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.

B-Movie Shakespeare: Orson Welles' Macbeth

With just a few exceptions, when we talk about an Orson Welles film we talk about a tangled mess of topics all at once. We talk about the film as it exists and the film as it might have been; we talk about intentions and motivations, disagreements and compromises, edits and changes; we talk about artistic integrity versus commercial considerations, about the rights of the artist contrasted with the rights of studios, stockholders, producers and distributors.

When left to his own devices—or, more accurately, the devices of himself and his chosen collaborators—Welles created great cinema. Yet Citizen Kane is perhaps the only one of his films to reach theaters entirely without compromise. A couple of others survived with only compromised production values as opposed to compromised content, but most of the Welles filmography is the story of films that are at best approximations, and at worst mere remnants, of the dreams that gave birth to them.

The Orson Welles of caricature—of bloated budgets and extended, meandering production schedules—would come later. In the 1940s his films were produced in the same manner in which he had produced his stage and radio projects. Budgets were relatively small, schedules were adhered to (though always pushed to the last second); planning and rehearsals were thorough but open to last-minute changes and improvisations. And in this climate he produced two of his greatest works: Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

After Kane nearly brought down RKO studios in 1941 by taking on William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful media mogul of his day, Welles’ career took an unexpected turn. Though RKO and Welles survived the battle with Hearst, the studio became wary of its star director. But it was ultimately the gloom of Ambersons and the freewheeling experimentalism of Welles’ South American documentary project It’s All True that finally derailed Welles, and he spent the next few years struggling to win back the trust of his benefactors.

His reputation—some say justly, some unjustly—became that of a troublemaker, an arrogant, budget-busting, non-commercial maverick. Having conquered Broadway at 20, radio at 21 and film at 24, he was not used to failure, or to playing the supplicant. And he must have found it galling that he, whose genius had always included the successful marriage of commercial entertainment with high art, should be branded an unbankable risk.

The Stranger (1944) was a purely commercial product, delivered on time and under budget for International Pictures. With the exception of a few flourishes here and there, it is the least Wellesian of his films and thus the least interesting. Lady From Shanghai (1947) was begun as payback for a loan that Columbia Studios chief Harry Cohn had given Welles for one of his stage productions. Shanghai too was a commercial film, with a few twists. But it was those unwanted twists that angered Cohn, who re-edited much of it and added a cheap score.

It was at this time that Welles, looking to find a studio that would back him as RKO had with Kane, joined Republic Studios, a low-budget producer of B movies, mostly westerns. Republic was willing to support a pet project of his: a stark, spare adaptation of Macbeth. Shakespeare was Welles' foundation as an artist: As a teenager he had published a series of guidebooks for adapting the works of the Bard to the modern stage, and as a young man he had made his reputation with the so-called “voodoo Macbeth,” a Roosevelt-era public works project in which he staged a sensational Haitian version of the play in Harlem with an all-black cast consisting mostly of first-time actors. Shakespearian tragedy underlies much of Welles’ self-written dramas, and he would return to the plays themselves on stage, radio and screen for much of his life.

Welles concocted a multi-faceted approach to the new Macbeth that would hold down expenses while maximizing rehearsal. He took a cast consisting largely of players from his own Mercury Theater on the road to Salt Lake City, where they would stage the play three times a day for four days as part of the Utah Centennial Festival. The festival would pick up the tab for the costumes, Republic would pay for the sets. When the theatrical run was over, the company would adjourn to the studio where, with three cameras operating at all times, shooting several scenes simultanously with the actors miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack, they would shoot the film in just three weeks. It would be a semi-radical but inexpensive experiment in stripped-down, streamlined filmmaking. (This is in marked contrast to his next project, the nomadic, globe-trotting four-year odyssey that would become Othello.)

Welles first adapted Macbeth to a screenplay, using his own guidebooks to fashion a dramatic restructuring of the play, emphasizing the witchcraft and heightening the horror and melodrama in the creation of a sort of high-art B picture. It is not so much an adaptation as a re-imagining, for Welles had no interest in simply filming the play; his goal was to rediscover much of the brash, barnstorming fun and frolic of Shakespeare, qualities he felt had been lost over decades of stuffy academization of the Bard. His intent was to use Macbeth as a starting point for something quite different, for something purely cinematic. He then adapted the screenplay to the stage for the Utah performances.

Much of Welles’ vaunted innovation throughout his career stemmed from necessity, from improvisation in the face of less than perfect circumstances. His radio shows conjured whole worlds on a merciless weekly deadline; the shadowy photography of Kane was conceived primarily as a method of concealing the lack of sets; and the staging of a famous scene in Othello amid the swirling steam of a Turkish bath was another inspired bit of improvisation, compensating for the fact that Welles’ supplier failed to deliver the costumes. From the beginning, Macbeth was essentially built on a framework of improvisation amid low-budget circumstances, its design consisting of papier-maché sets rising above a bare soundstage, its staging and photographic angles organized around the necessities of the quick three-camera shooting schedule.

Republic released the film in Europe to good reviews, but tested it only in select cities in America. They had already required Welles to cut about 20 minutes from it, but now they cut still more and insisted that as much of the dialogue as possible be re-recorded without the Scottish accents. (Welles had sought to return the play to its roots by abandoning the hybrid English accents that had become standard for interpretations of Shakespeare with a Scottish burr.) When this highly compromised version was finally officially released in the States after a lengthy delay, critical reception was largely hostile. While some of the footage has been replaced since then, and the Scottish-accent soundtrack restored, the film, like so many other Welles films, is still not quite the film he intended.

The film still draws mixed reviews. Joseph McBride, one of Welles’ most sympathetic biographers, bemoans the lack of subtlety of Welles in the title role, the weakness of Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth, and what he considers the budget-hampered photographic style, in which the actors move more than the camera. Meanwhile, David Thomson, generally one of Welles’ more critical biographers, describes the acting as “heartfelt and liberated” and flatly states that “no film since Kane had had so profoundly organized or expressive a photographic style.”

Welles’ films, like the man himself, retain the power to polarize his most ardent fans, even after 60 years.

Theater and Magic: The World of Orson Welles

The myth of Orson Welles has outlived its usefulness. The man has long since passed on, as have those who sought to undermine his achievements. He was jealously branded by Hollywood as the wunderkind-turned-enfant terrible of the cinema, the man who took on a media titan, and Hollywood itself, in Citizen Kane and then squandered his own career with his proclivity for self-destruction and artistic excess. The standard line on Welles was that he created just that single masterpiece before embarking on a long downward slide.

