Film Review #221: Imbued
2009
Director: Rob Nilsson
Cast: Stacy Keach, Liz Sklar, Michelle Anton Allen, Nancy Bower

San Francisco-based indie filmmaker Rob Nilsson has admired actor Stacy Keach since seeing him in John Huston’s classic 1972 film Fat City, where Keach played aging boxer Billy Tully, a washed-up boozer whose brush with a younger boxer (Jeff Bridges) prompts an ill-fated attempt at come-back in both the ring and the bedroom. As a story whose plotline is more valued for its enduring resonance than originality, the latest variation takes aim of this year’s Oscars – as it happens, with Jeff Bridges now in the senior role, this time engaging his demons on a slightly different stage with guitar and mic instead of gloves – as Crazy Heart. In another neat bit of irony, Keach – who remains one of our best actors – is about to start work on a forthcoming TV series, playing a boxer’s father.

The gambler and the showgirl-prostitute, plying their respective trades out on the wild edges of America’s unfinished frontier, is another familiar fable (though Imbued wears that cloak lightly and with some ambivalence – there’s one bit with the national anthem that steers us away from over-reliance on symbolism.) This time, Nilsson sets the action in today, from sunset to sunrise on the 32nd floor of a sleek and soaring but pointedly unfinished skyscraper, San Francisco’s Infinity Tower. We should not be too fooled by the modernity of this glass-walled apartment where a man and woman camp for the night – it’s still littered with step-ladders, paint trays, outsized unframed canvases on stretchers, a broken desk chair and a mattress on the floor, all of which Nilsson makes us notice right away. For all the distant sparkling lights of the city’s skyline, the balcony overlooks an exit ramp off a deserted stretch of freeway. Though wired to the ether of the outside world via cell phones and laptop – and via something more primitive too, in the form of a good-luck Mama Effa statue – Donatello and Lydia surely occupy as remote and isolated an outpost as any in American cinema.

For Imbued – there’s a dictionary definition of the word not long into the movie – Nilsson casts Stacy Keach as Donatello, a football bookie with a fear of heights, his own addiction to the ponies and his own set of ethics for “coming out clean.” Liz Sklar is Lydia, a high-end call-girl who apparently arrives at the wrong door. She’s looking for Brent – Donatello’s just had him on the phone but still playing close to the vest, doesn’t help her out with that – and she has a “problem,” a matter of $2500 she needs to repay by morning.

Donatello doesn’t want sex. “I’ve had sex,” he says. “What have you got that I haven’t had?” But he’s just won a bundle on a Cincinnati race and so offers her the money. We see later that such generosity on his part is usually his standard prelude to skipping out. And Lydia takes it, but not before a protracted kind of strip poker occurs between them, each seeking and offering something other than these encounters usually bring. And not before we see the failures that each can’t shake – Donatello’s fourth, much younger wife (Michelle Anton Allen), his quite lost daughter Tammy (Nancy Bower) and Lydia’s Greg. Donatello’s obsessive fear of heights keeps him from the horizon’s bigger picture – something Lydia introduces him to in a moment of wonderment the like of which I’ve rarely seen pulled off on any screen. These are brave performances – edgy, completely unsentimental and deeply affecting.

But don’t mistake Imbued for one of those emotively intense but formless psychodramas wandering the world. What Nilsson does here with his co-writer Denny Dey, frequent DP Mickey Freeman and cast regulars from previous Citizen Cinema productions – six besides Keach and Sklar, entering the story via phone conversations – is something else. After making primarily cast-workshopped movies for years that he shaped in post-production – early on, this Cassavetes fan found “excessive story” a barrier – Nilsson returns to a script this time. It’s more highly structured than you think, with the phone calls offering pacing and history that counter-weight its present-moment time frame and closed setting. For example, shortly after Lydia arrives she’s on the phone with the insistent madam who set up her date, while Donatello’s on another phone with a Mrs. Baker, an elderly novice bettor of whom he doesn’t wish to take advantage. You find you can attend to both at once, your own capacity for attention enlarged.

Nilsson visited Syracuse last spring as the guest of the Syracuse International Film Festival, which screened four of his films and had him on a couple panels. He’s had a busy eight months since then, with a trip to Trotsky’s birthplace in Eastern Europe for a film project, a first invitation-only screening in January of a new feature titled Sand, and the shopping of other projects. Last month Nilsson enjoyed recognition in New York City with a major retrospective at Anthology Film Archives of the 1970’s San Francisco film collective Cine Manifest, of which he was a founding member.

SYRFILM brings Nilsson back this week, along with Michelle Anton Allen, who's appeared in several of his films and is now producing for Citizen Cinema. There’s a visit to a class at LeMoyne College on Friday morning and then Friday evening Nilsson introduces the East Coast premiere of Imbued at the Palace Theatre. Nilsson also brings a taped interview with Sklar and Keach, and Stacy Keach – who also did the film's spare, surgically targeted jazz score – joins the event live by Skype onscreen for Q&A along with the filmmaker.

******* Nilsson’s “Imbued” screens at the Palace, 2384 James St. on Friday, Feb. 26th at 7:30 PM. Read more about the Cine Manifest retrospective at Anthology Fil Archives by scrolling down here or going to www.thefanzine.com.

Rob Nilsson and Cine Manifest
Anthology Film Archives retrospective highlights still-working filmmaker

Re-posted from www.thefanzine.com, 1/22/2010

In releasing the DVD of his Winter Oranges in 2000, a film set on Sagi Island just off the coast of Hiroshima and concerning encounters between the islanders and a group of tourists, filmmaker Rob Nilsson wrote on the liner, “Only when art is non-political can it be radical. Only when it transcends all political systems and stands for the human heart, the rights of the individual, the reality of human contradiction…and that highly charged, chaotic, largely misunderstood mystery we choose to call love, can it fulfill its cathartic responsibility.”

This might seem an odd introduction to the early work of indie filmmaker Rob Nilsson, three of whose films are part of a Cine Manifest retrospective this month at Anthology Film Archives. Nilsson was an original member of Cine Manifest, San Francisco’s 1970s Marxist film collective. He is still making films at quite a brisk pace, working collaboratively and wrestling with the place of politics in art. Winter Oranges came about from an invitation to Nilsson from Sagi Poiesis II, a filmmaking workshop that brought him together with young Japanese actors and artists to create a film by what Nilsson calls “direct action cinema.”

“Direct action” owes as much to John Cassavetes’ cast improvisations, the 60s-era hire-wire jazz of Sonny Rollins and Coltrane, the production mobility and expanded editing made possible by digital filmmaking and to cinema vérité as it does to Marx. And it owes directors like Bergman, to whom reviewers compared Nilsson’s first feature visually for its bleak winter landscapes. More important for Nilsson, Bergman imposed upon himself the discipline of filmmakers from unfree societies who, constrained from portraying politics openly, have made compelling and perhaps their most deeply subversive stories about human beings. As early as Signal 7 (begun in 1983), despite subplots about a union vote and a union-themed stage play, Nilsson was articulating his aversion to “excessive plot” and his desire for “film [that] could be made from the inside instead of external story hovering over it.”

Winter Oranges is also clearly a direct descendant of Cine Manifest, a group comprising Eugene Corr, Peter Gessner, John Hanson, Judy Irola, Stephen Lighthill, Nilsson, and Steve Wax – and most enduringly for Nilsson, composer/filmmaker David Schickele, who didn’t actually join the collective but worked on many of their films. Except for Gessner, who left the group before its dissolution and became a private investigator, all the original members still work in some aspect of cinema – in film studies, PBS and network television, as filmmakers on both coasts and in the Wisconsin heartland.

II.

The Anthology Film Archives (AFA) retrospective of Cine Manifest runs January 21 through the 28th. Of the nine films included – each screens twice – the centerpiece screenings are the collective’s own two major features (Over-Under, Sideways-Down, 1977, and Northern Lights, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1979 for best first feature) and a sampling of their shorter documentary work (Western Coal, 1973, and Prairie Trilogy, 1978-80). The AFA program brackets these selections with five more films that elaborate how the collective came to be and shed light on how they functioned and the subsequent directions some of them took.

Jerry Stoll’s 1967 film Sons and Daughters (which Lighthill worked on) documents the Bay area’s anti-Vietnam War movement and influenced the collective’s formation. Irola, who now heads cinematography at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, developed her 2006 “true story” documentary, Cine Manifest, from a reunion held in 2002 for the purpose of reflecting on the personal and professional consequences of the collective and, the following year, the 25th anniversary celebration of Northern Lights. (The screening schedule is mum on whether AFA will also show the four Cine Manifest “birthday movie” shorts included as extras on the DVD of Irola’s film, but it looks like there would be time.) There are also three post-Cine Manifest films: Nilsson’s tale of two aspiring actors moonlighting as cabbies, Signal 7 (1986), Hanson’s portrait of a woman mine-worker’s conflicts between job and relationship in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range strip-mines, Wildrose (1985), and the Oscar-nominated film Corr partnered on about the McCarthy-era blacklist, Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey (1990).

