Chronology and Filmnotes of 
      year 2002 ciné16 shows:

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The purpose of this page is to give you an idea of the typical programming of a ciné16 show, and to provide you with details on films and filmmakers we've showcased. The following 44 programs, encompassing 170 films, are chronicled from most recent 2002 show backward to the first of the calendar year.

2002 Highlights:  On May 18, we were pleased to host Brooklyn filmmaker Tony DeNonno, in a one-night retrospective of his films.  On June 20 and 27, we hosted a retrospective of some of the lesser-known (but, in our opinion, the best) films made by Weston Woods, in a program entitled 'Fifty Years of Picture Books: a Two-Part Tribute to Morton Schindel and Weston Woods'.  On October 3, we inaugurated our Partner Cities program by initiating a series of monthly programs in St. Louis, Missouri, co-curated by AFA officer Margie Newman and Marc Syp.  Held at the Mad Art Gallery, we're averaging more than 150 people per show.  In November, we gained national interest in our retrospective of the films of Bert Van Bork, which director Geoff Alexander presented at the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in Boston.  Also in November, Geoff's 40 page monograph,  'An Academic Perspective: The Life and Times of John Barnes,' appeared in 'The Moving Image', the Journal of the  Association of Moving Image Archivists. To further our goal of increasing national awareness of our work, we introduced a new logo for the Academic Film Archive (below).  Although branding is not normally considered an element in the work of a non-profit organization, we see this as a major component in our marketing efforts, which we'll undertake to increase awareness locally and nationally, of our mission and programming.  The eventual objective is to secure funding for a permanent location for our archives and programs.

The purpose of this page is to give you an idea of the typical programming of a ciné16 show, and to provide you with details on films and filmmakers we've showcased. The following programs are chronicled from most recent 2002 show backward to the first of the year.

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Thursday, December 26, 2002... A Tribute to Frank Cole

Tonight’s program comes to us by way of Sanjay Mohanta and our friend Lois Siegel, who both insisted that I review Cole’s small but significant body of work. Cole, who died several years ago under circumstances that will probably never be fully known, made what is probably the most powerful ten minute short film I’ve ever seen, "A Documentary", which we’ll show tonight.

Cole’s small body of work was concerned mainly with the subject of death. In 1989, he carried the ashes of his grandfather into the Sahara, and filmed his own dance with death over the course of a year, traveling by camel, from Nema, Mauritania, to Sudan’s Red Sea (as the first documented crossing of the Sahara by camel, Cole’s trip would enter the Guinness Book of Records in 1996). The result was the autobiographically abstract ‘Life Without Death’ a 90 minute documentary created over ten years’ time. After finishing the film, he left details of screenings in the hands of others, preferring to return to the Sahara, rather than face questions from fans and critics. The Canadian Film Institute ran a retrospective of Cole’s work in November, 2000, but unbeknownst to all, Cole had perished a month earlier, bludgeoned by bandits in Mali. It would be four months before authorities would be able to positively identify the body as being his.

‘Life Without Death’ is perhaps overly long, and its precursor, ‘A Life’, is not as interesting, or powerful, as the two Cole films were showing tonight. In addition to these films, we’ll round out the program with work by two of Cole’s acquaintances, Ottawa filmmakers Lois Siegel and Dan Sokolowski.

Lois Siegel, Paulie, Frank Cole, Robin Black.  
Photo courtesy Lois Siegel.

Lois Siegel, who teaches film classes as well as being an outstanding filmmaker, recalls Cole’s particularities:

(June 17, 2002) ‘You must see "The Mountenay's" - It's my favorite, along with "A Documentary." Frank used to show these two films to my classes and talk about them and his work. I once stayed at his apartment in Ottawa when I was living in Montreal, but working on casting of a film in Ottawa. The only 'furniture' he had in his living room was a Steenbeck [a flatbed film editor]. There was a scorpion he had found in the desert in a glass jar. He lost another scorpion in a hotel room in Paris...’

(June 18, 2002) I wish you had met him.  This was a different experience. There was no one quite like Frank.  He spoke softly and slowly. He was always thinking.  If he wrote a note, it was usually one line, signed Frank. He was very to the point.

The last time he came to my class, he was questioning everything he had done.  I think he was very lonely at times.  He told my class that film was not the answer to everything, that it was important to have a life.  I think he wished he had a family. I knew one of his former girlfriends. That didn't work. He was still focused on making films and she wanted to have a baby. She left Canada and went back to Peru.

We would often to go see documentary films at the local repertory theatre.  He would only go to see documentaries, no fiction. The last film we saw was Dr. Death, by Errol Morris. Frank was obsessed with 'death.'

I met him in the early 80s at the Grierson Film Seminar in Niagara-on-the-Lake, near Niagara Falls. Those seminars were terrific in the early 80s. Filmmakers and librarians would come from all over Canada, with a few foreign invited guests.  We would stay in a big hotel... we were the only guests in November, off season.  There was a theatre in town. We'd see each other’s films all day, argue fiercely about them, and then continue discussions over meals and in the bar. I met wonderful people and it was the only way to see Canadian films from across the country.

On tonight’s show:

‘A Documentary’ (1979) 10m, dir. Frank Cole. This shocking film documents the final days of Cole’s grandparents. In the opening scene, Cole’s grandfather reminisces about the good looks and sparkling personality his wife, decades earlier. A series of overlapping stills then detail his morning awakening and dressing. He then walks out his door, into an elevator, ascends to the room of his wife, and we become aware that the activity takes place in a multistory institutional rest home, in which they are both entombed. Cole’s grandmother, as we soon see, is little more physically than a taught layer of skin stretched over a skeleton; she can no longer communicate. In a film loaded with poignancy, Cole’s grandfather discusses the prospects of his present life: "I like young people, but young people don’t like me… because I’m old, you see." And the future: "I’ll still be here, I guess, for life… life imprisonment."

‘The Mountenays: Family Pictures’ (1982) 20m, dir. Frank Cole. The Mountenays are an extended family living in the Ottawa Valley, near Perth, Ontario. Their house is a hodgepodge of add-ons, extensions, and reconstructions, seemingly built with found materials. On their property, we find a variety of farm animals, broken appliances, and several cars in varying states of disrepair, often reworked to provide icy joyrides. The Mountenays are people who are "off the grid", in terms of social acceptance and financial responsibilities. A female family member recalls with indignation the time a social worker threatened to remove the children from the home. While few of us would, if we were honest enough to admit it, want the Mountenays for next-door neighbors, there is a lesson here: the refusal of others to live like we do may not necessarily be a justification for removing children from their loving parents. Frank Cole chose to focus on the joy and heart of this family, while less prescient filmmakers may have chosen instead to dwell on sympathy, pity, or scorn.

Lois Siegel remembers:

(June 17, 2002) ‘There is a wonderful story about "The Mountenays" - a wonderful backwoods family.  The health department came and said they had to have cement floors, not dirt floors.  So the Mountenays hired a cement truck to come and pour cement on the floors of the house, but they didn't bother to take out the furniture first. The truck just pulled up and poured the cement in, regardless of the furniture that was still in the house.’

Also on the program:

Three exceptional short films by Cole’s friend, experimental filmmaker Dan Sokolowski, and three by our friend and colleague Lois Siegel:

‘Still Life’ (1994) 6m, dir. Dan Sokolowski. The beachhead evolution of dawn-to-dusk.

‘Fire and Ice’ (1998) 3m, dir. Dan Sokolowski. The bliss of freezing rain, captured on film.

‘Winter Time’ (2000) 6m, dir. Dan Sokolowski. Stills and animation with palette-knife painting, accompanied by the exceptional Peter Togni Trio, playing Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’.

‘Stunt People’ (1989) 48m, dir. Lois Siegel. An interesting counterpoint to the Mountenays: Marcel Fournier and four generations of ‘Les Frères Cascadeurs’, a family of people who make their living by smashing cars, catching fire, and falling off buildings. Lois takes us behind the scenes, showing us how it's done, accompanied by a terrific soundtrack by André Vincelli (the film won the 1990 Genie Award: Best Short Documentary from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television).

‘Paralysis’ (1972) 8m. Siegel’s second film, made in conjunction with Ray Jurgens, continues her flirtation with the abstract. Here, she filmed the original image from the screen of an oscilloscope, transferred it to a high-contrast black and white copy, superimposed the internegatives, then completed the film by "re-filming the edited version on a rear-projection screen while using colored gels". A hypnotic film, with music by Terry Riley.

‘Faces’ (1976) 6m, dir. Lois Siegel. Siegel is also an accomplished still photographer. In this film, composed of interlaced portraits, she has developed a haunting series of images reminiscent of the work of Diane Arbus, reminding the viewer that the soul of the subject remains under strong scrutiny when confronted by the dispassionate technology of the lens.

Thursday, December 19, 2002...  A Tribute to Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead is hardly a household name any more, but she was at the forefront of anthropological studies for much of the twentieth century. She lives now through her writings and several films, two of which we’ll show tonight.

Born in 1901, she earned a doctorate with Franz Boas while at Columbia, and began her first field work in Samoa in 1925, where her work focused on adolescent girls. Her landmark book "Coming of Age in Samoa" posited that sexual development was particular to cultural norms in a given society, and perhaps the western world had something valuable to learn from societies that were perceived to be less developed. A subsequent book, "Growing Up in New Guinea" (1929) focused on her field work on the island of Manus, where she further developed the idea that people considered to be "primitive" evidenced a sophistication in terms of cultural and social development that was equal to, if different from, that found in the west. Prior to this work, it was a given, even in scholarly circles, that the "childlike" behaviors of non-western peoples were evidence of arrested social development. Such views are apparent in ethnographic films of the day, in which on-screen narratives treated adults in such societies as little more than exotic caricatures.

Her work in the Pacific was delayed by World War II, but she returned to Manus in 1953 to write a new book "New Lives for Old", which discussed possibilities for social change within aboriginal society. She found a permanent position at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, continued writing (she authored over twenty books), lecturing, and traveling, and passed away in 1978.

Many of Mead’s ideas, considered radical for their time, are just as advanced today, as evidenced by the extreme difficulty many western scholars have in dispassionately addressing sexual mores in countries such as Thailand and Cambodia. Such scholars continually attempt to influence western governments to coerce their eastern counterparts to bend to western standards. As Mead suggests, such meddling can ultimately have mixed results, at best.

Tonight’s films are a fascinating introduction to the work of Margaret Mead, and should not be missed by those interested in other world cultures, and what they have to offer us.

On the program:

‘Reflections: Margaret Mead’ (1976) 55m, dir. Tim White. Filmed three years prior to her death, we join Mead in an animated three day extended conversation, much of it held in her home in Hancock, NH.

‘Four Families’ (1959) 58m, prod. Ian MacNeill. A comparative study of family life in India, France, Japan and Canada. Here, Dr. Mead describes the national character of these countries, and relates the different ways children are raised in each of them.

For a biography of Margaret Mead, visit: www.webster.edu/~woolflm/margaretmead.html
 

Thursday, December 12, 2002...  Michael Selic presents ciné16 Klessix: Great Films from our Past

Tonight, our illustrious CFO presents his favorite ciné16 films on the subject of Winter (and one of summer, to keep us honest...)

‘Winter Prophesies’ (1988) 30m, dir. Donald Winkler. A warm portrait of poet Ralph Gustafson and his wife, a very pretty film made in Canada's eastern townships, perhaps as much about the chronicles of an enduring relationship as about the music and poetry that play so fundamental a part in their lives. Winkler's chiaroscuro treatment involves intensive use of shadows and light to augment the 'place' of the poet's writings.

