As a teenager, my playground was downtown Norfolk, Virginia.  On Saturdays - weekdays if I'd skipped school - I'd catch the downtown bus to see such films as The Honeymoon Killers (1969) and Equinox (1970).  Then I'd go record shopping at Frankie's Got It record store, which was owned by "Norfolk sound" purveyor Frank Guida, the Sicilian-American record producer who discovered Gary "U.S." Bonds, Jimmy Soul, Tommy Facenda, and Lenis Guess, and who once received a fan letter from The Beatles.  It was at Frankie's that I first became aware of the ouevre of Rudy Ray Moore, Skillet and Leroy, and many others, and bought my first Funkadelic album ("Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow").  I'd peruse my new vinyl treasures while enjoying a chili dog and an Orange Julius as I listened to my waitress boast about her boyfriend's big dick.

A trip downtown also meant a stop at Henderson's Newsstand, a shabby-looking hole in the wall situated at the junction where the Granby Street of boutiques and department stores gave way to the street of shame so well remembered by generations of sailors who served duty at the Norfolk Naval Station.  No less an expert on the subject than Johnny Legend has claimed that Norfolk, Virginia was the sleaziest town he'd ever set foot in.  During the late sixties and early seventies, neon-lit taverns and cheap flophouses were still laid out tight as piano keys along this stretch of Granby Street.  Hordes of sailors, some from faraway ports, swarmed past derelicts and con men from one bar to the next while MPs prowled the streets for drunk or AWOL gobs.  

Though it bordered this nether world of gin blossoms and lice, Henderson's Newsstand was, among other things, a respite for the intellectually curious.  It was at Henderson's where I first laid eyes on publications such as The Village Voice; Evergreen Review; Ramparts; Ralph Ginsburg's Avant Garde; music zines Creem, Crawdaddy, NME and Melody Maker; the short-lived Eye; and a plethora of underground newspapers such as The East Village Other and The Berkeley Barb.  They also sold grayish-colored hot dogs from a rotisserie.  It was at Henderson's where I spied a tenth-grade classmate feverishly thumbing through an issue of Iron Man (not the Marvel comic).  Most of these titles were not available anywhere else in Norfolk but from Henderson's, which staked its claim within sailor purgatory long before the appearance of head shops and counterculture bookstores.

The proprietor of this oasis of literary ephemera was a man named Arthur Goldstein, whom everyone knew as "Bootsie."  Diminutive, pallid, and always looking as if he'd just rolled out of bed, Bootsie could be seen evenings at closing time locking the door of his shop and scurrying down Granby Street, the daily racing form protruding from his ill-fitting sports jacket.  In his shop, he was unfailingly courteous to anyone who stepped up to his counter to make a purchase or ask about the availability of a publication.  But if you happened to catch his eye, you could tell that he was sizing you up.  His was a business that depended on him being able to understand his customers.

That's because Bootsie was not only the dealer of magazines ranging from Sex to Sexty to After Dark.  He also sold, from under the counter, hard core pornography.  LOTS of it.  Many a sailor returned to his ship with a brown paper bag filled with books and magazines that, at the time, were illegal to either sell or buy.  Before 1973's Miller v. California Supreme Court ruling began to loosen legal restrictions against hardcore pornography, a conviction for selling what is easily found nowadays on the internet would likely result in a steep fine and, possibly, a jail sentence.  Laws regulating the sale of adult publications varied wildly from state to state, and Virginia's statutes were among the strictest.

Unfortunately for Bootsie, he wasn't always successful in judging the intentions of his customers. Some turned out to be on the payroll of Norfolk's vice squad.  During his career, Bootsie was arrested for selling smut a whopping total of 65 times, jailed twice, and fined over $65,000.  His first arrest, in 1958 for defying two court orders to rid his store of adult magazines, cost him ten days in jail and $15,000 ( that's $123,000 in today's dollars) plus legal costs.   Nevertheless, Bootsie would not back down from city hall's onslaught.  He continued to peddle porn to those who wanted it, the law be damned.  To genteel Norfolk, he was the problem that refused to go away.

After the wide distribution of Gerard Damiano's Deep Throat (1972) and other explicit films had challenged and changed public attitudes about the acceptability of graphic depictions of sex, Bootsie's little store was still detested but grudgingly tolerated.  When a zoning change designed to prohibit new adult bookstores and theaters from opening downtown took effect, Henderson's Newsstand was protected from the ban by a grandfather clause.  The years of legal harassment finally seemed to be over for the lantern-jawed smut peddler.  But in 1983 Henderson's was one of a half-dozen businesses wiped out by a five-alarm fire.  (Along with Henderson's went the Downtown Wig Mart and Mr. Dog-N-Friend.)   As staff writer Robert Morris of the Norfolk newspaper, The Virginian Pilot, opined on July 17, "A fire Saturday on Granby Mall may have done something that city officials, judges, and champions of Norfolk's community standards had been unable to do for more than three decades - put Arthur (Bootsie) Goldstein out of business."

But a fire wasn't about to stop Bootsie.  He was quoted the following day in front of his burned-out store: "...we'll get back in there soon...you gotta' work.  If you don't work, you die."  True to his word, Bootsie opened another store several blocks from the previous location.  This newsstand, however, not only lacked the unique character of Henderson's but also no longer had an exemption to sell adult books and magazines.  Bootsie was back in the hot seat, spending the next five years repeatedly facing new charges of vending pornography.  Each time, his defense was to claim that he hadn't understood the court's orders.  In 1988, while covering the most recent dust-up between Bootsie and City Hall, The Virginian Pilot stated: "These photos (one of which appears above) and this report are not the last we'll hear of Bootsie."  And it wasn't, though the news took a turn for the tragic.

On June 14, 1989, his 75th birthday, Bootsie was gunned down during a robbery in his newsstand. The frail old man had apparently been trying to escape his killer; the bullets had entered his back and buttocks. Bootsie's murderer, who fled the scene without ever finding the $126,00 bankroll hidden in the store, was never brought to justice.  The only suspect in the cold-blooded killing was eventually released for lack of evidence. The sanitized "new" Norfolk proved to be no safer than its seedy forebear, and it was lawlessness, not the law, that finally ended Bootsie's run.

One of Bootsie's prior indictments had been for "aiding in the delinquency of a minor."  The "delinquency" in question was the act of Bootsie selling airplane glue to a high school student who was assisting the Norfolk Vice Squad in a sting operation.  In the sixties, such glue was the drug of choice for wayward teens attracted by its low cost and easy availability.  Testor's glue, used by hobbyists to bind the unassembled parts of their plastic Messerschmitts together, had been designated in 1969 by Virginia and other states as a controlled substance.  Bootsie was convicted for selling a tube of it to a minor.

This arrest may help explain a peculiar exchange I had with Bootsie in the summer of 1971.  A 17-year-old friend had asked me, one year his senior and, therefore, a legal adult, to purchase for him at Henderson's a plastic vibrator (the generic type that would soon be widely available in shopping malls) so he and his girlfriend could, uh, "experiment" at the drive-in theater.  I reluctantly agreed, and on carrying out the illicit deed found that Bootsie seemed somewhat reticent about the transaction.  After checking my age and making the sale, he suddenly sprang from around the counter, reached up to wrap his arm around my shoulder, and, giving my elbow a paternal pat, rasped these words in my ear: "Whatever you do, make sure that no KIDS get their hands on this!"

Some details for this tribute were drawn from articles written by Robert Morris and Tony Germanotta for The Virginian Pilot.  The 1958 photo of downtown Norfolk's skid row is uncredited. Bootsie was photographed by Robie Ray for The Virginian Pilot, and the photo of me eating a hot dog from Henderson's Newsstand was taken by Jim Rosko.  This tribute to Bootsie is dedicated to the memory of F. J. Armstrong.

By the mid-sixties, the first-run movie theaters of downtown Norfolk, Virginia, the formerly seedy seaport town from where I hail, were well beyond their glory days.  Fear of crime and the convenience offered by the new suburban shopping centers had taken their toll on the crowds of consumers that had once flocked to the stores and venues along Granby Street. 

Theaters that hadn't switched to showing softcore porn to snag sailors on shore leave were juggling second-run Hollywood features with low-budget exploitation fare.  The venerable Granby Theater abandoned first-run fare in favor of  Succubus (1968) and The Horrors of Spider Island (1965).  The Byrd, a decrepit fleapit of a theater where The Giant Behemoth (1959) had terrorized me as a six-year-old, hosted Torture Dungeon (1970) and other no-budget oddities before shutting its doors for good in late 1970.  The Norva, now a concert hall, was the site of the local premiere of the Italian "mondo" film that had been retitled for U.S. audiences as Ecco (1965). 

The posh 2,100 seat Loews Theater ("Dixie's Million Dollar Dandy"), which had opened to great fanfare in 1926 with the silent comedy Beverly of Graustark starring William Randolph Hearst's own rosebud,  Marion Davies, was likely to follow the first-run engagement of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with the re-release of the double-billed Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs.  

It was at the Loews where I first saw Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971), and endured such grindhouse legends as Mark Of The Devil (1970), The Last House On The Left (1972), and Twitch Of The Death Nerve (1972).  It's also where I stumbled across Nelson Lyon's The Telephone Book (1971), a surreal satire so obscure it was once believed to be lost, or to have never existed at all. 

Millennials will probably respond with bemusement to a film set in a world where people searched for phone numbers in a book so thick that it was often used as a booster seat for children, where the identity of a person on the other line was not betrayed by caller ID, and the sight of two adjacent phone booths didn’t seem at all unusual.  It was a moment in time between a more circumscribed era when you might lose your day job for appearing in a nudie film (a la Audrey Campbell) and the anything-goes world of hardcore porn.  Following the X-rated The Telephone Book, her film debut, Sarah Kennedy joined the cast of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin’s waning comedy series Laugh-In to claim the “giggly blonde” role after the departure of Goldie Hawn.

Nelson Lyon was subsequently hired as a writer for Saturday Night Live, where he befriended a chubby comic who soon became the program’s most popular performer.  Lyon's involvement in the cocaine and heroin-fueled orgy that killed his portly pal, John Belushi, on March 5, 1982, resulted in him being blacklisted by the film and television industry.  He died in 2012, the same year that Norfolk's evolving Loew's Theater, now owned and operated by a local community college, commemorated its rich cinematic history - and the law of diminishing returns - by screening Michel Hazanavicius' genteel silent film The Artist (2012).  As with Manhattan, it's a different town now.