However, reports of the artist’s slow-motion death have been greatly exaggerated. Though there’s an element of truth in the criticism of Welles—he was, by most accounts brash, difficult and at times self-destructive, yet immeasurably charming—the decline was not in his work but in his relations with those who controlled the purse strings and the means of production; artistically he remained vital until his death in 1985.

Pacific Film Archive will present a retrospective covering all of the director’s major cinematic work, in roughly chronological order, through April 13. Citizen Kane shows tonight (Friday) at 7 p.m.; his follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, screens Saturday at 5 p.m.

Much of the criticism of Welles, now as well as then, stems from a profound misunderstanding of the man and of his art. While it is true that Welles was a restless innovator, his innovations were, for the most part, at the service of a classicist’s art. He was far more conservative in his sentiments and affections than the image of the bold, relentless, iconoclastic youth of Kane would indicate.

To begin to understand the trajectory of Welles’ career, one must keep in mind the polarities of his influences: traditional theater and magic.

Welles was an accomplished magician, often performing tricks for cast and crew. And during World War II he traveled the country performing for the troops and sawing Marlene Dietrich in half before their very eyes. He was a consummate showman who took great pleasure in startling and dazzling an audience.

But he was also a serious actor, writer and director, trained in the classics of literature and theater from a very young age. As the creative force behind the Mercury Theater in New York in the 1930s, he forged his reputation, at the age of 20, by reviving classic works with a bold, modernist aesthetic. And on radio, with the Mercury Theater on the Air, he focused on the same sort of material, adapting the classics to one-hour and half-hour dramas. (His groundbreaking theater career may survive only in photographs and second-hand accounts, but virtually all of Welles’ surviving radio work can be found on the Internet, cheap if not free, in MP3 format.)

But Welles’ traditionalism was often overshadowed in the public mind by his showmanship, by his attention-getting forays into more melodramatic projects. While he established his presence on radio as the original voice of The Shadow and presented his share of thrillers on stage and on radio, the bulk of Welles’ oeuvre, in every medium in which he worked, was far more serious in intent and execution.

It was his radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds that really launched the myth. The controversial broadcast relocated the Martian invasion from England to New Jersey and presented the drama as a series of breaking news announcements interrupting “our regularly scheduled program.” The show set off a nationwide panic that might have destroyed any other director’s career; instead it earned the Mercury a sponsor (the program would soon be renamed the Campbell Playhouse) and earned him the chance to make a movie.

The result was Citizen Kane, a brash, bold film that featured Welles’ trademark blend of commercial entertainment, high art and sleight-of-hand chicanery. Its effrontery to everything Hollywood was evident in every shot; Welles ostentatiously brandished his mastery of the medium: unusual camera angles; dramatic visual and thematic contrasts; complex tapestries of sound; long takes followed by startling cuts and transitions; and of course Greg Toland’s deep-focus photography. For better and for worse, the film made Welles’ reputation: a showman with pretensions to Art.

He would go on to complete just 11 more films, several of them truly great, most of them groundbreaking, and at least one or two fascinating failures. Many of them were taken away from him and re-edited without his input or consent; some were hampered from the start by low budgets and a lack of resources as a result of Welles’ self-imposed exile in Europe as an independent filmmaker. But if one fact stands out above all in PFA's restrospective, it is that Welles never stood still stylistically. Though every film is stamped with his peculiar visual style, his body of work ranges from expressionist to classical, from period pieces to modern-day noir, from Shakespeare to documentary and personal essay.

The film that might have been his true masterpiece came immediately after Kane. The story of the making and unmaking of The Magnificent Ambersons is nearly as tragic as the film itself. Welles rather faithfully adapted Booth Tarkington’s novel, using a style much more restrained and fluid than the genre-busting flash and disjointed narrative pyrotechnics of Kane. The result, as Francois Truffaut put it, is a film “made in violent contrast to Citizen Kane, almost as if by another filmmaker who detested the first and wanted to give him a lesson in modesty.”

Ambersons is a nostalgic dream dissolving into a jaded, weary reality check, a portrait of a vanishing epoch, of the passing of time and the coming of change. To modern eyes, it may seem like an old-fashioned Hollywood film; it is stately and somber and lavish in design. Even a film as showy as Kane may, in these times, require an educated eye to fully appreciate its innovation and audacity, but Ambersons can be even more vexing to the modern viewer, for the workings of its innovations are carefully concealed. Welles wasn’t aiming for shock and awe with this film, as he was with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast and, to some extent, with Kane; he was instead offering a beautifully crafted and seamless film, rich in novelistic detail, which employed its innovations purely in the service of the tale.

Welles borrowed many techniques from his predecessors, including the iris—a common device from the silent era—and images burnished at the edges, like the more sentimental works of D.W. Griffith. He also incorporated much of his radio experience, narrating the film himself as he did in his Mercury broadcasts and using radio’s bridging musical cues to provide fluid transitions between scenes. Also evident are elements of classic theater, such as the gossiping townsfolk who act as a sort of Greek chorus.

Ambersons employed Welles’ much-vaunted long takes, his camera dancing along with the guests in the ballroom scene or gazing patiently as the delicate psyche of Agnes Moorehead’s Aunt Fanny finally collapses in the kitchen scene. And Welles’ editing talents came to the fore once again, most evidently in the opening montage that establishes the setting with humor and delicate irony. As in all of Welles’ best work, he brought together a wide range of styles and influences and melded them into a personal vision of great depth and complexity, but this time the seams and stagecraft were more carefully hidden from view.

RKO previewed the film for an audience, and though the comment cards contained many remarks that were ecstatic, many more were severely critical. It was war time, and the average moviegoer wanted escapism, not gloom. The studio panicked and, while Welles was shooting another film in Brazil, began to carve away at his most personal film. Nearly an hour’s worth of footage was scrapped; several scenes were re-shot, re-written or re-edited; and an attempt at a happy ending was tacked on. In the words of critic David Thomson, it is a film “so dark and mournful that it would not be shown properly to the American public.” It’s a testament to the power of Welles’ vision that the butchered 88-minute film is still widely considered a masterpiece.

Shooting scripts, memos, photographs and first-hand accounts provide a fairly complete picture of what is missing from the film as it exists today. In addition to the original ending, the loss of one particular scene is especially galling: As the family’s fortunes decline, young George takes one last walk through the decaying mansion as the camera follows in one long, unbroken take. The shot went on for several minutes, allowing the character time to mourn the passing of an era as he moves through each room, past pieces of furniture shrouded in sheets like the ghosts of ballroom dances past. It was a technical tour de force, with crew members frantically pulling apart sets and doorways and sliding others into place and laying dolly tracks just beyond the view of the camera as it traveled through the house. It is the essence of the art of Orson Welles: the magician’s hand, deft and graceful and invisible in the creation of a seamless and elegant illusion.

Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone is often thought of as an ironic filmmaker, a mischievous genre deconstructionist. But though his films have plenty of humor and wit, they also contain great beauty and depth and insight. Though he may have worked most famously in a genre largely considered pulp—the Western—Leone was one of the great cinematic artists.

Pacific Film Archive is presenting seven of Leone’s best films, starting Saturday and running through Oct. 28.

Leone is best known for his films with Clint Eastwood, the so-called “spaghetti westerns” in which the director deconstructed and built upon the traditions of a uniquely American genre. The “Dollars Trilogy” culminated in perhaps his most beloved film, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967). But his masterpiece is Once Upon a Time in the West, (1968) a nearly three-hour epic that re-imagines the great myths and imagery of western expansion.

Leone did not merely deconstruct and caricature the Western, he revitalized it, bringing a greater depth and mystery to its vistas and villains. He delved into the roots of the form’s archetypes, digging up the primal thoughts, emotions and characters that inhabited the landscape. And then he magnified it all; he distilled the genre to its essence and then spread it on thick in deep sepia tones.

But it is the faces of his characters, even more than the dramatic Monument Valley backdrop, that provide Once Upon a Time in the West’s most enduring images. Leone deepened the impact of the close-up, juxtaposing and equating the rugged terrain of the landscape with the equally rugged terrain of the human face, each giving greater significance to the other. The eyes of his sweat-soaked, sun-scarred outlaws reflect the landscape and imbue it with meaning, and the landscape shapes the characters who survey it.

Though the widescreen format is ideal for shooting vast panoramic landscapes, it poses problems for photographing people. Close-ups must crop the face above the eye, and yet they still leave wide swaths of wasted open space on either side. Leone made use of these limitations, however, bringing his camera in even tighter and expertly balancing close-up faces on one side of the frame with open vistas on the other.

Leone’s masterful use of the widescreen format is particularly evident in the scene where Jill arrives at the McBain ranch to find the bodies of her husband and his children laid out on tables in the dooryard. The body of her husband, his head in the lower left corner of the frame, slants upwards across the frame to where Jill’s grief-stricken face is positioned in the upper right. Across the frame to the left of her is a group of attentive neighbors dressed in black, and behind them the rugged hills as backdrop. In one expertly composed image, Leone tells the whole story.

Leone knew how to move his camera as well. One of the most stirring moments in any Western comes when Jill first arrives in Flagstone, hoping to find her new husband waiting for her at the train station. She waits and watches in vain as the throng of passengers moves past until she finally heads into the station office. And here begins a brilliant marriage of form and content: Leone’s camera follows her to the door and then watches through the window as she asks for directions from the station agent. The agent guides her through a door on the opposite side of the building as Leone lifts his camera above the window, up the wall and over the roof, and as the music swells we get our first look at the town, all construction and bustling activity. It is the birth of the West, and we encounter it along with Jill, who is soon to become its guiding feminine life force. Indeed, it is as if the town only comes to life once she lays eyes on it. It is a shot full of the promise, the legend, the myth and the glory of the West, achieved with simple but masterful technique.

Claudia Cardinale, as Jill, is in fact the cornerstone of the film. Though the photogenic Italian’s voice was dubbed by an actress with a better grasp of English, Cardinale was not cast simply as eye candy, but for her expressive face and her ability to project a mix of weariness and determination. In the scene at the station and again toward the end of the film, when Harmonica walks into the house only to announce his departure, Cardinale demonstrates her talent in a close-ups that sees her effortlessly transition from joyful anticipation to crestfallen disillusionment to iron-willed perseverance. Her face is beautiful yet damaged, once by the life she has escaped and again here while she watches as the life she hoped to escape to is ripped from her grasp. And again Leone demonstrates his knowledge and faith in the terrain of the human face, patiently holding the camera’s gaze on Jill as the emotional change overtakes her features.

As the New Orleans hooker turned pioneer homesteader, Jill may at first seem like a mere variation on a stock Western character. But Leone is after something else here. Throughout the film, Jill is consistently associated with water—the water that runs beneath the dream of a town that will be known as Sweetwater; the water that will fuel the heaving, churning steam train that represents progress; the water she heats for the weary Cheyenne’s coffee; the hot bath with which she renews herself after suffering the world’s degradations; and the water she brings to the thirsty railroad workers in the film’s closing shot. She is the life force of this brave new world, the madonna that gives birth to this new land. And though the moments when her clothing is torn or barely held together by flimsy string may seem at first like simple exploitation, there is greater significance in these images. For in the end it will be her strength and determination that shines through the dust and violence, just as it is her beauty and courage that are unleashed once her dandified city clothes are torn apart, the phony veneer of sophistication and respectability giving way to the earthy mother of the West.

The Meditative Art of Kiarostami

It’s a perverse world that lets the name of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami remain obscure to the vast Western film-going public. He is considered by many to among the three or four greatest artists in cinema today, the creative force behind some of the most thoughtful and compelling films of the past 25 years.

Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley Art Museum are celebrating his career with an exhibition of his work entitled “Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker,” consisting of screenings of his movies at PFA and an exhibition of his photography at BAM. The films series runs through Aug. 30; the photography exhibit is on view through Sept. 23.

Much of Kiarostami’s cinema consists of contemplative, intelligent films that probe into the thoughts and souls of his characters, using non-professional actors selected for their faces and for their innate character. He began his career making documentaries about the lives of children in Iran, later fusing documentary work with fiction in the creation of dynamic hybrid films. But it was with 1999’s Taste of Cherry that Kiarostami firmly cemented his international reputation, becoming the first Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d’or at the Cannes film festival.

Taste of Cherry, showing Aug. 11, is a slow, meditative film about a man, Mr. Badii, trolling through the outskirts of Tehran in search of someone to help him committ suicide. He has dug a hole in a dusty mountainside and intends to take an overdose of sleeping pills and settle into the pit one night, never to wake up. But he worries that he might survive, and so he goes looking for someone who will agree to check on him in the morning and either rescue or bury him.

The film consists primarily of Badii driving around Tehran in his beat-up Range Rover, scanning the faces of work-soliciting day laborers, of scroungers and hitchhikers and passersby, looking for a sympathetic and competent assistant. He finds three prospects along the way: a young soldier, a middle-aged seminarian, and an aging taxidermist. Badii engages in long discussions with each as they drive along, contemplating life and death and trying to persuade them to help him.

