By David Sterritt
BALTIMORE–The Maryland Film Festival is a small affair, running a scant three days (plus opening night) and showing few enough movies that a dedicated spectator can see almost everything. Under the guiding hand of festival chief Jed Dietz, it can be an adventurous event. Recent editions have included Irrevérsible, the brilliant but brutal Gaspar Noé melodrama, and edgy documentaries like American Eunuchs, about men who choose to have their testicles removed; A Certain Kind of Death, about corpses of people so marginalized that they’re not discovered until they’ve started to decay; and The Gift, about gay “bug chasers” who have unsafe sex in order to become HIV positive for reasons of romance, politics, or (if you ask me) stupidity.
Also offbeat is the festival’s policy of filling the coveted opening-night slot with documentary and narrative shorts. The standouts of this year’s opener were The Little Gorilla, an almost wordless comedy by Harry Kellerman about a little boy’s jungle-gym dreams, and Two Hands, a documentary by Nathaniel Kahn about the recovery of superb pianist Leon Fleischer from a condition that crippled two of his fingers (and hence his concert career) for years. Kellerman is a new director from New York, and I’m pleased to report he was a grad student of mine when I was a prof in Columbia University’s film division. Kahn is the marvelously talented director of the 2003 documentary My Architect, about his relationship with architect Louis I. Kahn, his justly renowned (and wildly eccentric) father. Both filmmakers did themselves proud.
So did the international auteurs whose movies I put on my must-see list. The first of these was the irrepressible Guy Maddin, with whom the Maryland festival has cultivated a good relationship over the years. His new feature, Brand Upon the Brain, is vintage stuff—a tale of madness, death, madness, horror, madness, and sexuality that’s very, very slippery. The style is Maddin’s preferred mode, faux-silent cinema, with lots of intertitles and a print that looks like it’s been badly stored for the past several decades. At about 95 minutes it lasts too long for what it has to say, but that’s the only cavil I can come up with. Maddin is a true original, and since his 2000 comeback with The Heart of the World his inventiveness has been unstoppable.
Next up was the amazingly gifted Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose Syndromes and a Century is arguably his finest work since Mysterious Object at Noon, his inimitable debut feature of 2000. Then again, Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady were also amazing, so let’s call them all his finest work. Syndromes and a Century unfolds its leisurely, loosely strung story at a Thai hospital (the filmmaker’s parents were physicians) in two different time periods, identifiable not through narrative developments but through changes in mood, atmosphere, and ambience. This is one of the rare movies that casts a genuine aesthetic spell on the receptive spectator—it’s hard to gauge passage through time or space except by submitting to the film’s beguiling surfaces and letting them wash over you like a current of water or wind. This is cinema of the most advanced and astonishing kind.
Much the same can be said about Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang and his new feature, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, the first movie he’s shot in Malaysia, the country he hails from. His regular lead actor, Lee Kang-sheng, plays a Chinese visitor to Kuala Lumpur, where he’s roughed up by street thugs and rescued by a bunch of Bangladeshi men; one of them then cares for him until he’s well enough to check out the local Chinatown area, where a couple of women enter his life. All of this is counterpointed by events involving a hospital patient, also played by Lee and identified as “paralyzed guy” in the credits. The characters are fascinating, but as always in Tsai’s movies, the tones and textures of the environment are what matter most, along with the boldly elliptical dramatic strokes that constitute the sort-of-narrative that binds the film together. Tsai’s distinctive trademarks are all here—the loneliness, the shabbiness, the music, the thinly veiled passion, and the near-ubiquity of water, an element that no other filmmaker save Andre Tarkovsky has imbued with such mysterious, even mystical qualities. Tsai is taking cinema to levels it has never explored, or conceived of exploring, before.
These were the best discoveries on tap at the festival, but not the only ones. Andrew Neel appeared with a riveting documentary about his grandmother Alice Neel, the extraordinary American painter whose description of herself as a “collector of souls” is entirely accurate; for just one example, her picture of the aging and ailing Andy Warhol, glimpsed too briefly in the film, is a harrowing classic of take-no-prisoners portraiture. Alice Neel paints a well-rounded, sometimes unsparing portrait of her and of various family members who, in some cases, seem as idiosyncratic as she was, if not remotely as gifted. And when I asked a question after the screening, Andrew revealed himself as another Columbia student of mine, whom I didn’t remember until that moment! Go figure. (I like to think I taught him and Harry everything they know. I’m sure I didn’t, but hey, my ego tells me I’m the auteur behind the auteurs.)