Cine Manifest’s original nucleus came together around the formation of an independent trade union. They wanted to live and make films collectively; their pooled and distributed salaries from other jobs – Lighthill worked for CBS and provided about half – supported about a dozen people and allowed them to do their own projects. Their subjects were those left out of mainstream narratives – for example, farmers, factory workers, women – and they understood all cinema as occurring in some political context. But, although they did immerse themselves in Chinese commune-style self-criticism that eventually led to ruptures, they were not to occupy themselves as filmmakers with simple agit prop. As Hanson later recalled, “We spent the entire time trying to figure out what ‘political’ meant.” To Steve Wax, it meant, “Our films should have a message – and an audience too. People inspire people. Facts don’t.”

As part of a “self-history” of the collective in the media journal Jump Cut (1974, no. 3), Corr and Gessner wrote that attempts like Godard’s were “elitist,” adding, “We won’t concede popular films to Hollywood.”

Speaking in Irola’s 2006 documentary, Nilsson said, “We were pretentious as hell. I read things I wrote and I blanch, but I forgive us because we were all really trying.”

Besides hiring local actors, the collective conducted open casting calls and actors’ workshops for non-professionals, a practice Nilsson kept and has developed extensively since then. The casting for the collective’s first completed feature, Over-Under, Sideways-Down, turned up Johnny Tidwell, who had never acted or gotten beyond the ninth grade. Tidwell – and that film’s male lead, Robert Viharo – continued to work with Nilsson right up to and through the 9@Night films (though Tidwell died before the cycle was completed). Gene Corr told Irola, “We found middle-class people had developed a persona they wanted to protect. Working class people were willing to gamble it all.”

III.

Northern Lights. Begun in 1975 with a two-week shoot in North Dakota, this feature took three years of additional interior shooting and editing back in California to finish and went on to win at Cannes for best first feature. A North Dakota native, John Hanson had originally invited Nilsson to join him in making a 20-minute documentary about the formation of the Nonpartisan League and its victory in the 1916 state elections. Both had roots in the state; Hanson’s father was a farmer and Nilsson’s grandfather had been state photographer and shot the first movie footage there in 1907 before moving the family west to Marin County above San Francisco.

An outgrowth of Socialist organizing and repulsion at the stranglehold on farmers by the Eastern-owned banks, railroads and grain elevators in a time of mass foreclosures and plunging prices for winter wheat, the Nonpartisan League enrolled some 10,000 farmers to sweep the state Republican primary in the spring and the governorship that fall in the general election. The League remained in power for six years in North Dakota, passing social safety-net legislation friendly to working people, creating state-owned banks and grain elevators, giving women the vote, and organizing in thirteen other states.

Hanson and Nilsson would indeed make a documentary on this topic later, but the Northern Lights project rather quickly became what Nilsson called a “hybrid” instead. With Nilsson and Hanson dividing the writing, directing and producing, Hanson focused on working with Irola, who was cinematographer, and Nilsson worked with the cast, largely North Dakota residents except for the Bay-area leads and Bill Ackeridge, who showed up in a number of their films and has one of the leads in Signal 7. The locale was the tiny real town of Crosby and the story centered on farmer-organizer Ray Sorenson (Robert Behling) and his fiancée Inga (Susan Lynch), as they plan to marry, watch their Norwegian families suffer loss and lose their farms, take part in the League’s efforts and try to sustain a relationship.

To structure the narrative like a set of nested boxes, the filmmakers enlisted 94-year-old Henry Martinson – himself a homesteader who lost his farm and joined the League’s efforts – to “discover” Ray’s diary and some old photos, and decide it would “make a good yarn about a time when we had the powers-that-be on the run.” So Henry pounds on an old upright typewriter and soon Ray’s voice takes over, beginning with a diary entry in the spring of 1915 about his plans to “get an answer out of Inga,” fading to a quietly lyrical scene among a stand of birch trees by a pond in which she agrees to marry him. As Inga had stalled on answering him, Ray starts out with little sympathy for the League – he remarks he never met an organizer with a sense of humor – whose local agents are trying to recruit him as the story unfolds. Through a series of diary entries that fade to flash-backs, hard times and wrenching losses – Ray finds his deeply depressed father in a field, frozen to death and still holding his bottle, sees his mother return to Ohio and Inga’s family turned off their land by a plump banker in a fur coat, suffers a break with his brother John (Joe Spano) – convince Ray. He goes on the road for the League to convince equally skeptical others. There’s a text scroll at the end that sums up the League’s history, and Martinson returns, treating us to a tune on his cello, some calisthenics and ruminations about history eventually vindicating the League’s efforts.

“One of these days, they’ll go too far,” predicts Henry of the powers-that-be. “And – well, you know what I’m talking about. I’m an optimist. I can wait.”

Repeated watching doesn’t dim what Cannes judges cited as Irola’s “dazzling” cinematography – fluid, spare yet elegant, keenly and gracefully attuned to the depth with which movement endows image, evocative of the bigness of the land and sky that homesteaders labored within, and to the sheer physicality of their lives. Sometimes shot from barely above ground level – though this magnifies the horizon, Ray’s Uncle Thor also has an oft-repeated joke about hearing the grass grow – and shot through with light piercing vast darkness, here is a film about reaching for and illuminating particular lives long past in a shared place. Just as Henry tramps through woods and drives across the land, so do Ray and Inga. Nilsson was already forty when he made this film, and there’s remarkably little naïve romanticism or arrogance about the power of theory here. When it comes to organizing, Ray doesn’t want to; he and Inga grapple with her real and persistent fears that these efforts and separations will come to nothing and leave them both with no less lonely a life than she watched her mother endure. The power in Ray’s organizing really is rooted in relationship, in group conversations that one senses had to convince this cast as well as the audience – and the occasional “wrassling” match as a means of persuasion.

The AFA retrospective offers Northern Lights in a newly restored 35 mm print.

Prairie Trilogy. This retrospective provides a chance to see films that are now quite rare. Over-Under, Sideways-Down, which examines the travails of a worker who yearns for a break in baseball to escape a water-heater factory with racial tensions, still plays fresh and strong; you come away hoping it could find its way to a DVD incarnation. Likewise, it seems that Waldo Salt should rightfully join the cluster of more recent film projects about artists like Dalton Trumbo and Gertrude Berg who suffered under the blacklists.

But the most striking resurrection may be that of Prairie Trilogy, the three linked short docs of which Hanson and Nilsson make Henry Martinson the star. Prairie Fire (1978, 30 minutes) is Martinson’s telling of the history of the Nonpartisan League, and includes archival footage by Nilsson’s grandfather, Frithjof Holmboe. Martinson recalls his own homesteading some miles outside Crosby, North Dakota – he’d left Sacred Heart, Minnesota, staked by his dad with $65 – and there’s an expanded narration about the national context in those years leading up to World War I and beyond, including the increasingly checkered career of League co-founder A. C. Townley, the recall campaigns of 1921, the sometimes violent harassment of League members, and the smears against them in The Red Flame (a publication that certainly anticipated the Red Channels bulletins of the McCarthy years that poisoned the broadcasting industry).

Rebel Earth and Survivor (both 1980, 60 minutes and 30 minutes respectively) progressively narrow the focus. Rebel Earth follows Martinson on a trek across the state, accompanied by young farmer Jon Ness (Ness and both his parents have small parts in Northern Lights). He searches for his old homestead, also finding an elderly couple who homesteaded near him. He visits the 92-year-old publisher of the Daily News in Minot, Hal Davies, and they recall the years Martinson ran the Socialist paper in town, The Iconoclast. He recalls his later-in-life marriage to a musician who “took a dim view of my organizing.” Ness takes Martinson home to his parents where a gathering of neighbors make music and Martinson reads his poems.

Survivor is a closer-up portrait of Martinson’s history, from his work on a threshing crew that one farmer didn’t want to let sleep in his barn during a blizzard, to his years in the capital with the Departments of Labor and Agriculture, to more poetry (until he died in 1981, Martinson was state poet laureate), to his job as the AFL-CIO’s state recording secretary (the oldest working labor official in the country).

In 1987 Nilsson and Hanson issued all three docs as Prairie Trilogy on a single VHS that’s long out of print. It’s not surprising to discover that Trilogy shares footage with Northern Lights, or that it illuminates the sources of some of the feature film’s plotting and incidents. There’s an historic introduction of the League’s candidate for governor, Lynn Frasier, and Martinson gives a speech in the empty state legislature’s chamber, to the delight of the film crew – these surely inform the scene in which Ray Sorenson practices his introduction of Frasier in the empty church. But, if possible, Prairie Trilogy contains an abundance of footage even more beautiful than that in Northern Lights, a tip-off that the Trilogy is not simply left-over scraps patched together but an intentional portrait that fills a gap in conventional history.

Martinson was a highly quotable, personally accomplished eye-witness, a sort of Renaissance man of his time – and we should wonder if we’re surprised to find him in the middle of the prairie. In Rebel Earth, he and Ness stop at some bars along the way, where young Ness gets in arguments – which you come to see Martinson slyly instigates. And at another point he patiently explains, reinforcing a position not unlike that Cine Manifest had come to regarding their work, “Most of the organizers had songs. It’s not enough to approach people through intellect alone. There must be something that appeals to the emotions.”

