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THE SEASONS IN QUINCY: FOUR PORTRAITS OF JOHN BERGER

Tilda Swinton pays tribute to her friend John Berger in THE SEASONS IN QUINCY

THE SEASONS IN QUINCY: FOUR PORTRAITS OF JOHN BERGER (Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz & Tilda Swinton, 2015)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, August 31
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
seasonsinquincy.com

I remember the first time I saw the BBC series Ways of Seeing, thoroughly entranced by the host, a curly-haired British art critic with the cutest little lisp of his “R”s who promised that, while looking at European painting in a whole new way, “we shall discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.” Years later, I was distraught when I couldn’t find my paperback copy of the companion book; my wife quickly ordered it and it was soon in my hands, where I devoured every word and image again and again. So I was terrifically excited when I heard about the new documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, which opens August 31 at Film Forum. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I came away from the four-part film feeling disappointed and let down; I selfishly wanted only Berger (pronounced with a soft “g”) but instead got too much of his friends and colleagues. And to make matters worse, the directors are too often what Berger tried so hard to avoid being throughout his long, influential career: pretentious. The film begins in winter with “Ways of Listening,” in which director Colin MacCabe focuses on Berger and his longtime friend, Oscar-nominated actress Tilda Swinton, as they talk at Berger’s farm in the small French town of Quincy, where he moved in the 1970s after becoming fed up with England. Filmed in 2010, the segment works best when Berger tells personal stories about his father and war; Swinton listens while peeling apples, the camera on her as much as on him. It occasionally feels as if she can’t decide whether to share Berger or keep him to herself; they already have a special connection, sharing the same birthday, albeit thirty-four years apart. But I wanted to make my own connection with Berger, a down-to-earth intellectual with a lust for life and a wide-ranging legacy, an artist, critic, “radical humanist,” social commentator, political activist, husband, father, farmer, and self-described “revolutionary writer” who prefers to simply be known as a storyteller.

In “Spring,” Christopher Roth focuses on Berger’s comparison of humans and animals, explored in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” But Roth’s blending of shots of nature with members of his crew, other farmers, and Jacques Derrida are disjointed, attempting too hard to create the kind of poetry that simply rolls off Berger’s tongue. The section also delves into time and death; sadly, Berger’s beloved wife, Beverly Bancroft, had recently passed away, in 2013. “Every shepherd knows that the herd outlasts the herdsman,” Berger says in a 1980 clip from Mike Dibb’s Parting Shots from Animals. For summer’s “A Song for Politics,” directors MacCabe and Bartek Dziadosz head indoors for a political discussion featuring Berger with MacCabe, German artist and director Roth, Indian poet and activist Akshi Singh, and American novelist and poet Ben Lerner. Berger makes some fascinating points, but I was hoping to see and hear more from him instead of from the others on the panel. “Let’s be quite clear,” Berger says, gesticulating with his right hand, “hope has nothing, nothing to do with optimism.”

John Berger and Tilda Swinton go on an intellectual journey in THE SEASONS IN QUINCY

The ninety-minute film concludes with Swinton’s fall-set “Harvest,” in which the actress and her twins, Xavier Swinton Byrne and Honor Swinton Byrne, travel through the Scottish Highlands to Quincy and meet up with Berger’s son, Yves, a painter and farmer. Meanwhile, Berger talks about the internet and Beverly and tells the kids to pick raspberries in her memory as such words as “from,” “via,” and “to” show up onscreen, emphasizing life’s journey. The craggy-faced Berger, who is now eighty-nine and boasts an impressive head of white hair, has a marvelous way of telling a story; his mind refuses to work like the rest of ours, interpreting and enjoying the world in unique and creative ways that are beautiful to watch and listen to. Unfortunately, aside from a smattering of marvelous bits here and there and some wonderful archival clips, this series of meandering narratives doesn’t quite do the extraordinary man justice. But then again, maybe I was just too optimistic. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger opens August 31 at Film Forum, with MacCabe participating in a Q&A following the 7:10 show on Wednesday night.