Also reviewed for this edition of ecco:  El Vampiro Negro (1953), It Follows (2015), and Return From the Ashes (1965).  Added to the archive is Freeway (1996).

Rather than recoil, as a sane person would, from the ubiquitous lists of "highlights" at year's end, I've done my own.  If nothing else, "best of" lists reveal their authors' taste and perspective so readers can either take further notice or run screaming.  Lists also draw attention to deserving films that may have escaped prior consideration, although one of the following opened at 771 screens in the U.S. and has so far amassed over $24 million worldwide.

It's a good thing that Richard Linklater's Boyhood found an appreciative crossover audience.  Some on my list have yet to - and may never - find U.S. distribution, unlike, say, Horrible Bosses 2, which has grossed (pun intended) nearly $49 million as of this writing.

Not included in the list but among the best I saw this year are these short films, in alphabetical order:  Glistening Thrills and New Fancy Foils (both Jodie Mack); Journey To The East (Tsai Ming Liang); The pimp and his trophies (Antoinette Zwirchmayr); Red Capriccio (Blake Williams); Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (Margaret Honda); Twelve Told Tales (Johann Lurf); and Under The Atmosphere (Mike Stoltz).

The features I liked this year, in order of preference.

1.  Ida - Dir: Pawel Pawlikowski.  To my mind, no other film in 2014 came as close to perfection as this portrait of postwar Poland in the 1960s as seen through the grim enlightenment of a young Catholic novice (Agata Kulesza) about the secrets of her - and Europe's - grievous past.  The stark black and white compositions from cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal are stunning, and the screenplay by director Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz eschews all bombast and sentimentality.

2.  Goodbye To Language 3D - Dir: Jean-Luc Godard.  With copious jump-cuts in both image and soundtrack, Goodbye To Language 3D is easily the most ADD-affected film of the year. Its parallel narratives, however slender, are threaded together through frequent appearances by Roxy Miéville, who happens to be the octogenarian filmmaker's mixed-breed canine.  The 3D technology, developed especially for this film, takes an impoverished gimmick to new levels as it explores flora and fauna, naked human bodies, Mary Shelley, Roxy's sniffing snout, and both old and new modes of communication.  Accompanying this visual mayhem are the works of Beethoven, Sibelius and others, as well as the voice of Godard recycling centuries of philosophy and literature.  You'll be reeling for days from its scant 70 minutes.

3.  Jauja - Dir: Lisandro Alonso.  A beautifully realized puzzle of a film, Jauja asks questions that are unanswerable to its creator, much less any viewer who attempts to corral its narrative. Though the screenplay by poet Fabian Casas and director Alonso is based on the real-life massacre of the indigenous people of Patagonia by Argentine troops in the late nineteenth century, Jauja inserts a melancholy Danish cavalry officer (Viggo Mortensen) and his somber young daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) into a surrealist's Heart of  Darkness.

4.  Boyhood - Dir: Richard Linklater. Though not the first film to span a fictional character's life over the course of real time (for example, see Marco Bellocchio's Sorelle Mai from 2010), Richard Linklater's coming-of-age tale, which tracks thirteen years of its young protagonist's childhood and adolescence, pulses with the popular culture that reflected and influenced American life of the early twenty-first century.  Young Mason's quest for purpose will be studied, perhaps fruitlessly, by the automatons who will one day replace us.

5.  Phoenix - Dir: Christian Petzold.  Using as their basis the macabre 1963 French novel Le Retour des Cendres by Hubert Monteilhet, director Petzold and the late filmmaker Harun Farocki conjured a delirious screenplay that probes the post-WWII German psyche through evocations of Georges Franju's clinical horrors and the matriarchal melodramas of Douglas Sirk.  With the most satisfying conclusion of any film I saw all year, Phoenix is a worthy successor to Petzold's arthouse hit Barbara (2012) and a work to be savored by filmgoers of all stripes.

6.  Child's Pose - Dir: Calin Peter Netzer.  The so-named Romanian New Wave reached another high note with Netzer's portrait of a wealthy, domineering matriarch intent on saving her  capricious son from a prison sentence for driving drunk and killing the child of an impoverished  family.  Veteran actress Luminita Gheorghiu is chilling as the suffocating mother whose clashes  with the police and the victim's grieving parents lay bare the expectations of the privileged in a  society rife with corruption.

7.  L'il Quinquin - Dir: Bruno Dumont.  Made for French television as a mini-series, L'il Quinquin finds director Dumont satirizing a Bruno Dumont film.  The four fifty-minute broadcast episodes  that constitute the feature version combine the baffling existentialism of Dumont's more
somber works with caustic black humor that targets small-town paranoia and provincial racism.  As the police investigation into a series of gruesome murders unfolds, tic-laden lead inspector Commandant Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) meets his match in the titular delinquent Quinquin (Alane Delhaye), a chubby ragamuffin with an eternal smirk and a taste for mischief.  

8.  Silvered Water: Syria Self-Portrait - Dir: Wiam Simav Bedirxan, Ossama Mohammed.  One of  two documentaries in my top ten, Silvered Water is a harrowing compilation of cellphone videos  and web downloads that puts the viewer in the midst of the Syrian civil war.  At times sickening in its graphic depiction of torture, mutilation, and death, Silvered Water somehow coalesces these disparate fragments of video, some so pixilated that they court abstraction, into a cine-poem of disquieting beauty.  Narrated by Mohammed, a Syrian filmmaker now exiled in Paris, Silvered Water (titled after the translated name of its co-director, fearless activist Bedirxan) transcends the banality of the 24-hour news cycle and its endless talking heads.  It's often difficult to watch, but even harder to forget.

9.  What Now? Remind Me - Dir: Joaquim Pinto.  My other documentary choice is a cine-journal by  filmmaker Joaquim Pinto, a sound engineer for Manoel de Oliveira and the late Raoul Ruiz, who has lived with HIV for over twenty years.  This beguiling cinematic diary, nearly three hours long, follows the lives of Pinto, his partner Nuno, and their four dogs in a rural Portuguese village.  We see Pinto visit old friends and recall those lost to AIDS.  He ruminates on the nature of viruses and endures the harsh effects of experimental drugs.  But What Now? Remind Me is not only about the challenges of living with HIV; it's also a meditation on the pleasures of a quotidian life, captured in their everyday majesty by Pinto's watchful lens.

10.  Listen Up Philip - Dir: Alex Ross Perry.  A dark comedy featuring a bitter, self-obsessed  asshole of a novelist (Jason Schwartzman) as its focus doesn't sound inviting, but Listen Up Philip is a savagely funny jab at the New York literary scene and an off-handed evocation of reclusive author Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint) in particular. The trail of destruction that obnoxious, antisocial Philip Lewis Friedman plows through his personal and professional relationships will make you cringe, but Listen Up Philip triumphs through director Perry's sharp, acerbic script and inspired performances from Schwartzman, Jonathan Pryce as a dour, middle-aged novelist/mentor, and Elizabeth Moss as Philip's maligned girlfriend.

Runners Up (in alphabetical order):  The Babadook (Jennifer Kent); La Camioneta (Mark Kendall); Heaven Knows What (Ben & Joshua Safdie); Horse Money (Pedro Costa); Ilo Ilo (Anthony Chen); Letters To Max (Eric Baudelaire); The Look Of Silence (Joshua Oppenheimer); The Princess Of France (Matías Piñeiro); Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne); and We Are The Best! (Lukas Moodysson).

TIFF 2014 continued the string of strong, female-centric films with Céline Sciamma's Girlhood, which tracks the empowerment of its sixteen-year-old protagonist through her indoctrination into a tough girl gang.  Quiet, circumspect Marieme (Karidja Touré), confined with her family in cramped public housing on the outskirts of Paris, is despondent upon learning that she has failed high school.  After a shaky encounter with three aggressively confident girls, she is welcomed as a new member of their defiant clique and rechristened "Vic," as in "victor."  The girls' sisterly bonding helps them navigate a world where privilege lies in strength.  Together they extort lunch money, shoplift clothes, rent hotel rooms for parties, and fight other girls for domination.  When not roaming Parisian shopping malls or holding court in barren concrete plazas with her gal pals, Marieme surreptitiously courts Ismael (Idrissa Diabate), a soft-spoken friend of her abusive older brother, and attempts to shield her younger sister from the hardships and humiliations she endures on a daily basis.  Sciamma gets the most from her amateur cast, most notably in a career-making performance from Touré.  Cinematographer Crystel Fournier's compositions are as dynamic as the film's volatile subjects, never more so than in one inspired scene in which the girls, swathed in stolen evening gowns still adorned with security tags, lip-synch and dance to a Beyoncé pop hit. Though the film's final quarter unconvincingly shifts into The Wire territory, Girlhood is a beautifully acted, visually assured portrayal of an ambitious young woman's attempt to rise above the pervasive, soul-crushing indifference of her hard-bitten environs.

The festival's "City to City" spotlight, this year focusing on Seoul, presented another tale of a troubled teen.  A Girl At My Door is the promising but flawed debut feature of Lee Chang-Dong protégé Judy Jung.  Bae Doona (The Host) stars as Young-nam, a scandalized law officer transferred from her swank station in Seoul to serve as police chief for an impoverished coastal town.  There she meets Yong-ha (Song Sae Byuk), a brutish, alcoholic fishing boat magnate who happens to be the town's primary supplier of jobs.  Upon witnessing the drunken lout beating his thirteen-year-old step-daughter Dohee (Sae-ron Kim), Young-nam tumbles headfirst into a dysfunctional family drama she finds increasingly difficult to escape.  Though suffused with artful compositions by cinematographer Hyun Seok Kim from Chang-Dong's films, A  Girl At My Door strains from the overabundance of topical issues that writer/director Jung has stuffed into its two-hour running time.  Along with alcoholism, intolerance, child abuse, and police corruption, we're also served up the plight of undocumented workers.  At times the message overwhelms the dramatic context.  For instance, most viewers will find it difficult to consider Young-nam's "scandal" a career deterrent in modern-day Seoul; instead, it appears to exist merely to provide an element of conflict for Jung's tale to pivot around during its final stretch.  Although the script meanders, Jung's visual acuity and assured direction of her cast - most notably Kim, the same age as the character she portrays - bodes well for future projects.