The making of Northern Lights was itself an act of rebellion, initiated in a year of critical shifts and battles within Cine Manifest. When Hanson and Nilsson already had their crew in North Dakota, colleagues back in San Francisco tried to veto the project. David Schickele, who did edit the film, thought it was a bad idea too. Nilsson and Hanson simply went ahead anyway, forming New Front Films along with attorney John Stout (who remains active in Nilsson’s ventures to this day) to manage the production. Secondly, that summer Judy Irola had gone to Copenhagen to work on a feminist film. Afterward she kept working with Cine Manifest, and overall gave the collective good marks from her new horizons, but wanted to shoot films herself. And disputes within the collective about the making of Over-Under, Sideways-Down – actually finished in advance of Northern Lights – led to the group firing Peter Gessner from both the film and the collective. Cine Manifest continued until 1978 or ’79 – depending on accounts – with some additions, and certainly with a constellation of people who repeatedly worked together over the years.

IV.

Signal 7. Nilsson made a trio of films in the mid-80s, projects he picked up, set down, alternated raising funds for and editing, as he is wont to do – very often his films come out some time after the initial shoot, and not always in order of production. These three were all released on DVD in 2005 by Koch Lorber: Signal 7 (the cabbie tale, dedicated to John Cassavetes and drawn from his own Boston cabbie days), Heat and Light (which drew on his African years, first in the Peace Corps in Nigeria and later in Biafra, and addressed the narcissism of the lead character, a obsessively jealous photojournalist whom Nilsson played himself), and the cross-country running cult classic with Bruce Dern, On the Edge.

Signal 7 seems an astute choice as an example of Nilsson’s early post-Cine Manifest work, a demonstration of both his roots and the directions in which he would go. From early on, Nilsson has said he regarded Cassavetes’ work as “not an anomaly, but a way.” Cassavetes had already made Shadows (1959) and Faces (1968) when Cine Manifest formed; during the 70s he also made such films as A Woman Under the influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and the bravura performance film Opening Night (1977). What Nilsson is now calling “direct action” has roots in both which has he refined and expanded over the years, making extensive use of cast rehearsal and work-shopping of characters’ back-stories, but not of the scenes to be filmed. (He says he “lost” a scene once, from Heat and Sunlight, that never measured up in the actual filming to its workshop improv “and I decided that was an omen"). Though he has sometimes worked from a script, the direct action films develop their dialogue and storyline in collaboration with the cast from an outline he, and often a co-writer, provide.

Last spring Nilsson told me in an interview, “I’m trying to get away from theater. With the exception of certain avant-garde styles, theatre is a way of coming up with something to do and then rehearsing it and rehearsing it until it’s entirely a re-creation. I’m trying to have the whole thing be creation. To me that’s what cinema does so much better. You can be right there in the moment. It’s the one time that interests me, the one time that this particular phrase is spoken. And is that it? No. Now I take it into what I call the alchemical lab and I start to edit.”

Beginning in near dark and jazz-fueled, Signal 7 concerns two aging cabbies, Marty and Speed (Dan Leegant and Bill Ackeridge, both Nilsson regulars), over a single night shift at DeSoto Cabs in San Francisco. There is a subtext of labor issues, to be sure – city cabbies have just rejected a bid to unionize, and both men break for late night auditions for Odets’ labor drama Waiting for Lefty. But the weight falls on their own relationship and how each provides the other with a listening ear for secret aspirations – their long-planned trip to L.A. to take up acting seriously – as well as ready-made reasons not to go in the form of other obligations. During the night a cabbie is murdered (“signal 7” is the cabbie distress call), both join their colleagues for cards and bawdy jokes, Speed picks up an Israeli woman whom he scares with his attempt to impress her and he gets a rather pretentious acting exercise that proves as harrowing to watch as it is for him. Really an inventory of the ways men try to get right the roles they think they should play, Signal 7 comes to rest in an unexpected scene of wholly unsentimental tenderness between Speed and his wife. A number of Nilsson films end at dawn with similar exhausted intimacy, a caution this may be all we have when the masks come off.

V.

In the decades since Cine Manifest, Nilsson has continued to work collaboratively. Besides workshop projects in Japan (which resulted in Winter Oranges), Jordan (Samt/Silence, 2004) and South Africa (Frank Dead Souls, 2008), he’s gone to Kansas City (Opening, 2006). In 1989 he travelled with musicians John Cale and Brian Eno to Amsterdam, Russia and Wales around the recording of The Falklands Suite, resulting in the documentary, Words for the Dying (1990). In 1991 he set up shop in San Francisco’s red-light district for the 14-year-long Tenderloin Action Group/Tenderloin yGroup, on-going workshops that produced first the billiards classic Chalk (1996) and then 9@Night (2002-07), a nine-film cycle with overlapping time frames, key scenes that recur across films, and some fifty characters that first screened in its entirety at Harvard Film Archives in the fall of 2007. His collaboration with the San Francisco Digital Film School resulted in Security (2005) and in 2007 the haunting Presque Isle (2007), set in his paper mill hometown of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. At his own outfit in Berkeley, Citizen Cinema, Nilsson continues to offer workshops and apprentice new filmmakers. Last spring he completed Imbued with Stacey Keach. In the past year, he’s been shopping a film idea about the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, shot footage during a pilgrimage to Trotsky’s birthplace (and, over Christmas, supplemented that with footage of the prairie outside Kansas City, the “American steppes”). Earlier this month another feature, Sand, had a first by-invitation screening in San Francisco.

From Northern Lights on, all of Nilsson’s films have had their official premiers at the Mill Valley Film Festival north of San Francisco (though Northern Lights had a first screening in Crosby, North Dakota), and he makes the festival circuit as well. Last spring he came to Syracuse, where I live, for a tribute mini-retrospective during the Syracuse International Film Festival. On that trip he left a screener here of Imbued, and next month he’ll return to Syracuse for the East Coast premiere on February 26th.

Imbued has screened at a number of other festivals since its premiere last fall at Mill Valley, and the prospect of its reaching a larger audience in the wake of AFA’s retrospective is exciting. Imbued had a script to work from and a smaller cast than usual in a Nilsson film. An aging football bookie with a fear of heights, whose fourth young, needy wife believes he’s an actuary, Donatello (Stacy Keach) sets up shop for a weekend in the upper reaches of an unfinished high-rise (Imbued was filmed in the Infinity Building, San Francisco), supplied with a couple cell phones, a quart of whiskey, his laptop, and the dictionary he’s systematically memorizing to fend off panic attacks. Arriving at the wrong address, a call-girl named Lydia (Liz Sklar) winds up staying the night. Donatello’s wife Sylvia calls (Michelle Anton Allen, from the 9@Night film, Go Together, and Presque Isle), as does his estranged crack addict daughter, Tammy (Nancy Bower), each seeking some connection with him. Both Donatello and Lydia imagine they understand the politics of gender and each is rudely albeit unmaliciously awakened, again by dawn.

Since the recent Westerns There Will Be Blood, the remake of 3:10 to Yuma and Appaloosa, and even David Milch's Deadwood, all employed sets of framed-in, unfinished construction for pivotal scenes in such a way as to comment on American life, as the Western seems such a ready template to do – in those cases, that we are still living in that young, unfinished house – it’s hard not to hear an echo of that in this film with its gambler and saloon girl, despite the sleekness of the skyscraper.

Nilsson might demur. “Politics,” he told me, “is about choosing sides. But I can’t choose any sides, because I represent everybody in a particular context. Artists try to say, ‘Look, it’s okay. See, this is how we are. And this is the pain and this is the joy. This is the eighty years you get. You know, take a look. Take a look.’”

*******
This article appeared on 1/22/2010 in www.thefanzine.com, editor Casey McKinney.
Judy Irola’s "Cine Manifest" doc is also available at Netflix, as are Nilsson’s "Signal 7," "Heat and Light," "On the Edge," and a recent reissue of "Words for the Dying." Irola has a new film due out this fall entitled "Niger ’66: A Peace Corps Diary." "Northern Lights" is available again on DVD from Nilsson’s Citizen Cinema in Berkeley, California, as are the "9 @ Night" films and others. "Prairie Trilogy" is not yet available on DVD, and I thank the filmmaker for lending me his VHS copy.

Film Review #220: Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders
2010
Stephen Talbot & David Davis for PBS
Cast: Marco Werman, Alexis Bloom, Arun Rath, Mirissa Neff

“Russians love tragic songs,” says former rock’n’roll dissident Alexander Yelin, creator of “A Man Like Putin,” the 2002 runaway hit music video that Vladimir Putin liked enough to use in his 2004 presidential run and still uses at rallies now. “At its core, this is about female tragedy. A woman lives in the provinces. She’s surrounded by dirt and drunkards. She wants the guy she sees on TV.”

Clad in his Pearl Jam tee-shirt and busy promoting an all-female heavy metal band now, Yelin tells reporter Alexis Bloom he has no regrets about writing the song – on a $300 bet – that has contributed to strong-man Putin’s cult of personality as Russia’s ideal man.

“I’m a professional,” he says. “I can write whatever you want. I could write an anti-Putin song, but right now there’s no market for it.”

Bloom grew up in apartheid South Africa and her resume includes an undercover investigative report about life under Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe, so she may know a thing or two about media and politics. Her 18-minute story on the career of one supposedly innocent feel-good pop song is unexpectedly bracing and leads the pilot for a new PBS show.

Unusually well-made and combining astute cultural and political analysis with some terrific world music, the arrival next week of PBS’ music magazine Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders is good news indeed. Even better, WCNY Channel 24 will carry the program, whose pilot airs both here in Central New York and nationally next Monday evening at 10 o’clock.

