Noir City 9 shines spotlight on cinematic darkness

The American roots of film noir begin with the crime fiction that emerged during the 1930s from the pens of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and multitudes of lesser-known talents. In the wake of the Great Depression, these pulp authors reshaped the literary landscape with dark, cynical, morally ambivalent tales of crime, sex and vice — stories steeped in shadowy imagery, tough talk, and a hardscrabble hyper-realism that portrayed a brutal, hostile world. There were no heroes, only anti-heroes — self-preserving pragmatists whose cynicism was born of dashed hopes and faded ideals.

It was only a matter of time before these stories infiltrated Hollywood, merging with the stark, shadowy imagery of German Expressionism, which crossed the Atlantic along with the refugees who left Germany just ahead of Hitler's advancing stormtroopers. And thus a bold and distinctly downbeat genre was born, a German-American hybrid that introduced a stock of melodramatic 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, tormented, world-weary anti-hero 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.

Noir City, the annual film festival that celebrates these dark cinematic gems and presents them on the big screen in all their tawdry glory, returns to San Francisco's Castro Theater this Friday with another 10-day program of dames, destruction and depravity. The festival is full of rarities; in fact, most of films in this year's program are not available on DVD.

The festival features 24 films, from A-list masterpieces to B-movie programmers, and kicks off at 7:30 p.m. Friday with Robert Taylor and Audrey Totter in Curtis Bernhardt's High Wall (1947), presented in a new 35-mm print preserved by the Film Noir Foundation. The double feature continues with Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a Peter Lorre film that some consider the first American noir.

Highlights include two classics from George Cukor: Gaslight (1944), starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and A Double Life, with Ronald Colman's Oscar-winning performance as a Broadway actor slipping into madness; Strangers in the Night (1944), just one of director Anthony Mann's many great films; Marilyn Monroe as a mentally unstable babysitter who seduces Richard Widmark in Don't Bother to Knock (1952); Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), playing the role created by Agnes Moorhead in the original radio production that was one of the most famous broadcasts from that medium's golden age; and what noir festival would be complete without at least one Humphrey Bogart film? This year, it's The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), in which Bogart plays a mentally unhinged painter with murderous designs on his wife — Stanwyck again.

But the festival's best shows are often the lesser-known gems, pictures large and small that have, for one reason or another, slipped into semi-obscurity over the years.

Olivia de Havilland turns in two strong performances The Dark Mirror (1946), portraying identical twins caught up in a murder investigation. A psychologist aids in unravelling the crime by subjecting the sisters to the usual round of Rorschach tests, and though de Havilland ably delineates the sweet, kindly sister from the jealous and possibly dangerous one, director Robert Siodmak takes pity on the audience by giving the girls personalized necklaces that spell out their names in bold letters — it's as though Siodmak was taking advice from a bad editorial cartoonist.

Woman on the Beach (1947) was directed by the great Jean Renoir, yet the film was drastically cut before its release. Still, it's a strong enough little film, with Robert Ryan as the lovestruck innocent caught in the grip of seductress Joan Bennet. Like an apparition, she appears on the beach and before long Ryan has stepped into the role of savior, trying to free the distressed damsel from the clutches of her husband, an aging painter who has lost his sight, his muse, and, we're left to assume, his virility.

Joan Bennett appears again in a film by another festival regular, director Fritz Lang, whose German films exerted a strong influence on noir. In America, Lang's vision was curtailed, sometimes for the better, but oftentimes for the worse. With Secret Beyond the Door (1948), Lang had simply lost his mojo, spinning a nonsense tale of psychoanalytic babble while hoping his visual flair would carry the day. It didn't, but it's still an entertaining affair, with Bennet struggling to unravel the mysteries of Michael Redgrave's tormented psyche. The film will be presented in a new print restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, a project funded by Martin Scorcese's Film Foundation.

Noir City 9. Through Jan 30 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. For more information see www.noircity.com or www.thecastrotheatre.com.