According his critically acclaimed filmography, prolific festival favorite Hong Sang-soo's latest was shown not as part of "City to City" but in the "Masters" program, despite its Seoul setting.  Hill Of Freedom continues Hong's droll dissection of the manners and mores of South Korea's adult middle class, particularly the capricious behavior of men (often, stand-ins for the director himself), a thematic constancy that has led some critics to claim that he's continually remaking the same film. This view overlooks the subtle shifts of emphasis that make each of his works a discrete experience.  Hill Of Freedom, though unquestionably a Hong film, deviates from the pattern by foregrounding the humor.  The agreeable result is his all-out funniest feature yet.  Mori (Kase Ryo), an unemployed language instructor from Japan, arrives in Seoul with hopes of rekindling his bygone romance with former co-worker Kwon (Seo Young-hwa), to whom he has sent a packet of letters that has gone unanswered.  Mori speaks little Korean, so his conversations in Seoul are awkwardly conducted in English.  Moreover, his episodic adventures are related out of sequence, and, in one segment, with alternative outcomes.  Hong indulges his usual fondness for depicting characters in drunken bouts of soju-soaked conversation, which further amplifies the role of miscommunication established by Mori's language impediment.  In one squirm-inducing scene, Mori trades barbed Japanese vs. Korean stereotypes with his middle-aged landlady (Yeo-jeong Yoon from 2010's The Housemaid), neither seemingly aware of how offensive the other construes their remarks.  The character of Mori is an inspired comic invention, inert yet always the center of attention; the film swirls about him like water circles a drain.  Though it lacks the bite of the director's best work, The Power Of Kangwon Province (1998) and Woman On The Beach (2006), Hill Of Freedom would well serve the curious neophyte as a tasty introduction to Hong's slyly sardonic ouevre.

The "Masters" program was also home to Jean-Luc Godard's latest, Goodbye To Language 3-D, which might have been screened in the "Wavelengths" category were it not made by the 83-year-old iconoclast who walked away with the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes festival.  As with other post-eighties Godard films, there is only the faintest trace of a linear story.  What exists seems to be some sort of love triangle plus an award-winning dog, but this minuscule framework counts for little.  Instead, Godard replaces narrative with visual and verbal cues that reference art, philosophy, poetry, and nature.  Character dialog, narration, and Godard's beloved intertitles (now, floating in your face) either paraphrase or directly quote his many literary influences, with the potentiality of interpreting (or re-interpreting) the barrage of visual quotations.  For a film titled to suggest the demise of language, there's no shortage of communication during its brief 70 minutes.  An ambitious list by Ted Fendt tracks most of the literary and cinematic references cited in Goodbye To Language 3-D.  The decision for Godard to film in 3-D may seem strange (and this follows a 3-D short he contributed to an omnibus film), but he brings to what is typically a gimmick of disposable entertainment the suggestion of new potential.  The depth perception is phenomenal, including but not limited to the often-cited sequence in which the right and left eyes witness a different scene. As you might imagine from Fendt's imposing list of references, Goodbye To Language 3-D demands multiple viewings to savor its complexities.  I was only able to catch a single showing at TIFF, which alone constitutes sensorial overload, so let me refer you to David Bordwell's excellent analysis so we can both begin digging.  Goodbye To Language 3-D will be in theaters later this fall, and on Blu-ray 3-D in early 2015.

Also shown in the "Masters" category was Timbuktu, the latest from Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako.  The director's previous work, Bamako (2006), took western culture, specifically the IMF and the World Bank, to task for the exploitation of Africa.  Timbuktu traces the fate of one small community in Northern Mali when another group of exploiters, an armed band of Islamic fundamentalists, arrive and impose draconian sharia law on the populace.  Among their victims is the family of Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), a cattle herder who runs afoul of the extremists.  A filmmaker acutely attuned to beauty (as those who have seen 1992's Waiting For Happiness can attest), Sissako summarizes his theme in an early scene in which the fanatics callously splinter apart Malian sculpture with their automatic weapons.  All that a culture creates to celebrate and exalt human experience - art, music, dance - are forbidden, with brutal punishment meted out to those who disobey.  When not oppressing the villagers, the zealots lust after the local women, whether single or not, and clandestinely argue about teams whose sports their laws have banned. Sissako's message is clear: under the tyranny of those who do not cherish it, beauty will cease to exist.  Timbuktu itself would be a likely target for reasons aside from its graceful compositions from cinematographer Sofian El Fani (2013's Blue Is The Warmest Color) and sensual score by Amin Bouhafa.  With poetry, compassion, and nary a hyper-ventilating Hollywood actor in sight, Timbuktu observes both the scourge of fundamentalist intolerance and the courage of people who refuse to be subjugated.

A critic once cited the long opening scene in Bruno Dumont's dour second feature Humanité (1999) as an unintended parody of art film formalism.  With his four-part French television mini-series P'tit Quinquin, now a 200-minute feature entitled Li'l Quinquin, Dumont has reimagined the earlier film as a dark comedy.  It's not unlike what you'd get if Inspector Clouseau, not Special Agent Dale Cooper, had been assigned the Twin Peaks investigation.  When a dead cow stuffed with human remains is discovered in a rustic seaside village in northern France, rumpled, eccentric Commandant Van der Weyden (Bernard Pruvost) and his earnest partner, Lieutenant Carpentier (Philippe Jore) set out to find the culprit.  As the murders mount, the detectives gradually discover unsavory connections among the victims.  They also uncover the dark heart of the racist, xenophobic locals who react to their investigation with disdain.  The latter are exemplified by the title character, a ten-year-old terror with an omnipresent sneer and little regard for authority. When not harassing immigrant kids or throwing firecrackers at tourists, Quinquin (Alane Delhaye) and his pals pursue the police procedural with ghoulish glee.  With Li'l Quinquin, Dumont reintroduces themes from his first two features, La vie de Jésus (1997) and Humanité, with broad humor, particularly in the physical comedy of Pruvost's tic-laden performance as a police inspector of many unusual postures.  As in his dramas, the director wrings fine performances from a livelier than usual amateur cast of locals.  Few would have expected this comedy from Dumont, and even fewer would have imagined that it would be among his best.

Though not as unexpected as the Dumont comedy, the sublime Journey To The West (NOT the Stephen Chow film), Tsai Ming-liang's latest installation in his "Walker" series, is more amazing cinema from the filmmaker whose previous feature, Stray Dogs, was one of the highlights of last year's TIFF but was rumored to be his last.  As in the previous "Walker" films, Tsai's lead actor Lee Kang-sheng portrays a crimson-robed monk who walks so slowly that his movements are nearly imperceptible.  For this western journey, the monk traverses through the cityscape of Marseilles and is joined in several scenes by an acolyte (Dennis Lavant from Leos Carax films) who attempts to duplicate the master's snail-like loco motion.  One of many highlights is a scene filmed in a staircase leading to the underground train station:  as Lee descends the stairs, haloed by sunlight flooding the entryway, residents of Marseilles react to his ghostly visage on their way to or from the station below.  Tsai teases the viewer in several scenes which begin without the monk in sight, encouraging viewers to search for him in the crowds, a la "Where's Waldo."  In other scenes, we glimpse Lee through windows as he ever so slowly glides across the background.  The effect is the antithesis of most contemporary films, which hold inaction in suspicion and offer as audience payoff only more frenetic hustle and bustle.  With a brief run time of 56 minutes, the serene grace of Journey To The West was a welcome balm to frazzled festival goers.

Tsai's film exists in a separate world from Jalmari Helander's splashy action film Big Game, which was screened in the "Midnight Madness" category.  The premise:  a thirteen-year-old boy (Onni Tommilla) is fatefully tasked with protecting the President of the United States (Samuel L. Jackson) against a heavily armed terrorist group tracking him across the mountains of Finland.  As an admirer of Helander's inventive horror fantasy Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010), I had big hopes for Big Game.  Sadly, it's a better match for meager expectations.  With a budget nearly five times the earlier film's, Big Game has lots of CGI, explosions, and marquee movie stars (Jackson, Felicity Huffman, Jim Broadbent), but none of the quirky charm of its predecessor.  In his initial appearance, Jackson has fun in a role meant to suggest the current commander in chief (declining poll numbers, a health-obsessed wife), but the satire is abandoned once Big Game kicks into action movie overdrive and the multiple attacks and narrow escapes lunge towards tedium.  The film closes with a revelation of treachery that may delight those who obsess over conspiracies about an earlier, ill-fated American president, but by then Big Game has already fizzled as an action spectacle, a coming-of-age tale, and a movie.

Yet another "Midnight Madness" disappointment, Jonas Govaerts' Cub sure sounded good on paper: Belgian cub scout troop camping in a remote wooded area is preyed upon by a feral child called Kai who sets brutal traps for his unsuspecting victims.  Lord Of The Flies meets Deliverance in Bruno Bettelheim's cabin at Camp Crystal Lake.  Ah, if only!  Instead, Cub squanders an intriguing premise along with its tantalizing initial half-hour to morph into yet another Euro neo-slasher film, signaled by the appearance of an immense adult boogeyman who orchestrates the carnage from a secret underground lair.  The killer's "traps" are fanciful, fairly ridiculous creations that recall the inventions of Rube Goldberg, particularly one risible contraption involving an arrow and a hornet's nest that had the audience cackling hysterically.  (Following the screening, a bemused Govaerts pondered the laughter inspired by scenes he intended to be terrifying.)  The assured performance of young actor Maurice Luijten as the black sheep of the scouting group constitutes most of what little impresses about Cub.  There's also Kai's mask, a totemic creation of tree bark that cannily evokes primal terror.  Less successful are the one-note characterizations of the doomed troop and several especially hard-to-swallow plot twists near the conclusion.  In introducing his film, former scout Govaerts offered Cub as a corrective to Sleepaway Camp (1983), but it's neither as daring or entertaining as that nasty little number. 

The violence briefly glimpsed in Pedro Costa's Horse Money is not of Cub's escapist variety.  The supposedly final feature in Costa's Fontainhas series about the demolition of a blue-collar neighborhood in Portugal once populated by immigrants from Cape Verde, Horse Money tracks the real or imagined terrors of palsied construction worker Ventura, the series' suffering patriarch, as he recalls an attack by soldiers and his time spent in what must be the world's scariest-looking hospital.  There he encounters Vitalina (Vitalina Varela), who has arrived in Portugal too late for her husband's funeral (although Ventura claims the man's still alive).  As the two speak of displacement from within empty hospital corridors or dilapidated factories, we seem to be watching ghosts revisiting the realms of their darkest trials.  Horse Money approaches the surreal in an oddly disturbing scene inside an elevator as Ventura is tormented by disembodied voices of self-doubt while under the watch of a living toy soldier.  In a standout interlude, Ventura's former Fontainhas neighbors are framed in tableaux vivants as a yearning folk melody caresses the lustrous imagery. The rich cinematography of Leonardo Simões, who previously shot Colossal Youth for Costa, suggests that he spends time in museums with the Old Masters.  The film's distinctive look heightens its disquieting aura; in the nightmarish realm of Horse Money, there's no clear distinction between its characters' physical and psychological worlds.  One can never be certain if the darkness from which a figure emerges is the memory of an actual place or the depths of the subconscious, as both cast the same cruel shadow on the present.  Horse Money, the darkest but most visually striking of the Fontainhas films, is haunted by the impact of Portugal's 1974 "Carnation Revolution" on its immigrant communities, but also casts an eye at the struggles of the dispossessed everywhere.


