Berkeley Video and Film Festival 2006

The Berkeley Video and Film Festival makes its annual appearance this weekend, starting today (Friday) and running through Sunday evening at the Oaks Theater on Solano Avenue in Berkeley. This year’s program features more than 50 works, from brief clips by budding filmmakers, running just a few minutes in length, to full-length features by established directors. 

Festival Director Mel Vapour says this is their best and biggest yet. The festival has expanded over the years to include films from beyond the East Bay, and perhaps the most notable national product in this year’s program is The Big Buy, directed by Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck and produced by Robert Greenwald, who also produced last year’s Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Cost. The Big Buy tracks the spectacular rise and fall of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, from his early days as an apparent no-count in the Texas legislature to his ascent to national power as Newt Gingrich’s right-hand man, to his successful—and illegal—battle to gerrymander the Texas redistricting process, a move which helped send George W. Bush to the White House. 

If you’ve been following the news, you know the rest of the story. But what The Big Buy adds to the tale is the behind-the-scenes machinations of the investigation into DeLay’s organization. Along the way, we hear from the usual suspects when it comes to commentary on all things Texas: Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, etc., names sure to find a welcoming audience in Berkeley. The Saturday evening screening will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Birnbaum. 

Other films in the festival have roots a little closer to home. Festival Director Vapour has watched director Hoku Uchiyama grow up, from a young, talented kid who took part in youth programs at Vapour’s East Bay Media Center to a film school graduate and accomplished filmmaker. Uchiyama’s 34-minute film Rose is an engaging short subject with a compelling story and evocative photography. In the film’s first few minutes, Uchiyama clearly and effectively delineates his characters with a series of shots of the young protagonist and just a few lines of dialogue, drawing the viewer immediately into young Travis’ world and setting the stage for a tale that seamlessly blends the mystic with the mundane. The compositions, camera movements and polished style demonstrate the young director’s confidence and control over his craft. 

Two other films concern Berkeley itself. Double-Spaced: A Berkeley Comedy has that “Hey everybody, let’s make a movie!” feel to it. The movie is about students and feels like it was made by students as well, almost as a lark. It features plenty of shots of the city, from downtown to Telegraph Avenue, and of course plenty of shots of the UC campus. It even contains a brief shot of the student protagonist reading this very newspaper, but before you have a second to ponder this stark breach of realism, a close-up reveals that he is fact reading the comics page. 

It’s an amateurish film that wears on its sleeve its aspirations toward Wes Anderson-style preciousness, with a wayward protagonist caught up in a loony bit of intrigue, a soundtrack consisting of light, catchy pop songs, and an optimistic ending meant to reinforce the humanity of all involved. It has an awkward feel to it, and most of its punchlines are oversold. But then there’s Meghan Kane, an actress who, in just two scenes totaling probably just 60 seconds of screen time, steals the show with a hilarious and uncanny depiction of a student many will recognize: the glib, patronizing, utterly self-satisfied graduate student, so taken with her own fabulousness that she must focus her every word and gesture on the never-ending effort to make all around her aware of their comparative lack of fabulousness. It’s just a few seconds, but it’s worth the price of admission. 

Another film takes on the Berkeley theme as well, this one with slightly higher aspirations and budget. Berkeley concerns a young man who comes to town as a freshman in the late ’60s and has his life transformed by what he finds. The film stars Nick Roth as the student and Henry Winkler as his father. The film attempts to capture the experience of Berkeley during the Vietnam War era, but doesn’t quite pull it off. For many viewers the film will probably be a moving evocation of the experience; for others, it may seem to merely trivialize it. The Saturday night screening will be followed by a question-and-answer session with director Bobby Roth. 

These examples only hint at the breadth of the festival’s offerings. For a complete schedule see www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org. Day passes for the festival are just $12. 

Berkeley Video and Film Festival. Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Oaks Theater, 1875 Solano Ave., Berkeley. www.berkeleyvideofilmfest.org. 

The Up Series: True Human Drama

Often the most compelling dramas are not found in novels or Hollywood movies, but in everyday life. This is the charm and allure of The Up Series, an extraordinary documentary film project now in its fifth decade. 

Begun in 1964 as a program for England’s Granada Television, the first film in the series, 7 Up, featured interviews with a group of 7-year-old children in an effort to catch “a glimpse of England in the year 2000.” 

Michael Apted worked as a researcher on the first program and, with the second program, 7 Plus 7, broadcast in 1971, he took over the project, directing another film every seven years to follow up on the lives of the original 14 participants. The latest film in the series, 49 Up, opens today (Friday) at Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley. 

The project was begun all those years ago with very definite ideas in mind. The children were selected from various strata of English society with the intent of showing how one’s background may determine one’s future. “Give me the child until he is 7 and I will give you the man,” the narrator intones, and far more often than necessary. 

The premise may have been a bit contrived—even the 14-year-olds ridicule it for its simplistic approach in 7 Plus 7—and often it seems that Apted is far too determined to make the subsequent films conform to the expectations of the first. It might have helped to have had a sociologist involved with the formulation of the questions in order to give them a little more weight and validity; and perhaps someone with a background in therapy or counseling could have posed the questions in place of the director, someone with a better sense of how to communicate with people, to demonstrate the necessary curiosity and compassion. For Apted is often incapable of keeping the questions neutral or of phrasing his queries in such a way as to invite discussion. There are moments where his clumsy comments reveal as much about his own perceptions as those of the participants. In 7 Plus 7 he asks a trio of 14-year-old girls if they worry about the “danger” of finding themselves married and homebound with children when they’re in their early 20s. In 28 Up he asks a man if he’s worried about his sanity, and seven years later, when the man is 35 and still struggling to find his way in life, Apted asks if he has given up, to which the man snaps back “My life’s not over yet!” 

