Screen Picks

Camra-Stylo: The Writer as Director (through Sun., Dec. 19, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) In the second week of I-House's writers-as-directors series, the must-see is Friday night's shorts program, which gathers one-offs by authors who made brief but memorable contributions to the art of film. Considering Jean Genet's importance to filmmakers like Todd Haynes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, not to mention umpteen adaptations of The Maids, it's hard to believe Genet directed only one 20-minute short. But as two-reel careers go, Genet's is uniquely distinguished. The chiaroscuro lyricism of Un Chant d'amour (1950) draws on themes familiar to any reader of The Thief's Journal; there's no better symbol of the way repression intensifies desire than the thin reed with which the prisoners pass cigarette smoke through a hole in the wall, enveloping each other in a languorous haze. The rhythmic code the prisoners use to communicate through walls becomes a governing metaphor for existence under the watchful eye of the law, while Genet creates a stark fantasy space where the men's bodies entwine without fear of being caught. Still, as in all of Genet's work, society's strictures create a certain allure. When, at the film's climax, a pair of hands clutch a key through a barred window, they seem almost reluctant.

In addition to the only films directed by Yukio Mishima and Samuel Beckett—the sensuously fatalist Ritual of Love and Death and the stark Film, which stars Buster Keaton as a hooded agoraphobe—the program also includes two shorts by William Burroughs and Anthony Balch, Towers Open Fire (1963) and The Cut Ups (1966). The former is a science-fiction tale in which a man tap-dances to the end of the world, as the sky fills with the amorphous blobs of deteriorating film emulsion. Such joy in destruction sets the stage for The Cut Ups, in which phrases banal and scientific repeat ad nauseam while images are stacked and reshuffled to dizzying effect. Phrases from a Scientology auditing test—"Look at that picture. How does it seem to you now?"—are transformed through repetition until they become arrows pointing at the medium's heart: It's the audio-collage equivalent of The Man With a Movie Camera.

Misc. Picks If Christmas spirit is driving you to drink, let off some steam with Secret Cinema's "Creepy Christmas Films," a collection of unsettling shorts featuring Davey, Goliath, Howdy Doody and a bunch of malcontent puppets (Fri., 8 p.m., Sedgwick Cultural Center).

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