Events

8:30pm
Sunday, April 5
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley

$7

From the beginning of his British years, Losey attracted collaborators of equally high ambition, such as stars Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker, whose acting talents weren't fully understood until their work with the American director. Frustrated by interference from producers and the constraints endemic to the British film industry, which mirrored the overt commercial orientation of Hollywood on a smaller scale, Losey watched enviously as European Art Cinema began to fully flower on the continent. Finally everything came together in his first British masterpiece, The Servant, starring Bogarde, James Fox, and Sarah Miles, in a taboo-traversing exploration of oblique power games between classes, sexes, and sexualities. The Servant would mark Losey's first collaboration with the young Harold Pinter, only five-or-so years into his legendary career as the world's most important post-Beckett playwright, and garnered a nomination for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Losey's career as International Superstar art-film director was off and running....

Adopting Resnais-influenced oblique editing strategies for the first time, Losey creates from the future Nobel-Prize-winning Pinter's script a superbly-crafted corrosive vision of sexual and social anomie, one of the high-water marks from the classic period of European Art Cinema. Accident is proof-positive that Joseph Losey was the most brilliant filmmaking victim of the Hollywood Blacklist, and that an American was the greatest director of the British Cinema of the 1960's.

1967 Color 35mm 105 min.

Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.

Forgotten '70's masterpiece Puzzle of a Downfall Child
Starring Faye Dunaway

8pm
Sunday, September 28
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley


In the 1960's, Jerry Schatzberg was already a legend in the New York scene. A highly sought-after photographer who crossed the boundaries of Fashion, Street, and Portrait, his work would contribute to the developing icon-status of, among many others, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Catherine Deneuve, Roman Polanski, Edie Sedgwick, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and a baby-faced Fidel Castro. Photos by Schatzberg graced the covers of some of the most important pop-music albums of the era, including Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. He owned some of Manhattan's hippest discotheques and threw many of the island's wildest parties. But despite sporting the credentials of an affluent scenester, Schatzberg's artistic sensibilities weren't rooted in the realms of fashion and wealth but rather were attuned to the pain and whimsy found in the private worlds of society's misfits, outcasts, and cast-offs. Although photography allowed him to touch upon this motif, the 1970's would offer him the opportunity to explore his themes in far greater depth, and in a new medium.

In the late 1960's, Hollywood--mirror to the nation--found itself creaking and cracking from the strain of the uncontrollable social revolution ripping through the country. The old formulas weren't working anymore, especially in the light of the on-going tragedy and melodrama broadcast nightly: Vietnam war carnage, assassinations, protests, riots. With the simultaneous end of the Production Code (a restrictive form of self-policing which allowed the film industry to evade government censorship), a new generation came of age determined to explore through cinema a rapidly changing world, and with a radically new sensibility. The breakthrough smash-success of Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch forced open the studio floodgates to the energies of this new generation, Jerry Schatzberg among them.

Schatzberg recruited Carole Eastman (writer of Five Easy Pieces and uncredited contributor to the script of Petulia) to write Puzzle's script. He spent years in search of backing until finally, in 1970, he found patron saints in Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who were able to set up the production under their aegis at Universal.

Now in his eighties and still working, Schatzberg has recently emerged from years of critical neglect within his home country, has been honored with retrospectives, and is receiving his due as one of America's great iconoclasts of film and photography.

Not on video!
Color 35mm 105 min.

Preceded by a selection of classic trailers!

Jean-Isidore Isou's Venom and Eternity

"I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It's reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this pig filled with grease will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, rupture, of this corpulent and balloon organization which is called film." -Jean-Isidore Isou

In 1951, Jean-Isidore Isou released his first film, "Venom and Eternity". Isou, who made his name as a poet, painter, and economic theorist, was founder of "Lettrism", the most radical art movement in history, committed to a complete remaking of aesthetics from the ground up. Georges Bataille lauded his poetry as "superb". Isou now unleashed his talents in his wildest work yet, and the incendiary results are with us to this day.