Perhaps this is a deliberate technique on Apted’s part, but if so it sometimes comes across as insensitive and rude, even if it now and then produces a valuable insight. At other times Apted seems too intent on validating the project’s original premises, attempting to draw definitive cause-and-effect links between the circumstances of childhood and adulthood. In effect, Apted, though he keeps himself off-camera, becomes a character in the drama, his leading questions often belying his own prejudices and preconceived notions. 

But these are minor flaws. Taken as a whole, the series is probably among the greatest documentaries ever made. And yes, there is much truth and value to the film’s premises, and to its aspirations toward sociological significance, and often its hypotheses are validated as children who seemed destined for a particular line of work or station in life indeed end up fulfilling those expectations. But the series is full of surprises, and overall it works best as simple human drama: Shamelessly cute 7-year-olds grow into awkward, gangly 14-year olds; budding, passionate adults of 21 become 28-year-olds settling into careers and families. The participants are honest, intelligent and interesting and their stories invite compassion; we take pleasure in their triumphs, we shed tears for their tragedies. We see them face rejection, take on new jobs and careers, search for love and companionship; we see them start families, raise children, and deal with the deaths of their own parents; we see them struggle to maintain marriages and face the setbacks of divorce; we see plans laid and hopes dashed, and then we see them rise again to rebuild their lives. 

The project itself has been something of a mixed blessing for its participants. One man even describes it as a bit of poison he is forced to swallow every seven years. Some opt out of later films, sometimes to return later, sometimes not. We don’t get the impression that any of them are participating in the project for the pleasure of being on television or on the big screen; they seem to participate out of a sense of duty, and not to the filmmakers, but rather to their fellow Englishmen. For even when they question the value of the project, they seem to evince a knowledge that their stories may in some way shed light for others on worthwhile issues. 

All the films leading up to 49 Up (2006) are available on DVD from First Run Features. But you don’t necessarily need to have seen every film to appreciate the drama of the later productions. Each film features plenty of footage from the previous films to at least present the arc of each life. 

It must have been a wonderful experience for the original audiences to see this series begin and watch as these lives unfurled over the decades, to have grown up with these men and women and checked in with them every seven years. Undoubtedly many have found kinship with these 14 people as they have made their way through life. But to see the entire series, in sequence and all at once, is a revelation; full and rich human lives unfold in one film after another, the participants aging 40 years in just a few days’ time. The haughty are humbled, the meek gain confidence, the lost become found, the pampered lose everything. These are true human dramas, moving and fascinating, and unfolding in real time. 

Spirit of the Beehive: Tracing Childhood's Alternate Realities

Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) is one of the most influential and iconic of Spanish films. Set “somewhere on the Castillian plain” in 1940, just after the Spanish Civil War, Erice’s film conjures a remote village where the echoes of war and repression resound in the lives of an increasingly fragmented family. 

Criterion has just released the film on DVD in an excellent edition which faithfully renders the film’s honey-colored lighting and evocative score. The two-disc set also includes informative extra features, including an interview with Erice and a documentary about the film in which Ana Torrent, the child actress, returns to the village as an adult. 

Torrent plays a young girl, also named Ana, just 6 or 7 years old, who becomes mesmerized when she and her older sister attend a screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein, an experience that inspires a series of thoughts, emotions and free associations which haunt her and dramatically transform her interpretation of the world in which she lives. 

The two girls live with their parents in a shell of house, a hollowed-out Faulknerian manor that stands like a decaying relic of a long-lost past. And contained within that house are likewise faded, hollowed-out people, seemingly damaged by years of conflict, both personal and political. I say seemingly because Erice never spells anything out with any degree of certainty; he merely suggests, presenting his characters as they exist in the present, their withdrawn behavior providing the only intimation of what happened in the past. 

Distance and space are major themes. The horizon of the plain is high and far, with fields stretching for miles in all directions. And the distances between people seem greater still. The parents, for instance, are rarely shown in the same shot, and each frequently seems to have no idea where the other has gone. The wife bicycles off to the train station to deliver a letter, and we get the feeling she has done it surreptitiously. She stands for a moment on the platform, watching with detachment as soldiers on the train gaze at her through the windows as they briefly pass in and out of her world. Meanwhile the father returns home from his beekeeping tasks and settles himself in a chair in his study, facing away from the door and toward a window as he puts on headphones to listen to a short-wave radio. Their connections with each other and with the outside world are tenuous; the world, for whatever private reasons, is held at arm’s length. 

In one extraordinary shot, Erice keeps the camera trained on the wife’s face as she feigns sleep when her husband enters the room and fumbles his way into bed. He never enters the frame; he is but a vague, shapeless shadow on the wall behind her. And when he finally settles in, she opens her eyes again and simply stares straight ahead until the fadeout. Her husband is no longer a partner and companion, but merely something she lives with, a regularly occurring event she has ceased to even acknowledge. 

The film is based primarily on the childhood memories of Erice and his co-screenwriter Ángel Fernández Santos. It began, Erice says, with the image of the Frankenstein monster and the little girl together at the water’s edge in the 1931 movie. That image, he said, conveyed to him all one could ever wish to express in an image. But the cinematic influences on Spirit of the Beehive go further than Frankenstein. In fact, the film is full of subtle references to other films, for its premise is based on the dreamlike qualities of the cinematic experience. The scene at the train station is staged to resemble one of the Lumiere brothers’ earliest films; many of the wide shots of the plain suggest the panoramic drama of American westerns; and the scene in the cinema, with the faces of enthralled children gazing in rapt attention, is reminiscent of the scene in Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows when the young protagonist skips school and takes in a Punch ‘n’ Judy show at the local amusement park. 

