60s and shorts

In a piece for Slate that touches on Bertolucci's The Dreamers, Danger Mouse's Grey Album and a few other books and movies, Ted Widmer writes:

Certain years stand out for world-shaping events (2001; 1963), and others, more rare, for a feeling that our DNA itself is changing, and an alternative universe of human possibility is coming into view, if only for a brief, tantalizing moment. 1848 was such a year, and 1968 had the same electric quality.... Thirty-six years later, the blurry events of '68 are coming back into focus, more vividly than one might expect.

And if you consider that specific year as a vortex, a flashpoint at which several forces suddenly coalesced out of the history before it to warp history after it, all these years on down the line, you can easily tick off a few other signs of what's in the air. Docs like The Weather Underground and The Fog of War; and specifically related to film, J Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties and the evidently weaker British counterpart, Peter Cowie's Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s.

There's also the return of Che Guevara, at least on the screen. Terrence Malick was to have made a film based on his last days with Benicio Del Toro in the lead, but as Variety is reporting (and linkables like Ananova are passing on), that project's been shelved for a year while Malick shoots a biopic of Pocahontas instead.

But Malick's film would have been the fourth Che movie in relatively rapid succession. The first, of course, is Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries, which made a splash at Sundance and then news in Berlin for getting yanked out of the fest in favor of a spot in Cannes. The second, Gianni Mina's Travelling with Che Guevara (here's a PDF file with more info), is a doc, a sort of "making of" on the first but also has "a sense of Chinese boxes" about it, as Geoffrey Macnab wrote a few weeks ago in his Guardian profile of Alberto Granado, the biologist who took that famous bike ride with Che. The film retells that story, in a way, while peeking in on the progress of Salles's fictional account. The third is Romano Scavolini's Che: The Last Hours, which Macnab's also seen:

Guevara's war against injustice ended on a grim and squalid note in October 1967 at a school house in La Higuera, a poverty-stricken village in Bolivia... When the order came to execute him, none of the Bolivian soldiers was willing to take on the job. Eventually, a sergeant who wanted the money, and who was determined to prove he was not a coward, agreed to carry out the assassination. He was so drunk that his colleagues recall him vomiting outside the school house before he went in to shoot Guevara.

[...]

Nowadays, as Camillo [Guevara, Che's son] acknowledges, Che Guevara is a pop culture icon whose image is as ubiquitous as that of Elvis or Madonna. [Cough.] "People love the myth of Che Guevara and to have T-shirts, hats and posters in their room, but they don't respect the integrity of what he did. They don't really know the story. I'd love that they understood who he was... he was not a model."

But the attraction is there - quite possibly because we've come to realize that we've let ourselves slip into a state of stifling conformity and that there are - in the other sense of the word - models to look back to, possibly holding clues to how we might slap ourselves back into action again.

"For the past two nights the cinetrix has been rolling around in some of the 1960s most acclaimed cinema." On the program: Blow-Up and Cléo de 5 à 7:

So many convertibles! So many beautiful young women and hip, artistic young men! Such a preening overawareness of themselves as films in conversation with other films and genre and style conventions. It was great.

But really, I want to talk about three things: the pastoral, loft life, and - quelle surprise - music.

Also, the cinetrix has been following this whole movieoke thing forever; in the New York Times, Randy Kennedy catches up.

Back, generally speaking, to the 60s: "Auteur of the notorious Flaming Creatures, performance artist before such a term existed, photographer of unlikely incandescences, "the Alfred Jarry of the East Village," [Jack] Smith died without a will in 1989." So you'd expect his legacy to be up in the air; but as C Carr reports in the Village Voice, it's far worse than that. Also in the Voice:

• Leslie Camhi on the Rendez-Vous With French Cinema program at the Walter Reade, March 12 through 21.
• Ed Halter: "Legendary San Francisco champions of DIY cinema as the ultimate form of mind-blowing, budget-busting, kick-assing cultural resistance, Craig Baldwin and Jon Moritsugu have cranked out two of the most formidable oeuvres in contemporary underground film." And both have retros this month at the Anthology Film Archives.
• Michael Atkinson, briefly, on the new Andrzej Wajda box set.
• J Hoberman's reviews: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant and Nir Bergman's Broken Wings.

