2009 Berkeley Video and Film Festival

The annual Berkeley Video and Film Festival returns this year with yet another eclectic program of independent cinema.

The 18th annual festival, put on by Berkeley's East Bay Media Center, starts at 7:30 p.m. Friday night at Landmark’s Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley and continues from noon to midnight Saturday with more than two dozen screenings.

Though this year’s program emphasizes documentaries, the festival features its usual eclectic blend of wide-ranging fare, from student films to experimental short subjects to feature-length films—all of them truly independent and all of them unlike anything showing at your local megaplex. More than a dozen of this year's entries come from local filmmakers, and the rest from across the country and around the world.

Below are are few highlights; the complete schedule can be found at www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org.

The Sunfisher

By Cecil Hirvi aka George Aguilar

George Aguilar continues his series of virtual films, unleashing his avatar alter ego Cecil Hirvi in Second Life for another installment of “Machinima Poetry.” This episode finds Hirvi finding himself as he gazes into the media mirror, watching old Hollywood footage of a young soldier’s uncertain return from the battlefield to the open fields of Wyoming.

15 minutes. Screens Friday at 8:10 p.m.

Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs On the Road

By Lars Movin and Steen M. Rasmussen

A documentary showing influential experimental artist and writer William Burroughs as few have seen him. Burroughs toured often in his final decades, reading from his work in theaters and clubs, bringing his unique diction and wily humor to bear on his wildly original prose. The prickly aloofness of his image is belied by his bashful charm as he meets and greets his fans, but when the lights dim and the microphone swings into place, the fierce, fiery satirist, sage and starry-eyed dreamer is unleashed, revealing a performer of great wit, drama and strength.

74 minutes. Screens Saturday at 8:10 p.m.

You Don't Know Jack: The Jack Soo Story

By Jeff Adachi

Jeff Adachi, director of the documentary The Slanted Screen, which examined the history of Asian-Americans in Hollywood, takes on the life story of singer and comedic actor Jack Soo. From his childhood in Oakland to his young adulthood in Japanese internment camps during World War II, and finally to his breakthrough roles in the play and film Flower Drum Song and television sitcoms "Valentine’s Day" and "Barney Miller," the erstwhile Goro Suzuki’s brave refusal to comply with America’s “oriental” stereotypes almost single-handedly broke the mold, recasting Asian Americans in a new light in our popular entertainment.

69 minutes. Screens Saturday at 1:15 p.m.

Oh My God! It's Harrod Blank!

By David Silberberg

Harrod Blank’s life is every bit as much a peripatetic work of art as the eccentric, eclectic art cars to which he has devoted his life. Silverberg’s film tracks the farm boy-turned-artist as he passes through UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley in his single-minded—some would say obsessive—pursuit of self-expression, enlisting a series of girlfriends as sidekicks on a rambling journey that is at times maddening but never less than fascinating and endearing.

75 minutes. Screens Saturday at 5:18 p.m.

Kaziah, the Goat Woman

By Amy Janes and Kathleen Dolan

Kaziah Hancock, armed with oils and brushes, celebrates the lives of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq by painting gift portraits for their families. On her remote ranch in Utah, she also raises goats. Born into a polygamist sect, she knows the meaning of freedom, as she’s had to fight for hers. Liberation and discovery of self is joyfully celebrated in her art and in this cinematic document.

25 minutes. Screens Saturday at 4:25 p.m.

Behind the Wheel

By Tao Ruspoli and LAFCO

Director Tao Ruspoli and his band of Los Angeles filmmaker cohorts outfitted an old school bus as a fully equipped portable production studio and set off across the United States in search of art and artists. The journey takes them across the country’s southern states in a quixotic examination of the intersection of the personal and the political.

84 minutes. Screens Saturday at 9:25 p.m.

Ciuada del Futuro

By Damian Carnero and Karin Losert

The critical history of a former socialist model town in the outskirts of Havana, told by the adult children of its first inhabitants.

20 minutes. Screens Saturday at 3:02 p.m.

