Friday,
December 10 ~ Sunday, December 19
Caméra-Stylo:
The Writer as Director
In
his landmark 1948 essay Birth of a New Avant-Garde,
filmmaker Alexandre Astruc advanced the notion of le caméra-stylo
(camera pen) which imagined the cinema eventually breaking
free of the concrete demands of narrative, where images become
a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language.
Greatly influenced by Astruc's
theory, it was only a few years later that in 1954 Francois
Truffaut spoke of the director as an auteur, the cinematic
equivalent of a novelist, cap able
of expressing themselves through recurring thematic elements,
distinctive ways of building characters, and, above all, through
the deployment and movement of actors and objects within the
time and space of the shot.
The
immense popularity of the auteurist cinema of such
legendary directors as John Ford, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks
and Alfred Hitchcock eventually saw film surpass the novel as
the dominant narrative form of our time. As a result, major
literary figures - novelists, playwrights, poets soon began
to venture into the medium in search of new and unfamiliar ways
of seeing and interpreting. This series offers up
a
survey of some of the more notable films directed by contemporary
writers. Deeply poetic and surprisingly assured, these films
challenge the limits of expected narrative structure as well
as our assumptions of conventional realism. Their brilliant
visual associations offer a fascinating parallel to the literary
work of their respective directors and vividly remind us of
Astruc's idea of film as a language independent altogether of
literature.
This
program was made possible through additional support from Cinema
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania,
Marie Bonnel and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NYC)
and The British Film Institute.
Friday,
December 10 at 7:00pm
Maidstone
dir.
Norman Mailer, USA, 1970, 35mm, 96 mins, color
In
the summer of 1968, the elegant resort town of East Hampton
witnessed a bizarre invasion of celebrities and unknowns, professional
actors and amateurs, assembled by Norman Mailer to make a movie
in which he would be both director and star. An existential
psychodrama, Maidstone celebrates a highly popular,
though esoteric film director, Norman T. Kingsley, who is casting
a remake of Buńuel's
Belle du Jour. Also considering a run for the U.S.
presidency, Kingsley finds himself being scrutinized by both
the Eastern establishment and an elite secret police organization
formed to protect him from assassination. Described by Mailer
as a guerilla
raid on the nature of reality,
Maidstone is a volatile mix of existential politics
and sexual intrigue that dissolves the line between fiction
and actuality setting the stage for an explosion of human passions.
Saturday,
December 11 at 7:00pm
Tough
Guys Don't Dance
dir.
Norman Mailer, USA, 1987, 35mm, 110 mins, color
A
relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the
modern American male, Tough Guys Don't
Dance
is an offbeat noir starring Ryan O'Neal
as Tim Madden -- an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon,
cigarettes, and careless women with money. After an encounter
with a woman who reminds him of the wife who deserted him, Madden
awakens from a drinking binge with fragmented memories and an
agonizing suspicion that he committed murder. With a corrupt
chief of police watching his every move, Madden must piece together
the hazy events of the night before to solve a murder he may
or
may not have
committed.
Wednesday,
December 15 at 7:00pm
India
Song
dir.
Marguerite Duras, France, 1975, 16mm, 120 mins, color, French
w/ English subtitles
 India
Song is an oblique love story set in India in the 1930s,
populated by a group of characters whose actions (and most notably
inaction) were prefigured in many of Marguerite Duras' earlier
novels. Here Duras focuses on a summer monsoon season during which
a group of Europeans haunt the film's interiors through their
reflections in ballroom mirrors, through the faceless voices that
narrate their stories, and through the memories they endure. The
voices also remember the story of a beggar woman, whose mournful
tale counterpoints the love story in its recollection of famine,
monsoon, and heat.
Thursday,
December 16 at 7:00pm
Kuhle
Wampe (Whither Germany?)
dir.
Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht, Germany, 1932, 16mm, 71 mins,
b/w, German w/ English subtitles
Conceived
and co-directed by Bertolt Brecht at the political and artistic
watershed of the waning Weimar Republic, Kuhle Wampe
tells the tragic tale of the family Bönike, working-class Berliners
devastated by poverty. Exquisitely photographed by Gunther Krampf
(Nosferatu), with a score by Hans Eisler, this semi-documentary
combines inspired montage sequences with intimate realist and
comic scenes of family life. The only communist film to come
out of Weimar Germany, Kuhle Wampe was swiftly banned
on Hitler's rise to power in 1933.