The Lars Von Trier Retrospective at the American Museum of the Moving Image gives Armond White the perfect opportunity to tell us what he really thinks about Von Trier in the New York Press: "King of the Know-Nothings. The Jupiter of Cinematic Three-Card Monte. Expect historians to one day look back on the launching of Von Trier's Dogme95 (the manifesto that brought filmmaking closer to amateur porn) and laugh." Also in the NYP:

• Matt Zoller Seitz on The Passion of the Christ, by way of a review of The Reckoning.
• Mark Ames shares his qualms concerning The Ladykillers and Kill Bill, Volume 2.
• DVD reviews.
• An amusing piece from Matt Taibbi on how TiVo's going to change the world as we know it.

Doug Cummings on the industrious and creative experimental filmmaker and animator Norman McLaren.

In indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez covers an intriguing discussion in that it was held by a group of people all known for what they used to do - though few would doubt their collective savvy on what's going on now. The subject at hand: "The Indie '90s: How Down, How Dirty?"; the participants: "former United Artists head Bingham Ray, former producers rep John Pierson, and the moderator, former New York Times film critic Janet Maslin."

Read Spanish? Via Perlentaucher, the peerless cultural blog in Germany, a fine issue of Radar, the weekend supplement to the Argentinian daily paper Pagina 12:

• Extracts from Oliver Stone's Comandante (which many of you will have seen anyway) but also from the screenplay for Pedro Almodóvar's La mala educacion, set to premiere in Cannes.
• A piece notes the trend for Hollywood remakes of Asian films.
• Another rounds up superheroes who take care of the crime-fighting outside the US.

Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

"As something of an anorak/geek/nerd myself, I must confess to deriving pleasure from our move to the mainstream," writes Sandy Starr in Spiked. "But enjoyable though it is, even an incorrigible geek such as myself has to confess that the mainstreaming of geekdom is far from a healthy phenomenon." Via Metaphilm.

Scott Macaulay asks, "Um, is anyone else out there following the very scary goings on at the FCC these days?"

In the Guardian:

• Lalit Mohan Joshi on Vijay Anand, 1934 - 2004.
• Ronald Bergan on Frances Dee, 1907 - 2004.
• Lyn Gardner on the BFI's Silent Shakespeare collection.
• Kate Stables's online viewing tips.

Casting Doubt: a new issue of Invisible Culture.

Festival round-up:

• The 11th Annual New York Underground Film Festival opens today and runs through the 16th. Laura Sinagra previews the fest in the Voice, Rania Richardson for indieWIRE.
• Also in iW, Anthony Kaufman: "This month, Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center is hosting a film festival that showcases what the cinema might look like in a world dominated not by America's dream factory, but by the European Union. And let me tell you, it's a lot more thrilling, innovative and inclusive (10 of the 36 films are directed by women) than what we have now."
• Camille T. Taiara in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on Traveling Film South Asia 2004, March 12 - 28 in SF and Milpitas.
• Also in San Francisco, the Fearless Tales Genre Fest, March 11 through 14. You'll definitely want to view that trailer.
• Filmmaker contributor Travis Crawford annotates the Philadelphia Film Festival's "Danger After Dark" program (April 8 - 21); succinct descriptions of select horror films, plus loads o' links.

NY vs LA, Round... I dunno, I've lost count. Anyway: Alexandra Jacobs in the New York Observer.

Not much has made it online from the March/April issue of Film Comment, but still:

• Richard Combs on Joseph Losey.
• Olaf Möller: "The notion of an African Bollywood - half-jokingly called Nollywood - is suddenly catching on."
• Results of the best-of-03 Readers' Poll.

Sites to browse, via Cinema Minima: Undergroundfilm, Micromovies and Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

So long, Steve. Check you later, Rex.

Via Drew's Blog-O-Rama, a frighteningly thorough fan site for Lost in Translation.

Online viewing tip. Bush Ad Remix. Via SignalStation.

Posted by dwhudson at March 10, 2004 12:02 PM