‘Snow War’ (1979) 25m, dir. Harold Tichenor. Avalanche, anyone? Not when these fellows are around, doing double duty at rescue and, in conjunction with Canadian Forces, shooting howitzers at mountainsides to create avalanches at Rogers Pass, Glacier National Park, BC.

Two from Tom Smith's 'Farm Family' series...

'Farm Family in Summer' (1968) 15m, dir. Tom Smith.  This film, told in 3rd person narrative, offers a fascinating look at the rural county fair culture, from preparing exhibits to friendly country huckstering, to harness races, to carny rides.

'Farm Family in Winter' (1967) 15m, dir. Tom Smith.  Narrated by Grandpa, who wrestles the hard-starting, gas-powered "snow-buggy" into action, then fetches the vet, who is prevented from reaching the farm road due to adverse conditions, in order to doctor a sick calf.  

Tom Smith, who would later achieve his greatest critical success as the General Manager of George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, was the creator of probably the most moving portrayal of American farm life in the classroom academic film genre, with his ‘Farm Family’ series of 1967-1968, comprising four films comparing the impact of seasonal changes upon the Red Markham farm and family of Whitewater, Wisconsin. Each film  chronicles daily and seasonal life of the family and farm, contrasting the seeming simplicity of daily chores with the impact of major events, such the birth of a calf, the harvesting of a crop, or the coming of the summer
county fair. With the exception of 'Summer', each film is narrated in first person by a different family member.   These are important films that are almost ethnographic in their approach to documenting the life and work of a rural family unit.

The affection that the filmmaker had for the family is apparent, and seems to be evident in the
family’s approach to the filmmaker as well, who made four visits to the farm to make these films, and who remains in touch with Dale Markham. The easygoing attitude the family has toward the camera is largely responsible for the charm of this series, a fascinating and refreshing look at a subject that was all too often didactic in the hands of other filmmakers. 

Tom wrote to us in June of 2001, reminiscing about the events surrounding the making of these films:

"The Farm Family films were planned as 2nd Editions. There had been a 'Farm Family...' series made in the 1940s in black and white. They were extremely didactic films guaranteed to put you to sleep as quickly as a stiff shot of pentothal. So I was asked to replace them with a new series in color. The first trick was to find a farm where I could film. Headquartered in Chicago, I set out to look in nearby Southern Wisconsin - a two hour drive from my home in Palatine, Illinois. I needed not only a good looking farm but one with kids in elementary school - the age of our target audience. It wasn't easy to find a combination of the two. I consulted with Farm Bureau Agents in several counties. I recall one farm we visited looked great from the outside. The Agent told me they had kids the right age. Then I met the farmer, a handsome, husky fellow - perfect type. We shook hands and it felt strange. Turned out he was missing two fingers on his right hand. I didn't want to have to explain the missing fingers in every film. I knew a lot of shots in the movies would be close-ups of the farmer's hands at work. So this farm was out.

"It took me weeks of looking. I drove past 100s farms of farms and visited more than 30. I ended up in Walworth county in southern Wisconsin, a country where I had lived for one year when I was a kid. As we drove up to the Markham dairy farm, it looked pretty good. I met farmer "Red" Markham and his wife. Red had all his digits, a good smile was a very tall and strong-looking fellow. His wife Eloise seemed to be all in one piece too. The kids were the perfect age but Red wasn't sure he trusted a city slicker like me promising to pay him some small fee to film his kids on his farm for a year. He had heard lots of sales pitches and figures this could be like one of those "free vacation" offers where they really only want to sell you a condo. We sat in his kitchen over coffee and I tried to persuade him but things weren't going well.

"To make a connection I mentioned that I lived in nearby Whitewater for one year when I was seven years old. That didn't make much of an impression on him. Then I added that my brother-in-law was from Whitewater too. Maybe he knew him - Bud Ardelt. Red put his cup down and broke into a smile. "Bud Ardelt is your brother-in-law?" Turned out that Red and Bud played for four years on the Whitewater football team together and in High School were buddies. He shook my hand - we had a deal. (Incidentally well-known historian Steven Ambrose was also on that same football team.)

"It was only my second year at EBEC and the four films were made while I continued to make other films on other subjects. I normally made about five or six, 12 to 18 minute films a year. We began filming with Fall. Then followed each season as it came along. Summer was the last. As you know from having seen the films, there was usually a thin plot running but what carried the show was showing the farming activities during that particular season. Fall was harvest, Winter not much happens but the kids have lots of fun in the snow and they cut their own Christmas tree. Spring is planting time and Summer there is the county fair. I don't recall why we didn't have a first person narration for the summer movie. No one in the films was an actor and to get someone to read a narration was very difficult. I had to do it line by line and often would not let them see the words but rather read it to them and have them repeat it...

"I've stayed in contact with the Markham family over the years. They have now retired from farming but the parents still live on the farm. The kids are all grown-up and most have kids of their own. None are farmers. As I mentioned "Red" was a big guy - over six foot- five inches tall. His sons grew to be taller than he. One of the boys seen in the film - Dale, went on to be a college football star and briefly played for a pro team. He is now in his 40s. I think he works for a seed company. Pam studied nursing but now is raising her own family. We get Christmas cards from them every year and ten or fifteen years ago I stopped at the farm, unannounced. They were just as friendly as they could be. We laughed and talked of the old days and funny things that happened during that year when I made the films.

"The film crew was normally about four or five people. I served as cameraman on a couple of the films but don't recall which ones. Arthur Bothham was the cameraman on the others including the "Fall" film. I second unit on all of them - running up to the farm to shoot one specific scene for a day with my Bolex and then returning home. There was no real "Grandpa" on the farm. The fellow who played "Grandpa" was actually our film's grip - Stanley Wallega. Stanley died about 15 years ago."

Thursday, December 5, 2002...  Barinda Samra presents ciné16 Klessix: Great Films from our Past.  Tonight: 

The Aesthetics of Ascetics: North American Communal Religions

Maybe your friendly neighborhood atheists at ciné16 just don’t get it: while everybody else seems to be going spiritual on us, we concentrate on eating pizza, watching films, and tightening the nuts & bolts on the old Land Rover. OK we admit it, if there IS a hereafter, we won’t be where everyone else is, anticipating being stuck forever for our disbelief inside a metal 16mm film can, to be released only when an equally disbelieving kid rubs our rusty home three times, releasing our magenta, vinegary essence and asking for a wish. As cynical as we are about the whole business, we have to admit the films on tonight’s program are interesting. We still wonder why people choose to give up sex and fast driving, or live so far away that neat things like art museums are off the map. In fact, I’ve got a cousin who has a farm in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and I once asked him if he wanted to visit San Francisco to see the sights. He kind of slowly looked around at the horizon and said "now, why would I want to do that, anyway?" If you’re like my cousin Brian (or if you’re curious like me about what’s going on in the minds of such folks) then by all means join us at ciné16 tonight while we all try to figure the damn thing out...

‘Shakers’ (1984) 60m, dir. Ken Burns/Amy Stechler Burns. Founded in 1774 by Ann Lee and eight followers, the Shakers grew to 6,000 people spread over 19 villages, consisting of people who embraced abstinence and a simple lifestyle. Because members couldn’t reproduce, the group had dwindled to 12 individuals in two villages by the time this film was made. A good film, too, with lots of information about their unique architecture, furniture, crafts, and songs. A poignant ending, too, with a chair going up at auction.

‘Hutterites’ (1964) 28m, dir. Colin Low. Any film by Colin Low is a treat, and this winner of the Blue Ribbon at the 1965 American Film Festival is no exception. It all takes place in Alberta, beautifully written and narrated by the late Stanley Jackson.

‘Amish: People of Preservation’ (1978) 29m, prod. John L. Ruth. We still don’t understand how two people named Stoltzfus can live five miles apart and not be related; maybe this film can help to elucidate the culture and philosophy of these seemingly otherworldly people.

Wednesday, November 27...  Reel Art :: Cinema    (to be held at Anno Domini)  

Note:  This is the first in a series of three of monthly programs held at Anno Domini, 150 South Montgomery Street Unit B, at Park Street, San Jose.  

On tonight's program:

‘New York School’ (1975) 55 m, dir. Michael Blackwood. Blackwood has an extremely impressive body of filmwork in the arts, specializing in the work of non-representational artists. What is most impressive about Blackwood’s films is their lack of pretense. The art world has long been cluttered with artbabble spoken among people having advanced art degrees who, unable to communicate ideas to the intelligent public simply, clearly, and evocatively, write to each other instead in code, through museum catalogues and wall placards.  Blackwood’s got it right. The artists mostly care about conveying an emotional feeling on the canvas, and are quite capable of discussing the means of employing the medium, their influences, and how and why they paint the way they do. The filmmaker captures all that here in encyclopedic fashion, unfolding a world that evolved from surrealism (Bréton called Gorky "the last surrealist", while others credited him as the first abstract expressionist) to action painting, and beyond. In this film, we see an animated Jackson Pollock changing to his paint-encrusted work shoes, mad-scrambling over floored paintings, then peering through a clear horizontal "canvas" of Lucite, attacking the camera with a machine-gun of black paint. We hear the only recording of his voice ever made, and visit with his wife, friends, enemies, and unknowns: painters Adolph Gottlieb, Jack Tworkov, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Al Held, Lee Krasner, Willem DeKooning, Joan Mitchell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt. Critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg describe the history and impact of the movement, including the importance of departed artists such as Franz Kline and Hans Hoffmann, and patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim. Crossing disciplines, composer Morton Feldman discusses his contribution to Mark Rothko’s chapel in Houston.

The film is an important one, providing a historical context to the "big" paintings seen in every museum of modern art today, and saving the viewer from having to hack through interminable art treatises written by those who didn’t make the cut.

‘Running Fence’ (1977) 58m, dir. David/Albert Maysles/Charlotte Zwerin. It was a year after the used record store I started closed down, after the megastore opened down the street and, in offering whole catalogues of the same records we sold, managed to sell them for less money new, than we could used. Such is life.   Somehow, some way, I’d cobbled enough money from selling our depleted stock, to go to Spain for 6 weeks, where I met the girl from Barcelona who soon moved back with me to California. I landed a job in a special ed classroom, working with children having communication disorders. The freewheeling days of doing anything I wanted, any time I wanted, had pretty much come to an end, I thought. Christo (in collaboration with his wife, Jeanne-Claude) was in the news: he wanted to put up a 24 mile running fence through ranchlands in Sonoma and Marin counties. 18 feet high and made of nylon, he’d won the battle with individual ranchers, battled coastal commissions, and now the damn thing was going up. I’ll admit, I couldn’t quite grasp the "art" element in all this, but I was willing to go along (after all, I grew up in dada, and believed that, just by calling it "art", you made it so). It would only be up for two weeks, and I took my beat-up red VW bug up there to see the fence. It was beautiful, in a way that was absolutely unimaginable unless you were actually there, and could get out of the car, and see this shining, translucent ribbon brilliantly outlining the breathtaking landscape.

Fortunately, the Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin were there too, and their film, consisting of all of the arguments, meetings, and alliances, that made the fence as much performance art as monumental sculpture, is magnificent, historical, and as Californian as can be. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s website is a kick (http://www.christojeanneclaude.net ), if a bit tricky to navigate. Here’s what I found, and liked:

'Frank Film' (1973) 9m, dir. Frank Mouris. In a dizzying array of 11,592 collage shots, Mouris utilizes multiple voices to summarize his life, an amazing film that challenges the visual and auditory senses to the extreme.