"Venom and Eternity" features the smoldering, searing presence of Isou himself, playing a young film aesthete who rewrites all conventions of filmmaking, morality, and propriety before our very eyes. Multiple fractured narratives are introduced, then discarded as they lose their charm. In an Oedipal revenge against the patriarchal image, Isou allows the soundtrack to dominate, assaulting the audience with haughty, ironic rants, and howled primal chants. Not satisfied by this means of attack, Isou introduces the most willfully disjointed cutting style up to this point in film history, then paints on, scratches, and gouges the filmstock itself.

"Venom and Eternity"'s premiere at Cannes was greeted by riots quelled only by the use of firehoses. Jean Cocteau, who appears in the film, nevertheless prevailed upon the authorities to invent a prize for a work so groundbreaking, the "Prix spectateurs d'avant garde 1951". Chaos ensued as "Venom" made its way around the world, including a riot at its San Francisco premiere!

Isou's activities spurred not only the aesthetic innovation of American filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the French New Wave (and hence the whole modern visual world), but the social and political radicalism of the international youth rebellion movement, and the pranksterism of the Situationist International, directly inspiring the fury spilling onto streets around the world starting in May '68!

"Is 'Venom' a springboard or is it a void? In fifty years we'll know the answer. After all, remember how Wagner was received. Today, no one objects to his outbursts. The day will come, perhaps, when Isou's style will be the fashion. Who can tell?" -Jean Cocteau, 1951

A "masterpiece... often breathtaking"! -Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2005

Not on video!
B+W 16mm 77 min.



Immediately following Venom and Eternity, Christopher Maclaine's The End

While the French cultural response to the nuclear age was aesthetic and political, American Beats came at the problem from spiritual and sexual angles. In 1953, San Francisco's own Christopher Maclaine (the "Antonin Artaud of North Beach") created what has often been described as the ultimate expression of the Beat sensibility on film. "The End" offers us the chance for apocalyptic ruminations as we explore the twisted tales of five characters as they make their way through their last day on earth. No film could be more relevant to the insanity of the last five years. Like "Venom and Eternity," "The End" was greeted with a riot upon its San Francisco premiere! A blast!

Not on video!
Color/ B+W 16mm 34-3/4 min.


Two complete shows: 7:00 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.

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Film Series: Film Gods Shoot Back

Much of mainstream criticism since the 1950's has considered the director as the auteur of a film work. However, certain actors, by the consistency and force of their personalities across many films, may be regarded as the authors of their performances. In this series, we examine what happens when these celluloid heroes assume the role of director and leave their full imprint on a film. Of the resulting works, some have been hailed as masterpieces, while others have been overlooked. In all cases, they shine a distinct light on the artistic process.

The third program in this on-going series:

Lupino-Noir: A Double Feature from Hollywood's Toughest Cookie
The Bigamist and Outrage

Sunday, March 8
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley
(Please note: We are renting the venue. This is not a PFA program and thus does not appear in their publicity.)

Admission: $7
Tickets on sale in the PFA lobby one hour before showtime.

Tough as a leather purse-strap, hard as nail polish, Ida Lupino broke new ground in mid-century Hollywood. It was no place for a woman...

"The English Jean Harlow"

In the 1930's, Ida Lupino earned her bread as the innocent girl in a string of mostly forgotten pictures. But the beautiful bottle-blonde was as world-wise as the characters she was destined to play, and soon tired of this rut. She knew what she wanted and she knew how to get it. Minus the bleach and the baby fat, she barged into William Wellman's office armed only with determination and a stolen script. Thus captivated by her audition for The Light That Failed, Wellman cast her as her first prostitute. This is the Ida Lupino we know and love.

"A poor man's Bette Davis"

In the '40's, Lupino specialized in hard-luck noir dames in such movies as They Drive by Night, High Sierra, and Road House. A born malcontent, she grew frustrated working in the shadow of the likes of Bette Davis, being offered parts they turned down. Warners suspended her for rejecting these table-scrap roles, and in her free time she studied the workings on the other side of the camera. After her contract was up, she turned freelance, and soon formed a production company with her husband: Filmakers.

"A poor man's Don Siegel"

Lupino produced, wrote, and acted, and when the director of Not Wanted took ill three days into shooting, she took up directing as well. Low-budget issue pictures, the savage forebears of today's TV movies, were Filmakers' specialty. They did pure social melodrama (Hard, Fast and Beautiful) and straight noir (Private Hell 36), but most of their output was a volatile mixture of the two, cemented by a woman's touch. In this program, we dive headfirst into these murky waters.

