NEW YORK: Film Society of Lincoln Center pays tribute to the late, great Manny Farber with the kind of celebration every film critic (every film nut, for that matter) has probably dreamed of being held in his honor: a couple week's worth of movies that inspired Farber to kick the theater seat in front of him in happy excitement, and to kick out the jams when he sat down to transfer that excitement to his writing about them. Any enthusiast of Farber's will notice something missing that's essential to their own conception of The Manny Farber Experience, but the programmers have certainly done an admirable job of indicating the wide range of Farber's taste, from the grungy crime movies (Howard Hawks's Scarface, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground) and suggestive scare flicks (the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur I Walked with a Zombie) and motor-mouthed comedies (His Girl Friday, Preston Sturges's Christmas in July) that Farber pegged as the pride of old Hollywood to such art-house fare as Resnais's Muriel, Godard's Two or Three Things I know About Her, and experimental films by Michael Snow and Jean-Marie Straub. The double bill of the season just might be Don Siegel's The Lineup, a charged thriller based on a forgotten TV series and starring Eli Wallach as a demented hit man, with the classic Chuck Jones cartoon One Froggy Evening. This Sunday, the program also pairs up two short documentaries inspired by Farber's work: Chris Petit's 1999 Negative Space, which includes interviews with both Manny and his soul brother Dave Hickey, and Untitled: New Blue, Paul Schrader's five-minute look at one of Farber's paintings. Schrader will be on hand to introduce the film, and as an associate of Neil Young's once said of another associate of Neil Young's that boy can flat yap.
Film Forum begins a week-long tribute to director Les Blank, a documentarian whose range of subjects--mainly food, filmmaking, music, and wild women--clearly designate him as one of God's better ideas. Included are Blank's classic tribute to Mardi Gras Indians, Always for Pleasure (1978), whose title could also apply very nicely to his career, as could his 1968 God Respects Us When We Work, but Loves Us When We Dance. Other films included cover the life and work of bluesmen Lightinin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Louisiana musicians CLifton Chenier and Michael Doucet, and Flaco Jimenez, as well as garlic, polka, Tex-Mex, and Werner Herzog, seen in the double bill Burden of Dreams, which is about the making of Fitzcarraldo, and the short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, which is literally about what it says it's about. To gorge on this stuff is to come to a fresh understanding of just how thoroughly you've misspent most of your own life.
Also dropping in at the Forum for a week: Charlie Ahearn's 1982 Wild Style, in a spanking new 35-mm. print. Starring a celebrated graffiti artist, Lee Quinones, and shot in New York back in the day when the city had graffiti, Wild Style was a mainstay of cable TV's Night Flight in the late 1980s, and it seems to come back about once every ten years. To be honest, I've never been able to remain focused on it for all of its 82 minutes. But its hardcore fans don't worship at its altar because Ahearn was a master filmmaker or any kind of storyteller; they revere the movie, which includes glimpses of Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, the Rock Steady Crew, the Cold Crush Brothers, artist Sandra Fabara, and onetime "downtown scene queen" Patti Astor, because it's a living record of a moment just before hip hop broke wide open, and because Ahearn had the taste, or the good luck, to capture that moment in a way that seemed to anticipate what was about to come. It's practically a federal law that any mention of the movie include the phrase "time capsule."
More pieces of time can be found at Anthology Film Archives, where they're kicking off an eight-film retrosepctive to 86-year-old director Arthur Penn, who I once referred to at this site as "the late" Arthur Penn, only to turn on TCM's Brando documentary to see him chattering away, still alive and looking more like Iggy Pop than ever. The AFA will be running his groundbreaking Bonnie & Clyde as well as some of the less heralded earlier films that offer tantalizing hints of the triumphs to come--The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman as Billy the Kid and the excellent film version of The Miracle Worker, but also his film maudit and first collaboration with Warren Beatty, the fascinating, unclassifable failure Mickey One (1965)--and the ambitious, sometimes fumbling attempts to follow it up (Alice's Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves.)
BERKELEY: "Discovering Teuvo Tulio" (November 15-December 4) at Pacific Film Archives offers those looking for something different and obscure (in our neck of the woods, anyway) the chance to catch up on "the wild and willful director of Finnish melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s." Tulio was an actor in silent films, earning the designation "Finland's Valentino." According to the PFA, when Tulio turned director, "he poured an erotic passion worthy of Valentino into the act of filmmaking itself. In his early 'haystack dramas,' Tulio paid homage to the spectacular nature cinematography of Scandinavian silents and retold classic coming-of-age stories, embellishing these with outrageous use of orchestral music and editing to rival Eisenstein (he produced and edited all his films of this era). As war approached, his themes and imagery became considerably darker, more urban and expressionistic. The thread that runs through all these films is the sexual frankness that overturns the very conventions Tulio so consciously resurrects. Surely if every woman who innocently engaged in premarital sex went down the road Tulio maps, prostitution would have accounted for half of Finland’s GDP." Not having seen any of the four films in the program, I can't vouch for any of this, but it sure caught my attention. Apparently Aki Kaurismaki is a big fan, and for all I know, Tulio may turn out to be the Douglas Sirk to his Fassbinder. So if you love The Man Without a Past, The Match Factory Girl and La Vie de Boheme--and if you don't, to hell with you, I say--here's your chance to see where their roots may lie.