Thursday, November 21... Robert Emmett presents ciné16 Klessix: Dr. Frank Baxter and Andy Rooney on the English Language

Tonight's show is hosted by Robert Emmett, esteemed host of the "Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show", Saturday mornings from 9-12 on KFJC, 89.7.  Filmnotes were written by Geoff Alexander.

When ever I get into a discussion on the subject of educational film,somebody always asks: "hey, remember the bald guy who used to do science films?" He'd probably rather be known as Dr. Frank Baxter, the glib, bemused host (and wearer of the worst looking suit I've ever seen on film) of some of the best known ed films of the late 50s -early 60s. Well, recently I've been reviewing some of those films, like'Our Mr. Sun', 'Hemo the Magnificent', etc. And you know what? They contain some of the most blatant pro-religious propaganda this side of Gene Scott. And no wonder: they were directed by one of America's most beloved homophobic religious zealots --- oops, I mean directors --- Frank Capra (read his autobiography). We elementary school kids must have either missed the propaganda, or skipped critical thinking class that day: the films stand out in our minds as well-crafted and funny,but some come up short in the time test. Perhaps "someone upstairs"also sensed a church/state conflict: in the late 1950s responsibility for these Warner Bros. - made titles was transferred to Academy Award nominee Owen Crump, who produced terrific films such as "It's About Time", and tonight's film, 'Alphabet Conspiracy'.

'Alphabet Conspiracy' (1959) 55m, dir. Robert Sinclair. This is the only Bell Science film to explore a subject not specifically related to a traditional "hard science", the study of language. Frustrated by the ambiguity inherent in the English language, the Mad Hatter (Hans Conreid) and Jabberwock attempt destroy Language by lighting an explosive charge under the world's great literature. On a fantastic, enlarged cartoon library set designed by William Kuehl, they convinced a young girl to join their conspiracy, when Baxter as "Dr. Linguistics" arrives to illustrate the value of the written  and spoken word. Guests range from jazz trumpeter Shorty Rogers, who banters in beat phrases, to psychologist Keith Hayes, whose research on chimpanzee communication was made with chimp family member and guest Viki. 

'Strange Case of the English Language' (1968) 48m, prod. Andy Rooney.  While 'Alphabet Conspiracy' can be viewed as a great children's film that adults may like as well, 'Strange Case' is a funny, occasionally acerbic film for adults that also appeals to bright kids. Rooney's tenure as '60 Minutes' resident curmudgeon often masks the fact that he was a magnificently witty writer (e.g. his sobering 'Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed', shown earlier this year at ciné16). And how many reporters today are as adept at interpreting irony, amusement, and intellectual bewilderment as was the film's host, Harry Reasoner? But the real highlight of this film is an amazing interview with Peter Ustinov, who mimics American speech patterns.

Tonight's films are two of the finest documents on the English Language we've seen, and each of them represents a historically significant gathering of individuals who today are considered giants in their respective crafts. They may considered to be rare: 'Alphabet Conspiracy', like many of the films we show at ciné16, is never shown to adults, and the witty, understated 'Strange Case' is,  sadly to our knowledge, never shown anywhere.

Thursday, November 14, 2002...  From Cave Dwellers to Volcanic Destruction: the Academic Films of Bert Van Bork, part two of two

In the 1980s, Van Bork completed an important body of work focusing on photomicrographic explorations of tiny predatory animals, and their animal and vegetable victims. Here, we are exposed to fascinating forms, colors, and behaviors. The movement of amoeba may look familiar, mirroring the advance of pillow-lava in Van Bork’s volcanic films.

‘Plankton and the Open Sea’ (1986) 22m, dir. Bert Van Bork. Beginning with beautiful shots of phytoplankton, Van Bork explores dinoflagellates and diatoms, the latter of which leave remarkable skeletons scattered in their watery graves. Zooplanktons such as copepods, which consume up to 10,000 phytoplanktons a day, and the terrifying tomoperid worm, are their predators.

‘Protists: Form, Function, and Ecology’ (1986) 20m, dir. Bert Van Bork. Educator Benjamin Bloom, in discussing his three domains of learning, emphasized the value of the affective, which, to paraphrase, inculcates a stimulus that motivates the student to want to learn more about a given subject. In searching for superior academic films, one looks for affective triggers that induce interest, instead of sleep. Van Bork specialized in visually arresting images, intended to keep the student riveted on the film. Here, for example, he focuses on parasitic intestinal protists, the surprisingly sad death of a paramecium, and the contents found through a window in a steer’s rumen, from which a researcher grabs a handful of partially digested cud, wraps the slop in a cheesecloth, then wrings it out to obtain protists for microscope slides. Worse for us: plasmodium, the cause of malaria, and the knowledge that protists have been around for 500 million years, 100 times longer than humankind.

‘Eyewitness’ (1999) 38m, dir. Bert Van Bork. Nominated for an Academy Award in 2000, the film examines paintings and sketches done by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Van Bork painstakingly traced the chronological paths of three artists, Jan Komski, Felix Nussbaum, and Dina Gottliebova, conducted interviews, and provides examples of art never before seen on film. Like much of Van Bork’s other work, light and shadow are dramatically juxtaposed. Here, the power, and occasional beauty of the art, are a prelude to the horrors surrounding their creation. In Gottliebova’s case, she was requested to paint eleven watercolor portraits of Gypsy prisoners, who became her friends. Upon completion of the final portrait, Mengele sent them to the gas chambers.

‘Eyewitness’, although thematically different than Van Bork’s earlier work, draws heavily on the stylistic elements perfected in his days as an academic filmmaker.

Also on the program:

'Geologic Time' (1986) 22m, dir. Bert Van Bork.  Beautifully filmed in the four corners area, this film describes several important methods of dating.

Thursday, November 7, 2002...  From Cave Dwellers to Volcanic Destruction: the Academic Films of Bert Van Bork, part one of two

I’m pleased to announce that we’ll be giving a one-night presentation of the films of Bert Van Bork at the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in Boston, on November 21. This is not only a significant moment for the AFA, but it’s also the first time in 25 years, that, to our knowledge, a nationally-recognized retrospective has been held on the work of an academic filmmaker anywhere in the United States. This will be a two and a half hour presentation, and we’ll be previewing the program in San Jose as a precursor to the November event, in two evenings. The folowing notes were provided to AMIA for the evening’s program guide.

Tonight we present the first national retrospective of the work of one of the more daring cinematographer/producer to work in the 16mm educational genre, Bert Van Bork, whose stunning camera work is defined by superior color, design, and perspective. Van Bork’s story is a fascinating one, not only in terms of his own personal history, but of his multi-dimensional relationship to many different art forms as well. Born in 1928 in Augustusburg, Germany, he studied graphic art and painting in the Academies of Fine Arts in Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden, leading him to produce stark two-dimensional woodcuts of intense and terrifying beauty. These were often made from the pine remains of destroyed buildings and old furniture, depicting a Berlin struggling with an uncertain future. In 1954, he moved to Chicago by way of New York, and continued working in oil on canvas and drypoint, displaying an influence of German expressionism in his portrayals of the landscapes of the American Southwest, and cityscapes of Chicago. By this time, Van Bork had become an accomplished stills photographer as well, and received the National Award for Outstanding Photography in Germany in 1954. In 1960, he wrote a book with photographs, ‘The Artist at Work: Jacques Lipchitz’.

In 1957, Van Bork was hired to produce films for Encyclopaedia Britannica, soon becoming noted for his stunning geological studies, and recognized for his daring in obtaining footage under extremely arduous volcanic conditions. Of all filmmakers working within the academic film framework, Van Bork may have been the most successful in terms of melding the art and science of filmmaking, blending artistic sensibility with exacting technical standards far superior to many of his contemporaries. His remarkable science films may be mistaken for art films: exploring nature’s forms, Van Bork is kin to Weston and Adams, supplanting their black and white with brilliant color, shot more than occasionally under arduous circumstances.

It is hoped this retrospective will encourage archivists not only to gain an appreciation for the work of one of academic film’s more prolific filmmakers, but to re-evaluate the potential for classroom academic films within their own collections.

Film program in San Jose, November 7, 2002

‘Cave Community’ (1960) 13m, dir. Bert Van Bork. In another dangerous assignment that virtually any other filmmaker would refuse outright, Van Bork and his crew lower themselves into the Cumberland Caverns in McMinnville, Tennessee, to film salamanders and other cave life. Van Bork relates an interesting series of events surrounding the making of the film: arriving in McMinnville, the crew stopped at a hamburger stand for lunch. "Sorry, no more hamburgers", they were told, even though other patrons were eating. Suspicious that the crew were government agents looking for illegal moonshine stills, word had gotten around the small community that no one was to cooperate with Van Bork. Needing several local workers to assist in helping to carry, lower, and raise the equipment from the cave, the filmmaker was refused personnel by the local employment office, a problem Van Bork eventually overcame by hiring a team of African-American workers, disconnected from the community power structure. Upon emerging from the cave, Van Bork and the workers were pelted with stones from angry locals. The filming itself was arduous, too: first, Van Bork lowered himself by rope so he could film the others descending, then he and the others crawled through passages so narrow that they had to remove the belts and pants to get through. Electricity was cabled from the surface, enabling them to generate enough light to succeed with the slow ASA 10 movie film which was standard in 1960.

Cave Community is a transitional film, containing elements of static 1950's-style educational filmmaking, including elementary graphics and a stilted narrative. It also includes sequences that are precursors to the more modern era of academic filmmaking that was to follow, exemplified by the closing shot, silhouetting the large, looming human shadow figures slowly walking off-frame, casting their spectres against the sides of the cavern, providing a German-Expressionist hue which seems more out of Fritz Lang’s M, than a biology series funded by EB.

‘Heartbeat of a Volcano’ (1970) 21m, prod. Bert Van Bork. This film is, we think, the granddaddy of all volcano films, a twenty-one minute trip to hell in the fast lane. Van Bork intended, in his visit to the big island, to film the sputtering Kilauhea, show the geologists using seismographs and geotometers, and maybe get a shot or two of the degassing process at the vents. Instead, as the ground base geologist yells into the short-wave: "she's going wild, she's going wild!", the volcano trembles furiously, dramatically erupting from a threatening lava vent.  The following sequence is perhaps unprecedented in academic film, roughly seventy seconds of non-narrated footage, accompanied only by natural sound.   These moments are filled with spectacular night shots of a giant firefall twice as high as Niagara Falls, glowing lava streams and tremendous explosions.  

Van Bork burned up two pair of shoes as he hung close to the carnage to film the greatest volcanic film we’ve seen. These spectacular shots were planned the day before the explosion, as Van Bork and assistant Ulf Backström reconnoitered the volcanic area, marking exit routes with reflective  tape, and noting the location of lava vents. In one scene, geologists are shown fleeing the approaching lava, but the camera remains (Van Bork, his eye glued to the camera, was prevented from pitching forward into vents and calderas by the steady hand of Backstrom, holding tightly to the back of his belt). The hand of the AGI's John Shelton is in fine evidence here on the soundtrack, which is resplendent with time signatures from radio station WWVH, and motor sounds from seismometers to the generators powering field geometers.

‘Fire in the Sea’ (1973) 10m, dir. Bert Van Bork. In contrast with the "hard-science" treatment in ‘Heartbeat of a Volcano’, this unnarrated film poetically conveys the exceptional forces at the nexus of land and sea.

