's subjectivity ever threatens to overwhelm, he augments it with poetic inserts from her imagination--paranoid fantasies and memories colored by the present ordeal.

But ultimately it is Richardson who captures our gaze and forms the pivot around which all the film's ironic juxtapositions revolve.

1988 Color 35mm 103 min.

First Stabs: Formative Works by Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman

Fear and Desire and The Delinquents
Sunday, May 10

Roxie Cinema
3117 16th St.
San Francisco

Admission: $7
Click here to purchase advance tickets

Stanley Kubrick was born to make films. As a youth, he was a rapacious movie-goer, turning his critical eye to the myriad cinematic offerings of his native New York City. A talented shutterbug, he parlayed this hobby into a job as staff photographer at Look magazine while still in his teens. Kubrick's yearning to extend his photographic work into the domain of cinema led to his first short film, Day of the Fight, a portrait of boxer Walter Cartier, whom he previously profiled in the pages of Look.

From the start of his career, Kubrick had high-art aspirations, and these are evident even in his first feature-length work. Fear and Desire, perhaps the first independently-made American art film, is an allegorical war picture that explicitly locates its conflict, and its primal motivators, in the province of the mind. Kubrick acted as producer, director, and editor, and though his mise-en-scène was limited by available locations and props and a mostly static camera, he nonetheless evinced a flair for evoking moods with eye-catching compositions and subtle nuances of light, and an analytical, poetic approach to montage.

Ultimately, the film's miniscule budget was insufficient to fully realize its maker's intent, particularly when it came to performances, including that of a young and spastic Paul Mazursky. Kubrick, who would become notorious for requiring multitudinous takes in pursuit of his ineffable vision, was unable to indulge this maniacal perfectionism in Fear and Desire, and would suppress the film as his career advanced. But close examination reveals the seeds of themes that pervade his later work: the imperviousness to reason of man's subconscious, often destructive impulses; his isolation (Kubrick eschews "normal" displays of emotion, and he frequently refuses to provide us a charismatic, conventionally sympathetic protagonist to identify with); and a fascination with the grotesque.

At 7pm: Fear and Desire (1953 B+W 35mm 61 min.)
Preceded by:
Day of the Fight (1951 B+W 16mm 16 min.)
Flying Padre (1951 B+W 16mm 9 min.)

Robert Altman is best remembered for his masterpieces of the 1970's (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville, etc.), less so for his 1950's efforts, separated from his mature work by a long journeyman period in TV. His early industrial/educational shorts (eg. How to Run a Filling Station, Better Football), made for-hire in early '50's Kansas City, show a quaint but timely concern for keeping the nation's youth off the streets and out of trouble.

Juvenile delinquency, by various names a long-time staple of exploitation films, became the subject of Altman's first feature, 1957's The Delinquents. Tom Laughlin (to become famous for his Billy Jack movies) channels the late James Dean (much admired by Altman) in his first starring role as a teen driven from the arms of his girl and into the clutches of a vicious gang which includes Richard Bakalyan in his debut.

Altman has always used certain conventions of what we now call vérité style, applying his own poetics to the multifarious scrappiness of real life. If the party scene in The Delinquents seems to have the dynamics of an actual party, it's because it is one. Though Kubrickian perfectionism was never one of Altman's hallmarks, he nevertheless came later to dismiss this early work as "meaningless". But he could never deny that it's fabulously entertaining.

At 8:45pm: The Delinquents (1957 B+W 35mm 72 min.)

Film Series: Radical Strategies

As part of its mission, the Film on Film Foundation seeks to showcase exciting and unusual celluloid motion-picture film works which have rarely been screened locally, unleashing some for the very first time. Our debut series, 'Radical Strategies', represents the opening salvo in this part of our undertaking. Each film in this series of experimental narratives questions the nature of cinema itself, and in its realization, each proffers potential answers to the questions of what cinema is, can, or should be.

A concurrent thematic: the 100-plus years of film's existence have been aligned with dramatic international political upheaval. Experimenters in form have often seen their work as connected to a fundamental recreation of the social/political world, and this adds an additional, sometimes explosive, resonance to the ideas of 'Radical Strategies.'

