The Continuing Adventures of Scott Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scorsese and the Stones: Shine a Light

You may ask, Why another Rolling Stones concert film? Aren’t they a tad past their prime? And haven’t these guys had enough camera time over the past 45 years? 

The answer is simple: Not only is it unprecedented for a rock ’n’ roll band to stay together this long, to keep recording and performing well into their 60s, but the Stones are undoubtedly a better live band today than they’ve ever been. 

Martin Scorsese’s new concert film, Shine a Light, showing at Shattuck Cinemas and in an IMAX version at San Francisco’s Metreon, captures the latter-day Stones in its current incarnation as the hardest-working band in show business. 

The dynamics of the band’s performances have changed over the years, and at nearly every significant stage of their development they’ve had a great director drop in to document the proceedings. In the early 1960s they were a British white-boy blues band, with much of their repertoire drawn from the songbooks of their Chicago blues idols: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy. By the late ’60s, the band was something quite different, having carved out its own identity with a unique sound that blended their influences into an idiosyncratic new brand of rock. The band’s image had grown darker, and their live shows began to take on a somewhat menacing air—the Stones seemed genuinely dangerous. The era reached its conclusion with the infamous free concert at Altamont in which a man was murdered by Hell’s Angels right in front of the stage, a harrowing moment caught on film in the first of the great films about the Stones, Gimme Shelter. 

By the early ’70s the aura of danger had faded a bit, and the Stones took on an air of camp rock ’n’ roll decadence, dabbling in reggae and disco, glitter and makeup, and staging ever more outrageous live performances. Once again, they were put on the big screen in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. In the 1980s, the Stones set out on rock’s first stadium tour, proving that even while pushing 40, they were still the biggest band in the world, and the great director Hal Ashby caught it all on film in Let’s Spend the Night Together. Since that time, as the band morphed into a smoothly run global enterprise, they’ve been competently filmed by a variety of lesser-known directors for the band’s various DVD releases. 

But here they get another great director, one able to go beyond the mechanics and craft of a concert film to strive for something more, to attempt to capture the essence of a live performance and transform it into something distinctly cinematic. 

Critics have complained that Shine a Light isn’t a documentary, that it neither seeks nor provides much insight into the inner workings of the band and the secret to its longevity. These critics are missing the point. There is no shortage of documentaries about the band’s storied career. Perhaps it is true that the definitive Stones documentary has yet to be made, and perhaps Scorsese, coming off well-received films about Bob Dylan and blues, is just the man to do it. But this is not that film. Here Scorsese is simply interested in the performance itself. The Stones have never been particularly introspective, never sentimental, never prone to dwelling on the past. Thus it is entirely fitting that Shine a Light should simply focus on the moment. 

A good concert film first requires a good concert, but more than that it requires an understanding of what makes that concert good. Most of the ingredients are here: a great band at the peak of its form; a great venue, New York’s Beacon Theater, intimate and packed to the rafters; and a great director to capture it all. What is missing from Shine a Light is a true Stones crowd. The occasion was a benefit concert for Global Warming Awareness, with Bill and Hillary Clinton and their vast entourage taking up the center of one balcony. But the real problem is the floor crowd, which Scorsese decided to fill with a bevy of photogenic 20-something women—hardly the Stones’ prime demographic these days. As a result, much of the first few rows are filled with young fillies more focused on being photographed than on the band and the music. Their conspicuous placement and posturing only detracts from the film. 

Still, you’ve never seen such a beautifully photographed concert. Scorsese matches the movement of his cameras to the pace of the band, following guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood around the stage, registering the crack of Charlie Watts’ tightly controlled drumming, and relentlessly pursuing singer Mick Jagger as Jagger relentlessly pursues the audience. Scorsese built a team of top-notch cinematographers to man the 17 cameras that relentlessly traverse the theater to keep pace with the whirling dervish that is Jagger. Low-angle shots transform the lights and ceilings into a dizzying pattern that swirls above the heads of the band as they roam the stage and dart in and out along the catwalk. Close-ups of the guitarists give a glimpse of the band’s unique dual-guitar attack, in which both trade off playing lead and rhythm. And plenty of screen time is given to the cast of backing musicians, most of whom have been touring with the Rolling Stones for at least 20 years, and, in the case of saxophonist Bobby Keyes, for nearly 40. 

