LA FUGA, Spring 2008

My friend Milenko Skoknik is a very busy fellow. Along with (allegedly) making a film for his Masters Program at San Francisco State, he's been helping out on a film down in Los Angeles, acting in a film in Puerto Rico, and falling in love with a young woman in Manhattan. If Miklós Rózsa were alive he'd be the likely candidate to score all this epic drama.

As if that isn't enough, he's recently contributed an interview with Manda Bala's Jason Kohn to the most current issue of the Chilean forum La Fuga ("The Escape"), which likewise features a sidebar on film theory, additional interviews with Jonathan Rosenbaum and Jean-Louis Comolli, plus essays on the "genre snatching" of The Invasion, a report from the set of Alicia Scheron's latest film Turistas (not to be confused with recent torture porn), the "poetic contamination" of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, four notes for Kaurismäki and much much more, all in Spanish of course.

NOIR CITY 6: CHARLES McGRAW: BIOGRAPHY OF A FILM NOIR TOUGH GUY—The Evening Class Interview With Alan K. Rode

Are you ready? Have you dusted off your rain-weathered fedora and bent its brim? Cinched your raincoat? Straightened the seam of your nylons? Polished your handgun? As I announced earlier, Noir City is on its way this week and I'm starting out my coverage with an interview with author Alan K. Rode.

I met Alan at last year's Noir City Film Festival where I discovered that—along with "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller—he was one of the key forces behind the Film Noir Foundation and the festival proper. During the course of our conversation I learned he was working on a biography of noir heavy Charles McGraw. Admitting I was fairly new to noir and not familiar with McGraw, Rode took it upon himself to educate me by forwarding me copies of The Threat (1949) and Roadblock (1951), which I devoured before moving on to T-Men (1947) and Border Incident (1949).

I've spent this last year familiarizing myself not only with McGraw's films but Rode's prodigious online presence, not only his interviews with Muller for The Film Noir Foundation's website but also for The Big Chat, where he has likewise moderated interviews with Andrew Dickos, Arthur Lyons, Lee Server, John O'Dowd and Karen Burroughs Hannsberry.

Rode is also a frequent contributor to Film Monthly where he's reviewed 711 Ocean Drive (1950), Ace in the Hole (1951), Bob Le Flambeur [Bob The Gambler] (1955), Border Incident (1949), Crime Wave (1954), D.O.A. (1949), The Harder They Fall (1956), The Lodger (1944) / Hangover Square (1945), The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), Moonrise (1948), and The Well (1951). He's likewise dispatched from the Palm Springs Film Noir Festival for 2002, 2004, and 2005; the American Cinematheque Film Noir Festival for 2003, 2004, and 2005; and Noir City (2003). And he's reported on the Centenniel Tribute to Otto Preminger and Glenn Ford's 90th Birthday Tribute in Hollywood.

Along with being on the Board of Directors for the Film Noir Foundation and writing for Film Monthly, Alan Rode likewise contributes vintage DVD commentaries and special features for VCI Entertainment and Fox Home Entertainment. He has performed numerous on-stage commentaries and interviews with film actors, writers and producers at the Palm Springs Film Noir Festival, the Santa Fe Film Noir Festival, the Danger and Despair Film Series in San Francisco, the Sci-fi, Horror and Fantasy Film Festival in Los Angeles, and is an associate producer and guest moderator of the annual Noir City Film Festivals in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In October 2007, his volume on McGraw—Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy—was published by McFarland. James Ellroy has described Rode's biography as "A spellbinding account of the great noir heavy … and a must-have addition to all film-noir libraries. Deft biography and overall wild tale." Turner Classic Movies has likewise given the book a rave review at their website, noting that Rode's biography "relates the startling life of the memorable character actor against the backdrop of the old Hollywood studio system through anti-trust divestiture and the rise of television into the modern era of filmmaking." They conclude: "Alan K. Rode gives us an intimate biography of a familiar, yet heretofore obscure actor, a wonderful narrative history of Hollywood and an incisive look at the evolution of the film noir style."

Equally glowing in his praise is Gary Sweeney at The Midnight Palace. Sweeney observes that "Rode has taken on a somewhat difficult subject in McGraw. Like many actors in the sub-superstar realm, his tale hasn't been documented a million times over, which generally makes for a more tedious research process. Rode tackles the job with extreme precision. Very little, if anything, seems to be left out." The only thing that confuses Sweeney is how Rode managed to fit such a wealth of information in just under 230 pages. He chalks it up to great writing! I would have to agree.

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Michael Guillén: Alan, when did you first start watching the films of Charles McGraw and what was it about him that captured your imagination?

Alan K. Rode: He first captured my imagination when I was a kid and my father took my brother and I to see Spartacus. What I remember from that—this was back in 1960—was when Kirk Douglas killed McGraw by putting his head in that vat of chunky beef soup. I was somehow disappointed. I [then] noticed him over the years. As time went on and my interest in film became more focused, I kept taking notice of him. He struck me as being a unique actor who brought an authentic toughness and boldness to the screen—particularly in the post-war film noirs—and nobody knew very much about him. I started following his career and accumulating information about him.

Guillén: I recall that last year when we met at Noir City I told you I didn't know who Charles McGraw was; but, that wasn't entirely true. It ended up that I knew him from his performances in Spartacus, In Cold Blood and The Birds. I just didn't associate his name with those performances. It was his early noir work that I was thoroughly unfamiliar with and I'm pleased that, with your incentive, I've caught many of those earlier performances this past year on DVD.

Rode: McGraw is the kind of person who—a lot of people who have seen the book—his name doesn't get through to them; but, then when they look at his face on the cover of the book, they go, "Oh, I know him!" He really is in that pantheon of character actors and secondary leading men—but mainly character actors—who people can identify: Charles McGraw, Sidney Greenstreet, all of those type of people that simply aren't around anymore.

Guillén: As George Sweeney has indicated in his review for The Midnight Palace, your task was made all the more daunting for being original research. But to paraphrase your own words, there is as much about McGraw in your book as could be found and as much as could be told. What was your research strategy? Where did you start and how did it gain momentum over time?