The fifth program in this on-going series: Joseph Losey's supreme masterpiece of European Art Cinema: Accident.

...A squeal of tires in the dead of night, then a CRASH!... The Oxford tutor rushes from his house to the car lying on its side... A handsome young student lies dead within the wreckage... A beautiful girl the tutor loves lies stirring beside the dead boy. As she drifts back towards consciousness, the tutor reaches in to pull her out... "Don't!" he shrieks. "You're stepping on his face!"

8:30pm
Sunday, April 5
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley

The career of Joseph Losey is unparalleled in the history of cinema. His work as a radical left-wing director in the New York theater of the 1930's lead to a collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and Charles Laughton as director of the American version of the now-classic play Galileo, and to gigs directing Hollywood genre films, such as the iconic Noir masterpiece, The Prowler. As his reputation as a filmmaker was becoming established, however, the McCarthy Era, and its persecution of Hollywood leftists, swung into gear. In 1951 he got word he was to be served a subpoena by the US Congress to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rather than be grilled regarding his radical pursuits and associates before a national audience, Losey fled to Europe, where he soon found work--again directing low-budget genre pictures. Swiftly finding himself at center stage within the film industry in Britain, he settled there semi-permanently. At the beginning of these years, the Hollywood Blacklist cast such a wide net, he was for a time forced to work under an assumed name. All the Losey trademarks, however, were in full evidence--scathing critique of class systems, profound identification with outsiders and the alienated, sexual ambivalence, sadomasochistic emotional relationships, and an astonishing stylistic panache. All were heightened and brought to maturity by Losey's experience as blacklistee and exile, and the consequent amplification of his characteristic (but justified) paranoia and hysteria.

From the beginning of his British years, Losey attracted collaborators of equally high ambition, such as stars Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker, whose acting talents weren't fully understood until their work with the American director. Frustrated by interference from producers and the constraints endemic to the British film industry, which mirrored the overt commercial orientation of Hollywood on a smaller scale, Losey watched enviously as European Art Cinema began to fully flower on the continent. Finally everything came together in his first British masterpiece, The Servant, starring Bogarde, James Fox, and Sarah Miles, in a taboo-traversing exploration of oblique power games between classes, sexes, and sexualities. The Servant would mark Losey's first collaboration with the young Harold Pinter, only five-or-so years into his legendary career as the world's most important post-Beckett playwright, and garnered a nomination for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Losey's career as International Superstar art-film director was off and running....

His work reached its zenith in 1967, in his second collaboration with Harold Pinter: Accident. The story, adapted from the novel by Nicholas Mosley (estranged son of notorious British Union of Fascists founder Sir Oswald Mosley) is a made-in-heaven launching point for Losey and Pinter's ultimate exploration of the disassociation and disconnect within the soul and society of modern man. Accident stars Bogarde and Baker as at-one-time-close Oxford dons in the midst of excruciating and calamitously competitive mid-life crises, Jacqueline Sassard as the incredibly beautiful student with whom they both fall in love, to the detriment of their respective spouses, and the young Michael York as her fiance, in one of his first screen roles. Vivien Merchant, Pinter's first wife, and major European screen actress Delphine Seyrig round out the cast as, respectively, Bogarde's wife and one-time lover.

Adopting Resnais-influenced oblique editing strategies for the first time, Losey creates from the future Nobel-Prize-winning Pinter's script a superbly-crafted corrosive vision of sexual and social anomie, one of the high-water marks from the classic period of European Art Cinema. Accident is proof-positive that Joseph Losey was the most brilliant filmmaking victim of the Hollywood Blacklist, and that an American was the greatest director of the British Cinema of the 1960's.

Awarded the first Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix Spécial du Jury!

1967 Color 35mm 105 min.

Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.

