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.
Learning of many of the horrible things the Third Reich was doing, Charlie Chaplin could not hold his tongue anymore, finally making his first talking picture in 1940. In The Great Dictator, writer-director-producer Chaplin unrelentingly mocks Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, albeit with a very serious edge, as WWII threatens. Chaplin plays the dual roles of a simple Jewish barber living in the ghetto (who has elements of the Little Tramp) and Adenoid Hinkle, the rather Hitler-esque Fascist leader of the country of Tomania. Just as he named the nation after a foodborne illness (ptomaine poisoning), Chaplin does not go for subtlety in the film; his right-hand man is Herr Garbitsch (Henry Daniel spoofing Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels), and his military mastermind is Field Marshal Herring (Billy Gilbert making fun of Heinrich Himmler). Chaplin plays Hinkle like a cartoon character, with pratfalls galore, and when he speaks in German, especially when he gives a major speech, he spits out fake German words with a smattering of funny English ones. When he learns that Benzino Napaloni (Jack Oakie as a melding of Benito Mussolini and Napoleon Bonaparte) has gathered his troops on the Osterlitz border (think Anschluss), Hinkle invites the Bacteria dictator to his Tomanian palace, where they engage in numerous hysterical bouts of one-upmanship, including a riotous battle involving barber chairs. Meanwhile, Chaplin performs another of the film’s most memorable scenes, the shave of an old man set to Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5.” But when Commander Schultz (Reginald Gardiner) leaves the Nazi regime and decides to help the Jewish people in the ghetto, Hinkle sends his stormtroopers out to find the traitor, leading to a major case of mistaken identity and a heartfelt, if overly melodramatic, finale. In addition, Chaplin’s lover at the time, Paulette Goddard, plays Hannah (named for Chaplin’s mother), a young Jewish woman living in the ghetto, and Bowery Boys fans will recognize Bernard Gorcey, who played sweet-shop owner Louie Dombrowski in the goofy film series, as Mr. Mann.The Great Dictator is filled with marvelous moments, from Hinkle dancing with a balloon globe to several of the Jews in the ghetto trying to hide in the same chest, but the film does suffer from pedagoguery in making its political points, and some of the slapstick is too lowbrow. Nominated for five Oscars, it falls somewhere between the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) and the Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! (1940) while also referencing the 1921 silent film King, Queen, Joker, in which Chaplin’s older half-brother, Sidney (who also directed), played the dual role of a modest barber and the king of the fictional Coronia. A seminal achievement that was supposedly seen by Hitler twice, The Great Dictator is screening on August 21 as part of Symphony Space’s “Chaplin” series, which is presenting many of his works on the big screen in HD for the first time ever; the series continues with such films as 
