Film Screenings / Programs / Series
ANTI-BIOPICS
July 14 – August 1
July 14-August 1, 2010
The word ‘biopic’ strikes well-founded fear into the heart of many serious filmgoers, calling to mind the steady stream of bloated, big-budget, hare-brained films produced in Hollywood and elsewhere that delight in recruiting glamorous movie-stars to impersonate various famous or infamous figures whose lives are shoehorned into a depressingly prefab, reductive mold. The biopic is one of the most ubiquitous and perennial of cinematic genres, but it has developed conventions that are spectacularly ill-suited to conveying the messiness, the complexity, and the essential, ultimately impenetrable mystery of a real human life. But it doesn’t have to be thus.
Though always overshadowed by the GANDHIs, CAPOTEs, and WALK THE LINEs of the world, there is a glorious alternative tradition of films that have experimented with more sophisticated, evocative, and visionary ways of conveying the essence of a human life, of capturing a particular figure’s sensibility or exploring the significance of their experience. This summer Anthology presents an eclectic selection of these innovative, experimental, and just plain far-out biographical films (‘anti-biopics’, for lack of a better term). Roughly divided into two halves (films about pre-20th- and 20th-century figures), the series features films about artists, philosophers, scientists, world leaders, and saints, made by filmmakers as varied as Roberto Rossellini, Andy Warhol, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, Robert Altman, and Alexander Sokurov. And as a very special supplementary program, in September we will be presenting Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s remarkable and rarely-screened “German trilogy”, featuring the monumental HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY (aka OUR HITLER).
Prepare to be educated and dazzled all at once!
Special thanks to Mark Rappaport, Paul Schrader, Brian Belovarac & Sarah Finklea (Janus Films), Jonathan Howell (New Yorker Films), Laurence Berbon (Tamasa Distribution), Delphine Selles-Alvarez (Cultural Services of the French Embassy), Benjamin Crossley-Marra (Zeitgeist Films), Paul Ginsburg (Universal Pictures), Gary Palmucci (Kino International), Ken Eisen (Shadow Distribution), Mark McElhatten, Anne Morra, Mary Keene & Kitty Cleary (MoMA), Stephen Lu (Asian Media Access), Cristina Prado & Alejandro Díaz (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía), Aldo Sánchez Ramírez & Sebastian Mitre (Mexican Cultural Institute), Frida Maceira (Tequila Gang/Salamandra Producciones), Alejandra Menache Hernandez & Jaime Aguilar Alvarez Gonzalez (Fundación Televisa), Carlos Gutiérrez (Cinema Tropical), Matthew Seig (Sandcastle 5 Productions), Todd Wiener & Steven Hill (UCLA Film & Television Archive), Marilee Womack (Warner Bros), and Bradley Eros.
PRE-20TH CENTURY:
Ken Russell
LISZTOMANIA
1975, 103 minutes, 35mm. With Roger Daltrey, Paul Nicholas, and Ringo Starr.
Russell reinvents the biopic as a gleefully anachronistic, grossly obscene, unapologetically tasteless, and genuinely unhinged phantasmagoria, with piano virtuoso and composer Franz Liszt presented as a proto-rock-star (no great stretch for The Who’s Roger Daltrey) locked in a Manichean struggle with the satanic Richard Wagner. While most of the films in this series challenge biopic conventions by eschewing psychology, practicing formal experimentation, or developing a filmic style reflective of their subjects’ art, LISZTOMANIA does so via power-pop musical numbers, Frankenstein monster Nazis, and giant penises. This is Ken Russell at his most excessive (which is to say, prepare to take cover!).
–Wednesday, July 14 at 7:00 and Saturday, July 17 at 9:00.
Sergei Paradjanov
THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES / SAYAT NOVA
1968, 79 minutes, 35mm. In Armenian with English subtitles.