Basketball Guru

By Doug Harris

An affectionate biography of the legendary basketball coach who started at the University of San Francisco and went on to coach for Cal and the U.S. Olympic team.

13 minutes. Screens Saturday at 2:25 p.m.

Wall Taps

By Carol Jacobsen

Carol Jacobsen’s short documentary roams the perimeter of a women’s prison in what amounts to a sustained traveling shot of fences, gates and barbed wire. Superimposed periodically are the faces of former inmates as they relate their experiences of fear, humiliation, degradation and shame while intermittent glimpses flicker by of life inside the prison gates.

10 minutes. Screens Saturday at 2:39 p.m.

Karma Calling

By Sarba Das

“A fable about hope and love for a family of Hindus from Hoboken,” as the narrator describes it, Sarba Das’s feature takes place at the intersection of two strands of western-influenced easterners. An Indian family living in New Jersey finds itself stretched thin under the cultural and financial strains of American life. Meanwhile, in India, a young man employed as a call-center info peddler for an American corporation also hears the call to go west in the form of an unexpected long-distance romance.

90 minutes. Screens Friday at 9:35 p.m.

Under My Garden (Sotto Il Mio Giardino)

By Andrea Lodovichetti

In Lodovichetti’s evocative and ominous short film, a boy’s interest in the behavior of ants, paired with the disappearance of a neighbor’s wife and his new affair with a young, nearly naked companion, leads the boy to suspect that a body is buried in the yard in a sort of miniature Rear Window told from a child’s perspective. The film won a Golden Globe, the Spike Lee Award and has been an official selection at more than 30 international film festivals.

19 minutes. Screens Friday at 9:15 p.m.

Curses and Sermons

By Nic Saunders

Nic Saunders’ short film is a mystic reimagining of a Michael McClure poem, “Rainbows Reflected on Sheer Black,” that is both expressionistic and eclectic, ranging from rugged Western to Technicolor dream/nightmare.

15 minutes. Screens Friday at 8:40 p.m.

Scissu

By Tom Bowilogua and Alex Beier

A bevy of buzzing lights, visceral electronic noise, pulsing heartbeats and a sort of breathy claustrophobia suffuse this unsettling film of sex, guns, violence and depravity. It is a story told in reverse, constantly stepping backward to fill in the gaps, gradually piecing together a plot consisting of desperate people resorting to desperate means in pursuit of cheap thrills, fleeting pleasures and sensual violence. In German with English subtitles.

27 minutes. Screens Saturday at 10:50 p.m.

Escape From Oakland

By Dan K. Harvest

Dan K Harvest’s guerilla-style music video follows a local rapper’s attempt to escape—by car, by bike, by any means necessary—his evil record company’s plan to cast him in a reality show. The clip takes us on a madcap journey through Berkeley and Oakland as the beleaguered hip-hopper tries to buck the corporate hacks and keep it real in the East Bay’s urban jungle. 7 minutes. Screens Saturday at 6:35 p.m.

Berkeley Video and Film Festival

Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26

Shattuck Cinemas

2230 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.

Festival passes cost just $13 ($10 for students and seniors).

Festival info: www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org or (510) 843-3699

East Bay Media Center

www.eastbaymediacenter.com

1939 Addison St., Berkeley

(510) 843-3699

maketv@aol.com

The Films of William Klein at Pacific Film Archive

American expatriate filmmaker William Klein’s work shows a wide and eclectic range. He started as a photographer before making his way into motion pictures, both fiction and nonfiction.

Pacific Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of his work, “Top Bill: The Films of William Klein,” starting Friday and running through Oct. 11.

Klein is perhaps best known in the mainstream film world for his documentary, Muhammad Ali, the Greatest (1974), which screens Friday night at 6:30 p.m., and for The Little Richard Story (1980), showing Sept. 24.

But most of Klein’s work has been in a more avant-garde vein. His first fiction film, Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), shows Saturday at 8:40 p.m. and follows the seemingly meteoric rise of a young Brooklyn-born model, an average freckle-faced girl who ascends to the top of the European fashion world. Klein had done time in that world as a fashion photographer, and here he turns his camera around to reveal a blistering portrait of a vacuous, image-obsessed culture. Polly is essentially what she has always been, a simple girl, youthful, callow and naive, but through the magic of makeup, wigs and a loving lens she is transformed into a goddess, an icon, a harbinger of a youth movement that she is only dimly aware of and that may not really exist anyway.

