Thursday,
October 5 - Saturday, October 7
Views
of a Changing World, 2nd edition
Documentary
is the creative treatment of actuality –
John Grierson
 The
nature of documentary films has changed in the past twenty years
from the cinema verite’ tradition to a genre that has recently
become successful in theatrical release. Modern lightweight
digital video cameras and computer-based editing have greatly
aided documentary makers, as has the dramatic drop in equipment
prices. Everyone, virtually, can be a documentary filmmaker.
The
genre, though, still concerns itself with representing the observable
world. The documentarian draws on past and present actuality
- the world of social and historical experience - to construct
an account of lives and events. Paul Rotha has pointed out,
“Documentary defines not subject nor style but approach. Documentary
differs from story film not in its disregard for craftsmanship,
but in the purpose to which that craftsmanship is put.”
This
selection of contemporary documentaries demonstrates many of
the technological changes in the making of today’s films while
retaining the crucial definition John Grierson noted: they all
consist of the well-crafted, raw material of reality.
Thursday,
October 5 at 7pm
Excellent
Cadavers
dir.
Marco Turco, Italy, 2005, BetaSP, 92 mins, color, English and
Italian
w/
English subtitles
Introduced
by Professor Jonathan Steinberg, the Walter H. Annenberg Professor
of Modern European History Department Chair at the University
of Pennsylvania
 Excellent
Cadavers chronicles
the Mafia’s history and its integral relationship to Italian
politics. In the past the Cosa Nostra would kill only their
own, but in the 1970’s they began assassinating prosecutors
and judges, thus producing “excellent cadavers.” The film focuses
on Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who led the Maxi-Trials
in Palermo , where, in an underground bunker, hundreds of Mafia
defendants were tried. Interviews with Falcone and Borsellino
(both of whom were assassinated in 1992) are interwoven with
trial highlights, where informants confronted bosses and “soldiers”
recounted horrifying stories.
Through
contemporary interviews with magistrates involved in these historic
trials, archival footage, and the heart-rending photos of public
assassinations by Sicilian photojournalist Letizia Battaglia,
Excellent Cadavers traces the history of the relationship
between the Mafia and Italian politicians since the end of WWII,
when the Sicilian organization became a useful tool during the
Cold War.
Friday,
October 6 at 7pm
Workingman’s
Death
dir.
Michael Glawogger, Austria , 2005, BetaSP, 122 mins, color,
English, Pashto, Yoruba, German, Ibo, Indonesian, Mandarin and
Russian w/ English subtitles
Introduced
by Dr. Arancha Garcia del Soto, Director of Refugee Initiatives
at the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict
at the University of Pennsylvania
 Director
Michael Glawogger’s epic scale documentaries pull together grand
global themes in unexpected ways. Glawogger visits with workers
in far-flung corners of the world - from a sixteen-inch-high
sprawling coal mineshaft in the Ukraine to a gruesome slaughter
yard in Nigeria - he delivers spectacular footage of the most
difficult labor this planet has to offer. At once a rejoinder
to those predicting the death of manual labor and a ground level
lesson on globalization, the film makes the efforts of these
impoverished men something heroic. They represent a forgotten
kind of courage.
Saturday,
October 7 at 2pm
The
Well (Brunnen)
dir.
Kristien Petri, Sweden, 2005, 35mm, 105 mins, b/w and color,
English, Spanish and Swedish w/ English subtitles
Introduced
by Dr. Arancha Garcia del Soto, Director of Refugee Initiatives
at the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict
at the University of Pennsylvania
Orson
Welles had a long passionate love affair with Spain, shooting
many of his films there. He loved the people, food and customs
and became fixated, as did Ernest Hemingway, upon its bullfighting.
The country also provided the inspiration for his famously incomplete
adaptation of Don Quixote. But who knew Welles’ ashes
are buried in Spain in a well on the property of a renowned
bullfighter? The Well is Kristian Petri’s loving attempt
to trace Welles’ Spanish sojourns. Mixing personal reflection
and original interviews with archival footage shot by and about
Welles, Petri crafts a wonderfully unconventional documentary
that does full justice to its subject, one of the cinema’s most
fascinating men.
Saturday,
October 7 at 7pm
Bientot,
J'Espere (Be Seeing You)
dir.
Chris Marker and Mario Marret, France, 1968, BetaSP, 58 mins,
b/w, French w/ English subtitles
 From
1967 to 1976, Chris Marker was a member of SLON (the “Company
for the Launching of New Works”). SLON was based on the idea
that cinema should not be thought of solely in terms of industry
and commerce. 1967 was also the year that an important strike
broke out at the textile plant Rhodiaceta. The workers demands
concerned not only salary and job security, but also the very
lifestyle imposed on them by society. It was only natural that
Chris Marker, along with other technicians and members of SLON,
would visit the town of Besancon to document the strike and
the lives and attitudes of the workers. Completed and first
shown in 1968, when France was rocked by revolutionary protests,
A Bientot, J’ Espere is a document of the year, of
a moment really, when everything was called into question.
followed
by
The
Case of the Grinning Cat (Chat Perches)
dir.
Chris Marker, France, 2004, BetaSP, 58 mins, color, French w/
English subtitles
The
Case of the Grinning Cat,
the latest creation from legendary French filmmaker Chris Marker,
takes us meandering through Paris over the course of three years
in search of a series of mysterious grinning cats whose stenciled
image has sprung up in the most unlikely places: high atop buildings
all over the city. The film begins in November 2001 in a Paris
still fresh from the shock of the September 11 attacks on the
US, and where the newspaper headlines read, “We are all Americans.”
Over the next year, in the lead up to the Iraq war, the city’s
youth march in numerous demonstrations for all manner of causes
as Marker continues his pursuit of the mysterious cats. He finds
them again showing up as the emblem of the new French youth
movement.
“Make cats not war!” street art is the flip side of idealism
and exuberance driving the young people marching in protests
the likes of which Paris hasn’t seen since the mythic events
of May 1968. While at times it might seem that the spirit of
idealism has survived intact, the filmmaker’s observation of
it is tempered. Causes too, he observes, are a matter of fashion,
and the film ends on a somber note. Cats and owls, politics
and art, nimbly take their place in this Marker shuffle.
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