Representing one extreme within the spectrum of innovative approaches to the biographical film, Paradjanov’s masterpiece pays tribute to the 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova by means of a series of striking, mysterious, and enigmatic tableaux, evoking the poet’s childhood and youth, his days as a troubadour at the court of King Heraclius II of Georgia, his retreat to a monastery, and his old age and death, as well as suggesting something of the nature of his sensibility. POMEGRANATES is arguably the most radical and visionary of all biographical films.
–Wednesday, July 14 at 9:15, Saturday, July 17 at 7:15, and Thursday, July 22 at 9:00.
Derek Jarman
WITTGENSTEIN
1993, 75 minutes, 35mm. With Karl Johnson, Tilda Swinton, and Michael Gough.
Seven years after the release of his highly personal, studio-bound, freely anachronistic portrait of the painter Caravaggio, Jarman made this even more stylized biographical study of one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers. Shot on a soundstage with radically minimalist sets consisting of little more than a handful of suggestive props, Jarman stages significant moments from Wittgenstein’s life, played out in a vacuum of darkness suggestive of a philosophically-charged void. Utilizing a series of ploys to undercut biopic clichés – including direct-address to the camera, unapologetically anachronistic touches, and the appearance of an alien who engages in dialogue with the young Wittgenstein – Jarman conjures a highly meditative and experimental exploration of the philosopher’s life and thought.
–Thursday, July 15 at 7:00 and Monday, July 19 at 9:30.
Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet
CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH / CHRONIK DER ANNA MAGDALENA BACH
1968, 94 minutes, 35mm. In German with English subtitles. With Gustav Leonhardt and Christiane Lang.
This beautiful, lucid account of the last 27 years of the life of J.S. Bach (as played by Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt), seen through the eyes of his second wife, is mediated partly through documents but mostly through Bach’s own music, performed in original locations and “used neither as accompaniment nor as commentary but as aesthetic material in its own right” (Straub). This is among the most de-dramatized and materialist of biographical films.
–Thursday, July 15 at 8:45 and Sunday, July 18 at 6:30.
Alain Cavalier
THÉRÈSE
1986, 94 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
“Thérèse Martin died of neglect and consumption in a Carmelite convent at the age of 25, leaving behind little more than a slim volume of memoirs and a reputation for piety and self-mortification. Like an obsessed artist or athlete, she had honed her life for one end – the sainthood she was granted in 1925, less than three decades after her death. In brief and limpid episodes Cavalier bares the masochism, eroticism, and purity at the heart of Thérèse’s self-enclosed crusade. … [The film] evokes equally the atavistic appeal and repulsiveness of fanatic faith and unrelenting vision. Unfolding with the cumulative rhythms of prayer, it achieves by the end the intensity and ambivalence of a religious experience.” –Peter Keough, CHICAGO READER
–Friday, July 16 at 7:00, Tuesday, July 20 at 9:00, and Thursday, July 22 at 7:00.
Alex Cox
WALKER
1987, 94 minutes, 35mm. With Ed Harris and Peter Boyle; written by Rudy Wurlitzer.
“[T]his delirious fantasy about William Walker, the American who ruled Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857, is all over the place and excessive, but as a radical statement about the U.S.’s involvement in that country it packs a very welcome wallop. … Deliberate and surreal anachronisms plant the action in a historical version of the present, and David Bridges’s cinematography combined with a liberal use of slow motion creates a lyrical depiction of carnage and devastation. … One can certainly quarrel with some aspects of the film’s treatment of history, but with political cowardice in commercial filmmaking so prevalent, one can only admire this movie’s gusto in calling a spade a spade, and the exhilaration of its anger and wit.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
–Friday, July 16 at 9:00 and Tuesday, July 20 at 7:00.
Federico Fellini
FELLINI’S CASANOVA / IL CASANOVA DI FEDERICO FELLINI
1976, 148 minutes, 35mm. In English, Italian, French, and German with English subtitles. With Donald Sutherland and Tina Aumont.