Sound Tracks is a West Coast entity, the offspring of veteran documentary filmmaker and PBS FRONTLINE/World’s Stephen Talbot, long based in San Francisco, and Oregon Public Broadcasting’s multiple Emmy-winner David Davis. Besides Bloom, Talbot has recruited FRONTLINE/World reporters Marco Werman (who serves as host) and Arun Rath, as well as deejay/San Francisco Bay Guardian art director/journalist Mirissa Neff, for a three-feature format with a performance closer called “Global Hit.” The editing, semi-animated graphic design that bridges segments, music themes and sound design are all crisp, graceful and bright. But beyond that, Sound Tracks asks in each of its segments questions about music's purpose - and art's - that go well beyond the insular assumption of mere entertainment. How delightful that Sounds Tracks also manages to provide such first-rate entertainment. Sound Tracks also enjoys the input and participation of the Center for Asian American Media, Latino Public Broadcasters, National Black Programming Consortium, Native American Public Telecommunications, and Pacific Islanders in Communications.

After Bloom, Marco Werman goes to Lagos, Nigeria, to explore music’s purpose with the youngest son of legendary Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The current Broadway musical Fela! recounts how Kuti – inspired by the Black Panthers and Malcolm X – combined 1970s U.S. jazz and funk with West Africa juju to create what he called Afrobeat, railing against the military regime’s brutality and theft of oil profits in a mix of Pidgin English and Yoruba. Fela died in 1997 of AIDS; he had been arrested over 200 times and – after the release of his ’77 album Zombie – his home torched and his elderly mother thrown out an upper-story window. Seun Kuti was just 14 when his father died, but took over Fela’s band, the Egypt 80, and continues to carry on as cultural provocateur.

In the third segment, after landing by balloon in the Kazakh capital’s central marketplace and reminding us this culture dates back to Genghis Khan, reporter Arun Rath joins violinist Marat Bisengaliev – “Kazakhstan’s Itzhak Perlman” – and travels with him to Hollywood. Sasha Baron Cohen’s 2006 film Borat, actually filmed in Romania, offended Kazakhs in multiple ways. Bisengaliev focused on the fake national anthem – one line proudly hails the “cleanest prostitutes in the region” – written by the filmmaker’s brother, Erran. Bisengaliev invited the composer to write a symphony for Kazakhs as a way of making amends; Sound Tracks filmed its premiere performance and the Kazakh audience’s response.

The short closing segment centers on the mournful traditional Portuguese bar songs called fado – meaning fate or destiny – usually sung by women in black, accompanied by drums and classical guitar. The diva Mariza, European sensation and star of Carlos Saura’s film Fados – sings “Minh’ Alma/My Soul” at a massive outdoor Lisbon concert.

Publicity for Sound Tracks promises it’s good for a whole season and that subsequent shows will take us to bayou Louisiana, Havana, Paris, the desert music festivals of Mali, bluegrass country and Bollywood. But there’s no word on a regular time slot, so my guess is that audience feed-back will count for a lot in whether we see more installments.

*******
This article appears in the 1/21/2010 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. “Sound Tracks” debuts Monday, 1/25 at 10:00 PM PBS stations nationally, including here in CNY on WCNY Channel 24. See a trailer from “Sound Tracks” and read this article online, along with others arts and entertainment coverage from Eagle Newspapers, at cnylink.com – click A&E.

Film Review #219: Séraphine
2008
Director: Martin Provost
Cast: Yolande Moreau, Ulrich Tukur, Anne Bennent

During the Renaissance, artists commonly took the name of their home village or city – for example, Leonardo da Vinci. Wilhelm Uhde, the German art critic who discovered Séraphine Louis in the French village of Senlis shortly before the outbreak of World War I, adopted this practice to distinguish the creator of ecstatic paintings of nature in the style he called “modern primitive.” As we see in French director Martin Provost’s 2008 film of the same name, the reticent, sometimes socially abrasive Séraphine (Yolande Moreau) at first believed that Uhde (Ulrich Tukur) was mocking her when he compared her work – rendered in home-made finger paints of stolen church candle wax, blood from the butcher shop, pond scum and other “secret ingredients” – to those of the old masters. In fact, when not traipsing through the countryside in her own version of pre-Avatar rapture, Séraphine is most often seen on her knees – scrubbing, painting in her locked room, or praying. The film’s other pervasive image is that of a door or window opening into startling light beyond the dark, cramped interiors of Senlis homes and shops – fitting for a portrait of this early “outsider” artist who found only meager sustenance from most social relations, and also suggestive of her access to transported spiritual states.

Provost’s dramatization of the relationship between the two – ruptured by war, madness and Uhde’s own vicissitudes of loyalty – won seven César Awards in France (including Best Actress for Yolande Moreau’s luminous performance in the title role) and in December was named Best Foreign Film By or About Women by the national Women Film Critics Circle here. Last Sunday, at their awards meeting in a Manhattan restaurant, the National Society of Film Critics also designated Yolande Moreau Best Actress in a 2009 film. (A friend and sometime collaborator of countrywoman Agnes Varda, the Belgian Moreau can also be seen in Varda’s currently running, much acclaimed The Beaches of Agnes – she also had a part in Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond – and her own The Sea Also Rises from 2004 is available at Netflix).

Séraphine premiered in Paris in October of 2008 and in New York last March at Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema festival. There was a DVD release in Canada last June, but the theatrical run in the States of this quiet, distinctly non-blockbuster film has been quite limited, so its appearance in Central New York at all makes it worth a short drive to Hamilton, where it’s currently got a five-day run.

Uhde had already been the first to buy work by Picasso and Braque and to write about Henri Rousseau when he sojourned in Senlis and there stumbled upon a painting of apples by the eccentric middle-aged woman who scrubbed his floors. Séraphine Louis, orphaned early, impoverished and fragile, began painting because her guardian angel commanded her to do so – she had spent twenty years working in the local convent – and she died in 1942 after spending the last decade of her life in the Clermont insane asylum. She met Uhde in 1912, during the period she kept a dingy room in town and picked up odd jobs at cleaning and laundry. The film compresses this first period of their acquaintance to just 1914, ending when Uhde – a Jew and a gay man – hastily left France with his sister Anne-Marie (Anne Bennent) as German troops advanced. Because he was German, the French government had already confiscated and sold off his art collection.

It was Séraphine, entering his ransacked rooms, who saved Uhde’s notebook and returned it to him in 1927, when he was again living in France at nearby Chantilly, and they resumed their association. Uhde then supported her with a small stipend and in 1929 organized an exhibition entitled “Painters of the Sacred Heart” that featured her work. Séraphine had extreme difficulty integrating such material support and recognition, and she became increasingly unstable. Uhde meant for her to be able to buy paint and canvas and stop scrubbing floors. She rented the entire upper floor of her building, decorated lavishly, tried to purchase a villa – Uhde put his foot down at this – and, inscrutably, ordered a bridal trousseau. When she went door to door in the white lace dress and veil, the neighbors had her locked up.

In the film, Uhde visits her just twice at the asylum. She does not respond to him the first time and – in a resonant reversal of image – he only observes her through a window the second. But he does pay for a private room at the asylum that allows her privacy and the freedom to take walks in the fields. The extent to which Uhde abandoned or exploited Séraphine personally or was a product of his times – in the film a doctor advises him against trying to see her again, insisting such contact would make her worse – remains enigmatic in Provost’s telling. Uhde also continued to exhibit her work in Paris and elsewhere, and announced her death some years in advance of the fact. But Uhde served Séraphine’s work itself well, which has endured and enjoyed its own renaissance; the exhibition of her paintings at the Musée Maillol in Paris that began in October 2008, coinciding with the film’s opening, ran until mid-September of 2009.

*******
An abbreviated form of this review appears in the 1/7/10 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. “Séraphine” is well worth a drive to Hamilton – closer than Ithaca – where it opened Wednesday for a five-day run at Hamilton Theater, 7 Lebanon St., 315.824.2724. Screens daily at 5:30 PM through Sunday, 1/10. Take Route 20 east through Caz and Morrisville, turn south on Route 46 (which becomes 12B). About 40 miles, though winter weather may add time.

Film Review #218: A Christmas Sampler
Thumbnail Reviews of James Cameron’s Avatar, Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated, Rob Marshall’s Nine, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, and Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air

It turns out that The Young Victoria, subject of last week’s preview column – it opened Christmas Day at Manlius Art Cinema and would still be a perfect reason to make that short, snowy drive east of the city – is only the tip of the late December movie iceberg. This is a good thing, because overall it’s been a scantier film year than 2008. Awards season cranks up as the year winds down, so some of us have been on targeted missions into the multiplexes – and not for Uncle Joe’s Christmas tie. This week we offer something a little different – not a Top Ten list but a holiday sampler.

