Chelsea on the Rocks: Cinema Village, Now Playing

A very pleasant surprise. Abel Ferrara's documentary on the Hotel Chelsea is an inside job, as the director is a former resident, and clearly upset with the hotel's slow transformation from an artists' asylum to a more conventional for-profit business. His interviewees, ranging from famous figures to bohemian characters, add up to a pleasing picture of a New York subculture that is thinned by time but still going about its business and hanging on to its 400 square feet. What's wonderful about the film is how unerring are Ferrara's instincts for how he should insert himself into this tapestry. No invisible interviewer, he irrupts into conversations from the other side of the camera with opinions and obscenities, probably much as he would under any circumstances. Eventually he shows up in the frame, playing a song in Dan's Guitars or delightedly showing a crew member the secret passageway from El Quijote to the Chelsea lobby. Yet there is no sense of Ferrara stealing the show: he is more than generous to the parade of aging hipsters on display, and has a witty way of balancing his sense of showmanship with his pleasure in revealing the filmmaking mechanism. Though former Chelsea proprietor Stanley Bard is the hero of the film, Ferrara does not cut away from the residents' occasional negative reminiscences of him; nor does he excise his own weird outburst at one point. Beneath Ferrara's persona of filmmaker-as-curmudgeon is a powerful and by no means simplistic attitude toward how to be a filter and how to be a mirror. Chelsea on the Rocks is currently at the Cinema Village, with shows daily at 5:20 pm and 9:55 pm.

Al Momia (The Night of Counting the Years): Walter Reade, Friday, October 9, 2009

A fixture on lists of the greatest Arabic films, rarely screened in the US, Al Momia (1969; released here in 1975 with the lovely title The Night of Counting the Years) is the only completed feature film by one Shadi Abdel Salam, who had previously served as an art director and costume designer in the Egyptian film industry. Set in the 1880s, the film is based on the real-life story of a Egyptian rural community who survive by raiding ancient tombs and selling the antiquities to foreign black-marketeers. Roberto Rossellini, who employed Abdel Salam as set designer for his Mankind's Fight for Survival TV series, is said to have helped the director find backing for the film; but its contained compositions, striking use of shadow and light, and stylized performance style (the actors are obliged to use classical Arabic) place Abdel Salam more in the tradition of Murnau. If you can't make it out to the Walter Reade for Al Momia's screening this Friday, October 9 at 6:15 pm, you can find English-subtitled versions of the film on Google Video (parts one and two) and at the Internet Archive.

Life During Wartime: New York Film Festival, October 10 and 11, 2009

I'll be writing about a number of Fall 2009 films in my Toronto wrap-up for Senses of Cinema, so I don't want to scoop myself. But, if you've ever liked Todd Solondz (that should weed a few of you out), catch his new film Life During Wartime (a sequel to Solondz's 1998 Happiness) at Alice Tully Hall on Saturday, October 10 at 9 pm or Sunday, October 11 at 11 am. It's my favorite among the New York Film Festival slate so far.

Land and Sons: Scandinavia House, October 1 and 3, 2009 (screenings cancelled)

Scandinavia House, whose fine weekly screenings are one of the better kept secrets of the NYC film scene, is showing Ágúst Guðmundsson's 1980 Land og synir (Land and Sons) as part of its current Icelandic film series. I saw the film at Filmex 81, and wrote about it in the L.A. Reader at the time: "An intelligent, quietly graceful debut by director-screenwriter Ágúst Guðmundsson, which deserves better than to be known as the most successful Icelandic film. The story deals with a subject also treated in Bergman's Faro Document 1979: the younger generation's unwillingness to continue working the often-unprofitable farms that were a way of life to the parents. A restless son (Sigurður Sigurjónsson), prepared to leave Iceland for the Danish mainland, is given pause by his awareness of tradition and his awakening love for his neighbor's daughter (Guðný Ragnarsdóttir). The film's great virtue is the calm and gravity with which it treats this dilemma: Guðmundsson's thoughtful, literate script provides each of the characters with his or her own respectable justifications, and the awesome Icelandic landscape and the parable-like narrative unobtrusively create a mood of universality. Land and Sons is not the type of film to create a stir at a film festival, but it manages to be effectively entertaining as it slowly unfolds its understated despair." It screens on Thursday, October 1 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, October 3 at 3 pm.

Later that same day: thanks to Kevin Helfenbein for pointing out to me that Scandinavia House has cancelled its screenings of Land og synir, and has substituted Guðmundsson's 2001 Mávahlátur (The Seagull's Laughter), which had a brief theatrical run in NYC in early 2004. Mávahlátur isn't a bad film at all, actually: the story, about a small Icelandic town adjusting to a now-glamorous native daughter returned from the US, could have easily skewed noncomformist/middlebrow, but Guðmundsson fills it with nice behavioral touches. Still, I'm sorry not to get another look at Land og synir.