Rode: The original momentum to transform my hobbied obsession with Charles McGraw into a book came from a serendipitous meeting with Mildred "Millie" Black who played a large part in the book and who I became very close with. Once I met her and I started hearing all the stories about Charlie, about Old Hollywood and the Sunset Strip, and a lot of the photos she had, I knew I had to write a book. It then became a matter of researching the films, the television programs, trying to get a hold of everything and looking at it. I was able to go to the USC Film and Television Library and search out these various archives that had the original production notes and cast notes. I was fortunate in getting a hold of and reviewing some of Mark Hellinger's private correspondence having to do with The Killers and Brute Force, and I just kept going with it. I interviewed people and one thing lead to another. It finally got to a point where I had to say, "Enough!" The one interesting piece of research was that I thought—with McGraw coming out of the Group Theatre and the amount of people that had been blacklisted [from there]—that he had to be somehow involved in that; that there had to be an FBI file. So I requested that through the Freedom of Information Act and then, of course, when that came in, I found out that the FBI had surreptitiously investigated him over a period of years because of his alleged communism.

Guillén: That was fascinating research on your part. Speaking of Millie Black's photographs, they're stunning. Is your book basically the only place where these photographs have been published?

Rode: That's correct. The movie stills were done piecework for the studios and they're probably around in different places—some of them will turn up in EBay—but the personal photos of McGraw in her back yard playing Lady Macbeth or sitting around with friends, all that stuff, none of that has been published before.

Guillén: They're remarkable. In Jim Steranko's foreward to your book, he states: "Is it my imagination or is there a note of irony in the fact that so many of yesterday's leading men [and he names quite a few] have vanished from the public consciousness, while certain actors who supported them on the big screen [McGraw among them] have not only remained cultural favorites, but often become cult icons?" I really appreciated that statement because it tracks with an important thesis proposed by Alexander Nemerov in his study Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures, which is that supporting characters, even bit characters with minor roles, possess a "sudden fleeting centrality" that, indeed, renders them iconic. "Major characters," Nemerov writes, "require the use and subordination of minor characters in order to develop, but the secondary characters hardly remain secondary." In fact, Nemerov suggests, "they constantly threaten to disrupt the plots and upstage the protagonists." McGraw specifically is—as you describe him—"an iconic visual touchstone of the film noir style." In other words, despite being a secondary character in many of his films, McGraw is the one we remember from those films. Can you describe that film noir iconicity that McGraw possessed?

Rode: That's tough. It's almost like taking it back and saying, "What is film noir?" It's almost like beauty is in the eye of the beholder or like that Supreme Court justice who tried to define "obscenity" in an opinion and wrote, "I know it when I see it." However, I would say that McGraw brought to the screen what I'd term post-World War II noir realism. In other words, before the War and before film noir came to full flower, you had the 1930s films with gangsters; you had good guys and tough guys as bad guys, but it was declarative. There was nothing muted about the hero; there was nothing ambiguous about the bad guys. They always got their just desserts. But even the bad guys—like, for example, James Cagney in Angels With Dirty Faces—he died yellow because, at heart, the bad guys were all good. When the country went to war and everyone saw the things that happened as a result of the war—not only saw them but experienced them and came back—we started seeing different pictures with a harder edge. McGraw played right into that: the chiseled face, the voice, the cigarette at the corner of his mouth, the declarative dialogue that was written for him. You didn't see any of the people during the '30s, in the past decade, kill anyone like McGraw did in T-Men by locking Wallace Ford in the steam bath and grinning about it. Or running over George Murphy in Border Incident with a furrow cultivator. You had a new kind of toughness in McGraw's voice, face, and his on screen presence. Somebody told me once, they murmured into my ear, they said, "Y'know, so-and-so moves very well." When you watch McGraw on screen entering, moving in a room, he doesn't look like he's acting. He never looks down to hit his marks. He glides like a small battleship dressed in a trench coat. He gives that aura of authentic toughness as a copper and venality as a heavy. Although he was a versatile actor—he could do comedy, he could do a lot of different things—he played into that whole time and place and had that noir realism on the screen.

Guillén: Your biography is not only a detailed, well-researched portrait of Charles McGraw; but, a veritable whos-who of Hollywood film noir history, including nuanced sketches of such seminal personalities as Mark Hellinger, Robert Siodmok, Bryan Foy, Johnny Rosselli, Reed Hadley, Sidney Boehm, Crane Wilbur, Walter Wanger, Daniel Mainwaring, Earl Felton, Dick Fleischer—the list goes on and on—right down to the "anal erotic" interferences of Howard Hughes. Can you speak to your efforts to contextualize McGraw's specific career within the history of RKO's creative ensemble?

Rode: I didn't want to write a book just about Charles McGraw and just tell his life and how he lived and the movies he was in, etc. My vision as the book took shape was to use McGraw as the tour guide through those years in Hollywood that saw so much change. McGraw got to Hollywood in 1942 when the studio system was at its height and he worked up until shortly before he passed away in 1980 when the whole town had changed and all the studios were bought out by corporations, which basically is the way things are now. I wanted to use McGraw as a tour guide through that transition of Hollywood where the studio system got racked by the consent decree that took their theatres away and basically changed the entire equation in Hollywood, and also by television. I also wanted to show the evolution of film noir and how McGraw's career went through with that and how film noir actually morphed into the television, where it didn't just die. It was a process of cinematic Darwinism. Film noir went into cop shows on television and died out at the movies as the culture and the technology and the movie industry moved on. That was a conscious thematic choice I made using McGraw to lay all of that out.

Guillén: Well, it was a fascinating choice that has provided great background history for readers like myself who are still learning about film noir and the history of the Hollywood studios. At about the time you were turning on to McGraw's portrayals in film, I didn't realize it but I was indirectly turning on to him through Jim Steranko's appropriation of McGraw's persona in Steranko's innovative treatment of the comic book Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.! I have all those comic books in my collection; I still love them. Can you speak to how you hooked up with Jim Steranko and convinced him to write the foreword to your book?

Rode: I had heard through someone I knew slightly on an internet discussion board that Steranko had used McGraw as his template or his inspiration for the Nick Fury character. I thought about that and I said, "Gee, first off I have to confirm that." What I've tried to do with everything in the book is qualify—if something was a story—if it was a story I could confirm it through information. The first thing I tried to do with that piece of information was to contact Jim Steranko and ask him about that. That's exactly what I did. I went through a lengthy process and got a hold of him. He and I started an email relationship and found out, in fact, that he did base the Nick Fury character on Charles McGraw. We traded many emails. We ended up sending movies to one another. Jim and I ended up becoming good friends because of this and about every other month we now get on the phone for two to three hours and just talk. With several emails back and forth, at a certain point I got to thinking, "Why don't I ask Jim to write the introduction to the book?" I approached him and he kindly and graciously did it with alacrity and I think he did a superb job.