First at the box office comes Avatar – in its first ten days it grossed, in the U.S alone, almost half the $430 million spent on its production and marketing – James Cameron’s fable about a crippled U.S. Marine who goes undercover on the planet Pandora, joins with the native Navi people and leads an insurrection to save their sacred lands. Like last year’s WALL-e, Avatar has a message, and Cameron has imbued it with additional Native American myth. Sam Worthington stars as Jake Sully, with Zoe Saldana as Neytiri, the Navi woman who takes him in and teaches him her people’s ways, and Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. This is a particularly fitting role for Weaver, who brings inevitable echoes of her own Ellen Ripley from the Alien quartet, the second of which Cameron directed in 1986. (Michelle Rodriguez, who plays the helicopter pilot here and whom you may recognize from TV’s Lost, is not the same actress from that film – who can forget Pvt. Vazquez’ “Let’s rock and roll”? – but she looks enough like her to make the casting intentional). Avatar is almost three hours long, tight as a drum, visually breath-taking and moving as all get-out. Make sure to see it in 3-D.

One of three films that opened here Christmas Day, Nancy Meyers’ light comedy It’s Complicated is the latest from national treasure Meryl Streep as Jane Adler, torn between her re-married ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin, a very good sport here) and her shy architect Adam (Steve Martin). I confess that possibly only Meryl Streep could lure me into a Steve Martin movie. In this confection, Jane has three young adult kids, a delightful set of women friends (Rita Wilson and Mary Kay Place among them), and a see-all son-in-law-to-be (very well-played by John Krasinski). The cast had as good a time making this large-hearted, very funny movie as you will watching it – especially the lap-top scene.

“Pastiche,” says the British film writer Richard Dyer, is best defined as knowing imitation. I admit I found the prospect of Daniel Day-Lewis in the role created by Marcello Mastroianni for Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ½ intriguing, and the cast of women – Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren – delectable. Nine is Rob Marshall’s film version of the musical based on Fellini’s film, staged in 1982 and then again in 2002. Nine is meant as a tribute to Italian cinema and some of the echoes are there. Loren’s cameo as the mother of 1960s-era director Guido Contini (Day-Lewis), creatively blocked on the eve of a new shoot, is of course close to perfect on several levels. The flash-backs of Guido as a boy running with his pack of buddies along the horizon through the wheat fields wonderfully echo Rossellini’s boys in Rome, Open City – and a number of others. And as Contini’s aggrieved wife, Cotillard delivers the smash performance of the film (with Dench coming in a close second). But Nine is bloated, uneven, and jarring in spots. It’s telling that American actress Kate Hudson’s musical number is what gets the spotlight reprise as the end credits roll, and I hope U.S audiences will not be fooled that this knock-off is the real thing.

Officially Jason Reitman's Up in the Air opened on the 25th too, but we got it here last Wednesday. It is not the best picture of the year by a long shot. But there is something brewing here worth looking at – about the toll that corporate culture has taken on us all in this recession and about the roles of men and women in the financial and social freedom that modern business culture creates for an elite class. Fine performances from George Clooney as Ryan, the ungrounded corporate hatchet man who fires people, Anna Kendrick as the young whippersnapper, and Vera Farmiga as Alex, whose secret twist should not be the jolt it is when it arrives. Alex is an especially troubling figure in her success in achieving all that a man might, complicated by very winning sequences as sympathetic older sounding board when Natalie’s boyfriend dumps her and as Ryan’s date at his younger sister’s wedding. But her turning the tables on Ryan is no victory for women. Up in the Air arrives at a seemingly perfect moment for its subject matter, with its book-end montages of people getting the news they’re fired, its aerial views and its characters' assumptions they know "the big picture," and its sleek industrial look. But adapted from a novel by Walter Kirn written earlier in the decade, its message is still older, so the film easily takes its place among a long line of films and novels deeply wary of modern business life. And the scene in which Ryan arrives onstage at the Mecca of motivational speakers’ conferences in Las Vegas – the symbol of all he is willing to walk away from for Alex – eerily reminded me of what Kevin Costner’s character wound up settling for, a kind of spiritual death after his loss of the Whitney Houston singer – in The Bodyguard. Now that was 1992, and we still didn’t get the message?

English director Guy Ritchie lost Madonna this year and he got yet another bad rap from the movie critics. But even if he is an acquired taste – see Snatch, Revolver, Rocknrolla for starters – Sherlock Holmes is much better than you’re hearing. Gloriously detailed in its look at London’s seamier side (see the January issue of Smithsonian magazine for a tour of Holmes’ London), this film has witty, sharply timed performances from Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson, plus some terrific action staging. It’s a treat, and it lays the groundwork for sequel with the beginnings of a Professor Moriarty yarn.

It’s true that The Princess and the Frog is not on this list – some of my goddaughters and I are tackling that one later in the week.

*******
This review appears in the 12/31/09 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle. These movies are screening at area multiplexes. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column that’s also available online, usually with trailers, at www.cnylink.com – click A&E, where you can read other arts coverage from Eagle Newspapers.

Film Review #217: The Young Victoria
2009
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Cast: Emily Blunt, Rupert Friend, Miranda Richardson

He has been instructed in every detail of her likes and dislikes in advance. Indeed this instruction has formed the core of his own education and defined his purpose in life, according to his uncle, the Belgian King Leopold, who has a very long-range plan for keeping the English on his side. But when Albert (Rupert Friend, the tousle-haired star of Cherie) dutifully walks in the garden with Victoria (Emily Blunt) for the first time, he finds he likes the English crown princess much more than he expected. This prompts him to blurt out the truth: he really prefers the composer Schubert, even though he knows she does not. Stronger and more astute than most adults around her suppose, Victoria grasps this burst of sincerity at once, allows she “doesn’t mind” Schubert, and something sparks between them. As will be the case at a number of pivotal moments, in this telling of history integrity proves to be very sexy.

When England’s Queen Victoria had her coronation in 1837 at the age of 18, among the more well-placed in the audience in Westminster Cathedral was an obscure, nearly penniless but well-born German prince named Albert, who was actually her first cousin. Albert was only a bit older than she and, despite the thicket of relentless intrigues surrounding them both, the two had found their way into a clearing of sorts and actually seem to have married for love. Victoria ruled until she was 81, though she lost Albert when he was only 42 to typhoid in 1861. They had nine children and their descendants eventually populated the royal families of eight other European nations. Albert and Victoria also championed reforms in education, welfare and industry, and supported the arts and sciences.

The Young Victoria focuses on a brief but crucial slice of this monarch’s long life, framed by her courtship and the early years of her marriage to Albert. There is a prologue – Victoria as a sheltered, lonely princess with little company other than her dog Dash and her governess, Baroness Lehzen (Jeanette Hain) to relieve the rigid regime imposed by her mother, the bitter, out-of-favor Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) at the instigation of her bullying advisor, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), whose scheme is to force Victoria to sign over her rights to the throne and name her mother Regent. And there is an epilogue of sorts, in which we see a forty-ish Victoria, just widowed, laying out Albert’s clothing in the morning, as she would do each day for the remainder of her life.

But the body of the film concerns how these two attractive young people escape together from a life-time as pawns of the power brokers around them and, each having the same impulse, address the idea – quite radical to their would-be keepers – that a sovereign’s job might be the well-being of their people. In another of those pivotal moments, Victoria – who has just told her advisor Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) that she has seen “suffering” among her people, which concern Melbourne rebuffs as tinkering with the natural place of the “rabble” – already fond of Albert, warms further to his ideas that workers might be housed more humanely than has happened in the midst of too-rapid industrial growth. Enboldened by her encouragement, he sketches out an architectural plan he has been thinking about for her and she asks if she may keep it.

Now this might seem about as romantic as getting a washing machine for Valentine’s Day. But part of this film’s achievement is making a distant era with what now seem like quite rigid and insular social interactions emotionally intelligible. Albert’s presence in Victoria’s life to begin with is nothing if not coldly calculated, but we share his – and her – growing delight and amazement at what he finds there.

The Young Victoria also manages to provide us with some basic history that goes down pretty easy. As Albert is instructed in who the players are in the English court – besides eventual Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, there’s Lord Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, and the Dowager Queen Adelaide (Harriet Walter) – who their allies are and the nature of their policy leanings, so are we. This is not intricate and detailed history here. But you come away knowing a fair bit more than you might have before and having learned it painlessly. For many of us, the Victorian era is interminably long, brocade-stiff, and associated with repression of every sort. Fittingly, that era is often dramatized in this film by one character putting another soundly in their place. But together, Albert and Victoria loosened some of those places up a bit, and watching that is a treat.

*******
This review appears in the 12/24/09 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle. “The Young Victoria” opens at Manlius Art Cinema on Christmas Day. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column in the Syracuse City Eagle, where Nancy's other arts coverage can be found at www.cnylink.com - click A&E. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

Film Review #216: An Education
2008/9
Director: Lone Scherfig
Cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Carey Mulligan, Olivia Williams

Initially marketed as a vehicle for its male lead, Peter Sarsgaard as the aging playboy David Goldman, Lone Scherfig’s An Education has emerged instead as a showcase for its women. Set in the first stirrings of social ferment of early 1960s London and its suburbs, this fine ensemble film centers on a bright young woman’s detour from her path to Oxford University when she accepts a ride in the rain from a charming sleaze with secrets.