OUTDOOR CINEMA: EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT takes viewers on an extraordinary journey into the heart of darkness and beyond

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (EL ABRAZO DE LA SERPIENTE) (Ciro Guerra, 2015)
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Wednesday, August 24, free, live music at 7:00, screening at sunset
718-956-1819
www.socratessculpturepark.org
embraceoftheserpent.oscilloscope.net

Colombian writer-director Ciro Guerra takes viewers on a spectacular journey through time and space and deep into the heart of darkness in the extraordinary Embrace of the Serpent. Guerra’s Oscar-nominated film, the first to be shot in the Colombian Amazon in thirty years, opens with a 1909 quote from explorer Theodor Koch-Grünberg: “It is not possible for me to know if the infinite jungle has started on me the process that has taken many others to complete and irremediable insanity.” Inspired by the real-life journals of Koch-Grünberg and botanist and explorer Richard Evans Schultes, Guerra poetically shifts back and forth between two similar trips down the Vaupés River, both led by the same Amazonian shaman, each time guiding a white scientist on a perilous expedition in a long, narrow canoe. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, ailing white ethnologist Theo (Jan Bijvoet) and his native aid, Manduca (Yauenkü Migue), seek the help of Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a shaman wholly suspicious of whites and who believes he is the last of his tribe. However, Theo claims he knows where remnants of Karamakate’s people live and will show him in return for helping him find the magical and mysterious hallucinogenic Yakruna plant that Theo thinks can cure his illness. Forty years later, white botanist Evan (Brionne Davis) enlists Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar Salvador) to locate what is thought to be the last surviving Yakruna plant, which he hopes will finally allow him to dream in order to heal his soul. Evoking such films as Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Embrace of the Serpent makes the rainforest itself a character, shot in glorious black-and-white by David Gallego (Cecilia, Violencia) in a sparkling palette reminiscent of the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. As the parallel stories continue, the men encounter similar locations that have changed dramatically over time, largely as a result of rubber barons descending on the forest and white missionaries bringing Western religion to the natives. It’s difficult to watch without being assailed by imperialist concepts of the “noble savage,” mainly because the Amazon — and our Western minds — have been so profoundly affected by those ideas. “Before he can become a warrior, a man has to leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams,” the older Karamakate says. “In that journey he has to discover, completely alone, who he really is.”

Guide Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar Salvador) and botanist Evan (Brionne Davis) explore dreams in Ciro Guerra’s EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT

Winner of the Directors’ Fortnight Art Cinema Award at the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, Embrace of the Serpent is an unforgettable spiritual quest into the ravages of colonialism, the evils of materialism, the end of indigenous cultures, and what should be a sacred relationship between humanity and nature. Written by Guerra (2004’s Wandering Shadows, 2009’s The Wind Journeys) and Jacques Toulemonde (Anna), it is told from the point of view of the indigenous people of the Amazon, whom Guerra worked closely with in the making of the film, assuring them of his intentions to not exploit them the way so many others have. Aside from the Belgian Bijvoet and the Texan Davis, the rest of the cast is made up of members of tribes that live along the Vaupés. Guerra actually brought along a shaman known as a payé to perform ritual ceremonies to ensure the safety of the cast and crew and to protect the jungle itself. “What Ciro is doing with this film is an homage to the memory of our elders, in the time before: the way the white men treated the natives, the rubber exploitation,” Torres, in his first movie, says about the film. “I’ve asked the elders how it was and it is as seen in the film; that’s why we decided to support it. For the elders and myself it is a memory of the ancestors and their knowledge.” Salvador, who previously had bad experiences with filmmakers, notes, “It is a film that shows the Amazon, the lungs of the world, the greater purifying filter, and the most valuable of indigenous cultures. That is its greatest achievement.” Embrace of the Serpent is a great achievement indeed, an honest, humanistic, maddening journey that takes you places you’ve never been. Embrace of the Serpent is screening August 24 in Long Island City, concluding Socrates Sculpture Park’s seventeenth annual free summer Outdoor Cinema series, programmed by Film Forum, and will be preceded by a live performance by Bulla en el Barrio, with South American food available for purchase from La Carreta Paisa.