There is a crucial moment in the cinema scene that sets the stage for the rest of the film. The children, including Ana, were in fact watching Frankenstein while Erice and his cameraman staked out a spot off to the side and filmed them with a hand-held camera, capturing the reactions on their faces. It was a gamble and it paid off, for Erice got exactly what he was looking for: At the moment when the monster kills the little girl, Ana’s face changes; her eyes widen as she leans forward and appears to catch her breath. She has clearly identified with the characters on the screen and is seeking to understand the monster, his lumbering, primitive form something of a reflection of the walking dead around her. It is the magic of cinema, just as Erice remembered it from his own childhood. 

Thus begins a subtle and complex inner drama as Ana, too young to distinguish between fantasy and reality, internalizes the story, becoming deeply concerned for the ostracized monster. Her older sister tells her that the monster is not really dead, that he lives nearby in an abandoned well. Eventually Ana makes the trip out to the well alone, and finds in the adjoining farmhouse an escaped freedom fighter. And when the fighter is later discovered and executed, screen fantasy and daily life become inextricably linked in her mind; she confuses the freedom fighter with the monster, his death with the monster’s death, the film’s vengeful townfolk her own townfolk. 

And here again we see the brilliance of Erice’s use of long takes. Previously they had been used to emphasize the spaces between people and the slow passage of time. But with Ana they express much more, dramatizing that stretch of time between a child’s absorption of events and her final synthesis and interpretation of those events, the melding of disparate experiences into a new and private reality. 

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). $39.99. 99 minutes. Criterion. www.criterion.com.

Winsor McCay and the Birth of Animation

Despite his claims to the contrary, Winsor McCay did not invent the animated cartoon. But the legendary cartoonist did play a pioneering role, helping to advance, shape and define the nascent art form.

This Saturday Pacific Film Archive will present several films by McCay as part of a presentation by another accomplished cartoonist, John Canemaker.

Canemaker has many achievements to his credit, the latest among them being the Academy Award he won last year for his short film The Moon and the Son. The film depicted an imaginary conversation between Canemaker and his deceased father and featured the voices of John Turturro and Eli Wallach.

Canemaker will be present for a screening of his own films as part of a program entitled “John Canemaker: Marching to a Different Toon” at 5 p.m. Saturday and will follow at 7:30 p.m. with a presentation and discussion of the McCay films.

The presentation on McCay is based on Canemaker’s own biography of the great cartoonist, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. The book was first published in 1987 but has been newly revised and expanded in a beautiful new edition that presents excellent reproductions of McCay’s artwork along with insightful and scholarly analysis. It is the only comprehensive biography of McCay and will surely play a crucial role in helping to better establish his legacy in print and animated cartooning.

McCay’s range and talent is difficult to comprehend today. He was an extremely prolific artist, creating a number of popular comic strips as well as illustrations, editorial cartoons and animated cartoons, working on many of them simultaneously. The work for which he is most renowned focused on dreams and fantasy and included his most famous and beloved creation, Little Nemo in Slumberland, widely considered one of the greatest comic strips of all time.

Another of his unique, though lesser known, strips is Dream of the Rarebit Fiend. Like Nemo, it relies on a predictable pattern in the creation of a most unpredictable strip. Each week the strip depicted a harrowing nightmare consisting of often surreal and hallucinatory imagery, and each week the strip concluded in precisely the same way: The protagonist would wake up in bed, realize it was just a dream, and exclaim that never again would he eat so much rarebit for dinner.

McCay used the same basic structure for Little Nemo, with the young boy always waking up or falling out of bed in the strip’s final panel, a device later used to great effect by another comic strip artist, Bill Watterson, whose Calvin and Hobbes often featured the wild adventures that take place inside the mind of a highly imaginative 6-year-old boy.

Little Nemo in Slumberland ran as a full page every Sunday at a time when a newspaper page was nearly twice the size of today’s broadsheet pages. The comic strip was a relatively new medium when Nemo debuted in 1905, just 10 years old and still struggling to find its niche. McCay’s superior draftsmanship, wide-ranging imagination and bold use of color took the form to new heights.

Brilliant as his imagination and artwork were, McCay was not without his shortcomings. He never seemed to master dialogue or narrative thrust. His dialogue is trite and redundant, and often crammed into awkward and at times barely legible word balloons. Of course, the word balloon itself was a recent invention, and it took time for artists to learn to incorporate them gracefully into their compositions. But McCay never seemed to fully grasp the concept; in fact, Nemo, even in its second incarnation in the 1920s, still evinced this anomalous flaw.

McCay later turned his attention to animation, and once again, he played a major role in the development of a new art form, using his bold imagination, unparalleled drawing skills and showman’s flair in advancing the new medium. McCay employed wonderfully sophisticated effects and charming characters in his animated work, even taking his films on the road in vaudeville.

“Where McCay differed from his predecessors,” Canemaker writes, “was in his ability to animate his drawings with no sacrifice of linear detail; the fluid motion, naturalistic timing, feeling of weight, and, eventually, the attempts to inject individualistic personality traits into his characters were new qualities that McCay first brought to the animated film medium.”

McCay developed techniques that would later become commonplace and, in stark contrast to other, more secretive artists of the day, refused to patent those techniques, believing that the art form stood a better chance of progressing if artists shared their knowledge.

Saturday’s screening will include four of McCay’s 10 animated films. His first film was Little Nemo, in which Nemo, Flip and the Imp go through a series of fun-house mirror style transformations. At the time, audiences were skeptical and often didn’t believe that the film was hand-drawn.

“It was pronounced very lifelike,” McCay wrote in a 1927 essay, “but my audience declared that it was not a drawing, but that the pictures were photographs of real children.”

So, in his next film, McCay drew something a little more difficult. How a Mosquito Operates, a somewhat twisted presentation that would fit right in today in Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation Festival, features a disturbingly oversized mosquito plunging his proboscis again and again into the face of a sleeping man, eventually becoming so bloated with blood that he explodes. Again, the cartoonist encountered skepticism.

