Port Townsend. Preview.

The Port Townsend Film Festival opens tomorrow and runs through Sunday. Critic and notorious feather-ruffler NP Thompson previews a few of the highlights.

This year, Orthodox cineastes on the Olympic Peninsula won't have to make a choice between atoning for their sins on the High Holy Days or further profaning G-d by going to the movies: The seventh annual Port Townsend Film Festival has been moved up by two weekends so as not to conflict with Yom Kippur. If this Victorian seaport's status as an epicenter of old-time hippies, New Age mystics, and more massage therapists per capita than anywhere else in the Pacific Northwest hadn't preceded itself, this appeal to Tradition would nonetheless speak volumes, even among the uncircumcised.

Since the Festival began in 2000, it has centered on a featured guest who attends an archival screening of one of his or her old classics, then fields questions from a packed house of filmgoers. In seasons past, the guests of honor were actors whose careers came of age in the 1950s, the last living vestiges of a more glamorous era, including Tony Curtis, who came packaged with Sweet Smell of Success, Eva Marie Saint with All Fall Down, Jane Powell with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and my favorite, the still wonderfully salty Patricia Neal, who said to me before a presentation of Hud, "Oh, I just love Eva Marie Saint - she's a gorgeous kid!" But as stars from that time grow fewer and fewer, the guests have been of more recent vintage: Debra Winger and Arliss Howard arrived last year with their seldom seen chunk of Deep South surrealism, Big Bad Love. And this year, somewhat incongruously but no less delightfully, it is Alex the Droog's turn. 70s icon Malcolm McDowell will take the stage, and while there's a midnight screening of the ubiquitous A Clockwork Orange, the real treasure here is the chance to see Lindsay Anderson's 1968 masterpiece If... on the big screen, a film that Paramount has thus far failed to issue on DVD.

Filmed at Cheltenham College, Anderson's alma mater, If... draws upon the director's experiences (unhappy, of course) in what he called "the strange sub-world" of the English public school system. Anderson and the scenarist David Sherwin never specify in which era their movie takes place. The students at this all-male institution of learning dress in Edwardian suits with high collars, yet a Che Guevara poster hangs on the junior boys' dormitory wall.

If... so thoroughly succeeds at sending up sacred cows that one British ambassador termed it "an insult to the nation." Rollickingly funny and starkly serious at the same time, the film today testifies to what a confident moviemaker Anderson was. His choice of shots, the preciseness of the cuts in how they enhance our understanding of the school's rituals, the provocative ease with which Anderson weaves between shooting in color or black and white, the way he seems wholly at one with his editor David Gladwell and his cinematographer Miroslav Ondrícek, all of this abounds through every frame.

And there's another, equally important quality: Anderson's great humor, by turns boisterous or understated. Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), who has plastered his dorm room with photos of military action figures, looks up from his reading and announces, "There's no such thing as a wrong war. Violence and revolution are the only pure acts. War is the last possible creative act." What I love about this scene is that I never knew whether these college freshman-esque statements are Mick's own ideas or if he's parroting what he's just read, and in either case it hardly matters to his roommate Wallace (a handsome Richard Warwick) who preens before a mirror during Mick's speech, deeply worried about the prospects of going bald or having bad breath.

Gay energy pulses throughout If..., despite McDowell's tiger-ish tussling with Christine Noonan on a café floor. "This homosexual flirtatiousness is so adolescent!" shrieks one of the upperclassmen, dismayed by his fellow prefects' obsession with the younger boys who act as their "slaves." In one extraordinary sequence, a gymnast repeatedly twirls around a bar, capturing the attention of a junior who stands above him on a landing, transfixed by the masculine grace of the acrobat's physique. Gavin Lambert describes this passage as "One of the most lyrical homoerotic episodes in any movie," and its details, once observed, are difficult to forget: the agape expression on the boy's face, the white cables of the fisherman's sweater he's trying to pull over his head, and the way his blond hair sticks straight up once he finally does, so that he resembles a miniature fashion model.

Even after 38 years, If...'s anti-establishment satire remains fresh and painfully relevant. When the school chaplain, prior to commencing war exercises, bellows at the altar, "Jesus Christ is our Commanding Officer!" it isn't tough to imagine George W Bush muttering a near-verbatim sentiment. If... screens once at the festival, on Saturday evening, September 16, at Broughton Auditorium, with McDowell on hand to talk about this, his debut feature, and about his late mentor Lindsay Anderson.

The Port Townsend Film Festival has a history of programming distinguished documentaries: Ballets Russes, Robb Moss's The Same River Twice, Bruce Weber's A Letter to True, and Home of the Brave, regarding the martyred civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, all had screenings here before opening on the art-house circuit. The best of the new documentary films this time around is Linda Hattendorf's The Cats of Mirikitani.