Photo: Olivia de Havilland portrays identical twins caught in a murder investigation in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror (1946).

Deconstructing Hef

Haven't we seen enough of Hugh Hefner in his smoking robe and pajamas? Hasn't it been a couple of decades since we'd seen enough? Well, perhaps we can take one last look. His heyday may be long gone, his image and impact reduced by self-caricature and the sort of privilege that allows the wealthy to drift into irrevelance and senility with all their illusions intact; but whatever your take on the man, his mission and his achievements, Hefner has had a significant impact on American culture.

Brigitte Berman's new documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, puts these achievements into context, challenging our preconceived notions of a man who has spent nearly 60 years battling the government, the religious right and outraged feminists in his efforts to push us toward "a healthier attitude toward sex." The film opens Friday, Aug. 20 at Landmark's Lumiere Theater in San Francisco and at Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley.

But sex is only one aspect of Hefner's career on the public stage. He fought for civil rights, and not merely as a celebrity endorser; he put his money and reputation on the line in defense of the First Amendment; he spoke out against the Vietnam War. In the '50s, '60s and '70s, Hefner never shied away from fighting for the causes he believed in. Newsman Mike Wallace didn't particularly like Hefner when he first interviewed him for 60 Minutes, and he didn't find Hefner's arguments convincing. But years later, Wallace did come to like Hefner, and said that, more than that, he trusted him; for Hefner, whether you agreed with him or not, was always honest and upfront with his beliefs.

Hugh Hefner's improbable journey began when, as a young family man, he came to realize that he was not required to simply live out the model provided by his parents. Seeking an outlet for his creative talents as a writer and cartoonist, he began planning a men's magazine. It would be an intelligent magazine with a stable of talented writers and artists providing provocative essays, literary fiction, sharp cartoons and plenty of humor. But the most daring premise of his venture was its frank sexuality. Hefner would challenge accepted notions of sexual propriety and he would challenge sexually repressive laws, making the claim that, if those laws were enforced, most of the population would face prison sentences of at least five years. His magazine would would air out the sexual taboos of the 1950s with the radical idea that, not only was sex a natural and very important aspect of life, but that women liked it, too.

The first Playboy centerfold was a long rumored but rarely seen nude photo of Marilyn Monroe that Hefner tracked down. Soon Hefner would move from purchasing photos of models and would further explicate his view of sex by staging his own photo sessions, seeking amateur girl-next-door types, presenting sex as common, healthy, fun — even pure in a slightly prurient way.

The magazine courted controversy from the beginning, and Hefner took on his opponents without hesitation, fighting his battles in editorials, in other media, and in the courts. Circulation climbed quickly; within a few years Playboy surpassed Esquire by selling 700,000 copies a month. In time that number would reach 2 million.

Soon Playboy became a high-profile brand and the empire expanded to include a syndicated television show, in which Hefner showcased artists, musicians and intellectuals. His willingness to bring in black guests, including mixed-race vocal groups, thrust him into the civil rights debate, as did his support for Lenny Bruce, whom Hefner provided with legal counsel when the comedian was arrested for obscenity. When Hefner learned that the owners of his Playboy nightclub franchises in the South were, in accordance with discriminatory state laws, refusing to admit black customers or book black performers, he bought the clubs back and ran them himself, defying the law by booking controversial comedian Dick Gregory. As Gregory put it, the white attitude toward black entertainers at the time was, "You can sing to me, nigger, but you can't talk."

Feminists considered these causes and the literary content of his magazine a sort of front, a clever ploy to raise the stature of the magazine and to legitimize Hefner's real vocation: pornography. They called him on the inherent misogyny of the presentation of the girl next door as a closeted wild animal, waiting to spring into action at the snap of a man's fingers; they criticized his promotion of an unattainable physical ideal that few women could emulate; they claimed that he treated women as commodities, as mere fodder for male fantasy, and that the practice was harmful to men as well as women.