‘Mesa Verde: Mystery of the Silent Cities’ (1975) 14m, prod. Bert Van Bork. Few might argue the case that this film sets the standard for the Anasazi aesthetic in academic classroom film. Flying within impossibly narrow canyons to achieve dizzying shots of cliff-dwellings, Van Bork used two pilots during the filming, one of whom quit in the middle of the shooting out of fear for his life, reminding the filmmaker that he had children. Van Bork’s masterful shots were accomplished by removing the helicopter door, mounting the camera on a fixed mount, then directing the pilot through a headphone mic to fly in various trajectories. As if the breathtaking displays of the terrain and dwellings aren’t enough, Van Bork also begins some pan shots with abstract architectural designs abruptly jutting out from behind incomplete shadowy formations, resembling more a German expressionist painting than an ancient, deserted town built into the rock. The filmmaker tells an interesting story about the narrator of the film, Jack Palance. Contacting the actor by telephone, Van Bork secured Palance’s agreement to do the narration provided the script was acceptable. After reviewing it, the actor suggested they meet at one of Hollywood’s finest restaurants to discuss the project: Bob’s Big Boy! With Palance’s dramatic interpretation of the text accompanied by the haunting percussion ensemble musical score by Hans Wurman, the film transcends the didactic historical and dry anthropological, and transfixes the viewer instead by offering an in-motion armchair view of the challenging location these long-forgotten people chose as home.

‘Richard Hunt: Sculptor’ (1978) 14m. dir. Bert Van Bork . Hunt, who welds junkyard materials into fantastic art forms, discusses his own history as a black sculptor. The filmmaker originally met Hunt at a museum opening, where the sculptor pointedly referred to himself as a sculptor first, and eschewed characterizing himself as a "black artist". His sculpture of John Jones, the first African-American elected to an Illinois public office, is reminiscent of Rodin's 'Balzac' in abstraction, though not in form. See the Smithsonian Institution’s oral history interview with him at: http://artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/hunt79.htm

Also on the program:

'Water Cycle' (1980) 14m, dir. Bert Van Bork.  "Painterly" is perhaps the best word to describe this beautiful film, describing geological weathering.

Thursday, October 31, 2002... Reintroducing our Past: Signature Films from Our Collection

Because this is an anniversary program, we want to emphasize the breadth of our archive by showing films that are among our most requested. For those of you who’ve attended our past programs, this program will allow you to see important films you’ve missed. For first-time viewers, tonight’s films will give you a sense of what AFA and ciné16 are all about. Remember that Miss ciné16 will be here tonight, to give you her personal thanks for supporting us.

On the show:

'Lee's Parasol' (1979) 25m, dir. Paul Saltzman. Beautifully painted parasols are a craft indigenous to the village of Bor Sang, near Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Lee's friends and family are involved in the entire process: cutting large bamboo stalks, trimming shoots for the intricate pieces, making dye for the paper. As in many of Saltzman's films, there is drama here as well, as Lee's boss is faced with the prospect of having to give away Lee's first creation to satisfy an important customer.

Lots of our viewers fell in love with Ladha "Lee" Nakhampa, who was 15 years old in 1977, when Saltzman made her the subject of this film. Earlier this year, I traveled to Bor Sang to meet Lee, who now has children of her own, and had taken a brief hiatus from making parasols due to a motorbike accident. Although everyone in the village knows about the film, it had been years since anyone had seen it, as Lee’s copy had somehow vanished over the years. We contacted Paul Saltzman, who sent Lee a new video copy, which provides the village with a fine documentary of its crafts and people. 

'American Shoeshine' (1976) 30m, dir. Sparky Greene. Nominated for an Academy Award in 1976, it's hard to see how this one could have missed the Oscar. A profoundly deep and entertaining introduction to the world of the black shoeshine artist, a dozen or so shoe shiners are featured, armed with hot-poppin’ rags and street-corner philosophy. Too rarely shown, this tribute to the rhythm and poetry of an important element of American life is one of the more important films documenting the life of the black worker in the U.S.  This out-of-distribution film is indicative of the types of films that the AFA is dedicated to saving.

‘African Pygmy Thrills’ (1930?) 10m, prod. Eugene W. Castle. Castle Films, whose series ‘The Adventure Parade’ resulted in a number of commercially exotic films on ethnic traditions and cultures, actually utilized authentic music in this film, instead of the boring orchestral scores that were more typical of the era. Although the continued use of the term "these little men", and the embarrassing attempt to comically portray an older member of the group as a cynic seems condescending to present-day sensibilities, the faithful recording of the building of a vine bridge 50 feet above the water is remarkable. Climbing 150 feet to the top of a riverside tree, a vine is fixed to an ingenious boatswain’s chair, and a member of the group is swung to a similar tree on the opposite side of the river. Over the next eight days, a complete bridge of several tons is built of vines, the crossing initiated by climbing either tree to the height of fifty feet. While such films represent proof that even sensationalist films of the era contained often superb ethnographic content, it also illustrates the frustration many of these cinematographers may have experienced in seeing their work dumbed-down for theatrical showing. Nevertheless, the documentary aspect of the footage is important, and represents an authentic, if somewhat clumsy attempt to portray significant elements of faraway cultures. ‘African Pygmy Thrills’ is historically significant for one other reason: feature filmmaker Werner Herzog has cited his viewing of this film, as a child, as the impetus for embarking on a career in film.

‘Marcelo Ramos: Artesano Pirotécnico’ (1980) 15m, dir. Judith Bronowski. This is the hands-down winner of the Most Subversive Film Ever-To-Be-Shown-To-Schoolchildren award. There’s no telling how many US schoolkids went home and started playing with matches, gasoline, and black powder after seeing the Ramos family from San Pedro Zumpango, Mexico build their mighty rockets for the La Purísima Concepción festival. Even grandma gets involved, weaving fuses, and the two-year olds are running around stuffing powder in tubes. My favorite? How about the wooden-barrel mixer, powered by a really sparky old electrical wire. Bronowski is probably the greatest of all the filmmakers who explored the Mexican artisan genre; this film explains why.

‘One Hundred Watts 120 Volts’ (1977) 10m, dir. Carson Davidson. The mechanized production of Duro-Test light bulbs is filmed as a dance to the tune of the Brandenburg, as choreographed filaments, glass, and metal combine in a dynamic finale.

'Lion's Den' (Dr. Doolittle) (1928) 10m, dir. Lotte Reiniger. Renoir’s chief assistant on ‘Rules of the Game' was Carl Koch, whose wife, Lotte Reiniger, was one of the early giants of animation. Her style consisted of elaborately staged silhouettes, and ‘Lion’s Den’ is a ten-minute excerpt from her 65-minute ‘Dr. Doolittle’ which she distributed for the school market in the early 1950s. For more on this outstanding animator, read William Moritz’ bio and filmography at: http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.3/articles/moritz1.3.html

Thursday, October 3, 2002... Extraordinary Lives: Barinda Samra presents ciné16 Klessix from Past Shows

Tonight, Barinda presents films from past ciné16 shows, documenting people who have walked slightly further off the beaten path than the rest of us. These are, historically, among our most-requested films.

Tonight:

'Nahanni' (1962) 15m, dir. Donald Wilder. "I'll be dead or drowned before I quit!" says ancient prospector Albert Faille, as he attempts to go upriver in the Yukon yet again in search for gold. In either a tribute to man's perseverance or his folly, Nahanni is one of the more unforgettable films ever produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

'The Cutting Edge' (1980) 18m, dir. Eric Perlman. Yuichiro Miura is famous as the man who skied down Everest, reportedly attaining speeds of over 100 mph down 45 degree slopes, stopping with a parachute. In tonight's film, he attempts to ski down an 8000 foot peak in Antarctica, gets buried by an avalanche, then does it again successfully the next day down slopes of 60 degrees. I'm not sure if he's a comic-book caricature of a 20th century samurai, or just plain nuts. Either way, he talks about the Zen of it all.

‘Ruth Stout’s Garden’ (1976) 20m, prod. Arthur Mokin. The story is that Mokin’s wife read about the octogenarian gardener in the NY Times, and they all decided a visit would be in order. The visit produced a film, based on the life and philosophy of an iconoclast suffragette and political progressive, replete with tales of nude gardening. One finds it difficult not to mentally attempt to smooth old layers of skin to reveal the girl beneath. An outstanding film.

‘Whistling Smith’ (1976) 27m, dir. Michael Scott. Sergeant Bernie Smith walks his beat on Vancouver's skid row, cussin’ out and befriending prostitutes, telling pimps to move along, and warning a ‘john’, "hey fella, you know that girl’s a prostitute?". Although citizens and Smith alike are, to a certain extent, playing for the camera, the proprietor of a Chinese restaurant is not, when he kicks out the entire film crew as well as Sergeant Smith for disturbing his customers. If you (like us) feel that San Jose Police presence on First and San Salvador Streets after 11pm on weekends is overkill, take a look at how Vancouver utilizes community policing, and ask yourself which method you'd rather see for your tax dollars.

Thursday, September 26, 2002...  ‘The Great Dictator’ (1940) 126m, dir. Charles Chaplin. 

Chaplin’s ‘Dictator’ isn’t seen very often today, and too bad. In addition to writing, directing, and producing the film, Chaplin plays dual roles, that of a Jewish barber confined to a ghetto, and Hynkel the Dictator, a caricature of Adolf Hitler. In the late 1930’s, when the film was under production, pacification of Hitler was still considered an option by many governments, and the actor-director’s stance against fascism was considered bold for the time. Chaplin’s early slapstick comedies always contained a social perspective, however subtle, but ‘Dictator’ is an extremely bold series of salvos against discrimination and ignorance. In the final sequence, the director, facing the camera, rails against the evils of fascism, in a tirade that some critics have called didactic. For the fifty-year old Chaplin, however, it was clearly a time to take a position.  

In 'My Autobiography', he wrote:

Halfway through making The Great Dictator I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists. They had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship trouble. Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain. But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at. Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis. However, I was determined to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race.

The story concerns a barber who goes to war, where he saves the life of a fellow soldier, who eventually becomes an officer under Hynkel’s command. The barber remembers none of this, having lost a large portion of his memory due to a war injury. Eventually returning to the ghetto, he naïvely sets up shop, ignorant of the reign of terror that has recently begun against his people. Eventually, his resemblance to Hynkel provides perhaps a too-predictable end to the film. Chaplin plays the dictator as a buffoon, who spends his days bouncing a beachball-sized globe in the air, as he plots world conquest.

Chaplin was nominated for best actor and writer of best original screenplay for the 1941 Academy Awards. Jack Oakie, who plays "Napolioni", was nominated for best supporting actor, while composer Meredith Willson received a nomination for best original score.

Film audiences today are relatively unfamiliar with Chaplin’s post 1930’s films, as programmers recognize the universal appeal of the early comedies, eschewing the darkness of ‘Dictator’ and ‘Monsieur Verdoux’ (1947), in which Chaplin portrays a dapper, charming murderer. At 126 minutes, this film runs beyond our standard two-hour running time, and we encourage you to see a film rarely screened, but still powerful in its conception and realization.

Thursday, September 19, 2002...  Tim Kordas presents ciné16 Klessix: great films from our archives.  