RETURN OF THE DOUBLE FEATURE!

return of the double feature

Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, August 19, through Tuesday, September 13, $14
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, you could pay one single admission and see two professional baseball games, called a double header. “Let’s play two!” Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks, famously said in July 1969. And you could stay and watch both games for one regular price, without having to clear out after the first contest. Also in that magical land of long ago, you see two movies for the price of one, known as a double feature. As Richard O’Brien sings in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, “I wanna go — oh oh oh oh / to the late night, double feature, picture show.” Film Forum, which often hosts double features, is now honoring the two-pack with “Return of the Double Feature,” twenty-six pairings of fifty-two classic movies, brought together by director, star, theme, writer, or other reason. Master programmer Bruce Goldstein gets things going with the Alfred Hitchcock / Jimmy Stewart duo of Vertigo and Rear Window, followed by Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Breathless, Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and The Killing, and F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise and Nosferatu. After that, the double bills become more conceptual, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo with Sergio Corbucci’s Django, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place with Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, and, perhaps best of all, Hitchcock’s Psycho with Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

psycho repulsion

You can catch Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude and Where’s Poppa?, Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s The Third Man and his own The Lady from Shanghai, and Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s Laura and John Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven. There are double features by Robert Altman, Charlie Chaplin, Terrence Malick, Alain Resnais, and Luis Buñuel; based on novels by James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler; and starring Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Toshiro Mifune, and Cary Grant. Among the other dynamic duos are Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief with Tim Burton’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton’s Ed Wood with Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder with André de Toth’s House of Wax, both shown in 3-D. Instead of bingeing on Netflix, you might as well just settle in for the long haul at Film Forum and take in as much of this superb master class in cinema as you can, presented two flicks at a time, just like in the good old days.

DON’T BLINK — ROBERT FRANK

Robert Frank takes a unique look at his life and career in documentary made by his longtime editor

DON’T BLINK — ROBERT FRANK (Laura Israel, 2015)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, July 13
212-727-8110
www.dontblinkrobertfrank.com
filmforum.org

“I hate these fucking interviews,” innovative, influential, ornery, and iconoclastic photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank says while preparing to be interviewed in 1984; the scene is shown in Laura Israel’s new documentary, Don’t Blink — Robert Frank. “I’d like to walk out of the fucking frame,” he adds, then does just that. But in Don’t Blink, Frank finds himself walking once more into the frame as Israel, his longtime film editor, attempts to get him to open up about his life and career. Born in Zurich in 1924, Frank immigrated to the United States in 1947, became a fashion photographer, and had his artistic breakthrough in 1958 with the publication of the controversial photo book The Americans, which captured people unawares from all over the country, using no captions, just image, to get his point across. (In 2009, “The Americans”) was installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in addition to a gallery show of related photographs at Pace/McGill.) In the film, Frank does talk about his past and present, discussing his time with such Beats as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Peter Orlovsky, which he displayed in the 1959 film Pull My Daisy, narrated by an improvising Kerouac and codirected by Alfred Leslie; touching on the tragic early deaths of his son and daughter; sharing details about his parents, including his father, whose hobby was photography; hanging out with his wife, fellow artist June Leaf; and delving into such influences as Walker Evans and his creative process, which is not exactly complex. “Usually the first picture is the best one. Make sure they’re smiling, say cheese,” Frank says with a laugh, then adds, “The main thing is get it over, quick.” Israel takes that advice to heart, trying to get what she can out of Frank before he changes his mind; at first he didn’t want to participate in the film at all, but once he went with it, he also made sure to playfully battle with Israel over who was really in control.

