April 1- 7, 2004
screen picks
Three Days of Wiseman (Tue.-Thu., April 6—8, 7:30 p.m., free, Lang Performing Arts Center, Swarthmore College, 610-328-8200) The market for three-hour documentaries being what it is, Frederick Wiseman's enthralling films usually find their main outlet on public television, and video rentals are limited to prohibitive institutional rates. (Bootlegs, of course, abound.) Swarthmore College's three-night Wiseman program, then, is more than a tribute to one of America's greatest living filmmakers: It's like being present when they opened Tut's tomb. Meat (Tue., 7:30 p.m.), an austere black-and-white look at the American beef industry that will make even Fast Food Nation readers blanch. Ballet (Wed., 7:30 p.m.) goes The Company one better, with its in-depth portrait of New York's American Ballet Theater. An incendiary 1967 portrait of conditions inside a Massachussetts mental institution, Titicut Follies (Thu, 7:30 p.m.), is Wiseman's best-known work by far, and as the movie that prompted Wiseman's transition from lawyer to filmmaker, it has a solid place in film history. But the more Wiseman I see, the less I like Titicut, or the fact that it's held up as representative of Wiseman's work as a whole. For once, the accusations of voyeurism often leveled at Wiseman seem to hold true: Even though it's not the shortest of Wiseman's movies, Titicut feels unnaturally compressed, its heightened urgency (it was, after all, meant as an exposé) often turning its subjects into objects. Such (admittedly inadvertent) freak-show salaciousness, along with the fact that the film was banned in Massachusetts for decades, is no doubt what has turned Titicut into a cult object, a status none of Wiseman's superior later films comes close to enjoying. Still, it remains a central text for teachers and students of documentary ethics, a topic that will no doubt engage Wiseman when he introduces the film himself. All screenings are free, but reservations for the talk and Titicut screening are recommended: lpacres.swarthmore.edu.
3-D Film Festival (Sun., April 4, 7 p.m., N. 3rd, Third and Brown sts., www.phila3d.com) There's a good reason 3-D movies have a bad reputation: they're invariably awful. Fortunately, there will be liquor on hand when the Philadelphia 3D Club hosts this video screening of Friday the 13th, Part 3, as well as tridimensional flicks from the Czech Republic and the Southern California Stereoscopic Club, Movies Division. FYI, this is not part of the April Fools' Day issue.
Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic (Mon., April 5, and Wed., April 7, 8 p.m., Turner Classic Movies) Many a filmmaker has reached into America's heart, but how many have entered their bathrooms? According to Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury's generous documentary (split into one-hour segments for its TCM airing), the lush pageantry of Cecil B. DeMille's epics was so enthralling to American audiences that it inspired a fad for marble bathtubs. To hear it from DeMille's critics, who make brief but pointed appearances here, that's the only thing DeMille inspired: Lavish latter-day spectaculars like The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show on Earth are Hollywood filmmaking at its most emptily excessive and self-important. (After The Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese's enthusiasm for DeMille seems sadly prophetic.) Thankfully, American Epic lingers long over DeMille's early career in silents -- no less excessive (witness a helpless maiden's offscreen branding, complete with smoke rising into the frame), but considerably more attuned to human qualities as well. TCM will trot out DeMille's warhorses all month long; the white elephant parade includes The Squaw Man (1914), sometimes called the first Hollywood feature film, with a new score by composer H. Scott Salinas.
In This World (Mon., April 5, 7 p.m., County Theater; Wed., April 7, 7 p.m., Ambler Theater) When I saw it in Toronto last fall, I found Michael Winterbottom and Tony Grisoni's ersatz-neorealist tale of Afghan refugees struggling to reach the West a manipulative tearjerker whose cast of nonprofessional actors just increases the sense that the director and writer are staging a kind of liberal-guilt puppet show. But it's not without worth, and considering all the junk that opens in Philadelphia -- and the fact that I like a good argument -- it's a shame the movie skipped over us altogether. (Better a thoughtful failure than Games People Play: New York.) Since it's out on DVD, the chances of even a one-off screening in town are virtually nil, but Marcel Zyskind's sand-swept vistas make it worth the trip to see the film on the big screen.
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