As Jenny, 24-year-old Carey Mulligan is generating Oscar buzz for her witty, nuanced performance as a 16-year-old sampling possible and widely divergent futures. As Jenny’s comrade-side kick in the clandestine adventures of their bad-boy boyfriends, Rosamund Pike as Helen strikes just the right balance between an older, worldlier and eventually tackier woman who fusses with Jenny’s hair and wardrobe now but would be implausible as an appropriate friend later. As the haughty head-mistress whose few short appearances embody distilled and blindered authority, the versatile Emma Thompson is as perfect here as she was in her recent cameo as “sexual legend” in another recent British import depicting roughly the same period, Pirate Radio. As Jenny’s mother, Cara Seymour is well-intended and a little swept-away by the times and her daughter’s slick suitor, but – crucially – never depicted as foolish. (One can say the same for Alfred Molina as Jenny’s dad and for Jenny’s young aspiring boyfriend, who may be a tad bumbling but knows when to make his exit gracefully.)

Then there is Miss Stubbs. As the plain teacher whose literary lessons about Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre should warn us and Jenny too of what’s coming, Olivia Williams just won the Invisible Woman Award from the national Women Film Critics Circle, given for the performance by a woman most ignored by critics. On the WFCC’s annual awards show, broadcast live from WBAI Pacifica in New York City on December 9th (with a patch-in from WAER 88.3 FM here in Syracuse by yours truly), Chicago film critic Jan Huttner called Williams’ performance as Miss Stubbs “the heart and conscience of the film.” Huttner wondered how come so many male reviewers felt blind-sided by the “sudden” change of tone in the movie’s third act, since Miss Stubbs’ telegraphs the outcome from virtually the first scene – certainly well before David’s partner in crime Danny (Dominic Cooper) rolls his eyes to Helen at David’s fabrications.

Despite being well-liked generally by film reviewers with a 94% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, the “consensus” on the film at that site is indeed a caution that “the latter part of the film may not appeal to all [despite being] a charming coming-of-age tale.” But WFCC doubly honored An Education with its annual Karen Morley Award for the film that best exemplifies a woman’s search for identity. For those who prefer An Education as a light romp in which opportunistic older men need see no particular damage done by their dalliances, and may assume that women look back on these events only fondly, the third act does take a dreary turn.

Here, Jenny discovers letters addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. David Goldman” in David’s sports car’s glove-box at the worst possible moment, just as David is driving Jenny and her parents to a restaurant to celebrate their engagement. By now, Jenny has watched David charm her parents in a series of escalating lies about himself and their outings, and she herself has been charmed out of her initial consternation at his business dealings, because – as she says forlornly at one point – before she met him nothing had ever happened in her life. In this moment and in what follows, Jenny discerns the point to this part of her “education” in the shock – so rude when we are at a certain age – that how someone treats others is a fairly reliable prediction of how they will treat us too. Only then is Jenny able to ask Miss Stubbs for help. One might say Jenny – clearly so bright in the film’s opening scene – comes back to her right mind, with a snap of clarity that I found frankly exhilarating.

Interestingly, Danish director Lone Scherfig, perhaps best know for her 2000 film Italian for Beginners, does not take this period piece too deeply into the decade’s rock music and social rebellion. Jenny is not listening to the music broadcast from pirate radio ships anchored in the North Sea, so emblematic of her own generation’s flowering. Jenny is still listening to the steamy older French singer Juliette Greco, her notion of sophistication in a still-out-of-reach, older world. But as the film ends, she’s in Oxford at last, and the Beatles can’t be far behind.

*******
An abbreviated version of this review appears in the 12/17/09 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle on page 12. Read the full roster of WFCC’s 2009 film awards at criticalwomen.net. Thanks to WAER Syracuse for the use of Studio A and continued support. “An Education” continues screening at Manlius Art Cinema through December 24. On Christmas Day, Manlius opens The Young Victoria, which we’ll review in next Thursday’s issue. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column in the Syracuse City Eagle. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

Film Review #215: Precious
2009
Director: Lee Daniels
Cast: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo'Nique, Paula Patton, Lenny Kravitz

Several weeks ago an irate letter-writer worried in The Post-Standard that Syracuse might miss Precious altogether. Although that letter actually appeared the morning after Nat Tobin announced on his weekly e-list that he was bringing Precious to Manlius Art Cinema, there was a lag before Regal Theaters booked the film into Carousel. It took breaking all sorts of attendance records in the very limited initial theatrical release that Precious got from Lionsgate Films for the mall chains – here and in 100 markets nationwide – to get wind of its profitability. Precious – based, as its longer official title tells us, on the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire – opened last Friday at both Manlius and Carousel Mall, and it was satisfying to see some weekend showings sold out.

The first film ever to win the Audience Award at both the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, Precious is the second feature film directed by Lee Daniels, who has mainly worked as a producer on edgy films like Monster’s Ball. Set in 1987, the film tells the story of teen-aged Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), her sexual and physical abuse at the hands of both her father and her mother Mary (Mo’Nique), and how a teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), and a social services worker, Mrs. Weiss (Mariah Carey), intervene. Let me say early on that if Lee Daniels and Mo’Nique don’t get Oscar nominations, there is no justice.

As the film opens, Precious is pregnant with her second child and has been suspended from her public school in Harlem. She’s referred to Each One Teach One, an alternative pre-GED program (if that sounds familiar to you, yes, the film uses a program of the Syracuse-based ProLiteracy, an item way at the tail end of the credits). Despite her own nearly paralyzing fears and her mother’s vigorous encouragement to get on welfare and stay home with her instead, Precious goes to school and, little by little, she and her classmates grow and bond. She also applies for her own welfare, which in this case would open the door to independence from her mother, who’s already running a scam involving Precious’ first child. Precious has her baby and decides to keep him, which provokes a brutal explosion when she tries to take the infant home. Coatless, Precious lands on the nighttime winter streets, narrowly avoiding the television thrown down the stairwell after her. Thanks to Ms. Rain, who pulls in all the chips on her considerable Rolodex file, there’s housing out there for Precious and little Abdul, and – I’m leaving out a lot here – Precious has a chance to decisively reject ever going home again.

Like Steven Spielberg’s 1985 screen adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, Precious has generated emotional and defensive controversy. Both films contain fathers who rape their daughters, and Precious adds a mother who continues to sexually abuse her daughter after that father has left (besides a dizzying range of other abuses). The harshest criticism so far has come from Armond White of The New York Press weekly in Manhattan. White accuses Daniels and executive co-producers Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry – all three have spoken publically about their own childhood abuse – of “pandering and opportunism,” creating a “sociological horror show,” and the most racist depiction of African Americans since Birth of a Nation. On the other hand, commentators like NYU-based journalist Cindy Rodriguez (who wrote for The Post-Standard some years ago), have written astutely and persuasively about how Precious lays out the persistent legacy of slavery and racism that surfaces in the self-worth of many of these characters. Lest we imagine that the 1987 setting safely distances this story, a host of commentary has focused on the present-day plight of similar girls. In the current issue of O Magazine, Winfrey remarks, “I see this girl every day, and I never saw her.”

There’s no doubt the story’s volatile, and even The New York Times’ A.O. Scott, who admires this film, calls it “florid” – which isn’t all that far from “lurid.” But while the subject matter is certainly florid, I want to distinguish that from the way the movie itself is made and talk instead about the film’s restraint. Because in fact Daniels and his cast and crew have refrained from many easy, slapdash things that ruin countless movies by shoving our emotions around. I noticed this first fairly early in the movie – steeling myself at a dramatic moment when I half-expected the music to swell manipulatively and, miraculously, it didn’t. Precious does have a lively soundtrack that’s already out on CD, but Daniels lets his actors do their work.

And what work they do! Besides the principal performances, this makes room for some fine ensemble acting – talk-show host Sherry Shepherd as Cornrows, the school’s receptionist, always on the phone over some boyfriend problem; singer Lenny Kravitz as the vegetarian male nurse whom Precious fixes up with her in one deft comical scene; singer Mariah Carey as the social services worker who anchors the final harrowing scene toward which the movie builds.

In particular, the middle section of the film comprises a series of brief, cleanly written and edited vignettes about Ms. Rain’s classroom itself. These depict time passing as these young women grow and learn and bond in a group setting that is as much therapeutic as educational. Ms. Rain’s interventions can be decisive and dramatic. She stops a fight after a girl sneers at Precious that “F is for fat” (dispensing a lesson in justice about which infraction is really more injurious, she throws the other girl out). But they’re also frequently delicate and nuanced, supremely appreciative of the smallest of victories. Girls who begin the class in stylized poses of indifference and surly defiance gradually discover their own curiosity and even affection for one another. Their participation becomes actively supportive, despite lapses and outbursts, even on the day when Ms. Rain tells them that “the oldest is in charge” and thus the Bahamian immigrant Ramona (a wonderful Chynna Laine) teaches the class.

So when Precious blurts out that she’s just learned she’s HIV+, the group has so progressed that the others can be still and listen – even the jittery girl who started out greeting every remotely serious topic with wild, derisive laughter. It’s worth noting that Daniels and his screenwriter have placed this dramatic development structurally so that it serves a purpose other than stereotyping. In a 1987 classroom, announcing an HIV+ diagnosis would be far more unsettling than today, and how the film handles that might serve as a clue to those who are so jittery about what Precious says out loud.