Klein captures the phenomenon from all angles, from the media-created cultural movement that Polly is said to represent, to the political ramifications of that cultural shift, and the simpler, more primal level of love and sex and fantasy, as Polly is essentially reduced to a static, seamless sex object, a blank slate of penetrating gazes, parted lips and kinky costumes upon which men can project their seediest desires.

Klein followed with more stinging satires, including Mr. Freedom (1969), showing Sept. 19, and The Model Couple (1977), screening Oct. 10.

The Cinematic Poetry of Hiroshi Shimizu

Japanese director Hiroshi Shimizu, nearly unknown in the West, was a friend and sometime collaborator of his better-known contemporary Yasujiro Ozu.

The two share many qualities. Though their techniques differed, their themes were similar, and both evinced an uncommon compassion and abiding empathy for their characters.

Criterion has released a box set of four Shimizu films, none of which have appeared on DVD in this country before and only one of which has ever had much exposure on American movie screens. “Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu,” part of Criterion’s Eclipse line of DVD releases, is aptly named; not only does it refer to the fact that the director shot these films largely on location in the mountains and seaside towns of Japan, but it also calls to mind his distinctive and eloquent use of the traveling shot.

Shimizu’s camerawork is not technically complex—it usually involves simple movements forward or backward or from side to side—but it is employed so artfully and with such grace that his moving camera speaks volumes about his narrative, his characters and his perspective.

Like Ozu, Shimizu uses simple and very direct techniques to convey so much more than script or image can suggest. His style is almost Hemingwayesque in that he imbues the most elementary building blocks of his artistic language to suggest a vast world of emotion, humanity and depth. He employs his camera the way a poet chooses just the right word, a simple word, and emphasizes it with a sharp, poignant delivery.

Shimizu’s work is deceptively slight; he strikes a delicate balance between pathos and lighthearted entertainment. His films are full of wit, intelligence and an overwhelming sense of compassion. He views his characters with patience and wholly without judgment, using landscape and setting—dappled light, swaying branches, timelessly pastoral meadows, bridges over gentle but relentless streams—to convey their dilemmas, perspectives and personalities.

Mr. Thank You (1936) may be the most accessible and pleasing of the set’s four films. It features an effective motif, first introduced as comedy but employed with greater poetry and depth as the story develops. A bus driver traverses the same landscape each day, transporting rural folks to the big city and back. As pedestrians and bicyclists step aside to let his bus pass along the narrow mountain roads, he tips his hat and cheerfully calls out “Thank you,” earning him his affectionate nickname. The film gradually becomes more thoughtful, and even, in small ways, political, as Shimizu moves us gently from a lighthearted travelogue to a sociological examination of Depression-era Japan.

Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933), the only silent film in the collection, is something of a melodrama, but again with a light touch, tracing a love triangle that contains disaster, tragedy, redemption and ambivalence.

In The Masseurs and a Woman (1938), the traveling shot is again deployed. The film opens with the camera retreating before two blind hikers, masseurs on their way to seasonal work at a mountain spa. The two converse like characters from a Beckett play, talking of nothing on the way to nowhere.

Gradually something of a plot unfolds, though it is a slight one. Characters, each with his or her own brand of loneliness, interact at the spa, seeking connections with one another, like ghosts grasping for something tangible to hold onto. It is a Winesburg, Ohio-like poem of emptiness, with people tentatively reaching out but pulling back for fear of...what? Rejection? Success? Disappointment? Vulnerability? The specifics of their lives are withheld; details about the woman at the center of the intrigue are only slowly revealed. Another traveling shot depicts her from the point of view of one of the blind masseurs: he senses her nearby as she passes him on the street, a ghostly, mysterious and tremendously sensual presence—a woman simultaneously earthy and real but slightly beyond reach, a romantic and erotic dream, a scent, a gentle breeze, a feeling that can’t quite be pinned down.