Previously shown in this series:

Forgotten '70's masterpiece Puzzle of a Downfall Child
Starring Faye Dunaway

8pm
Sunday, September 28
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley

In the 1960's, Jerry Schatzberg was already a legend in the New York scene. A highly sought-after photographer who crossed the boundaries of Fashion, Street, and Portrait, his work would contribute to the developing icon-status of, among many others, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Catherine Deneuve, Roman Polanski, Edie Sedgwick, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and a baby-faced Fidel Castro. Photos by Schatzberg graced the covers of some of the most important pop-music albums of the era, including Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. He owned some of Manhattan's hippest discotheques and threw many of the island's wildest parties. But despite sporting the credentials of an affluent scenester, Schatzberg's artistic sensibilities weren't rooted in the realms of fashion and wealth but rather were attuned to the pain and whimsy found in the private worlds of society's misfits, outcasts, and cast-offs. Although photography allowed him to touch upon this motif, the 1970's would offer him the opportunity to explore his themes in far greater depth, and in a new medium.

In the late 1960's, Hollywood--mirror to the nation--found itself creaking and cracking from the strain of the uncontrollable social revolution ripping through the country. The old formulas weren't working anymore, especially in the light of the on-going tragedy and melodrama broadcast nightly: Vietnam war carnage, assassinations, protests, riots. With the simultaneous end of the Production Code (a restrictive form of self-policing which allowed the film industry to evade government censorship), a new generation came of age determined to explore through cinema a rapidly changing world, and with a radically new sensibility. The breakthrough smash-success of Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch forced open the studio floodgates to the energies of this new generation, Jerry Schatzberg among them.

For much of the '60's, he'd been nursing a potential film project, based on his taped interviews with the model Anne Saint Marie, about Lou Andreas Sand, a neurotic young woman swept up into fashion-industry success, only to be discarded when her time has passed. The fractured narrative--cutting at will between scenes of her youth, the "glory days" of her 20's, and living as a washed-up recluse in a rustic beach house, as well as images from her paranoid fantasies--would mirror the character's fractured psyche. While a sordid and scandalous history would be explored, the film would keep some distance from its butterfly-like subject, allowing a kaleidoscopic range of ideas and emotions to be suggested, but without allowing her to be pinned-down by ultimate conclusions. Schatzberg told his story to one of his camera's subjects, the young Faye Dunaway, and, with her acting career just underway, Dunaway became obsessed with playing this role. Though Schatzberg had imagined casting multiple actresses to play Lou at different ages, he quickly realized that Dunaway, who had become his lover, was perfect to incarnate all phases of this tragic character.

Schatzberg recruited Carole Eastman (writer of Five Easy Pieces and uncredited contributor to the script of Petulia) to write Puzzle's script. He spent years in search of backing until finally, in 1970, he found patron saints in Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who were able to set up the production under their aegis at Universal.

Photographed by Adam Holender (Midnight Cowboy), and co-starring Roy Scheider and Viveca Lindfors, the resulting film revealed an artist steeped in Bergmanesque psycho-drama, Alain Resnais-inflected lyrical montage, and acting technique centered in an improvisational quest for oblique emotional truth. Schatzberg was swiftly acclaimed internationally as having the most European sensibility of the new American auteurs. Buoyed by critical success, he was able to seize the Hollywood apparatus to continue to explore the realities of misfits who have slipped through the cracks of American society in such major '70's works as The Panic in Needle Park (with Al Pacino), Scarecrow (with Gene Hackman and Al Pacino--this film was co-winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, 1973), and Sweet Revenge (aka Dandy, the All-American Girl).

Now in his eighties and still working, Schatzberg has recently emerged from years of critical neglect within his home country, has been honored with retrospectives, and is receiving his due as one of America's great iconoclasts of film and photography.

Not on video!
Color 35mm 105 min.

Preceded by a selection of classic trailers!

Revolution by Cinema: Two films by Jonas Mekas
Guns of the Trees and The Brig

Easter Sunday, March 23
Pacific Film Archive Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph
Berkeley

(Please note: Since this screening is not a presentation of the Pacific Film Archive, it does not appear in their calendar or in any of their publicity. Nevertheless, the show will go on!)