And Scorsese never loses sight of the crowd, keeping them dappled in warm light and misty shadow, as much a part of the tableau as the gilded theater and set design. 

Though the set list begins and ends with stalwart Stones classics, 12 of the concert’s 18 songs are lesser-known or at least less-often-performed tracks. After the behind-the-scenes prologue, which, in the IMAX version, is projected at standard movie size, the frame immediately expands to full IMAX size at the first notes of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and the frenetic pace, rapid editing and flashing lights make the experience a bit overwhelming. But things settle down a bit with “Shattered,” as the Stones settle into gear and highlight album tracks and overlooked gems, with a special emphasis on 1978’s Some Girls album. And in between, Scorsese peppers the film with brief archival clips from interviews with the Stones through the decades, most of them adding a light comedic touch to the proceedings. There is just one misstep, as Scorsese interrupts Richards’ rendition of the rarely performed “Connection” with clips of interviews with the guitarist. 

Fittingly, the one moment where Scorsese’s restless camera comes to a stop, if only for a few seconds, is for a prolonged close-up of guest star Buddy Guy. Fitting because Guy, as one of the still-living icons of the Chicago blues sound of the 1950s, is at the very center of what the Stones are all about. He joins them for a cover of “Champagne and Reefer,” a song by the great Muddy Waters, the man who more than anyone else inspired the Stones’ music and identity. They even took their name from a Waters song. Sure, most of their signature riffs are based on the guitar work of Chuck Berry, and there were myriad other influences along the way. But it was Waters, along with the rest of the electrified, urban, plugged-in Chicago blues masters, that led the way for a quintet of English white boys in the early 1960s. 

The Stones have always been loyal to those roots and paid homage to them, sharing the stage with their idols and helping to bring greater fame to those elder gentlemen, even when it means getting blown off the stage by them. For all of Jagger’s manic energy and cheeky posturing, for all Keith Richards’ swaggering attitude, it is Buddy Guy who summons the essence of the hard, driven sound that inspired them, with his deft, soulful guitar work and powerful, resonant voice. As Guy solos, standing firmly at center stage, the band circles him, surrounding the man like worshippers paying tribute to the sound and spirit which launched them on their five-decade journey.

The Talkies Learn to Move: Pabst's Threepenny Opera

When Bertolt Brecht and G.W. Pabst decided to collaborate in bringing the former's Threepenny Opera to the screen, both men were at the peak of their careers. But the collaboration would be anything but smooth. Indeed it was fraught with conflict, as so many Brecht projects were.

The film has just been released on DVD by Criterion in a two-disc edition that features a beautiful transfer of the German film along with a host of features, including commentary by film scholars David Bathrick and Eric Rentschler, the French version of the film, and a documentary and essay on the adaptation from stage to screen.

Brecht drafted the original screenplay, but delivered something far different than he was asked for. Rather than simply bringing the original play to the screen, he drastically altered it, adding and removing scenes, rearranging the structure, and greatly altering the content and focus of the tale.

Brecht had already clashed with composer Kurt Weill over the play itself, each man claiming credit for the production's success. Now he clashed with Pabst, who took Brecht's script and bent it to his own aims. But as Bathrick and Rentschler point out in the disc's commentary track, the two men may not have been so far apart as they claimed. Each was perhaps reluctant to credit the other with the film's better qualities and reserved the right to scapegoat the other should the critics be unkind.

Shortchanged by the film, however, is Kurt Weill, for few of his compositions made it onto the screen.

The final product, though it may bear relatively little resemblance to the stage production, is an excellent film and a milestone of early sound cinema. Pabst often replaces scenes of dialogue with imagery, with long gazes, with near-silent shots in which the actors convey the plot without words. 

And at a time when the camera had been rendered almost stagnant by cumbersome sound equipment, Pabst's camera roams through the sets with fluidity and ease. If the camerawork at times seem similar to Fritz Lang's M, released that same year, there is good reason: Both films were shot by legendary cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner.