It is a thoughtful tale infused with philosophical dialogue and simple symbolic devices. We never learn the secret of Badii’s despair, for it is irrelevant. What Kiarostami is really aiming for is allegory. Badii, in the form of his passengers, is taken from youth through old age, from fear and naiveté to religious conviction to aged wisdom and practicality. All the while the truck slowly navigates meandering, desolate roads on its way up the mountain.

The film closes with an ambiguous shot of Badii withdrawing into the hole, closing his eyes and receding into darkness as a storm gathers above him. Kiarostami gives no signal as to whether Badii lives or dies, and some critics have questioned this decision. But there really is no other appropriate conclusion; the ending can only be ambiguous, as this is not simply the story of Badii’s suicide attempt but a discussion of suicide in general, and specifically in a religious society that forbids it. It is likewise just as much a story about the passengers that share Badii’s Range Rover and the ways in which his plan forces them to confront their own beliefs and values, as well as an invitation to ponder such thoughts ourselves, thereby making us complicit in the exercise. “I believe in a cinema which gives more possibilities and more time to its viewer,” Kiarostami told film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, “a half-fabricated cinema, an unfinished cinema that is completed by the creative spirit of the viewer, [so that] all of a sudden we have a hundred films.”

There has always been a contingent of directors who have fought against the inherent passivity of the cinematic experience. Live theater requires audience participation in the suspension of disbelief in the face of fabricated sets, as well as the necessity of response via laughter or applause. In its golden age in the 1930s and ’40s, radio, the so-called “theater of the mind,” enlisted the imagination of the listener to fill in the gaps left by the lack of visuals. Even silent film required the use of that imagination, requiring audiences to imagine voices and sound effects to accompany the action on the screen.

But full-color, sound-era cinema supplies nearly all that is necessary, and thus the experience requires far less of the viewer. Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry instead asks the audience to take part, to contemplate the value of life, the nature of suicide, and the search for meaning in the face of despair.

But what critics of the film have found most baffling about it is the coda which follows Badii’s ambiguous fate. After 890 minutes of meditative imagery and philosophic discussion, the appearance of behind-the-scenes footage is jarring. We see the lead actor passing a cigarette to Kiarostami, technicians positioning microphones, and a group of soldiers from an early scene in the film are given the OK to call it a day and relax. At first it may seem like an ironic distancing measure, a shallow gesture to simply remind the audience that, after all, it’s just a movie. But the coda is far more compelling and profound than that, for it serves as a life-affirming counterpoint to the bleakness that preceded it.

The presence of soldiers in the shot recalls Badii’s earlier reminiscence about his military service, where he met his closest friends and took part in a group dynamic, as opposed to the action of the film, in which he is largely alone, and never in the company of more than one person at a time. What Kiarostami shows us with this final scene is the reality behind the story of Badii—that filmmaking is a communal experience, consisting of comrades taking pleasure in community, in art, in craft, and in the simple act of lounging together in the grass, with shots of the soldiers taking a break from their soldiering, enjoying each other’s company beneath blooming trees and clear skies. Yet all this takes place to the strains of Louis Armstrong’s recording of “St. James Infirmary,” a song about impending death. It is a gentle reminder, an endorsement of the views of Badii’s final passenger, that simple moments are what defines a life. “Would you give up the taste of cherries?” he had asked Badii, and here Kiarostami gives us that taste, demonstrating in effect that there is much to be appreciated in this life if one is willing to reach for it, and than even a despairing conversation along a dusty road in a beat-up Range Rover is an experience not to be missed.

"Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker"

Through Aug. 30 at Pacific Film archive; through Sept. 23 at Berkeley Art Museum. www.bampfa.edu.

Photo caption: Homayoun Ershadi as Mr. Badii in Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry.

Tough Old Broad: A Barbara Stanwyck Centennial Retrospective

You’d think a beautiful young woman with a name like Ruby Stevens would have had it made in 1930s Hollywood. And she very well might have; the name conjures images of a bright-eyed ingenue, lovely, ambitious and 100 percent red-blooded American.

But that’s exactly what Barbara Stanwyck wanted to avoid, and thus, on the advice of a Broadway director, she changed her name, adopting a moniker that better suited her unique blend of strength, beauty, class and seductive allure.

The name suited the woman as well as the actress, for Stanwyck was already the woman she would soon portray: a tough, hard-luck dame, clawing her way to the top. Orphaned at a young age, she was raised in a series of foster homes, working as a fashion model and Broadway chorus girl before landing a theatrical role that caused the movie industry to take notice.

“I’m a tough old broad from Brooklyn,” Stanwyck once said. “I intend to go on acting until I’m 90 and they won’t need to paste my face with make-up.” She didn’t quite make it to 90, but she did work well into her 70s in a career that spanned nearly 60 years and earned her four Academy Award nominations, an honorary Oscar in 1982, and the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.

Pacific Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of some of the actress’ best work in honor of the centennial of her birth. The series runs through July 31 and begins Friday with Night Nurse (1931), a Pre-Code classic that pairs Stanwyck with the brassy Joan Blondell, and Stella Dallas (1937), considered by many to be Stanwyck’s best.

Stanwyck’s early career is full of commanding, riveting performances as working-class femme fatales struggling to survive and conquer in a man’s world. Baby Face (1933) and Ladies They Talk About (1933) are essentially companion pieces, telling similar tales accompanied by the same musical theme—the drawling, bawdy, jazz-era strains of “St. Louis Blues.” In both films Stanwyck’s character uses her body, her grace and her wit to manipulate men in pursuit of her material desires; she knows full well what they want and how to entice them with it, cynically selling notions of romance and passion in which she has long since ceased to believe. Stanwyck was judicious with her contempt though; she not only looked on her victims with disdain, but always managed to imbue her gutsy golddiggers with an undercurrent of self-loathing, an awareness that the dirty business of life soils everyone it touches, and that the path to the top runs through more than a few fetid swamps of vice.

There was much more to Stanwyck than sex, however. Few actors could convey as much with just their eyes. “Eyes are the greatest tool in film,” Director Frank Capra told her, and she put the advice to good use. Her gaze was piercing and challenging, while simultaneously conveying the bemusement and weariness of a woman long tired of playing the fantasy object for legions of sweaty old businessmen in rumpled suits. She was also a gifted comedienne, comfortable in the delivery of droll putdowns and flirtatious witticisms. Yet she was fully capable of more overtly comedic roles, as in The Lady Eve (1941), in which she played a con-artist trying to play it straight but needing all her vice and cunning to get there. “My only problem,” Stanwyck said in response to a question about her signature roles, “is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth.”