At 7:30pm: The Bigamist

When Harry and Eve (Joan Fontaine) decide to adopt a baby, the man at the agency senses something amiss and looks into Harry's background. Instead of murder or armed robbery he finds... another woman. Similar in structure to Double Indemnity, The Bigamist musters compassion for its tragic characters while chipping away at the myth of the ideal post-war family.

1953 B+W 35mm 80 min.
Print Source: UCLA Film & Television Archive
Preservation funded by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association

At 9:15pm: Outrage

On her way home from work, soon-to-be-married Mala Powers is attacked and.... The staging of the crime is a masterpiece of expressionism, but the true horror is revealed in the aftermath, in the social and psychological fallout. Lupino's treatment of this ultimate taboo transcends exploitation, showing real understanding and sympathy.

1950 B+W 16mm 75 min.

Classic trailers before both films!

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A Double Feature of Maverick, Go-for-broke, Meta-cinematic Hell-raising--
Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie and Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

Wednesday, June 4
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th St.
San Francisco

Admission: $7 for both films

At 7pm: The Last Movie

Almost from the outset of his acting career, Dennis Hopper earned a reputation as rebellious, egotistical, and drug-addled. By channeling these qualities into his directorial debut, Easy Rider, he created perhaps the most iconic and profitable counter-culture movie ever, and helped launch the phenomenon known as "New Hollywood". Studio heads, eager to cash in on this success, yet out of touch with youth tastes and changing mores, gave Hopper a million-dollar budget and carte blanche to produce a follow-up hit.

Here was Hopper's opportunity to develop an idea he had hatched on a Mexico location shoot several years prior: when the film crew departs, leaving the sets behind, is this not a form of cultural imperialism? This is the point of departure of The Last Movie.

When an ill-fated Samuel Fuller-helmed western pulls out of a small Peruvian village, stuntman Kansas (Hopper) stays behind, shacking up with a local whore and pursuing a crass expatriate version of the American Dream. While Kansas goes native on his own terms, the natives, fascinated by the novelty of cinema, resurrect the aborted film shoot in tribal fashion, enacting rituals of real violence before jerry-built prop cameras.

With multiple meta-narratives encircling this radical inversion of the cinematic apparatus, it's no wonder that the film implodes, beautifully, spectacularly, under the weight of its own contradictions.

True to its thematic conflation of the processes and products of cinema, The Last Movie's chaos was mirrored in the conditions of its filming--a confused, sex-, drug-, and paranoia-fueled bacchanal. Hopper kept this up the 18 or so months he spent cloistered at home in Taos editing his opus, under the influence of Bruce Conner and Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo).

Thrust upon a public expecting Easy Rider-style hippie quaintness, this confounding masterpiece ensured Hopper would not work again in Hollywood for nearly a decade.

"No other studio-released film of the period is quite so formally audacious." -Jonathan Rosenbaum

Grand Prize winner, Venice Film Festival, 1971
1971 Color 35mm 108 min.

At 9:15pm: Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

At the end of the 60's, after the success of his stage musical Stop the World--I Want to Get Off and a prominent role in Doctor Dolittle, Anthony Newley was at the height of his career as an actor, singer, and composer. What better time to try his hand at directing, and what better inspiration than his own fabulous life?

Far from filming a straight autobiography, Newley created a fantastical musical folly, overbrimming with vaudevillian flourishes and gleeful bad taste. On the occasion of his 40th birthday, fictionalized alter-ego Heironymus Merkin revisits the formative events of his life, many involving sexual debauchery, via a film-within-a-film device which is freely abused at all of its nested levels. This Russ Meyer-style subject matter is laced with Jacques Demy-style surreal whimsy and a tinge of British sensibility, all within a structure cribbed directly from Fellini.

Seeking neither to apologize for nor distance himself from the salacious and sordid details of his past, Newley invites us all to share in his solipsistic revelry. His candor about his somewhat Nabokovian appetite for women is especially notable as the film features his then-wife, Joan Collins, and their two young children. Milton Berle also appears as the devil in the guise of a drug-pushing svengali.