Fellini’s late-career film is a phantasmagoric portrait of the notorious womanizer, and, despite its typically Fellini-esque spectacle, one of the director’s bleakest and most pessimistic films. Portraying Casanova (Sutherland, in a remarkable performance) in his waning days, engaging in various amorous and political adventures with an air of bored detachment as he travels through a disease-ridden Europe, the film debunks the myth of Casanova as a great lover and instead presents him as an ordinary man swept along by extraordinary circumstances.
“Imbued with an air of funereal solemnity and elegance, CASANOVA forsakes realism in favor of a stylized romantic pessimism which confronts impotence, failure, sexuality, and exploitation as fully as Pasolini’s SALÒ. Although teetering at times dangerously close to Ken Russell, the visual daring and pure imagination of every image leave it as an elegiac farewell to an era of Italian cinema; and Sutherland’s performance is the most astonishing piece of screen acting since Brando’s in LAST TANGO IN PARIS.” –TIME OUT LONDON
–Saturday, July 17 at 4:15 and Monday, July 19 at 6:30.
Roberto Rossellini
CARTESIUS
1974, 162 minutes, video. In Italian with English subtitles.
“Rossellini’s portrait of René Descartes was his third film set in seventeenth-century France, and is even more elliptical than the others. Rossellini leaves out many…aspects of Descartes’ life (his military service, his devout religious practices, his application of algebra to geometry), focusing instead on his deficiencies, his fear, existential terror, his indolence and self-absorption. Rossellini described Descartes as ‘a son of a bitch, a coward, a lazy person. He was quite repulsive of course, not simpatico…. But I don’t care about that. He was intelligent.’ … With his characteristic attention to quotidian detail, ever curious camera, and emphasis on the social and economic contexts for Descartes’ scientific inquiry, Rossellini produces a demanding, tough, intellectually gripping portrait of the man whose cogito ergo sum could stand as another of the director’s credos.” –James Quandt, CINEMATHEQUE ONTARIO
–Sunday, July 18 at 3:15 and Wednesday, July 21 at 9:00.
Roberto Rossellini
BLAISE PASCAL
1972, 129 minutes, video. In French with English subtitles. With Pierre Arditi.
Rossellini was arguably the supreme maker of biographical films, creating portraits of historical figures throughout his career but devoting himself almost entirely to the genre towards the end of his life. These late “history films” are frankly pedagogical works, using an ostensibly dry, anti-dramatic style to convey the stories of their subjects’ lives without resorting to the narrative and psychological clichés of conventional biopics. And yet the result is a series of films of enormous emotional and intellectual power. BLAISE PASCAL is one of the greatest and most hypnotic of these late works.
“[T]he epitome of [his] mature art…. PASCAL is the closest Rossellini came to the spiritualized minimalism of Dreyer and Bresson; it explicitly acknowledges DAY OF WRATH and AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, and it’s nearly as great as both.” –J. Hoberman
–Sunday, July 18 at 8:30 and Wednesday, July 21 at 6:30.
20TH CENTURY:
Francesco Rosi
SALVATORE GIULIANO
1961, 125 minutes, 35mm. In Italian with English subtitles.
Like EDVARD MUNCH, but even more so, Rosi’s portrait of the notorious Sicilian bandit upends biopic conventions by focusing less on its ostensible subject than on the environment, the society, and the historical conditions out of which he emerged and into which he was subsumed. One of the greatest of all post-neorealist films, SALVATORE GIULIANO is a remarkably urgent and incisive portrait of Sicilian society, with Giuliano not so much the film’s central figure as much as he is its structuring absence.
–Friday, July 23 at 7:00 and Tuesday, July 27 at 6:45.
Robert Altman
SECRET HONOR
1984, 90 minutes, 35mm. With Philip Baker Hall.
