Also this issue: Piano Forte Roman Polanski's The Pianist finds strength in quiet. -Cindy Fuchs Playing His Part Adrien Brody tunes up. -Cindy Fuchs Almost Perfect In Talk to Her, Javier Cémara's attentive nurse seems like the perfect guy -- with just one huge catch. -Sam Adams new continuing Showtimes Repertory Film

January 2- 8, 2003

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

War Isé (Fri., Jan. 3-Sun., Jan. 26, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) It's tempting to say the timing couldn't be better for International House's monthlong series of films addressing the theme of war, but then, there's hardly been a moment in the last several months when it wouldn't have seemed apropos. In the works for months, the series, spread over every weekend in January, covers a mightily impressive range of countries, eras and directors, from Godard and Brakhage to Herzog and King Vidor.

The 19 films that comprise 'War Is' might be loosely grouped as 'anti-war movies,' although the term has always been controversial; on the one hand are those who hold that any movie that accurately depicts the horrors of combat is de facto anti-war, while Franois Truffaut once said that no war movie can be truly anti-war, since the camera automatically aestheticizes its subject. In any case, programmer Michael Chaiken says the idea was not to assemble a series of anti-war screeds. "I felt that would be a little too transparent, too transparently liberal, despite our personal feelings or convictions," he explains. "We tried to find films that represented a wide range of perspectives. There aren't too many films that are pro-war, but the idea was to have a multiplicity of perspectives, as many voices as we could get -- and, of course, to show films a little bit outside of what would be considered the war picture genre. The hope was to show films that people might not have seen, to engender new experience."

It would, on the surface, be hard to find two movies more difficult than King Vidor's majestic The Big Parade (1925) and Jean-Luc Godard's subversive, sarcastic Les Carabiniers (1963), which kick off the series' first weekend. (The Big Parade screens Friday at 8 p.m., Les Carabiniers Saturday at 8, preceded by the short Campaign in Poland, a slice of wartime Nazi propaganda.) Vidor's story of three American men from differing class backgrounds who find solidarity in the trenches of World War I was the most popular film of the silent era, setting box office records not broken until Gone With the Wind. Though not as sharp-witted as Vidor's The Crowd, there's a trace of the same anti-conformist rhetoric in an early sequence when the men's faces dissolve into one another as they stage a triumphant hometown parade before shipping out. After an overlong sequence establishing camaraderie among the men and their flirtations with comely French farm girls, the parade imagery finds a haunting echo in a fairly nightmarish battle sequence where the men march unprotected through a denuded forest thick with German snipers, their comrades falling almost unnoticed as the cannon fodder charge onward.

If The Big Parade, for all its heartfelt sentiment, is still a Hollywood production through and through (think of it as the Saving Private Ryan of its day), Les Carabiniers is a black-comic fable, designed to give its audience none of the pleasures of a traditional war movie. (It suggests an anti-authoritarian installment of The Goon Show.) Following two energetic young men -- named, with the bluntness characteristic of the film, Ulysses and Michelangelo -- who eagerly seize the opportunity to be storm troopers for a never-seen king, all the while sending postcards back to their mod-girl sweethearts. Though Godard later expressed dissatisfaction with the film -- apparently preferring the anti-Vietnam diatribes he slipped into virtually every one of his late-'60s films -- it's interesting to see the didacticism of a later period so closely wedded to the bubbling energy of his early films. The result, at times, is almost gibberish -- long lists of the places the boys will one day conquer, illustrated with picture postcards and swapped like trading cards. Godard isn't exactly known as a cut-up, but Les Carabiniers might be as close to comedy as he ever got.

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LANCE LOUD! A Death in an American Family (Mon., Jan. 6, 10 p.m., PBS) Cast blame or give credit as you see fit, but the PBS series An American Family more or less invented reality television back in 1973. The Louds, a Santa Barbara family who splintered during filming, were attacked by critics for their supposed atypicality, though in retrospect they don't look too abnormal (although maybe comparing them to the Osbournes gives them too wide a berth). Particularly savaged was their son, Lance, who came out to his parents during filming (although interviewed now, mother Pat says they'd always more or less known); The New York Times called him the family's "evil flower" and "a Goya-esque emotional dwarf," evidently put off by his flamboyant attention-grabbing and Warhol-inspired lifestyle. Almost 30 years later, as filmmakers Alan and Susan Raymond catch up with him, Lance -- who, somewhere along the line, took to writing his name in capital letters with an exclamation point at the end -- is dying of AIDS-related illnesses, and has invited the Raymonds back for what they call "the last chapter in An American Family."Part retrospective (the series hasn't been seen in years, though it's due on DVD in March), part mea culpa (Lance winces as he recalls some of his camera-inspired antics), it's a touching valedictory, if it doesn't do much to investigate how much of the Louds' fate might have been spurred by the Raymonds' cameras. But then, it seems like Lance was performing long before they came on the scene.