Audiences and critics were not kind to this deliriously indulgent ego-driven undertaking. Newley's career hit the skids, as did his marriage. With hindsight, however, we can appreciate its cockeyed charm. Such a film would be inconceivable today.

"A must-see for counterculture-masochists" -Steven Puchalski

1969 Color 16mm 117 min. Rare X-rated version!

Classic trailers before both films!

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Previously shown in this series:

The World's Greatest Sinner
Saturday, December 15
7:00 pm and 9:15 pm
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street
San Francisco

Advance tickets may be bought online at the Roxie webpage, or just show up at the box office before the show like normal folk!

Timothy Carey's 1962 psychotronic masterpiece The World's Greatest Sinner

He was just an average, happily married family man. He should never have listened to that snake!

One day the devil, in the form of a snake, manifests himself to insurance salesman Clarence Hilliard (Timothy Carey). In short order Hilliard drops out, re-christens himself God, recruits a skid row following, and becomes an atheistic, silver lamé-clad rockabilly evangelist. With his mantra, "There is only one God, and that's Man!" and his wide-ranging sexual deviancy and deranged demagoguery, Carey's blaspheming anti-deity stakes out a position somewhere between Nietzsche and Charles Manson. Falling for his own opportunistically populist rhetoric, he goes mad with power-lust, abusing and destroying his acolytes with shockingly escalating excesses. Nothing is sacred in this scathing, still-topical indictment of religion, politics, and society!

In its giddy, sensationalistic treatment of themes eschewed in polite discourse even now, The World's Greatest Sinner achieves a rough-hewn radicalism unthinkable in a studio picture. It is the archetypal underground film, made outside the establishment and to this day denied a proper release. Nonetheless, this pioneering portrayal of out-of-control youth rebellion presaged the uproar of the '60's and paved the way for emblematic films like Wild in the Streets.

Timothy Carey arrived in Hollywood in 1951, fresh out of drama school, intent on showcasing his greatness by whatever means necessary. He conned his way into early bit parts, and spent the next two decades playing heavies and weirdos in genre pictures and cheapies, some of which ended up as drive-in staples, spiced up with added softcore and gore scenes.

"I thought I was a great actor; I'm the only one who did."

During this checkered career, Carey worked with some of the greatest actors and directors of his time: Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick. He would always do his best to upstage or upset the star, to impress or frustrate the director with his unhinged improvisations. Wherever Carey trod, chaos soon followed. At times he would earn grudging respect; more often he would come to blows with the crew. Films that he had to pull out of, for one reason or another, include Bonnie and Clyde and the first two Godfathers.

"I was probably fired more than any other actor in Hollywood."

Off-screen, Carey's raw primitivism was equally evident. In auditions, media appearances, and in person, he flouted the patience and sensibilities of his audiences, telling crude jokes and breaking into song, or, in keeping with a late-life obsession, into wind. On several occasions, he pulled out a gun loaded with blanks and staged a mock murder-suicide before horrified onlookers.

With his unruly talent, Carey made a mark in all his performances. In a bad movie, his presence in a scene could elevate it to the sublime. Even in great films, his off-kilter characterizations would stand out. Anyone who has seen The Killing remembers the quietly sociopathic sharpshooter, an understated role by his standards. In the 1970's John Cassavetes recognized Carey's mad brilliance, giving him free reign in a key role in his film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, as well as Minnie and Moskowitz.

Carey embarked on The World's Greatest Sinner, his most personal project, in 1958. He spent three years filming this epic monument to his own genius, as money and circumstances allowed, like a stateside Orson Welles. Among its claims to fame, this production launched the careers of rocker Frank Zappa, who composed the soundtrack, and gonzo auteur Ray Dennis Steckler. True to form, at the notorious premiere Carey instigated a riot and fired a gun into the theater's ceiling. This time, the bullets were real!

"Oh you're Tim Carey, you made The World's Greatest Sinner! I want to see that picture!" -Elvis Presley

"Carey has the emotional brilliance of an Eisenstein!" -John Cassavetes

Not available on DVD!
1962 B+W/Color 35mm 82 min.

Preceded by: Timothy Carey in Cinema Justice (35mm 6 min.),
and classic Timothy Carey trailers!

With an introduction and Q&A by the son of God himself, Romeo Carey!

Gunfire in the theater will not be tolerated!