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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

This week at SFC: Man on Wire + The Phantom of the Cinematheque

Building 7
Fernandes Industrial Centre
Eastern Main Road
Laventille
PORT OF SPAIN


STUDIOFILMCLUB is located in the front foyer space of building 7.

Our screenings are FREE and all are welcome.
Thursday December 18th
First Film 7:30 - Man on Wire starts 8:30pm

MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh/UK/2008/90')
On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the worlds tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. Following six and a half years of dreaming of the towers, Petit spent eight months in New York City planning the execution of the coup. Aided by a team of friends and accomplices, Petit was faced with numerous extraordinary challenges: he had to find a way to bypass the WTCs security; smuggle the heavy steel cable and rigging equipment into the towers; pass the wire between the two rooftops; anchor the wire and tension it to withstand the winds and the swaying of the buildings. The rigging was done by night in complete secrecy. At 7:15 AM, Philippe took his first step on the high wire 1,350 feet above the sidewalks of Manhattan James Marshs documentary brings Petits extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Philippe himself, and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that became known as the artistic crime of the century.

Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard/France/2004/120') PART 2

Henri Langlois was, in many respects, the ultimate film fan. In 1936, at the age of 22, Langlois became (along with Jean Mitry and Georges Franju) one of the founders of the Cinémathèque Française, a theater and museum devoted to preserving the history of the motion picture. Initially a tiny operation financed by private funds, the Cinémathèque, with time, grew into Europe's most important film archive, collecting and preserving prints of rare films from all over the world and protecting many rare gems of the French cinema from destruction during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Langlois' enthusiasm for sharing the treasures of his collection with others helped spawn a film-crazy generation who created the French New Wave of the '50s, and in time, the French government acknowledged the importance of the Cinémathèque's work by financing their endeavors. In 1968, the French minister of culture, André Malraux, responded to Langlois' difficult personality and sloppy bookkeeping by pulling the government's financing of his projects, which led to an international outcry leading to the shutdown of the Cannes Film Festival by activists and film buffs. The Cinémathèque's funding and Langlois' leadership were later restored, and in 1973, his work in film preservation was honored with a special Academy Award. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque is a documentary which chronicles the life, times, and passions of the legendary archivist and includes interviews with his friends, contemporaries, and colleagues -- including Claude Berri, Claude Chabrol, Jack Valenti, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

Man on Wire by Peter Bradshaw

Before the acrobats of Parkour and the gonzo activists of free-running, before the situationist-anarchists of skateboarding in California's Dogtown, who covertly drained suburban swimming-pools to ride their sky-blue curves, there was Philippe Petit.

This was the 24-year-old French highwire artiste who loved to trespass on famous high buildings and ply his marvellous trade, stringing cables between spires and ledges and masts and walking across without a net. On August 7 1974, he achieved his masterpiece: walking across the towers of the World Trade Centre in downtown New York as a stunned crowd gathered below. He and his crew had had to creep up both structures in twin teams, and then attach the wire by literally firing across the initial guiding rope from one tower to the other with a bow and arrow. It was the epat to end all epats : a sensational piece of victimless criminal daring which required enormous cunning and discipline, not merely in the extraordinary act itself - Petit impishly danced back and forth across the wire over and over again while fuming cops raged near the ledge - but in the preparation and the skulduggery involved smuggling in the gear and disguised personnel, as if for a bank job.

What Petit brought off was a remarkable, even religious gesture of devotion, both to the building and to New York itself; this was, in fact, a unique act of homage no other artist could have managed, and New Yorkers instantly appreciated it. Graham Greene once playfully endorsed the Great Train Robbers' crime, but his praise for these violent men was misjudged; I wonder if he missed a trick in not writing about Petit, instead?

James Marsh's documentary about this sublime piece of audacity does full justice to Petit's vision, using interviews with the man himself and his crew, and using photos from the time, and dramatised reconstructions - there is evidently no home-movie record and no television footage, as this was before the age of rolling coverage and rapid-response news 'copters.