“My audiences were pleased,” McCay wrote, “but declared the mosquito was operated by wires to get the effect before the camera.”

So McCay decided to create a character that could not be photographed: Gertie the Dinosaur. Gertie was a popular creation and McCay proceeded to take her on the road in vaudeville with a clever act that consisted of McCay standing beside the screen and commanding Gertie as though she were a trained elephant. He would toss her a pumpkin, crack a trainer’s whip, and even step into the frame himself, disappearing behind the screen and reappearing onscreen as an animated figure riding on the dinosaur’s back, a moment later satirized by Buster Keaton in his first feature film, The Three Ages.

McCay’s next project was his most ambitious. The Sinking of the Lusitania took two years to produce and consisted of nearly 25,000 drawings. It marked the first time McCay used the technique of drawing on transparent cels on separate backgrounds, a technique that not only saved time and work, but also contributed greatly to the film’s dynamics. For the first time, McCay’s animated work took on a more cinematic quality, using dramatic angles to further enhance the action.

Great as his films are and important as his contribution may be, McCay’s defects again hindered his progress. Animated cartoons would soon develop plot and narrative, and, eventually, sound, but without McCay’s help. He played a significant role in nurturing animated film into its adolescence, but it would take other talents to bring it to maturity.

Mr. Arkadin: Orson Welles' Unfinished Puzzle

Criterion's three-disc set of Orson Welles’ long-neglected 1955 film Mr. Arkadin contains a wealth of material documenting the film’s murky history. Just as Criterion gave the deluxe treatment last year to Welles’ 1972 F For Fake, so this year the company has produced a respectful and informative package for Arkadin that does well to salvage the mystery and reputation of this confounding movie. 

The line on Mr. Arkadin is that it is essentially a surrealist version of Citizen Kane, taking the earlier film’s plot and form and elevating every aspect to absurdist heights. Arkadin follows the pattern of Kane by sending a young man off in search of the mysteries of an older man’s life. However, in the case of Mr. Arkadin, the older man is still alive, has in fact commissioned the search, and kills off each witness the younger man uncovers in an attempt to erase his unsavory past, with the goal of protecting his daughter from the disturbing truth behind the family’s wealth. It’s a good enough plot for a pulp movie, but Welles tried to elevate it to something more meaningful and significant, as well as baroque, and that didn’t sit too well with the film’s producer, or its distributors. Eventually, as with so many other Welles projects, the film was taken out of his hands before he could finish it. The result is a film often regarded as his poorest effort. 

Mr. Arkadin has its roots in a weekly English radio show Welles starred in called The Lives of Harry Lime, a series exploiting the character he made famous in the 1949 Carol Reed film The Third Man. In the early 1950s, Welles was working on his screen version of Othello, traipsing all over Europe on a dwindling budget, desperately trying to raise cash to finance the film. An English producer proposed the radio series and Welles seized the opportunity to make some easy money, cranking out these slight entertainments for a year while he continued to make Othello. 

The script for Mr. Arkadin grew from three of these radio shows, and the Criterion DVD includes all of them, providing a fascinating glimpse into the genesis of the film. 

There are any number of published critiques comparing Kane and Arkadin, some merely tracking the similarities between the two, others taking a psychoanalytical approach, positing that Welles himself was burdened by his earlier greatness and was seeking to somehow negate it through the latter film’s perverse fantasy. However, an often overlooked aspect of Arkadin is that it provides something of a blueprint for Welles’ later works, as many of its scenes, and even individual shots prefigure those of Touch of Evil (1958), the would-be B movie that Welles transformed into a noir masterpiece, and The Trial (1962), Welles’ feverish adaptation of Franz Kafka’s nightmarish novel. 

All of these films reflect Welles’ favored themes: power, regret, betrayal among men, and a strong hint of nostalgia. But what’s interesting about Arkadin is that it uses devices and shots that are replicated almost exactly in Welles’ later films. It’s as if he was so disappointed in the failure of Arkadin that he couldn’t bear to abandon some of its finer moments. 

All three films feature Akim Tamiroff in key roles, usually as a sort of clownish character to be abused by Welles’ tyrants. Toward the end of Arkadin, there is a scene in which Welles looms over Tamiroff as Tamiroff lies on a bed, the wrought-iron bedframe decorating the edge of the image. A few years later, Welles, backed this time with Hollywood money, would stage a similar scene much more elaborately in Touch of Evil, with gaudy flashing neon lights illuminating Welles’ Hank Quinlan as he stalks Tamiroff’s Uncle Joe Grande around a hotel room, strangling him and leaving him to wilt over a similarly ornate bedframe. 

Also in Arkadin, Tamiroff, in another hotel room, at one point moves toward a high window, stepping on a chair as though he is about to escape. Again, in Touch of Evil, Tamiroff, in an effort to escape the murderous Quinlan, climbs toward a high window and shatters it in an escape attempt before Welles pulls him back down. 

One more parallel is in each film’s closing scenes. In Mr. Arkadin, Paola Mori, Arkadin’s daughter, offers a stoic and ambiguous epitaph for her deceased father: “He was capable of anything.” The line is uttered almost without inflection—a frequent problem with Mori’s acting, but in this case the tone is intentional. Likewise, Touch of Evil closes with another exotic beauty—this time Marlene Dietrich—eulogizing the fallen Captain Hank Quinlan with another terse remark: “He was some kind of man.” These closing lines are almost Hemingwayesque in their simplicity, providing stark, dry conclusions to otherwise elaborate melodramas. 

