Screenings

Free Show with BU ID

See "Quality of Life," part of the B-Side Roadshow at 8 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre (40 Brattle St., Harvard Sq., Cambridge, Mass.) June 27 for FREE with your BU ID.

Harvard Film Archive presents:
Contested Realities: Pseudodocumentary and Other Staged Events
March 24 - April 5

With the success of films such as the improvisational works of Christopher Guest and television comedies such as The Office, the language of nonfiction cinema has become increasingly scrutinized, satirized and reconstituted. This series presents an overview of some of the more compelling works which use reflexive strategies to challenge the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Rather than more recent attempts to employ these conventions as a tool for parody, these works pose more challenging questions about truthful modes of representation in cinema.

Filmed in 1968 but never released theatrically, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which opens the series, deconstructs the filmmaking process by turning the cameras on the unsuspecting crew under the cover of a “making of” documentary, but it becomes increasingly clear that director William Greaves, who will be here to introduce his film, has more complex motives for capturing the behind the scenes antics.

Director William Greaves In Person – March 24
March 24 (Friday) 7 p.m.
March 25 (Saturday) 7 p.m.
March 25 (Saturday) 9 p.m.
March 26 (Sunday) 7 p.m.
March 26 (Sunday) 9 p.m.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
Directed by William Greaves
US 1968, 35mm, color, 70 min.
With Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows, William Greaves

In this film-within-a-film, director William Greaves dares to break the accepted rules of cinema. It is 1968 and Greaves and his crew are in New York’s Central Park, ostensibly filming a screen test. The drama involves a bitter break up between a married couple, but this is just the “cover story.” The real story is happening “off” camera, as the enigmatic director pursues his hidden agenda. The growing conflict and chaos—accompanied by moments of uproarious humor—explode on-screen, producing the energy, and the insights, that the director is searching for. Mixing multiple cameras, split-screen images, and cinema-verité and conventional shooting styles, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One offers multiple levels of reality that reveal, and comment upon, the creative process.

Director William Greaves In Person

March 24 (Friday) 9 p.m.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2
Directed by William Greaves
US 2005, 35mm, color, 94 min.
With Audrey Henningham, Shannon Baker, William Greaves, Bob Rosen

35 years later after the making of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, William Greaves is back in Central Park filming the same actors playing the same roles. Alice and Freddie—the young married couple bitterly arguing in the 1968 film—have gone their separate ways. Alice is now a successful, if somewhat fading, cabaret singer; Freddie a much-in-demand group therapist. It is a beautiful fall day. The New York City Marathon is about to begin and all looks well as they meet for the first time since their nasty break-up 35 years earlier. It is obvious that they both want to bury the past. But the director has other ideas.

March 27 (Monday) 7 p.m.

The Connection
Directed by Shirley Clarke
US 1961, 35mm, b/w, 110 min.
With Warren Finnerty, Jerome Raphael, Carl Lee

Shown at Cannes the year before the official advent of International Critics’ Week, the out-of-competition screening of The Connection nevertheless served as the model for what the Semaine was to become. Clarke’s debut feature was a canny adaptation of Jack Gelber’s celebrated Off-Broadway play about a group of heroin addicts waiting for their “connection.” While the original Living Theater production had used a play-within-a-play strategy for its narration, Clarke devised a more cinematic frame involving a documentary director at work on his cinema-vérité portrait of the drug scene—a technique which, as the distinguished French critic Georges Sadoul pointed out, “works brilliantly in this film.” While the film garnered rave reviews at Cannes (even the conservative American trade journal Variety noted that it would be a hit in “enlightened spots”), it faced a withering censorship battle back in the States that delayed its release by a year and a half.

March 27 (Monday) 9 p.m.

David Holzman’s Diary
Directed by Jim McBride
US 1967, 16mm, b/w, 73 min.
With L.M. Kit Carson, Eileen Dietz, Lousie Levine

David Holzman is a struggling young filmmaker living in New York City who decides to make a film about his life. Inspired by Godard’s famed quote that film is “truth at 24 frames per second,” David throws himself headlong into the process, alienating his girlfriend and pushing himself to the brink of sanity. A vital piece in the New York-based American independent film movement of the 1960’s, McBride’s faux documentary offers an immediate critique on the truth-telling claims of non-fiction film.

