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 second program in this on-going series:
A Double Feature of Maverick, Go-for-broke, Meta-cinematic Hell-raising--
Wednesday, June 4
Admission: $7 for both films
At 7pm: The Last Movie
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.
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
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?
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!
The World's Greatest Sinner
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 lam�-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.
"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!
Preceded by: Timothy Carey in Cinema Justice (35mm 6 min.),
With an introduction and Q&A by the son of God himself, Romeo Carey!
Gunfire in the theater will not be tolerated!
Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie and Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?
Roxie Cinema
3117 16th St.
San Francisco
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.
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.
1971 Color 35mm 108 min.
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.
Previously shown in this series:
Saturday, December 15
7:00 pm and 9:15 pm
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street
San Francisco
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.
1962 B+W/Color 35mm 82 min.
and classic Timothy Carey trailers!
Film Series: Radical Strategies
As part of its mission, the Film on Film Foundation seeks to showcase exciting and unusual celluloid motion-picture film works which have rarely been screened locally, unleashing some for the very first time. Our debut series, 'Radical Strategies', represents the opening salvo in this part of our undertaking. Each film in this series of experimental narratives questions the nature of cinema itself, and in its realization, each proffers potential answers to the questions of what cinema is, can, or should be.
A concurrent thematic: the 100-plus years of film's existence have been aligned with dramatic international political upheaval. Experimenters in form have often seen their work as connected to a fundamental recreation of the social/political world, and this adds an additional, sometimes explosive, resonance to the ideas of 'Radical Strategies.'
The third program in this on-going series:
Revolution by Cinema: Two films by Jonas Mekas
Guns of the Trees and The Brig
Easter Sunday, March 23
Pacific Film Archive Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph
Berkeley
(Please note: Since this screening is not a presentation of the Pacific Film Archive, it does not appear in their calendar or in any of their publicity. Nevertheless, the show will go on!)
Tickets go on sale at 5pm Sunday in the PFA Theater Lobby.
Admission: $7
"We don't want false, polished, slick films. We prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don't want rosy films - we want them the color of blood." -Jonas Mekas, 1961
"What I want to achieve - ideally - with my film: is overthrow the government." -Jonas Mekas, Diaries, 11 August 1960
At 7pm: Guns of the Trees
In 1960, Jonas Mekas stood at a crossroads. An acclaimed Lithuanian poet in his youth, who fought and suffered at the hands of both Nazis and Soviets, he had emigrated to the US in 1949 and swiftly established himself at the center of New York's film scene. As founder of what was arguably America's first serious cinema publication, Film Culture, as organizer of various screenings of independent film all over Manhattan, and as champion of the movement he would proclaim the New American Cinema in the pages of the soon-to-be legendary Village Voice, his intellectual influence was omnipresent. He and his brother Adolfas had been "practicing" with their Bolex for some time, and now the challenge of films such as Cassavetes' Shadows and his increasing alignment with a radical Beat ethos in the face of the Bomb, the rapidly evolving civil-rights movement, and regular police incursions into Greenwich Village coffeehouse bohemia forced his hand at inventing by-any-means-necessary feature filmmaking. Although Guns of the Trees was scripted, the hallmark of his efforts would be a commitment to spontaneity, both in form and content, in the service of creating a "New Man" who would radically transform society.
Stolen equipment was secured. Money for film was begged and borrowed. The rag-tag crew (including a young Peter Bogdanovich) roamed all over the New York environs, shooting off-the-cuff, shoplifting food, being chased from locations by over-zealous cops. By the end of their journey, they had created a portrait of an America on the brink of apocalypse, by means of intertwining stories of two couples, one white, one black, who try to make sense of it all. Featuring the Brando-esque Ben Carruthers, acclaimed for his role in Shadows, and voice-over poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Guns would prove daring enough to earn Mekas a visit from the FBI.
Not on video!