Other aspects of Arkadin show up in The Trial, another of Welles’ independent European productions. The film again features Tamiroff in a key role and is edited to resemble a nightmare, with canted camera angles and disorienting cuts from one off-kilter shot to another. Welles had been something of a pioneer in independent filmmaking, demonstrating with his Macbeth that film could be a living, breathing organism, that it didn’t require the polished sheen of Hollywood. He sought to prove that film could be more free-flowing, deviating from scripts and indulging whimsical tangents with improvised shots and dialogue. Usually his experiments paid off. In the case of Mr. Arkadin, they didn’t. 

Welles never finished editing the film before its producer took it out of its hands. It was released in a compromised form, Welles’ elaborate flashback structure having been replaced by a chronological re-ordering of the scenes. The Criterion release presents three versions: the re-edited European version, an even more heavily re-edited American version (re-titled Confidential Report), and a brand new version in which historians and researchers have attempted to restore Welles’ original editing pattern, reconfiguring the picture to reflect, as best as can be determined, what Welles had originally intended. The result is a more coherent and artistic film than heretofore suspected. 

Mr. Arkadin may still be a failure but few directors fail as spectacularly as Orson Welles. The Criterion edition provides beautifully restored prints that showcase its photography, as well as a host of extra features that help to provide a clear picture of just what exactly Welles was striving for with this film and how and why he failed. 

Mr. Arkadin (1955). $49.95. 105 minutes. Criterion. www.criterionco.com.

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man

What better way to appreciate and pay tribute to the songs of Leonard Cohen than to watch and listen as a cast of his less talented idolaters walk on stage and butcher them? 

This appears to be the premise of Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, a documentary that just completed its second week at the Albany Twin. 

I had read several reviews beforehand and had some idea what I was in for. I knew, for instance, that the film consists primarily of footage from a 2005 concert in which musicians, famous and otherwise, performed Cohen’s music; I knew that interviews with Cohen would be interspersed throughout, and that the man himself would not step before the mic until the film’s final moments; and I knew that among those paying tribute to Cohen in interviews would be U2’s Bono, a man who, I’ll admit, inspires in me a wholly irrational degree of hostility. But still, I thought, it’s Leonard Cohen, his words, his music, his life … how bad could it be? 

Ay caramba. 

The musicians involved are apparently incapable of appreciating just exactly what makes Cohen’s music unique. They pay homage to his words, which are indeed the most crucial element of his art, but give not a moment’s thought to how exactly those words work, how they should be delivered to accord them the respect they deserve, or how and why they have endured for decades. 

The performance of those words is an art that these lesser talents have yet to grasp. To put those words across means focusing on them, uttering them, cleanly and crisply, with delicacy but with authority. This is poetry after all, and the words speak for themselves. But these singers and musicians instead do Cohen and us a great disservice by cluttering their performances with affectation: they tremble, they squint, they gesture, they wallow, they quaver, they fidget, they clutch at their hearts. They do not so much feel the words and music as put a great deal of sound and fury into the act of convincing us that they feel the words and music. It’s as if they don’t trust each song to convey to us its greatness, but rather proclaim themselves the arbiters of that greatness, and seek to convince us less enlightened souls that, no, really, this is good stuff and you should pay attention. On the other hand, the film did succeed in sending me right home to listen to Cohen’s original records, if only to purge myself of the memory of these overwrought cover versions. 

The only exceptions are the performances of Rufus Wainwright, whose gleefully silly rendition of “Everybody Knows” demonstrates what every other figure in the film, save Cohen himself, utterly lacks: a sense of humor. Wainwright plays up the campy aspects of the song, emphasizing the wit while also taking great pleasure in letting flow the swirling stream of the song’s dizzying and decadent lyrics. 

Cohen’s humor is on display often in the film’s interview segments as he offers insightful tales and self-deprecating remarks about his life and career. Director Lian Lunson, however, is intent on presenting Cohen with the same sort of hyperbolic grandiosity with which the rest of the cast presents him, even using the absurd device of an echo to repeat some of the singer’s more resonant asides. 

When the dapper minimalist finally takes up the microphone, he puts the musicians and the filmmakers to shame, delivering a perfectly dry, perfectly dignified performance of “Tower of Song.” It’s a welcome sight: the aged man in immaculate suit, holding his glasses in his hand as he stand still and distinguished before a glittering, red curtain. Ah, this is the real deal, this is what we paid for. But then the camera pulls back for one last indignity, revealing the backing band: U2. Yes, Bono, the world’s most prolifically sanctimonious and self-aggrandizing showman, has managed yet again to stamp his wrap-around-shade-clad face on another cultural icon. It’s not enough to testify before the United Nations; not enough to stamp his maudlin mug on the Sept. 11 tribute concert; not enough to contribute a cliché-ridden celebratory montage to the finale of last month’s World Cup. Now he’s got to stake his claim to the legacy of Leonard Cohen. 

But Cohen’s music stands alone. It has endured for decades, despite the man’s infrequent releases and even more infrequent performances. It has withstood the test of time, and it can surely withstand this silly movie, just as surely as it can withstand Bono. 

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man (2006). Directed by Lian Lunson. Featuring Leonard Cohen, U2, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Linda Thompson and others. 115 minutes. 

Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos

If you’re a soccer fan still looking for a way to get the poisonous image of Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt out of your mind, the solution may have arrived in the form of a new documentary. Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos tells the story of soccer’s arrival in the United States in the late 1970s, when media mogul Steve Ross set out to make the “the beautiful game” a national phenomenon. 

The film opens today at the Lumiere Theater in San Francisco. It’s as yet unclear whether it will come to the East Bay, so the Lumiere engagement may be the only chance to see it before it goes to DVD. 

In the mid 1970s, Ross and a few partners created the North American Soccer League. At the time, soccer was a virtually unknown sport in America, and there wasn’t a single player of professional caliber in the country. 

They knew they’d need a successful franchise in New York in order to get the league off the ground, and to make that franchise successful they would need to attract a marquee name. 