Guillén: That's too cool. Your biography has a narrative traction that propels it forward like a true pageturner. It's almost as if you've adopted the persona of the narrator of a pulp crime novel or a voiceover in a film noir classic. For example, you describe the working relationship between Louis B. Mayer and Nick Schenck as being "as convivial as two cats stuffed in a pillowcase being dragged behind a pickup truck." And you write about William Talman's ominous on-screen persona as possessing "the visual cast of a malevolent space alien who happened to wander into a film noir." These descriptions are visceral! How did you decide which voice to use in talking about the life of Charles McGraw?

Rode: To be honest with you, that's an interesting observation you've made. I didn't really think about it too much except that it was my story to tell and I wanted to tell it and I wanted it to be entertaining as well as informative. It ended up having some brevity, y'know. It's not a long book. But that was just my style of writing. I wanted to write to inform, to tell a story that I wanted to share with people that I thought was very interesting. It was a narrative biography so some of the comments I made were part of telling the story. That was just the way I wrote the book.

Guillén: That being said, your storytelling is thoroughly engaging, Alan, and I applaud you for that. I hope that you'll be the voiceover when this gets turned into a documentary?

Rode: [Laughs.] They haven't been beating my door down on that one! But, if they do knock on my door, I'll definitely open it.

Guillén: There you go. I'm presuming you'll be hosting the McGraw double-bill—Reign of Terror and Border Incident—at this year's Noir City?

Rode: That's correct. I'll be doing a booksigning at 6:00 on Wednesday, January 30, at the M Is For Mystery table in the Castro Theatre mezzanine. Then I'll be introducing and talking a little bit about those two movies, which I'm very excited about because I think they're two very good films.

Guillén: As a Chicano, Border Incident is a key representative of The Bronze Screen and one of my favorites. I'm delighted to get to see it on a big screen. I also understand McGraw is in another film on the Noir City 6 program, The Story of Molly X?

Rode: That's correct. The Story of Molly X is a film, interestingly enough, that I on the Film Noir Foundation—working with Eddie Muller and Anita Monga—really wanted to find because there's only a horrible 16mm videotape copy floating around that's virtually unwatchable. The Foundation has forged some truly great relationships with people at the studios and at Universal they found a print and struck a print for us gratis! I don't think The Story of Molly X has been seen on the big screen since its release in 1949. This is really something I'm looking forward to in seeing this print. McGraw's particular part in the movie is not very large at all. He's in the movie as the cop. I did get to go through the production files for this movie at USC and found out some interesting things about how the cast members changed and how Crane Wilbur—who was the producer-director of this movie—was under extreme budget pressure. Originally, McGraw's part was going to be played by Jeff Chandler. They had built it up quite a bit; but, Chandler either opted out or they removed him because they couldn't pay his salary. They put McGraw in and he finished the part in three days. While he's there and he does a good job, it's not what I would call a leading role.

Guillén: More a budget-saving strategy?

Rode: That's exactly right. When you look through the records of these old movies and you really dig into this thing, these guys had to bring their movies in under budget. The directors and the producers who couldn't bring their films on schedule and under budget didn't last very long.

Guillén: Speaking of that—and on somewhat of a tangent—I recently hosted a "blogathon" on the films of Val Lewton, who was possibly one of the main exemplars of that low-budget strategy. Can you speak to the "noirish" elements in the films of Val Lewton? I know he's not really considered film noir but there are noirish elements there?

Rode: Oh yeah. In my book I talk about RKO as the "Capital of Noir" and certainly Val Lewton played a large role in that. Lewton's main contribution to a style very similar to noir—or let's just say a dark style—was his ability due to his creativity and also the budget constraints of the hidden hand suggestion of terror and so on and so forth. In Cat People when Jane Randolph is in the pool, you never see the black panther; it's all suggested. In The Leopard Man, the blood running underneath the door [suggests] the girl is killed. We all remember being scared by those movies or startled at certain [moments]. Lewton and Jacques Tourneur discovered that the power of suggestion is a lot more terrifying than special effects shoved in your face on the screen. Lewton was the greatest exponent of the power of terror via suggestion.

Guillén: Well, Alan, thank you for your time.

Rode: Absolutely. Thank you so much. I'm really glad that you liked the book and I look forward to seeing you at Noir City this weekend!

Cross-published on Twitch.

01/29/08 UPDATE: Michael Fox touches base with Alan Rode for SF360.

PSIFF08—Michael Hawley's Eurocentric Festival

Along with my own highlights dispatch from the 2008 Palm Springs International Festival ("PSIFF08") to The Greencine Daily, Evening Class contributing writer Michael Hawley summarizes his viewing pleasure of the European fare at this year's fest.

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PSIFF08 came to a close with my having seen 38 films—a relatively small number when you consider there were more than 200 on offer. At festival's end, I was surprised to see that nearly half the films I saw were European. It was never my intention to have a Eurocentric festival, but given my areas of interest and the vagaries of press ticket availability, that's how it turned out. So for my first report, here are some quick takes on the European films I saw at PSIFF08, presently in roughly west-to-east geographical order.

The reason for starting on Europe's western front is that it allows me to jump right to my two favorite films—Baltasar Kormákur's Icelandic Oscar submission Jar City (Mýrin), and Spanish director Jaime Rosales' Solitary Fragments (La Soledad). I had mixed feelings about Kormákur's 101 Reykjavík (2000) and its follow-up, The Sea (Hafið, 2002), which made the absolute perfection attained by this engrossing, complex police procedural all the more remarkable. The film's title refers to a facility in Reykjavík where specimens of human anomalies are stored, including the brain of a girl who died of a genetic disease in 1971. Over the film's tightly wound 94 minutes, we learn how this girl's brain is intricately linked to a present day murder. Flawlessly acted and beautifully shot to reflect the grainy, icy-grayness of Icelandic winter, Jar City also possesses a great deal of humor, albeit mostly of a visceral variety. For instance, who knew that Icelanders order sheep's heads from drive-thru windows like we order Big Macs—and then dig in, eyeballs first? And speaking as one who lives in gun-happy San Francisco (it was announced last week that there are over 60,000 handguns and 2400 assault rifles loose in the city of Dirty Harry), I was stunned at the total absence of firearms in a film about police and murder.