The film includes a confrontation with critics on the Dick Cavett Show during which Hefner did not have an answer for these allegations. In a telling moment, he refers to his two feminist critics as girls, making his blind spot apparent: In Hefner's eyes, he's no sexist, no misogynist; he loves girls. Women, however, a more complex proposition.

It's a curious mindset that can't see the problematic nature of Hefner's relations with, and presentations of, women. The glamor of the parties at the Playboy mansion, where Hefner supplied his celebrity friends with wine, food and beautiful women, doesn't conceal his role as a sort of high-society pimp. He fails to recognize the possibility that women are drawn to him not out of love or physical attraction, but because of his money and power and star-making potential, his ability to launch a young woman on a career path as he did Jenny McCarthy, Shannon Tweed and Pamela Anderson. His proclamations of sexual honesty and freedom belie the fact that his view of sex is not only relentlessly male-centric but blatantly adolescent. Thus his provocative centerfolds spurred a national debate while simultaneously retarding it; they put sex center-stage but it was a rather limited view of sex, and when that point was made, Hefner and Playboy were ill-prepared for the debate that followed.

In the Reagan years, Playboy was beset by a boycott campaign that pressured convenience stores to drop the magazine, leading to significant losses in circulation which it never recovered. The nightclubs closed; a Playmate was murdered; and Hefner suffered a stroke. His brush with death changed his outlook and he tried marriage and family life again; but once that marriage failed, he returned to his swinging ways with a vengeance, overcompensating with polygamous relationships with a bevy of young, buxom blondes.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, for years a friend, supporter and admirer of Hefner, says she no longer mentions his name when debating issues of sexual freedom; he mixed up his personal life with his mission, she says, so that the self-caricature of his later years has undermined his credibility and the merits of his arguments — people just don't take him seriously anymore. Other friends interviewed in the film say that love is his "rosebud," the elusive childhood longing that motivates the man.

So if your image of Hefner is a doddering old fool drifting into senility with a bleach-blonde silicon doll on each arm, his lascivious grin masking the emptiness inside as his improbably buoyant companions serve as substitutes for love ... well, fair enough. But it's the extremist who push the limits, who forges the debate and pushes us toward progress. Hefner established the other end of the spectrum; we may not travel even half the distance across that spectrum, but at least we know the limits, allowing us to better define ourselves and our place on the continuum. Hefner is happy to help people to define their values, even if they only define them in opposition to his own.

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel

124 minutes. Not rated. Directed by Brigitte Berman. Featuring Hugh Hefner, Jim Brown, Gene Simmons, Jenny McCarthy, Mike Wallace, Dick Gregory, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Tony Bennett, James Caan, Joan Baez, David Steinberg, George Lucas, Bill Maher, Pete Seeger. www.hughhefnerplayboyactivistrebel.com.

Two Gently Unfolding Dramas by Yasujiro Ozu

Almost from the beginning of the medium, filmmakers were eager to transcend the limits of traditional theater by putting the camera in motion, by sending it racing, swooping and soaring; by using a variety of lenses to shape the image, to magnify, distort and exaggerate; and by using the editing process to suggest, startle and surprise. And while some of the most exciting filmmakers over the past century have been those who found ways to employ these devices with flash and panache, one of the greatest directors the medium has ever produced was one who limited himself to the simplest and most austere techniques.

Yasujiro Ozu used his camera simply to observe his characters, to linger on their faces, their homes, their possessions—to look into the souls of everyday people under everyday circumstances. He was both a naturalist and a rigorous formalist, a director who sought to capture life as it is lived, but within a framework of rigidly defined restrictions. He limited the camera’s range of motion and the angles from which it could gaze; he limited his editing to simple, direct cuts—few dissolves or fades; and dialogue was conveyed in simple master shots followed by alternating close-ups. This artistic

code focused greater attention on content over form, allowing character to reveal itself, allowing dialogue to breathe, and allowing revelatory spaces to open up between words and gestures and characters. Thus relationships and motivations and plot points would gradually take shape before the viewer’s eyes.

