George Romero has a ball discussing NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in new documentary about the making of his masterpiece (courtesy of Predestinate Productions)
BIRTH OF THE LIVING DEAD (Rob Kuhns, 2013)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Wednesday, November 6
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.firstrunfeatures.com
“It was this tiny little movie in Pittsburgh that seemed to have no chance and it changed the world,” says Jason Zinoman at the beginning of Rob Kuhns’s extremely entertaining new documentary, Birth of the Living Dead. Zinoman, author of Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, is one of several experts discussing the making, influence, and legacy of college dropout George A. Romero’s 1968 classic frightfest, Night of the Living Dead, which essentially invented the flesh-eating zombie. Throughout the documentary, the Bronx-born Romero, looking somewhat like a wide-eyed, white-haired Martin Scorsese, shares fascinating behind-the-scenes details about the creation of his masterpiece, describing how he raised what little funds he could, how most of the nonprofessional actors were members of the local community (steel workers, cops, meatpackers, ad executives, television hosts, etc.) who not only played ad-libbing humans or zombies but also supplied props, did the makeup, and donated equipment, and how no one really thought they’d ever actually finish and distribute the film, having previously specialized primarily in beer commercials and such authorized shorts as Mister Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy — which Romero still considers his scariest work to date. Fans of Night of the Living Dead will glory in learning more about Harry and Helen Cooper (business partners Karl Hindman and Marilyn Eastman), newscaster Charles Craig, cemetery zombie Bill Hinzman, Sheriff McClelland (George Kosana), and others. While Romero says that the casting of Duane Jones as Ben was not based on race — and that not a word of the script was changed because Jones was black — a group of talking heads relates how it was a genius move not to make specific mention of race in the film, which was completed just before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Gary Pullin illustrates George Romero editing NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (courtesy of Predestinate Productions)
Among those excitedly placing NOTLD firmly in film history and sociopolitical context, explaining how it was a counterculture touchstone that symbolized the unrest in late 1960s America brought about by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, are critic, curator, and radio host Elvis Mitchell (The Black List, The Treatment), indie filmmaker and Birth executive producer Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter, Habit), Hollywood producer Gale Anne Hurd (Aliens, The Walking Dead), film journalist Mark Harris (Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood), documentarian and NYU professor Sam Pollard, producer Chiz Schultz (who tells an amazing story about Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark), and the aforementioned Zinoman. It’s absolutely gripping when Ben’s slap of Barbara (Judith O’Dea) is compared to scenes from In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The Brooklyn-based Kuhns, who wrote, produced, directed, and edited the film, includes archival news footage that he was able to access through his role as editor of the Bill Moyers television program Moyers & Company; meets with Bronx elementary school teacher Christopher Cruz, who is questionably showing fifth- and sixth-grade students NOTLD as part of his film class; and adds ghoulish graphic-novel-style animation by Gary Pullin. However, he curiously never touches on anything Romero did post-NOTLD, a career that has boasted another five Dead movies so far. But he has done a great service for the nonpareil standard-bearer, offering a thrilling examination of the little horror movie that could. Stick around for a post-credits tribute to Hinzman, who passed away last year at the age of seventy-five. Birth of the Living Dead opens November 6 at the IFC Center, with Kuhns on hand for the 8:35 screenings on Wednesday and Thursday, which will be followed by free 10:15 showings of the original Night of the Living Dead.
