Film Screenings / Programs / Series
TALKING HEAD
August 4 – August 17
August 4-17, 2011
Within the context of the art of film, the term “talking heads” has almost come to represent a dirty word, signifying a type of documentary filmmaking that, however informative and intelligent, is prosaic, artistically unimaginative, and resolutely un-cinematic. But one of the paradoxes of the medium is the existence of films that are profoundly cinematic despite rejecting almost everything we associate with the term. And there may be no clearer proof of this than the fact that filmmakers as varied as Jean Eustache, Shirley Clarke, Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol, and Wang Bing, among many others, have constructed unforgettable films out of nothing more than the unvarnished testimony of a single individual. Whether their motivations are aesthetic or ethical (given the genre’s recurring preoccupation with war crimes and other atrocities), these filmmakers have chosen to focus on men and women whose eloquence and charisma, and the momentousness of the events they’ve experienced or witnessed, render their testimony so compelling that the usual documentary affectations would only serve as distractions. In doing so, they’ve demonstrated the immense, and paradoxically cinematic, power of the “talking head.”
Special thanks to Jacob Burckhardt, Rainer Frimmel, Christoph Hübner, Saul Levine, James Nares, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Delphine Selles-Alvarez (Cultural Services of the French Embassy), Laurence Berbon (Tamasa), Lindsay Bosch (Video Data Bank), Brigitta Burger-Utzer & Ute Katschthaler (Sixpack Films), Kitty Cleary (MoMA), Dennis Doros & Amy Heller (Milestone Films), Jonathan Howell (New Yorker Films), Lihong Kong, Eric Liknaitzky (Contemporary Films), Mark McElhatten, Jonathan Miller & Livia Bloom (Icarus Films), Gary Palmucci (Kino Lorber), Anna Pfitzenmaier & Sandra Smarsch (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv), and Michael Piaker (Sony Pictures Classics).
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
THE CONFESSIONS OF WINIFRED WAGNER / WINIFRED WAGNER UND DIE GESCHICHTE DES HAUSES WAHNFRIED VON 1914-1975
1975, 104/302 minutes, 16mm/video. In German with English subtitles.
“‘He had that perfect Austrian warmth and understanding’: Winifred Wagner (78-year-old widow of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried) on the human face and personal charm of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s passion for Wagner inevitably led him to Winifred, organizer of the Bayreuth Festival. During their 22-year friendship, to whose memory she is stubbornly faithful, Hitler doted on her family and mentioned nothing of politics: ‘I would say he was too easily influenced and gave in to radical demands’, is her only criticism, made apparently without irony. This film features Winifred Wagner’s first interview about Hitler as a patron of the arts. It’s an extraordinary document – about the role of art in a society, about its relation to politics, and about degrees of unawareness.” –Chris Petit, TIME OUT FILM GUIDE
–104-minute version (16mm): Thursday, August 4 at 6:45 and Thursday, August 11 at 8:45.
–302-minute version (video): Saturday, August 6 at 1:30.
Martin Scorsese
ITALIANAMERICAN
1974, 49 minutes, 35mm.
&
AMERICAN BOY
1978, 55 minutes, 16mm.
Early in his career Martin Scorsese made not one but two TALKING HEAD films. The first, ITALIANAMERICAN, finds him interviewing his parents (the focus is equally on the two of them, but after 40 years of marriage they have arguably become enough of a unit to qualify as a single “talking head”) in their Elizabeth Street walk-up apartment. The second, AMERICAN BOY, documents a raucous autobiographical performance by Steven Prince (TAXI DRIVER’s unforgettable gun/drugs/Cadillac salesman “Easy Andy”) whose recollected life stories encompass army brat-hood, draft-dodging, heroin abuse, a turbulent stint as a road manager for Neil Diamond, even murder.
–Thursday, August 4 at 9:00 and Tuesday, August 9 at 9:15.
Jean Eustache
NUMÉRO ZÉRO
1971/2003, 104 minutes, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
The first feature film by the legendary Eustache is one of the seminal TALKING HEAD films, consisting of a straightforward, unadorned interview with his grandmother, who gives a passionate account of her lurid past – the wars she survived, the babies she lost, and the husband accused of pedophilia. Eustache considered the film a jumping-off point for his later work (hence the title). But while a truncated version of the film was exhibited on French TV in the 70s, the longer original version was not screened publicly until 2003, nearly twenty years after Eustache’s death. These ultra-rare Stateside screenings are not to be missed!
–Friday, August 5 at 6:45 and Friday, August 12 at 9:15.
Christoph Hübner
THOMAS HARLAN – MOVING SHRAPNEL / WANDERSPLITTER
2006, 96 minutes, video. In German with English subtitles.
Thomas Harlan was born in 1929 as the only son of the German director Veit Harlan, maker of the notorious anti-semitic propaganda film, JEW SÜSS. After WWII Harlan wrote plays, poetry, and prose, engaged in left-wing discourses, and in 1959 he began archival research into the National Socialist regime. This research led to the prosecution of more than 2,000 German war criminals. Harlan, who passed away last year, lived in his final years in a respiratory clinic in South Germany. It is in this clinic that he examined fragments of his past for this film.