Criterion has just released two rarely seen examples of Ozu’s mid-career work, The Only Son (1936) and There Was a Father (1942). The two films have many parallels, both tracking the relationship between a son and a single parent who must make great sacrifices for him.

In The Only Son, a mother lives a life of toil in order to send her son to college and eventually Tokyo, where she hopes he will rise in the world. When she is finally able to visit him, she is surprised to find that not only has he a wife and child, but a rather lowly job as a night school teacher. And the school teacher who had served as his mentor has fared no better in the big city; he runs a shabby restaurant, serving pork cutlets in a poor part of town. Mother and son spend several days together, for the most part avoiding the issues at hand. But there are two conversations in which these issues finally come to the service, and Ozu's muted approach captures the spoken and unspoken emotions that permeate the dialogue — disappointment, pride, shame, regret, love, resignation, dignity and acceptance.

There Was a Father stars Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu as a man who seeks the best for his son, only to find that his decisions lead to their continual separation. This was a wartime film, and themes of duty and sacrifice were considered patriotic, lending the movie a political subtext, a rarity in Ozu's work. Far from the American form of propaganda film, in which virtuous leading men with broad shoulders committed acts of heroism on the front line while their pinup-worthy wives kept the home fires burning, Japanese propaganda featured a more quiet form of sacrifice, of fortitude and dutiful dedication to the nation's interests. There Was a Father shows that that dedication even trumps the father-son relationship, as Ryu consistently steers his son in directions that will make him most useful to Japan, even though it drives the two of them apart.

Ozu's work is almost literary, owing more to the novel than to film; his means of expression are subtle and powerful. His method for conveying the growing gap between father and son is to show the two fishing side by side. The camera watches from behind as the pair cast their lines over and over again in perfect unison. When the boy finally stops, the meaning and impact of the gesture is startling and poignant; there is no need to show tears or an exchange of words or glances.

Though he is often regarded as the most Japanese of Japanese directors, whose cinema captured unique and specific aspects of that nation’s life and culture, Ozu’s work easily transcends international boundaries, delving into character, relationships and commonplace issues to find the universal. His favored subjects include families and the relationships between generations; the aging process; city life versus rural life; and all the values that complement and conflict with one another in the ensuing drama: pragmatism and idealism, love and kindness, justice and forgiveness.

“Rather than tell a superficial story,” Ozu said, “I wanted to go deeper, to show ... the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savor.”

Ozu's calm, gently unfolding dramas give us time to not only get to know his characters, but also deeply care about them — to enjoy their humor, to admire their strength and to forgive their transgressions — so that, when a film ends, there is often a feeling of regret that these characters are gone from our lives. “Every time I watch an Ozu film,” says actor Eijiro Tong, “I start to feel very sentimental as the end of the film nears. As I think back over the story, it’s like a flood of old memories washing over me, one after another.”

This is the essential sadness and loneliness that resides at the core of Ozu’s work — the awareness of the inevitability of change, and that beginnings are followed all too soon by endings.

The Only Son (1936) and There Was a Father (1942): Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu. 83 minutes; 87 minutes. www.criterion.com. Two-disc set includes essays by critic and historian Tony Rayns, an appreciation of Chishu Ryu by film scholar Donald Ritchie, comments by Ryu on Ozu, and video interviews with film scholars Tadao Sato, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson.

Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr.

In 1928, Buster Keaton was wrapping up an astounding decade of independent filmmaking, seemingly with another decade or two stretched out before him. But circumstances conspired to bring his remarkable string of sterling comedies to a premature end. During production on his tenth feature film, Steamboat Bill, Jr., Keaton's marriage ended in bitter divorce and Joseph Schenk, Keaton's producer and brother-in-law, sold his contract to MGM, a move that would render silent comedy's most innovative auteur a mere shift worker in Hollywood's largest cinema assembly line. And with the talkies just around the corner, it's no wonder that Keaton's loss of personal and professional autonomy should lead to a fierce bout of alcoholism and steep career decline.