Tonight's films:

‘Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed’ (1968) 50m, prod. Andrew Rooney & Vern Diamond. Cosby begins his narration in a classroom, discussing little-known black inventors and the impact their creations had on America. The program becomes progressively more intense, and, to a certain degree, frustrating for the viewer as the breadth of discrimination becomes ever more apparent, as is the historical lack of understanding of the positive contributions made by black scholars, scientists, and artists. Written and produced by Andy Rooney, it is appropriate today as ever, a timeless film that, not surprisingly, demands to be seen today both in a historic as well as contemporary light.  Part of CBS News’ ‘Of Black America’ series.

‘The Tenement’ (1967) 40m. prod. Jay McMullen. We’ve long lauded the important work done by Fred W. Friendly’s ‘CBS Reports’ team; here, hard-hitting Jay McMullen takes us to the run-down, blighted building at 3823 So. Ellis Ave, Chicago, in the summer of 1966.

Thursday, September 12, 2002...  Michael Selic presents ciné16 Klessix: great films from our archives.  

‘Jules et Jim’ (1962) 100m, dir. François Truffaut

"I can say that my reading, in 1953, of Jules et Jim, the first novel by an old gentleman of seventy-four, once and for all settled my vocation as a filmmaker. I was twenty-one and was a film critic. It was love at first sight for that book and I thought, ‘If I ever succeed in making films I will film ‘Jules et Jim’." - François Truffaut

"In all my twenty years of cinema, the filming of ‘Jules et Jim’, thanks to Jeanne Moreau, remains a luminous memory, the most luminous." – Truffaut, 1979

Actress Moreau had been an early supporter of Truffaut’s work, agreeing to a hastily improvised part in ‘400 Blows’. In ‘Jules et Jim’, which followed three years later, she becomes the lover of two best friends, both of whom are enamored  of their warm yet emotionally distant muse. The story takes place in the years immediately preceding and following the first world war, an event that further complicates the lives of the German Jules (Oskar Werner) and Parisian Jim (Henri Serre), each of whom expresses fears of killing his best friend on the battlefield.  Intertwined in this triangle are the vectors of additional lovers, as each of the individuals in the film --- including the sculptor whose passion for the face of a woman on a stone sculpture in a faraway land precluded the arrival of Moreau’s character --- attempts to find love and acceptance in a world of rapidly changing mores, its innocence shattered by the cataclysmic winds of international conflict and destruction.

Thursday, September 5, 2002...  Robert Emmett presents ciné16 Klessix: great films from our archives.

'Shaw vs. Shakespeare' series (1970) 90m, dir. John Barnes. 

After reading the complete works of George Bernard Shaw, Barnes wrote, directed, and produced a series of three films narrated by Shaw (brilliantly portrayed by Donald Moffat), describing how parallel characters (e.g. Julius Caesar, played by Richard Kiley) are treated differently by the two playwrights. We feel this series is one of the highlights of educational  cinema: engaging, thoughtful, and intellectually stimulating. This is a rare opportunity to see these three half-hour films, produced in 1970, presented consecutively.

Thursday, August 29, 2002... Window on Time: EB’s American Geological Institute films

Part II: The Bill Matthews AGI Films (see introductory program notes for August 22, 2002)

‘Water Cycle’ (1980) 14m, dir. Bert Van Bork. Think a great film can’t be made on a seemingly mundane subject? Try this, one of Van Bork’s finest, with painterly cinematography, beautiful time-lapse clouds, great framing, referential to German Expressionism in its shadowplay.

‘Erosion and Weathering: Looking at the Land’ (1976) 17m, dir. Bert Van Bork. If you think San Francisco street parades when you think of the word "dike", think again: here are beautiful shots of Shiprock dike, and a nearby ghost town.

‘San Andreas Fault’ (1974), 17m, dir. Bert Van Bork. It all starts at the San Juan Bautista rodeo grounds, along the ol’ mission trail, podner. Find out why a building riding a faultline is a lot like a cowpuncher ridin’ a bull, ‘cept without the tabackee for a lubricant. Van Bork (again) at his stellar best.

‘Volcanoes: Exploring the Restless Earth’ (1973) 18m, dir. Bert Van Bork. Here you have them in spades: Paricutín, Vesuvius, Surtsey, and the horrifyingly buried town of Vestmanneyjar.

‘Storms: Relentless Atmosphere’ (1974) 22m, dir. William Kay. Big, wet fun: on thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and flying into the eye…

‘Daybreak’ (1975) 10m, prod. Bert Van Bork. While not an AGI film (and therefore, not one made under Matthews’ aegis, either), this film lends credence to the concept of geology as art and poetry. Van Bork was fond of shooting extra footage everywhere he went, then taking those outtakes, making a treatment for an almost-completed film, then pitching the finished product to EB. When the new treatment was accepted, he’d not only get paid for a film he’d already made, but get reimbursed for film expenses too, it a bit of financial legerdemain necessary for even an exceptional academic filmmaker to make ends meet. Good thing he did, for here we have a dramatic fly-over of the area surrounding Monument Valley, with helicopter-pilot David Jones at the rudder.

Thursday, August 22, 2002... Window on Time: EB’s American Geological Institute films, a Two-Part Series

Of all the series of science films made by Encyclopaedia Britannica, none were as spectacular, visually, as the forty-two part AGI Earth Science series, made in conjunction with the American Geological Institute as part of the EB’s Earth Science Curriculum Project. The series was actually made in two distinct yet interconnected parts, and featured different films crews, each working with a different geological advisor.

The initial series, made from approximately 1964 to 1973, was made in conjunction with geologist John Shelton. Many of these titles were filmed by Isidore Mankofsky, who noted that location shots were often selected during airplane rides taken with pilot Shelton (e.g. Beach: River of Sand, 1968, dir. Warren Brown). An ever-present element in the Shelton films is the occasional drone of a single-propeller aircraft, accompanying aerial shots of geological formations.

Shelton, who we interviewed at the age of 89, on August 18 of this year, received his PhD from Yale in 1947, and taught geology at Pomona State College.  His 'Geology Illustrated' was a standard textbook.  In the early 1960s, EB asked the American Geological Institute to invite several key geologists, one of whom was Shelton, to a two-week conference in Illinois, for the purpose of determining subject matter for a series of proposed films.  During the conference, Shelton compiled a list of ten guidelines for the production of a successful film, which included the eschewing of musical accompaniment in favor of natural ambient sounds.  As a result of the acceptance of these guidelines, he was elected by his colleagues to act as the liaison between the geologists and EB.  Soon thereafter, he signed a contract with EB to be the chief scientific advisor on the project.   In producing a film, Shelton would call on a colleague with expertise in a particular field (e.g. glaciology, tectonics), assist in writing the script, and pilot the rented Cessna 170, 180, or 210 high-wing aircraft for aerial shots.  In shooting, cameraman Isidore Mankofsky removed the front passenger's seat, and used a specially-made camera rig that was fixed to the sliders.  Shelton had designed a replacement door for the Cessna that would telescope outward, allowing Mankofsky's camera to shoot geological formations directly below the aircraft.  When the rough cut was finished, Shelton would convene geologists and EB executives to watch the film and suggest last-minute changes, the execution of which would often keep him up until the early hours of the morning.  "I put my heart and soul into those films", relates Shelton today.  In particular, he remembers how he and producer Stan Croner spent several frustrating hours trying to determine the proper narrative ending for 'Beach: River of Sand', in which the shooting script shows dredging taking place along urban beaches to remove sand which heretofore had been carried away by the longshore current:  "I woke up in the middle of the night, and remember scribbling down what would be the final line of the film, 'man now has to do what nature did before'."

The second series, produced roughly from 1968 to 1980, was made under the guidance of geologist William H. Matthews III. Probably the most spectacular of the AGI series were the subjects filmed by Bert Van Bork, whose sometimes taciturn, occasionally mercurial, and ultimately precise methodology and presence generated as much or more controversy within EB than any other filmmaker ever employed there. We are presenting these extraordinary films over a two week period.

Part I: The John Shelton AGI Films

‘Glacier on the Move’ (1973) 11m, dir. Richard Kucera. Here, University of British Columbia geologist Kucera introduces the Athabasca glacier in Canadian Rockies, through magnificent time-lapse cinematography.

‘What Makes Clouds’ (1965) 19m, dir. Warren Brown. Much of the success, camera-wise, of the 60s-70s era EB, was due to the extraordinary talent of Isidore Mankofsky, who delighted in the occasional cinematic trompe-l’oeil: here, he’s somewhere between Magritte and Dalí, with a clock reflected in dish, some time-lapse clouds, and a seemingly colossal droplet-covered pitcher of water standing, like an Oldenburg sculpture, against the deep azure sky.

‘Rocks That Originate Underground’ (1966) 20m, dir. Charles Finance. It’s tough to find pre-1970 EB films in color, since most were printed on unstable Eastman film stock, and have now color-shifted to bright red. We were fortunate to find this exception, a study of Metamorphic, plutonic, volcanic rocks, filmed by Mankofsky and Fred Goodich.

‘Beach: River of Sand’ (1968) 20m, dir. Warren Brown. Geologist, seemingly to a person, point to this film as a seminal film that grabbed their attention in elementary school, and subtly pointed them to the profession. Mankofsky is again having fun, this time with a seemingly larger-than-life hand on a beach, and the time-lapse disappearance of a sandcastle. Like every print we’ve seen of this remarkable film, our copy tonight has shifted to red.

‘Heartbeat of a Volcano’ (1970) 21m, prod. Bert Van Bork. This film is, we think, the granddaddy of all volcano films, a twenty-one minute trip to hell in the fast lane. Van Bork intended, in his visit to the big island, to film the sputtering Kilauhea, show the geologists using seismographs and geotometers, and maybe get a shot or two of the degassing process at the vents. Instead, as the ground base geologist yells into the short-wave: "she's going wild, she's going wild!", the volcano trembles furiously, dramatically erupting from a threatening lava vent.  With spectacular night shots of a giant firefall twice as high as Niagara Falls, glowing lava streams and tremendous explosions, Van Bork burned up two pair of shoes as he hung close to the carnage to film the greatest volcanic film we’ve seen. These spectacular shots were planned the day before the explosion, as Van Bork and assistant cameraman Ulf Backstrom reconnoitered the volcanic area, marking exit routes with white tape, and noting the location of lava vents. In one scene, geologists are shown fleeing the approaching lava, but the camera remains (Van Bork, his eye glued to the camera, was prevented from pitching forward into vents and calderas by the steady hand of Backstrom, holding tightly to the back of his belt).  The hand of the AGI's John Shelton is in fine evidence here on the soundtrack, which is respendent with time signatures from radio station WWVH, and motor sounds from seismometers to the generators powering field geometers.

Thursday, August 15, 2002...  Robert Emmett presents ciné16 Klessix: great films from our archives.  

San Jose Lost & Found: a Past Look at Our Present (KFJC's Robert Emmett presents a program we originally ran on March 28 of this year).  To wit:

‘Quicksilver’ (1967) 30m, dir. Alex Zanini. Produced at KNTV, this is a history of New Almaden, essential to the Gold Rush era, producing toxic cinnabar, a material which releases gold from its rocky prison. It ends in an odd, upbeat note: mining will soon return to New Almaden!

‘Valley of Heart's Delight’ (1948) 18m, unknown director. No no, not the pristine, black and white film from 1925 you may have seen before, but a spanking new version, touting Santa Clara Valley's Clapp's Baby Food factory, the American Can Company plant, FMC, San Jose Steel, and Moffett Field, all accessible via the old Monterey Highway, and the Coast Daylight locomotive-driven train.