Winner of First Prize at Porretta Terme, Italy, 1962
1961 B+W 16mm 85 mins.
At 8:45pm: The Brig
By 1964, post-JFK assassination, the American atmosphere was considerably grimmer. In a year in which he spent time in jail for exhibiting Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Jean Genet's Un Chant d'amour, Mekas attended the original production of Kenneth Brown's The Brig, a proto-Guantanamo hallucinatory vision of a play set in a Marine base in Japan. Simultaneously electrified and horrified by the all-too-real events transpiring before his eyes, he immediately resolved to film it in a cinema-verite manner, and shortly thereafter completed what is possibly the shortest schedule in the history of fiction feature-film production: The Brig, photographed with the camera hand-held by Mekas himself, took no more than three hours to shoot. The film proved a major success of the New American Cinema, and was a further salvo in the direction of what would become Mekas' modus operandi of a completely spontaneous and responsive filmmaking form. Although it could be called "scripted", the shooting itself was almost entirely improvised--this dichotomy mirroring what Mekas increasingly found to be the paradigm of the modern world: the fixed "establishment" reality vs. that of the free, the open, the brave. He was well on his way towards becoming the self-described "raving maniac of cinema"....
"The Mekas brothers are no longer the gentle poets that we thought they were:
they are two wild Indians drying scalps." -Cahiers du cinema
Not on video!
Winner of Prize for Best Fictional Film at the 15th
International Documentary Festival of Venice, 1964.
1964 B+W 16mm 68 mins.
Previously shown in this series:
Eros Plus Massacre
Sunday, September 16
Pacific Film Archive Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph
Berkeley
Tickets will be on sale starting at 3:30 Sunday in the theater lobby. Admission is $7, cash only.
In 1959 two cinematic movements, twin colossi of 20th century artistic reinvention, were born across the world from each other.
While the exploits of the French New Wave are widely known in the U.S., the simultaneous adventures of the Japanese New
Wave have only begun to be revealed on these shores. Oshima, Masumura, Hani, Imamura, Suzuki and others dealt with issues
of contemporary alienation, youth rebellion, the post-war legacy, sexual freedom, the role of women, the plight of the Japanese
individual caught between the attractions of left and right-wing collectivized factions, etc. Perhaps no group of filmmakers has
ever so rigorously confronted the issues of their society in such a head-on manner. Given that this was occurring in the midst of
1960's political tumult and media explosion, it was inevitable that the results would take the form of convulsive frenzy, culminating
in Yoshishige Yoshida's 1970 masterpiece, "Eros plus Massacre", until now all but unseen in the U.S.
In a radically Brechtian style, "Eros" relates the "true" story of 1910's and 20's legendary anarchist Sakae Osugi, the most
famous radical agitator of his time, as well as the founder of Japan's first school dedicated to teaching Esperanto, the language
invented in the cause of Utopian world reconciliation. This wildly popular firebrand (described as "a kind of politicized Mick
Jagger-in-his-prime") was the mastermind behind the Rice Riots, which brought approximately 10 million Japanese to the edge of
rebellion in what's been called "the greatest uprising in modern Japanese history". His services to humanity were rewarded with
the #1 slot on the military police (the Kempeitai)'s death-list. After a May Day speech in Paris proved so rousing it led to his
arrest and deportation back to Japan, the Kempeitai had their chance. Following the Great Kanto Earthquake, under the pretext of
quelling potential anarchist uprisings, Osugi, his lover Noe Ito, and his six-year-old nephew were arrested and murdered. This
became known as the "Amakasu Incident" (the later exploits of Lieutenant Amakasu, the officer in charge of these activities, were
portrayed by Riyuchi Sakamoto in Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor").
Rather than focussing on the grand stage of politics, however, Yoshida's stylistically playful work centers on the intimate politics
between Osugi, his wife, and his two lovers. Refusing to respect conventional narrative constraints, the film charges across
barriers of time and genre, interweaving Osugi's story with one of latter-day students embarked on a research project into the
anarchist's ideas regarding free love. Through these colliding quests of self-discovery, "Eros" humorously delves into the
question of whether unlimited passion can be the source of ultimate human liberation....
A film of epic proportions, "Eros" features some of the most famously beautiful black-and-white cinematography in the history of
cinema.
"Masterpiece... The finest cinematic reflection I've seen on histrionic death." -Noel Burch
"Masterpiece." -Tadao Sato
Not on video!
B+W 35mm cinemascope 167 min.
Japanese w/ English subtitles
Print courtesy of the Japan Foundation
Since this screening is not a presentation of the Pacific Film Archive, it does not appear in their calendar or in any of their publicity. Nevertheless, the show will go on!
Venom and Eternity and The End
Wednesday May 23rd
7:00 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street
San Francisco
click here for flyer
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.
Contact Information
Film on Film Foundation
PO Box 9926
Berkeley, CA 94709-0926
info@filmonfilm.org