Screen Picks

Youth Media Jam (Thu., May 20-Thu., May 27, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) The Prince calls youth media "the fastest-growing trend in independent filmmaking," and with eight days of screenings, slams and workshops, and assists from Scribe Video Center, WYBE-TV, the Big Picture Alliance, Termite TV and Reelblack, it's clear there's plenty of support to go around. Each night's screening has a different theme, while workshops on Friday and Saturday afternoons offer emerging filmmakers the chance to learn from director-educators like Eugene Martin (Edge City) and San Francisco's Spencer Nakasako, whose documentary Refugee screens Friday at 7 p.m. ($10, or free to participants in Nakasako's "Documentation and Identity" workshop the next morning).

Nakasako might be over the age limit, but his teenage subjects aren't. Refugee follows three Cambodian-American young men from their homes in San Francisco's Tenderloin District (where they were Nakasako's students) to the homeland they hardly remember. Nakasako restricts himself to the role of cameraman and video diarist, never passing judgment on his young subjects and their conflicting tangle of emotions. At times, their lack of perspective, so classically American, can be galling: Reunited with his father, Michael unloads two decades of hurt, unable to understand his father's decision to send his wife and child away as a sacrifice rather than an act of selfishness. (The fact that his father had a second wife Michael never knew about hardly helps matters.) When Michael tells his dad that, if he'd had the choice, he'd never have let his family be separated (which, you can't help noting, sounds like something from an American movie), his father can only respond, sadly, "It was a time of war." You long for a confrontation like those in Daughter from Danang, where the American-raised daughter of Vietnamese parents comes to terms with her ignorance of her own history. But even as Nakasako's subjects stare out at the killing fields, it seems as the distance they've traveled is just beginning to sink in.

That sense of being on the edge of understanding animates some of YMJ's best shorts, about two dozen of which were screened in advance. Perhaps the most thought-provoking is Help!, by CAPA's Len Shafer, part of the "Hot Issues" program (Sat., 1:30 p.m., free). The three-part film looks at the complexities of high school romance, from coming out to sleeping around, most sharply in a vignette where two boys awkwardly discuss whether or not they're, uh, you know. After it's established that both are (or at least think they might be), they move towards each other, but the more tentative of the two warns, "I don't kiss." Of course not, sighs his disappointed friend. "That would be gay."

The idea that young peoples' issues are best addressed by young people themselves underlies the work of the Philadelphia-based Big Picture Alliance. The night devoted to their work (Wed., 6 p.m., free) includes "It's All About Lead," a rap video in which girls in school uniforms tell kids to urge their parents to get their pipes tested, and Camike, a teenage mother's story from a teenage mother's perspective.

Reelblack's "Intramurals" program (Sun., 5:30 p.m., free) features Life Stories from Washington Avenue, facilitated by the always-welcome Termite TV, while closing night's "Variety Hour" (May 27, 7 p.m., $5) includes a nifty bit of animation (of which there's more than you might think) from CAPA's Will Drinker called Totem Pole. There ought to be something for everyone's taste, but in case there isn't, a full day of Saturday programming climaxes with the open video slam (8 p.m., $3 suggested donation). The first 20 filmmakers between ages 11 and 18 will get to show up to six minutes of their work -- though a caution to the shy: Introductions are required. A complete schedule for all Youth Media Jam events is available at www.princemusictheater.org/film/ymj.

A Red Bear (Fri., May 21, 8 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215—895-6542) This Argentinean import kicks off a monthly series of films from Cinema Tropical, the New York-based distributor devoted to movies by or about Latin America. Adrián Caetano's Un Oso Rojo starts things off with a bang, or rather several of them: This story of an ex-con named Bear (Julio Chávez) often abandons its neorealist roots for scenes of rote and occasionally preposterous gunplay. The movie can't seem to decide if it wants to be a social drama or a Western, though Chávez's sadly swaggering performance would be welcome in either genre. After seven years, Bear returns to find his wife and daughter living with another man. But Bear keeps his anger hidden, with the inmate's knack for keeping his head down; he whittles away at his wife's reluctance and his daughter's unfamiliarity. At the same time as Bear is working his way back into the criminal class, he's protecting his wife's boyfriend, an unemployed habitual gambler whose temper has a tendency to flare. The relationship between the two men is the movie's most surprising development, bolstered by the implicit understanding that two men trying to support a family on limited means have more in common than their crossed paths might suggest. At times, A Red Bear rivals the social complexity of the Dardenne brothers; at others, particularly when Bear is solving his problems with a perfectly aimed handgun, it dissolves into pat cliche.