As fate would have it, the greatest player to ever play the game, the Brazillian legend Pelé—winner of a record three World Cup championships—had just announced his retirement from Santos, the Brazillian league team where he had spent his entire career. After tense negotiations, they managed to lure Pelé to the New York Cosmos, telling him that if he chose to play for a European team all he could win was another championship, whereas if he played for the Cosmos he could win an entire country. 

Pelé took the offer and began a second career, which continues to this day, as the game’s greatest ambassador, using his charm, charisma and unparalleled skills to spread the gospel of football. 

What ensued was a circus of soccer, media relations and mayhem that consumed the city of New York and took the world of American sports by storm for several years. The documentary features interviews will the major players in this drama (with the notable exception of Pelé himself), and while some—the less talented American players, at least—are humble and good-natured and still thrilled to have been a part of history and to have shared the field with the great Pelé, it would seem that several others have managed to transfer their competitive energies from the playing field to the pages of history as each tries to put his own particular stamp on the story of the Cosmos. 

This is not a calm, dignified documentary of talking heads respectfully and calmly stating the facts; these are men with axes to grind, and it makes for compelling viewing. 

The story that emerges is one of great drama, great humor, and great potential gone unmet. For the Cosmos, and the North American Soccer League along with it, eventually imploded. The last straw was Ross’ unsuccessful bid to bring the 1986 World Cup to America. When FIFA, soccer’s governing body, instead awarded the tournament to Mexico, NASL and Cosmos executives felt it was a death knell for the game in America, a missed opportunity for FIFA to open up the game’s only remaining unconquered market. 

In the wake of FIFA’s decision, the NASL folded and the tremendous inroads made by Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia and the rest of the New York Cosmos vanished in the dust. 

Just a few years later the United States would qualify for the World Cup for the first time in 40 years, making a respectable showing at the 1990 tournament in Italy. And in 1994, the World Cup finally made it to America, paving the way for the founding of a new league, Major League Soccer. But the momentum had been lost; soccer is still touted in America more for its potential rather than its achievements. It’s an ongoing battle, a struggle to instill within a largely indifferent public the excitement and drama that swelled to a crescendo for a brief, glorious moment in the summer of 1977. 

Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (2006). Directed by Paul Crowder and John Dower. Featuring Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia, Henry Kissinger, Mia Hamm. Narrated by Matt Dillon. 

Tributes to Gaynor, Borzage at Pacific Film Archive

Two retrospectives starting today (Friday) at Pacific Film Archive will illuminate the work of actress Janet Gaynor and director Frank Borzage, both sterling talents in their day but unjustly overlooked in ours.

Janet Gaynor worked as an usherette at San Francisco’s Castro Theater soon after it opened in 1922 before heading to Hollywood to work as an extra. Within a few years she not only found her way into starring roles but established herself as one of the industry’s top talents, appearing in some of the era’s best movies and along the way earning herself the Best Actress Oscar at the first Academy Awards in 1929.

“Janet Gaynor: A Centennial Celebration,” running through Aug. 13, is a touring exhibition put together by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. It features her first supporting roles and the three starring performances that earned her the Academy Award, as well as a selection of her sound-era work, including 1937’s A Star is Born.

Gaynor’s signature role was something of a waif, a wide-eyed innocent, fragile but with great moral strength. In a sense, she was like the second coming of “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, both of whom were beloved by audiences for their down-to-earth style and pixie-like charm. Gaynor managed to take seemingly limited roles and imbue them with an expressiveness that demonstrated virtue and nobility as well as a delicate vulnerability.

Her most celebrated role is in Sunrise, the first American film by German director F.W. Murnau. Murnau had made a name for himself as one of Germany’s top directors with films as disparate as the horror masterpiece Nosferatu, the Expressionist classic The Last Laugh, and a cinematic retelling of Faust. In America, his varied interests would lead him to further expand his repertoire, directing “women’s pictures” and even documentaries. It is precisely this wide-ranging virtuosity that has caused him to be overlooked by history, as there are few consistent threads running throughout his career to cement his identity in the public consciousness.

With Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Murnau brought Germanic technique and a palpable European sensibility to American commercial filmmaking. The film is celebrated for its roaming camerawork, its evocative set design, its emotional range and fable-like qualities. It is considered one of the finest films of the silent era, and Gaynor’s performance is one its greatest virtues.

The movie concerns a young country couple whose happy home is threatened when the husband is tempted by a footloose city flapper. Murnau sets up dichotomies that are almost allegorical: between city and country, love and lust, virtue and temptation. It is melodrama raised to the level of poetry, a fable of love, devotion and redemption.

Some of the performances may seem a bit dramatic to modern eyes, but that is part of the scheme: We’re not simply looking at a couple, we are looking at “two humans,” at archetypes, at people who serve more as symbols than as characters.

Gaynor’s performance, however, is subtle and at times profound. Her graceful, demure character undergoes dramatic changes, from loving and devoted to wounded and disillusioned, to frightened, endangered and mistrustful to redemptive, forgiving and strong. Her supple face and soulful eyes somehow manage to convey a range of thoughts and emotions that pages of dialogue could only suggest.

Gaynor easily made the transition to talkies, her voice matching the public perception of her character, and her career remained steady through the mid-'30s, a span that included a series of 12 films with co-star Charles Farrell, including Street Angel (1928), Lucky Star (1929), Delicious (1931), and a remake of Pickford’s Tess of the Storm Country (1932).

Tonight’s screening of Gaynor’s first pairing with Farrell, Seventh Heaven, marks an overlap with another PFA series looking back at the career of director Frank Borzage.

Borzage captured, perhaps better than any other director, the euphoria of romance. His films may at times seem overly sentimental, but they are remarkably effective, using the simplest of themes, strategically repeated, to make the heart skip a beat. With a skillful blend of light humor and sincere emotions, Borzage’s films manage to be quite stirring.