The great clown's depression is on clear display in Steamboat Bill's — and indeed the silent era's — most spectacular stunt, in which Buster stands motionless as gale-force winds bring a thousand-pound wall crashing down around him, the frame of a second-floor window passing neatly over his head and around his shoulders, leaving him stunned but unscathed. Keaton's crew tried to dissuade him from performing the stunt; the photographer cranked the camera with his eyes averted, and the co-director refused to take part at all, taking refuge in a nearby tent while praying for Keaton's soul.

Keaton's career had reached an artistic if not commercial peak a couple of years earlier with The General, his Civil War comedy masterpiece. It was an expensive production that made relatively little profit and drew mixed reviews, prompting Schenk to require Keaton to make a markedly less ambitious follow-up. Keaton kept costs down on his next few films, including Steamboat Bill, saving his money for a lavish finish in which a hurricane wreaks havoc on River Junction. It's a remarkable sequence of daring stunts and comedic destruction, providing a climactic conclusion to Keaton's independent career, one that would, unfortunately, foreshadow the stormy times that lay ahead for him.

1928. 70 minutes. $29.95. www.kino.com.

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up

It was with 1999’s Taste of Cherry that Abbas Kiarostami firmly cemented his international reputation, becoming the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival. But by then, his contemplative, intelligent films had been spurring debate in his home country for many years. Close-Up (1990), Kiarostami's emphatic declaration of Iranian cinematic artistry, looked back on cinema itself through a refracted lens, blending fiction, fact and fantasy into a story both stimulating and sad.

Close-Up was inspired by a news story Kiarostami read concerning Hossein Sabzian, an obsessive cinemaphile who impersonated Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and thereby insinuated himself into the life of a wealthy family, if only for a few days. Kiarostami then insinuated himself into Sabzian's trial, convincing the judge to not only allow the director to film the proceedings, but to question the defendant as the cameras rolled. The director also managed to persuade Sabzian and his victims to re-enact the story of their meeting and brief association, and then, upon Sabzian's release from jail, staged a meeting between the impersonator and the impersonated, with Mohsen Makhmalbaf carrying Sabzian on the back of his motorcycle to the home of his victims to ask for their forgiveness.The result is an examination of cinema and the troubled mind of a man who has devoted his life to a fanatic appreciation of the art. Close-Up, as with all of Kiarostami's best work, uses the drama and melodrama of everyday life to present his viewers with tantalizing, even baffling questions, and wisely leaves the answers to us.

Criterions' new DVD and BluRay editions of the film include audio commentary by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum; The Traveler, Kiarostami's first feature film; a documentary on Hossein Sabzian, six years after Close-Up; a new interview with Kiarostami; and A Walk with Kiarostami, a documentary portrait of the director by Iranian film professor Jamsheed Akrami.

1990. 98 minutes. $39.95. www.criterion.com.

Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich

Today, British director Carol Reed's reputation rests primarily on The Third Man, the 1950 post-war thriller in which Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles joined an international cast in the sewers of Vienna in the creation of a cinema classic. But Reed created at least two more masterpieces with The Fallen Idol and Odd Man Out, as well as a number of other fine but lesser-known films, produce both before and after his late '40s peak.

Night Train to Munich is a delirious ride, a curious hybrid of espionage thriller, Allied propaganda and screwball comedy, in which Nazis pursue a Czech scientist and his daughter from Prague to England to a precarious tram in the Swiss Alps. Rarely seen today, it was quite a success upon its release in 1940, its wry wit, sly sexual innuendo and absurdist cloak-and-dagger romance taking viewers on a stylish and ironic — if low-budget — tour through a series of genre conventions. Rex Harrison is suave and sarcastic, if a bit smarmy; Paul Henreid turns his heroic image on its head; and Margaret Lockwood maintains her beauty, humor and poise throughout a parade of plot twists.