Tickets go on sale at 5pm Sunday in the PFA Theater Lobby.
Admission: $7

"We don't want false, polished, slick films. We prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don't want rosy films - we want them the color of blood." -Jonas Mekas, 1961

"What I want to achieve - ideally - with my film: is overthrow the government." -Jonas Mekas, Diaries, 11 August 1960

At 7pm: Guns of the Trees

In 1960, Jonas Mekas stood at a crossroads. An acclaimed Lithuanian poet in his youth, who fought and suffered at the hands of both Nazis and Soviets, he had emigrated to the US in 1949 and swiftly established himself at the center of New York's film scene. As founder of what was arguably America's first serious cinema publication, Film Culture, as organizer of various screenings of independent film all over Manhattan, and as champion of the movement he would proclaim the New American Cinema in the pages of the soon-to-be legendary Village Voice, his intellectual influence was omnipresent. He and his brother Adolfas had been "practicing" with their Bolex for some time, and now the challenge of films such as Cassavetes' Shadows and his increasing alignment with a radical Beat ethos in the face of the Bomb, the rapidly evolving civil-rights movement, and regular police incursions into Greenwich Village coffeehouse bohemia forced his hand at inventing by-any-means-necessary feature filmmaking. Although Guns of the Trees was scripted, the hallmark of his efforts would be a commitment to spontaneity, both in form and content, in the service of creating a "New Man" who would radically transform society.

Stolen equipment was secured. Money for film was begged and borrowed. The rag-tag crew (including a young Peter Bogdanovich) roamed all over the New York environs, shooting off-the-cuff, shoplifting food, being chased from locations by over-zealous cops. By the end of their journey, they had created a portrait of an America on the brink of apocalypse, by means of intertwining stories of two couples, one white, one black, who try to make sense of it all. Featuring the Brando-esque Ben Carruthers, acclaimed for his role in Shadows, and voice-over poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Guns would prove daring enough to earn Mekas a visit from the FBI.

Not on video!
Winner of First Prize at Porretta Terme, Italy, 1962
1961 B+W 16mm 85 mins.

At 8:45pm: The Brig

By 1964, post-JFK assassination, the American atmosphere was considerably grimmer. In a year in which he spent time in jail for exhibiting Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Jean Genet's Un Chant d'amour, Mekas attended the original production of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, a proto-Guantanamo hallucinatory vision of a play set in a Marine base in Japan. Simultaneously electrified and horrified by the all-too-real events transpiring before his eyes, he immediately resolved to film it in a cinema-verite manner, and shortly thereafter completed what is possibly the shortest schedule in the history of fiction feature-film production: The Brig, photographed with the camera hand-held by Mekas himself, took no more than three hours to shoot. The film proved a major success of the New American Cinema, and was a further salvo in the direction of what would become Mekas' modus operandi of a completely spontaneous and responsive filmmaking form. Although it could be called "scripted", the shooting itself was almost entirely improvised--this dichotomy mirroring what Mekas increasingly found to be the paradigm of the modern world: the fixed "establishment" reality vs. that of the free, the open, the brave. He was well on his way towards becoming the self-described "raving maniac of cinema"....

"The Mekas brothers are no longer the gentle poets that we thought they were: they are two wild Indians drying scalps." -Cahiers du cinema

Not on video!
Winner of Prize for Best Fictional Film at the 15th International Documentary Festival of Venice, 1964.
1964 B+W 16mm 68 mins.

Eros Plus Massacre
Sunday, September 16
Pacific Film Archive Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph
Berkeley

Tickets will be on sale starting at 3:30 Sunday in the theater lobby. Admission is $7, cash only.