There are other similarities between the two films. Both examine the criminal underworld, and do so with a blend of humor, intrigue and distaste. And both feature wonderfully sustained sequences of cat-and-mouse amid the squalid streets. One image in Threepenny Opera is especially striking: One of Mack the Knife's henchmen has stolen an armchair and is running through the streets with police in pursuit. He crosses a courtyard, invisible beneath the chair, looking like an ant carrying its booty back to the nest. He scurries across the courtyard and out of view, only to appear again with the police right behind him, firing bullets into the upholstery.

In America, the reaction to synchronized sound technology had been extreme. The first couple of years worth of American sound films were filled with wall-to-wall talk; the audience was rarely given a break from the endless chatter of showgirls and dandy men about town. It seemed everyone was a wit, armed with a ready punchline for every situation. In Germany, by contrast, sound was being used more judiciously and with greater sophistication. Filmmakers like Pabst and Lang did not give up the virtues of the more image-focused cinema of silent pictures. Rather than treating sound as an end in itself, they used it as a means to an end, as another tool in the creation of compelling cinema. Sound was used as atmosphere, or fused into the story as a plot point, and often employed in one sequence merely to draw greater attention to the silence of another sequence.

The result is a film of richness and depth, with sound and image combining in the creation of a sharply rendered underworld. The words of Brecht, the music of Weill, the images of Pabst and Wagner — a fruitful collaboration of some of Germany's greatest talents.

Threepenny Opera. $39.95. Criterion Collection. www.criterion.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. 

The Surreal and Subversive World of Busby Berkeley

The films of Busby Berkeley are rendered in the popular imagination as naïve and silly entertainments from a simpler time, from a bygone era of innocence, frivolity and wholly unsophisticated audiences. This notion is not only false, it gives short shrift to the director and to the moviegoers who flocked to his films. 

In the 1930s films of Busby Berkeley the plot is merely a hook on which to hang the director-choreographer’s surreal musical sequences—interludes of imaginative and often highly subversive sexual fantasies. 

Six of Berkeley’s best-known movies have recently been released in a box set, "The Busby Berkeley Collection," and a careful viewing of these early musicals dispels any lingering notions of their innocence. 

Movie musicals began with the advent of reliable sound technology in the late 1920s, which sent the industry into a tailspin as the major studios hastily adopted the new medium. 

Though there are examples of extraordinary filmmaking during this era, they are few and far between. For the most part, the earliest talkies were awkward and clumsy, and hardly any them are remembered today, other than as examples of the pitfalls of the new technology. 

Much of this was due to the physical demands of the equipment. The boom microphone hadn’t been invented, so large mics had to be somehow concealed on the set, and actors had to do their best to direct their voices toward them. And the camera, which was quite noisy, had to be engulfed in blimp-like wrapping to silence it, or placed inside a sound-proof booth, filming the action from behind a plate-glass window. Both techniques essentially immobilized the camera, rendering the early talkies static and stagebound. 

This is the context from which sprang the Hollywood musical. Early musicals were essentially filmed stage productions, with the camera placed dead center in the equivalent of the front row and the actors and dancers paraded back and forth before its gaze. And that was enough—for a while. Audiences were drawn by the spectacle, by the novelty of sound, and of course by the allure of Hollywood chorus girls. 

Then came Busby Berkeley. 

Before making the move to Hollywood, Berkeley had made a name for himself as a choreographer in a string of successful New York stage productions. Once in the movie business he quickly expanded his role, first taking over the direction of his musical numbers and then assuming control of the films themselves. 

Berkeley wasn’t much of a director when there was no music. In fact, he was quite mediocre. It’s unclear whether he simply had no talent for handling actors and dialogue or simply didn’t care enough to bother. But once the music started, there was no one like him. He exploited every device and angle that cinema afforded him. 

Berkeley presented dancers in vast groups, in multitudes swirling about in shifting geometric patterns. More often than not these multitudes featured dozens of identically and scantily clad ingenues in pulsating patterns, with the camera dollying smoothly and suggestively toward and through them. Film critic David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, describes Berkeley as having revealed cinema’s “ready, lascivious disposition toward orgy.” 

Gold Diggers of 1935 was made shortly after the industry began enforcing the Production Code, Hollywood’s attempt to appease the federal government by a method of self-censorship. It laid down strict rules of morality for film content: villains were to be punished; good must always triumph over evil; loose women should learn the error of their ways or at least be made to face dire consequences, etc. A director could manage to smuggle in some immoral behavior here and there, as long as it was questioned or punished by the film’s end. 