Sequestered in his home, a disgraced President Richard Milhous Nixon arms himself with a bottle of scotch and a gun to record memoirs that no one will hear, a passionate attempt to defend himself and his political legacy. Based on the original play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, made with a student crew at the University of Michigan, and starring Philip Baker Hall in a tour-de-force solo performance, SECRET HONOR – one of the most interesting of Altman’s post-70s films – is a searing interrogation of the Nixon mystique and an audacious depiction of unchecked paranoia.
“Altman’s one-man theatrical adaptation, for all its dense verbosity, is resolutely cinematic, employing a prowling camera to illuminate the dark areas of its melancholy, megalomaniac hero’s soul.” –Geoff Andrew, TIME OUT LONDON
–Friday, July 23 at 9:30 and Thursday, July 29 at 7:00.
Mark Rappaport
FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG
1995, 97 minutes, video. With Mary Beth Hurt.
“Rappaport’s film essay is an imaginary monologue in which the late actress (superbly played by Hurt) meditates on her troubled life. The real Seberg was discovered, as an Iowa teenager, by Otto Preminger…; she later starred in Godard’s BREATHLESS, became involved in radical politics, was persecuted by the FBI, and died – an apparent suicide – in 1979, at the age of forty. Rappaport’s Seberg delivers a detached, ironic running commentary on a series of clips and stills illustrating her erratic career; what’s moving about the film is that this woman is a ghost, bitterly aware that the smart ideas she’s reeling off never occurred to her during her time on earth. Seeing herself clearly for the first time, she seems to know that the image she’s looking at is still a kind of illusion: a trick of time and distance, like the cold, useless light of a dead star.” –Terence Rafferty, NEW YORKER
–Saturday, July 24 at 3:45 and Saturday, July 31 at 9:15.
Alexander Sokurov
THE SUN / SOLNTSE
2005, 115 minutes, 35mm. In English and Japanese with English subtitles.
The third in Sokurov’s series of films on world leaders (after 1999’s Hitler portrait MOLOCH, and 2001’s woefully under-seen TAURUS, a meditation on Lenin’s last days), THE SUN depicts, in Sokurov’s typically hypnotic, heightened manner, the experiences of Japanese Emperor Hirohito in the final days of WWII, as he faces the inevitable surrender of his country and the momentous decision to renounce his heretofore asserted divinity. Sokurov’s world-leader films are fraught with a fascinating tension between Sokurov’s hermetic, hallucinatory sensibility and the concrete historical meanings embodied by their protagonists, a tension that places them among the great director’s finest films.
–Saturday, July 24 at 6:00, Tuesday, July 27 at 9:15, and Saturday, July 31 at 4:30.
Peter Watkins
EDVARD MUNCH
1974, 174 minutes, 35mm.
Watkins’s portrait of the great painter is a bona fide masterpiece, and a supreme example of a particular approach to re-thinking the biographical film. Watkins’s social and political commitment, which has manifested itself in other films (such as THE WAR GAME and PUNISHMENT PARK) in an angry and passionate stance, here takes the form of a rigorous, deeply intelligent inquiry into Munch’s era (achieved through Watkins’s accustomed faux-documentary approach). A critique-by-example of most biopics, Watkins reverses the usual relationship between figure and context, focusing on the social and political conditions in which Munch lived his life and created his work, a dimension relegated by most biographical films to the status of a more-or-less relevant “background”. Munch himself remains an elusive, somewhat remote figure. And yet despite, or perhaps because of, this elusiveness, the film’s portrait of the artist is a poetic and deeply moving one.
–Saturday, July 24 at 8:30, Wednesday, July 28 at 7:30, and Sunday, August 1 at 5:00.
Stanley Kwan
CENTER STAGE / ACTRESS
1992, 126 minutes, 35mm. In Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles. With Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Ka Fai.