Robert Frank has fun with some of his old films in DON’T BLINK

Israel (Windfall) does not tell Frank’s story chronologically but instead relies on a kind of thematic wandering through his life, intercutting old lectures, interviews, home movies, and photographs with clips from such Frank films as Conversations in Vermont, About Me: A Musical, Energy and How to Get It, Candy Mountain, One Hour, and Paper Route. Israel spends the most time on Cocksucker Blues, an unreleased work about the Rolling Stones on tour in 1972 (and about which Mick Jagger told Frank, “It’s a fucking good film, Robert, but if it shows in America we’ll never be allowed in the country again”), and Me and My Brother, which focuses on Julius Orlovsky, Peter Orlovsky’s brother, who suddenly awakened from a catatonic state and had some fascinating things to say. Just as Frank’s films went back and forth between color and black-and-white and avoided conventional storytelling methods, Israel does the same with Don’t Blink, using offbeat angles, also switching between color and black-and-white, and incorporating other deft touches that lend insight to Frank, who is now ninety-one and still has disheveled hair, and his work, especially when he’s taking Polaroids and scratching and painting on the back of the pictures. (Alex Bingham served as both editor and art director, while the cinematography is by Lisa Rinzler.) The film’s fierce soundtrack meshes well with Frank’s independent streak, with songs by the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, the Mekons, New Order, the Kills, Yo La Tengo, Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders, the White Stripes, and Tom Waits, many of whom Israel has made music videos for. Perhaps at the heart of Frank’s methodology is what he calls “spontaneous intuition,” something that works for both life and art and helps propel Israel’s warmhearted but never worshipful documentary; their camaraderie is evident in nearly every frame. Don’t Blink — Robert Frank opens July 13 at Film Forum, with Israel participating in Q&As following the 8:00 screening on July 13 with author Nicholas Dawidoff, after the 8:00 screening on July 15 with Bingham, Rinzler, and producer Melinda Shopsin, and at the 4:15 show on July 17 with Ed Lachman, the award-winning DP who has shot several Todd Haynes films and is credited with additional camera on Don’t Blink. And as a bonus, Film Forum will be showing the rarely screened Cocksucker Blues at 9:50 on July 20 and 21. (Don’t Blink also serves as excellent preparation for the upcoming BAMcinématek survey “The Films of Robert Frank,” which consists of twenty-five works by Frank screened on Thursday nights August 4 through September 22.)

OUTDOOR CINEMA: L’ATALANTE

Michel Simon has loads of fun as a somewhat decrepit first mate in Jean Vigo’s classic L’ATALANTE

L’ATALANTE (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Wednesday, July 13, free, live music at 7:00, screening at sunset
718-956-1819
www.socratessculpturepark.org

Swiss actor Michel Simon is spectacularly hilarious as an aging, somewhat decrepit first mate with a peculiar lust for life and cats in French auteur Jean Vigo’s fourth and final film, L’Atalante. After barge captain Jean (Jean Dasté) and Juliette (Dita Parlo) get married in her small, tight-knit country town, they head for the big city of Paris on the long boat, L’Atalante, that he captains as his job. First mate Père Jules (Simon) and his young cabin boy (Louis Lefebvre) come along for the would-be honeymoon, attempting to make sure it’s a smooth ride, which of course it’s not. Juliette wants to enjoy the Parisian nightlife, Jean is a jealous, overprotective stick-in-the-mud, and Père Jules — well, Père Jules is downright unpredictable, pretty much all id, living life footloose and fancy free even if he doesn’t have much money or many true friends. When a love-struck bicycle-riding peddler (Gilles Margaritis) tries to woo Juliette, Jean grows angry, and an emotional and psychological battle ensues. But through it all, Père Jules just keeps on keepin’ on, never getting too concerned, confident that everything will work out in the end, because that’s what happens in life.