There were plenty of directors who flouted these rules, slipping subtle innuendo into their films. But no one subverted the code more ostentatiously than Berkeley. 

By the time Gold Diggers was made, sound technology had advanced significantly, with boom mics and a mobile cameras allowing Berkeley to expand his canvas. Though it is neither the film’s biggest nor most famous number, the “Words in My Heart” sequence is one of Berkeley’s most fascinating. The song features dozens of virginal upper-class society girls, dressed in white and seated primly at pearly white baby grand pianos, all swirling and spinning in ecstatic little pirouettes amid a sea of blackness. As they move about, the group takes on various shapes, at one point aligning themselves in two columns which recede into the distance. The two lines begin to move apart and together again in sensuous undulations as the camera pulls back, essentially taking on the appearance of a sort of animated Georgia O’Keefe painting. 

This would be suggestive enough, but Berkeley takes it a step further. For if you look closely, under each of those pianos is a pair of black-clad legs, the legs of dozens of men who are essentially carrying the pianos on their backs, propelling these young belles around the floor. The furtiveness of their placement, along with the positioning of the their bodies in relationship to the women, suggests far more than one might suspect at first glance. 

The fact that these men are visible is not an accident. Special effects were quite sophisticated by the early 1920s. This is not a case of a director clumsily revealing the mechanics of his technique. Berkeley chose to make those men visible, chose to incorporate them into the dance, chose to allow reflections on the black floor to bring out their silhouettes. With Freudian flair, he quite deliberately placed them beneath the gleaming, shimmering surfaces of lovely white pianos and lovely white ladies. 

The song is followed a few minutes later by the film’s climactic sequence, Winy Shaw’s Oscar-winning performance of “Lullaby of Broadway.” Again, the segment is typical Berkeley: A swarm of dancers parades across vast Art Deco sets, drawing Shaw into their whirlwind of movement. But the sequence ends abruptly as Shaw falls from a balcony to her death. It’s difficult to interpret this development: Was Berkeley bowing to the Production Code? Or was he satirizing the code? Or was it just a tragic little melodrama with no greater consideration? 

Perhaps it was meant to appease the censors, not for Wini Shaw’s devil-may-care frolic among the chorus, but for the racy “Words in My Heart” sequence that preceded it. 

In the depths of the depression, Hollywood provided glossy, escapist movies which sought to entertain audiences by returning them to the heady days of the 1920s, to the days of jazz, flappers and prosperity, an era when the theories of Sigmund Freud were in vogue. And in that generation of directors, there was no one more giddily Freudian than Busby Berkeley. 

"The Busby Berkeley Collection," featuring Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933, Dames, 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1935, as well as bonus features, including a compilation of more than 20 complete musical numbers from nine of Berkeley’s Warner Bros. films of the 1930s. Warner Home Video. Unrated. $59.98.

PFA Presents The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy

Jacques Demy has taken a lot of hits over the years. He was a man who attempted to make movies for everyone, yet he was never what people wanted him to be. He wasn’t political enough, wasn’t edgy enough, wasn’t rebellious enough.

But his critics were often missing the point. Demy did not aspire to be political, edgy or rebellious. He did not attempt to portray characters burdened with the world’s problems. He didn’t look for timely themes, didn’t try to capture a moment in history. Demy was more concerned with the timeless themes of love, happiness and heartache; he merely wanted to show people swept up in the joy and agony of love.

Pacific Film Archive is seeking to rectify these misconceptions with “The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy,” a series of five of his films, as well as Jacquot, a documentary about the director made by his wife, filmmaker Agnes Varda. The series began Thursday and runs through Sunday.

Demy’s first film, Lola, was greeted with praise by his contemporaries. Lola embodied so much of what the French New Wave embraced: young French people in modern, realistic locales, facing real-life dilemmas, sprinkled with references to American movies and culture.

