Continuing its mission to rescue lost classics from obscurity, Milestone Films follows up recently restored releases Killer of Sheep and The Exiles with Margot Benacerraf’s lyrical and commanding Araya, a film which, though it shared the International Critics Prize with Hiroshima mon amour at Cannes in 1959, has eluded wide distribution until now. Venezuelan filmmaker Benacerraf focuses on the populace of the titular setting, vast salt marshes located on a peninsula off her home country’s northeastern coast. Although Araya is a cinematic act of preservation—a document chronicling a place and timeworn practices just prior to a move toward modernization by the area’s salt-harvesting industry—the director is interested in expressively rendering the circadian rhythms of Araya’s salt workers and fisherman, and so her film becomes an ode to the people of the region.
Monday, September 14, 7:30 pm
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Flaherty NYC returns this September, commemorating the work of Chick Strand, whose work was featured at the 2009 Flaherty Seminar and who passed away this July at the age of 78 after battling cancer.
Chick Strand is a seminal filmmaker who helped found Canyon Cinema alongside filmmaker Bruce Baillie when she was living and studying in Berkeley in the early 1960s. Known for her lyrical handheld 16mm camerawork, her frequently feminist subject matter, and her droll sense of humor, Strand worked in both experimental and documentary modes and brought experimental techniques to her nonfiction work. She was also a painter, photographer, and professor; she taught filmmaking for more than two decades at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with filmmaker, Hampshire professor, and Flaherty Trustee Bill Brand, and filmmakers Barbara Hammer and Lynne Sachs.
Films and videos to be screened include:
· Anselmo and the Women (1986, 16mm, 35min, Mexico)
One of a series of films about Anselmo, a Mexican street musician, and his life-long struggle to make a good life for his children. This film focuses on his relationship with his wife Adela and his mistress, Cruz, and theirs with him.
· Mosori Monika (1970, 16mm, 20min, Venezuela)
The relationship between the Warao Indians and the Spanish Franciscan missionaries sent to “civilize” them is simple on the surface, but actually manifested in a complex change of techniques, values and life style which have indelibly altered the Warao vision of life.
· Fake Fruit (1986, 16mm, 22min, Mexico)
An intimate documentary about young women who make papier mache fruit and vegetables in a small factory in Mexico. They have a gringo boss, but the factory is owned by his Mexican wife. The film focuses on color, music, movement, and the constant gossip that reveals what the women think about men.
TICKET INFORMATION:
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General admission tickets to the Flaherty NYC series at the Anthology Film Archives are $9. Tickets are $7 for students with valid I.D., and $6 for Anthology members with membership card.
Tickets can be purchased at the Anthology box office the day of the show. For more information, call the Flaherty at 212-448-0457.
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Anthology Film Archives is located in the old Second Avenue Courthouse building in the East Village at 32 Second Ave. at the corner of 2nd Street.
Contact Information
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The Flaherty/International Film Seminars
email: (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
phone: 212-448-0458
web: http://www.flahertyseminar.org
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I first encountered DJ Spooky’s multimedia project Rebirth of a Nation four years ago, when I was still a student at the University of North Carolina. Back then this radical revision of D.W. Griffith’s masterpiece was still making its rounds as a live performance, and the idea of it alone was enough to make it an ultra-hip, must-see event. Condensed from three hours to a little under two, the film was sliced up and projected on a triptych of large screens, allowing for a surprising juxtaposition of storylines, and giving off the sense that this monolith in cinema history was being fractured into a form commensurate to its multiple personalities. The DJ stood on the stage in deep concentration, mixing the music live as the towering images flickered above his head. And perhaps more than anything else I saw that night, the vision of DJ Spooky (whose real name is Paul Miller) working away at his turntable in the dim light was an intriguing addition to the Griffith legacy.
Like Miller’s quirky book-length manifesto Rhythm Science, Rebirth is designed as a grand statement on the vitality of DJ culture and the primacy of the sound-recycler as author. But beyond all the visual and sonic manipulations on display was the very presence of this young African American artist, which begged the obvious question: what extraordinary journey have we taken from these blackface caricatures we’re seeing on the screen to this black man on the stage freely expressing himself to a crowd of college students? The son of a former dean at Howard University’s School of Law, Miller studied philosophy and French at Bowdoin, then freelanced at The Village Voice and Artforum before becoming a pioneer in experimental hip hop. His attempt to publicly deconstruct and outwit a famously racist text seemed not only like poetic justice but also a rare personal and historical gesture in the art of turntablism, where the man behind the mixer so often gets lost in an avalanche of decontextualized sources. Click here to read the rest of Andrew Chan’s review of Rebirth of a Nation, playing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, June 22 – 28.
“The story of three consenting adults in the privacy of their own home” is how posters and promotional material for Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George described the film upon its release, although in truth the words “consenting,” “adults,” “privacy,” and “home” are all stretched throughout. Even the progressive apologia this tagline suggests seems at odds with much of the film’s moral content: sure, Aldrich has constructed a blunt, non-euphemistic film about lesbian relationships, but it’s also salacious, brutal, and grotesque. It’s a wonder that Aldrich acted so surprised when Sister George’s lengthy, Sapphic love scene infamously made it the first major American film to be given an X rating (he sued Jack Valenti and the MPAA over the rating and, when he lost, had to pay court fees amounting to $43,000). For there’s a vague, but appreciable, note of irony in the liberal humanism of the tagline that positions Aldrich’s film a little further away from The Children’s Hour and a little closer to Russ Meyer’s Vixen!, made the same year, which also has a lot of muddled, hilarious, and horrifying ideas about lesbianism.
While today he is largely remembered for individual hit films like The Dirty Dozen and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Aldrich was even by the late 1950s highly regarded by the authors of Cahiers du cinéma, who leagued him with auteurs like Hitchcock and Renoir, both of whom he assisted in his early Hollywood days. This was mainly because his thematic considerations and deep cynicism ranged so widely and consistently across a multitude of genres: noir, Western, sports film, biblical epic, comedy, war blockbuster, Southern gothic. In the cycle of (broadly defined) “women’s pictures” that he made in the Sixties—Baby Jane, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Sister George, Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (produced by Aldrich and directed by Lee H. Katzin)—there’s just as much moral ambiguity, violence, and deception as in his male-centric pictures (even if the villains don’t always wears black, as in some of his early Westerns).
“I can’t imagine that Jean-Claude Brisseau will find himself among the critically coddled members of the art-house canon, or that his American premieres will someday be greeted with polite, eager reviews in hip city papers,” wrote Reverse Shot’s Nick Pinkerton in his assessment of 2005’s Secret Things. And while Nick—whose stalwart advocacy for this perviest of all contemporary French directors (edging out countryman Benoît Jacquot by several hairs) inspired me to look through his back catalogue—is probably right, there’s something to be said for the fact that Brisseau’s À l’aventure is being showcased in the Film Comment Selects programme alongside such art movies of the moment as Gotz Spiellman’s Revanche and Philippe Garel’s Frontier of Dawn.
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