March 18-24, 2004
screen picks
Truck Stop Still Lifes (Sun., March 21, 7 p.m., $3 suggested donation, Space 1026, 1026 Arch St.) Bill Brown, who breezed through town two years ago on the Lo-Fi Landscapes tour, returns for this three-film program, including the new Mountain State. It won't come as a surprise to anyone who's seen his work that Brown likes to move around. These three movies -- Confederation Park and Buffalo Common are the others -- take Brown through North Dakota, the Virginias and several Canadian provinces, and his narration describes a 16 mm version of the punk-rock lifestyle, moving from town to town, crashing in warehouses or sleeping on a friend's couch. But Brown's wandering is more than a lifestyle choice: It's part of a philosophy that sees boundaries as antithetical to human nature. Brown's evocative style, part travelogue, part personal essay, fuses history and home movies, roadside picaresques and political commentary.
Confederation Park, the most succinct and effective of the three films, explores the long-simmering tensions between French- and English-speaking Canadians. Over images of undisturbed skyscrapers, Brown narrates the history of violent Quebecois separatism as well as its more benign modern-day equivalent; today, he says, frustrated Francophones are more likely to cross out the English-language instructions on electric hand dryers than plot to blow up bridges. Cobbled together from once-independent regions, Canada appears to Brown as an arbitrary conglomeration; standing on a playground map, he playfully runs from province to province, hopscotching borders with insouciant glee.
Confederation Park's title hints at the way landmarks simultaneously commemorate and nullify history, reducing national conflicts to a neatly delineated patch of ground, complex figures to inert statues. Mountain State tours West Virginia's monuments, including a statue of an Indian chief that was a landmark for European settlers, and an Indian burial mound that was once leveled off to serve as a judges' stand for horse racing, then excavated by the Smithsonian. In Buffalo Common, history resist attempts at burial, as decommissioned nuclear silos in North Dakota reveal their secrets.
Commonwealth Tribute (Through Sat., March 20, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) As subjects for a cultural series go, "Mosaic of the Commonwealth" is about as vague as it gets, but International House's Michael Chaiken has seized the opportunity to program a handful of marvelous English-language films. After Wednesday's tribute to the National Film Board of Canada, the series continues with Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (Thu., 8 p.m.), whose stunning photography of the Australian outback is sure to do I-House's big screen proud. Even more noteworthy is The Bed Sitting Room (Sat., 8 p.m.), Richard Lester's madcap post-apocalyptic fable. A veritable who's who of 1960s British comedy -- Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Rita Tushingham and Ralph Richardson -- joined forces to bring Milligan and John Antrobus' abstract comic nightmare to the screen. After a "nuclear misunderstanding" leaves 40 million Britons dead in just two minutes, 28 seconds (including peace treaty), the few who remain on the rubbish-heap wasteland of postwar Britain cling steadfastly to the shreds of their old existence: A man kneels behind the frame of an old TV set and reads the "news" as if nothing has changed. A devastating parody of stiff-upper-lip attitudes, the film is laced with simple but devastating imagery; a pile of old shoes absurdly commemorates the dead, but also invokes the piles of possessions outside Nazi death camps. Inexplicably, The Bed Sitting Room has never even been available on video, much less DVD, so this rare screening is a necessity.
Underground ($29.95 DVD) Emir Kusturica's raucous fable positively bursts with evocative images, each of them rich enough to sustain a lesser film. The effect is close to lunching at an all-you-can-eat buffet, only your head starts swelling instead of your stomach. In Kusturica's hands, it isn't repetition that turns history into farce, but human appetites. Spanning more than a half century, Underground restages the history of the former Yugoslavia as an expansive black comedy, animated by the lust for life which is both the characters' salvation and their undoing. Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) and Marko (Miki Manojilovic) begin as loyal Communists fighting the Nazis, but after a convoluted series of events, Marko becomes a party hero, and Blacky winds up literally underground, hidden in a cellar, convinced that the war with the Nazis has never ended. Marko exploits his longtime friend and dozens like him, convincing them to manufacture weapons which Marko then sells on the black market. He's a war profiteer without a war. And that's not the only way he profits off his old friend; the populace at large believes Blacky is dead, and Marko has transformed him into a posthumous war hero, using their friendship to cement his own claim to political power.
Kusturica's flair for the absurd is undeniable; when Blacky finally emerges from his prison, he walks smack into the filming of Marko's official biopic, whose actors so closely resemble their real-life counterparts that Blacky believes nothing has changed. (Woe to the thespian in the role of the sadistic Nazi officer.) The nearly three-hour film is undeniably excessive -- it's the kind of movie where characters repeatedly get hit over the head with bottles of wine -- but Kusturica has the conviction of his own excess.
Misc. Picks The late Rufus Thomas works his crowd-control magic in Wattstax, returning to the Prince in 35 mm (Sun., 7:30 p.m.). Richard Power Hoffman's Invisible Mountains, a highlight of last year's Festival of Independents, resurfaces at the County and Ambler Theaters (Mon./Wed., 7 p.m.).
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