Speaking of folks I know, The Visit, a narrative feature directed by Baltimore’s own Mary Hardcastle, had two of them in the cast: Edward Sparrow, a lit’ry sage and my fellow prof at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Melissa Sparrow, also a sage and a Johns Hopkins pediatrician to boot. Both are excellent actors, it turns out. Melissa makes a striking impression even though her character, a hard-working wife and mother, dies early in the story, leaving her husband (played by Ned, natch) and their young son (played by Wil Hardcastle, the director’s son) to cope with grief and loss. This gets more complicated when the dead woman’s sister (played by Hardcastle herself) shows up with too many ideas about how they should be getting their lives together again. The result is an amiable and amusing drama of everyday life in stressed-out circumstances.
The festival imported rock star and political activist Henry Rollins to show a movie of his choice, and he selected Maxed Out, a documentary about the staggering debts increasingly accrued by credit-happy American consumers. Rollins’s introduction was a model of succinctness, and after the film he made the engaging announcement that—since he’s not a professor who makes people sit in their seats—he’d hang out in the lobby for as much discussion and chitchat as the audience wanted. The movie itself was disappointing, though, filling far too much of its 90-minute running time with sob stories about individual cases rather than extended analyses of fundamental problems.
Other guests of the festival included Lodge Kerrigan, an ingenious filmmaker and terrific guy who presented a screening of A Sense of Loss, the 1972 documentary by Marcel Ophuls about Northern Ireland’s troubles; Milestone Film and Video honchos Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, ingenious distributors and terrific folks who presented Charles Burnett’s gritty-poetic drama Killer of Sheep, made in 1977 but denied a true theatrical release until now because of problems with music rights and the barely hidden biases that work against African-American filmmakers to this day; and Baltimore Sun film critic Chris Kaltenbach, who presented his annual 3-D extravaganza—this year the 1953 thriller Man in the Dark, starring Edmond O’Brien as a criminal whose lawbreaking brain cells are excised by surgeons, with surprising (well, not that surprising) results. The big rollercoaster chase scene is the picture’s official highlight, but I rather liked the brain-surgery stuff, with lethal-looking implements coming right … at … you ….
Ah, the magic of movies. Thanks to Jed and the Maryland festival for a lively selection.
BALTIMORE–The Maryland Film Festival is a small affair, running a scant three days (plus opening night) and showing few enough movies that a dedicated spectator can see almost everything. Under the guiding hand of festival chief Jed Dietz, it can be an adventurous event. Recent editions have included Irrevérsible, the brilliant but brutal Gaspar Noé melodrama, and edgy documentaries like American Eunuchs, about men who choose to have their testicles removed; A Certain Kind of Death, about corpses of people so marginalized that they’re not discovered until they’ve started to decay; and The Gift, about gay “bug chasers” who have unsafe sex in order to become HIV positive for reasons of romance, politics, or (if you ask me) stupidity.
Also offbeat is the festival’s policy of filling the coveted opening-night slot with documentary and narrative shorts. The standouts of this year’s opener were The Little Gorilla, an almost wordless comedy by Harry Kellerman about a little boy’s jungle-gym dreams, and Two Hands, a documentary by Nathaniel Kahn about the recovery of superb pianist Leon Fleischer from a condition that crippled two of his fingers (and hence his concert career) for years. Kellerman is a new director from New York, and I’m pleased to report he was a grad student of mine when I was a prof in Columbia University’s film division. Kahn is the marvelously talented director of the 2003 documentary My Architect, about his relationship with architect Louis I. Kahn, his justly renowned (and wildly eccentric) father. Both filmmakers did themselves proud.
So did the international auteurs whose movies I put on my must-see list. The first of these was the irrepressible Guy Maddin, with whom the Maryland festival has cultivated a good relationship over the years. His new feature, Brand Upon the Brain, is vintage stuff—a tale of madness, death, madness, horror, madness, and sexuality that’s very, very slippery. The style is Maddin’s preferred mode, faux-silent cinema, with lots of intertitles and a print that looks like it’s been badly stored for the past several decades. At about 95 minutes it lasts too long for what it has to say, but that’s the only cavil I can come up with. Maddin is a true original, and since his 2000 comeback with The Heart of the World his inventiveness has been unstoppable.
