Charles Burnett’s MY BROTHER’S WEDDING is a poignant tale of a family struggling to survive in Watts
CHANGING THE PICTURE: MY BROTHER’S WEDDING (Charles Burnett, 1983/2007)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, February 23, free with museum admission, 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.milestonefilms.com
Following the breakout success of the 2006 release of Charles Burnett’s remarkable Killer of Sheep (1977), the following year Milestone Films released a restored and digitally reedited version of Burnett’s poignant My Brother’s Wedding. Everett Silas stars as Pierce Mundy, a ne’er-do-well slacker who loafs around in his parents’ dry-cleaning store, waits for his best friend, the smooth-talking Soldier (Ronnie Bell), to get out of jail, and resents that his brother, Wendell (Dennis Kemper), has become a successful lawyer and is preparing to marry the snobby Sonia (Gaye Shannon-Burnett, the director’s real-life wife). As he did with Killer of Sheep, Burnett (To Sleep with Anger) sets the film in Watts, where poor black families struggle to make a go of it in the shadow of ritzy Los Angeles. Although Pierce never seems to make the right decision, his choices are limited, but that doesn’t stop Burnett from coming up with some very droll, funny scenes. Shot in color (Killer of Sheep was made in black-and-white), My Brother’s Wedding is another no-budget treasure from a vital director who is vastly underrecognized. My Brother’s Wedding is screening on February 23 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Changing the Picture” and “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema,” focusing on films that look at the real black experience in postwar America, and will be preceded by Robert Wheaton’s 1986 short, A Little Off Mark. The series concludes February 24 with Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation, preceded by Iverson White’s Dark Exodus, and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts and The Pocketbook.
In February 2005, Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat bought a camera to capture the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel. But he also began filming the dangerous events taking place in and around his home in Bil’in, one of many West Bank villages that were being separated from much of their land by a fence and then a wall, as Israeli settlers moved into newly constructed buildings. Over the course of the next five years, Burnat went through five cameras as he documented the mostly peaceful demonstrations, led by two of his friends, Adeeb Abu-Rahma and Phil, against the Israeli military, with many of the scuffles turning violent on the part of the soldiers. Burnat follows the growth of his children, particularly Gibreel, who gets lessons on how to be careful at the protests from his mother, Burnat’s Brazilian-born wife, Soraya. Much of what he exposes is disturbing, as Israeli soldiers burn down olive trees, lob in tear gas, and shoot an unarmed captive in the leg. However, there is an overriding feeling that Burnat, who teamed up in 2009 to structure the film with Israeli codirector Guy Davidi, has cut out some essential parts, deleting valuable information that might better explain some of what was going on. (More than five hundred hours of footage were edited down to ninety minutes for the final film.) At one point Burnat is arrested for throwing rocks; although he never shows himself taking such action, he also does not claim he was wrongly imprisoned. And another scene in which Soraya begs for him to stop filming because it is hurting the family feels staged. Still, the footage does exemplify the intense battle going on between Palestinians and Israelis over the West Bank settlements, resulting in so much unnecessary violence and destruction. The fight even continues over the film itself, as Palestinians are boycotting it because of the involvement of Israeli financing, while Israelis consider it a pro-Palestinian film and are avoiding it as well. In the end, the Oscar-nominated 5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal look at one man’s experience of a political crisis that has no resolution in sight.
One of America’s most daring and adventurous filmmakers, California native Paul Thomas Anderson, who has dazzled, amazed, challenged, and confused audiences with such previous gems as Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood, has done it again with his latest, The Master. The film is built around the fascinating relationship between Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a WWII vet struggling to fit into the real world after seeing so much violence and death overseas, and the Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the leader of a cultlike organization known as the Cause that believes in past-life regression and invasive questioning known as Processing to help people deal with personal trauma. The Master essentially adopts Quell, intrigued by his distorted outlook on life, making him a member of the family, which also includes his wife, Peggy (Amy Adams), his son, Val (Jesse Plemons), and his daughter, Elizabeth (Ambyr Childers). Inspired by the real-life tale of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology — and incorporating war stories he was told by Jason Robards on the set of Magnolia, elements from the life of John Steinbeck, and discarded scenes from the script for There Will Be Blood — Anderson crafts a, dare we say, masterful cinematic experience built around a pair of extraordinary performances. Phoenix absolutely inhabits the role of Quell, staggering about with an awkward gait, with impossibly deep lines on his face and eyes that seem to be able to look through lead. Hoffman is his equal as the much cooler and calmer spiritual leader, until he is faced with sudden turmoil. The scenes in which the two men sit across from each other, going through a Processing session, are mesmerizing, the most powerful moments to be found onscreen last year. (Both Phoenix and Hoffman received Oscar nods, along with Adams.) But despite the title, the focus remains on Quell, a lost soul searching for somewhere to belong in a changing postwar America. Anderson’s first film in four years, The Master is a bold, audacious work that is as unsettling as it is exhilarating.
Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura blurs the lines between reality and fiction in his cinéma vérité masterpiece, A Man Vanishes. The 1967 black-and-white documentary delves into one of Japan’s annual multitude of missing persons cases, this time investigating the mysterious disappearance of Tadashi Ôshima, a plastics wholesaler who vanished during a business trip. Imamura sends out actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi (The Insect Woman, Intentions of Murder) to conduct interviews with Ôshima’s fiancée, Yoshie Hayakawa, who develops an interest in her inquisitor; Yoshie’s sister, Sayo, who quickly finds herself on the defensive; business associates who talk about Ôshima’s drinking, womanizing, and embezzling from the company; and several people who remember seeing Sayo together with Ôshima, something she adamantly denies despite building evidence. Throughout the 130-minute work, the film references itself as being a film, culminating in Imamura’s pulling the rug out from under viewers and calling everything they’ve seen into question in an unforgettable moment that breaks down the fourth wall and explodes the very nature of truth and cinematic storytelling itself. It also explores individual identity and just how much one really knows those closest to them. Originally supposed to be the first of a twenty-four-part series exploring two dozen missing-persons cases, A Man Vanishes ended up being such a challenging undertaking that it was the only one Imamura made, but what a film it is; it would be more than a decade before he returned to fiction, with 1979’s Vengeance Is Mine, which led the way to a spectacular final two decades that also included The Ballad of Narayama, Eijanaika, Black Rain, The Eel, Dr. Akagi, and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. The amazing A Man Vanishes is screening February 19 at the IFC Center as part of the Tuesday-night series “Stranger than Fiction,” followed by a Q&A with documentarian Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story, Fighter) and John Walter (How to Draw a Bunny).
French auteur Leos Carax’s adaptation of Herman Melville’s controversial 1852 novel, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, is a dour, plodding tale of family dysfunction reaching ridiculous heights. Named after the first letter of each word in the French title of Melville’s tome, Pierre ou les ambiguities, and the tenth and final draft of the script, POLA X follows the trials and tribulations of an aristocratic clan facing its ultimate demise. The patriarch, a cold war diplomat, has died, and his beautiful blonde wife, Marie (Catherine Deneuve), is going through his boxes of papers. Their son, novelist Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu), who refers to his mother as his sister and is not uncomfortable talking to her while she is naked, is engaged to the prim and proper Lucie (Delphine Chuillot). Pierre, Lucie, and his very serious cousin, Thibault (Laurent Lucas), form a sort of Jules and Jim trio. But Pierre is haunted by a dark-haired woman lurking in his dreams, a somewhat feral creature who ends up claiming to be his half-sister, Isabelle (Yekaterina Golubeva), the result of an indiscretion their father had while on an assignment. Angered by the story Isabelle tells him, Pierre takes off with her and her companions, Razerka (Petruta Catana) and Razerka’s young daughter (Mihaella Silaghi). Pierre and Isabelle grow too close very quickly, soon finding themselves posing as husband and wife while living with an underground radical organization. And it only gets crazier from there. POLA X attempts to be epic in scope, its central tale of incest and ennui echoing France’s treatment of Eastern Europe and its refugees, but Carax makes virtually every character unlikable, and nearly every scene stretches credulity, resulting in two hours of annoying people making annoying choices and doing annoying things. POLA X is screening on February 19 at Florence Gould Hall as part of the French Institute Alliance Française CinémaTuesdays series “When Boy Meets Girl: The Cinema of Leos Carax”; it was initially supposed to be preceded by Carax’s 1997 short, Sans titre, also starring Depardieu, Golubeva, and Deneuve, but that has been canceled. The series concludes February 26 with Carax’s widely hailed latest film, Holy Motors, with the director on hand to participate in a Q&A with Richard Brody following the 7:00 show.