Auteurs series looks for lessons from old masters
Classic films showed the way
In decades past, cinephiles would eagerly anticipate the latest releases from European filmmakers who were expanding the boundaries and defying conventions of how to tell a story on the big screen.
Then, they’d cluster in coffee shops, bars or film clubs to debate and analyze the new techniques.
That’s something of the feeling Jason Silverman says he’s trying to recreate with the Auteurs series at the Center for Contemporary Arts Cinematheque — albeit in a retro sort of way. Some approaches that were groundbreaking when the films in the series were released might be old hat today.
“People want to experience that, what it’s like to see it on the big screen,” said Silverman, Cinematheque director. “It’s exciting.”
Now in its third year, the Auteurs series started as part of the Summer Film Institute at St. John’s College, where students studied legendary directors and their films, many of which were screened at the CCA. This year, St. John’s is not offering Film Institute screenings for the public, but the previous ones were so popular, Silverman said he decided to put together his own program.
“People loved it more than we anticipated,” he said.
The program theme centers on newly restored films, although two of the offerings have not been restored.
One of them never was released in the United States because of certain rights issues, but now is being made available through a newly discovered 35mm print. “A half-dozen cities will be playing this very rare print,” Silverman said of “Ossessione,” a 1943 film by Italian director Luchino Visconti. After
showing in Santa Fe and a few other U.S. locations, it will head back to a vault in Rome, he added.
This film was a landmark for Italian neorealist style — a somewhat gritty “cinema of the streets” that involves hand-held cameras with an “in the moment” feel, he said. And the story may be familiar to Americans — it’s based on James M. Cain’s novel “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” That story of a drifter and the wife of a café owner plotting murder was made into films in the United States in both 1946 and 1981.
Writer and producer Kirk Ellis, whom Silverman calls “one of the world’s greatest introducers of films of any genre,” will offer opening remarks for the “Ossessione” screening.
Opera lovers will get a cinematic preview to Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa” on this summer’s Santa Fe Opera program through Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s “Thirst.” James Robinson, stage director for “Vanessa,” will introduce Bergman’s film, and tell how it influenced his design and direction for the opera.
“He will give an idea of how opera and cinema connect,” Silverman said.
He calls “Thirst” an “idiosyncratic melodrama,” but not one that follows the obvious plot lines in the American style of that genre. “It’s filled with surprises,” Silverman said. “The story is told in a mystical fashion; it’s also incredibly beautiful to look at.” It follows a couple’s travels across postwar Europe, the people they encounter and their growing separation.
“People call it his first masterpiece,” Silverman said. “Others would debate that.”
The series opened last week with Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast,” a film that uses magical effects back before the days when computers could make anything look real on screen. “Jean Cocteau was a very visionary director, very inventive. He played with reality and was very imaginative,” Silverman said.
This Saturday’s film is “Thin Blue Line,” a documentary by Errol Morris that shattered everyone’s idea of what a documentary should be like. Rather than outlining a staid set of facts in examining a person convicted of killing a Dallas police officer, the 1981 film uses controversial re-enactments to throw the viewer in the middle of a thriller.
“There is no voice-of-God narrative,” Silverman said. “You’re immersed in it as if it’s a piece of fiction.” Now, it’s a pretty standard way of fact-based story-telling, he added.
Paul Barnes, who edited this film and was an early editing partner with Ken Burns, will introduce it.
Silverman himself, who codirected a documentary on African filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, will introduce “Black Girl,” Sembène’s first feature film. It focuses on a Senegalese woman who goes to work for a French couple who end up taking her to France, where she feels isolated and degraded.
“It’s partly a story about victimization, but also about self-empowerment in a way,” Silverman said. It has parallels in the continued French power in the African country at the time, even after it won its independence, and also in Sembène’s struggle to make a film with no money and very little in the way of equipment.
And it’s the first time that an African story was told by an African filmmaker, instead of the European viewpoint usually applied to such tales, he said.
The series ends with Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 crime caper “Band of Outsiders.” It follows and is somewhat similar to “Breathless,” Godard’s better known film, but Silverman said it shows a little more refinement in its storytelling. This example of French New Wave features Anna Karina, with whom Godard had an ongoing actor/director relationship. It includes a dash through the Louvre and a dance scene that may have inspired a similar one in “Pulp Fiction,” Silverman said.
“He bends time … he jumps us around from moment to moment,” he said of Godard’s jump-cut technique. “It bends and breaks the rules.”