Solitary Fragments was also perfect, but in a completely different way. This measured, organic look at the lives of two women, takes its sweet time rifling through the mundane and exceptional events that make up a life. Adela is a divorced, single mom whose life is changed after crossing paths with an act of urban terrorism. Antonia is a widow with three grown daughters, each possessing problems and foibles that threaten her peace. Meals are prepared, clothes are ironed, card games played, buses ridden. People are petty and annoying one day, and quietly heroic the next. Not a moment of this organic film felt dishonest, which is why, unlike many in the audience, I remained absorbed for all of its two-hour-plus running time. Director Rosales employs the occasional use of split screen, using it almost exclusively for interior shots. The result is fractured architecture and some startling moments of actors inadvertently addressing the camera directly. I'm grateful to Michael Guillén for alerting me to this wonderful discovery.

In contrast, dishonesty is at work throughout all of Irina Palm, one of two British films I saw in the festival. The story is preposterous, the supporting characters broadly conceived and the music maddeningly repetitive. The film is also enormous fun. Marianne Faithfull stars as Maggie, a kindly grandmother who finances her sick grandson's life-saving operation by giving hand jobs through a glory hole in a London sex emporium. With her ultra smooth hands, she finds herself in hot demand, with a long line of customers and the stage name of Irina Palm. Maggie fashions her cubicle with homey pictures and plastic flowers, and does her work wearing a frumpy housecoat whilst flipping through magazines. Conflict comes in the form of disapproving friends and relatives, and a nasty case of "penis elbow." Faithfull is restrained, but fearless in the role.

I hadn't had the opportunity to see a Peter Greenaway film since 1999's 8½ Women, so I was excited to have a look at his latest work, Nightwatching. For my money, this is Greenaway at his most fascinating and accessible, which came as a relief at the end of a very long, five-film day. Nightwatching is the director's imagining of how Rembrandt came to create—and ultimately be destroyed by—his portrait of 31 Amsterdam guild members posing as militiamen in his celebrated painting, "The Nightwatch". Greenaway takes things further by unearthing a murder conspiracy he believes is contained in the painting, and everyone depicted on the canvas is assigned a salacious backstory. Earthy and ribald, lyrical and literate, Nightwatching's combination of natural and staged settings are seamlessly blended, then complemented with elegant tracking shots. Rembrandt is waggishly played by The Office's Martin Freeman (becoming the latest actor to do a Full Monty for Greenaway), and he speaks (as do all the film's characters) in a contemporary vernacular that is disarming and immediate. Everything is "bloody" this and "fucking" that. In one scene, Rembrandt whines to his wife, who is reluctant to have sex so soon after childbirth, "I'm tired of masturbating onto a paint rag." Girl With a Pearl Earring this ain't.

The five-film day that ended with Greenaway began early in the morning with Jacques Rivette's equally exquisite The Duchess of Langeais (Ne touchez pas la hache). I confess to being at a bit of a loss when it comes to this French master's work, which probably made my thorough enjoyment of this Balzac adaptation all the more considerable. In this chaste little chamber drama, Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu skillfully portray a flirtatious married duchess and a stolid Napoleonic general. Initially, she toys mercilessly with his affections, until one day the tables are turned. "Steel against steel, we shall see which is the sharper." And see we do, as the couple's game of one-ups-manship results in nothing good for all concerned. Watching this film was like experiencing a sublime piece of theater, only with clever intertitles and no intermission.

I was less enthusiastic about the other French films I saw. Nicolas Klotz's long, dry-as-toast Heartbeat Detector (La Question humaine) tells the story of a corporate psychologist (Mathieu Amalric) assigned the task of ferreting out the reasons for his company CEO's (Michael Lonsdale) erratic behavior. We're given a break from the film's dreary corporate milieu only during two odd music sequences—one a flamenco concert and the other a debauched outdoor rave. Remorse over a past act of Nazi barbarism lends poignancy to the last act, but by then it had been too long a slog for me to care. Serge Bozon's middling musical dramedy La France, finds Sylvie Testud disguised in soldier drag as she tries to track down an errant husband across the battlefields of WWI. She attaches herself to a regiment (led by Pascal Greggory) with a big secret of its own, and there are some nicely observed moments of wartime camaraderie and forbearance. As for the film's Beatle-esque music sequences, in which the soldiers break out instruments and sing songs that do not even obliquely bear upon the rest of the film—I plead complete bewilderment. In Micha Wald's brutal revenge film, In the Arms of My Enemy (Voleurs de chevaux), 19th century Dnieper River cossack Gregoire Colin seeks to avenge the death of a younger brother. This one had the Palm Springs audience squirming and squealing with its excess of beating, stabbing, pummeling, goring, and plain old raping, murdering and pillaging. Thanks to languid pacing and gorgeous cinematography, all this mayhem is given a veneer of mystical transcendence. But in the end, I found it impossible to accept this cast of attractive French actors as bygone, salt of the earth Slavs.

Belgium's Oscar submission, Nic Balthazar's Ben X, was perhaps my least favorite film of the festival. An agitated and overwrought look at the serious issue of bullying, it was too cartoonish to affect much empathy for its main character, a teen who suffers from a form of autism called Asperger's Syndrome. Rabidly bullied by his classmates, Ben prefers to dwell in the on-line gaming world of ArchLord, where he always dominates his adversaries and always gets the girl. The script cooks up a real-world revenge scenario (irritatingly foreshadowed throughout the film), but it's utterly unconvincing when it finally arrives. As Ben, newcomer Greg Timmermans is directed into giving a one-note, stiff, bug-eyed performance. It would be unfair of me not to mention that the audience at Palm Springs loved this movie, and indeed at last year's Montreal World Film Festival it won the Grand Prix, Audience Favorite and the Ecumenical Jury Prize. Michael Guillén reports on the director's Palm Springs Q&A here.