A huge critical and financial success in its native China, Zhao Wei’s romantic epic, So Young, will open the fourth annual New York Chinese Film Festival on November 5 at Alice Tully Hall. Adapted by screenwriter Li Qiang (Peacock) from Xin Yiwuit’s novel To Our Youth That Is Fading Away, the film follows a group of young women who meet at college, fall in and out of love with various young men, then look back at what could have been ten years later. The central focus is on Zheng Wei (Yang Zishan), an impulsive civil engineering freshman who is incensed by how she is treated by fellow architecture student and loner Chen Xiaozheng (Mark Chao). But soon her very public hatred simmers down as she tries to convince the very private Chen to be her boyfriend. Meanwhile, her roommates, campus beauty Ruan Guan (Jiang Shuying), clean freak Li Weijuan (Zhang Yao), and the butch Zhu Xiaobei (Liu Yase), go through their own problems as they all grow close. Award-winning actress and singer Zhao (So Close, Shaolin Soccer) makes a solid directorial debut with So Young, which takes its name from the song by Suede, although the film is overly long at more than two hours and gets confusing as it jumps around in time. But as the girls mature, so does the film itself, exploring social class, education, love, loyalty, ambition, and the many trials and tribulations that accompany the journey from childhood to adulthood. Zhao will attend the red carpet opening and participate in a postscreening Q&A. The festival continues November 6-7 at the AMC Empire 25 on Forty-Second St. with Larry Yang’s Sorry, I Love You, Xue Xiaolu’s Finding Mr. Right, Joe Ma’s Love Undercover, Pang Ho-Cheung’s Love in the Buff, Wilson Yip’s IP Man, and Clarence Fok Yiu-leung’s Special ID; among those taking part in Q&As after the screenings are Yang, Wesley Wong, Miriam Yeung, and Donnie Yen.
Polish writer-director Władysław Pasikowski digs up a deeply disturbing and controversial part of his country’s past in the gripping drama Aftermath. When Franek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop), who left his family’s small farming village twenty years earlier, in 1980, comes home to spend the summer helping out his brother, Józek (Maciej Stuhr), he is surprised to find that his younger sibling has become a hated outcast. It turns out that Józek has been uncovering Jewish gravestones, which the townspeople and even the church have been using to pave roads and for various other architectural purposes. He’s been gathering them in the middle of his wheat field, building a cemetery that has outraged the villagers. They become even angrier — and more dangerous — when Franek, who, like his brother, has never before shown any sympathy for the Jews, starts investigating what really happened there sixty years ago, a dark, dirty secret that everyone else is determined will remain buried. In Aftermath, Pasikowski (Kroll, Pigs) adds horror-genre tropes to a Holocaust tale not seen on film before while evoking such wide-ranging fiction and nonfiction works as Marian Marzynski’s Shtetl, Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. Aftermath is a thriller that is not so much about good and evil but about guilt, responsibility, and the choices people make, and then have to live with. Inspired by a true story documented by historian Jan T. Gross in Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, which stirred up major controversy when it was published in 2000, Aftermath has led to a heated polemic battle between the right and the left in Poland, as well as death threats against Stuhr, who was named Best Actor by the Polish Film Academy for his portrayal of the conflicted Józek. An important, well-made film that is able to avoid being swallowed by the swirling debate surrounding it, Aftermath opens November 1 at Lincoln Plaza and Cinema Village.
In F. W. Murnau’s classic horror film, Max Schreck stars as Count Orlok, a creepy, inhuman-looking Transylvanian who is meeting with real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) in order to buy a house in Germany. Hutter soon learns that the count has a taste for blood, as well as lust for his wife, Ellen (Greta Schröder), whom he has left behind in Germany. When Count Orlok, a bunch of rats, and a group of coffins filled with Transylvanian earth head out on a ship bound for Wisborg, the race is on to save Ellen, and Germany. Murnau’s Nosferatu is set in an expressionist world of liminal shadows and fear, as he and cinematographers Fritz Arno Wagner and Günther Krampf continually place the menacing Orlok in oddly shaped doorways that help exaggerate his long, spiny fingers and pointed nose and ears. Unable to acquire the rights from Bram Stoker’s estate to adapt the Gothic horror novel Dracula into a film, writer Henrik Galeen (The Golem, The Student of Prague) and director Murnau (Sunrise, The Last Laugh) instead made Nosferatu, paring down the Dracula legend, changing the names of the characters, and tweaking the story in various parts. Upon its 1922 release, they were sued anyway, and all prints were destroyed except for one, ensuring the survival of what became a defining genre classic. In 1979, German auteur Werner Herzog (Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo) paid tribute to the earlier film with Nosferatu the Vampyre, a near scene-by-scene homage to Murnau’s original but with Stoker’s character names restored, as the book was by then in the public domain. Hans Erdmann’s complete score no longer exists, so numerous musical compositions have accompanied screenings and DVD/VHS releases over the years; at Film Forum, pianist Steve Sterner will offer his take on November 4 at 7:30.