Ornamental Hairpin (1941) bears resemblance to Ozu’s film, especially his early work, in that it depicts multiple generations and stages of life in one dense milieu—from the boredom of children who have exhausted the pleasures of games, to love burgeoning among the young, to pragmatic middle age, to the wisdom and weariness of old age, as well as its poignant regression in the form of an old man who is as eager for a game of Go as the children are for any game at all. And the middle-aged bear the brunt of both, sandwiched between the demands of their children and parents.

The film also contains perhaps Shimizu’s most effective and devastating use of the traveling shot. You can see it coming in the final minutes as Shimizu beautifully establishes the themes of his closing sequence. A young woman retraces her steps through fields and streams and groves, the backdrops of a now-concluded romance. We have watched as she aided a young soldier in his recovery from an injury, helping him to take small steps one at a time until he could walk again without crutches. Her sentimental journey takes her across a narrow bridge across a stream, through a meadow and into a grove of trees, her face always obscured by a white parasol. Finally she comes to the foot of the stairwell that served as the final test of the soldier’s recuperation. The angle of the parasol changes and her face is revealed, looking up toward Shimizu’s camera as it patiently waits for her to begin her ascent. And when she does, Shimizu cuts to a view from the side, the camera tracking with her one step at a time as she begins the hard climb of her own recovery from wounds less visible but no less crippling.

The Rough-Hewn Art of John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes’ Shadows speeds and skips along like its jazz score, with the hip, street-savvy spirit of structured improvisation. Images and plot points are strung together like loose, individual notes that gradually cohere into rhythm and melody and refrain. 

Criterion has released restored prints of Shadows (1959) and Faces (1968) in stand-alone editions. The two films were previously available only as part of a larger box set of Cassavetes’ films. 

Shadows (1959), Cassavetes’ first film as a director, was an experimental, anti-Hollywood film. Shot on the cheap on Actors’ Studio sets and on location in the streets of New York, the film essentially launched the American independent film movement with its gritty, do-it-yourself aesthetic. 

With its low-budget production values—rough-hewn, high-contrast photography and an often out-of-sync soundtrack—the film was surely a challenge to the eyes and ears of the era’s moviegoers. And really, it still is.Shadows is unapologetically ragged, by both design and necessity, it’s homemade aesthetic lending it an aura of authenticity in comparison with the slick Hollywood entertainments in which Cassavetes the actor labored to finance the work of Cassavetes the director. 

Cassavetes was dissatisfied with his first completed version. It was too loose, too fractured, so he rewrote and re-shot portions of the film and followed with a second version that gave greater shape to the work. 

The story concerns the relationships and activities of a trio of African-American siblings, touching on many issues, from family to friendship to love to race. 

In a sense, the film represents a return to the earliest days of the motion picture, when filmmakers shot on location, under the open sun and on open terrain—a time when budgets were small and equipment more primitive. With Shadows, Cassavetes recaptured the spirit of adventure that suffuses the work of cinema’s pioneers. Thus, what is often cited as the birth of independent cinema is more akin to a rebirth—one of many that the art form has undergone and continues to undergo, as each generation manages to find its own way of stripping away the layers of artifice to delve deeper into the medium, to rediscover the simple, elemental power of what is still essentially the art of photographing the human face. 

Criterion. $29.95 each. www.criterion.com. 

The Past Comes Alive in Rossellini's History Films

When Roberto Rossellini set aside fictional narratives for educational films, he immersed himself in the world of history and knowledge. But his goal was not to teach in the pedantic sense. Rossellini wanted to give the viewer a more complete experience, to imbue his studies of historical figures with the essence of life in the times in which they lived.

Criterion has released three of the Italian director’s films—Cartesius, Blaise Pascal, and The Art of the Medici—as part of a boxed set, Rossellini’s History Films. It is the 14th volume in the company’s Eclipse series, spotlighting overlooked films in inexpensive, pared-down editions that feature restored prints and thoughtful essays, but no supplemental features.