‘San Jose 70/71’ (1971) 27m, unknown director. This defines the concept of ‘unknown film’. The credits having been stripped off somewhere in the distant past, no one seems to know who produced this film, but it’s brightly optimistic tone is indicative of the youthful energy of this city of only 500,000 people. Here we visit City Hall, with Ron James as mayor, the impossibly young future mayors Norman Mineta, and Janet Gray Hayes, and their Council counterparts Virginia Schaeffer, Joe Colla, Walter Hays, Kurt Gross, and the ever-testy Dave Goglio. A city with a future! The redevelopment agency is hard at work here, bringing you the spanking new Park Center Plaza development, and the highly touted, remarkable Performing Arts Center, just beginning construction, which will finally put San Jose on the cultural map of the nation.

‘Roads Across the Bay’ (1963) 30m, dir. Frank Robinson. Farther north, the crisis of moving people across the water is solved by the building of the Bay Bridge, bringing a welcome end to the slow-moving ferries, and the beginning of the end to inter-urban trains. This well-made documentary chronicles the building of the bridge through contemporary footage, with cursory mention of the GGB, and Richmond-San Rafael span.

Thursday, August 8, 2002...  Exiles on Main Street (corner of Third): the Native American Experience in the City of Angels

Special Note:  Programming films on Native Americans has been a real jinx for us.  Our lowest attendance ever was for the "ciné16 Pow-Wow" a few years back, when only two people showed up.  We arrived at Blake's to show this film on July 4th this year... and Blake's was closed!  I brought the two other people who showed up back to my house, and we showed anyway, had a few beers, and projected the film against the back wall of my house.  This film is great, and it must be shown again, so take advantage of tonight's reprise... here it is again:

‘The Exiles’ (1961) 72m,  dir. Kent Mackenzie.  In the years following WWII, many Native Americans left the reservation for the big city, searching for opportunities unavailable in rural areas. In the cites, they found themselves caught between two cultures, that of the non-Native mercantile establishment, and that of an increasingly disenfranchised Native group of émigrés. The action in ‘Exiles’ takes place over a twelve hour period, and focuses on a group of male friends who spend an anguished, but apparently typical evening fighting, gambling, drinking at skid row bars such as the Ritz Café at Third and Main Streets (heavy product-placement of Lucky Lager here), and drinking in cars barreling down Los Angeles streets. In one scene, two couples arrive at a gas station; when one of the women takes too long in the washroom, she is left behind. For the women who have children, their lot is to stay home, cook and care for the children. For entertainment, they might take in a movie, alone.

Mackenzie engaged the actors --- all of whom play themselves --- in improvising dialogue (on prison: "Time's just time to me. If I can do it outside, I can do it inside"), and suggesting scenarios. The final scene of the film is shot on a hill overlooking the lights of Los Angeles, where, after some cuffing around of the women, a woe-begotten pow-wow takes place, reminiscent of Goya’s ‘Romería’, where tortured souls serenade phantasms.

Cinematographer Sven Walnum was directly involved in much of the film, and told us a little about how the film was made:

Kent Mackenzie, the director and originator of the idea, was a mutual friend of us from USC Cinema Department. He got a job as an editor of commercials and the owner of the company was very impressed with Kent's ideas about this feature type documentary, so he would let us use his camera and light equipment. For film he gave us 35 mm shortends left over from shooting commercials. So whenever he had enough film, he got a bunch of us together (not always the same crew and we all pitched in and did everything). As a consequence the film was shot over a period of over 2 years. One of the lead girls in the film was pregnant with child when we started filming. She had the child and before we finished she was pregnant again which of course was very convenient since it matched with what we had shot a couple of years before.

The workprint was done on 16mm so we all helped editing different segments. I had a little editing bench set up in the little house I rented while going through a divorce. I edited 2 segments. One was the card game, and the other was… a sequence that took place in a gas station… Erik Daarstad was the main DP, (and) also John Morrill… did quite a bit of the photography. Erik lives, I believe, somewhere in Montana. He later made quite a name for himself as photographer for the National Geographic, of course quite some time ago. He may have gone back to Norway for all I know. Kent McKenzie died not too long after we finished the film as far as I know. He was a very talented guy and very sensitive person.

Walnum stated that Mackenize, who died of a heart attack while in his late 20s or early 30s, had wanted to make a film on Native Americans, traveled to a reservation, but found little inspiration there for his film vision. He connected with former reservation members living in downtown Los Angeles, who were excited about making the film, and were friendly toward the young crew, none of whom were being paid to make this low-budget film shot cinéma vérité style.

Although the scenes are at times uncomfortable to watch, one soon becomes aware that the film is only peripherally about Native Americans. All displaced young persons, separated from culture and community, and unable (or unwilling) to participate in the economic illusion that lured them to lands far away, could tell this tale. It’s undoubtedly been told many times over many generations, but rarely this poignantly.

Occasionally, one discovers films that contain so much raw power that adding another film to the program is pointless. This is such a film. ciné16 viewers will leave this show with visions of the cast lurking in the shadows, and may well wonder what eventually became of them, their girlfriends and wives, and their very young children.

Thursday, August 1, 2002... The Art of Dance, in Three Parts (Program III)

‘Martha Graham Dance Company’ (1976) 90m, dir. Merrill Broackway. This tour-de-force of modern dance is introduced by Gregory Peck (who danced under Graham, for a time), followed by Graham (1894-1991) herself, who addresses the camera in sideways-fashion, a skeletal éminence-grise of the dance world (for a concise biography, with early photos, visit: http://www.pitt.edu/%7Egillis/dance/martha.html ). Graham’s fame in dance was augmented by her costume designs, and choice of music and sets. Sculptor Isamu Noguchi designed nearly twenty sets for her (for his commentary, and pictures, visit: http://www.noguchi.org/graham.html ), and she utilized the music of such 20^th century stalwarts as Louis Horst, Aaron Copland, and Samuel Barber. 

This film is a 16mm version of a videotaped performance shown on WNET television in 1976, and includes:  'Diversion of Angels', with music by Norman Dello Joio; 'Lamentations' danced by Peggy Lyman, music by Zoltán Kodály; 'Frontier', danced by Janet Eilber, music by Louis Horst; 'Adorations'; 'Medea's Dance of Vengeance' (from 'Cave of the Heart'), with music by Samuel Barber; Appalachian Spring', music by Aaron Copland, set by Isamu Noguchi.  'Medea's Dance' is, in our estimation, one of the most powerful performanaces we've ever seen in dance film.

Graham's life was legendary and often contradictory, as underscored by her commentary on her sexual philosophy from ‘Blood Memory’ her autobiography:

"In the early days when I still had an active night life I wouldn’t be caught dead in bed without a light makeup. But I was never promiscuous. I always had one boyfriend at a time. I didn’t have time for lovers or love affairs --- with some delightful exceptions. My philosophy of lovers and boyfriends? When I loved them I loved them. When I didn’t, I left. That simple. And I suppose I wasn’t always that nice at times… All of my life I’ve been a devotee of sex… fulfillment, as opposed to procreation…"

‘Merce Cunningham’ (1964) 20m, dir. Etienne Becker/Jacqueline Raynal/Patrice Wyers. A visit with the dancer/choreographer and company, with Robert Rauschenberg, costumes & lighting, and John Cage, music, filmed in France, on Cunningham’s world tour of 1964, in gorgeous black and white.

Thursday, July 25, 2002... The Art of Dance, in Three Parts (Program II)

‘Night Journey’ (1960) 30m, dir. Alexander Hammid. Featuring sets and costumes by Isamu Noguchi and the terrific music score by William Schuman, Martha Graham’s magnificent treatment of the Oedipus story as Jocasta, with Bertram Ross as son Oedipus, who falls in love with his mother, then blinds himself after discovering her true identity. The dance is one of both sexual and maternal symbolism, the "vaginal cry" as Graham has called it. Her description of Jocasta’s transition from queen to mother, taken from ‘Blood Memory’, is an insightful explanation of the philosophical drive behind the choreography:

…she drops the robe in front of her. All of her queenliness, all of her majesty goes down with that robe.

She steps across it, over to the rope that becomes the umbilical cord, raises it, stretches it out in her hands, looks at it with deep love, not hatred, but pity, affection, and the tragic awareness of what beauty and anguish it has brought her. She looks to the right side of the world --- there are buttercups there. The sky has clouds. She looks to the left side perhaps there are daffodils, the world is inflamed with the beauty of the flowers. It is flamed with her love of life. It is then, in this moment of smiling recognition that the umbilical cord is going to be her savior, her companion, her reason or the evidence for her passage into the world of death, of forgetfulness where memory exists no more and the terrors of memory have no place.

She turns to the back, pulls the cord around her neck. There is a moment of simulated strangling, and she does a back fall. She does not land in a position. She lands in a figureless sprawl, a blot on the ground, like one of' those Rorschach blots. She lies there in nothingness.

But her memory of that mark of her death to her life, to her body and the world, will defile every other being who steps into that matter of her being, and passes through with boots forever stained with the memory of happiness. I know I see her rushing down a corridor, a columned corridor, frantic with this umbilical cord in her hands, frantic knowing site can have no peace from the demands of the crime except to die. And it is that rush that carries her to the great doors at the beginning, causes her to thrust them open into the room of her destiny, to close them and proceed to the bed. It is from that moment that I have taken the dance.

‘Modern Ballet’ (1960) 30m, dir. Walter Strate. Martha Myer hosts a fascinating visit with choreographer Antony Tudor, with excerpts from 'Undertow', 'Romeo & Juliet', and 'Pillar of Fire' (music by Arnold Schönberg), danced by Nora Kaye and Hugh Laing. Tudor discusses Mickhail Fokine's influence on his work. Dancer Dick Andros’ biography of Tudor (born Michael Cook, 1908-1987) http://members.tripod.com/androsdance/biographies/tudor_anthony.htm is wonderful, and be sure to continue to the following story on the page for a funny anecdote on hairpieces in dance.

‘Moor's Pavanne: Variation on a Theme of Othello’ (1950) 20m, dir. Walter Strate. Another fine work choreographed by José Limón, with an unfortunate flaw in the optical soundtrack, diminishing somewhat the beauty of the music by Purcell.

‘9 Variations on a Dance Theme’ (1966) 13m, dir. Hilary Harris. This is one of the more exceptional dance films ever made, with nine increasingly difficult variations, equally challenging to the dancer, musicians, cinematographer, and film editor.

Thursday, July 18, 2002...   The Art of Dance, in Three Parts (Program I)

ciné16 is delighted to present three outstanding evenings dedicated to the art of Dance. Generally, we attempt to provide some historical perspective on the value of our shows, but feel, in the case of these three programs, that the visual splendor of what you’ll see on the screen makes words superfluous.  We recommend visiting http://www.myhistory.org/historytopics/articles/theatrical_dance.html , which provides a quick historical overview of the world of dance, valuable in describing the difference between classical ballet and modern dance. 

This week’s show:

‘Invention in Dance’ (1960) 30m, dir. Greg Harney. Do we ever like Martha Myers! Here, the assistant professor at Smith College, resplendently decked out by Filene’s, hosts one episode in the amazing ‘A Time To Dance’ series made by Boston’s WGBH for National Educational Television. Myers begins this program by introducing choreographer Alwin Nikolais, who presents excerpts from three of his pieces, 'When', 'Fixation', and ‘Disks’. The dances themselves, performed by Murray Louis, Arlene Laub, Phyllis Lamhut, Coral Martindale, Beverly Schmidt, and Dorothy Vislocky, are marvelously abstract, whether utilizing body-length fabrics to hide the physical form, or metal disks clamped on one foot to provide percussive ornamentation to the music. Myers also provides historical perspective on the evolution of Dance from the art of traditional Ballet, including film clips of Ruth St. Denis. Visit http://www.americandancefestival.org/01School/faculty.html for a biography on Myers.

