NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.
Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster. The retrospective, which runs for a couple of weeks, also includes Alan Rudolph and writer Bud Shrake's joyously entertaining Songwriter, in which Rip demonstrates that he may be the only man alive who can turn Willie Nelson into his straight man; the little-seen 1970 Tropic of Cancer, starring Rip as Henry Miller; Milton Moses Ginsburg's Coming Apart, a virtual one-man show with Rip as a demented psychiatrist filming himself in a mirror; Beyond the Law, another Mailer psychodrama; and the more recent 40 Shades of Blue, starring the grizzled older Torn as a legendary Southern music producer. There's also a special program labeled "A Rip Torn Miscellanea", consisting of "rare footage of Torn, including documentation of some of his renowned stage performances, forgotten talk-show appearances, excerpts from some of his lesser-known film and TV work," including a half-hour TV film from 1976 in which he plays Walt Whitman.
SAN FRANCISCO: At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Fearless: Strand Releasing Turns 20" is in full swing and continues through Saturday and continues from March 6 through March 8. This celebration of the risk-taking distributor's films includes a double feature from the neglected French director-actor Jacques Nolot, Before I Forget and Porn Theater.
BERKELEY: "Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran" at Pacific Film Archives (March 1 - April 29) is a "celebration of women filmmakers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the diaspora in Europe" that offers "a remarkable geographic, cultural, and stylistic range. In documentaries, features, and experimental works, the directors depict urban attitudes and rural traditions, the dream of escape and the isolation of exile, and the comforts and entrapments of family." Director-actress Niki Karimi will be present at the opening-day screenings of her One Night and A Few Days Later... The program also includes Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini's wrenching The Day I Became a Woman and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated memoir Persepolis.
COLUMBIA, MISSOURI: The True/False Film Festival, which kicked off last night and runs through the weekend, is an international documentary festival with a fast-growing reputation based on the breadth and quality of its selections, which last year included this year's Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, Man on Wire. indieWIRE has an interview with festival founders David Wilson and Paul Sturtz.