June 10-16, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

In Memoriam: Jean Rouch (Fri.-Sun., June 11-13, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) What a difference a dash makes. When Jean Rouch, who died in February at the age of 86, adapted Dizga Vertov's kinopravda into French, he called it cinéma-vérité. By the time it crossed the Atlantic, cinema verite had lost more than the hyphen: It had become shorthand for the unobtrusive, self-effacing style of documentary pioneered by Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, the "fly-on-the-wall" illusion that viewers have entered a room unnoticed.

What Rouch was after was not "the cinema of truth, but the truth of cinema," which is to say a truth, not the truth. The distinction is central to Rouch's work as a filmmaker and ethnographer. A stint in West Africa during World War II ignited a passion for documenting other cultures (and occasionally his own), but Rouch quickly grew to believe that written words could never transcend the author's point of view. Inspired by Vertov's self-conscious experimentation and the poetic ethno-narratives of Robert Flaherty, Rouch set out to create a collaborative, explicitly nonobjective cinema that blends elements traditionally associated with both documentary and fiction film.

I-House's three-day tribute includes many of Rouch's best-known films, including The Chronicle of a Summer (Fri., 7 p.m.), The Human Pyramid (Sun., 2 p.m.), and the short Les Maîtres fous (Sat., 7 p.m., followed by the feature-length Jaguar), as well as Musso-Musso: Jean Rouch, as if É (Sun., noon), a documentary portrait of Rouch inspired by his own techniques. Chronicle (1960), Rouch's signature work, begins with man-on-the-street interviews asking Parisians, "Are you happy?" But the film, co-directed by Edgar Morin, quickly moves past that "false reality" to encompass less contrived, more confrontational moments. Rouch and Morin constantly make their presence felt on screen or on the soundtrack, and the film culminates with what would become a Rouch trademark: a screening where the characters watch the film so far and comment on their own representation.

The Human Pyramid (1961) blurs the lines between subject and object with even greater determination. Rouch asks a group of students in Ghana, both black and white, to create a story about the possibility of understanding between the races. They then act out a story which inevitably parallels their lives, until it's no longer clear whether its fiction is entirely invented. When the students worry what dramatizing their hopes and fears might do, Rouch assures them he will take "la responsibilité du scenario," a phrase which would serve as a fitting epitaph.

Rouch worked on Jaguar from 1954 to 1967, not atypical for a filmmaker who, according to the recently published anthology Ciné-Ethnography (University of Minnesota Press), left more than two dozen films uncompleted at his death. Shot silent, with improvised narration added after the fact (in the manner of Flaherty's Man of Aran), it's a somewhat awkward hybrid shot through with moments of brilliant confrontation, as three African men travel from the savannah to the cities of Ghana, their perspectives shifting along the way. But no one with even a casual interest in Rouch's work should miss Les Maîtres fous. Documenting a ceremony of the West African Hauka, who enter a trance in which they are possessed by the spirits of various colonial administrators, the film was a major influence on works like Jean Genet's The Blacks, Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass and Peter Brook's Marat/Sade. Just as important as the depiction of the trance, though, are the framing sequences showing the Hauka before and after the possession, where they're seen living and returning to their daily lives. Rouch's first surviving film, In the Land of the Black Magi (preceding Musso-Musso), documents another celebratory trance, but the film, which Rouch later disowned, is full of dark-continent rhetoric; the trance is filmed from afar, edited for shock value. Les Maîtres fous -- which can be translated as both "the masters of madness" and "the mad masters" — shows the trances as part of the Hauka's way of life, contrasting their ceremonies with the colonists' pomp and circumstance. The Friday and Sunday screenings will be introduced by Rouch experts Sam DiIorio and Ivone Margulies.

The Weather Underground (Sat., June 12, 7:30 p.m. and Sun., June 13, 2 p.m., $8.50-$10, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) Sam Green and Bill Siegel's fascinating documentary is out on a Docurama DVD, with a host of extras, the best of which is an excerpt from Emile de Antonio's admittedly superior Underground (1976). But Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn's commentary is as infuriating as it is enlightening. They refer to onetime Weatherman David Gilbert, serving 75-to-life for participating in an armed robbery in which a security guard was murdered, as a "political prisoner," and dispute the notion that blowing up buildings can be construed as "violence." Three decades after the fact, it seems the two haven't so much come to terms with their would-be revolutionary past so much as rewritten it for their own convenience.

The movie's conscience is Mark Rudd, who was ousted from the group before they went underground for questioning the decision to go on bombing after an explosion killed three Weathermen who'd been planning to bomb a military dance (the only deaths directly associated with the group). As part of the First Person Festival, Rudd will read from his unpublished memoir (quoted briefly in the film) at Barnes & Noble (Fri., 7 p.m.) and speak following the Saturday screening of the documentary. As much as Dohrn and Ayers, Rudd upholds the principles of collective action and organized dissent, but his honest coming-to-terms with the Weather Underground's legacy makes for a far more fruitful discussion.

The Fog of War ($26.96 DVD) Coming to terms with the Vietnam era in a very different way, Errol Morris' first-person doc would be a great movie if it were about anyone less important than Robert McNamara, the former defense secretary widely viewed as the instigator behind the escalation of American intervention. Fog works overtly to dispel that impression, and recorded conversations between McNamara and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson seem to support the claim that McNamara was a company man who opposed the increase of American forces but bowed to Johnson's bellicosity. But while the movie's revisionist history is well worth considering — and McNamara's latter-day wisdom is entirely essential — Morris' decision to present McNamara entirely in his own words raises as many questions as it answers. It's odd at least that Morris chose to counter the Holocaust denial of Mr. Death's Fred Leuchter with expert testimony, but leaves McNamara's rationalizations unanswered; Leuchter may have represented a serious phenomenon, but as an individual, his importance surely pales besides McNamara's. There's no question Morris has made a vital contribution to the ongoing debate, and helped redefine not just McNamara's legacy but the history of the entire era. But Morris mustered more certainty on the origins of the universe and an unwitnessed crime than he does for one of the most pored-over periods in modern history.

Six Feet Under (premieres Sun., June 13, 9 p.m., HBO) Memo to HBO: There's still time to revamp the schedule so that the first three episodes of the new Six Feet Under season air back-to-back on Sunday. Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of disappointed viewers walking around until June 27. The fourth season of Alan Ball's sex-'n'-death drama opens with two of its most aggravating episodes, both centered around the death of Nate's wife Lisa (Lili Taylor). As much as its mortuary setting promises a tête-à-tête with the Grim Reaper, the show works best when it can put a spin on the encounter. Apart from its first episode, the show has never dealt with the death of a character so central to the Fisher family's lives, and the result is exactly the kind of maudlin soul-searching that it's always done its best to glide above. (Let's not even mention Federico's guilt over that forlorn blowjob, which instigates what might be the most contrived sex-worker subplot since The West Wing's first season.) Disgraced cop Keith starts working celeb security, which pulls the show away from its center (although Michelle Trachtenberg's bratty starlet is a keen caricature), while Brenda's budding relationship with hunk-next-door Justin Theroux seems like a pale excuse to keep her off the sidelines. That's the problem with a show about wayward characters: After a few seasons, just the fact that they're in each others' lives starts to be a stretch.

And then, just like that, it all falls together, culminating in the fourth episode, unquestionably one of the show's best. No fair giving too much away, but it builds to a climax which suggests that this season will be ultimately about the questionable possibility of starting over — David and Keith are back on, Ruth's just getting to know her new husband, and Claire keeps thinking she's found herself when the bottom drops out again. Life after death? Watch and see.