Screen Picks

Sam Adams on film.

by Sam Adams

FACTORY MADE: The subject of Martina Kudlacek's Notes on Marie Menken ran with filmmakers such as Gerard Malanga, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Views of a Changing World (Thu.-Sat., Nov. 1-3, $5-$7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, www.ihousephilly.org) The emblematic film in "Views of a Changing World," International House's third annual showcase of international documentaries, is Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread, a powerful collective portrait of agricultural labor so mechanized that details of place and nationality seem almost irrelevant, even obliterated. Baby chicks slide into a funnel and are shot out of a chute like tennis balls; dead fish seem to gasp for air on a conveyer belt, their mouths flapping open and shut as they are robotically gutted; endless rows of cabbages are gobbled up by a mammoth harvester, inching ineluctably forward.

Like Manufactured Landscapes or Workingman's Death, Our Daily Bread emphasizes the rote repetition and geometric determination of the factory floor, but Geyrhalter seems as awed as he is troubled by the magnificent orderliness of this world, a wonder that becomes invisible to the people who inhabit it. The engrossing (and just gross) spectacle of a massive saw slicing lengthwise through a cow's carcass is interrupted when its operator stops to take a cell-phone call, nonchalantly chatting in a room filled with offal. The human capacity to adapt to these bizarre environments seems both inspiring and troublesome. Some things ought not to be too familiar.

There's only one enterprise at stake in Juan Carlos Rulfo's In the Pit, but it's massive enough to employ a small city. The so-called "Second Deck," an airborne freeway running more than 10 miles through Mexico City, is touted as a symbol of the city's modernization, but the conditions that produce it are anything but high-tech. Literally working from the ground up, Rulfo follows a crew of hard-worn day laborers who go from digging foundations for the freeway's massive support pillars to threading iron rods high above the ground. (The conditions are strikingly similar to those on display in Jia Zhang-ke's portraits of contemporary China.)

Rulfo spreads out, spending time with traffic cops and disgruntled commuters, but his most memorable characters are those pouring their sweat into a structure many of them will never be able to use. (One wonders if he might be able to ride his bicycle on the freeway some day.) It's grim and treacherous work; when a sudden rainstorm sends gouts of water into an unshored hole several dozen feet deep, the men at the bottom scramble for the bucket of a nearby backhoe, the only ride up to the top. While the men unleash a constant stream of sexual innuendo and affectionate insults to keep morale high, it's clear they're earning barely enough to survive, and that another dangerous job will follow this one. As one puts it, "Work is never going to end. The end's going to be for us."

Unearthed for its 40th anniversary, Peter Lennon's Rocky Road to Dublin looks at 1960s Ireland with the clear, critical eye of a disillusioned expatriate. Lennon, then writing for the Guardian in Paris, returned home and found his native country struggling to modernize while still clinging to the past. Lennon mocks a Gaelic sports club for its provincial ban on "foreign games," and lampoons a supposedly with-it priest whose idea of keeping up with youth culture is crooning "Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy" to hospital patients. Although the film was suppressed in Ireland for decades, it feels too inconclusive to be incendiary, although the attached making-of documentary helps clarify some of Lennon's intentions. It also details Lennon's collaboration with legendary cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who shot Rocky Road in between Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black and Godard's Week End, and points up the film's claim to cinematic history (or at least a footnote therein): It was the last film shown before the 1968 Cannes festival was shut down in response to political protests.

In Martina Kudlacek's Notes on Marie Menken, Stan Brakhage calls Menken the most critical influence on his early development, and luminaries from Kenneth Anger to Gerard Malanga testify to her importance, which would seem to provide ample material for a 90-minute documentary. But Kudlacek's maddeningly discursive and frustratingly incomplete portrait too often tries to ape the impulsive lyricism of Menken's films, throwing in pointless shots of falling snow and letting its subjects run off on tangents that have nothing to do with the movie's ostensible subject. It's fascinating to learn that the drunken rows between Menken and her husband, Willard Maas, were Edward Albee's inspiration for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but Kudlacek makes no attempt to square the hulking harridan glimpsed in Warhol's Chelsea Girls with the playful intimacy of her films. The movie's only use is as a pretext for what follows: a half-hour of Menken's short films, including Arabesque for Kenneth Anger and the Brakhage-inspiring Eye Music in Red Major.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)