Next up was the amazingly gifted Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose Syndromes and a Century is arguably his finest work since Mysterious Object at Noon, his inimitable debut feature of 2000. Then again, Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady were also amazing, so let’s call them all his finest work. Syndromes and a Century unfolds its leisurely, loosely strung story at a Thai hospital (the filmmaker’s parents were physicians) in two different time periods, identifiable not through narrative developments but through changes in mood, atmosphere, and ambience. This is one of the rare movies that casts a genuine aesthetic spell on the receptive spectator—it’s hard to gauge passage through time or space except by submitting to the film’s beguiling surfaces and letting them wash over you like a current of water or wind. This is cinema of the most advanced and astonishing kind.
Much the same can be said about Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang and his new feature, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, the first movie he’s shot in Malaysia, the country he hails from. His regular lead actor, Lee Kang-sheng, plays a Chinese visitor to Kuala Lumpur, where he’s roughed up by street thugs and rescued by a bunch of Bangladeshi men; one of them then cares for him until he’s well enough to check out the local Chinatown area, where a couple of women enter his life. All of this is counterpointed by events involving a hospital patient, also played by Lee and identified as “paralyzed guy” in the credits. The characters are fascinating, but as always in Tsai’s movies, the tones and textures of the environment are what matter most, along with the boldly elliptical dramatic strokes that constitute the sort-of-narrative that binds the film together. Tsai’s distinctive trademarks are all here—the loneliness, the shabbiness, the music, the thinly veiled passion, and the near-ubiquity of water, an element that no other filmmaker save Andre Tarkovsky has imbued with such mysterious, even mystical qualities. Tsai is taking cinema to levels it has never explored, or conceived of exploring, before.
These were the best discoveries on tap at the festival, but not the only ones. Andrew Neel appeared with a riveting documentary about his grandmother Alice Neel, the extraordinary American painter whose description of herself as a “collector of souls” is entirely accurate; for just one example, her picture of the aging and ailing Andy Warhol, glimpsed too briefly in the film, is a harrowing classic of take-no-prisoners portraiture. Alice Neel paints a well-rounded, sometimes unsparing portrait of her and of various family members who, in some cases, seem as idiosyncratic as she was, if not remotely as gifted. And when I asked a question after the screening, Andrew revealed himself as another Columbia student of mine, whom I didn’t remember until that moment! Go figure. (I like to think I taught him and Harry everything they know. I’m sure I didn’t, but hey, my ego tells me I’m the auteur behind the auteurs.)
Speaking of folks I know, The Visit, a narrative feature directed by Baltimore’s own Mary Hardcastle, had two of them in the cast: Edward Sparrow, a lit’ry sage and my fellow prof at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Melissa Sparrow, also a sage and a Johns Hopkins pediatrician to boot. Both are excellent actors, it turns out. Melissa makes a striking impression even though her character, a hard-working wife and mother, dies early in the story, leaving her husband (played by Ned, natch) and their young son (played by Wil Hardcastle, the director’s son) to cope with grief and loss. This gets more complicated when the dead woman’s sister (played by Hardcastle herself) shows up with too many ideas about how they should be getting their lives together again. The result is an amiable and amusing drama of everyday life in stressed-out circumstances.
The festival imported rock star and political activist Henry Rollins to show a movie of his choice, and he selected Maxed Out, a documentary about the staggering debts increasingly accrued by credit-happy American consumers. Rollins’s introduction was a model of succinctness, and after the film he made the engaging announcement that—since he’s not a professor who makes people sit in their seats—he’d hang out in the lobby for as much discussion and chitchat as the audience wanted. The movie itself was disappointing, though, filling far too much of its 90-minute running time with sob stories about individual cases rather than extended analyses of fundamental problems.
Other guests of the festival included Lodge Kerrigan, an ingenious filmmaker and terrific guy who presented a screening of A Sense of Loss, the 1972 documentary by Marcel Ophuls about Northern Ireland’s troubles; Milestone Film and Video honchos Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, ingenious distributors and terrific folks who presented Charles Burnett’s gritty-poetic drama Killer of Sheep, made in 1977 but denied a true theatrical release until now because of problems with music rights and the barely hidden biases that work against African-American filmmakers to this day; and Baltimore Sun film critic Chris Kaltenbach, who presented his annual 3-D extravaganza—this year the 1953 thriller Man in the Dark, starring Edmond O’Brien as a criminal whose lawbreaking brain cells are excised by surgeons, with surprising (well, not that surprising) results. The big rollercoaster chase scene is the picture’s official highlight, but I rather liked the brain-surgery stuff, with lethal-looking implements coming right … at … you ….
Ah, the magic of movies. Thanks to Jed and the Maryland festival for a lively selection.