–Friday, August 5 at 9:00, Sunday, August 14 at 3:00, and Tuesday, August 16 at 9:00.
Gerhard Scheumann & Walter Heynowski
THE SMILING MAN / DER LACHENDE MANN
1966, 65 minutes, video. In German with English subtitles.
Posing as West German journalists, East German filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk. Müller fought in Congo’s civil war in the 1960s, and the more Pernod he imbibes, the more fascinating this interview becomes. He asserts that blacks are no better than animals, shares his dream of enlisting in the U.S. Army to fight communism, and flaunts his military paraphernalia. This tour-de-force touches on other Nazis who are active in Africa as well as American world dominance.
–Saturday, August 6 at 7:30, Thursday, August 11 at 7:00, and Wednesday, August 17 at 9:00.
Claude Lanzmann
SOBIBOR, OCTOBER 14, 1943, 4 P.M. / SOBIBÓR, 14 OCTOBRE 1943, 16 HEURES
2001, 95 minutes, 35mm. In Hebrew and French with English subtitles.
An essential supplement to Lanzmann’s renowned SHOAH, this film centers on an extended interview with Yehuda Lerner, a young Jew involved in the only successful uprising by Jewish death-camp prisoners.
“Lerner’s account…is as gripping as the greatest thrillers and as gratifying as any story of brave and cunning virtue confronting mighty evil.” –Richard Brody, NEW YORKER
–Saturday, August 6 at 9:00, Sunday, August 14 at 8:15, and Tuesday, August 16 at 7:00.
Wang Bing
FENGMING: A CHINESE MEMOIR
2007, 186 minutes, video. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Special thanks to Wang Bing and Lihong Kong.
Wrapped in her coat, an old woman walks slowly through a housing complex in China to her simple apartment. Inside, He Fengming settles into her armchair and remembers. Her memories take us back to 1949, to the beginning of a journey that will take us through 30 years of her life and of the New China. In FENGMING, Wang Bing presents her unforgettable story, from her repeated persecution under the two reformatory campaigns in China during the 1950s through her rehabilitation in 1974.
–Sunday, August 7 at 3:00 and Saturday, August 13 at 4:30.
Ferry Radax
THOMAS BERNHARD – THREE DAYS / THOMAS BERNHARD – DREI TAGE
1970, 58 minutes, video. In German with English subtitles.
“One of Radax’s trademarks are his made-for-TV portraits of famous artists which alternate between documentation and interpretation, distance and embellishment. This early b&w portrait of Bernhard shows the writer sitting on a park bench, quiet and unapproachable, talking about childhood memories, loneliness, and writing, and the final result is rather austere. The point-of-view alternates between a variety of distances, and the scene is occasionally interrupted by black frames which resemble a drooping eyelid.” –Harry Tomicek, SIXPACK FILMS
–Sunday, August 7 at 6:45 and Saturday, August 13 at 3:00.
Andy Warhol
PAUL SWAN
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm.
Warhol’s documentary portrait of the early 20th century American dancer who pioneered ‘aesthetic’, interpretive forms of modern dance. The elderly Swan recreates past dance performances, reciting poetry for the camera, frequently changing costumes, and leaving the stage empty for long periods while he hunts for a lost shoe.
&
Andy Warhol
OUTER AND INNER SPACE
1965, 33 minutes, double-screen 16mm.
Shot using videotape equipment loaned to Warhol by the Norelco Company, this film features Edie Sedgwick seated in front of a large television screen, on which we see her pre-recorded video image. As the videotape plays, she responds to her own image and talks with someone off-screen. The result is a fascinating exercise in double-screen filmmaking which highlights Sedgwick’s beauty as well as her mercurial, fragmented personality.
–Sunday, August 7 at 8:15 and Sunday, August 14 at 5:45.
Andy Warhol
SCREEN TEST #1
1965, 66 minutes, 16mm. Written by Ronald Tavel; with Philip Fagan.
Andy Warhol was in many ways the TALKING HEAD filmmaker par excellence, as evidenced by several of his features, as well as the plethora of “talking head” passages embedded within other films. The first of many Warhol films scripted by playwright Ronald Tavel, SCREEN TEST #1 stars Philip Fagan as the subject of Tavel’s off-screen examination. In the face of his tester’s increasingly suggestive and campy instructions, Fagan becomes stubbornly unresponsive, refusing to follow Tavel’s lead and falling back instead on the appeal of his own silent good looks.
–Monday, August 8 at 7:15.
Andy Warhol
SCREEN TEST #2
1965, 67 minutes, 16mm. Written by Ronald Tavel; with Mario Montez.
As Mario Montez auditions for the role of Esmerelda in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Ronald Tavel, again off-screen, subjects the actor to a series of increasingly humiliating improvisations. But Mario’s faith in his self-created persona sustains the illusion of his character and becomes, in the end, a triumph of performance art.
–Monday, August 8 at 8:45.