Cartesius (1974) tracks the life and life’s work of Descartes in his relentless pursuit of reason and science over emotion, faith and perception. Descartes is always wandering, always leaving one place for another. He arrives in a town, takes in its culture, and soon tires of it, moving on to another place with different people, different customs, different perspectives. It seems that half the scenes begin with someone telling Descartes how glad they are to meet and talk with him, and asking how long he’ll stay. The answer is always some version of, “Not long, I’m afraid. Tomorrow I set out for....”

Rossellini depicts Descartes as driven yet somehow lifeless. He has little expression and little joy, and indeed little companionship to offer to others, beyond intellectual discussions of scientific theories. He rarely partakes of the life around him but instead spends much of his time retreating into solitude after repeatedly thrusting his head into the spotlight. His life is an endless quest for empirical evidence, and, though Rossellini finds much to admire in that, he highlights the toll it takes on Descartes, crippling the philospher-scientist with a lack of love and grace.

In the end, Descartes comes to a solemn conclusion: “Science has prevented me from living.”

Though Blaise Pascal (1972) was made before Cartesius, it serves as something of an antidote to the later film. Pascal, too, is in search of reason and logic, but he is also searching for something more, something higher than facts, something not so much to believe as to believe in. He feels his quest for the hard truth of science is empty without a faith to encompass it.

Rossellini even stages a (fictional) confrontation between the two men, where Pascal questions the older Descartes after a lecture. It is a study in contrasts, as the earnest Pascal embodies youth and grace and love as he challenges and rebuts the cold, stolid facts of the seemingly depleted older man.

Rossellini’s history films were made for television, not for the big-screen experience of the theater. And that fact, combined with their subject matter and an emphasis on education rather than entertainment, makes for films that are more expository than cinematic, consisting primarily of conversations and dialogue as opposed to action.

Blaise Pascal and Cartesius employ virtually the same score, an evocative if mysterious tolling of chimes that at times sounds like the ambient noise of church bells filling each scene. And, when each philospher-scientist begins one of his many monologues, a quiet, creeping, almost chilling minimalist theme sets in, as though to cue the viewer that a key intellectual argument is being made. You can almost see classrooms of students hurriedly taking out their notepads at Ros-sellini’s signal.

Criterion. $59.95. www.criterion.com.

Newspaper Noir: San Francisco's Noir City 7

The struggle of World War II and the triumph of its conclusion brought to the silver screen a vision of a nation bold and patriotic, wholesome and optimistic. From propaganda films to brassy celebratory musicals, Hollywood’s program of A-list releases rolled out a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked presentation of Norman Rockwell’s America.

But there was another side to the story.

Not everyone could forget the horrors of war, could ignore the blood and mud stains of battle, could wipe away the imagery of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Many found it impossible to simply lay down their weapons and retire to the suburbs; for them the terror of the war lingered, and in Hollywood that creeping malaise manifested itself in the form of an anxious, fearful and pessimistic cinema—the stuff of B movies.

More than a decade later the French would give a name to it: film noir. But in America, during the genre’s heyday of the 1940s and ’50s, it had no name. Crime dramas, they were simply called, but it went deeper than that. The urban angst that was allowed no expression in the can-do spirit of mainstream film gave rise to a genre that went beyond mere crime in the depiction of a pervasive moral corruption and a spiraling spiritual decay. Living in the shadow of the Holocaust and under the cloud of imminent nuclear annihilation, there were, as William Faulkner once said, no longer problems of the spirit but only the question: When will I be blown up?

Noir City, the San Francisco film festival that celebrates this era of cinematic darkness, perversity and mayhem, presents its annual 10-day orgy of angst beginning this Friday at the Castro Theater. The festival screens a double bill every day through Feb. 1.