The New Wave was about aesthetics and attitude; its characters shared a certain disaffection with or alienation from their surroundings. Demy’s work shares the referential nature of the New Wave; his films are steeped in Hollywood lore and mannerisms, but he doesn’t share the New Wave’s alienation and rebelliousness. For while Demy’s characters may become restless and disenchanted with their surroundings, all it takes is a little affection from the opposite sex to rekindle their excitement with the world—much too bourgeois for the New Wave.

Lola’s male lead, Roland (Marc Michel), is lost and wandering through life, as are his counterparts in such New Wave classics as Francois Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Band of Outsiders. But there is no grand meaning or sociological statement behind Roland’s predicament—he’s just lazy. And lonely. He wanders from job to job and cafe to cafe, but he’s not looking for a religion, a political cause, or for fulfillment through work. Nor is he searching for identity, really. He is simply looking for love. And yes, it is through companionship that he hopes to find meaning and fulfillment, but this is almost an afterthought; Roland more or less just wants to be happy.

Though Lola has all the trappings of the New Wave, it is at odds with the movement in that its story is at its root a simple one. Demy is not trying to make a grand statement, he is only trying to make a movie about love lost, found and lost again.

Demy was also at odds with the political motivations of the Left Bank school of thought, of which Varda's work was a cornerstone. Once again, somewhat by chance, he had become associated with a school of filmmaking to whose tenets he did not adhere, and this misunderstanding of his work and his aspirations again led to criticism. His films are not about politics; they are about love, romance, dreams and failure, all wrapped up in a layer of escapism.

And this informs one of the central premises behind Demy’s work: that pain and loss go down better with a layer of frosting. His films are light, fluffy confections of infectious music, swirling emotions and bright, lovely faces surrounded by bright, lovely colors.

The actors in Demy’s films are young, beautiful and full of dreams and longing, and it is difficult not to fall for them. The women—from Anouk Aimée’s Lola to Catherine Deneuve’s Genevieve to Ellen Farner’s Madeleine and even Annie Dupéroux’s precocious 14-year-old Cécile—are without fail lovely and engaging and easily draw empathy from the audience.

Unlike Godard’s heroines, who often have a certain detached aura, Demy’s women have more in common with the flushed-faced excitable young belles of Hollywood’s heyday. Demy’s actresses evince the fresh, bubbly wholesomeness of the Hollywood starlets of the ‘40s and ‘50s while managing to convey much of the moodiness, sultriness and complexity of America’s leading ladies of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

The men likewise are compelling, though Roland at times seems a bit too bland to be fully engaging. Guy on the other hand, in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with his gentle, soulful eyes and all-around good-guy qualities, is a sympathetic character from the start.

In 1967 Demy pursued Gene Kelly as star and choreographer for The Young Girls of Rochefort. Kelly, already in his mid 50s, was well past his song-and-dance prime and was working primarily as a director. Bringing him back in front of the camera in a French musical may have seemed like an odd decision at the time, but it was a perfectly logical extension of Demy’s work. Demy was a great admirer of Hollywood’s golden age of musicals, and Kelly especially embodied much of the creative spirit Demy sought for his films.

Check out Kelly’s musicals of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s and you can see the influence they had on Demy. Kelly was fascinated with dreams and fantasy, placing in each of his great films extended show-stopping dream sequences full of color, dance and romance. On The Town features a balletic demonstration of love and longing; An American in Paris shows the whirlwind of emotions of a couple in love amid the joy and glamor of Gay Paree; and Singin’ in the Rain features an episodic sequence filled with bright, splashy colors as his Don Lockwood character goes from rags to riches to lovelorn in 10 minutes of highly stylized fantasy.

There is a satisfying thread that runs through the PFA series. Umbrellas, strong on its own merits, is all the more engaging when you have seen Lola, which gives you the full import of the character of Roland—his wandering spirit, his lost love, and all the pain and shiftlessness that leads him to Genevieve and to the profession of diamond-selling. And Model Shop likewise gives the audience a chance to follow up on Lola’s title character, catching up with her after she has left France and made her way to Los Angeles.

To see these films together makes clear what so many of Demy’s critics missed: that he was in fact a filmmaker of great originality and integrity. He may not have been the director some wanted him to be, but he stayed true to his vision, making simple, emotional movies about simple, emotional people, regardless of the politics, trends and preferences of his era.

The Enchanting World of Jacques Demy.

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.