“Stanley Kwan’s masterpiece is still the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen…. The story of silent film actress Ruan Ling-yu, known as the Garbo of Chinese cinema, it combines documentary with period re-creation, biopic glamour with profound curiosity, and ravishing historical clips with color simulations of the same sequences being shot – all to explore a past that seems more complex, sexy, and mysterious than the present. … Any historical movie worth its salt historicizes the present along with the past, and this movie implicitly juxtaposes our own inadequacy with those potent clips of Ling-yu herself.” –Jonathan Rosenbaum, CHICAGO READER
–Sunday, July 25 at 3:30 and Thursday, July 29 at 9:00.
Andy Warhol
LUPE
1966, 72 minutes, 16mm. With Edie Sedgwick and Billy Name.
&
José Rodriguez-Soltero
LUPE
1966, 50 minutes, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. With Mario Montez, Charles Ludlam, and Lola Pashalinski.
The ultimate underground biopic double-feature: a pair of essential films investigating (and transfiguring) the life and persona of Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez, and featuring performances by two of the legends of the 60s underground. Warhol’s two-reel version, designed to be shown as either a single- or double-screen work, is a showcase for Edie Sedgwick, who interacts with Billy Name and then dines alone in an elegant apartment, drinking herself into a toilet-bowl grave. Rather than focusing on Velez’s decline, Rodriguez-Soltero’s version is a sumptuous film that celebrates both Velez and actor Mario Montez. Drawing on the collaboration of Theater of the Ridiculous stars Lola Pashalinski and Charles Ludlam, LUPE is one of the finest films from the New York underground, offering an ecstatic explosion of color, costume, music, camp performance, and complex superimpositions.
–Sunday, July 25 at 6:00 and Friday, July 30 at 9:30. [Rodriguez-Soltero’s LUPE also screens as part of the Charles Ludlam series on August 19.]
CO-PRESENTED BY CINEMA TROPICAL
Paul Leduc
FRIDA / FRIDA, NATURALEZA VIVA
1986, 108 minutes, 35mm. In Spanish, Russian, French, and German with English subtitles.
“Ofelia Medina – bearing an uncanny resemblance to her subject – gives a powerful performance as the flamboyant Mexican painter, wife of the renowned muralist Diego Rivera, close friend of Leon Trotsky, and committed revolutionary. As she drifts in and out of consciousness on her deathbed, fragments of memories and dreams pass through her mind. These images – some haunting, some moving, some painful, some enchanting – gradually form a mosaic of her interior and exterior life. Every frame of this remarkable film exhibits a painterly sense of color, light, and texture.” –VANCOUVER LATIN AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL
–Sunday, July 25 at 8:30 and Saturday, July 31 at 7:00.
Georgy Shengelaya
PIROSMANI
1969, 85 minutes, 16mm. In Russian, Georgian, and French with English subtitles.
A unique film on the life of the primitive Georgian artist Niko Pirosmanashvili, who was born in 1862 and died of starvation and alcoholism in 1918. Pirosmani spent much of his life wandering from tavern to tavern, exchanging his paintings for food, drink, and shelter. Lush with static compositions and muted colors, the film is striking not only for its beautifully controlled visual style – which reflects the rich simplicity of Pirosmani’s primitive paintings – but also as a carefully subdued study of the relationship between an artist and society.
–Monday, July 26 at 7:00 and Sunday, August 1 at 8:30.
Paul Schrader
MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS
1985, 121 minutes, 35mm. In English and Japanese with English subtitles. With Ken Ogata.
“Schrader’s mesmerizing vision of famed Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima is a dramatic extension of the titular American Gigolo’s transformation into an elusive object of desire, with Mishima similarly re-fashioning himself, embellishing his image with militaristic, reactionary politics and a group of devoted followers. Set to a driving Philip Glass score, Schrader’s unconventional biopic interweaves Mishima’s life and work, centering on the events leading to the author’s attempted coup and 1970 suicide and structured by lush adaptations of three Mishima novels, poetic interludes that mark a furthest extreme in Schrader’s use of stylized mise-en-scène.” –HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE
–Monday, July 26 at 9:00 and Friday, July 30 at 7:00.