For anyone who seriously loves moviegoing, it's always a joy to discover a fresh approach or a new experience.  There's no shortage of buzz when a legend from yesteryear turns out a game changer such as Goodbye To Language 3D, but innovative work from lesser-known filmmakers is often overlooked.  A half-capacity audience turned up at the Art Gallery of Ontario's Jackman Hall for Eric Baudelaire's Letters To Max, which proved to be a loss for those who didn't take a chance on this formally inventive, impossible to classify, sort-of-documentary.  The project was initiated when Baudelaire, who was photographing locations in the unrecognized country of Abkhazia, befriended its affable Foreign Minister, Maxim Guinjua.  Years later, Baudelaire conceived of an art project in which he'd send letters to Guinjua (nicknamed "Max"), which would be returned to him because there is no international mail exchange with Abkhazia.  He'd then display the returned letters as "a sculpture."  His plans changed when Max actually received the letters and the idea for the film took root.  Its framework is simple but clever:  the text of Baudelaire's letters to Max appears superimposed over footage shot in Abkhazia while Max reads his responses in English on the soundtrack.  Over the course of the film, Baudelaire moves from friendly queries to difficult questions about Abkhazia's secession from Georgia, which Max either sidesteps or spins with diplomatic aplomb.  He offers sympathy for banished Georgians and defends his country's embrace of Russia, which officially recognized Abkhazia as a country in 2008.  During the Q&A, Baudelaire observed that his film is by conception one-sided: it's all from the perspective of Max.  No Georgians are interviewed to present an alternative view of the bloody civil war and the following ethnic purge.  Instead, we are treated to (almost) unflappable Abkhazian diplomacy courtesy of the mercurial Max.  Though its subject matter apparently lacks the whiff of dramatic potential that tends to attract overflow festival audiences, Letters To Max is an unexpectedly appealing account of an unusual correspondence that incisively questions the role of communication on both a personal and global scale.  Along with Godard's film and Jauja, it was one of TIFF's freshest offerings.

One of the perks of TIFF is the festival's annual Cinematheque series, which screens a half-dozen or so world classics, most often as newly struck prints, for free.  Though I was unable to fit John Paizs' hard-to-see Crime Wave (1985) into my schedule, I did manage to catch the restoration by the China Film Archive of Wu Yonggang's silent classic The Goddess (1934) starring Ruan Ling-yu. Called China's answer to Greta Garbo, Ruan appeared in sixteen films during her short career.  In The Goddess, she stars as the title character, a young widow of the Shanghai slums who prostitutes herself to support her toddler son.  Her efforts at paving his way to a better life are thwarted by "The Boss," a heavy-set gambler who sees her as a means of financing his indolent lifestyle.  But he's not her only problem.  Once the sanctimonious administrators at the boy's school learn how she earns his tuition, the inexorable chain of events leading to the Goddess' downfall are set in motion.  Wu Yonggang's progressive screenplay eschews moralistic judgment of Ruan's character, instead opting for a more contemporary view of prostitution.  His actors also avoid the stagy hand-wringing of much silent cinema; particularly Ruan, whose expressive face subtly conveys the hopes and desperation of her saintly whore.  With this film his directorial debut, Wu Yonggang enjoyed a long career in the Chinese film industry until his death at age 75 in 1982.  Not so for Ruan Ling-yu.  In his introduction to the TIFF screening of The Goddess, San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Noah Cowan noted how the film's grievous conclusion mirrors the actual circumstances of its star, who, upon being accused of seducing a wealthy industrialist, committed suicide at age 24.  She left behind a brief but impressive resumé and the following handwritten note: "Gossip is a fearful thing."

Abel Ferrara follows up his contentious Cannes spitball Welcome To New York (2014) with an ambitious biopic of the late Italian filmmaker, poet, and critic Pier Paolo Pasolini.  With Willem Dafoe roundly nailing the look and mannerisms of its subject, Pasolini traces the last several days of one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century.  Ferrara leans on Pasolini's writings, a few of his favorite actors (Ninetto Davoli, Adriana Asti), and even the man's own clothing to create his interpretation of an enigmatic figure to whom he probably utters nightly devotions.  Segments from Pasolini's complex, unfinished novel "Petrolio" are dramatized, as is his unfinished script for Porno-Teo-Kolossal, slated to be the follow-up to his notorious last film Salo, The 120 Days Of Sodom.  But despite the filmmaker's meticulous attention to detail, Pasolini the film is curiously flat.  Part of the problem is Ferrara's decision to have his actors speak English, which no doubt aided Dafoe but forces the Italian cast members to clumsily mouth a foreign language.  The result recalls the English-speaking Italy of such dowdy studio films as Melvin Frank's Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968).  Equally underwhelming are the scenes Ferrara reconstructed from Pasolini's tape-recorded screenplay for Porno-Teo-Kolossal, which not only fail to approach Pasolini's visual style but are downright cheesy-looking.  During production, Ferrara tantalized interviewers by suggesting that he was to reveal new information about Pasolini's murder.  After casting such tempting bait, he shrugs off the conspiracy theories for the consensus view that the filmmaker was killed by blue-collar homophobes, not exactly breaking news.  The depiction of the murder itself is as inert as the 75 minutes that precede it.  For a filmmaker as intuitive and daring as Ferrara, it's disappointing that the most riveting moments are provided by the segments from an actual Pasolini film that unreel in the background during the opening interview sequence.  They're from Salo, The 120 Days Of Sodom, which I don't need to ever watch again.

Anyone who's ever winced through the notorious underground tape featuring the late Buddy Rich will understand the central conflict in Damien Chazelle's flashy Whiplash:  established older musician verbally abuses his proteges.  This time the abuse is tainted with homophobia and cruel observations about the students' loved ones, and maneuvers from shouted harangues into violence. Talented and ambitious young drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) is chosen from the ranks of a fictitious New York music school, purportedly modeled after Boston's Berklee, to join the band assembled by jazz conservatory instructor Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons).  A Marine drill sergeant of a music teacher, Fletcher employs the old jazz chestnut about "Philly" Joe Jones hurling a cymbal at the young Charlie Parker after the younger man hit the wrong note as a justification for insulting, cajoling, and physically abusing his terrified students to purportedly inspire them to greater achievement.  Both Simmons and Teller are excellent in their roles, and the latter earns cudos for actually being the one kicking ass in his tub-slapping scenes.  Cinematographer Sharone Meir and editor Tom Cross deserve credit for the film's syncopated visual flair.  The concluding showdown between Neyman and his nutty professor, a marvel of inventive camera work and kinetic editing, elicited gratified yelps and applause from the Toronto audience.  Much of writer/director Chazelle's script is reportedly drawn from his music school experiences, and the conservatory setting is nothing if not vividly rendered.  But dramatically, Whiplash is as manipulative as its sadistic music instructor, hinging on several questionable plot developments during its home stretch.  And Chazelle stretches the boundaries of credulity to suggest that vanity-driven sociopath Fletcher would tarnish his own highly-guarded reputation to ruin the career of an upstart as payback.  Buddy Rich would know better.

We shift from fictional tyrants to actual tyranny in contemporary Indonesia, where families live in the same neighborhoods, sometimes even next door, to their loved ones' killers.  During the anti-communist purge of 1965-66, an estimated half a million Indonesians were brutally slaughtered by the Indonesian Army, paramilitary groups, and hired thugs, none of whom were ever held accountable for their crimes.  Joshua Oppenheimer's 2012 documentary The Act Of Killing features interviews with a motley assortment of these killers, who openly brag about torturing, raping, and butchering their victims, and in the context of making a film happily reenact their methods of interrogation and murder.  His follow-up, The Look Of Silence, revisits the killings from the perspective of the victims.  Middle-aged Adi, a door-to-door optometrist, uses the pretext of eye examinations to confront the men who slaughtered his older brother.  Their awed reaction is unrepentant, angry, and threatening.  Oppenheimer cuts from these tense confrontations to scenes of Adi's domestic life with his wife and young daughter, and to his frail, elderly parents. Aware that the killers could still strike with impunity, the family reacts with fear when Adi reveals to them his mission.  And so will viewers.  Though devoid of the surreal shocks of the previous film, The Look Of Silence succeeds as a horrifying exposé of a lingering evil that nonchalantly defies one courageous man's attempt to seek justice and reconciliation.  Oppenheimer's documentaries have been criticized - unfairly, I think - for not exploring the complicity of Western governments in the purge, such as the CIA's role in assisting the Indonesian Army in preparing lists of targeted names. It's a topic that deserves its own film.

Syrian filmmakers Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan's Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait employs amateur cellphone video downloaded from YouTube along with Mohammad and Bedirxan's own video work to reveal the struggle of the Syrian resistance against dictator Bashir al-Assad.  Exiled in Paris, veteran filmmaker Mohammad assembled the film while corresponding with Bedirxan, a Kurdish freedom fighter whose bravery in taping the battle-torn streets of Homs resulted in scenes of pulse-quickening immediacy.  Her life on the line, Bedirxan becomes the audience surrogate for a hellish tour of the no-man's-land that is now Syria.  The downloaded clips that provide the film with its "Self-Portrait" subtitle were taped by both the resistance and the oppressors, with video from the latter gleefully displaying shocking brutality against prisoners.  The central atrocity is the fate of one teenage boy, who is seen being beaten by his captors and whose subsequent outcome is grimly recounted.  Gruesome images of death and mutilation are difficult to endure, as are the agonized cries of a burned kitten that Bedirxan encounters on the street.  Countering its horrific content, Silvered Water, Syria Self Portrait is filtered through Mohammad's reflective, poetic perspective and given visual expression by the images of amateur video that abruptly burst into Brakhage-like abstractions of light.  These elegiac expressions elevate the film beyond routine documentary while simultaneously delivering to Western viewers a more nuanced insight into the Syrian tragedy than can be gleaned from our facile 24/7 news cycle.  The complex allegiances and oppositions within the struggle are acknowledged as Bedirxan laments that a makeshift school she established for girls inside a bombed building was abruptly closed by reactionary resistance members.  "Is our revolution eating itself?," she wonders.   What little hope exists is personified by a young boy shown wandering the rubble-strewn streets of Homs, innocently oblivious to the horrors surrounding him.