In 1959 two cinematic movements, twin colossi of 20th century artistic reinvention, were born across the world from each other. While the exploits of the French New Wave are widely known in the U.S., the simultaneous adventures of the Japanese New Wave have only begun to be revealed on these shores. Oshima, Masumura, Hani, Imamura, Suzuki and others dealt with issues of contemporary alienation, youth rebellion, the post-war legacy, sexual freedom, the role of women, the plight of the Japanese individual caught between the attractions of left and right-wing collectivized factions, etc. Perhaps no group of filmmakers has ever so rigorously confronted the issues of their society in such a head-on manner. Given that this was occurring in the midst of 1960's political tumult and media explosion, it was inevitable that the results would take the form of convulsive frenzy, culminating in Yoshishige Yoshida's 1970 masterpiece, "Eros plus Massacre", until now all but unseen in the U.S.

In a radically Brechtian style, "Eros" relates the "true" story of 1910's and 20's legendary anarchist Sakae Osugi, the most famous radical agitator of his time, as well as the founder of Japan's first school dedicated to teaching Esperanto, the language invented in the cause of Utopian world reconciliation. This wildly popular firebrand (described as "a kind of politicized Mick Jagger-in-his-prime") was the mastermind behind the Rice Riots, which brought approximately 10 million Japanese to the edge of rebellion in what's been called "the greatest uprising in modern Japanese history". His services to humanity were rewarded with the #1 slot on the military police (the Kempeitai)'s death-list. After a May Day speech in Paris proved so rousing it led to his arrest and deportation back to Japan, the Kempeitai had their chance. Following the Great Kanto Earthquake, under the pretext of quelling potential anarchist uprisings, Osugi, his lover Noe Ito, and his six-year-old nephew were arrested and murdered. This became known as the "Amakasu Incident" (the later exploits of Lieutenant Amakasu, the officer in charge of these activities, were portrayed by Riyuchi Sakamoto in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor").

Rather than focussing on the grand stage of politics, however, Yoshida's stylistically playful work centers on the intimate politics between Osugi, his wife, and his two lovers. Refusing to respect conventional narrative constraints, the film charges across barriers of time and genre, interweaving Osugi's story with one of latter-day students embarked on a research project into the anarchist's ideas regarding free love. Through these colliding quests of self-discovery, "Eros" humorously delves into the question of whether unlimited passion can be the source of ultimate human liberation....

A film of epic proportions, "Eros" features some of the most famously beautiful black-and-white cinematography in the history of cinema.

"Masterpiece... The finest cinematic reflection I've seen on histrionic death." -Noel Burch

"Masterpiece." -Tadao Sato

Not on video!
B+W 35mm cinemascope 167 min.
Japanese w/ English subtitles
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation

Since this screening is not a presentation of the Pacific Film Archive, it does not appear in their calendar or in any of their publicity. Nevertheless, the show will go on!

Venom and Eternity and The End
Wednesday May 23rd
7:00 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street
San Francisco

click here for flyer

Jean-Isidore Isou's Venom and Eternity

"I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It's reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this pig filled with grease will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, rupture, of this corpulent and balloon organization which is called film." -Jean-Isidore Isou

In 1951, Jean-Isidore Isou released his first film, "Venom and Eternity". Isou, who made his name as a poet, painter, and economic theorist, was founder of "Lettrism", the most radical art movement in history, committed to a complete remaking of aesthetics from the ground up. Georges Bataille lauded his poetry as "superb". Isou now unleashed his talents in his wildest work yet, and the incendiary results are with us to this day.

"Venom and Eternity" features the smoldering, searing presence of Isou himself, playing a young film aesthete who rewrites all conventions of filmmaking, morality, and propriety before our very eyes. Multiple fractured narratives are introduced, then discarded as they lose their charm. In an Oedipal revenge against the patriarchal image, Isou allows the soundtrack to dominate, assaulting the audience with haughty, ironic rants, and howled primal chants. Not satisfied by this means of attack, Isou introduces the most willfully disjointed cutting style up to this point in film history, then paints on, scratches, and gouges the filmstock itself.

"Venom and Eternity"'s premiere at Cannes was greeted by riots quelled only by the use of firehoses. Jean Cocteau, who appears in the film, nevertheless prevailed upon the authorities to invent a prize for a work so groundbreaking, the "Prix spectateurs d'avant garde 1951". Chaos ensued as "Venom" made its way around the world, including a riot at its San Francisco premiere!