Criterion's new DVD and BluRay editions of the film include an essay by film critic Philip Kemp and a conversation between film scholars Peter Evans and Bruce Babbington regarding Carol Reed, Night Train screenwriters, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, and the film's social and political context.

1940. 90 minutes. $29.95. www.criterion.com.

Mystery Train Explores a Mythic Memphis

Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train is a laconic journey, in three parts, through a Memphis of the imagination. Spurred by the passion and fury of a fierce backbeat, three interlocking deadpan vignettes find rock and roll pilgrims searching for something — the ghost of Elvis, the spirit of Carl Perkins, or a vague yearning for the vaguely defined essence of pompadoured rebellion — amid the empty streets and hollowed-out hotels of a faded town still trading on a brief epochal moment in its history. A young, star-struck Japanese couple, a rebel without a cause, and a comically stoic widow traverse the remnants of a mythic city in a mythic America in search of the reflected glory of the nearly mythic but everlasting moment of its ascendence. Screamin' Jay Hawkins, one of the real-life architects of rock and roll, takes a supporting role as an eccentric hotelier working the late shift.

Criterion's new DVD and BluRay editions of the film included a Q&A with Jarmusch; excerpts from the 2001 documentary Screamin' Jay Hawkins: I Put a Spell on Me; a documentary about the film's locations and the musical history of Memphis; and essays by Dennis Lim and Peter Guralnick.

1989. 110 minutes. $39.95. www.criterion.com.

Noir City Brings Cinema’s Dark Side to the Castro

An “eternal juvenile” no more, Dick Powell finally broke free of the battery of baby-faced roles he endured in a seemingly endless series of bright-eyed 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. With middle age fast approaching, Powell struggled to carve out a new identity for himself, jumping ship from one studio to another in search of a new career path.

Eventually he succeeded. Two examples of Dick Powell born again will screen this weekend as part of Noir City, the annual film noir festival at San Francisco’s Castro Theater. This year’s theme is “Lust and Larceny” and there is plenty of both throughout the 10-day series, which kicks off Friday with Pitfall, featuring Powell and Lizabeth Scott, and continues through Jan. 31. Powell appears again in Cry Danger, showing Saturday, Jan. 23.

In an effort to shed his boyish Warner Bros. image, Powell bought out his contract and signed with Paramount, only to bolt again when the studio denied him the lead in Double Indemnity. Soon enough Powell signed with RKO, and landed the plum role of shamus Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder My Sweet.

This breakthrough role was followed by more in the same vein: dark, hard-bitten dramas with a world-weary edge, a distinctly American genre to which French critics would ultimately give the name. Powell parlayed his second wave of cinematic success into a couple of radio gigs as well, including one of his signature characters, the private detective Richard Diamond. Powell was even secure enough by this point to include a nod to his earlier persona, finishing each episode by crooning a tune to his paramour.

It was at this time that Powell made one of his best, but least-known films, Cry Danger. Powell plays a sardonic, embittered ex-con, determined after five years in the pen to set a few things straight. Dry, drunken, down-on-his-luck Richard Erdman is along for the ride as a battle-scarred ex-Marine angling for a payday as reward for getting Powell out of prison.

Cry Danger showed at Noir City a couple of years ago, and though it was a murky 16-millimeter print—the only print available at the time—it was a crowd-pleaser. The evening was made all the more entertaining by the presence of Richard Erdman, who proved himself every bit the charismatic wisecracker even in his 80s. This year, the film screens in a brand-new 35-millimeter print, a rare opportunity to see this acerbic crime classic in peak condition.