Perhaps the most telling restraint of all is that addiction – the usual kind anyway – is absent from this story. (The most we get is Ms. Rain having a decorous glass or two of holiday wine.) Now this is almost too good to pass up for any pandering filmmaker who’s into easy short-cuts and sensational stereotypes. Leaving out the booze and dope accomplishes several things, however. What intoxicated characters see is exaggerated, and allows audiences to view the way circumstances are portrayed as distorted. Instead, the film regards the landscape of Precious’ world – well, soberly, without any mind-altering chemical boost. Without that distraction, we see what else is really there. Paradoxically, this makes way to see the full range and force of the fantasies that both Precious and her mother engage in. These include dissociative moments common among those surviving and escaping trauma, fierce schoolgirl daydreams about fitting in and being popular and “looking right,” one intriguingly droll scene in which Precious imagines herself inside a TV screening of the Sophia Loren World War II epic Two Women (which I think precludes the quick, wry sense of humor she starts to display later), and her mother’s more extreme habit of zoning out before the TV that probably verges on the psychotic.

Her mother’s path is, after all, one that Precious could have taken. We see how this all could have happened, and where it might've wound up, most vividly in that final scene in Mrs. Weiss’ cubicle during Mary’s last bid to get Precious back. She’s lucky and so are we. And Mo’Nique has a whole lot more under her hat than “Skinny Women Are Evil.”

* * *
This review is part of the November 25, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle. “Precious” is playing at both Manlius Art Cinema and Carousel Mall Regal Theaters, and Lee Daniels’ first film, “Shadowboxer” (2005) is available for Instant Viewing or regular rental at Netflix. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film review column. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle.

Film Review #214: Pirate Radio
2008
Director: Richard Curtis
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rhys Ifans, Emma Thompson

Maybe the surprise engagement softened us up, but I prefer to see it as further evidence of the enduring power of rock’n’roll. Local music fans will remember when WAER’s deejay Eric Cohen used the main stage at Jazz Fest to go down on one knee. Last Friday night another enterprising young man engineered the same thing during the closing credits at the early screening of Pirate Radio in Albany’s Spectrum Theatre. As snapshots of the couple flashed onscreen and the live Black gospel choir planted in the audience burst into the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” he popped the question. Coming up the aisle as the crowd for the next showing filtered in, their giant images still looming on the screen behind them, they looked pretty happy, and way too young to have been alive in 1966, when Pirate Radio takes place.

Pirate Radio opened nationwide last Friday with little advance notice. Except for the face of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in the newspaper ads and a Friday afternoon feature on NPR about the history of 1960s-era offshore pirate radio stations that I caught on the drive to Albany, it wasn’t on my radar at all. My sister and I were thinking of Lorna’s Silence, the new one by the Belgian filmmaker Dardenne brothers, or maybe Paris, which we went back to see Saturday night. Pirate Radio was pretty much a Plan B. But – still softened up with lingering good cheer from that engagement or not – we cheered and clapped right along with everybody else when the end credits rolled.

About 20 minutes longer and titled The Boat that Rocked before its U.S. makeover, Pirate Radio hadn’t done all that well overseas. Many reviews here have been luke-warm too – grumpily calling it a “mess” and a “hodgepodge,” a poor imitation of Richard Lester’s madcap Beatles films (A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, 1964 and ‘65) and – ironically, considering the movie’s own personification of upper crust British culture police, Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh), who vows to crush the outlaw radio stations and the “sewer” they represent – nowhere near the in-depth treatment the subject or the era deserve. Excuse me, but this movie is a musical. How much “character development” does even The Sound of Music really have, folks? Pirate Radio was written and directed by Richard Curtis, from whom we’ve had Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually – affectionate entertainments, really, as this film is.

The year is 1966, when the UK’s state-owned BBC aired about two hours of rock music a week, compared to the United States’ 571 music-and-news format privately-owned commercial radio stations that provided Top 40 rock music 24 hours a day. State-owned radio monopolies actually pervaded most European broadcasting since the 1920s and, in England’s case, agreements with the musicians’ unions prevented more than minimal on-air “needle-time” as a way of tightly controlling competition with live performers. As the opening montage shows, about half of Britain’s population – 20 million people – listened to rock on U.S.-style pirate stations. That is, stations financed by advertizing (often U.S.-based) that aired commercials on shows run by popular deejays with nicknames, jingles, station ID’s and their own steadfast, infatuated fans. The first offshore pirate stations broadcast from ships in the 1950s off Denmark, Holland and Sweden. A London-based agent, Rohan O’Rahilly, launched Radio Caroline in March 1964, with another eight or nine stations following. Parliament did pass the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in August 1967, as the film depicts.

Pirate Radio only loosely adheres to this history, it’s true, leaving out many nuances of that day’s culture wars – save joyous resistance to authority – or our own day’s political correctness, and cobbling together a tale of the decrepit fictional ex-tanker Radio Rock anchored in the North Sea, with an assortment of odd birds and motley crew – including Hoffman as the American, Rhys Ifans as the Brit megastar deejay Gavin Cavanaugh, Bill Nighy as the ship’s captain Quentin, and the lone woman Felicity (Katherine Parker), allowed on board to cook only because she’s a lesbian. Into this comes Quentin’s godson Carl (Tom Sturridge), sent for some manning-up by his mother Charlotte (Emma Thompson), whom Quentin calls a “sexual legend.” Plot twists abound, including visits from giddy fans, games of chicken, finding Carl's long-lost father and a sudden swerve into Titanic-as-rock-opera midway through, with a box of beloved albums standing in for that sapphire necklace. And the soundtrack – close to 40 songs – well, it is glorious. No matter what age you are, you’re likely to know them all.

*******
This review appeared in the 11/19/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Find Simon Frith’s fascinating and more complete history of the British pirate stations at the film’s official website. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column reviewing DVDs, special screenings and films of enduring worth. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle.

Film Review #213: Tattooed Under Fire
2009
Director: Nancy Schiesari
Documentary

“The Vikings wore their shields on their backs when they went into battle, so it should be on the back,” says Josh, 22, a soft-faced boy with wide eyes and still a bit of baby fat around his middle. It’s April 2005, 1500 U.S. troops have died in Iraq, and Josh is deploying there in two months. In Nancy Schiesari’s documentary Tattooed Under Fire, Josh is explaining why the Viking shield tattoo he has worked to design with the artists at River City Tattoo in Killeen, Texas, incorporates the Norse “tree of life” into its design and will cover most of his back.

“I’m Norwegian on my mother’s side, so as a warrior, this is another link to my heritage,” he adds, his upper lip beaded with sweat as the needle bites into his back. I have a bit of ink, so I know this peculiar sensation. It doesn’t exactly hurt, because the needle’s never in one spot long enough, but it’s always just about to, so you can reach your limit for a session.

Diamond Glen, the senior tattoo artist in the shop, is familiar with tattoo’s rituals and lore. He elaborates that ancient warriors painted and tattooed themselves to intimidate the enemy, part and parcel with the fearsome pounding on shields and bellowing that we all know in movies from Stagecoach to Braveheart to Steve McQueen’s Hunger. “Tattoos are like permanent war-paint,” says Glen, who says he has two sons himself, that these Fort Hood soldiers are “good kids – babies, most of ‘em.”

Roxanne, who owns River City Tattoo and could easily pass for any of her soldier clientele’s mothers, says she grew up around the military and she respects their desire to do their duty.

“But I don’t like the duty this time,” she says. “These kids put their heart and soul into these designs. They’re saying, it’s my body, it’s my life, and I want to design it.”

Fort Hood, Texas, scene of last week’s horrific mass shooting and this week’s somber observances, is the largest U.S. military facility in the world. A major center for deployment of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, Fort Hood also houses the Army’s Warrior Combat Stress Reset Program for the treatment of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Increasingly, many U.S. men and women in uniform – one estimate, according to the film, is that 95% of those deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan – choose tattoo and other body art to express their complex reactions to combat both survived and anticipated.

This week, Schiesari’s documentary about the use of tattoo among U.S. troops begins airing across the nation on PBS stations. Its first Central New York airing was Monday night on WCNY Channel 24. Initially scheduled in honor of Veterans’ Day, the timing takes on added urgency after the Fort Hood tragedy. Tattooed Under Fire was filmed in Killeen, Texas, just outside Fort Hood, over about a three-year period. Schiesari is a native Brit who’s made documentaries about the photographer Hansel Mieth and filmmaker Martin Scorsese for the BBC, along with work for England’s Channel 4, ABC, National Geographic and PBS, and she’s served as cinematographer on films like Alice Walker’s 1993 Warrior Marks. Now she teaches filmmaking at the University of Texas/Austin, where Tattooed Under Fire premiered in September 2008. Before the awful coincidence of last week’s Fort Hood shootings, the film had already gained increased attention on this year’s festival circuit - deservedly so, for it leans in close with a group of young soldiers, mostly men but including three women, decent, sometimes unknowing, as they talk about their hopes and fears and anger and sometimes grief, make jokes, try to get ready.

In just 56 compact minutes, Schiesari profiles nearly a dozen of them, sometimes including reprise interviews when they return. A medic has an hour glass with wings flying through a thunderstorm across his upper chest – carefully below the collar line of his dress uniform. A soft-voiced young Latina says she’ll maybe buy her mother a house if she survives; an African American woman has grown increasingly bitter about the armed services. One rookie pushes a few envelopes when he designs a fetus in a blender design for his bicep and poses “making a muscle” with it before he ships out – he says any one of them could wind up “mush” – and then Schiesari catches him when he’s back from his hitch, chastened by real war’s proximity and amazed no one shot him for the excess of such an image.

