FSLC Honors James Brown

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Thursday, 21 August 2014 02:01

Written by Jacob Angstreich

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective, James Brown: The Hardest Working Man in Show Business is devoted to the film work of the great musician and performer and running from August 29th to September 1st 2014. The retrospective provides an exciting opportunity to see the rarely screened, early 1970s gangster drama, Black Caesar, starring Fred Williamson, in a pristine 35mm. 

Included in the retrospective is the 1965 Frankie Avalon vehicle, Ski Partywith James Brown doing a spectacular number while being accompanied with a curiously invisible backing band. Also included is Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s 2008 documentary Soul Power. Set against the backdrop of the music festival Zaire '74, Brown's music bookends the film's undercurrent of political turmoil.

Black Caesar was the first blaxploitation film directed by the fascinating Larry Cohen, one of the last, truly great directors to emerge from the Hollywood system. Although he has always been located somewhere on the margins of American commercial filmmaking. Cohen's work has been singled out for praise by some of the most eminent Anglophone auteurists, such as Dave Kehr, Fred Camper, Robin Wood, and Tom Gunning.

Cohen's somewhat wild, morally ambiguous screenplay has, expectedly, an abundance of interesting ideas as well as much of the radical content that made the director a darling of Marxist critics such as the inestimable Wood. Although Black Caesar is considerably cruder stylistically than the director's most satisfying works, it nonetheless possesses much of Cohen's characteristic anarchic energy and visual chaos, while maintaining a high level of emotional intensity throughout its length, recalling the bold sensibility of Sam Fuller whose films Cohen admires.

If Black Caesar doesn't ultimately rank with some of Cohen's most aesthetically noteworthy efforts — such as It's Alive!, God Told Me To, The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, or Special Effects — it is, at the very least, an intriguing curiosity, replete with instances of the director's compelling deployment of New York locations and carried by Williamson's confident and charismatic, star performance.

For more information, go to: www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

James Brown: The Hardest Working Man in Show Business
Aug 29 - Sept 1, 2013

Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street
New York, NY 10023

"The Strange Little Cat" Returns to FSLC

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 28 July 2014 16:38

Written by Jack Angstreich

The Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running Ramon Zürcher's quizzical The Strange Little Cat, from Germany, for a one-week exclusive engagement beginning on August 1st, 2014. The film had its local premiere earlier this year at the New Directors, New Films Festival.

The events of The Strange Little Cat take place over the course of a single day and evening, culminating in a family dinner party — almost all the action occurs within the confines of this single, urban apartment but there is hardly any narrative at all in conventional terms — a glass breaks, the youngest daughter cuts her finger picking it up, a rat is seen scurrying outside, a ball gets thrown through the window, an old woman dozes off, etc. There are a few brief sequences outside the apartment as well as a handful of almost dreamlike cutaways to scenes recalled by characters — these inserts introduce a novel, defamiliarizing texture into the experience of the film. The Strange Little Cat is remarkable for the degree to which it risks being purely inconsequential by merely observing the quotidian details of one ordinary family's day but it also manifests a notable singularity of focus and sensitivity to the peculiar qualities of generally overlooked minutiae.

Zürcher's eccentric and abstract realism generates a minimal, almost antiseptic, visual style, somewhat reminiscent of that of Michael Haneke but without the latter's relentlessness or sense of menace. (The subtle patterning of repetitions recalls the "parametric form" championed by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson — comparisons to the films of Jacques Tati and Chantal Akerman are not inapposite.) Presented in DCP, the digital format here is uncompromised by the usual problems with the range of contrast consequent upon shooting in bright light, although the austerity of Zürcher's approach might have yielded even richer rewards if he had had access to the more sensual qualities of 35mm (the film seems like it may be in an unusual ratio — at the press screening, the right and left sides of the frame were, regrettably, unmasked — I hope this can be corrected for the opening).

The Strange Little Cat is an unusual but strikingly accomplished work and one looks forward to future films by Zürcher, who is well-served here by his excellent, if unfamiliar, ensemble cast. I applaud the Film Society for taking a chance on such a seemingly uncommercial prospect.

The Strange Little Cat
August 1st, 2014

Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street
New York, NY 10023

For more information, go to: www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.

Joanna Hogg on 'Exhibition' at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 16 June 2014 22:34

Written by Jack Angstreich

On June 20th, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will open Joanna Hogg's impressive film, Exhibition — which had its local premiere at last year's New York Film Festival in its Emerging Artists sidebar and which I previously reviewed here — for a two-week exclusive run. In conjunction with the release of Exhibition, beginning on June 27th the Film Society will also be screening Hogg's two previous features, Unrelated and Archipelago, for a one-week exclusive run. 

Unrelated is centered upon a middle-aged London woman who goes on holiday in Italy, staying at a villa with an old friend and her family, developing a crush on her friend's son, played by Hogg's remarkable discovery, a very young Tom Hiddleston, who went on to appear in her other two features. For those that have seen Exhibition, one can recognize the distinctive cinematic vision of that film in the very first shots of the earlier one. Hogg's films are precisely observed, confidently combining a non-classical visual detachment with oblique storytelling, her sensuous minimalism evincing an unexpected emotional plangency. The director's documentary realism attains a dialectical force in being embedded within a rigorous formalism that is reminiscent at times of the work of Peter Greenaway.

Hogg attains uniformly convincing, naturalistic performances from the rest of her unfamiliar cast, including what appear to be several non-professional actors, while Hiddleston's good looks and charisma stand out, explaining his current Hollywood fame for playing Loki in the Thor and Avengers movies. (He had a delightful star turn in Jim Jarmusch's latest feature, Only Lovers Left Alive, which also had its local premiere at last year's New York Film Festival and recently concluded a run at the Film Society.)

The cool interiors of Exhibition were better suited to the digital format than the sunlit exteriors of Italy are in Unrelated — the latter film's not inconsiderable visual power would have been significantly enhanced had Hogg been able to shoot it in 35-millimeter, whatever other economic or practical advantages that digital may have afforded her. Despite this deficiency, Unrelated is a very engaging, memorable work, well worth a look.

Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street
New York, NY 10023

For more information, go to: www.filmlinc.com and follow @filmlinc on Twitter.