No dire world events sweep Quebec filmmaker Stéphane Lafleur's Tu Dors Nicole, a magical realist coming-of-age story about a young woman mired in the difficult space between carefree girlhood and the world of adult responsibility.  That she's already in her twenties, still living with her parents, and with no clear direction for moving forward makes Lafleur's film a bittersweet homage to post-adolescent cellar dwellers everywhere.  With her parents on an extended vacation, Nicole (Julianne Côté) and her older brother Remi (Marc-André Grondin) testily share the household, she with insomniac wanderings through their oddly unorthodox suburban neighborhood and he by converting the family living room into a practice space for his indie rock band.  When not plotting exotic vacations with her friend Veronique (Catherine St-Laurent), Nicole punches the clock at a Goodwill-type thrift shop from which she regularly pilfers the donated clothing because "they don't pay for it."  She's pursued by Martin (Godefroy Reding), a lovestruck ten-year-old with an impossibly deep voice who attempts to seduce her with poetic pillow talk that would rival the Pepé Le Pew playbook.  Television vet Côté is convincing as the film's idle protagonist, a comic character for whom life offers little but a string of defeats.  When Nicole addresses her Downs syndrome co-workers as "retards," the tables are turned as she becomes the object of their derision.  Later, a romantic possibility devolves into a humiliating revelation that leads to a final visual in-joke for viewers paying attention.  Featuring striking black and white cinematography from Lafleur regular Sara Mishara, Tu Dors Nicole often resembles a Quebecois version of Fernando Eimbcke's (2004's Duck Season) quirky, introspective dramadies.  Shoehorned into a program loaded with films about global barbarism, it was a welcome respite.

Over the course of 27 years, brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have crafted nine feature films that chart what Professor Philip Mosley of Pennsylvania State University has dubbed "responsible realism."  Like most of their previous films, Two Days, One Night revolves around a difficult moral choice faced by an individual in a desperate situation.  Sandra (Marion Cotillard), a working mother whose supportive husband Manu (Farbrizio Rongione) labors at a fast food restaurant, learns that she will lose her factory job if she cannot convince her co-workers to forego their annual bonus in favor of keeping her on the payroll by casting votes in a management-mandated election.  The stakes are high: without her salary, the family will lose their flat and be forced to live in public housing.  Within the title's allotted timespan, Sandra must convince each of her co-workers to weigh her needs over their own.  Oscar-winner Cotillard turns in her most subtle performance so far, surpassing her fine work in Jacques Audiard's 2012 Rust And Bone.  As usual, the remaining cast is composed of Dardenne regulars and first-timers.  All reflect the skill with which Luc and Jean-Pierre coax fine, true-to-life performances from their actors.  Following its Cannes debut were rumblings that Two Days, One Night falls short of the standards that one anticipates from the Dardennes.  Though it may seem modest when compared with their previous The Kid With A Bike (2013), Two Days, One Night is more essential viewing from two of the world's greatest living filmmakers.

Yet another living master and among the most literary of filmmakers, Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira was represented with his latest, the nineteen-minute The Old Man Of Belém.  The "old man" of the title is fourteenth century Portuguese writer Luís Vaz de Camões, author of the epic, nationalist poem Os Lusíadas.  In de Oliveira's fantasy, de Camões discusses Portuguese history and literature with nineteenth century writer Camilo Castelo Branco, twentieth-century poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, and Miguel de Cervantes' fictional character Don Quixote in an imagined Garden of Eternity (actually, a park bench outside de Oliveira's residence).  The writers' grand philosophizing is interspersed with fantasy images that spring from their commentary, footage from previous de Oliveira films, and clips of windmill tilting from Don Kikhot (1957) by Leningrad filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev.  As inscrutable as ever, the 105-year-old de Oliveira seems to be capping off his storied career by looking back at his literary sources and their role not only in shaping his films but in defining his country's soul.  

Following de Oliveira's film was a different take on de Camões by Lisbon-based filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes, whose work has been described as "post-colonial cinema."  Veering wildly from Oliveira's pedantic homage, the twenty-four minute Taprobana is a scatological comedy in which de Camões sucks down opium and engages in coprophagic sex with his mistress Dinamene in the jungles of Sri Lanka, crafts his masterwork Os Lusíadas in imitation of Homer, is captured by bounty hunters, loses Dinamene when they are shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta (here peopled by the naked nymphs of his epic poem), and ultimately faces eternal judgment from the gods of poetry on Mount Olympus.  The outrageous sight gags do little to conceal Abrantes' scornful swipe at Portuguese nationalism and its literary enablers.

The de Oliveira and Abrantes films were preceded by the debut from Joana Pimenta of Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.  The Figures Carved into the Knife by the Sap of the Banana Trees, sixteen minutes in length but surely the longest title at this year's TIFF, also casts an eye at Portuguese empire-building.  The title may be an allegorical allusion to the subjective nature of remembrance, but Pimenta, who describes her film as  existing "between a fictional colonial memory and science fiction," provides no easy answers.  Over images of postcards mailed back and forth between the Portuguese colony of Madeira and the former colony of Mozambique, a somber-sounding narrator recites a possibly fictitious traveler's sensorial recollections.  But the travelog-pretty imagery is infected by the hidden legacy of colonial rule, the Mozambique struggle for independence, and the subsequent years of bloody civil war.

Like a perplexing puzzle, Lisandro Alonzo's historical brain-fuck Jauja (pronounced "how-ka") pulls viewers into its seductive realm only to leave them grasping for stability by a narrative that shifts its perspective at its most dramatic juncture.  Viggo Mortensen stars as Gunnar Dinesen, a Danish officer assigned to assist the Argentine army in the 1882 attempt to eradicate the native peoples from the mountains and deserts of Patagonia.  The soldiers are a crude, superstitious lot who speak of Jauja, a mythical land of magic that supposedly lies across the Patagonian desert.  They also lust after Dinesen's young daughter Ingeborg (Villbjork Agger Malling), a slow-talking beauty who pines for a dog.  The squadron is put on alert by the astounding news that one of the Argentine soldiers, Zuluaga, has joined the natives and is leading savage raids against his former compatriots while disguised as a woman.  When Ingeborg runs away from the safety of the camp with a young soldier, Dineson sets out on his own across the desert to find her.  With Zuluaga its surrogate Kurtz, Jauja now has a corresponding Marlow to probe the limits of human perception.  Suggesting the look of aged tintypes and vintage Hollywood horse operas, cinematographer Timo Salmonen (from Aki Kaurismaki films) shot in full-frame without a matte, leaving the corners rounded.  This low-fi approach dramatically reshapes Alonzo's typically wide-angle compositions, giving Jauja a look unlike any recent film.  One standout scene has Mortensen's exhausted character stretching out atop a craggy butte in the desert and gazing up in wonder at the starry sky.  During the Q&A following the film, an audience member confessed that he didn't understand the film's final third.  "I don't understand it, either," answered Alonzo, not an admission of failure but an acknowledgement of the impenetrable nature of time and memory.  Among all others at TIFF, Alonzo's cosmic western is the film I'm most anxious to see again.

This is the second of three parts of ecco film and video's coverage of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.  Next installment:  Goodbye to Language, Timbuktu, L'il Quinquin, Journey to the West, and more!

With over 270 feature films - and sixteen programs of featurettes and shorts - stuffed into its eleven days and nights, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF for short) can chew up and spit out the most hardy of cinephiles without a ruffle of its ruby red carpet.  Far be it from me, however, to take the tack of the dyspeptic, put-upon cineaste who wheezes about how s/he endured this never-ending parade of poseurs and their godawful festival films in order to reassure you, a movie lover in Argonne, Wisconsin, that your HBO account and Netflix subscription are all you need.

No, TIFF 2014 was primarily a delight, offering a smorgasbord of digital and celluloid delicacies along with its inevitable non-edibles.  Further, TIFF and similar festivals may be the only option for seeing certain works theatrically, even in major metropolitan areas, now that the distribution of non-mainstream films has been cherry-picked for commercial potential by chains such as Landmark and Angelika or left at the mercy of budget-squeezed college and museum programmers. One admittedly specific example:  Margaret Honda's transcendent Spectrum Reverse Spectrum, made without a camera on 70mm film, exists in only two prints, one of which was screened at TIFF 2014.  There will be no digitized version or additional prints per the filmmaker, so good luck seeing that one no matter where you live.

Opening TIFF 2014 was The Judge from director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers), a courtroom drama starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall.  You can go here if you're interested; I wasn't. My entry to the fest was Olivier Assayas' The Clouds of Sils Maria, which recalls in its skillful juxtapositions of "being" and "acting" the filmmaker's Louis Feuillade tribute, Irma Vep (1996).  The shaky bond between a middle-aged actress (Juliette Binoche, late of Godzilla) and her tech-savvy young assistant (Kristen Stewart) mirrors the characters of a Chekhovian play they testily rehearse about a calculating neophyte in the business world who cruelly usurps the role of her elder supervisor and lover.  Binoche's character once starred as the younger woman but must now portray the victim opposite an up-and-coming enfant terrible (Chloë Grace Moretz).  Assayas has claimed that he wrote the film for Binoche, whose stunning performance rivals her work in Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel 1915 (2013).  Binoche and Stewart's complex characterizations set the stage for a festival filled with notable performances by women, a welcome rejoinder to the two-dimensional female cyphers of contemporary popular cinema. 

Standout performances by German actress Nina Hoss as the disfigured survivor of a Nazi concentration camp and Ronald Zehrfeld as her scheming husband highlight Christian Petzold's neo-noir Phoenix.  At times visually evocative of Hitchcock, Fassbinder, and Franju, the latter in a spooky scene set in a medical clinic, Phoenix was one of TIFF 2014's most tautly crafted thrillers. Written by Petzold with the late filmmaker and theorist Harun Farocki, the melodramatic script is (very) loosely based on the lurid 1961 novel Le retour des cendres by French author Hubert Monteilhet, which was also the source of J. Lee Thompson's near-forgotten Return From The Ashes (1965).  Phoenix transcends these pulpy roots much as its central character must ultimately learn to reject her former life to be reborn like the mythological bird that informs the film's title. It's also capped off with one of the most satisfying conclusions of recent note, earning shouts and applause from the TIFF audience.  Phoenix continues Petzold's fascination with his country's painful past as demonstrated in his international breakthrough Barbara (2012), a cold war drama which also featured both Hoss and Zehrfeld in compelling lead performances.  In fact, Petzold has been scrutinizing the conscience of postwar Germany since his feature film debut The State I Am In (2000).  Phoenix further cements his reputation as the leading light of the Berlin School.

