September 9-15, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Gretjen Clausing and the Future of Film at the Prince Repertory film fans in Philadelphia know that their ability to see movies always hangs by a thread, and with Gretjen Clausing's departure from the Prince Music Theater, that thread is looking a good deal thinner. On Aug. 12, using Clausing's e-mail address, Film at the Prince issued a statement that Clausing, who had served program director since its inception in 1999, would be "moving on to pursue other interests," while the Prince entered a "6-month strategic planning period."

Clausing, who spent 10 years at International House before the Prince gig, has landed on her feet. She's been lending a hand with this weekend's inaugural Media Film Festival (www.mediafilmfestival.com), and she told City Paper on Tuesday that she's accepted a job at Scribe Video Center producing the upcoming conference of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, which Scribe will host in September 2005. Under Clausing, the Prince played host to Scribe's Producer's Forum series, and events like the Prince's Youth Media Jam paralleled Scribe's blend of filmmaking instruction and community activism, so the fit seems like a natural. Clausing agrees. "I've hit the home run," she said on her way to a meeting with Scribe's Louis Massiah. "I'm really happy to be at a place where it's all media, all the time."

Dealing with the sporadic availability of the Prince's stage, used mainly for musical and theater programs, was Clausing's greatest challenge during her tenure, as it will likely be for any potential replacement. Clausing calls it "the Brigadoon syndrome — now you see us, now you don't." Transforming the upstairs black box theater in the Cinema Lounge helped keep Film at the Prince running even when a show was in progress downstairs, and Clausing says attendance doubled after Tamara Mahoney was added as program assistant. But when Mahoney left in March and was not replaced, it was "a big blow," Clausing says. "It felt like we'd taken a step backward."

The list of movies that likely would not have played Philadelphia without Film at the Prince goes on, but Clausing harbors especially fond memories of 2003's Kurosawa retrospective, exactly the kind of large-scale touring program that the city's other venues are reluctant to touch. "That was huge, one of those things where good followed good," she recalls.

While she was able to program an eclectic array of new and repertory films as well as mixed programs such as the live silent movie accompaniment of the Alloy Orchestra, Clausing felt her bosses "never understood" her programming philosophy. "I liked the fact that we were doing all kinds of things for different kinds of audiences," she says. "I think they wanted to take an opportunity to refocus the program."

Pinkenson says Film at the Prince will "probably" be looking to replace Clausing with another full-time program director down the line, "as soon as we find someone," not necessarily at the end of the six-month period. In the interim, they're looking "to try out some different things," including a greater emphasis on first-run films. Next week, the Prince will present weeklong runs of the documentary Bush's Brain and the Japanese horror movie The Grudge, both products of TLA Releasing's freshly inked pact with distributor Tartan Films. The following weekend brings two more TLA/Tartan titles: the festival reprise Anatomy of Hell and the docudrama The Hillside Strangler, as well as local indie Conspiracized. Clausing says her Scribe position may grow to include programming duties, and Pinkenson says the door is open if Scribe wants to use the Prince's facilities, which she justly calls "the best screen in the city." The movies will be waiting for them.

City of Brotherly Crime (Sat., Sept. 11, 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art and Design, 20th and The Parkway, 215-568-4515, ext. 4099) Secret Cinema, whose Web site has moved to the recall-friendly www.thesecretcinema.com, starts off its fall season on the seamy side with three perspectives on crime in this here city. The highlight is The Jungle, a 22-minute quasi-documentary short created by and starring a North Philly street gang in 1967. Under the guidance of social worker Harold Haskins, who will attend the screening, members of the 12th and Oxford Street Gang crafted an episodic, semi-fictional tale whose flashes of street-corner reality are more enlightening than its trumped-up situations. The climactic cap-gun battle feels grossly, almost purposefully false — the "dead" gang members fall ostentatiously, as if they can't or won't make their deaths too real — but the aimless, communal midday drinking feels as if you've just walked into the screen. (The proto-rap tribute to the activity — "A dollar-nine/ That's OK wine" — is an added treat.) Directed by Charlie "Brown" Davis, David "Bat Williams" and Jimmy "Country" Robinson (it could be worse; one cameraman is nicknamed "skinny bitch"), The Jungle was offered as a teaching tool to schools in and out of the ghetto; the accompanying study guide advised the latter that it could "be a bridge to an understanding of the problems confronting the Negro in the other America." But it's obvious the 12th and Oxford Gang, who at the time had been given three tenements to manage by the city, and later evolved into a filmmaking collective, don't see themselves or their neighborhood as a problem, so much as a way of life. The "other America," one gang member offers, is more like Africa: "Just the way it is in the real jungle, that's how it is up here."

You can bet that kid had never been to Africa, but his remark reveals an expectation that a neighborhood like his is where black people are supposed to live, and a sense that injustice and the rule of violence is nothing they haven't faced before. Not so the unnamed Philadelphia neighborhood in The Besieged Majority, an hourlong NBC special from 1970, which uses what looks like Germantown as a case study in urban decay. Law-abiding homeowners testify to the invasion of what presenter Edwin Newman labels an "unemployed, unskilled, unmotivated underclass," turning a once-peaceful neighborhood into a crime-ridden gauntlet, cozy suburban-style homes into armored fortresses. Newman admits the limitations of the special's decision to focus only on victims right up front, and Majority undercuts the impression of a white neighborhood besieged by non-white invaders by following a white storekeeper's testimony with a Latino husband's, and a black grandmother's. Still, that bit of balance doesn't counteract the image of police keeping black and white mobs on opposite street corners from having at each other. Perspective is provided by, of all people, then-Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, who expresses a desire to legalize gambling and offers his opinion that drug addicts are more ill than depraved. Even more captivating than the glimpses of Philadelphia three decades past (oh, those accents) is the time capsule of television style in the pre-video era. Besieged's repertory of emotion-tugging tricks — freeze-frames, color-to-black and white bleeds, quick cuts and mushy dissolves — may seem heavy-handed, but it's a hallmark of an era when film craftsmanship and TV reporting were closer cousins than they are today.

Misc. Picks: As big and beautiful as Brando, but not quite as light on its feet, Guys and Dolls is this month's dollar matinee at the Bridge. I hear Epitaph's a lock in the third. (Tue., Sept. 14, 1 p.m.). Fellini-heads rejoice; prolong your Dolce Vita high with a trip to the County and Ambler theaters, where screenings of a new print of I Vitelloni start Wed., Sept. 15.