Isou's activities spurred not only the aesthetic innovation of American filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the French New Wave (and hence the whole modern visual world), but the social and political radicalism of the international youth rebellion movement, and the pranksterism of the Situationist International, directly inspiring the fury spilling onto streets around the world starting in May '68!

"Is 'Venom' a springboard or is it a void? In fifty years we'll know the answer. After all, remember how Wagner was received. Today, no one objects to his outbursts. The day will come, perhaps, when Isou's style will be the fashion. Who can tell?" -Jean Cocteau, 1951

A "masterpiece... often breathtaking"! -Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2005

Not on video!
B+W 16mm 77 min.

Immediately following Venom and Eternity, Christopher Maclaine's The End

While the French cultural response to the nuclear age was aesthetic and political, American Beats came at the problem from spiritual and sexual angles. In 1953, San Francisco's own Christopher Maclaine (the "Antonin Artaud of North Beach") created what has often been described as the ultimate expression of the Beat sensibility on film. "The End" offers us the chance for apocalyptic ruminations as we explore the twisted tales of five characters as they make their way through their last day on earth. No film could be more relevant to the insanity of the last five years. Like "Venom and Eternity," "The End" was greeted with a riot upon its San Francisco premiere! A blast!

Not on video!
Color/ B+W 16mm 34-3/4 min.

Two complete shows: 7:00 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.

Film Series: Film Gods Shoot Back

Much of mainstream criticism since the 1950's has considered the director as the auteur of a film work. However, certain actors, by the consistency and force of their personalities across many films, may be regarded as the authors of their performances. In this series, we examine what happens when these celluloid heroes assume the role of director and leave their full imprint on a film. Of the resulting works, some have been hailed as masterpieces, while others have been overlooked. In all cases, they shine a distinct light on the artistic process.

The third program in this on-going series:

Lupino-Noir: A Double Feature from Hollywood's Toughest Cookie
The Bigamist and Outrage

Sunday, March 8
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley
(Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.)

Admission: $7
Tickets on sale in the PFA lobby one hour before showtime.

Tough as a leather purse-strap, hard as nail polish, Ida Lupino broke new ground in mid-century Hollywood. It was no place for a woman...

"The English Jean Harlow"

In the 1930's, Ida Lupino earned her bread as the innocent girl in a string of mostly forgotten pictures. But the beautiful bottle-blonde was as world-wise as the characters she was destined to play, and soon tired of this rut. She knew what she wanted and she knew how to get it. Minus the bleach and the baby fat, she barged into William Wellman's office armed only with determination and a stolen script. Thus captivated by her audition for The Light That Failed, Wellman cast her as her first prostitute. This is the Ida Lupino we know and love.

"A poor man's Bette Davis"

In the '40's, Lupino specialized in hard-luck noir dames in such movies as They Drive by Night, High Sierra, and Road House. A born malcontent, she grew frustrated working in the shadow of the likes of Bette Davis, being offered parts they turned down. Warners suspended her for rejecting these table-scrap roles, and in her free time she studied the workings on the other side of the camera. After her contract was up, she turned freelance, and soon formed a production company with her husband: Filmakers.

"A poor man's Don Siegel"

Lupino produced, wrote, and acted, and when the director of Not Wanted took ill three days into shooting, she took up directing as well. Low-budget issue pictures, the savage forebears of today's TV movies, were Filmakers' specialty. They did pure social melodrama (Hard, Fast and Beautiful) and straight noir (Private Hell 36), but most of their output was a volatile mixture of the two, cemented by a woman's touch. In this program, we dive headfirst into these murky waters.

At 7:30pm: The Bigamist

When Harry and Eve (Joan Fontaine) decide to adopt a baby, the man at the agency senses something amiss and looks into Harry's background. Instead of murder or armed robbery he finds... another woman. Similar in structure to Double Indemnity, The Bigamist musters compassion for its tragic characters while chipping away at the myth of the ideal post-war family.