As good as she was, the movie industry was not altogether kind to its young stars, and many actresses saw their careers vanish as the studios ditched them at the first signs of middle age. But Stanwyck’s startling talent, screen presence and behind-the-scenes negotiating prowess gave her an edge. By avoiding long contracts, she was never bound to any one studio, keeping her career and her paychecks healthy as a prolific freelancer.

Thus few actresses progressed as smoothly from eye-candy vixens to middle-aged dramatic roles. Double Indemnity (1944), for instance, saw her updating Baby Face’s Lily Powers by moving her to the upper class enclaves of the Hollywood Hills, now as a kept woman looking for adventure to stave off her domestic boredom—a door-to-door salesman’s wet dream, who lures insurance man Fred MacMurray into a lurid web of murder and intrigue. And still again she updated the portrait in Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night (1952). Here Stanwyck presents a stirring portrait of the opportunistic dame, but older now and tired of living a rootless life. Whereas the younger Stanwyck played women in dire or mundane circumstances looking for a way out, here she plays a woman on her way back home, returning to her humble origins on Monterey’s Cannery Row with the hope that she can finally set aside her nagging restlessness by embracing a simple domestic life. Yet her eyes belie the painful truth, revealing the jaded intelligence that knows her dissatisfaction is innate, that whatever she has is never enough, no matter how good the man and how safe the home he provides.

It’s a compelling picture of a complex woman, requiring the sort of feminine insight that director Lang was entirely incapable of throughout his long career, resulting in a fascinating case of professional role reversal, with a talented actor bringing out heretofore untapped talents in her director. And all in marked contrast to her co-star, a young Marilyn Monroe, who might have led a much different life had she adopted just a bit of Stanwyck’s steely resolve.

"Ball of Fire: A Barbara Stanwyck Centennial Retrospective." Friday, July 6 through Tuesday, July 31 at Pacific Film Archive. 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-5249. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Shohei Imamura's Japan

Think of Japanese cinema and one of two things probably comes to mind: either the robust, action-filled, western-influenced samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa, or the more refined, restrained and elegant films of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Mikio Naruse.

Shohei Imamura, one of the primary filmmakers of Japan’s New Wave, falls into neither category. His work focuses instead on the dregs of modern Japanese society. Pacific Film Archive is hosting a retrospective of the iconoclastic director’s work through June 30.

The New Wave refers to the generation of filmmakers that rose up through that country’s studio system in the years following World War II. Unlike the directors of the French New Wave—outsiders who began as critics and then set out to re-define their nation’s film culture—the directors of Japan’s New Wave were trained, cultivated and encouraged by the industry they would later challenge.

Imamura began his career as an assistant to Ozu and quickly came to the conclusion that, though Ozu was undoubtedly a great director, his restrained style was not for Imamura. When he finally got his hands on his own crew and camera, he veered in the opposite direction, renouncing the refinement and formal beauty of Ozu’s work and opting instead for a cinema of cruelty, perversion and dark humor.

Imamura thought of himself first as an anthropologist. His goal was to document the world as he saw it, not to shape, explain or judge it. And in fact, after making such classics as Pigs and Battleships (1961) and The Pornographers (1966), the director turned to documentary filmmaking in the 1970s.

As he explains in an interview included in the Criterion Collection’s new DVD edition of Vengeance is Mine, Imamura became somewhat disenchanted with actors while making The Profound Desire of the Gods in 1968 and afterwards sought other means of expression. For the next decade, he made nothing but documentaries, until returning to narrative, commercial filmmaking in 1979 with Vengeance is Mine, in which he fashioned a sort of reality-fiction hybrid.

The film, showing Tuesday, May 29, is based on the exploits of a real-life killer who roamed Japan for a few months in 1963. Ken Ogata plays the role of Iwao Enokizu with a steely impulsiveness, the very personification of id. He seeks only the immediate satisfaction of his desires, regardless of the human cost.

Imamura makes no effort to explain this man’s actions; he presents them as a simple fact of Japanese life in the post-war era. We learn much of Enokizu’s youth, his upbringing and his relationships, and though these details certainly help us get to know the character, there is still no clear motive given for his crimes. As critic Michael Atkinson puts it in the DVD’s liner notes, “Vengeance Is Mine … wastes no breath on compassion, no calories on decorousness, and no time on explanations.” Atkinson places Imamura among what he calls the “Sardonic Objectivists,” directors such as Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel and Douglas Sirk, who tried to shed light on humanity’s dark side. Imamura, Atkinson says, was “a Japanese Samuel Fuller, fascinated with working-class ruin and primal impulse.”

In the opening scenes of Vengeance is Mine, Imamura gives us the impression that the worst is over. The killer has been arrested and is being transported to prison. But soon we are subjected to flashbacks of Enokizu’s first two killings, graphic scenes which contain none of the usual screeching violins or tawdry effects of many a serial killer film, but are instead shot at arm’s length and with no adornment. Imamura sought no attention for his camerawork or framing; he wanted his technique to remain invisible. Thus, in simple documentary terms, we see murder not as a melodramatic plot point but as an almost mundane occurrence: grisly, clumsy and primitive.

There are no pure innocents in Imamura’s films. The killer's wife is somewhat deranged and manipulative herself. This is one of the themes that runs through much of Imamura’s work: women clawing their way through the morass of Japanese society, resorting to the baser instincts in the struggle to survive. These are not the long-suffering women of quiet dignity as found in classical Japanese cinema—“Those women don’t exist,” Imamura once said—they are bold, lusty, self-interested and at times desperate, using whatever means available to survive in a society that is structured to subdue and degrade them.

The result is a body of work unique in Japanese cinema, one that seeks not to organize and understand the world, but to simply document it without explanation or condemnation.

"Shohei Imamura's Japan." Through June 30 at Pacific Film Archive. 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-1124. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Vengeance is Mine (1979). Starring Ken Ogata, Mayumi Ogawa, Mitsuko Baisho, Frankie Sakai, Kazuo Kitamura, Chocho Miyako, Nijiko Kiyokawa, Rentaro Mikuni. Directed by Shohei Imamura. 140 minutes. Playing at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. $29.95. www.criterion.com.

Existential Despair in Antonioni's The Passenger

When I was 5 years old my kindergarten class, for whatever reason, took a field trip to the home of one of my classmates. Too young to have any notion of the local geography, I had no idea where the house was located. It was only when I stepped out the back door of the boy’s house into his backyard that I recognized the yellow playhouse and battered metal slide and realized that this was the house directly behind my own. I peeked through a hole in the fence and saw my own backyard: the lawn, the patio, the rusted swingset, the family dog sniffing about in the tall grass, the soccer ball under a tree where I had left it the day before.