In addition to Powell, this year’s program pays tribute to festival favorite Richard Widmark with a Jan. 29 double feature. Slattery’s Hurricane shows Widmark in one of his early leading roles, firmly

establishing the persona that would sustain him through several classics of the genre: tough, jaded, maybe a bit sleazy, but with a kind of weary decency waiting to shine through. Second on the bill is the Samuel Fuller noir masterpiece Pickup On South Street, with Widmark as an underworld conman, a pick-pocket who lives by his wits. Widmark seduces Jean Peters and plays the commies and the feds against each other while knocking back beers chilled in the icy waters beneath his shabby dockside shack.

The festival is full of rarities, films not available on DVD, many not available even on VHS. Another seldom-seen gem is Human Desire, one of director Fritz Lang’s better American films. Adapted from Emile Zola’s novel La Bete Humaine, Human Desire is a melodrama of love, lust and betrayal amid the freightyards of Philadelphia. Glen Ford plays a soldier just back from the Korean War who wants nothing more than to settle back into his life as a railroad engineer, with time to fish, catch a movie, or even step out with a nice girl, if he can find one. What he finds however is Vicky, played by perennial film noir femme fatale Gloria Grahame, whose marriage to Broderick Crawford is teetering on the edge of a spectacular collapse.

Lang had a checkered career in Hollywood, with neither the resources nor the autonomy he enjoyed in his pre-war German career. But Human Desire shows him in fine form, employing the intelligence and artistry that characterized his silent and early sound-era masterpieces. Long stretches pass artfully without dialogue, and the sights and sounds of trains, railroad tracks and freightyards are used to excellent effect, keeping the drama taut while filling the screen with compelling imagery.

Other highlights of the festival include Larceny, a dizzying melodrama of twists and turns centering around greed, corruption, and of course, dangerous dames; Marilyn Monroe in Niagara and Asphalt Jungle; A Place in the Sun, an adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; Escape in the Fog, in which a nurse is haunted by a dream of a murder committed on the Golden Gate Bridge; and an evening entitled “Bad Girls of Film Noir,” featuring “poor man’s Marilyn Monroe” Cleo Moore in a double bill of One Girl’s Confession and Women’s Prison.

Noir City

Friday, Jan 22 through Sunday, Jan 31 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders’ evocative and mysterious Wings of Desire (1987) has been released by the Criterion Collection in a two-disc, director-approved edition, with many extra features and an engaging and informative commentary track by the director.

This is one of those films where every ingredient plays a vital role. Wenders’ camera movement is delicate and eloquent; Henri Alekan’s photography is somber yet romantic; Jürgen Knieper’s score is visceral in its impact; writer Peter Handke’s interior monologues bring the disparate thoughts of Berlin’s residents into a unified tapestry of sound and emotion; and Peter Falk’s role as a one-time angel who gave up eternity for a shot at life on earth grounds the film in earthly pleasures while providing the film with a spark of self-referential humor.

But the most important and powerful aspect of Wings of Desire is the warm, benevolent gaze of Bruno Ganz as the guardian angel who longs to join the material world. Etched in Alekan’s black and white photography, his is a face of compassion and empathy, able to share in the sorrow and joy of those he watches over. And when he finally crosses over, in a burst of color and sensory data—cold frost, the taste of his own blood, the vitality and breathlessness of a brisk walk along chilly city streets—it is a face of almost childlike wonder.

127 minutes. $39.95. www.criterion.com.

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) covers one night in the lives of young Native Americans living in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill district. Mackenzie began interviewing a group of Indians in Los Angeles in 1956 and secured their support in producing an independent film that would provide a realistic portrayal of their community’s daily life. The film was completed in 1961 but has rarely been seen until its restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and its subsequent theatrical release by Milestone.