1953 B+W 35mm 80 min.
Print Source: UCLA Film & Television Archive
Preservation funded by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association

At 9:15pm: Outrage

On her way home from work, soon-to-be-married Mala Powers is attacked and.... The staging of the crime is a masterpiece of expressionism, but the true horror is revealed in the aftermath, in the social and psychological fallout. Lupino's treatment of this ultimate taboo transcends exploitation, showing real understanding and sympathy.

1950 B+W 16mm 75 min.

Classic trailers before both films!

A Double Feature of Maverick, Go-for-broke, Meta-cinematic Hell-raising--
Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie and Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

Wednesday, June 4
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th St.
San Francisco

Admission: $7 for both films

At 7pm: The Last Movie

Almost from the outset of his acting career, Dennis Hopper earned a reputation as rebellious, egotistical, and drug-addled. By channeling these qualities into his directorial debut, Easy Rider, he created perhaps the most iconic and profitable counter-culture movie ever, and helped launch the phenomenon known as "New Hollywood". Studio heads, eager to cash in on this success, yet out of touch with youth tastes and changing mores, gave Hopper a million-dollar budget and carte blanche to produce a follow-up hit.

Here was Hopper's opportunity to develop an idea he had hatched on a Mexico location shoot several years prior: when the film crew departs, leaving the sets behind, is this not a form of cultural imperialism? This is the point of departure of The Last Movie.

When an ill-fated Samuel Fuller-helmed western pulls out of a small Peruvian village, stuntman Kansas (Hopper) stays behind, shacking up with a local whore and pursuing a crass expatriate version of the American Dream. While Kansas goes native on his own terms, the natives, fascinated by the novelty of cinema, resurrect the aborted film shoot in tribal fashion, enacting rituals of real violence before jerry-built prop cameras.

With multiple meta-narratives encircling this radical inversion of the cinematic apparatus, it's no wonder that the film implodes, beautifully, spectacularly, under the weight of its own contradictions.

True to its thematic conflation of the processes and products of cinema, The Last Movie's chaos was mirrored in the conditions of its filming--a confused, sex-, drug-, and paranoia-fueled bacchanal. Hopper kept this up the 18 or so months he spent cloistered at home in Taos editing his opus, under the influence of Bruce Conner and Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo).

Thrust upon a public expecting Easy Rider-style hippie quaintness, this confounding masterpiece ensured Hopper would not work again in Hollywood for nearly a decade.

"No other studio-released film of the period is quite so formally audacious." -Jonathan Rosenbaum

Grand Prize winner, Venice Film Festival, 1971
1971 Color 35mm 108 min.

At 9:15pm: Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

At the end of the 60's, after the success of his stage musical Stop the World--I Want to Get Off and a prominent role in Doctor Dolittle, Anthony Newley was at the height of his career as an actor, singer, and composer. What better time to try his hand at directing, and what better inspiration than his own fabulous life?

Far from filming a straight autobiography, Newley created a fantastical musical folly, overbrimming with vaudevillian flourishes and gleeful bad taste. On the occasion of his 40th birthday, fictionalized alter-ego Heironymus Merkin revisits the formative events of his life, many involving sexual debauchery, via a film-within-a-film device which is freely abused at all of its nested levels. This Russ Meyer-style subject matter is laced with Jacques Demy-style surreal whimsy and a tinge of British sensibility, all within a structure cribbed directly from Fellini.

Seeking neither to apologize for nor distance himself from the salacious and sordid details of his past, Newley invites us all to share in his solipsistic revelry. His candor about his somewhat Nabokovian appetite for women is especially notable as the film features his then-wife, Joan Collins, and their two young children. Milton Berle also appears as the devil in the guise of a drug-pushing svengali.

Audiences and critics were not kind to this deliriously indulgent ego-driven undertaking. Newley's career hit the skids, as did his marriage. With hindsight, however, we can appreciate its cockeyed charm. Such a film would be inconceivable today.

"A must-see for counterculture-masochists" -Steven Puchalski

1969 Color 16mm 117 min. Rare X-rated version!

Classic trailers before both films!

