Jay Rosenblatt’s new THE D TRAIN is part of specially curated program at IFC Center
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, October 25, $16, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.jayrosenblattfilms.com
Last October, former therapist Jay Rosenblatt presented the New York premiere of yet another masterpiece, The Darkness of Day (2009), at MoMA, along with other “long shorts,” “diary films,” and “short shorts” composed primarily of found and archival footage and home movies. For more than thirty years, the San Francisco-based Rosenblatt, who was born in New York, has been making films that examine the human psyche in unique, unusual ways. On October 25, he will host a specially curated selection of his work as part of the IFC Center’s “Stranger than Fiction” series, including The Darkness of Day, Afraid So (2006), Human Remains (1998), King of the Jews (2000), and his latest, The D Train (2011). The Darkness of Day is a twenty-six-minute examination of suicide inspired by the self-inflicted deaths of two people Rosenblatt knew. Using footage rescued from school Dumpsters, he incorporates industrial and educational films about suicide, touching on such well-known cases as the Hemingway family and the first man to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge as well as that of a Japanese woman who leaped into a volcano, setting off a rash of copycats. Beverly Berning and Richard J. Silberg narrate the film, which includes readings from a suicide victim’s journal, in a steady monotone that is a trademark of Rosenblatt’s work. The Darkness of Day is both fascinating and frightening, perhaps the most honest look at suicide we’ve ever seen. In the three-minute Afraid So, Garrison Keillor reads from a poem by Jeanne Marie Beaumont that asks questions that all can be answered by the title while Rosenblatt shows related images; among the questions are “Is this going to hurt?,” “Will it leave a scar?,” “Are you contagious?,” and “Will I have to put him to sleep?” Human Remains, “a film about the banality of evil,” looks at Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco, and Mao Tse Tung; King of the Jews, “a film about fear and transcendence,” deals with Rosenblatt’s own childhood fear of Jesus; and The D Train chronicles an old man’s life in five minutes. Despite their often very serious subject matter, Rosenblatt’s films are absolutely thrilling to watch, intellectually stimulating, visually vibrant, and emotionally powerful.
When brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko first entered the boxing arena in the 1990s, they were each like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, seemingly unbeatable Russian machines. But both of them ended up facing tremendous adversity and rising up again, as depicted in the surprisingly intimate German documentary Klitschko. Director Sebastian Dehnhardt was given unlimited access to the brothers, their parents, Vitali’s wife, and other members of Team Klitschko, revealing the two skyscrapers to be much more than just a couple of great fighters. Both Vitali and his younger brother, Wladimir, are shown to be intelligent, well-spoken men (each with PhDs) who had one goal when they left kickboxing for professional boxing — to be heavyweight champions of the world. On their remarkable journey, Dehnhardt captures them training together, carefully watching each other’s performances in the ring, and playing chess. At one point Wladimir bans Vitali from his training camp, evoking the separation between “Irish” Micky Ward and his brother, Dicky Eklund, as seen in David O. Russell’s Oscar-nominated The Fighter, but the Klitschkos handle it very differently. The film features plenty of original fight footage in which Dehnhardt zooms in and slows things down to get breathtaking action shots from such contests as Vitali’s epic battle with Lennox Lewis, in which Klitschko got a horrifically deep gash over his left eye; Wladimir’s dizzying loss to Lamon Brewster; and both brothers taking on Corrie Sanders and Samuel Peter. Sharing their thoughts on the Klitschkos are longtime manager Bernd Bonte, Wladimir’s trainer Emanuel Steward, Vilati’s coach Fritz Sdunek, former champions Lewis, Brewster, and Chris Byrd, and boxing announcer Larry Merchant, none of whom have anything bad to say about the brothers, who come off as calm, thoughtful souls who love their mother dearly and rarely get riled up outside the ring. The film is disjointed, with an often hard-to-follow time line, and background information seems haphazard at best, but Klitschko is still a knockout of a film.
For nearly thirty years, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America, The Man Without a Past) has been making existential deadpan black comedies that are often as funny as they are dark and depressing. Has there ever been a film as bleak as 1990’s The Match Factory Girl, in which a young woman (Kati Outinen) suffers malady after malady, tragedy after tragedy, embarrassment after embarrassment, her expression never changing? In his latest film, the thoroughly engaging Le Havre, Kaurismäki moves the setting to a small port town in France, where shoeshine man Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a self-described former Bohemian, worries about his seriously ill wife (Outinen) while trying to help a young African boy (Blondin Miguel), who was smuggled into the country illegally on board a container ship, steer clear of the police, especially intrepid detective Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who never says no to a snifter of Calvados. Adding elements of French gangster and WWII Resistance films with Godardian undercurrents — he even casts Jean-Pierre Léaud in a small but pivotal role — Kaurismäki wryly examines how individuals as well as governments deal with illegal immigrants, something that has taken on more importance than ever amid the growing international economic crisis and fears of terrorism. Through it all, Marcel remains steadfast and stalwart, quietly and humbly going about his business, deadpan every step of the way. Wouter Zoon’s set design runs the gamut from stark grays to bursts of color, while longtime Kaurismäki cinematographer Timo Salminen shoots scene after scene with a beautiful simplicity. Winner of a Fipresci critics award at Cannes this year and Finland’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Le Havre is another marvelously unusual, charmingly offbeat tale from a master of the form. A selection of this year’s New York Film Festival, Le Havre opens October 21 at Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center, which is also hosting a Kaurismäki festival on weekends through December 18, showing nine of the director’s works; up next is The Match Factory Girl (October 28-30), followed by Leningrad Cowboys Go America (November 11-13), Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses (November 18-20), and The Man Without a Past (November 24-27).