Of course it’s really the war itself that has got under all our skins, marking the rest of us indelibly as these young soldiers.

*******
This review was part of the 11/12/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle. Look for additional screenings of “Tattooed Under Fire” on your local PBS station. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle.

Film Review #212: Nigger
2009
Director: Thea St. Omer
Documentary

“I don’t audible-ize the word,” says one of the interviewees, a middle-aged white man and presumably a teacher. He says that he will write “nigger” and he will refer to it, just never “audible-ize” it.

I suppose he really means “say out loud.” Generally I take a dim view of the practice of interchanging parts of speech – using “impact” as a verb is just lazy – and now here is a further alarming foray into adjectival contortion. “Audible-ize” may exist somewhere, probably as a technological term, but this is the first time I’ve heard it used. And perhaps it shows up here to illustrate unwittingly the lengths to which we’ll go in seeking linguistic escape from the snares of another word. Thea St. Omer takes on the many-shaded malignancy of that word in her masterful documentary, Nigger.

An instructor at the Newhouse School of Syracuse University, St. Omer screened an earlier version of Nigger there last spring and later at New York University. Now she’s finished the film – 59 minutes and shot in digital video – and she hosts a premiere screening next Wednesday at ArtRage Gallery in the Hawley-Greene neighborhood, just a short hop north from the SU campus near James and Lodi.

St. Omer distills Nigger from over 100 interviews. The majority of her interviewees are of African descent, but there are also Latinos, a number of whites including a German mother whose school-age daughter uses the term “digger” as code for the forbidden “nigger,” and several Asians including a slender young man who says he’s never been called a “nigger” and adds wistfully, “I’m not that cool.” One thing that film as a visual medium accomplishes here, without making any fuss about it at all, is the accumulation of a pool of subjects who are astonishingly varied in their range of age, style, accent, dress, station and degree of worldliness, stance and hue. This of course makes its own point given the film’s consideration of blunt-force stereotype.

St. Omer’s set-up is simple and intimate: acting as her own cameraperson and shooting in closeup, she interviews subjects against a black backdrop. In letting me watch the film for review she extracted a for-my-eyes-only promise because the dvcam master was delayed, getting its final color correction elsewhere. She needn’t have worried. The film’s look is very nice indeed.

She has taken what are evidently lengthy conversations and edited to pull short clips which she then arranges in sections. One can imagine that these categories emerged from the interviews she filmed as well as from her questions, and the sections are simply titled with white text on black: “A look at the word.” “Where did the term nigger come from?” “Is there such a thing as a nigger?” (This section is particularly intriguing, as interviewees think through aloud about the distinctions involved between a word and what it represents.) “To be called a nigger.” “The cultural nuances of nigger.” “Is there a difference between nigger and nigga?” “Should we use the words nigger and nigga today?” and “Are you a nigger?”, which evokes perhaps deeper emotion than in any of the previous sections. It is my guess that none of the white interviewees asked this question will ever claim glibbly that they "know how you feel."

While we don’t hear her voice until a good ways into the film – she softly asks a young man how he reacted when someone called him a nigger (instead of answering directly, he says, “My Jewish friend Andy beat the crap out of the guy!”) – and only infrequently after that, it’s evident she’s an excellent interviewer. Her subjects are relaxed, expressive, thoughtful, sometimes witty and frequently eloquent. I said above that she “distilled” this film; that’s descriptive but also offers the temptation to draw that metaphor out, for what’s here is a kind of bootleg knowledge. Clearly these enormously quotable people feel safe with St. Omer getting them on record about, as the film’s tagline goes, “Arguably the most loaded word in our history.”

Actually, I suppose some would argue about that assertion, and several of St. Omer’s subjects do reference parallel struggles in passing. For example, one woman says that “for some people, the world is full of niggers and kikes and homosexuals.” Another woman responds to the issue of who may appropriately use the word “nigga,” either in solidarity or as a way of claiming affection, by noting that she understands the theory of “reclaiming” and thereby transforming negative language but she can’t imagine ever actually calling her women friends by the “C” word. It seems to me another of St. Omer’s quiet accomplishments in this film is that we understand she’s not adverse to including other oppressions, but this one is what we’re talking about right now and – like the good teacher that I imagine she is in a classroom – she deftly keeps us right on point.

******* This review appeared in the October 1, 2009 print issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Thea St. Omer hosted the premiere screening of her finished documentary, Nigger, on Wednesday, October 7 at 7:00 PM at ArtRage Gallery, 505 Hawley Avenue, Syracuse.

Film Review #211: The Passion of Joan of Arc
1928/DVD 1999
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Cast: Renee Maria Falconetti & others

The idea of what makes a woman hero dates back at least to female medieval mystics, among them Joan of Arc, the illiterate French peasant girl whose “divine voices” told her to unite France, assist in the crowning of the young Charles VII and expel the English invaders. For her trouble she was betrayed by French collaborators in 1431, turned over to a Church court, tried for heresy – there were 29 “examinations” combined with torture, during which she disavowed her voices but then recanted – and burned at the stake, all by the time she was 19 years old.

Every Catholic schoolgirl knows Joan’s story – as much frightening cautionary tale as feminist inspiration – though actually a number of cultures have legends or historical instances of young women who transgressed conventions of their time, dressed in men’s clothing and took up arms and leadership at moments of crisis, often to repel invaders. The Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film about Joan’s trial and execution is by no means the first cinematic treatment of "the maid of Orleans" – at least seven movies preceded his, the earliest in 1895 – though the Catholic Church did not declare Joan a saint until 1920. Ingrid Bergman played Joan twice – in Victor Fleming’s 1948 adaptation of Maxwell Anderson’s play and again in 1954 for Rossellini. Otto Preminger launched Jean Seberg’s career by casting her in his 1957 film based on George Bernard Shaw’s play (the screenplay by that great novelist of Catholic doubt, Graham Greene). Director Robert Bresson’s Joan film came out in 1962, and in 1997 Luc Besson cast Milla Jovovich in The Messenger, still-popular on DVD and featuring Joan in battle. The most recent effort seems to be the riveting 2003 Hungarian film Joan of Arc on the Night Bus, best described as a post-modern opera, which incidentally screened here in Syracuse several years ago courtesy of the Syracuse International Film Festival. This list is not exhaustive, but illustrates an enduring fascination with Joan.

But Dreyer’s film has a certain mystique attached, even in terms of the film’s survival in the world. Fire destroyed the original negative. Then his second version – reconstructed from outtakes – was lost to fire too; Dreyer died in 1968 believing this work was gone, though boot-legged, truncated versions survived. In 1981, a print of Dreyer's original was found intact under circumstances either bizarre or miraculous, depending on your point of view: locked in a janitor’s metal cabinet in an Oslo psychiatric hospital. Restored in 1985, this has been available since 1999 on an excellent Criterion Collection DVD, which contains more of this history as well as options to play the film in its original silent form, with commentary, or with composer Richard Einhorn’s majestic Voices of Light. Einhorn himself encountered Dreyer’s film by accident at the Museum of Modern Art while considering whether to compose something about Joan. He comments on the Criterion DVD that first watching the Dreyer film was like “walking down an ordinary street, turning a corner and without warning, you find yourself staring at the Taj Mahal.”

Dreyer stripped his story down to Joan’s trial, with no panoramic shots of battlefields or Charles’ court or the Rheims cathedral, no lush scenery, no mystical moments of Joan with her heavenly confidantes, no fabulous costumes for Joan in armor astride her white horse. His camera came in at odd angles on a stripped down set, creating disorienting, unsettling visuals, literally askew perspectives that match the sensory perception of someone exhausted and under stress, and evidence of a harsh daily existence in details like Joan's ragged, dirty fingernails.

The film is relatively short – just 82 minutes – and he strips the narrative down too. Dreyer relied on the actual ecclesiastical trial transcripts for Joan’s exchanges with her tormentors. Joan’s was a show trial, so when vain, hair-splitting judges nonsensically ask her how she knew it was Saint Michael who visited her, whether he was naked and whether his hair was cut, she is not outwitted. When they inquire in another trick question whether God hates the English, she answers that she doesn’t know about that but she does know he will drive most of them out of France, except for those who die there. You may not think about this as you watch the film, but afterward it occurs how like the scriptural Jesus she is in Dreyer’s portrayal – both the boy found holding his own with the scholars in the temple and the later, angrier Jesus who drives the money-lenders out. And it’s no coincidence Dreyer titles his film The Passion of…. For some, Gethsemane – where Jesus is perhaps most fully human, doubting his salvation, wondering if he can avoid his painful death, wondering if he can do more good alive, asking please to get out of this, agonizing – is what makes his story worth its salt. And in this portion of Joan’s story – when she allows herself to be convinced to save herself, only to draw back from that spiritual calamity as from a dizzying brink – Dreyer’s film is most unforgettable.

Dreyer found his lead in Renée Maria Falconetti, a stage actress of light comedies. She found his methods so aversive that – much like the singer Björk’s experience with another Danish director, Lars von Trier – she never made another movie. The critic Pauline Kael called Falconetti’s performance the finest ever filmed. A ways off the beaten track from the multiplex, this one’s worth the trip.

*******
This review is from the 9/24/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Find The Passion of Joan of Arc at Netflix.com.