When Hattendorf began shooting footage in January 2001 of Tsutomu "Jimmy" Mirikitani, the then 80-year-old Japanese-American artist was living on the streets of SoHo, spending his days and nights under the awning of a Korean grocery. Hattendorf tosses out the talking heads approach to making a documentary; she favors medium and wide shots, showing us the entire person, saving her close-ups for Mirikitani's intricate, brightly colored nature paintings of jungle cats and persimmon blossoms. She depicts the artist, bundled up for winter, sketching with crayons or red pencils, pausing occasionally to introduce himself as "Grand Master Artist." Mirikitani - it's hard not to want to call him Jimmy - sports silvery Fu Manchu-like whiskers; he reminisces, at one point, on having worked briefly as a sushi chef for Jackson Pollock in East Hampton; he stashes his life's work in a box labeled "Imperial Art Treasures Department"; and he tenaciously (and admirably) refuses all forms of public assistance. Hattendorf not only does justice to Jimmy and his art - which would be accomplishment enough - she has a New Yorker's eye for her own city. In the early wintry scenes, there are exhilaratingly gloomy shots of lower Manhattan's gray light, of brownstone façades as snowflakes flurry; a hazy sunset burns its reflection in a few apartment windows, and radio reports on the soundtrack warn of weather advisories.

Several of Jimmy's paintings are workings out of the demons he harbors, even decades later, of his three and a half year internment at Tule Lake during World War II. The camp pictures are pastoral on the surface. The artist accentuates the looming mountain in the distance, the surrounding desert landscape, or the jackrabbits underfoot; only the barracks give away that we're seeing memories of prison.

Life goes on, and the World Trade Center towers crumble on 9/11. In a radically loving gesture, Hattendorf invites the homeless Jimmy to stay with her, and she documents their burgeoning friendship to earned emotional effect. There's a montage in which Jimmy listens in silence as clips of news coverage from the immediate aftermath of the blowback blare on his host's television set. A newscaster's smooth intonation, "A Gallup poll finds almost half of all Americans favor special IDs for Arabs, including those who are US citizens," segues to a comparison of how political might treated Japanese-descended Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and this prompts Jimmy's remark: "Stupid American government."

The Cats of Mirikitani, a film of immense charm and considerable bite, presents us with two Jimmies: the irascible old man he's become, and in still images, the beautiful idealist he was at age 25. Hattendorf never forces connections between then and now - it's all there in the material and in history, the way our government routinely uses the guise of "security" to justify any manner of cruel, aberrant behavior.

Governmental wrongdoing - and the efforts of good citizens to combat it - lies at the heart of Anthony Giacchino's The Camden 28. A powerful and necessary account of the Catholic Left's opposition to the Vietnam War, this documentary retraces an August 22, 1971 raid on a draft board office made by two priests, a minister, and more than two dozen church-going liberals. The movie is necessary, in part, because it's a much-needed slap in the face to the Christian Right. It is powerful for more reasons than I can enumerate here, although I wonder why a story this rich and strong has never yet fired the imagination of one of our brooding Catholic filmmakers, a Scorsese or a Coppola. The terrain here seems well-suited to their sensibilities: the Camden group was betrayed by one of their own, who turned into an FBI informant, and in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twist, the betrayer's nine-year-old son was soon thereafter fatally injured - he fell from a tree onto a spiked fence - and who should say Mass for the boy's last rites but one of the priests his father had set up.

"The money that's spent on bombs could be spent on buildings - that was our point we were trying to make," says Father Michael Doyle, in his lilting Irish brogue, "and it's still true." As the camera pans over images of this New Jersey town's boarded-up, bombed-out brick rowhouses, he continues: "In fact, it's more true today. And we're still wasting the money on the weaponry, and we still have Camden the way it is. So there is no vision [in the government], and the people are perishing here because there's no vision." This testimony, in tandem with Giacchino's deft inter-cutting of Vietnam-era footage with the present, creates a hall of mirrors effect, in which we see that corrupt administrations - from Johnson to Nixon to Bush - are no different from one another.

There are dozens of films squeezed into this three-day festival, including the Uruguayan Carnival fantasy Adios Momo and Isabella Rossellini's homage to Roberto Rossellini, My Dad Is 100 Years Old, which plays as part of the shorts collection "Jackson Pollock Was An Alcoholic (But He's Alright By Me)." And it isn't all movies: West Coast Live, "San Francisco's Radio Show to the World," returns to the Upstage for a third consecutive season. Since I first heard the show back in 1994, the year it went from local to national, I've always thought West Coast Live was one of the best possible uses of the radio medium, even on those occasions when I didn't cotton to one of the interviewees or hated the band that was playing. This time, Sedge Thomson interviews several Festival guests including McDowell, Hattendorf, and Robert Osborne, the urbane host of Turner Classic Movies. Osborne will hold court at two screenings: first, Otto Preminger's film noir Laura, which he's programmed in the "Formative Films" series; then, Lindsay Anderson's 1987 The Whales of August, the director's final theatrical release, which gave Lillian Gish and Bette Davis the best roles of their respective old ages. Last but not least, a number of filmmaking panels dot the calendar this weekend at Port Townsend, and the one I can hardly wait to attend is "Why Film Critics Matter," moderated by the formidable Kathleen Murphy. I'm eager to know why myself.

Posted by dwhudson at September 14, 2006 7:20 AM