La vie de famille: BAM, September 22, 2009

Those of you who missed the amazing Jacques Doillon retrospective at FIAF this spring should make an effort to get to BAM on Tuesday for Doillon's 1985 stunner La vie de famille, screening in BAM's Juliette Binoche tribute and by no means guaranteed to make future NYC appearances. (The screening was originally scheduled for Wednesday, September 23, but moved to the 22nd.) A sunlit road movie that transposes the last-romantic-couple formula to accommodate a father (Sami Frey) and his precocious young daughter (Mara Goyet), La vie de famille is a fantasy of cross-generation communion that stylizes its characters' verbal fluency in order to peer more deeply into the painful tangle of familial emotion. Among the film's many virtues is an evolving use of video diary to push intimacy to the point of fulfillment/exhaustion/sorrow. Showtimes are 4:30 pm, 6:50 pm, and 9:15 pm.

Only Angels Have Wings

Only Angels Have Wings is an annunciation: already a major director, Howard Hawks here becomes a definition of cinema. And yet Angels is not radically different from previous Hawks films, nor a model of seamless perfection.

One's first thought might be that Hawks benefitted from an evocative visual plan, courtesy of Lionel Banks' art design and Joseph Walker's dazzling, Oscar-nominated cinematography. But Hawks exploits that plan with a directorial freedom greater than he had previously permitted himself. More than ever before in his work, we experience the set as an actors' hangout, a place to linger over drinks, to come together in musical interludes, to catnap while waiting for the mail plane to return.

Hawks always liked to send strong genre signals, in order to increase the frisson when acting and action play out quicker, quieter, more informally than the genre backdrop leads us to expect. And the beginning of Angels is a genre pileup of major proportions. The traffic and bric-a-brac of the port of Barranca are swirled together with lively non-stop south-of-the-border music, and main characters are introduced gradually as the party travels from the streets into the Dutchman's lively restaurant/hotel/airport. Hawks and his screenwriters (Jules Furthman gets the credit, but a host of others participated, including Anne Wigton, who seems to have devised the basic story concept) introduce the love story and the comic relief early, but instinctively hold off on the film's really distinctive elements until its first set piece, the tense team effort to guide Joe Souther's plane home. The extraordinary impact of this scene depends upon Hawks discarding genre trappings a bit at a time, stripping the set and the performances of adornments, leaving us exposed to darkness and fog. The peak moment is when airline boss Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) impatiently orders that the musicians in the café stop playing: the order is passed along in the background, and after a few seconds the movie's chief genre signifier drops off the sound track, leaving ominous silence.

Only Angels Have Wings has an unusual structure that bodes well for Hawks' future career. The film's first and last thirds are devoted to lengthy, well-orchestrated dramatic interludes, centered on action and suspense while weaving in other story threads. No doubt Hawks' most dazzling coup is the Joe Souther interlude, with its surprising and understated expansion of the character of Kid (Thomas Mitchell), Geoff's second-in-command, who reveals both an unusual skill at tracking Joe's plane and an uncanny symbiosis with Geoff. If the biplane flight at the climax is inevitably less evocative and suspenseful, it takes us closer to the film's emotional center, with wild-eyed Thomas Mitchell and pulled-in Richard Barthelmess shoved together in a tiny cockpit, neither one revealing all his mystery, different acting styles checking each other out, competing archetypes of Hawksian existentialism.

Between these two integrated dramatic interludes, the film's middle third, alternating between chit-chat at the Dutchman's and adventures in the flying trade, is more meandering and lighter on plot than any previous Hawks passage. Yet this looser middle section points the way into Hawks' future: it contains the highest concentration of uninhibited behavioral play, the reflexive fun-on-a-movie-set that Hawks would hang onto after he had stripped away every other component of his style. Geoff and Kid wrestling for possession of Kid's double-headed coin, or Geoff patting the Dutchman's head while talking baby talk to him, belongs to a non-narrative, almost Warhol-like layer of the Hawks universe that can be regarded as either foreground or background, depending on where we focus our eyes.

As Hawks' directorial personality flowers in Angels, so do his idiosyncrasies. Love interest Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur) perhaps suffers from the competing subplots that flourish in this relaxed environment, to the point where she has to draw a gun on Geoff at the climax to regain lost dramatic stature. The odd character dynamic between Geoff and the disgraced Kilgallen (Barthelmess) - Geoff has great empathy for Kilgallen's plight, yet treats him with contempt to his face - will surface again in later Hawks films, where it will sometimes be mysteriously labeled as a form of therapy. Angels also sees Hawks beginning to convert his world view into an ethos, with both Bonnie and Kilgallen's wife Judy (Rita Hayworth) forced to capitulate to Geoff's ideas of right and wrong. Some viewers may be fazed by the full revelation of Hawks' personality - and yet this is what we have to deal with when an artist becomes so confident and so comprehensive that the cinema becomes subordinate to him instead of the other way around.

Ramrod and Pitfall: Anthology Film Archives, August 18, 2009

A piece I wrote on André de Toth's Ramrod (1947) and Pitfall (1948) is up at the Auteurs' Notebook. The films play once more in Anthology Film Archives' One-Eyed Auteurs series, on Tuesday, August 18: Pitfall at 7 pm, Ramrod at 9 pm.