March 28 (Tuesday) 7 p.m.

Me and My Brother
Directed by Robert Frank
US 1969, 35mm, b/w and color, 91 min.
With Julius Olovsky, Joseph Chaikin, John Coe

Frank makes a serious attempt to deal with mental illness in this film, which begins as a cinema-verité portrait of a catatonic schizophrenic, but veers into a bizarre mixture of fact and fiction. Julius, the schizophrenic, is taken from the hospital by his poet brother (Peter Orlovsky) and follows a tour of poetry readings with Allen Ginsberg. The result is not only sprawling and chaotic but also touching, as Frank remains sensitive to the concerns of the central character. The film features odd cameos by Christopher Walken and Roscoe Lee Browne.

March 28 (Tuesday) 9 p.m.

One Parallel Movie (One P.M.)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard and D.A. Pennebaker
US 1972, 16mm, color, 90 min.

One of the Dziga Vertov Group projects of the 1960s was Jean Luc Godard’s collaboration with filmmakers Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker culminated in an aborted Dziga-Vertov Group project shot in America during 1968 entitled One A.M. (One American Movie). After Godard left the project, Pennebaker and Leacock edited the resulting footage into One Parallel Movie (aka One P.M.). A reflexive piece that marks the unceremonious end of the decade, the film includes footage of Rip Torn, Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver, The Jefferson Airplane and Godard himself.

March 29 (Wednesday) 7 p.m.

The War Game
Directed by Peter Watkins
Great Britain 1966, 35mm, b/w, 47 min.
With Michael Aspel, Peter Graham

In this highly controversial dramatization of the aftereffects of a nuclear attack on England, Watkins claims to have used "mathematical logic" to estimate the likely experience—both logistic and personal—of nuclear war, basing his visualization on the British government’s contingency plans and scientific research into the effects of radiation on the human body. The BBC considered the film to be excessively graphic and disturbing and refused to air it. Only reluctantly, after Watkins resigned from the BBC in protest, did the network agree to a theatrical release, although the broadcasting ban remained in place for twenty years. In an odd testament to its striking realism, the film went on to win the Academy Award for best documentary. Filmed in what would become the director’s trademark "semidocumentary" style, The War Game interrogates the clash between "subjective" and "objective" forms and refuses to allow the viewer a safe distance from the issues it presents.

Privilege
Directed by Peter Watkins
Great Britain 1967, 35mm, b/w, 95 min.
With Paul Jones, Jean Shrimpton, Mark London

With Privilege, Peter Watkins merged documentary style with metaphor to expand his interrogation of media and politics. The film was a product of Universal’s late 1960s European production program, which invited young European directors such as Watkins and François Truffaut to create low-budget features for the studio. More conventional than the director’s debut efforts, it nonetheless retains his trademark first-person interviews and pseudodocumentary style. The story concerns Steven Shorter (Jones), a successful pop singer who is convinced by the government to perform violent theatrical rock that will distract youth from politics and social problems and lull them into a "fruitful conformity" with church and state. When Shorter withdraws after realizing he is being manipulated to control the public, his fans turn against him and he becomes an enemy of the state.

For a complete schedule and more information, please visit: http://www.harvardfilmarchive.org/calendars/06_spring/pseudo.html

Translating Genocide: Journey to Sudan
Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2006 at 6 p.m.
Remis Auditorium, Museum of Fine Arts

Translating Genocide: Journey to Sudan by Kirsten Dirksen (2005, 36 min.) In March 2005, three college students traveled to Sudan to experience for themselves a part of the world that has suffered unfathomable human rights abuses in recent years. In this mtvU documentary, Nate, Andrew, and Stephanie witness what it is to live in the wake of human destruction and the faith refugees shared – by telling their stories to numerous camera crews – that help is on the way.

Following the film, there will be a panel discussion featuring Rev. Gloria Hammond MD and Rev. Liz Walker, formerly of Channel 4 Boston, as well as a Q & A with one of the students featured, filmmaker Andrew Karlsruher. For more information, please visit www.rwandaoutlook.org.

MFA members, seniors, and students $8; general admission $9.

Political Comedy

Film series on political comedy on behalf of the political science graduate student body. The movies (.pdf) are screened every other Tuesday in CAS 313 at 7PM and are open to the entire BU community. Admission is free.