André Heller & Othmar Schmiderer
BLIND SPOT: HITLER’S SECRETARY
2002, 90 minutes, 35mm. In German with English subtitles.
Traudl Junge describes on camera her experience working as one of Adolf Hitler’s private secretaries from 1942 until his suicide in 1945. After keeping quiet for nearly 60 years, Junge tells the riveting story of working alongside Hitler until the final collapse of the Nazi regime. Together with documentary filmmaker Schmiderer, Heller has condensed ten hours of material into a 90-minute film that renounces all form of stylistic embellishment and instead relies entirely on the compelling force of this woman and her stunning tale.
–Tuesday, August 9 at 7:15 and Monday, August 15 at 9:15.
JOE GIBBONS PROGRAM
ELEGY (1991, 11 minutes, video)
SABOTAGING SPRING (1991, 10 minutes, video)
BARBIE’S AUDITION (1995, 13 minutes, video)
FINAL EXIT (2001, 5 minutes, video)
CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIOPATH (2002, 37 minutes, video)
Joe Gibbons conveys his dry humor through obsessive monologues that scrape the bottom of a monomaniacal mind – spilling forth with fantasies of power, destruction, and death. In his tapes, the hand-held camera allows Gibbons’s alter-ego to surface as he gives vent to tyrannical rants that comically invert social values.
Total running time: ca. 80 minutes.
–Wednesday, August 10 at 7:00.
Saul Levine
DRIVEN (WITH JOE GIBBONS)
2003, 85 minutes, video.
“In his ongoing series DRIVEN…Levine rides in the front seat of an automobile while one of his friends talks about his or her life for 82 minutes (the maximum length of a single take using his digital camera). … By having his subjects drive him around the city at night, he disengages much of the self-consciousness inherent in the interview genre. … Levine’s low-key mode of inquiry and his genuine passion for listening have an infectious power. Sometimes his driver makes it easy for him: the filmmaker Joe Gibbons is an ironic raconteur who does not require Levine’s skillful intervention to fascinate us for almost an hour and a half at a stretch.” –P. Adams Sitney, ARTFORUM
–Wednesday, August 10 at 9:00.
Shirley Clarke
PORTRAIT OF JASON
1967, 105 minutes, 35mm. [Milestone Films will be re-releasing PORTRAIT OF JASON, along with other films by Shirley Clarke, in early 2012.]
“Clarke culled her PORTRAIT OF JASON from a grueling, 12-hour interview with her subject, Jason Holliday. A complicated examination of cinéma vérité conventions, the spectacle of the interviewed subject, and the seeming exoticism (for a mostly white, avant-garde audience) of a gay, African American performer and sometime hustler, the film is Holliday’s. His difficult performance of self against the filmmaker’s goading and unflinching gaze remains, in the end, his own.” –SFMOMA
“The most fascinating film I’ve ever seen.” –Ingmar Bergman
–Friday, August 12 at 7:00.
James Nares
NO JAPS AT MY FUNERAL
1980, 60 minutes, video.
“[A] deconstructive propaganda piece that demolishes the British version of events in Northern Ireland. It is an eloquent statement about brutality and victims, told mainly by Jackie, an IRA man whose personal account is intercut with images from British television. NO JAPS has the same formal properties as a typical TV documentary, but is aimed to show the bias of what is known on TV as ‘truth’.” –Gary Indiana, EAST VILLAGE EYE
&
Jacob Burckhardt
A GUIDED TOUR OF EDITH’S APARTMENT
2010, 47 minutes, video.
In his affecting new film, Burckhardt documents his mother, the artist Edith Schloss, as, one after the other, and in a non-stop torrent of commentary, she describes the many objects in her apartment, including her own paintings and assemblages. Thanks to her long and fascinating life, and her friendship with some of the 20th century’s most important artists, many of the pieces in her home are of great cultural interest. But more importantly, they all embody some sort of emotional or psychological significance for her, making Burckhardt’s deceptively straightforward, home-movie-like film something like his mother’s indirect autobiography, a portrait of a woman through her own work and the belongings she’s gathered over the decades.
–Saturday, August 13 at 8:30 and Monday, August 15 at 7:00.
Rainer Frimmel
NOTES FROM THE BASEMENT / AUFZEICHNUNGEN AUS DEM TIEFPARTERRE
1993-2000, 90 minutes, video. In German with English subtitles.
A radical look into the mind of the ‘man on the street’. Peter Haindl, a hospital orderly in Vienna, shot these home movies from 1993 to 1999. They were then given to Frimmel, who created this 90-minute compilation.
“While striking various poses around his apartment, Haindl addresses an imaginary public, his speeches ranging from defiant to contrite. … Commonplaces are qualified with contradictions and self-irony, and his tirades occasionally swerve in the direction of serious analysis.” –Dominik Kamalzadeh
–Wednesday, August 17 at 7:00. Also screening on Thursday, September 8 at 6:45 and Saturday, September 10 at 8:45, as part of the Rainer Frimmel & Tizza Covi retrospective.