Previously shown in this series:

The World's Greatest Sinner
Saturday, December 15
7:00 pm and 9:15 pm
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street
San Francisco

Advance tickets may be bought online at the Roxie webpage, or just show up at the box office before the show like normal folk!

Timothy Carey's 1962 psychotronic masterpiece The World's Greatest Sinner

He was just an average, happily married family man. He should never have listened to that snake!

One day the devil, in the form of a snake, manifests himself to insurance salesman Clarence Hilliard (Timothy Carey). In short order Hilliard drops out, re-christens himself God, recruits a skid row following, and becomes an atheistic, silver lamé-clad rockabilly evangelist. With his mantra, "There is only one God, and that's Man!" and his wide-ranging sexual deviancy and deranged demagoguery, Carey's blaspheming anti-deity stakes out a position somewhere between Nietzsche and Charles Manson. Falling for his own opportunistically populist rhetoric, he goes mad with power-lust, abusing and destroying his acolytes with shockingly escalating excesses. Nothing is sacred in this scathing, still-topical indictment of religion, politics, and society!

In its giddy, sensationalistic treatment of themes eschewed in polite discourse even now, The World's Greatest Sinner achieves a rough-hewn radicalism unthinkable in a studio picture. It is the archetypal underground film, made outside the establishment and to this day denied a proper release. Nonetheless, this pioneering portrayal of out-of-control youth rebellion presaged the uproar of the '60's and paved the way for emblematic films like Wild in the Streets.

Timothy Carey arrived in Hollywood in 1951, fresh out of drama school, intent on showcasing his greatness by whatever means necessary. He conned his way into early bit parts, and spent the next two decades playing heavies and weirdos in genre pictures and cheapies, some of which ended up as drive-in staples, spiced up with added softcore and gore scenes.

"I thought I was a great actor; I'm the only one who did."

During this checkered career, Carey worked with some of the greatest actors and directors of his time: Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick. He would always do his best to upstage or upset the star, to impress or frustrate the director with his unhinged improvisations. Wherever Carey trod, chaos soon followed. At times he would earn grudging respect; more often he would come to blows with the crew. Films that he had to pull out of, for one reason or another, include Bonnie and Clyde and the first two Godfathers.

"I was probably fired more than any other actor in Hollywood."

Off-screen, Carey's raw primitivism was equally evident. In auditions, media appearances, and in person, he flouted the patience and sensibilities of his audiences, telling crude jokes and breaking into song, or, in keeping with a late-life obsession, into wind. On several occasions, he pulled out a gun loaded with blanks and staged a mock murder-suicide before horrified onlookers.

With his unruly talent, Carey made a mark in all his performances. In a bad movie, his presence in a scene could elevate it to the sublime. Even in great films, his off-kilter characterizations would stand out. Anyone who has seen The Killing remembers the quietly sociopathic sharpshooter, an understated role by his standards. In the 1970's John Cassavetes recognized Carey's mad brilliance, giving him free reign in a key role in his film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, as well as Minnie and Moskowitz.

Carey embarked on The World's Greatest Sinner, his most personal project, in 1958. He spent three years filming this epic monument to his own genius, as money and circumstances allowed, like a stateside Orson Welles. Among its claims to fame, this production launched the careers of rocker Frank Zappa, who composed the soundtrack, and gonzo auteur Ray Dennis Steckler. True to form, at the notorious premiere Carey instigated a riot and fired a gun into the theater's ceiling. This time, the bullets were real!

"Oh you're Tim Carey, you made The World's Greatest Sinner! I want to see that picture!" -Elvis Presley

"Carey has the emotional brilliance of an Eisenstein!" -John Cassavetes

Not available on DVD!
1962 B+W/Color 35mm 82 min.

Preceded by: Timothy Carey in Cinema Justice (35mm 6 min.),
and classic Timothy Carey trailers!

With an introduction and Q&A by the son of God himself, Romeo Carey!

Gunfire in the theater will not be tolerated!