It was a disconcerting experience to look back in on my life from another vantage point. For the first time I realized that to the boy who lived behind me, I was the boy who lived behind him. Thus I had to face the uncomfortable truth that I was not the center of the universe, but just one little boy from one family in one house in one neighborhood in a world of other little boys and families and houses and neighborhoods.

It was a revelation for which I was not quite ready. But, being 5, I soldiered on.

This notion of moving outward in order to look back in is the central theme of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, in both content and form, though the protagonist’s epiphanies are hardly as simple or as benign. The film screens at 8:50 p.m. Friday as part of Pacific Film Archive’s ongoing retrospective of the modernist director’s career.

The Passenger stars Jack Nicholson, in one of his finest performances, as David Locke, an American journalist abroad who seizes an unforeseen opportunity to shed his life and identity in exchange for the life of Robertson, an acquaintance who has just died. Locke leaves behind a wife, a reputation, a home, everything, to take on the life of a man he barely knows. Using the man’s datebook to meet his appointments, Locke gradually unravels clues as to the life and identity of the man he has become, finding himself in more than a bit of trouble along the way.

We get a hint as to the catalyst of this adventure in the form of documentary footage of the journalist at work. In the clip, Locke, during an interview, hands over his camera at the request of his subject, who then casts the camera’s gaze back at Locke and begins to question the questioner. The tables are turned, and Locke, squirming before the lens, has nothing to say. He has unexpectedly been given a glimpse of himself—his first, it seems, and just for a moment—and has no answer for what he sees. He grimaces in discomfort, looks about nervously, then reaches forward to take the camera back, suggesting that he is fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with the truth with which he has been presented.

How much more resilient the 5-year-old who faces such a revelation, for he is unencumbered by the lifetime of assumptions and psychic inertia built up by the 35-year-old—a series of elaborate constructions each of which must be re-examined. The child’s epiphany is at least rooted in a sense of place; he sees a yard and a house, a family within the house and the house within a neighborhood—while Locke looks inward and finds nothing at all, or at least nothing he recognizes.

Thus he takes the opportunity to adopt a new identity, to shed the dead skin of a life through which he has been sleepwalking and to usurp the life and identity of a dead man, to become a passenger on the road of another man’s narrative. The journey is both alluring and dangerous; Locke, as Roberston, picks up a young lover, negotiates with underworld thugs, and cruises scenic byways as he works his away across Europe.

The closing sequence is a tour de force, a demonstration of bravura filmmaking for which the groundwork has been carefully laid over the preceding two hours. In a single, unbroken shot, Antonioni again employs the out-and-in motif, with Locke lying down on a hotel bed and turning away as the camera begins an extremely slow tracking movement toward the window. The movement and ambient sounds of the street draw our attention outside: Locke’s lover walks away, then returns; a boy throws stones; a trumpet sounds; cars pass by, stop, and move on; the two thugs arrive, and one walks toward the girl. All the while the camera steadily pushes forward until, just before it passes through the window, it pans slightly to the right to catch the faint reflection of the second thug entering the room, drawing his gun and using the rumbling of a passing car to mask the shot that kills Locke.

The camera continues outward and into the street, following the arrival of the police and Locke’s estranged wife. And as she enters the hotel, the camera, still in one unbroken shot, turns back toward the building and pushes again toward the window, looking back in as she and the girl and the police enter the room. “I never knew him,” she says, when asked if she recognizes the man on the bed. “Yes,” says the girl, when the question is put to her. And Antonioni has left us with something of a metaphysical quandary.

Who is this man? Is it Locke? Is it Robertson? Is it either, or is it anyone at all? Antonioni has forced us to look back in on our assumptions and re-examine the man we have come to know over the course of the film. Yet by the time the camera has made its journey outward, wheeled around and turned back in on itself, reality has shifted; Locke has ceased to exist. For that very act of introspection and the self-consciousness it requires permanently alters the man, the child or the moviegoer who experiences it, and in that long, lingering single shot, the film itself takes on the slow-motion processing of that self-awareness, stretching to contain not just action, but the mental processing of that action—the self-conscious preview, experience, re-play and analysis of its every facet.

The Passenger is perhaps the Antonioni's most successful merging of his patient, contemplative style and his somewhat grim world view, coalescing in the most tantalizingly inconclusive of conclusions. It is the dark side of rationalism: It is not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I think too much, therefore I cease to exist.”

The Lubitsch Touch at Pacific Film Archive

Silent film star Mary Pickford famously described director Ernst Lubitsch as a “director of doors,” a man more at home working with the choreography of entrances and exits than with actors and emotions. This acerbic remark, uttered in the awake of an ill-fated collaboration with the director on Rosita, his first American production, has a grain of truth but should be taken with a grain of salt as well.

Pickford was one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood and not inclined to accept a secondary role in a film’s creation. But Lubitsch’s films were not so much vehicles for stars so much as they were vehicles for Lubitsch, for his subtle and distinctive wit, both with images and later with dialogue.

A viewing of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) shows the truth behind both sides of the argument. The film shows tonight at Pacific Film Archive as part of a month-long career-spanning retrospective of the director’s work entitled “The Lubitsch Touch.” The series runs through Feb. 16 and tracks the legendary director’s career from his early German silent films to his much-celebrated American comedies of the sound era.

Lady Windermere’s Fan is an adaptation of an Oscar Wilde play that brazenly tosses out the words of Wilde in favor of sly visual humor and cues, replacing Wilde’s verbal wit with Lubitsch’s visual wit. The actors do good work, but clearly the director is in control, for the performances are not inspired but are instead matched meticulously to the staging and camerawork. There’s very little dialogue; most of the information is imparted to us simply through facial expressions, mannerisms and editing.

Many stars appeared in Lubitsch’s films, but Lubitsch himself was the true star of his productions, a noted auteur who guided the performances of his actors down to the smallest detail. Like Chaplin, he acted out each role and instructed his actors to mimic him, and, as with Chaplin again, this at times led to rather stilted performances. The actors were not permitted much leeway in plying their trade. However, the fact that the technique so often found such great results was a testament to Lubitsch’s unique talents.

One scene in particular illustrates Pickford’s dissent perfectly: Lubistch, in order to quickly and comically expresses the increasing intimacy between a couple, gives us two scenes of the suitor approaching the front door of his lady’s apartment. A close-up shows just his hand as he starts to ring the doorbell, things twice, hesitates, pulls out a pocket mirror, replaces it, then rings the bell and politely offers his coat and hat to the maid while waiting to be introduced. A second scene, taking place some weeks later, shows the hand again ringing the bell, this time with no hesitation. The man then walks brusquely through the door and past the maid, hanging his hat and coat without her help before bursting into the lady’s rooms unannounced. All necessary information is conveyed through intertitles, camerawork and editing. The acting is almost superfluous; it’s Lubitsch’s performance through and through.