The stark, gloomy, high-contrast imagery of noir came from overseas, carried across the Atlantic by filmmakers who left Germany just ahead of Hitler’s stormtroopers. The expressionism of 1920s and ’30s German cinema, replete with its shadows, darkness, and undercurrents of psychic decay, infiltrated the Hollywood studio system and merged with the American gangster genre of tough-talking wise guys inspired by the pulp fiction of the 1930s. This hybrid genre introduced a stock of dramatic characters: the dangerous and brooding urban gangster-villain; the tormented innocent caught up in nefarious circumstances beyond his control or comprehension; the icy, diabolical femme fatale; and an array of edgy protagonists ranging from the introspective, world-weary anti-hero—think Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep—to the twitchy, slippery, would-be hero, the third-rate, small-time hood looking to get ahead in a hostile world for which he is ill-equipped—think Richard Widmark in Night and the City.

Eventually the netherworld of noir infiltrated the A list, its blackness spreading like spilled ink on porous newsprint. Billy Wilder, one of the many European refugees who worked in the genre, perfected it with the star-studded Double Indemnity (1944), and the style became so prevalent and nearly respectable that only a few years later, in 1950, Wilder saw fit to take it down a peg, satirizing noir and Hollywood itself with impish glee in Sunset Boulevard.

Noir City impresario Eddie Muller has crafted another program of classics and rarities, cleverly centered for maximum publicity on a theme guaranteed to bring him plenty of ink: “Newspaper Noir.” For with newspapers themselves currently immersed in their own noirish melodrama—jobs on the line and the fate of the medium in doubt—what film critic could resist a chance to wallow in that uncertainty by delving into Muller’s festival of fear and loathing?

For beleaguered journalists, the pleasures are many, beginning with the temptation to indulge in the nostalgic fantasy of the old-school newspaperman, a gumshoe reporter gazing skeptically from beneath the brim of a jaunty fedora, coldly examining the facts through the drifting smoke of an angled cigarette. No white-collar J-school grad, he; his sleepless nights are spent roaming rain-soaked streets and decadent nightclubs, trash-strewn alleys and cut-rate motels—places where anything can happen, and often has, just before he arrives. But enough of romance; the flip side of this coin is a dose of hard-boiled reality served with a dash of existentialist nightmare, as the modern-day journalist is more akin to Widmark than Bogart—cowering, doomed and anxiety-ridden, forever on the run from controlling forces poised to dispense a fate worse than a pink slip.

The festival begins with the former. Deadline USA (1952) is a bold and elegiac story of old-school journalistic integrity. Editor Bogart battles the avarice and ignorance that leads two spoiled and spiteful heiresses to put his paper on the block, and worse still, to sell it to an unworthy, scandal-mongering competitor who doubtless intends to bolster his own tawdry tabloid by closing down the competition. It’s a familiar story here in the Bay Area as the MediaNews chain has gobbled up a string of once-proud papers, large and small, to encircle the metropolis with a newspaper empire that consolidates its profits in Denver by cutting local staff and starving its newspapers of news. As rumors circulate about an impending MediaNews takeover of the only remaining Bay Area prize, the ailing San Francisco Chronicle, and as publicly traded corporations continue to run the nation's smaller independents out of business, Deadline USA only gains in relevance.

The festival closes with a look at the underbelly of the news world with the classic Clifford Odets-penned Sweet Smell of Success (1957), in which Burt Lancaster, as gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, toys with Tony Curtis in a demonstration of the heady abuse of power acquired through the pen. And between there are several more classics—including The Killers (1946), another Lancaster vehicle—but many more rarities, most not available on DVD, including Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and While the City Sleeps (both 1956), two wrongly neglected noirs by another towering figure of German cinema, Fritz Lang, whose early work was instrumental in shaping the genre.

Occasionally the selections veer slightly from newspapers into other media. The Unsuspected (1947), for example, stars Claude Rains as a radio personality who manages to maintain his celebrity as those around him begin to mysteriously die off. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian director best known today for Casablanca (1942), and scored by German émigré Franz Waxman, the film is produced with a deft touch, including a lovely expressionist motif in which the killer’s reflection, upside down and ominous, always appears just as he commits his crime, drifting into focus in the glass top of a table or in the black wax of a record—a succinct visual cue that the world is out of kilter.