Friday,
December 17 at 7:00pm
Shorts Program
Un
Chant d'Amour
dir.
Jean Genet, France, 1950, 16mm, 25 mins, b/w, silent
 Genet's
only film, hounded by censors for years, is a deeply personal
evocation of unrequited love that lies somewhere between pornography,
surrealism, and poetic realism. An affirmation of love in infinite
imprisonment, Un Chant d'Amour
brilliantly evokes the desperate frustration and the sensuous
nostalgia shared by lovesick prisoners and their oppressive
jailers.
Towers
Open Fire
dir.
Anthony Balch and William S. Burroughs, UK, 1963, 16mm, 16 mins,
b/w
An
assault on linear narrative and good taste, Towers Open
Fire is a virtual Burroughs compendium: society crumbles
as the Stock Exchange crashes, members of the Board are raygun-zapped
in their own boardroom, and a commando in the orgasm attack
leaps through a window and decimates a family photo collection.
Towers Open Fire brings together readings by Burroughs,
unrelated film sequences, and the pervasive image of Brion Gysin's
prototype Dreamachine - inducer of hallucinations and mental
stimulation.
The
Cut-Ups
dir.
Anthony Balch and William S. Burroughs, UK, 1966, 16mm, 12 mins,
b/w
With
The Cut-Ups Burroughs and longtime collaborator Anthony
Balch saw the creation of a cinema that attempted nothing less
than the savage deconstruction of the relationship between image
and reality. The film negates even the loose narratives of underground
film in favor of a jarring mathematical cut-up technique that
attempts to create an estrangement between sensory and psychological
conceptions.
Rite
of Love and Death
dir.
Yukio Mishima, Japan, 1965, 16mm, 21 mins, b/w
Japanese
novelist Yukio Mishima's only film is this beautifully photographed
adaptation of his short story Patriotism. An officer
in the elite guard (played by Mishima) is asked by the Emperor
to execute a number of his peers after an attempted coup d'etat.
Faced with the traditional samurai conflict of divided loyalties
to Emperor and to fellows-in-arms the officer maintains honor
in the only way possible for him: hara-kiri.
Film
dir.
Alan Schneider and Samuel Beckett, USA, 1965, 35mm, 20 mins,
b/w
Film
was directed by Alan Schneider under the personal supervision
of Samuel Beckett whose commitment to the project brought him
to America for his first and only visit. Based around Bishop
Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' (to be is to
be perceived), Film follows Buster Keaton, in his
last ever screen role, struggling to evade observation by an
all-seeing eye.
Saturday,
December 18 at 7:00pm
Duet
For Cannibals
dir.
Susan Sontag, Sweden, 1969, 35mm, 105 mins, b/w, Swedish w/
English subtitles
Susan
Sontag had already achieved wide recognition as a novelist,
essayist, and critic of contemporary culture when she directed
her first film, a psychological comedy-drama about the strange
influence an exiled German radical political leader and his
wife exercise over a young Swedish couple that comes under their
sway. Relations between the two couples evolve into a strange
menage a quatre when the younger woman becomes deeply
involved in the bizarre and erotic games played by the older
couple.
Sunday,
December 19 at 1:00pm
Eden
and After
dir.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, France/Tunisia, 1970, 16mm, color, French
w/ English subtitles
The
father of the Nouveau Roman movement in France, author
Alain Robbe-Grillet also directed a series of highly unconventional
and deeply imaginative films. Eden and After, Robbe-Grillet's
first film in color, is an erotic and labyrinthine tale of murder
and vampirism set somewhere between the fictitious landscapes
of the Marquis de Sade and Lewis Carroll. In Café Eden, a group
of bored students engaged in a series of baroque parlor games
are visited by a mysterious stranger whose very presence evokes
new menacing fantasies.
$6.00 General Admission;
$5.00 I House Members, Students and Seniors.
Available in advance
at TICKETWEB
or one hour before showtime at the International House Box Office.
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