‘Language of Dance’ (1960) 30m, dir. Greg Harney. Myers visits with José Limón (1908-1972) , who discusses emotion through body movement, with examples, followed by the television premiere of his 'There is a Time', danced by Pauline Koner, with music by Norman Dello Joio. Limón’s work was exceptional, and continues to be popular. Read his bio at: http://www.limon.org

‘Dancer’s World: Martha Graham’ (1957) 30m. dir. John Houseman. A terrific film hosted by Graham, an award winner at the‘57 Venice film festival. Here, she explains her philosophy of dance with examples from the repertoire, with superb cinematography by Peter Glushanok.

‘Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejías’ (1951) 18m, dir. Walter Strate. It doesn’t get better than this: Lorca’s tragic poem on the perils of fighting "at 5 in the afternoon", danced by Limón, with the remarkable Leticia Ide as "fate". The choreography is by Doris Humphrey, music by Norman Lloyd, costumes by Pauline Lawrence, and editing by Gil Margolis.

Thursday, July 11 2002... Guest Programmer Tim Kordas presents: ciné16 Klessix (past great films from our legendary vaults)

Neuroscience, Molecular Biology and Medicine Across Four Decades

Tim Kordas responded to our request for guest hosts and programmers recently, and came up with two fine programs, one of which he's hosting tonight.   Tom grew up in Livermore, California, got his undergrad degree in Cleveland, where he regularly visited John Ewing's Cleveland Cinemathèque.  Eventually, Tim made his way to graduate school in the neuroscience program at the University of Texas, Houston:  "While there I had the unfortunate opportunity to see (and TA a bit) at a medical school, which is part of the reason that I'm fascinated by medical training films."  Tim's program notes introduce his program for tonight:

"I'm always disappointed in the amount of real information about modern neuroscience available to the lay public. I find it bizarre that we live in a society where more than 90% of people believe in some kind of afterlife, some kind of 'self' outside of the purely biological brain; where at the same time everyone knows many people taking psychiatric medications. The movies this week illustrate some of the connections between the brain and the mind and from both to our culture."  - Tim Kordas

'Gateways to the Mind' (1958) 60m, dir. Owen Crump.  The soundstage and equipment are integrated into a description of brain function. The film's crew and a set of animated characters team up with Dr. Frank Baxter to explain the brain.  (From the 'Bell Science' series)

'Protein Synthesis: an Epic on the Cellular Level' (1971) 20m, dir. Gabriel Weiss.  After a quick introduction to the major components, 200 students fueled by complimentary wine illustrate protein synthesis with dance.  This film is not only highly entertaining, with its bright colors, movement and music, but also remains a very accurate portrayal of the protein synthesis model still taught today to biochemistry students around the world.

'Psychopath' (1961) 30m, prod. Robert Anderson. This film consists of interviews with the patient, his psychiatrist, his incarcerators, and others involved in the young man's life.

Thursday, July 4, 2002... Exiles on Main Street (corner of Third): the Native American Experience in the City of Angels

See notes (above) for August 8, 2002 show.

Thursday, June 20 and Thursday, June 27...  Fifty Years of Picture Books: a Two-Part Tribute to Morton Schindel and Weston Woods

The Academic Film Archive's Barinda Samra 
with Weston Woods' Mort Schindel, June, 2001

Founded by educator Morton Schindel in 1953, Weston Woods (named after the wooded area outside his home in Weston, Connecticut) specializes in animating children’s picture books on film. Schindel’s cinematic vision not only included making films of children’s picture books, but also interviews of the writers and filmmakers themselves. To our mind, this may be the richest element in Schindel’s legacy, an element unfortunately ignored by most people familiar with Weston Woods’ body of work.

For the next two weeks, ciné16 will present a series of films that, to our mind, represent some of the finest films in Weston Woods’ catalogue, and include several of the "artists and filmmakers" films. We invite you to join us for a rare opportunity to view a number of these films, concentrated over a two week period, reflecting a cohesive body of work easily identifiable as emanating from a common creative perspective.

Schindel’s own story is a fascinating one, and explains much about the philosophical approach taken by his company. Mort Schindel graduated from Columbia Teachers’ College in 1947, having taken audio-visual courses on subjects ranging from projection techniques to a Margaret Mead-taught course on propaganda and mass media. In 1948, he began working on films for Teaching Films Inc., which soon would declare bankruptcy. As part of the settlement, Schindel retained the rights to six of the films on which he’d worked, and formed his own company, Key Productions. Godfey Elliott’s Young America Films then contracted with Schindel to distribute Key films and make new films on standard topics (e.g. What Makes Things Float, 1951). The filmmaker meanwhile had noticed that children who read books in libraries rarely selected "Dick and Jane", but instead gravitated toward colorful picture books. He approached Elliott with the idea of animated picture book films as a new method of teaching reading, but was rebuffed. Schindel soon left for a two-year stint with the United States Information Service in Turkey, where he made films --- primarily on health and cultural issues --- and traveled by jeep as part of a mobile film presentation unit, equipped with generators to power projectors in the numerous villages without electricity. After returning to the United States, the filmmaker, in 1954, produced the first Weston Woods picture book film, and in 1964, made his first animated film, The Snowy Day. For the next several decades, Weston Woods would produce hundreds of titles, including works by authors such as Robert McCloskey (The Doughnuts from Robert McCloskey’s ‘Homer Price’), Tomi Ungerer (Beast of M. Racine, 1971, dir. Gene Deitch), and Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, 1973, dir. Gene Deitch).

One of Weston Woods’ most memorable films was Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1962, dir. Edward English), in which artist Lisl Weil, fresh from her performance at Lincoln Center, drew larger-than-life characters in different colored chalks while aggressively dancing to the Dukas score. Perhaps the strongest films produced by Schindel were the ‘Signature Series’, in which the people involved in creating these films, from artists, to directors, to producers, were shown animating, reading, and discussing their works. In Morton Schindel: From Pages to Screen (1981), the producer discusses the painstaking steps of the picture book-to-film process, from selecting artists who stylistically mirror the original artwork, to the spoken aspect, including a scene showing author/illustrator/filmmaker Gerald McDermott narrating his Arrow to the Sun (1973, Texture Films). Possibly the most thought-provoking in all the series was the droll interview done by director Gene Deitch with children’s illustrator and author Tomi Ungerer (an exceptionally funny and poignant artist in the adult erotic genre as well) in which the artist conveys the joy children express in being scared, and the value of occasional childhood loneliness (Tomi Ungerer, Storyteller, 1981).

No commentary on Weston Woods can be complete without discussing the contributions of director Gene Deitch, who Schindel had met during the latter’s tenure with CBS as creative director of the "Tom Terrific" black and white minimalist cartoon episodes shown on the ‘Captain Kangaroo’ television series. Both Tom and wonderdog Manfred, were drawn with as little elaboration as possible, their occasionally transparency allowing the few scenic images in the image to show through their bodies. Deitch was never able to acquire the budget needed for producing the cartoon in color, and was unceremoniously dropped in 1958. In 1959, having been hired as an independent animation director for a studio located in Prague, he was hired by Schindel at Weston Woods to direct efforts utilizing Czech animators in the state-run Kratky studio, whose production manager, Zdenka Najmanová, Deitch would eventually marry. In Prague, Deitch fell in love his colleague and the city, and remained there, transforming over twenty picture books into film. Among them were Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1973), which took over five years to complete, featured a musique-concrète score by written and performed by Deitch himself.

Morton Schindel sold Weston Woods Films to Scholastic Incorporated in 1996 to devote his time to the non-profit Weston Woods Institute which he founded in 1983 to promote innovative cultural education for children.  As of this writing, 16mm films are still being sold from the Scholastic Weston Woods catalogue. Gene Deitch and Zdenka Deitchova continue to work, play, and love, in Prague.

Thursday, June 27...  Weston Woods' 50^th Anniversary, Part II

‘Morton Schindel: From Pages to Screen’ (1981) 27m, prod. Morton Schindel. Here, Schindel describes how a book is transformed into a film. In addition, we see Gerald McDermott, Caldecott winner and two-time ciné16 guest, reading from his wonderful ‘Arrow to the Sun’.

‘Tomi Ungerer: Storyteller’ (1981) 21m, dir. Gene Deitch. An engaging and funny man, Ungerer is one of the darkest of all writers of children’s books. He takes an absolute joy in being an iconoclast, discusses his fear of the dark, and how children enjoy the terror in his books.  He defends children's innate intelligence, and notes the harm in being overly protective.  Not a word is mentioned about the fact that he’s also one of the world’s most ribald adult cartoonists,  in this insightful and humorous interview, filmed in his Strasboug home, with cartoonist Gene Deitch.

‘Maurice Sendak’ (1965) 19m, prod. Morton Schindel. Sendak began his Caldecott-winning book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, in 1955, but it wasn’t completed until 1963. Upon seeing this film, it’s not difficult to see why it took so long. Sendak is a perfectionist, who built elaborate wooden toys as a child (he shows us a few of them, here), and counts Francisco Goya as one of his bigger influences.

‘Where the Wild Things Are’ (1976) 8m, dir. Gene Deitch. See notes above.

‘Gene Deitch: the Picture Book Animated’ (1977) 25m, dir. Gene Deitch. Creator of the Mr. Magoo and Tom Terrific animated characters, Deitch has spent the last several decades in Prague, directing films based on children’s picture books along with his wife and colleague, Zdenka Deitchova. In tonight’s film, the engaging Deitch describes the painstaking process of animating a picture book for film, one of the best examples of films-on-filmmaking-process we’ve ever seen.

‘Patrick’ (1973) 7m, dir. Gene Deitch. As he fiddles, magic passes in his wake, as fish fly, and cakes grow on trees.

‘Changes, Changes’ (1973) 6m, dir. Gene Deitch. Here, two wooden dolls come to live amidst an arsenal of wooden blocks. The wonderful soundtrack is played by Frantisek Belfin and his All Wooden Orchestra.

Thursday, June 20...  Weston Woods' 50^th Anniversary, Part I

‘Lively Art of Picture Books’ (1964) 57m, dir. Joanna Foster Dougherty. This comprehensive film describes Weston Woods’ philosophy and books, as exemplified by Maurice Sendak, Robert McCloskey, and Barbara Cooney, who discuss --- and read from --- their own books.

‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (1962) 15m, dir. Edward English. Lisl Weil, a dancer who often performed in New York with friend Tommy Scherman and his Little Orchestra Society, was also a splendid charcoal artist. Here, accompanied by Sherman’s interpretation of Dukas, she soars across the screen, drawing imaginary characters on a massive blank board in a film that has tremendous affective value for both art and music students.

‘Ezra Jack Keats’ (1970) 17m, dir. Cynthia Freitag. Here, the noted children’s author is shown in his New York City studio, discussing his books, and his technique of collage mixed with painting. Additionally, Keats is shown making the paper he uses for some of his backgrounds, which he produces by introducing plain paper into a bath of water, in which oil paints have been introduced, but not mixed. The result is a mottled, swirling pastiche of color. Included as part of the film is his ‘A Letter to Amy’ (7m.).