Master of Light: Ghislain Cloquet (starts Tue., May 25, International House) Cinematographers work with light, but they toil in the shadows. Still, even a short list of his credits proves that Belgian cameraman Ghislain Cloquet is anything but obscure. Night and Fog, Le Trou, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Au Hasard Balthazar, Love and Death -- if the same cobbler had worked on all of them, you'd have no choice but to conclude that he was the most divine of shoemakers. Cloquet's impact isn't so secondary, but it's tough to pin down. Louis Malle once said that if any of his editors ever won an award, he'd fire him; Cloquet's self-effacing craftsmanship must have served him well when he shot Malle's The Fire Within. What distinguishes Cloquet's photography, particularly in black and white, is its transparency, even purity. It's hardly surprising that Robert Bresson, whose art consisted in honing each moment to its simplest and most direct expression, was so drawn to Cloquet, using him on Balthazar, Mouchette and Une Femme Douce.

Cloquet's color films have a similar, if less austere, simplicity. In Night and Fog (1955), directed by Alain Resnais, Cloquet's color photography of concentration-camp rubble contrasts with black-and-white footage of the camps at the height of the Holocaust. The film's narration evokes the ruins' "picture postcard" quality, but Cloquet's colors are muted ever so slightly, as if by lingering sorrow. Similarly, in Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), the vibrancy of movie-musical spectacle is dusted with a patina of industrial grime (or perhaps it's sea spray) from the shipyards of Nantes.

I-House's Cloquet tribute begins with a shattering double-bill: Night and Fog and The Fire Within (Tue., 8 p.m.). François Truffaut called the former "the greatest film ever made" (an epithet also bestowed on Balthazar, which screens next week), while Malle called his harrowing portrait of mental illness (also known as A Time to Live and a Time to Die) the first of his films he was "truly happy with." A rare American excursion for Cloquet, Arthur Penn's Mickey One (Wed., 8 p.m.) ought to have a place in cinema history, if for no other reason than it represents Penn's first venture with Bonnie and Clyde's Warren Beatty. Instead, rarely screened and never released on video, it's been doomed to unfair obscurity. The mix of Nouvelle Vague style and borscht belt dialogue is a rare taste, to be sure: Beatty's Polish emcee might be the first existential nightclub comic. On the run from mysterious gangland forces, he ought to lay low, but the desire to succeed is too strong: he rises to the top, and gets burned. Penn, coming off The Miracle Worker, seemed determined not to make the same mistake. Fired off the Nazi heist thriller The Train (which was completed by John Frankenheimer), Penn attacked the very fabric of moviemaking; with its prismatic chronology and live-wire performances, Mickey One is a showbiz Shadows.

In the series next week: Love and Death, Au Hasard Balthazar, The Young Girls of Rochefort and Tess.

Misc. Picks Male hysteria at its finest as Exhumed Films unspools two by John Woo at International House: Hard Boiled and A Bullet in the Head. Walking into a boardroom with your brother's skull was never so much fun. (Sat., 7 p.m., $9). Spiral Q's Handmade Film Series features Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and other disturbing Barbie doll shorts (Sat., 7 and 9:30 p.m., 3114 Spring Garden St.). Call it The Andrew Repasky McElhinney Collection: all three of the Fishtown auteur's features are now out on DVD. Be forewarned, though: George Bataille's Story of the Eye is available only in a limited edition of 69 (snigger), through www.diabolikdvd.com (a great local source for indulging that expensive passion for import DVDs). Magdalen and A Chronicle of Corpses can be had from the regular sources.

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