Desperate (1947), a quick and dirty thriller, features the always suave and menacing Raymond Burr tracking innocent Steve Brodie to exact revenge over the execution of Burr’s hoodlum brother. Director Anthony Mann sets the tone in the first few minutes with a classic mise en scene that shows a darkened gangster hideout illuminated only by a swinging lamp, set into motion by the flailing arms of man sent flying with a right hook from Burr’s ruthless gangster.

Noir City 7. Friday, Jan. 23, through Sunday, Feb. 1 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

The Continuing Adventures of Scott Walker

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man begins by building up the myth of Scott Walker, the narrator informing us of the elusiveness of the man, including the years of silence in which the singer rarely allowed himself to be photographed, at least not without customary sunglasses and visor pulled low. But if the opening of Stephen Kijak’s film seems a bit portentous, perhaps we can afford to be forgiving, as the music he documents has that same blend of grandiosity, mystery and sweeping melodrama. 

But once he is on screen, humble, shy and thoughtful at the age of 60, the myths not only disappear but seem downright silly. In his appearance and his politeness and his reticence, the still boyish-looking Walker bears resem-blance to Beck, an artist 30 years his junior whose elegiac, string-laden 2002 album Sea Change evoked the same gloomily atmospheric grandiosity that Walker pioneered. 

The film, opening Friday, Jan 23, at Shattuck Cinemas, provides an efficient if quick overview of Walker’s career: Noel Scott Engel, born in 1944, was just another pompadoured teenager in the age of rock and roll before joining a group called the Walker Brothers, a successful trio of heartthrobs that contained no brothers and no Walkers. Scott was not the band's lead singer at first, only taking the microphone for moody ballads to which his fluid baritone was better suited. But he soon become the band's frontman as their singles climbed the charts, their popularity in England putting them on a par with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Just a couple of years later, the band dissolved and Walker went solo with a string of Top Ten albums—Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3—that featured a mix of covers and original material. 

Scott 4 was his best yet, an album of all original material in which Walker fully met his potential, incorporating classical music, European literary influences, and a richer, more personal sense of melancholy. The songs were unique, even daring, and to this day Scott 4 is looked upon as perhaps his best work. But quite surprisingly, considering the great success of its predecessors, it failed to make a dent in the charts. 

The commercial failure of the album alarmed his record company, and perhaps Walker too, and for his next four albums, whether by choice or by force, he shelved his own songs in favor of covers. Walker now looks upon these as lost years and refuses to allow any of these records to be rereleased. 

Though the situation kept him on the margins of the music world, and though his resurgence was some years off, Walker's appeal still burned brightly among those in the know, and there were plenty to champion his work. Most notably, Julian Cope, an English musician who rose from the punk scene of the 1970s, set a new wave of Walker appreciation in motion by producing a compilation of Walker’s songs, replete with a blank cover, so as to introduce the music without preconception or prejudice to a new generation. (Director Stephen Kijak might have taken a cue from Cope with this approach to the music, as one of the annoyances of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man is the decision to illustrate Walker's songs with silly, screensaver-like graphics, all pulsating lines and floating electronic ephemera. A better approach would have to been to play the songs over a black background or perhaps a still photograph of Walker himself; music like this requires no help from Mac graphics software.) 

Walker reunited with his old band for a few albums in the late 1970s before resuming his solo work, but he has released only three albums since 1980. The documentary concludes with footage of Walker’s sessions for his most recent album, The Drift (2006), and these scenes both magnify and defuse the myth and mystery even further. Unusual methods and instruments—flower pots, lead pipes, garbage cans and butchered meats—are employed in sessions in which the ballcapped singer, far from the shady, elusive figure of legend, appears not only amiable, friendly and forthcoming, but even familiar. Though music of startling originality emanates from the man, he seems just like the boy next door. 

It may be painful for a shy, nervous man to open up his process for scrutiny; it may be deflating to see his shrouded reputation laid bare and made commonplace; and greater fame and mainstream attention may deprive his fans of a bit of the prized cult status which they’ve enjoyed for decades. But Scott Walker: 30 Century Man will hopefully bring wider appreciation to a unique musical talent who deserves a spot among the exceptional popular musicians of his time.