PFA will present “Frank Borzage’s Philosophy of Desire,” a selection of films spanning both the silent and sound eras, through Aug. 23.

The strengths of Borzage’s work are readily evident in Seventh Heaven: His street scenes are evocative; his interiors are convincing, self-contained worlds unto themselves; his simple themes are threaded throughout each scene; and his actors know their characters well and hit all the right notes. Some of the film’s most notable moments are the shots of the couple walking up the stairs, a scene that is hardly subtle (seven flights to heaven) but certainly charming as the waif timidly follows her benefactor; the humble abode itself, small but warm and inviting, a cozy ramshackle studio beneath the stars, the rent for which would keep a Berkeley landlord in the chips for years to come; and the joy that lights up Gaynor’s face when Farrell finally allows her to stay. Borzage is a master of tone, never losing his grip on the atmospheric and emotional details.

The film may be a bit long, considering its slight and somewhat predictable plot line, but it punches through its mundane source material with strong moments of poignancy and drama. Its fault lies with the fact that Borzage is not content to simply leave those moments alone. Genuine moments that would best be played simply and unfettered are instead restated, often so emphatically that the moment is robbed of its emotional power.

If you intend to see the film and don’t want its conclusion revealed, read no further, for many of Borzage’s virtues and vices are perfectly embodied in the film’s final scenes, and they cannot be discussed without giving too much away.

One of the loveliest but flawed moments in Seventh Heaven provides a perfect example of all that is right and wrong with Borzage’s technique. After Charles Farrell makes his way through the throngs of celebrants in the streets and climbs the seven flights of stairs, he bursts through the door and calls out the name of his beloved. She stands just a few feet away, across the room, and we see his hands reach for her. At that point, Borzage cuts to a shot from behind Gaynor, and we look over her shoulder as she runs to embrace Farrell. In an example of masterful direction, we see that as Gaynor runs to him, Farrell’s eyes do not follow but stay fixed just above the camera, and the realization dawns on us that he has lost his sight. This is superb filmmaking, with details revealed artfully through blocking, direction and editing.

Borzage can’t leave it there, however. The characters then take a few seconds to restate the obvious, drumming it into us with redundant intertitles when a simple reaction closeup of Gaynor’s beautifully expressive face could have done the job much more effectively.

But these are minor quibbles. Borzage worked in a time when such displays of emotion were more acceptable and when subtlety was not often rewarded in commercial moviemaking. His characters were wholesome and pure, with their hearts on their sleeves, overcoming tragedy by the transformative power of love.

The coming of World War II would puncture a hole in that world view, as a new sense of irony and detachment would brand Frank Borzage’s work as nostalgic, sentimental and out of date. And, as with Janet Gaynor, the simplicity and directness of his work would lead to decades of neglect and a lack of appreciation.

Janet Gaynor: A Centennial Celebration

July 21-Aug. 13

Frank Borzage's Philosophy of Desire

July 21-Aug. 23

2575 Pacific Film Archive, Bancroft Ave. www.bampfa.edu.

Déjà vu and Despair: Punishment Park

If you’ve seen or intend to see The Road to Guantanamo, reviewed in this space last week, it might be a good time to revisit Peter Watkins’ 1971 Punishment Park. The two films, 35 years apart, provide perspectives on the abuse of power that are both complementary and contradictory. 

Watkins, an Englishman, came to the United States in 1969 to make a series of documentaries on American history, but the project was eventually canceled. Instead he was inspired by the political turbulence of the era to create Punishment Park, a cinema verité depiction of a government crackdown on Vietnam-era dissidents. The film was released last year on DVD by New Yorker Video as part of a series called “The Cinema of Peter Watkins.” Other films in the series include The War Game, Culloden, The Gladiators and the biopic Edvard Munch. 

Punishment Park imagines a scenario in which President Nixon invokes his rights under the 1950 Internal Security Act and establishes detention camps for dissidents, militants and draft-dodgers—indeed, anyone who has committed an act of “sabotage” or who the government has reasonable cause to believe has the intention of committing such an act. Substitute “terrorism” for “sabotage,” pour yourself a stiff drink, then settle in for 90 minutes of deju vu and despair. 

The storm of criticism unleashed upon the film’s release would be no less anachronistic than the content in today’s heated political climate. The film was assailed as an anti-American polemic, a dangerous and subversive treatise that would provide aid and comfort to the enemy. 

The film cuts back and forth between two lines of action. In the first, a group of detainees faces a right-wing citizen tribunal in a series of improvised confrontations based loosely on the trial of the Chicago Seven. The actors—amateurs selected for their appearance and political views—improvised the dialogue, a creative decision that both helps and hinders the movie, lending the action a degree of immediacy while simultaneously rendering the characters as two-dimensional stereotypes. 

Each prisoner is questioned in turn before each is given the choice of a lengthy prison term or a few days in Punishment Park, a vast expanse of desert in which they will be left to wander while the military police hunt them down in a sort of state-sanctioned version of “The Most Dangerous Game.” 

The contentious environment inside the interrogation tent is further established by the details of photographer Joan Churchill’s framing of the scene: The detainees are disheveled and unkempt and face their interrogators while surrounded by the trappings of power: Guns, billy clubs and uniformed officers lurk always in the background. And while they sit alone in the heat, facing a torrent of abuse, the tribunal’s members pass around a pitcher of ice water, and are later shown taking a break while munching at a catered buffet. 

The second line of action features the previous group of detainees, who have already faced interrogation and have opted for Punishment Park. In a series of interviews with the narrator (voiced by Watkins), the prisoners discuss their predicament as they run from and eventually confront their captors. 