At this point, it has to be said that there is an elephant-in-the-living-room aspect to discussing Petit's great coup: namely, its similarity in some ways to a very much more malign spectacular brought off at the same location 27 years later. But with shrewdness and elegance, a defiant insistence on the subject's purity, Marsh tacitly allows us to realise the various parallels but says not a word about them. So neither will I.

Petit was an artist and a genius: the WTC exploit surely entitles him to both those descriptions. He describes how he conceived a fascination with the World Trade Centre towers even before they were built, reading about the plans in a magazine in a dentist's waiting-room as a boy. He claims that there was something in the buildings that cried out for a tightrope walker's wire to be strung between them. They were built to be used as he wished to use them: a successful high-wire walk would fulfil not merely his own destiny, but that of the two towers themselves. They were like those geographical areas in his In Search of Lost Time that Proust said were predestined to be battlefields because of accidents of geological formation: rivers, rises, gullies, which both hinder and inspire a general or tactician: "You don't make an artist's studio out of any old room; so you don't make a battlefield out of any old piece of ground."

His planning was extraordinarily detailed, involving many recce trips and dummy runs and even an entire fake magazine-journalist expedition, in which, posing as a reporter, he interviewed construction workers at the top of the yet-unfinished structure while his photographer took photos of these men, and also, covertly, photos of the ledges and the structures they would need for the rigging and the harness. Heartbreakingly, I notice they did get some cine-film of this cheeky exploit, but somehow failed to get any of the main event.

What of the aftermath? Petit relied heavily on various faintly dodgy and unreliable local American guys to get him into the building, but the actual technicians of the walk were his tried-and-trusted equipe : Jean-Francois Heckel and Jean-Louis Blondeau. There was also his devoted, gentle girlfriend Annie Allix. Their testimony is somehow unbearably moving - they are awestruck and tearful even now, though Petit is just cordial and ebullient. But what is even more painful is the fact that though big-hearted New Yorkers fell in love with the crazy Frenchman Petit, there was no celebrity status accorded to his humble helpers, who wound up being treated slightingly. Petit even betrayed Annie by having a fling with a beautiful American fan. Could it be that though Petit did not fall, there were others who did?

What Marsh shows us is Petit's childlike innocence and almost transcendental faith: faith in himself, faith in his leadership abilities, faith that the escapade would be a success, and faith that he would not fall. His sheer hypnotic self-belief meant that I found it quite impossible to imagine him losing his balance and plunging to his death: he defies gravity. In our world of health and safety, a world where success and fame means working within very well-understood corporate structures, Petit is a rare, exotic beast, and a wonderful one.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

This week at SFC: The Bicycle Thieves

The Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica/1948/Italy/93')

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) defined an era in cinema. In postwar, poverty-stricken Rome, a man, hoping to support his desperate family with a new job, loses his bicycle, his main means of transportation for work. With his wide-eyed young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodied all the greatest strengths of the neorealist film movement in Italy: emotional clarity, social righteousness, and brutal honesty.


Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard/France/2004/120') PART I
Henri Langlois was, in many respects, the ultimate film fan. In 1936, at the age of 22, Langlois became (along with Jean Mitry and Georges Franju) one of the founders of the Cinémathèque Française, a theater and museum devoted to preserving the history of the motion picture. Initially a tiny operation financed by private funds, the Cinémathèque, with time, grew into Europe's most important film archive, collecting and preserving prints of rare films from all over the world and protecting many rare gems of the French cinema from destruction during the Nazi occupation of World War II. Langlois' enthusiasm for sharing the treasures of his collection with others helped spawn a film-crazy generation who created the French New Wave of the '50s, and in time, the French government acknowledged the importance of the Cinémathèque's work by financing their endeavors. In 1968, the French minister of culture, André Malraux, responded to Langlois' difficult personality and sloppy bookkeeping by pulling the government's financing of his projects, which led to an international outcry leading to the shutdown of the Cannes Film Festival by activists and film buffs. The Cinémathèque's funding and Langlois' leadership were later restored, and in 1973, his work in film preservation was honored with a special Academy Award. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque is a documentary which chronicles the life, times, and passions of the legendary archivist and includes interviews with his friends, contemporaries, and colleagues -- including Claude Berri, Claude Chabrol, Jack Valenti, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