‘Children of the Northlights: a Portrait of Ingri & Edgar D'Aulaire’ (1976) 20m, dir. Jane Morrison. This beautiful film focuses on the work of a fascinating and aged couple, the D’Aulaires, who created their images on massive, lithographic stones. This film may also contain one of the earliest uses of home movies in the academic genre, showing the younger couple with footage of their own children.

‘Smile for Auntie’ (1979) 7m, dir. Gene Deitch. From a story by Diane Paterson, this diabolical film pokes cynical fun at overbearing, insensitive adults.

Thursday, June 13...  Robert Emmett Presents ciné16 Klessix: Creatures Great and Small

Tonight, the host of KFJC's Saturday morning Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show presents three of his favorite films from ciné16's past, to wit:

'Canaries to Clydesdales' (1977) 28m, dir. Eugene Boyko. If we had to pick a handful of the finest documentaries we've seen, this would be in the bunch.  Here, we join BC country veterinarians Vic Demetrick and Reg Maidment on their appointed rounds, and trust me, you'll need a strong stomach for this one: castrating a sheep, sawing out a still-born calf, removing porcupine quills from a dog's muzzle, and sticking an arm up a cow's butt are all in a day's work for these two. A fascinating film, also focusing on the Alphonse-Gaston-like working relationship between Vic and Reg.

'Vampire' (1979) 30m, prod. Adrian Warren. The vampire bats of Trinidad approach their prey on wing and on foot, as graphically illustrated by the donkeys abused in the filming of this picture. Sneaking up behind and biting 'em on the heels, they then follow these tethered and tormented creatures as they wander in circles. The humans then work to catch the winged mammals, poison them, then go to their cave to collect the dead. This film really makes 'Dracula' seem pretty tame...

'Mzima: Portrait of a Spring' (1983) 29m, dir. Alan Root. The ecosystem of  body of water in Tsavo, where Root takes the camera to the underwater world of the hippo.

Thursday, June 6... From Inside the Time Tunnel: Four Films on Writing

Maybe you’ve been there yourself, maybe not. I was lying in bed next to my girlfriend, looking out the window, all I could see was beach, ocean, coconut palms on Ko Lanta, an island emerging from the crystal waters of the eastern Andaman Sea. Inside, we huddled under a mosquito net billowing back and forth, its breathing propelled by a sea breeze one way, a revolving fan the other. The bungalow was on stilts, no telephone nor TV in sight, but with plenty of cool fresh water for a hose-nozzle shower after a few hours lounging in the impossibly blue sea. Looking at my girlfriend asleep, lost in her dreams, I realized I’d never been happier, and wanted to take in every last second, remember every sight, sound, and touch. In three days, I’d be back in the U.S. alone, leaving my girlfriend 10,000 miles away. The moment would all-too-soon be lost, and things being what they are in this world, it might never, ever re-occur. I wanted it to last forever, and thought it too bad that we can’t stretch time when we want to prolong life’s great moments. I closed my eyes, and imagined myself back in San Jose, walking into my house, petting my cat, picking up the mail, opening up a can of tuna. No girl, nor coconut palms, nor tropical breeze. I let myself daydream that way for a few minutes, my eyes shut. In my reverie, I wished I were back on Ko Lanta. Moments later, when I opened my eyes again, and, back in our seacoast hideaway, realized that, by time-traveling a bit, I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d bought three more days, a solid rescue from the future. By moving forward in time, I’d somehow heightened my senses to that present; even today, three weeks later, back in SJ for real, I can "see" everything in our bungalow as if it were in front of me.

Dear me, where was I going with this? Oh yes, about film. In thinking about the time tunnel, I realized that, to a very large extent, I live in the past. The films I watch at home were all made between roughly 1960 and 1985, and I probably watch 3-5 films most nights. Since I’ve never owned a TV, the characters that occupy my mediated world are all roughly twenty years older in real time than my own time. They don’t walk around in stilted, pre-talky stickman style, of course, but when I see them in today’s newspapers or magazines they’re a lot grayer. I wonder what the hell happened to them.

These are the films we bring to you every week, and for the first time, I’m seeing time-tunnel value to them, realizing that ciné16 viewers have a film experience no one else in the U.S. has. We see compelling stories told in past-contemporary, and we live with the characters in 1960-1985 time. When the lights go out, we travel back in time each week to see how the protagonists --- and sometimes villains --- of yesterday’s documentary and academic world ate, drank, smoked, and talked. We become acutely aware of the cranky old wood-burning time machine whenever we use the internet to update the record, understanding suddenly, at times jarringly, what befell yesterday’s heroes as they stumbled and tripped forward over the threshold of time.

This week, it’s boxer Elvis Yero, a 19 year old wunderkind from Miami. Despite an arrest for assault, everyone agrees can’t miss as a future champion, in the sunny world of 1985. In Charlotte Zwerin’s ‘Telling an Old Story’, he dreams of owning a Camaro Z-28, and carrying the American flag in the Olympics, and is followed by an endless stream of screaming teenaged girls. Last night, while writing this week’s filmnotes and wondering what ever became of him, my Google search caught the following paragraph, written by Enrique Encinosa in ‘Wail!, The Cyber Boxing Zone Journal’:

He died on Saturday, October 13, 2001 --- of a crack overdose --- in room 212 of the Gold Dust Motel, a loud blue and white two-story structure on the edge of a harsh Miami ghetto, next door to a strip theater. Elvis Yero was thirty-six years old.

While most people agree that good documentaries are timeless, few venues in the United States are wont to show this world of ghosts, and frankly, old spectres don’t pay the bills. These films are vitally alive, as you and I know, locked in their time zone. Their characters beg to be released, like aging circus performers, needing to show their stuff so that future viewers might briefly see an act that will most probably not be passed down to future generations, and may eventually be lost forever.

Tonight, the Yero film is part of our focus on a series of three films made by New York’s WNET, describing the process by which newspaper writers craft a story. ‘Writers Writing’ was the collective name, produced Alice Trillin and Jane Garney. It was eventually picked up for schools distribution by Encyclopaedia Britannica films, and each film was accompanied by an extensive teacher’s guide for use in journalism classes. The films are fascinating, well-crafted glimpses into the minds and notebooks of three top-notch writers.

On tonight’s program:

‘Pieces of a Puzzle’ (1985) 29m, dir. Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer. Here, reporter Courtland Milloy of the Washington Post and Lisa Couturier, a student in his journalism class at the University of Maryland, examine two sides of the urban eviction problem. Milloy and Couturier find themselves conflicted: poor people are unable to afford rent, but the landlords themselves are often middle class individuals struggling to improve neglected properties. Of particular interest are the people hired, under contract with U.S. marshals, to carry on the actual evictions, one of whom was, in the past, evicted herself.

‘Telling an Old Story’ (1985) 29m, dir. Charlotte Zwerin. The Miami Herald’s Madelaine Blais original story was supposed to focus on 87 year old philanthropist/activist Elizabeth Virrick, who, among other things, founded a gym to give at-risk youth a purpose, and perhaps, a future. Problem was, Virrick was such a good person, that Blais couldn’t find any conflict that would make her good newspaper copy. Instead, she focused on one of Virrick’s protégés, boxer Elvis Yero. The result was both a good human interest story, and a good boxing story. I suggest you visit http://www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/w12x-ee.htm after you’ve seen the film.

‘Before the First Word’ (1982) 29m, dir. Tom Simon. Here, the camera follows New York Times reporter Anna Quindlen and high school students, Maria Hampton and Wilmer Ortiz, as they write about life on Sullivan Street in New York City's Little Italy, during the annual Feast of St. Anthony. Everybody likes festivals, right? Wrong. Yuppies begin to gentrify the street, and are bothered by the smoke from the food concessions, wishing it would all go away.

Also:

‘Ernest Hemingway: Rough Diamond’ (1977) 29m, dir. Richard Marquand. Occasionally, we run into an exceptional film that seems to defy programming logic, and won’t fit easily into categories that film historians and scholars know and love. This film is one of those, and has been resting uneasily atop a shelf where I’ll always manage to see it, a constant reminder that this wonderful film has got to be shown. Part of the issue is that the writer is portrayed by an actor within a timeframe that wasn’t too far from the actual life of the Old Man, so it’s easy to compare the dramatic recreation with its larger-than-life subject. Lost in all this is a magnificent acting job by Larry Hoodekoff as the Hemingway of 1951 Cuba, in the process of writing "Old Man and the Sea". A large element of the power of this short film is in the unresolved sexual tension between the characters of Hoodekoff and Susannah Fellows who, as the Master's candidate, attempts to gain an interview with the irascible writer. After having seen this film three times, I’m convinced some of this must have carried on beyond the frame of the camera as well.

Thursday, May 30... Tales of Appalachia

It seems as though the words "poverty" and "Appalachia" are indelibly linked, underscored by the innumerable documentary films made on Appalachian people and subjects. Tonight, we’d like to look further into the social and cultural elements that bind the Appalachian community together. Tonight’s program does not ignore the valid economic hardships that continue to affect the quality of Appalachian life, but instead attempts to address many of the positive elements that serve as a cultural focal point for Appalachians who would prefer to stay, than leave for greener pastures.

‘Linda and Billy Ray from Appalachia’ (1970) 15m, dir. Maclovia Rodriguez. Expressing neither pity nor over-sentimentality, the director weaves the tale of two children who, with their parents, leave for the comparative riches of a blue-collar neighborhood in urban Cincinnati. Told in first person by the father, we experience the support of the extended family, as the newcomers gradually learn to cope and adjust in this new form of a hard-scrabble existence.

‘Todd: Growing Up in Appalachia’ (1970) 15m, dir. Herman J Engel. In this poignant sociodrama of poverty and morality, a hungry boy finds someone's food stamps, and is forced to make a choice. The schoolhouse scene is especially sobering: hand washing is done in a basin to illustrate the school’s sink no longer has running water, a teacher makes lunch for his students with government-issued canned food.

‘Aunt Arie’ (1975) 18m, dir. Steve Heiser. 86 year old Aunt Arie Carpenter from Coweeta Creek, North Carolina plants her sweet potatoes, bakes cornbread, cooks on her wood stove, and draws water from her well as she discusses life in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

‘Sourwood Mountain Dulcimers’ (1975) 30m, dir. Gene DuBey. This film was produced by Appalshop, a Whitesburg, Kentucky organization dedicated to showcasing the culture of Appalachia (take a look: http://ns.appalshop.org). Here, I.D. Stamper of Thornton, Kentucky teaches young John McCutcheon of Dungannon, Virginia how to play the mountain dulcimer. Stamper makes 'em, plays 'em, and talks about ‘em, and McCutcheon, who fooled us by playing real slowly at first, returns to play a hot hammered dulcimer by the end of the film.

‘Depressed Area, U.S.A.’ (1964) 30m, dir. Willard Van Dyke. Inspired by the book "Night Comes to the Cumberlands" by Harry Caudill, the CBS News ‘20^th Century’ team visits the town of Manchester, Clay Co., Kentucky. There, 73% of the 20,000 people in county are under the poverty level. Those who do work are paid $50-60/day for dangerous work, while the TVA refuses to provide better wages. This fine social documentary was made by noted filmmaker and still photographer Van Dyke, who also was the director of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art.

Thursday, May 23... Serials for the Serious: Introducing James Burke and David Attenborough

I stopped watching television sometime around the age of seventeen, sick