In addition to the cross-cutting and mise-en-scene, the film employs a series of techniques designed to increase the pace and heighten the dramatic tension. The presence of the narrator/filmmaker sets up a confrontational dynamic between the players and the camera, and when the narrator finally drops his objective distance and becomes part of the action, expressing his outrage to the military police who have shot down several detainees in the desert, Watkins raises challenging questions about the role of media, the value of journalistic objectivity, and the civic duty of a democratic citizenry. 

It may be difficult in these times to suspend our disbelief long enough to accept that the federal government would allow media access to such an exercise; Watkins seems not to have anticipated the corporate efficiency or the sheer Orwellian chutzpah of the current administration, which has learned the lessons of the past and imposes severe restrictions on the press. 

The Road to Guantanamo, criticized by some for not telling the government’s side of the story, could not do so because the government simply refuses to tell it. Watkins’ film, on the other hand, is a product of its era, a time when politicians had yet to learn these lessons, allowing their dirty laundry to be aired at the 1968 Democratic Convention, at Kent State, in Vietnam and elsewhere. In that sense, Punishment Park is almost nostalgic. 

The Harrowing Road to Guantanamo

Al Gore may be soaking up the spotlight with his doc du jour An Inconvenient Truth, but The Road to Guantanamo, opening today at Shattuck Cinemas, is a far more incendiary film and one that many Americans would do well to see. 

The Road to Guantanamo tells a harrowing tale, and though it ends happily enough for the young Englishmen whose story it relates, it is full of anguish and anger on behalf of the potentially hundreds of innocent detainees who have not fared as well. 

The film is part documentary, part dramatization. It tells the story of the “Tipton Trio,” three Englishmen of Pakistani origin who set out for their native country so that one of them can get married there. There were actually four of them at the start of the journey, but one vanished somewhere in Afghanistan, where the young men had traveled to be of some help to fellow Muslims caught in the crossfire between the United States and the Taliban. 

They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, rounded up with a group of alleged Taliban soldiers, arrested by the Northern Alliance, turned over to the American military, and eventually shipped off to Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They were lucky to even make it that far, but that was far from the end of their troubles. At Guantanamo the trio was subjected to inhumane conditions and repeated interrogations. They were systematically humiliated, beaten, abused and degraded. 

Though the story is dramatized, the action is interspersed with news footage and interviews with the Tipton Trio themselves. The technique may sound clumsy on paper but it works quite well, taking the simple, just-the-facts monologues of the young men and illustrating them with dramatic re-creations of their experiences. 

The dramatized segments feature young actors with little professional experience, chosen because they reflected many of the same traits as the men they portray; they are young, adventurous, brash, not especially religious and certainly apolitical. They are just kids, really, caught up in something too dark and too vast to comprehend, and the casting of these young actors brings those qualities to the fore. 

The film has already sparked controversy for its unflinching portrayal of the trespasses of the U.S. and British governments. Doubtless, its claims will be refuted, written off as politically-charged fantasies. But the tale is real. 

It seems like just a few years ago that tales of abduction, torture, indefinite detention and unlawful imprisonment occurred only in far-off lands: criminal deeds done by lawless, totalitarian governments or shadowy drug cartels in exotic locales. But now the American government is in on the act, if not for the first time then certainly for the first time on such a grand scale. 

Fahrenheit 9-11 kicked off this latest wave of political documentaries, but unlike that film and the many that followed in its wake—Outfoxed, The Corporation, Wal-Mart: The High Price of Low Cost, and even An Inconvenient Truth—Road to Guantanamo is not so easy to dismiss as a politically motivated polemic, especially in light of the recent suicides at Guantanamo. 

The film avoids many of the pitfalls of some of its recent predecessors, keeping the focus on the story itself rather than on the political players; George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair make only brief appearances. 

The filmmakers spend little time recounting the How and the Why, instead focusing their cameras on their subjects and sticking to the What. Why distract the audience with the pale justifications, obfuscations and moral rationalizations of politicians? Directors Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross dispense with the small talk and get right to the point, knowing that it is far more effective to simply stick to the facts, to simply show what happened to these men and leave spin to others. There is no more effective and affecting story to be told than the disturbing tale of how an unchecked government and an unwinnable war robbed these young men of more than two years of their lives. 

But those two years were not wasted, for these men did not cave in; they did not give in to the temptation to ease their suffering by saying what their captors wanted to hear. 

“It only made me stronger,” one of the men says in an interview, and the line received a round of applause from a recent San Francisco preview audience. This sense of irony is pervasive throughout the film, as we watch burly, ruthless Marines—“Honor-Bound to Defend Freedom,” as their slogan reads—systematically subverting every tenant of their democratic ideals in a misguided effort to protect freedom by destroying it. 

At times the film draws uneasy laughter, as if it were simply a comedy of errors as the big, bad bully misses the forest for the trees, lording his power over the powerless while his world crumbles around him. It is truly bewildering and dispiriting to think of the U.S. Marines wasting the time and resources to ask a few clueless kids, over and over, “Where’s Osama?” 

The film reinforces the realization that bin Laden has in fact achieved a crucial—if “asymmetric”—victory, having reduced the once-mighty United States to a nation of paranoia and recklessness, ruled by an increasingly undemocratic government bent on squandering its vast power and wealth in pursuit of the unattainable goal of an undefined victory over an unseen enemy. 

But the military acts at the behest of our president, and our president prefers to paint with a broad brush, with good represented by white faces and evil represented by brown ones. The Tipton Trio never had a chance. 

Even when evidence to the contrary rests right before their eyes, the Marines at Guantanamo see only what they want to see, choosing to gaze instead through the same polarizing lens favored by al Qaeda. 

And for many Americans, that’s quite all right. “My country, right or wrong,” apologists say. But they never finish the quote, never include the words Missouri Sen. Carl Schurz used to modify the statement: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”