Another audience favorite was Red Like the Sky (Rosso come il cielo), one of two Italian films I caught at the fest. I tend to steer clear of movies about children (or in this case, blind children), but I was curious because this one's based on the childhood experiences of real-life blind sound editor Mirco Mencacci. Although fairly sentimental and formulaic, I kept my gag reflex in check and even managed a smile at several key points. The story begins when 10-year-old Mirco loses his sight in a domestic gun accident and is shipped off to a Catholic boy's school for the blind. Reluctant to learn Braille, he begins capturing the great world of sound on a tape recorder he discovers in a closet. To the consternation of the crabby nuns and blind administrator who run the place, Mirco enlists the help of fellow students in creating an aural extravaganza to perform on Parents Day. Director Cristiano Bortone throws some interesting anti-clerical elements into the story (like the nun who tells the kiddies hellfire and damnation bedtime stories), but is less successful in relating Mirco's story to the social unrest of 1970's Italy.

One of my 10 favorite films of 2004 was Saverio Costanzo's Private, about a Palestinian family whose home is seized by the Israeli army for use as a lookout post. (Though completely filmed in Italy, it was disqualified as that country's Oscar submission because the dialogue was in Hebrew and Arabic). In his new film, In Memory of Myself (In memoria di me), the claustrophobic confines of a single house in Private are traded for the sterile expanse of a Benedictine monastery on Venice's San Giorgio Island. Andrea is a troubled young man who's ready to give up his secular life of "false freedom" by enlisting as a novitiate for the priesthood. He fits in well at first, but soon experiences a full-on spiritual crisis when confronted by the hypocrisy and deceit of monastery superiors. He also becomes distracted/obsessed by two fellow students, whom it is vaguely suggested are engaged in less than godly relations. In Memory of Myself is a fascinating meditation on issues of faith and blind obedience to church dogma, but I was disappointed in an ending that wants to have it both ways. Costanzo makes exquisite use of the immense San Giorgio Maggiore monastery interiors, particularly an endless, arched-ceiling corridor which is lined on both sides with identical novitiate cell doors. Through the windows at the end of this corridor, we see the surreal image of cruise ships passing though the Venice lagoon. If there was an indelible image I took away from the festival, this was it.

Macedonia's Oscar submission, Shadows (Senki), is a compelling metaphysical thriller in which a young ER doctor named Lazar comes back to life after a car wreck has left him clinically dead. When he returns to his apartment, there's an old woman inside speaking a forgotten Aegean dialect of Macedonian. He records her words and has them translated: "Have respect and return what is not yours." Thus, a fevered narrative is set in motion in which Lazar seeks to discover what it is that needs to be returned. Following an endless series of paranormal encounters and the discovery of a box of bones owned by his mother, Lazar finally leads us to the film's extremely moving resolution. Director Milcho Manchevski shows tremendous visual flair and imagination, but I could have done with a good half-hour less of the histrionic booga-booga that tends to subtract from the film's power. At the very least, I'm now encouraged to seek out the director's 1994 Before the Rain, which won a Golden Lion at Venice and was nominated for an Oscar.

As part of its Archival Treasures series, the festival screened Romanian director Lucian Pintilie's long-banned 1968 film, Reenactment (Reconstituirea). According to film historian Milos Stehlik, who introduced the film, Pintilie is considered the spiritual father of today's Romanian new wave directors. At a riverside beach café, two young ruffians are forced to reenact a drunken melee which resulted in the demolition of a meatball kiosk and a waiter's head. The filmed reenactment is directed by a short-tempered district attorney, who plans to use it as a cautionary tale for potential juvenile delinquents. Reasons for the film's banishment seem pretty clear, the most obvious being its depiction of bureaucratic involvement in filmmaking. Then there's a moment where a character asks, "What's the difference between men and monkeys?" and the answer is "Monkeys don't carry ID cards." There's a literal goose chase, and I was particularly intrigued by a recurring cryptic image of changing room doors swinging open and closed in the breeze. Reenactment has a loose, inventive feel that characterized much of European cinema in the 60's, and I'm grateful to the festival for acquiring and screening such a flawless print. This is the kind of festival fare that separates the film fanatics from the mere fans.

I saw three Scandinavian films at the festival, including two Norwegian comedies; Bård Breien's The Art of Negative Thinking (Kunsten å tenke negativt) and Petter Næss' Gone with the Woman (Tatt av kvinnen), Norway's official Oscar submission. The former is an intermittently funny, politically incorrect black comedy that attempts to skewer society's attitudes towards the handicapped. Things get off to a great start when we're introduced to the main character—a young man who's passed out in his wheelchair with a clothespin clamped to each nipple, a revolver in his lap and Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" blasting on the stereo. Today's the day members of a positive-thinking therapy group for the disabled are coming to the house, and this guy's having none of it. In short order, emotional and physical abuse is heaped upon the participants, culminating in a reenactment of the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter. Now I like my comedies as black as the next degenerate, but for some reason I mostly failed to connect to this one.

Petter Næss is best known in the US as the director of 2002's Oscar-nominated art-house hit Elling. His Gone with the Woman is even better, but due to the abysmal state of US theatrical distribution of foreign films, the best he can hope for this time is selling the rights for a stinky Hollywood remake. Inspired and madcap, Gone with the Woman is a farcical look at the psychological minefield heterosexual men tiptoe across in order to co-exist with the female of the species. The film's hapless everyman, identified only as "him", seems OK with being single until the day when manipulative and unbalanced Marianne (Marian Saastad Ottesen, who also appears in The Art of Negative Thinking) inserts herself into his life without invitation or warning. We follow the downs and ups of their relationship, from first-time sex (she's turned on by him wearing swim goggles) to co-habitation (she comes with a hideous yellow chest of drawers that takes on a symbolic life of its own). A disastrous European back-packing trip is followed by breakup, reconciliation, a stab at maintaining a long distance relationship, infidelity and potential parenthood. It all moves along at a swift clip, aided by a clever visual style that will remind some of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. At times the director tries too hard, and a bit more subtlety would not have been unwelcome. In the Q&A, Næss jokingly confessed that the story is all based on personal experience. One day I'd love to see a woman director tackle the opposing P.O.V. in a similar style.