National Gallery is master documentarian Fred Wiseman's latest addition to his lifelong task of capturing the processes behind various institutions, a goal that stretches back to his first feature, the long-banned Titicut Follies (1967).  Nearly three hours in length, National Gallery is Wiseman's behind-the-scenes peek at the National Gallery of London.  Though there is the expected footage of board meetings and other administrative goings-on, much of the film's runtime consists of a gallery viewer's look at exhibits of paintings by the Old Masters, the collection's specialty.  Wiseman's shooting schedule coincided with special exhibits of paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci, Titian, and J.M.W. Turner, all of which are viewed along with their viewers.  In every Wiseman film we learn how institutions function, and National Gallery provides an education in the painstaking processes behind the restoration of delicate oil paintings.  We also learn about the works themselves through the words of museum docents tracked by Wiseman's camera through the galleries.  As a Wiseman film, however, National Gallery is less compelling than recent projects such as Boxing Gym (2010), perhaps because the level of human interest is overwhelmed by the worshipful attention given the artwork.  In one clip, the museum's director stresses to a subordinate how he is unwilling to allow any organization to project images onto the building's facade for fear that such an act would imply endorsement.  Later, a group of protesters hang a banner condemning the petroleum industry over the museum grand entrance, effectively realizing the director's fears.  The absence of an official's feedback on this act seems like a forfeited opportunity.  Wiseman's Q&A following the film proved to be more entertaining than the feature.  At age 84 he sees no need to suffer fools gladly, and offered barbed responses to the audience's typically inane questions.  When asked about his next project, Wiseman replied that he was working on a musical based on Titicut Follies featuring himself as lead performer.

On the other end of the age spectrum, nineteen-year-old Arielle Holmes portrays a barely fictionalized version of herself in Benny and Joshua Safdie's searing Heaven Knows What, a mashup of fiction and cinema verité about young NYC heroin addicts.  The mainlining is real, and occasionally in public places, in this ode to love and dependence filmed on location in vacant lots and fast-food joints.  Based on Holmes' unpublished autobiographical novel "Mad Love in New York City," Heaven Knows What offers an unflinching close-up of life on the street as portrayed by the author, her junkie friends, and a smattering of pros such as Brooklyn rapper Necro.  In the squalor of addiction, homelessness, and desperation, the Safdies find stark beauty in life lived on the edge. They're aided by DoP Sean Price Williams, whose compositions mercifully refrain from the shaky handheld camera that serves as indie shorthand for "real life."  The incendiary script, adapted by the Safdies and filmmaker Ronald Bronstein (2007's Frownland), revolves around the destructive relationship between teen addict Harley (Holmes) and Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), the unloving object of her obsessive love and the dark angel who first introduced her to heroin.  The emotionally aloof Ilya is both the totem of Harley's amour fou and an ambulatory metaphor for the one-sided love affair that is drug dependency.  At times reminiscent of smack forbears Midnight Cowboy and Panic in Needle Park, the low-budget, back-alley aesthetic is within spitting distance of the teen shockers of Larry Clark and Harmony Korine.

Another type of obsessive love is the subject of Peter Strickland's bizarre The Duke of Burgundy, which probes the individual sacrifice inherent in maintaining a monogamous relationship.  That the liaison he depicts is Penthouse Forum kinky gives Strickland room to ruminate about sexual power dynamics while eliciting successive waves of recognition and nervous laughter from his audience. Following a clever title sequence designed to resemble the credits of an arty seventies' softcore porn film, The Duke of Burgundy introduces matriarchal Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), an affluent lepidopterist whose collection of pinned and preserved subjects provides the film with its title (FYI: it's a sub-family of butterfly).  When not reading or writing about insects, Cynthia inflicts on her young maid Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna) punishments of an increasingly severe sexual nature in return for the slightest infraction.  But all is not as it initially seems in the penis-free world of The Duke of Burgundy, and therein resides the rub.  Writer-director Strickland furthers his interest in using sound to vividly conjure unseen actions as in his previous film, Berberian Sound Studio (2012), particularly with scenes in which descriptive noises involving a specific sadomasochistic act are heard behind a bathroom door.  But despite its old-school kinkiness, the film is never as explicit as its subject suggests.  During a Q&A after the screening, Strickland admitted that he had initially planned to remake Jesús Franco's La comtesse perverse (1974), but realized early in planning that one version was enough (though Franco alum Monica Swinn does turn up in a minor role).  He subsequently presented a CD featuring field recordings of cricket chirps to one lucky audience member, and confessed that he hoped that the film's title would lure unsuspecting viewers expecting a BBC-type historical drama.  They, too, may have found the film clever, alluring, and unexpectedly poignant, providing their willingness to immerse themselves in a world in which one character's idea for the perfect birthday gift is a "human toilet."

Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan's 196-minute Winter Sleep also explores, at the director's signature deliberate pace, the hidden recesses of a rocky relationship. The winner of the Palme d'or at this year's Cannes festival, the unusually verbose (for Ceylan) Winter Sleep charts several days in the troubled marriage of Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a former Shakespearean actor turned landlord and proprietor of a hotel catering to tourists, and Nihal (Melisa Sozen), his impetuous younger wife. The wealthiest man in town, Aydin's comfortable life is shown in sharp relief to the deprivations suffered by his neighbors, particularly one hardscrabble family of renters.  His oblivious self-regard has also alienated his wife and his divorced sister (Demet Akbag), whose presence in the household sparks bitter recriminations.  Unlike his previous feature, the Dostoevskian "whydunit" Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, Ceylan's new film charts the more mundane human transgressions of greed, pride, and the smug conviction of intellectual superiority.  The raw human interactions of Winter Sleep become the mirror that just might reveal to Aydin the true nature of his own flawed character.  Gökhan Tiryaki, Ceylan's cinematographer since his fourth feature Climates (2006), employs Rembrandt-worthy lighting and intimate, close-up photography to expose the percolating emotions betrayed by the human face.  A switch from his award-winning work for the painterly landscapes of Anatolia, it is no less beautiful.  Ceylan's cast is equally up to the challenge.  Haluk Bilginer, a veteran of British theatre, excels as a proud man blind to the needs of those around him. Also of note are Melisa Sozen as Aydin's belittled wife and Nejat Isler as a drunken tenant whose crumpled pride leads to cynical defiance.  Would-be viewers should not be put off by the film's lengthy runtime, for Ceylan doesn't squander a minute. 

Shakespeare is the primary inspiration for Matías Piñeiro's airy, avant-garde comedy La Princesa de Francia, though the Argentine filmmaker is less interested in hewing to his source, the Bard's Love's Labour's Lost, than he is in having fun in a modern setting with the play's complex romantic entanglements.  Departing from the strategy of his short film Rosalinda (2011) and previous feature Viola (2012), Piñeiro's latest revolves not around a female character from Shakespeare's comedies but a handsome young man.  Recently returned to Buenos Aires from an extended stay in Mexico, former theatre director Victor (Julián Larquier Tallarini) begins work on a hip hop-inspired radio production of Love's Labour's Lost, intent on avoiding the romantic distractions that had apparently derailed his previous efforts.  But by enlisting the aid of his former theater troupe, young actresses with whom he has either already has amorous connections, including his ex-girlfriend, or enticing newcomers, Victor's efforts seem doomed from the start.  This simple narrative concept, however, serves as only a framework for Piñeiro's complex roundelay of thwarted assignations and unfaithful lovers.  At one point, taking the theme of romantic confusion beyond Elizabethan recognition, Piñeiro re-stages the same scene thrice, with the same character acting against a different partner, with different outcomes, in a rondo of seductive scheming.  An inscribed museum postcard slipped into a bound copy of the play changes hands until its discovery at the conclusion, a nod to the mis-delivered letters of Shakespeare's original.  Piñeiro has stated that he grew familiar with Shakespeare not as works of theatre but as literature, and the attentive concentration on the sound of language, specifically the cadence of Elizabethan dialogue recited in Spanish, is one of the highlights of La Princesa de Francia.  There are no other films similar to those by Matías Piñeiro, and La Princesa de Francia is unlike anything else you will see this year. Given its complexity, Piñeiro's most challenging film to date bears repeated viewings, but the playfulness and intelligence behind its conception are readily apparent.  Be sure to stay for the charming post-credits postscript, the cries of an infant that was in utero during filming.

You'd be better off NOT staying for the contrived conclusion of Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure, an unsatisfying follow-up to the Swedish filmmaker's disturbing Play (2011).  The winner of this year's Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes, Force Majeure eschews the hyper-realism of the previous film for a broadly satirical jab at traditional sex roles.  When an induced avalanche threatens to snowball out of control at a Swiss ski resort, a vacationing businessman (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) deserts his wife and children in a panic.  His stunned spouse (Lisa Loven Kongsli) is less perturbed by this demonstration of cowardice than his steadfast denial that he ran away, leading to prolonged confrontations that spill over into the relationship of another vacationing couple.  But what is at first a squirm-inducing look into the messy results of a craven abandonment of the traditional male role as protector degenerates into silliness, as Östlund gives us his shamed vacationer crouched and blubbering uncontrollably in the hotel hallway.  A last-minute stab at sexual equivalency also strikes a false note, as if the filmmaker were attempting to erase his initial Etch-A-Sketch of a premise.  It's worth noting that the most courageous individual in Force Majeure turns out to be a minor character who has chosen to live outside the boundaries of the traditional nuclear family, but an intriguing suggestion in the margins is not enough to salvage this curiously non-committal work. 

The Wavelengths series of experimental films curated by programmer Andréa Picard provided numerous festival highlights.  Antoinette Zwirchmayr's 35mm The pimp and his trophies is a bold, dispassionately narrated recollection of the filmmaker's childhood layered over oddly staged tableux and family photographs of the mirrored walls and upholstered platforms of her grandfather's business establishment.  The disclosure that granddad was the most well-known brothel keeper in Salzburg introduces a startling contrast between Zwirchmayr's matter-of-fact delivery, which parallels the casual acceptance of his illicit profession by her family, and her need as an adult to come to terms with its implications.  Many of the photographs are viewed bisected by a small mirror, a key emblem in this complex work. 