His technique is not exactly subtle; in fact, Lubitsch’s presence can almost always be felt in his films, and this is a mixed blessing. Just as it is difficult to read Wilde without marveling at his wit, one cannot view a Lubitsch film without being made acutely conscious of the wit and style of the director. At its best it is a seductive technique, one that draws the viewer into an alliance with the director, making one feel as if one is in on the joke, sharing in the sense of superiority toward the objects of that wit; but at times it has a tendency to drain a film of drama and impact, maintaining a cynical distance from characters who are reduced to mere pawns in the director’s cinematic game.

The result is that Lubitsch’s films, though often just as entertaining today as they were in their time, are less art than entertainment, fun for their two-hour span but with little impact beyond the moment the theater lights come up. The “Lubitsch touch,” though deft, is a light touch, one that only lingers playfully amid the more complex, underlying themes of the story, rarely delving deeply into character, motivation or import. He won’t change your life but for two hours he’ll take you for a fun and stylish ride.

Other films in the series include Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, Angel, Heaven Can Wait, Trouble in Paradise, The Marriage Circle, Rosita, The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant. The series runs through Feb. 16. $4-8. 2575 Bancrot Way. 642-5249. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

PFA Screens Two Italian Art House Classics

A fascinating pair of Italian films will screen this weekend at Pacific Film Archive. The first, Il Posto (1961), could be seen as a sequel to Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, presenting another quietly observant portrait of a young man suffering through a rite of passage. It’s as though the 13-year-old Antoine Donel of the earlier film has now grown into the 18-year-old Domenico Cantoni, sent by his parents into the big city of Milan to find a job.

Directed by Ermanno Olmi, Il Posto fits in with the Italian neo-realism school of filmmaking in its presentation of a humanistic tale of youthful dreams and ambitions sacrificed at the altar of security and conformism.

Domenico seems to dread his entry into the working world, a world presented as one of time-worn adults marking time in soulless, dreary employment. However, a ray of light appears in the form of a young woman named Antonietta (Loredana Detto), and her sparkling presence illuminates the screen as well as the life of the hero. Together they navigate the job application process and take pleasure in each other’s company, the two bright-eyed youths constituting a slightly subversive presence in an otherwise stale maze of corridors, offices and standard-issue furniture.

The key to the film is Sandro Panseri, a non-professional actor with soulful eyes and the gentle, timid face of a youth trying to comprehend and master the ways of a foreign territory. He’s a small, skinny waif masquerading as a grown-up in ill-fitting grown-up clothing. He hits all the right notes and Olmi captures each one, showing us in wordless close-ups the fear, uncertainty, shyness and delight that flitter across the face of the young protagonist.

But about three-quarters into the film, Olmi suddenly abandons the main character for an extended sequence in which we learn something of the personal lives of each one of a number of accountants at the unnamed firm where Domenico has landed. It may seem like a tangent at first, but the sequence marks the opening salvo in a tour de force closing sequence that drives home the film’s major themes.

Domenico is promoted, and in an uncharacteristic but highly effective montage, Olmi shows us why. One of the accountants we’ve encountered has passed away, possibly by suicide, and his desk is turned over to Domenico, much to the dismay of his new colleagues. One, a 20-year veteran, complains to the manager, and when Domenico agrees to move to a desk in the back of the room, a frenzied and ruthless rush ensues as the other accountants begin a mad dash to claim the desk immediately in front of their own, a desperate game of musical chairs for which they’ve apparently been waiting for decades.

The final shot shows Domenico watching a man at the front of the room as he cranks what appears to be a mimeograph machine, feeding paper into one end and removing it from the other as a deafening mechanical whirr dominates the soundtrack. The grind has begun.

Yet as bleak as this conclusion may seem, it is also somewhat ambiguous, for throughout the film we have seen Domenico warmly befriended by the adults in his new environment, receiving a series of reassurances that a simpler life of lower expectations is not all bad but is in fact full of small pleasures. With these gentle moments of camaraderie and kindness, Olmi provides a welcome softening of the film’s sharp edge.

Domenico may have found himself in a dispiriting situation, but there is still energy and vivaciousness and curiosity in his face, a sign that although life is certainly capable of pummeling the spirit out of a young man, he still has a choice—plenty of choices, really—and retains the power to shape his own destiny. And the fact that Domenico is able to so clearly see his predicament in the closing scene leaves us with hope that he has the strength and determination to overcome it, now that he finally understands it.

Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) similarly focuses on a main character with enormously expressive eyes in the form of Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), another youthful spirit facing dire circumstances. But the style and delivery of the tale could not be more different from the observational calm of Olmi’s Il Posto.

La Strada tells the tale of a boorish brute of a traveling sideshow performer, Zampano, played by Anthony Quinn. When his wife dies, he travels back to her remote, impoverished village and essentially purchases her younger sister to take her place. Gelsomina has a clown-like countenance, and eventually she takes on the makeup of a clown, too. Her childish innocence calls to mind silent film comedian Harry Langdon, blending an adult body with an infantile purity that at times confounds us with its ambiguity.

And despite its rather simple story, the film is full of ambiguities. Gelsominia is at once innocent and deeply aware of her place in Zampano’s life. And the Fool, a character capable of both cruelty and martyrdom, provides lessons in life and love for the main characters while treating them with a degree of contempt.

The film itself seems to straddle two realms, leaning at times toward realism and at times toward a sort of fable-like fantasy. Beneath its circus settings, desolate stretches of beach and never-ending highways, it is a simple love story about a man who cannot admit his feelings and a child-like woman who is entirely governed by her own.

La Strada concludes with a powerful shot of Zampano alone on the beach after learning that his dismissal of Gelsomina has led her to madness and death. As he faces the open sea, he glances upwards for a moment, as though discovering God for the first time and begging his forgiveness. And it seems like the first time that he has lifted his brooding gaze from the ground, the first time we have seen the whites of his eyes. But it is too late now, and Zampano simply crumbles to the ground as though merging with the brittle sand.

The two films are showing as part of PFA’s tribute to Janus Films, the American distributor responsible for bringing so many foreign art house films to the United States in the 1950s and '60s. The series concludes next week with a screening of Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer (1963).

Il Posto (1961)

Directed by Ermanno Olmi. 93 minutes. 6:30 p.m. Friday.