The Exiles follows a group of young Native American men as they essentially forsake their women for a night on the town, meeting up with friends at bars, cavorting with other women, venturing into the hills for drinking, drumming and fighting. They make their way along a circuit of Indian hangouts, small oases in a white man’s city where they can be together and, hopefully, left alone to be themselves. Meanwhile, a lonely wife goes to the movies and finally returns to the home of a friend so that she doesn’t have to sleep alone. In the morning she is able to watch as her husband and his friends finally stumble home drunk through the streets of Bunker Hill.

The rough, gritty, low-budget aesthetic recalls Shadows, John Cassavetes’ first film, set in New York. Both films feel loose and improvised, giving the impression of an authentic depiction of a place and time. And both focus attention on the cities themselves, using the urban landscapes as contexts for the lives of the characters, while also providing a sort of snapshot of a city at a particular point in time.

Milestone is a small company that picks and chooses its material, often sinking much of the company’s resources into a single theatrical and DVD release. The company is responsible for making some rare and important films available to the movie-going public, including I Am Cuba and Killer of Sheep—an impressive streak of significant releases that continues with The Exiles.

72 minutes. $29.95. www.exilesfilm.com. www.milestonefilms.com.

New Releases From Kino Appeal to the Cinephile

Avant-Garde 3 (1922-1955)

Kino has released the third in its series of avant-garde films, this newest editi

on containing 20 films produced between 1922 and 1955. These collections feature rare but valuable films that demonstrate the outer reaches of cinema, a seemingly boundless medium in the hands of artists making films with no consideration for the commercial market—art for art’s sake. Avant-Garde 3 draws from the collections of Raymond Rohauer and George Eastman House in an effort “to illuminate the degree to which cinema’s evolution has been influenced by those filmmakers who occupy its periphery.”

In addition to its historical value, Avant-Garde 3, like its predecessors, provides a fascinating, eccentric and eclectic viewing experience. The films range in length from two minutes to 65 minutes and in subject matter from Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to home movies.

$29.95. www.kino.com.

How to be a Woman and How to be a Man (1950s)

A series of 1950s short educational films provides an instructive glance at who we once were and what we thought our children should be—and how they should be taught what they should be.

These films from Kino can be seen in several ways. At the simplest level, they’re entertaining, both on their own merits and as a time capsule of film production techniques and acting styles. But one cannot help but ask questions

as well. For instance, do these films represent a progressive embrace of a new medium, designed to tackle tough topics in a way teacher-student and parent-child interactions could not? Or do they mark the beginning of the abnegation of these duties, of a tendency to let the screen—first film and later television—to impart the lessons of adulthood? It’s a strange lesson indeed, to remove person-to-person contact from instruction in person-to-person

conduct.

$19.95 each. www.kino.com.

Gaumont Treasures 1897–1913

Kino has released another in its series of historical film collections. Following on such impressive and important releases as The Movies Begin and the Thomas Edison collection, the company has put together a

three-disc set called Gaumont Treasures 1897–1913, compiling more than 75 films from the early French studi

o, the Gaumont Film Company.

Each disc is devoted to one of Gaumont’s esteemed artistic directors. Disc one features the work of Alice Guy, whose contribution to the evolution of the art form places her among the ranks of Edwin Porter and her fellow countrymen George Melies and the Lumiere Brothers. The 60 films on this disc range in length from a few seconds to two and three reels and include early experiments in sound and hand-coloring.

Disc two features the work of Louis Feuillade, best known for Les Vampires and as an early mentor to Abel Gance. Though Feuillade made nearly 800 films for Gaumont, relatively few survive. This collection of 13 films includes his work in a range of genres, including comedy, tragedy, fantasy, social commentary and historical epic.

Disc three showcases the work of Leonce Perret, a man who had a profound impact on the advancement of French cinema but whose work is largely unknown in the United States. This set contains two films, the 43-minute Mystery of the Rocks of Kador, and the 124-minute Child of Paris, in which Perret demonstrated a mastery of the form that critic Georges Sadoul claimed was more expert and refined than that of the celebrated D.W. Griffith.

$79.95. www.kino.com.

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.