Blake Williams' Red Capriccio recycles YouTube video of a Chevy Caprice police car intercut with crumbling urban architectural structures, all filtered through color filters with near-stroboscopic impact.  Williams has said that his film's imagery and juxtapositions were inspired by Capriccio painting and symphonic composition, hence the title's descriptive pun.  Viewers are instructed to wear 3D glasses; however, the effect is not one of heightened depth perception but of pulsing, color-saturated intensity.  

Detour de Force profiles the sixties' exploits of Theodore "Ted" Serios, a former Chicago bellhop who claimed the ability to project images from his brain into a Polaroid camera, resulting in instant photographs of his thoughts.  Rebecca Baron's cryptic but frequently hilarious film consists of vintage 16mm footage of Serios and his champion, psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud, as they demonstrate what Serios dubbed "thoughtography" to news cameras and researchers.  Audio from tape recordings of Serios, who was frequently intoxicated and belligerent during his sessions, complements the archival images of what was either an unexplainable feat of mental projection or a trick worthy of Penn and Teller.

Johann Lurf's Twelve Told Tales chops up 35mm logos for major Hollywood studios into a flashing, frenetic, retina-searing assault on the senses that pulses through the viewer's cranium like dopamine.  That Lurf's eye for editing has produced a more pleasurable cinematic experience than anything likely to follow those logos is emblematic of both the sad predictability of contemporary mainstream cinema and the estimable offerings featured in the Wavelengths program.  If only someone would take a splicer to the three years of fashion porn bumper ads for TIFF sponsor l'Oréal ("because you're worth it")!

This is the first of three parts of ecco film and video's coverage of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.  Next installment:  The Goddess, Pasolini, Jauja, and more!

Ethnographic cinema has always been viewed with suspicion by the cautious because the imperatives of the filmmakers almost inevitably influence their perception of the subjects.  The results are often more "cinema" than "verité."  Further complicating this already compromised view of other cultures are the methods in which a popular art form, the movies, are marketed to the public.  Despite the ethnographic filmmakers' best intentions, their works have frequently been associated with advertising that highlighted the most sensationalistic aspects of cultural differences.  One need only look at the "mondo" genre of films to note that their brief popularity was based not on commonality of cultures but on the most excessive of differences, whether real or fabricated.

A role that ethnographic films have consistently played in the Western marketplace is as a sort of cinematic "Trojan horse," a method to depict behavior or standards of dress that would not be permissible in a domestic production but are granted lenience from the censors for their supposed educational value.  

Such is the case with a series of pseudo-documentary films made in Bali from the silent era to the 1940s.  The primary selling point for these films was the island's female inhabitants, whose custom was to appear in public with their breasts exposed.  As with Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) and Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), most of these films were scripted melodramas augmented with scenes of actual customs and ceremonies.  

Though not the first, the most notorious of these, Armand Denis and André Roosevelt's 1932 feature Kriss, the Sword of Death (later given the better-known title Goona Goona), popularized the term "goona goona" as a salacious buzzword of the thirties and forties, and set the tone for films to follow.  Denis, who subsequently made a career of ethnographic exploitation along with showmen such as Frank "Bring 'Em Back Alive" Buck, shot the film in two-strip Technicolor.  After its initial engagement, the film played the grindhouse circuit for years.

Also filmed in two-color Technicolor was Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1935), one of the last features to be made using that process and also one of the last silent films to be released by a major studio in the U.S.   Despite its lack of a synchronized soundtrack, Legong enjoyed an extended run with multiple reissues throughout the following decades.  As evidenced by Milestone Video's current DVD release, a large part of its appeal, aside from the topless women, may have been the stunning two-strip color cinematography of W. Howard Greene, an early Technicolor specialist.  Mid-century audiences also likely responded to the tragic love story that comprises the plot, which incorporates Balinese cultural practices into the melodramatic proceedings.

Teenager Poutou (Goesti Poetoe Aloes) and her younger sister Saplak (Njoman Saplak) are dancers who perform the legong, the dance of the virgins, at their sacred temple in Tampaksiring.  The girls live with their father, Bagus (Goesti Bagus Maura), whose passion is the breeding of fighting cocks.

At a temple feast, Poutou meets Njong (Njoman Nyong), a young gamelan musician, and promptly falls in love with him.  She makes plans to perform her last temple dance, which customarily signals a girl's betrothal.  But the fickle Njong falls for the younger Saplak, which sets in motion the dire local prophecy that disgrace will befall women whose love is unrequited.

Despite its simplicity, this thin plot incorporates not only the legong itself, but also a gamelan performance, the ceremony of the Barong and Rangda dance that signifies the battle between good and evil, and the spectacle of Balinese funeral pyres.  At a time when travel to Indonesia was reserved for only the most hardy of tourists, these scenes were no doubt unheralded in their exoticism and strengthened by the naturalistic acting of the native cast.  For contemporary viewers, Legong is a delicately wrought window into a unique culture that western influence has since corrupted.  The crass hustle and bustle of Kuta Beach could not be further away.

The print of Legong presented by Milestone Film and Video was preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive from three separate surviving prints.  When Legong was originally distributed in the U.S., all close-ups of its topless female actors were removed.  In the U.K., those scenes were left intact but a segment featuring a cockfight was excised. Thanks to the efforts of the UCLA Archive, the film is once again complete as originally intended.

Legong was directed and produced by the Marquis Henri de la Falaise de la Coudraye, a reportedly dashing WWI war hero once married to Hollywood legend Gloria Swanson. The Marquis' second wife, film star Constance Bennett, financed five films for him, including Legong and the two-strip Technicolor feature Kliou the Killer filmed in Vietnam. Though the original two-strip Technicolor version of Kliou the Killer has been lost to the ages, a surviving black and white print is included as an extra on Milestone Video's release of Legong.  Also included is Nikola Drakulic's 56 minute documentary Gods of Bali (1952), which bypasses melodramatics to present an explanatory, if less poetic, interpretation of Balinese rites and customs.  An alternate soundtrack by the contemporary group Gamelan Sekar Jaya is also provided for the main feature, and is preferable to the film's mawkish original score. 

Because of its display of post-pubescent nudity, Legong was fair bounty for the exploitation trade. In addition to numerous roadshow presentations under its original title, the film was reissued in the sixties by New York film distributor Alexander Beck as Djanger, Love Rite of Bali with the tagline "Nudity Without Crudity."  Beck's strategy was as transparent as Kroger Babb's infamous retitling of Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monica (1953) as Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl. With the lyrical, picturesque Legong, crudity is in the eye of the beholder.

Not so with the pandering B&W sound production Virgins of Bali (1932), filmmaker Deane H. Dickason's paean to the ogling of teenage breasts.  Though Virgins also weaves aspects of Balinese custom into its tale of two sisters, the twelve-year old Tagel (Ni Wayan Tagel) and her sixteen-year-old sister Grio (Ni Wayan Ugembon), the Gamelan and temple rites of Legong are but briefly glimpsed.  Instead, Dickason revels in scenes presenting the two girls as they "bathe their shamelessly nude, bronze bodies in the refreshing though murky waters" of the village stream. 

Ostensibly the story of  the elder sister's elopement with former temple dancer Kaler (T. Kaler), Virgins of Bali appears most interested in finding successive reasons to display the unclad torsos of its "naive" teenage subjects, often accompanied by tasteless commentary from narrator Dickason.  A scene of the two teens massaging their skin with coconut oil as protection from the harsh rays of the equatorial sun inspires Dickason to knowingly warn, "young men, mark my words: that Bali oil leaves telltale stains in twice as many places as any face powder."  The cynical, colonialist commentaries of the "mondo" genre loom large in the distance.

As with Legong, the creepy Virgins of Bali was prodigiously re-released for decades following its initial run.  A sad indicator of its sorry pedigree is the tawdry company it was forced to keep:  one engagement paired it in support of Eat 'Em Alive (1933) a feature-length film about animals eating one another.  Though Dickason enthuses about Bali as a "utopia," his film trivializes and cheapens Indonesian culture by catering to the base appetites of the roadshow circuit.  Seen today, it's a rank reminder of the sexual tourism of pederasts.

Alpha Video's budget DVD release of Virgins of Bali, now a property of Independent-International Pictures of Al Adamson infamy, includes as an extra the thirty-minute documentary Bali, Paradise Island (1930), one of Eugene W. Castle's "World Parade" travelogues once licensed for home projection through his Castle Films outfit.  Also included is the campy 1940 featurette Beauty in Bali, a presentation of the Bali Bra Company (formerly the Fay-Miss Brassiere Company), which opens with footage from Virgins of Bali accompanied by snooty commentary from an uncredited female narrator.  What follows is a full-color tour of the company's brassiere factory, concluding with bogus case studies of seven women whose physical challenges are solved by products from the Bali line of undergarments.  It's as tasteful as you'd expect.  

New reviews this edition:  Blue Ruin (2013), Five Artists: BillBobBillBillBob (1971), Murder In Mississippi (1965), and The Black Rebels (1965).  Added to the archive is The Love Butcher (1975).

Because I was tall for my age and therefore unsuspected by truant officers, junior high and early high school was a good time for skipping class and heading downtown on a public bus to see films that didn't play in either of my two neighborhood theaters.  I'd flash my fake I.D. at the box offices of the Loews, The Norva, or the Granby for films such as Macabro (1966) and Succubus (1968).   It was a great way to spend a weekday, certainly better than suffering through yet another boring lecture, and I thought I was seeing the most offbeat films in town.

At least that's what I thought until high school, when I took a seat in the cafeteria at a table where each Monday a particular senior would describe to the rest of us what he'd seen at the drive-in the previous weekend.  We'd listen raptly as we ate our shitty public school lunches to his tales of sex, gore, and smuggled six-packs amongst the "speaker-stand forest." *

It was soon apparent that the films he was seeing were unique to the drive-in experience, and the realization made me crave my drivers' license.  Alas, it would be nearly twenty years before I realized that the "eyeball scooped out with a spoon" cheapie he once recounted scene by scene was Kent Bateman's inimitable The Headless Eyes (1971).  Thanks, Wizard Video!

On another day he hushed the table into silence by describing a scene in which a captive soldier was bound to an altar and ritually disemboweled by savage, bikini-clad pagan women.  It was about then that some of us began to suspect that Mr. Moviegoer was either greatly enhancing or inventing outright the scenarios he was spinning.  But when challenged, the senior indignantly dared those of us at the table to see for ourselves.  The film's title:  Six Shes and A He (1963).