La Strada (1956)

Directed by Federico Fellini. 108 minutes. 5 p.m. Saturday.

Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way. $4-$8. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

Samurai Classics at Pacific Film Archive

Pacific Film Archive will present a series of seven samurai films beginning today and running through Dec. 17.

Most of the films come courtesy of Janus Films, the great American distributor of foreign arthouse cinema whose 50th anniversary PFA has been honoring in another ongoing series.

But the samurai series ain’t quite as highbrow as all that. Not on the surface, at least. These are popular entertainments, full of action and humor. But look closer and you’ll see films full of art and artistry, of complex themes and human struggle worthy of the highest forms of art, here dressed in violent period melodrama.

Of course no samurai series would be complete without the biggest samurai film of them all, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). Seven Samurai gave rise to an American version, The Magnificent Seven, but the western version pales in comparison with the original. Kurosawa takes his time with each character, presenting a fuller, richer, more engaging ensemble than the swaggering icons played by Yul Brynner et al.

Kurosawa is represented in the series by two other films as well: Throne of Blood (1957), his samurai adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Yojimbo (1961), a brilliant and funny film inspired by American westerns and later remade as a western, albeit an Italian western: Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars.

But most enlightening films in the series are the lesser-known classics of the genre.

The series starts with this weekend with two films by Masaki Kobayashi, Samurai Rebellion (1967) and Harakiri (1962).

Harakiri is a stunning film, a gradually unfolding tale of heartbreak and misfortune that builds toward a climactic act of revenge. Most of the film consists of conversations in which the characters play out a tense, strategic battle of wills, yet now and then the slow-burning tone is punctuated with scenes of sudden violence.

Kobayashi and photographer Yoshio Miyajima establish themselves quickly as masters of interiors with an opening credits sequence of slow tracking shots which delineate the architectural splendor of a great mansion. The pattern continues throughout the film with beautiful but discreet compositions and graceful tracking shots through corridors and into rooms, with pillars and doors and windows and figures arranged perfectly like stones in a garden.

Kobayashi often maintains a certain distance from his subjects, unobtrusively watching them as they go about their business. But when the action starts and the tone shifts, so too does the camera, zooming in like a Sergio Leone telephoto shot or tilting toward canted angles a la Orson Welles, signaling a shift in the dramatic action as well as the strategic repositioning of characters within fragile alliances. But Kobayashi also demonstrates his talent for outdoor shots with a one-on-one battle on a windswept plain that contains echoes of Bergman.

The plot concerns the requisite lone samurai, this time seeking to destroy the facade of nobility and honor maintained by a great clan, and he does so, for the most part, without action but with words. It is like one of those extended endgame scenes in a James Bond movie where the villain stops the show to explicate in great detail for the hero’s benefit the machinations of his nefarious scheme. Only here it lasts two hours and results in a tour de force of swordfight choreography as Tatsuya Nakadai takes on the house’s company of samurai and by extension the entire feudal system. He smashes down doors, breaks through walls, smears the house insignia with the blood of his enemies and dismantles the interiors that Kobayashi had photographed with such care throughout the film, the architecture that had sustained the house and masked its cowardice.

The series also features two films by director Kihachi Okamoto: Kill! (1968) and Sword of Doom (1966).

While Kobayashi’s work embodies much of what of what is best in the samurai genre, the films of Kihachi Okamoto elaborately deconstruct these elements in gleeful parodies that, like the Italian westerns of Leone, are equal parts satire and homage. Okamoto’s Kill!, made just six years after Harakiri, picks apart the genre’s stock features and embellishes its humor-laced plot with a score that deconstructs the genre’s musical themes as well, combining Japanese instrumentation with the cartoonishly grand orchestrations of the spaghetti western scores of the 1960s.

For more information on the samurai series, see Pacific Film Archive’s website: www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

PFA Screens a New Wave Classic

The films of Agnes Varda and her husband Jacques Demy could not be more different.

Demy, best known for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, was both part of and apart from the French New Wave. Enamored with Hollywood’s golden age musicals, he is sometimes referred to as France’s answer to Busby Berkeley: sweet but trite stories, artfully decorated but too slight for the tastes of his contemporaries.

Varda, on the other hand, is New Wave through and through. There are no gunfights, no car crashes, no dramatic chages of heart. Varda made small, insightful films about complex young characters. She represents the feminine side of the New Wave, a movement largely dominated by male directors. And while the male directors for the most part did a fair job of portraying women, Varda’s female characters have a depth and profundity unmatched in the work of her male counterparts.

Cleo From 5 to 7 details two hours in the life of its heroine in real time, though the timing is not exact and may not be quite realistic; it’s an action-packed two hours of supposedly everyday life. In that short span, the young pop singer protagonist manages a shopping trip, a rehearsal, a visit with a friend and an encounter with a stranger, not to mention bus and taxi trips all over Paris.

But this is hardly the point. What we’re watching is the psychological processes Cleo undergoes as she awaits the results of a medical test that will tell her just how serious her condition is. She has cancer; we don’t know what kind, we don’t know how serious. We only know that this beautiful, spoiled princess of a woman is suddenly dealing with something she is not accustomed to: hardship and pain.

How she deals with it tells us almost as much about her as the trappings of her privileged life—her furs, her hats, the adulation of her acquaintances. She approaches her illness with as much self-absorbed intensity as she presumably approached her pre-illness life; she draws people to her, collects them as small testaments to her beauty. But this is not portrayed with condescension; we do not feel contempt for her. Rather we are witnessing the sudden, painful expansion of a young woman’s consciousness as she learns that she is not the center of the world, a notion beautifully expressed in a scene where she plays her latest hit on a cafe jukebox and realizes that no one is paying attention. And, in an encounter with a young soldier about to return to battle in Algeria, she finally gives something of herself to another, offering companionship and conversation to a kindred spirit who also carries a burden.

The conclusion is typical of the New Wave; there is no big Hollywood–style conclusion, no tearful dramatic close or happy finale, but rather just a small revelation, the flicker of heightened consciousness across Cleo’s face. It is not a big change, not a life-altering change, and in fact the change may prove to be fleeting. But the drama in Cleo From 5 to 7 is not in the action, it is in the mind of its heroine. Such drama is difficult to express as an actor and difficult to photograph for a director, but Varda and her star make it as evident as any Hollywood car crash.

The film is showing at Pacific Film Archive as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of Janus Films and is available on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection’s 50 Years of Essential Arthouse box set.

Cleo From 5 To 7 (France, 1961)

Directed by Agnes Varda. Starring Corinne Marchand and featuring the music of Michel Legrand. 3 p.m. Sunday at Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.

www.criterionco.com.