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Play it again, Sam


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Published: Jun 4, 2008

HUSSEIN IN THE BRAIN: Acrassicauda rocks out during and after Saddam's era in Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The Democrats' intraparty squabbles are nothing compared to the old-school left's flair for self-immolation, vividly displayed in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise. Set, perhaps for practical as much as aesthetic reasons, entirely in Godard and then-wife Anne Wiazemsky's Paris apartment, the movie is a claustrophobic examination of the faddish Maoism that swept through France's student bodies in 1967, a product of anti-imperialist intoxication with the North Vietnamese and disillusionment with the Soviet Union's cold warmongering. The film's full title adds the caveat "ou plutôt à la chinoise" — or rather, in the Chinese style —a sly denunciation of the movie's play-acting revolutionaries.

Holing up in an apartment belonging to a comrade's absent parents, a group of students played by Wiazemsky, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto debate the merits of armed struggle in front of walls painted the color of a Little Red Book. Her face smeared with stage blood, Berto yells for aid as toy planes swing by on fishing lines, and a toy tank topped by a tiny American flag is bombarded by Maoist literature. For them, revolution is theater.

Godard, however, was increasingly dubious that theater, filmed or otherwise, could foment political change; at Cannes the next year, he denounced the assembled filmmakers, himself included, for lagging behind the masses then rioting in the streets. Standing in for his creator, one of La Chinoise's ideologues inverts the traditional dichotomy between the proto-documentary of the Lumière brothers and the illusionism of Georges Méliès, proclaiming Méliès the true maker of "actualités." Breaking with naturalism was the only way to approach the truth.

The ideological debates that animate La Chinoise, many of which are taken directly from Godard and Wiazemsky's pillow talk (no wonder the marriage didn't last), are obscure at three decades' remove, but its aesthetics are still revolutionary, bearing out the mandate to "confront vague ideas with clear images."

Revolution through popular culture is an impossible goal, and one the Clash never lived up to. But the live DVD Revolution Rock mercifully offers the option of turning off the tendentious voiceover track and simply watching the band perform, with footage from midsize theaters in 1977 all the way to Shea Stadium in 1982. In its own way, the hodgepodge collection makes a better case than Julien Temple's sprawling Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, whose populist affectations (look! it's John Cusack sitting by a campfire!) overshadow the complicated facts of Strummer's life.

Based on his Radiohead film Meeting People Is Easy, Grant Gee is no stylistic wallflower, but he takes a back seat for Joy Division, allowing the band's fascinating and ultimately tragic story to tell itself. Even the outtakes, all 75 minutes of them, are worth watching. It takes nothing away from Sam Riley's fine performance in Control to say that the footage of the real Ian Curtis blows him away; the intensity of his stage presence is something no actor could match. Perhaps the documentary's most fascinating revelation is that Curtis' cryptic lyrics were often taken directly from his life. In retrospect, some of his songs sound, inevitably, like rough drafts for his suicide note, but his bandmates confess that even they didn't always listen to the words.

Robyn Hitchcock is often dismissed for his preoccupation with, as the title of John Edginton's portrait has it, Sex, Food, Death ... and Insects. But Hitchcock says his true obsession is with life: "It takes sex to get you in, death to get you out and food to keep you here." Onstage, Hitchcock favors winding psychedelic monologues, but in his English garden he discourses readily on his songwriting process, which in this case involves Peter Buck and two of R.E.M.'s touring members, as well as the occasional Nick Lowe drop-in. Along with Jonathan Demme's Storefront Hitchcock, the most overlooked and one of Demme's best concert films, Sex, Food is a rare opportunity to get up close to an elusive artist.

Music itself is elusive for Acrassicauda, four young Iraqis who want nothing more than to rock out. Heavy Metal in Baghdad follows their attempts to shred before and after the U.S. overthrow. In Saddam's era, they wrote halfhearted anthems as the price of existence, rhyming "Saddam Hussein" with "drive you insane." Newer songs, not surprisingly, take aim at the international presence, although there's plenty of generic angst-venting as well. Released under the aegis of too-cool-for-school Vice magazine, Heavy Metal plays it relatively straight, although there's way too much time devoted to the directors' difficulty entering the country, as if those troubles equaled the daily struggles of their subjects' lives. When one of Acrassicauda's members accosts the camera in the last shot, you're inclined to sympathize.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)