Bicycle Thieves: A Passionate Commitment to the Real BY GODFREY CHESHIRE

Viewed in retrospect, much of modern cinema can seem to flow from twin fountainheads: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). Though separated by World War II, the two movies symbolize the cardinal impulses that came to captivate serious audiences, critics, and filmmakers after the war. The tendencies they signaled—ones soon fused into a singular aesthetic by the French new wave—are not so much divergent as complementary.
Where Citizen Kane heralded the age of the auteur and a cinema of passionate individual vision, Bicycle Thieves renounced “egoism” for collective concern, envisioning a cinema of impassioned social conscience. Both films reflect their directors’ personal formal gifts, and their distinct approaches to “the real” transmute the very different production circumstances under which they were created. While Welles’s use of deep-focus and other innovations brought a hyperrealist sophistication to the elaborate fantasy mechanics of the Hollywood studio film, De Sica’s uncommon skills as a visual stylist and director of actors imbued the purist tropes of Italian neorealism—social themes, the use of real locations and nonprofessional performers—with a degree of poetic eloquence and seductive dramatic power seldom equaled in his era.
To an extent almost unimaginable today, the very different forms of realism exemplified by these films were seen as matters not just of aesthetic advancement but of moral urgency, too. Welles’s critique of the collusion of media, political, and economic power was unprecedented, and he later paid the price for his boldness. In Europe, the searching self-examination provoked by a devastating war and the revelation of Hitler’s death camps implicated an entire culture, including a cinema of complicity and vain distraction, typified in Italy by the “white telephone” farces and historical superspectacles of the 1930s.
Born in the fires of war, neorealism served as a chastening, dis-illusioning rejection of Fascism and fantasy, yet its resort to documentary-style, street-level filming (especially in Roberto Rossellini’s trailblazing Rome, Open City, from 1945) was initially a matter of sheer necessity. It soon became an ethical stance, one with consequences both immediate and enduring. Today, more than in any other passage in film history, the tactics and ideals evoked by “neorealism” continue to represent the struggle for authenticity and political engagement in cinema.
Yet neorealism, which by some counts produced only twenty-one films in seven years, was finally less a movement than a moment: a rush of creative energies sparked by, and ultimately tied to, a particular historical crisis. Its authors began in Resistance and thought they were headed for Revolution, but Revolution did not materialize. By the time we reach Bicycle Thieves, in 1948, the neorealist trajectory has reached its apogee. With Italy reborn not as a socialist paradise but as a capitalist purgatory beset with massive unemployment (the postwar boom had yet to launch), the film teeters between ongoing idealism and encroaching melancholy, a place where the earnest formulas of ideology are deepened by the intuitions of tragedy.
The film was the third official collaboration between De Sica, a successful actor and matinee idol turned director, and Cesare Zavattini, a screen writer who also served as one of neorealism’s leading theoreticians. Like The Children Are Watching Us (1944) and Shoeshine (1946) before it, Bicycle Thieves uses children as characters whose innocence interrogates the dubious adult authority around them. Though loosely based on a book by Luigi Bartolini, the film exemplifies De Sica’s stated desire to “reintroduce the dramatic into quotidian situations, the marvelous in a little news item . . . considered by most people throwaway material.”
The quotidian anecdote dramatized here concerns Antonio Ricci, a young husband who has been suffering a prolonged spell of unemployment when he is offered a job as a bill poster. The catch is that he must have a bicycle, and his is in hock. Rescued by his wife’s willingness to pawn their bedsheets, Antonio sets out proudly and confidently on his new job, only to have his bicycle stolen on the first day. Desperate to stay employed, he mounts a wide-ranging search across Rome, accompanied most of the way by his young son, Bruno.
More than a half century on, it’s hard to recapture how striking Italy’s new realism—with its actual city streets and unfamiliar, hard-bitten faces—was to world audiences in the late 1940s, when any comparable Hollywood movie would have been shot on a studio back lot, with a star like Cary Grant (David O. Selznick’s choice for Antonio) in the lead role. Yet this film’s neorealism is a bit anomalous. Far from being shot guerrilla-style, with minimal crew and technical support, it was mounted by a team of movie professionals working on a budget generous enough to allow for large-scale scenes, hundreds of extras, and even the apparatus necessary to create a fake rainstorm.