I was largely ambivalent about Swedish director Roy Andersson's last film, 2000's acclaimed Songs from the Second Floor (Sånger från andra våningen), but not enough to keep me from checking out You, the Living (Du levande, Sweden's 2007 Oscar entry). Once again the director has assembled a string of vaguely connected absurdist vignettes that are at once comically deadpan and melancholic. Had the entire film delighted me as much as its first half hour, it might have been my favorite of the festival. I especially loved the tale of the man who gets the electric chair for his disastrous performance of the tablecloth trick, as well as the corpulent biker chick who continuously bellows that nobody understands her. The last two-thirds, however, felt much less inspired, becoming a full-on celebration of dreariness. The exception here is the film's most outstanding set-piece, during which a groupie dreams that she has finally married the lead guitarist of the Black Devils band. Dressed in her wedding gown, she moons over him as he plays an extended blues riff at her kitchen table. After several hypnotic minutes you realize that objects are moving past the kitchen window, and indeed, the kitchen eventually pulls into a train station where the newlyweds are greeted by a cheering mob. I'm not sure what Andersson means by all this, but moments from this film have continued to haunt my waking life ever since I saw it.

Finally, we come to Nikita Mikhalkov's 12 (12 razgnevannyh muzhchin), a Russian adaptation of the classic 1957 Sidney Lumet film 12 Angry Men. Mikhalkov, who co-wrote the script, also stars as the foreman of a jury that must unanimously decide the fate of a young Chechen accused of murdering his adoptive Russian father. The claustrophobic jury room of the original film is now a more cinematically-friendly school gymnasium, and the narrative has been opened up even further to include scenes of the accused's backstory. Each of the 12 jurors represent a different aspect of contemporary Russian society, from the "typical Jew" who is the first to change his vote to not-guilty, to the Georgian surgeon who knows first-hand about the racism experienced by non-Russians. The densely literate script gives each actor an opportunity to show his stuff, and the film is so smart and entertaining that its 160-minute running time whizzes by. This was one of my favorite films of the festival, and I would be very pleased should it go on to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Cross-published on Twitch.

JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD: THE 400 BLOWS—Introduction by Laura Truffaut

Maria Komodore starts off her San Francisco Bay Guardian overview of the career of Jean-Pierre Léaud with a perfect quote from critic Philippa Hawker who defines Léaud's acting style: "He is himself, he is his character Antoine Doinel, he is New Wave incarnate, he is the past-in-the-present, the past remembered and re-evaluated." Her overview is helpful in approaching the 13-film retrospective "Jean-Pierre Léaud: The New Wave and After" currently running at the Pacific Film Archives ("PFA") in Berkeley, California.

The series kicked off Friday, January 18, with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) introduced by Laura Truffaut, François Truffaut's daughter. She and her husband Steve Long, Berkeley residents, have been literally involved with PFA for decades and she agreed to provide introductory remarks.

* * *

I was but a child when I started attending movies here [at the PFA]. Actually, I wasn't born yet when The 400 Blows was shot; I was born during the editing of The 400 Blows. So I wasn't really present on the set and don't have anecdotes for you. There's a very brief glimpse of my mother pregnant with me towards the end of the movie; but, that's the extent of my firsthand knowledge of how the filming, the editing and the release of the movie went.

My father had made a short movie after several years as a film critic and that short movie Les Mistons [1957] was professionally made. After that he felt really confident and ready to make his first movie. In Les Mistons he directed two young actors—Gérard Blain and Bernadette Lafont in her first role—and he directed five young kids, pre-teens, and discovered—to his surprise—that he really enjoyed directing them more than he enjoyed directing adults at that point. He figured out ways to have them be natural and to do things that worked better on screen. He really loved that part of the movie and he decided to have as his first movie a subject he had been thinking about. Originally that subject was called Antoine Runs Away. It was going to be a part of a movie composed of chapters, anecdotes about childhood. As he started working on it, he realized he had enough material to make a whole movie. He hired a screenwriter—Marcel Moussy—and together they worked on the script.

Then they put an ad in François saying they were looking for a young boy aged 12 who wanted to be in the movies. Several, many, young boys showed up—quite a few ended up being in the classroom scenes in the movie; one of them ended up again in a second movie, Shoot the Piano Player—but, from the beginning it was very apparent that Jean-Pierre Léaud was the one. If you have access to the Criterion box set of the Antoine Doinel movies, his screen test is included and it's just incredible. He's so full of life. He was 14, but he felt he was a young 14 and could play 12 with no problem. What he really wanted was to be in the movie. He brought a real joyfulness and a lot of character that really appealed to my father.

The 400 Blows was fairly autobiographical—much more than my father acknowledged when the movie came out—because he wanted to protect his parents to some extent. It was tricky casting an autobiographical movie and he loved, I think, the ways in which Jean-Pierre was different from him. Jean-Pierre was more extroverted. My father told me that, as a child, he was sneaky and secretive. I don't think he was the class clown the way Antoine Doinel can be. Thanks to Jean-Pierre, the character evolved and it allowed the story not to be plaintive or maudlin, which were concerns of my father with this material.

There was no—well, not much—improvisation in the movie. The gist of the dialogue was written but Jean-Pierre Léaud was free to use his own words. There's one scene in particular that feels completely improvised but really was not: the scene with the psychologist towards the end of The 400 Blows. My father and Jean-Pierre both knew this was a very important scene and they had a long time to prepare for it. My father just gave him the questions he was to be asked but then told him to come up moreorless with his own answers. That worked beautifully. You can really see how much of an actor this 14-year-old is.

They didn't really anticipate going on with the Antoine Doinel character. That was never really thought, though Jean-Pierre was absolutely on his way to continue as an actor and he found several roles as a teenager and went on. But in about 1962, having made some other films, my father was asked if he wanted to participate in a collective movie called Love at Twenty with directors from various countries contributing a story of young people that [he felt] would be a good opportunity to [film] that character [again], not really at 20, but at 17-18 and how he lives independently.

Again, the material was fairly autobiographical. He gave Antoine Doinel a passion. My father at 16-17 spent his life in the movie theatre at the Cinémathèque and at debates on film. That's really all he did. He was trying to make a living somehow. So he gave Antoine Doinel a passion for classical music. He goes to concerts. He goes to lectures about classical music. It's interesting that he brought that into Antoine Doinel's adventures.