His account was later confirmed by my adult cousin, who with his wife had seen Mac Ahlberg's Fanny Hill (1968) at the drive-in along with this unanticipated co-feature. They were both outraged, he because the female cast members remain clothed and she from the ineptitude and overall shoddiness on display.  

Over forty years later I finally caught up with this made-in-Florida cheapie, and then only in a truncated video version. However, the infamous scene described by the high-school senior was intact.  

London After Midnight (1927) may never turn up, but Six Shes and A He sure did.  Somehow, somewhere, Mike Vraney of Something Weird Video located a slightly incomplete print of the film and made it available on DVD-R.   Prior to that, Six Shes and A He had largely been overlooked, so much so that when I interviewed its star, the late Bill Rogers, in 1993 for ecco, the world of bizarre video, he neglected to mention it.  Or perhaps his omission was intentional.

Rogers portrays "Fred Rogers," a fighter pilot (astronaut, according to the pressbook) who crash-lands in the Pacific Ocean and washes ashore on an island inhabited by six gold-bikini-clad women armed with spears.  

Forced to slave in the fields each day and sexually satisfy a different woman every night, the exhausted Rogers soon plots his escape with the aid of a turncoat.  The two manage to elude capture, but only after one of the women has been speared through the navel and another has been beaten to death with a sponge.

Originally filmed as Love Goddesses of Blood Island, the jaw-dropping Six Shes and A He was directed by Sting of Death (1965) co-producer, drive-in owner, and building contractor Richard S. Flink (under the pseudonym "Gordon H. Heaver") from a script by Herschell Gordon Lewis regular Bill Kerwin. Keeping it in the family, Kerwin's brother Harry devised the outrageous - especially for 1963 - gore effects.  In fact, Six Shes and A He has been credited by some as the first attempted imitation of Godfather of Gore Lewis' landmark Blood Feast from the same year.

As with Lewis' films, the proceedings are so absurd as to instantly strain credulity, and therein lies the appeal.  The camp quotient explodes in the scene where Rogers sways ecstatically like Stevie Wonder as he seemingly pretends to play an imaginary keyboard.  An unseen vocalist croons the wince-inducing theme "Love Goddess," purportedly written by Al Jacobs, the songwriter behind the patriotic anthem "This Is My Country."  (Though the vocals are credited to "Neil Patrick," I suspect that it's actually the pipes of jack-of-all-trades Rogers.)  In the background, the Love Goddesses strut and gesticulate like drunk interpretive dancers on a set built around a hideous Romanesque swimming pool.  It's the only clip you'll need to set the tone for your next tiki party.

Even in its current 46 minute runtime, Six Shes and A He is a test of patience.  The wooden acting leaves no doubt why the cast's filmographies are scant, with Rogers being the exception.  Sets inexplicably switch from an actual beach to godawful astroturf and potted plant imitations of a tropical forest.  The flashback scene with the slaughter of the soldier looks as though it's spliced in from another film, with Carol Wintress (as Rebecca) decked out in dragon-lady makeup and grimacing like the voodoo doll that terrorized Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror.  And that pathetic decapitation...

So why is such a sow's ear of a film of interest?  If you're not of a certain age, it probably isn't.  But Six Shes and A He, which was released the same year as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, is driven by male anxiety about the power of women.  Its kitschy tale of female domination dovetails with a recurring theme in so-called "sweat" magazines of the fifties and sixties.  These lurid, hyper-masculine fantasies appealed to World War II veterans coping with reintegration to peacetime society and blue collar workers whose masculine identity was in flux in the wake of an expanding female workforce and its demands for equality.  

Bill Kerwin's script could have been ripped from the pages of such trashy rags as True Adventures ("The Man-Killing Girls of Lepu"), Sir!  ("Duke Moore's 3 Years As A Stud Slave"), and Exotic Adventures ("Island Of Love-Starved Women").  These overblown fantasies take an odd turn, however, in Six Shes and A He, as male hegemony is ultimately undermined:  the eventual escape would be doomed to failure but for the heroic actions of a woman, as in Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill!  Kill! (1966).  All considered, Flink's cheesy costume pageant better reflects the turbulent sexual zeitgeist of 1963 than Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's mega-million megabomb Cleopatra, or any other of the year's high-profile films.

But I digress.  The senior graduated, shutting down the cafeteria connection, but not before he'd tantalized us with more lunchtime tales of drive-in depravity that will probably remain unidentified.  The following year I scored my drivers' license and began my drive-in mongering with the 1971 U.S. release of La residencia (aka The House That Screamed), about a young nutcase building his own perfect woman.  It was the beginning of the end for the drive-in era.

*  I copped this phrase from the lyrics of "Love in an F.J.," about making out at the drive-in, from the 1972 album "Teenage Heaven" by the Melbourne band Daddy Cool.

This edition includes reviews of Canibal, Child's Pose, and L'inconnu du lac (Stranger By the Lake).

In his 1996 book Michael Powell (Batsford), author James Howard reveals through recollections of the filmmaker's associates that the directorial half of "The Archers" was not an especially pleasant boss.  In fact, some who worked with him have claimed that Powell seemed to have a sadistic streak, sometimes reducing actors to tears if their performance didn't please him.  

Although dancer Moira Shearer, the star of Powell's classic The Red Shoes, found him to be "a director of great cinematic invention and originality," she also observed that "he neither understood nor respected actors and, far from creating a sympathetic atmosphere in the studio, he created the reverse.  It was a damaging experience for many people."

The late, great cameraman Jack Cardiff (1947's Black Narcissus, among many others) termed Powell's directorial style as "very abrasive," and recalled that he would be intentionally rude to lesser-known actors.  "You're not very good, are you?  Who's your agent?" are examples of Powell's attacks cited by Cardiff, who observes that the director "...believed this sort of insult would prick them into a better performance, but I don't think it ever did."  

Tyrannical filmmakers are a staple of the film industry, as anyone who has watched the YouTube clip in which director David O. Russell verbally - and almost physically - assaults Lily Tomlin (whose own tirades are legendary) on the set of I Heart Huckabees (2004) will attest.  Perhaps whenever perfectionist artistes must entrust their vision to interpretation by others, frayed nerves and rising tempers are an inevitable byproduct of the creative process.  Joseph von Sternberg, John Ford (who purportedly made John Wayne cry!), and Kurosawa Akira are only three examples of filmmakers known for their imperious behavior toward actors and crew members.

Conversely, something markedly different occurred when a former co-worker of mine, an amateur actor who occasionally appeared in television commercials and off-Broadway stage productions, was given a non-speaking role in John Waters' Serial Mom (1994).  This part-time actor fondly recalled that the Baltimore filmmaker was the kindest, most considerate professional he had ever worked with.  Although his part in the film was ultimately cut to mere seconds of screen time, my co-worker and the other members of the cast and crew received a personally written thank-you note from Waters and an invitation to the premiere.  

Life is indeed full of wonder when the self-professed "Prince of Puke," whose once-transgressive films reveled in eye-gouging, feces-eating mayhem posts thank-you cards to the least significant members of his cast, but the proper British director behind such sensitive character studies as I Know Where I'm Going (1945) frequently bestowed on his actors the aural equivalent of a shoebox full of dog shit.

New this installment are reviews of William Castle's It's A Small World (1950) and Georges Franju's Le téte contre les murs (1958).  Added to the archive is Joe D'Amato's Eva nera (aka Black Cobra, 1976).

Though I generally make a practice of writing about a film shortly after I've seen it, with this post I'm making an exception.  In fact, it's a television program from nearly 52 years ago that aired two weeks after I turned nine years old.  The Dupont Show of the Week was an NBC production that ran for four years and won eight primetime Emmy awards.  Unlike programs with recurring characters, each episode was a discrete performance, and the content veered from adaptations of stage productions to documentaries.  Such anthology series were not uncommon in the fifties and early sixties; an earlier program, CBS's Playhouse 90, is perhaps the best-remembered of these broadcasts.

The Richest Man In Bogota, episode 28 of the first season of The Dupont Show of the Week, aired on Father's Day, June 17, 1962.  Based on the 1899 short story "The Country of the Blind" by H. G. Wells, Frank Gabrielson's teleplay was turned down by sponsors when first proposed five years earlier for being too bizarre for prime time television.  Only through the ministrations of television director Ralph Nelson, who six years earlier had helmed Rod Serling's award-winning Requiem For A Heavyweight for Playhouse 90, did the script finally see production.  As a condition for broadcast, the title of Wells' story was changed to the more palatable The Richest Man in Bogota.

Gabrielson's script follows the strange adventure of Juan de Nunez (Lee Marvin), a prospector from Bogota, Colombia searching for uranium in the snow-capped mountains of his homeland. Trapped by an avalanche, he tumbles down a ravine and discovers a hidden valley inhabited by a race of people without eyes.  

Initially taking faith in the maxim, "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," de Nunez soon learns otherwise.  The words "eyes" and "sight" have no meaning in this world.  Reluctantly, he is forced to conform to the kingdom's strange beliefs, such as that their sightless community is the only world in existence.  

Convinced that de Nunez' vision is a source of evil, the villagers set out to "cure" him by gouging out his eyes.  Marina (Miriam Colon), the daughter of the group's powerful leader, manages to free him before he is blinded.  Together they attempt to escape their sightless pursuers.

Wells' original story was a caustic denunciation of the uneducated, unenlightened people of his era who, in his view, might as well be blind.  The eyeless villagers and their leaders live in ignorance of the outside world, just as the isolationists of Wells' era refused to see the turmoil beyond their own communities.  Screenwriter Gabrielson elaborated on this theme, providing the villagers with a book written by their once-sighted ancestors that explained why they were losing their vision and, eventually, their eyes.  Of course, such a book would be useless to those without eyes.

Originally broadcast in color, The Richest Man In Bogota exists today only as a black-and-white kinescope negative, with separate soundtrack, in the collection of the Library of Congress.  The 2009 release of the Criterion Collection's The Golden Age of Television DVD (which includes director Nelson's Requiem For A Heavyweight) offers a slight glimmer of hope that the kinescope for this unusual television adaptation might one day be made available.  

Special thanks to Tom Weaver and Marty Baumann for helping to match this distant memory with its title.

Also in this installment:  a revised review of Antonio Margheriti's La vergine di Noremberga (aka The Virgin of Nuremberg and Horror Castle) has been added to the Reviews section.