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Also this issue: The Empire Strikes Back Another Fine Meth What Goes Around |
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May 16-22, 2002
screen picks
Drawn from Memory/Still Life with Animated Dogs (Thu., May 16, 7 p.m., $10, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) If you're going to expect people to sit down and watch your life, you'd better have both an interesting life story and an interesting way of telling it. Animator Paul Fierlinger, who lives in Wynnewood with wife and co-animator Sandra, has both. Born in Japan, raised in the U.S. and then Czechoslovakia, Fierlinger, whose father was a Czech diplomat, his uncle the country's first Communist prime minister, covers the same ground in a very different fashion in these two short films, produced six years apart. Drawn from Memory, completed in 1995, is the more straightforward of the two, though it still moves in imaginative leaps and bounds. Drawn with a lively, Feiffer-esque line, the hourlong film moves from Fierlinger's birth through his eventual defection, taking in several years where he repudiated his family, adopted a pseudonym and lived in Bohemian Prague. (Vaclav Havel and Milos Forman do their own voiceover work.)
The playfulness that bubbles under Drawn from Memory comes to the surface in the recently completed Still Life with Animated Dogs, which looks back on Fierlinger's life through his relationships with a series of beloved pets. Bounding from tale to tale like a frisky pup, Still Life even jumps out of the story and into the studio for an uncommon moment of animated self-reflexivity. On its own, Still Life might seem a tad featherweight (if delightfully so), but the pairing with Drawn from Memory gives the new film an added poignancy, demonstrating, for example, why each of the dogs Fierlinger owned in Czechoslovakia was named for an American president, or how his relationships with them must have stabilized an otherwise turbulent life.
(Speaking of interesting presentations, Termite TV's 5-minute life stories will again be on display as part of Blue Sky's First Person memoir festival, which Fierlinger's appearance is also a part of. Thu, May 16 through Sun., May 19, 2 to 10 p.m., free, Drake Gallery, 1512 Spruce St.)
Inferno/Black Sabbath (Fri., May 17, 8 p.m., $5, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) If you've got an appetite for horror but are still frightened of New Jersey, take advantage of Exhumed Films' rare trip across the Delaware. This double bill brings in the heavy hitters, with a feature apiece from two masters of Italian splatter: Dario Argento's Inferno and Mario Bava's Black Sabbath. Somewhat desperately tagged as the follow-up to Argento's Suspiria (meaning it was the next movie he made), Inferno is effectively creepy despite its monstrously ridiculous plot, which basically involves a group of people who pry into the occult being stalked and murdered by a cowled figure with really nasty hands. Death comes by cat, by rat, by knife, by guillotine and some even less pleasant means. Argento's never exactly been known as a master of narrative, but it's pretty clear here that the conceptual tail is waving the storytelling dog -- in one early scene, a woman in search of a mysterious key drops through a hole in the floor and into a ballroom entirely filled with crystal-clear, swimming-pool blue water. (The rotting corpse in the room next door has apparently not befouled the water one iota.) Argento's love of color is apparent in the film's pop art design (shades of Phantom of the Paradise), and in the way he has actors bathed in pools of red and blue light for no apparent reason. More sensual than sensible, Inferno has everything that an Argento fan could want, and nothing that they're not used to overlooking. Also on the bill is Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, the 1963 trilogy of tales to delight Boris Karloff fans and loyal viewers of The Osbournes equally.
William Greaves/Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (Sat., May 18, 8 p.m., $10, The Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St., 215-925-9914, www.paintedbride.org) After I said some not-so-kind things about William Greaves' 1968 experimental film when it aired last fall on Sundance Channel, I got a package of clips in the mail, accompanied by a polite note from the director. Reading them didn't exactly change my mind, but it revealed how many people have bought into the meta-metafilm's mystique over the years. Very much a product of its time, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is one of a handful of features shot by the respected documentarian (Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey), and uses multiple frames and overlapping perspectives to detail both Greaves' attempt to shoot a fiction story and the story itself, at one point recording the crew's off-set discussion about whether or not to abandon the project. It's a lot more interesting in theory than in practice (which is why it's not surprising that a number of over-intellectualized critics don't mind pretending that the former is actually what's on screen) -- but that may actually prove to be a selling point Saturday night, when Greaves takes the Bride's stage post-screening, along with local filmmakers Louis Massiah, Kimi Takesue and Shanti Thakur for a discussion on "revisiting auteurism in the age of digital access." Their varying backgrounds -- Massiah (W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices, The Bombing of Osage Avenue) is a straight-up documentarian and community video activist; Thakur's Seven Hours to Burn is impressionistic autobiography; Takesue's lyrical Heaven's Crossroads took Best Documentary honors in this year's Festival of Independents, and she's currently at work on a fiction project -- should set the stage for a lively discussion about process, product and the line (or lack thereof) between documentary and fiction.
Waking Life ($29.98 DVD) Speaking of movies that are more interesting in concept than execution, the best feature of Waking Life is the audio commentary with the movie's scores of artists, most of whom had no animation experience before they were hired to digitally trace the footage director Richard Linklater had shot on DV, then used the results as the basis for animated flights of fancy. Even better, with the commentary on, you don't have to listen to the movie's dialogue, much of which consists of half-baked or recycled lessons in Philosophy 101. (Linklater and co. angrily rebut the charge that the movie is "sophomoric" on their commentary, but we'll leave them to make that case.) Listening to the animators (and their wide variety of Texas accents), you really get a feel for how each artist's personality informed the segment(s) they animated, which only deepens your appreciation for the film's wide range of styles, and how elegantly they're meshed together. Linklater's never been a director of particular visual interest (as evidence by last year's other Linklater release, the downright ugly Tape), but Waking Life is a true feast for the eyes. If only it were as easy on the ears.