As they went on then with Stolen Kisses [1968], which was planned, and Bed and Board [1970] also a few years later in the early '70s, there were more and more similarities between Antoine Doinel and my father that developed. Neither of them were very modern. They're a little old-fashioned. They're definitely not trendy. They don't go on vacations. They don't swim. They don't use Kleenex to blow their nose. They're not terribly faithful. Family life had its issues for them.

But, then again, there was a big difference that started appearing that made it hard to go on as you see, to some extent, in Stolen Kisses but more in Bed and Board and the last one in the series, Love On the Run [1979], which is that Antoine Doinel is always kind of starting adult life. He doesn't really have a career. He has very funny jobs that last for a while then peter out. In Stolen Kisses he works for a while as a detective. This was a great way to have supporting characters and supporting stories be more important compared to the earlier Antoine Doinel films. In Bed and Board he has a job for a while in a miniature harbor with miniature boats that he activates with a remote control. I've never met anybody that has a job like that; but, I can tell you that there are five or six movies of my father's where this is what the protagonist does for a living. Miniature boats, miniature planes. That was for two reasons. First, what [my father] loved was movies. He couldn't imagine what a real job would feel like or look like and, obviously, sitting at a desk or traveling with a briefcase through the airports of the world wasn't visually appealing. There were advantages to those [imaginary] jobs and also those jobs feel like play and that's really I think the only way [my father] could imagine somebody making a living happily was doing something that felt like play.

But that proved to be a problem for Antoine Doinel. He's so charming. He's an eternal adolescent; but, how long are we going to be patient with him trying to find himself and not quite succeeding? He's not an artist. He's not somebody who feels confidence in what he does. That really got to be difficult.

In the late '70s there was really no plan to go further with Antoine Doinel; but, my father realized he had all this material. It was really unique; a character who grows up on film from the age of 14 to 30. There was all this material and he thought it might be nice and an interesting challenge to mix it, to do 45 minutes of new material mixed in with flashbacks and find a way to weave it into an interesting narrative and to maybe put Antoine Doinel in a new direction; maybe put him into adulthood at last. It was really a challenge and difficult and, of course in the meanwhile, Jean-Pierre Léaud—as this retrospective is going to show—was doing a lot of other movies with a lot of other directors. He was always, at the same time, very modern. There are not too many Léaud movies where he's wearing a costume. In the series I think there are maybe just a couple: Two English Girls [1971] being one of them. My father was more interested in casting him in different roles, moving away from Antoine Doinel.

[Léaud] is an interesting and intriguing actor. Now there's a new generation of young French actors who clearly model themselves after Léaud, after the persona of his movies from the late '60s and early '70s that's very perceptible. I just want to add one purist fact. My father dedicated The Wild Child [1970]—a very different film of his—to Jean-Pierre Léaud. They were always very close and I think it was very clear to my father that there were strong echoes, personally for him, in this very different story of The Wild Child; a fairly isolated child who is brought up and given a lot of attention and educated by his mentor.

Enjoy the movie!

Cross-published on Twitch.

ROMEO & JULIET—Castro Theatre Valentines Day Appearance of Olivia Hussey

I don't know if it was sexual confusion or unbridled adolescent lust that caused me to pin up photos of both Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting on my bedroom wall when I was 14 years old; I just remember I loved looking at them both. Sometimes I'd imagine I was Leonard kissing Olivia and then I'd imagine I was Olivia being kissed by Leonard. It was an ambiguous, androgynous thrill!

All these years later I have to admit my orientation remains more indecisive than some might assume. More constant is Olivia Hussey's beauty, which Bay Area filmlovers will have the chance to appreciate in person when she appears on the Castro Theatre stage interviewed by Jan Wahl for a Valentines Day screening of Franco Zefferelli's Romeo & Juliet. This rare screening of Zefferelli's 1968 masterpiece will be shown in a gorgeous archival print.

As impresario Marc Huestis reminds us, Zefferelli's film galvanized a generation on its release when it cast two young and beautiful unknowns to portray the star-crossed lovers, bringing exquisite visuals and new vitality to Shakespeare's classic. Huestis delivers Hussey on stage to discuss the making of Romeo & Juliet as well as her other career highlights.

But the Castro Theatre screening of Romeo & Juliet belies a love story behind the scenes of Shakespeare's classic that comes to the foreground in a significant and timely way. That love story is one between Marc Huestis and the City of San Francisco. With individual flair and at much personal expense Marc has been entertaining San Franciscan audiences for decades, first as a performer in the legendary Angels of Light, and then as a producer of on-stage extravaganzas that have paid homage to the stars of yesteryear and bridged the gap between artist and audience. I interviewed Marc for SF360 when he was presenting his Fabulous Fashion Film Festival last year and it was at that time that it became clear to me how much Marc was struggling to maintain his creative offerings to San Francisco. Rising costs, changing exhibition platforms and audience apathy have made his extravaganzas more difficult to mount and administer. Though he dreams of continuing to add to San Francisco's cultural history, the realities of doing so may force him to give up such dreams. Thus, I was particularly pleased when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently honored Marc with a proclamation honoring his contributions to the city's cultural landscape.



But we all know that the only piece of paper that really pays the bills is printed currency. To that effect, the Valentines Day screening of Romeo & Juliet marks an urgent outreach to the San Francisco film community. If we wish Marc to continue in his creative ventures, he needs our support more than ever before. If ever there has been a project of his that you have wanted to support, this is the one. It's truly a make-or-break proposition for him. Marc has challenged those who believe in his vision to help him fill the Castro Theatre by selling 10 tickets each. The Evening Class has accepted this challenge by purchasing a block of tickets and here's the best part. I will give four sets of these orchestra seat tickets to four individuals who write up a no less than 250-word piece on Zefferelli's Romeo & Juliet to be published on The Evening Class. The deadline for this contest will be Saturday, February 9, so put on your thinking caps and send your written submissions via email to michael.guillen@gmail.com. Let's prove to Marc Huestis that we honor not only the show in show business but the business itself. I look forward to your entries! If writing is not your forte, then please consider purchasing your tickets for this important event via Ticketweb.