Here, the situational imperatives of early neorealism have become a conscious aesthetic—one, it must be noted, with proven market value in the cinephile capitals of Europe and America (neorealist films were always mostly an export commodity). Yet this isn’t to question De Sica and Zavattini’s sincerity. Though they perhaps elected to compete with Hollywood on a comparable level of technique, they were still embarked on the heroic quest of speaking about the real people and places and social hardships that most moviemakers (then as now) took pains to avoid.
Their commitment to the real finds its most immediately gratifying proof in the movie’s capacious, quasi-picaresque portrait of Rome. Like Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, À propos de Nice, and Wings of Desire, among others, Bicycle Thieves is one of cinema’s great “city films.” But its wide gaze isn’t simply geographic. In a way that subtly links De Sica’s vision to Dante’s, each of its physical spaces also has a social, emotional, and moral dimension—from the union hall where crass entertainment intrudes, to the sprawling thieves’ market of the Porta Portese, to the church where the poor are run through an assembly line of shaving, food, and worship, to the brothels and rough solidarity of the aptly named Via Panico, to the environs of a soccer stadium where Antonio’s solitary ordeal reaches a humiliatingly public climax.
This city symphony is also, at its most intimate cinematic level, a sym phony of looks. From the first, we are drawn into Antonio’s alternately hopeful and haunted gaze and what it beholds. In the shop where his wife pawns their sheets, the camera leads our eyes up a veritable tower of such linens, a catalog of forestalled dreams. In the search for the bicycle, Antonio both casts his own looks and receives looks of suspicion, curiosity, and, most prevalently, indifference. Sometimes looks are significantly blocked (by a slammed window, say) or misdirected (Antonio hurries on, looking ahead, while Bruno falls twice in the street behind).
In what’s often regarded as the film’s pivotal scene, Antonio decides to treat Bruno to a good meal. This complex gesture from father to son is played out against the subsidiary drama of looks exchanged between Bruno and a supercilious, pompadoured bourgeois boy at the next table. One could not call this passage especially subtle, yet its haunting power and richness show us what cinema can do that novels and theater cannot.
Looks also cue us to a gradual shift in the drama of Bicycle Thieves. Though it starts out focused closely on Antonio’s poverty and desperate need to recover his bicycle, by the latter sections what most concerns us is not what happens between Antonio and the bicycle or his social position but what transpires between the man and his son. Indeed, a second viewing of the film might suggest that this has been the main drama all along, that Bruno has been “looking after” Antonio in several senses that point us toward the film’s justly famous final moments, when a touching gesture of filial solidarity replaces the class solidarity that De Sica and Zavattini evidently saw as receding in Italy.
Given the importance of individual gazes to his drama, it’s no surprise that De Sica depends far more on variable compositions and cutting than did his neorealist colleagues Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, who inclined toward a more distanced camera style. Yet De Sica resists using close-ups or montage for Hollywood-style emotional overkill. Rather, his directing remains impressive for its vigorous inventiveness, the sense that every scene abounds in moments and details that add to the film’s accruing, multivalent meanings. Additionally, his genius with actors accounts here for the indelible performances of the nonprofessionals Lamberto Maggiorani, as Antonio, and Enzo Staiola, as Bruno.

Much has been made of the fact that Antonio is putting up a poster for a Rita Hayworth movie when his bike is stolen. Apologists like Zavattini, in positioning neorealism as the antithesis to Hollywood, often made claims that today look extravagant if not fanciful. André Bazin was surely closer to reality when he spoke of a “dialectical” relationship than when he vaunted neorealism as approaching “pure cinema.” Yet no important contribution to cinema should be condemned by its most utopian rhetoric. Judged by the brilliant conviction of Bicycle Thieves, neorealism still looks like our most potent reminder that a whole world exists outside the movie theater, to which our conscience and humanity oblige us to pay attention.