TCM Celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day With Charles Burnett Primetime Retrospective

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Monday, January 21, 2008), Turner Classic Movies ("TCM") is bringing the work of long-heralded independent filmmaker Charles Burnett to the forefront with a primetime marathon that kicks off with his award-winning 1977 drama Killer of Sheep. The marathon also includes Burnett's 1983 feature My Brother's Wedding, as well as three of his short films, all making their first appearance on TCM. TCM's tribute comes as interest in Burnett is experiencing a resurgence, thanks in part to the long-delayed theatrical release of Killer of Sheep last year. Burnett will be featured during the primetime marathon introducing each film with TCM host Robert Osborne.

"To be able to present a slate of Charles Burnett's films is a particular honor for everyone here at Turner Classic Movies," said Charles Tabesh, senior vice president of programming for the network. "Burnett is a cinematic voice that needs to be heard, and there's certainly no better day to introduce him to the many film lovers who haven't experienced his work than on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We are proud to be able to show these amazing and very insightful films, as well as being able to pair them with a daytime line-up of eight classics celebrating African-American life."

Born in Mississippi, Burnett grew up in the Watts district of Los Angeles and studied at UCLA. He first caught the attention of the cinematic world with his film Killer of Sheep, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival's Forum of New Cinema. His collection of films includes The Glass Shield (1994), Nightjohn (1996) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), the last earning him two Independent Spirit Awards for writing and directing. He is currently at work in Los Angeles on pre-production for his next feature film.

TCM's telecast of Killer of Sheep is the world television premiere of the sparkling restoration of the film by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The day also marks the world television premiere of My Brother's Wedding, restored by Pacific Film Archive at the University of California Berkeley and in a brand-new director's cut, as well as Burnett's three short films. Killer of Sheep's theatrical premiere in 2007 was the culmination of a seven-year effort to clear music rights to the film's legendary soundtrack. The clearances were undertaken by Milestone Film & Video, with additional financial assistance from director Steven Soderbergh and TCM. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called Killer of Sheep, "an American masterpiece, independent to the bone," and Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post described it as "a legend … a work that becomes exponentially richer and more profound upon repeated viewings."

In addition to the primetime Burnett festival, TCM's daytime line-up on Martin Luther King Jr. Day will feature eight classic films that delve into issues of race and race relations, including The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), Intruder in the Dust (1949), A Patch of Blue (1965) and A Raisin in the Sun (1961). Here is the complete MLK Jr. Day schedule (PT listings). Please check TCM's website for ET listings.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day Schedule

3:00AM. The Jackie Robinson Story (1950)—The legendary baseball player who broke the color line plays himself in this well-made, earnest biopic. Ruby Dee co-stars.

4:30AM. Intruder in the Dust (1949)—Juano Hernandez plays a black man accused of murder in a small Southern town and facing a lynch mob ready to exact vigilante justice in this adaptation of William Faulkner's novel. Robert Surtees provides the rich location photography.

6:00AM. The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959)—Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens star in this post-apocalyptic tale about a black man and a white woman in an uneasy relationship after a nuclear attack. Mel Ferrer co-stars.

7:45AM. Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)—Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan and Shelly Winters headline this story of a brutal robbery. John Lewis provides an outstanding jazz score in a film by Robert Wise.

9:30AM. Paris Blues (1961)—Musicians Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier are living it up on the Left Bank in Paris, wooing tourists Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll in the process. This beautifully made film features a dynamic score by jazz great Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong co-stars.

11:15AM. A Patch of Blue (1965)—This sensitive drama stars Elizabeth Hartman as a blind girl who falls in love with a black man, played by Sidney Poitier. Shelly Winters won an Oscar for her excellent performance as Hartman's shrewish mother.

1:15PM. Edge of the City (1957)—Director Martin Ritt explores the issue of integration in lower-class society with this gripping, realistic story about two dock workers in New York City forging a friendship and clashing with a union racketeer. John Cassavetes, Sidney Poitier and Jack Warden star in this film, Ritt's first as director.

2:45PM. A Raisin in the Sun (1961)—Lorraine Hansberry's extraordinary play about a Chicago family gets a sterling treatment with this film starring Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil and Diana Sands.

Directed by Charles Burnett

5:00PM. Killer of Sheep (1977)—A masterpiece of African-American filmmaking and one of the finest debuts in cinema history, Charles Burnett's 1977 classic wowed critics and audiences around the world with his blues-infused portrait of life in black Los Angeles. Henry Gayle Sanders stars as Stan, a man struggling to provide for his family and get by with some dignity. After copyright issues over the film's soundtrack prevented it from being seen for years, Killer of Sheep finally received a theatrical release in 2007. The film, which was created as Burnett's UCLA graduate thesis, was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress and named one of 100 Essential Films by the National Society of Film Critics.

6:40PM. The Horse (1973)—Burnett's lyrical and haunting short film follows a group of white men and a young black boy sitting vigil over a horse the day it is to be put to death. Dave Kehr of the New York Times recently called The Horse "a small masterpiece" and said, "If it were a short story by Faulkner, The Horse would have become an anthology piece decades ago."

7:00PM. My Brother's Wedding (1983)—Also receiving its first theatrical release in 2007, Burnett's wonderful second feature was called by A.O. Scott of the New York Times, "an indelible reminder of what real independence looks like." Impressively capturing the urban black experience, this funny, heartbreaking and timeless film follows Pierce Mundy, a young man in Watts with few prospects for the future. With his best friend just getting out of jail and his brother busy planning a marriage to a snooty, upper-middle-class woman, Pierce navigates his conflicting loyalties. Everett Silas, Jessie Holmes, Gaye Shannon-Burnett and Ronnie Bell star.

8:30PM. When It Rains (1995)—In this jazz-inspired short film, a self-described urban griot spends New Year's Day canvassing his neighborhood to scrape together enough rent money to keep a mother and daughter from losing their apartment. Featuring a cast and crew made up of Burnett's own circle of friends, this film recalls his earlier works in its South Central Los Angeles setting and outstanding music.

9:00PM. Several Friends (1969)—An early precursor to Killer of Sheep, this humorous short film follows a group of four unemployed friends in South Central Los Angeles as they try to deal with family life, a string of broken appliances and the assimilation of their rural upbringing with the reality of Watts.

9:30PM. Killer of Sheep (1977)—encore.

11:10PM. The Horse (1973)—encore.

11:30PM. My Brother's Wedding (1983)—encore.

1:00AM. When It Rains (1995)—encore.

1:30AM. Several Friends (1969)—encore.

Cross-published on Twitch.