Jean (Jean Dasté) is jealous of a hotshot peddler (Gilles Margaritis) trying to steal his wife (Dita Parlo) in L’ATALANTE

The son of anarchist Miguel Almereyda, who chose his last name because it is an anagram of the French phrase for “there is shit,” Vigo had been labeled a subversive for his first film, À propos de Nice, and his third film, Zéro de conduite, had been banned. So he went a little more conventional, at least for him, with L’Atalante, rewriting with Albert Riéra an original script by Jean Guinée. The film is an insightful tale of love and romance, of wealth and poverty, of hard social conditions, focusing on a wacky man who has experienced a lot in his life, even though he looks like a bum, reminiscent of Simon’s brilliant portrayal of Priape in Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning. Whether putting on a puppet show, displaying his tattoos, getting his fortune read, or walking around with cats on his shoulders, Père Jules is one of the most endearing and memorable characters in the history of cinema, a unique figure who surprises over and over again, and Simon’s portrayal is just amazing; it’s hard to believe that he was only thirty-nine when he made the picture. The highly poetic film, featuring a lovely score by Maurice Jaubert, also echoes F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, only from a comic, often slapstick angle. After shooting was completed, Vigo’s already failing health took a turn for the worse, and a battle ensued over final cut involving the producers and editor Louis Chavance and cinematographer Boris Kaufman (Dziga Vertov’s brother, who went on to shoot such American classics as On the Waterfront and 12 Angry Men). Vigo died in October 1934 at the age of twenty-nine, only a few weeks after L’Atalante was released. L’Atalante is screening July 13 in Long Island City as part of Socrates Sculpture Park’s free summer Outdoor Cinema series, programmed by Film Forum, and will be preceded by a live performance by Le Petit Pepinot, with French food available for purchase from Le Fond and La Maison du Soufflé. The seventeenth annual series continues through August 24 with such other international films as Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami’s Sonita, Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

THE KING OF COMEDY

The inimitable Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) imagines quite a career for himself in THE KING OF COMEDY

THE KING OF COMEDY (Martin Scorsese, 1982)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
June 24-30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Jerry Lewis is back in the news right now with the surprise online appearance of clips from his notorious unreleased 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried, a Holocaust picture believed to be so disastrous that he has vowed it will never see the light of day. But from June 24 to 30 at Film Forum, you can revisit one of the former MDA telethon host’s best performances, in Martin Scorsese’s vastly underrated and underappreciated 1982 masterpiece, The King of Comedy. Lewis stars as Jerry Langford, the host of a massively popular late-night television show. (The part was initially offered to Johnny Carson, who turned it down.) Lewis is one cool, calm customer as the smooth, elegant Langford, a far cry from his familiar caricatures in such films as The Bellboy, The Patsy, and The Nutty Professor. The most fascinating role in the film, however, is his stalker, wannabe-comedian Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), who is desperate to get on Jerry’s show and become part of his inner circle, as well as Masha (Sandra Bernhard), who is in love with Jerry and thinks they are destined to be together. When not hanging around Jerry’s office, harassing Langford’s right-hand associate, Cathy Long (Shelley Hack), and the receptionist (Margo Winkler), Pupkin is in the basement of his home, pretending to be a guest on the show, yakking it up with cardboard cutouts of Langford and Liza Minnelli while his mother (voiced by Scorsese’s real mom, Catherine) yells at him to do something with his life. Pupkin is also trying to impress a former high school classmate, Rita (Diahnne Abbott, who was married to De Niro at the time), a bartender who barely remembers him. When things don’t go quite as planned, Rupert and Masha try to pull off a crazy scheme to get what they feel is their destiny.

Jerry Lewis gives his most mature performance ever opposite Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s THE KING OF COMEDY

Written by film critic, activist, and author Paul D. Zimmerman, The King of Comedy has held up remarkably well over the years, displaying a thrilling prescience about the state of celebrity obsession and the need to be on television well before the internet and reality shows changed the dynamic between star and fan. De Niro fully embodies the creepy, awkward, splendidly dressed Pupkin, who is essentially the illegitimate love child of Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta as seen through the lens of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network. And Bernhard, in her first major film role, is a revelation as Masha, exhibiting an expert physicality worthy of the best cinematic comedians, with just the right amount of dark madness. Just as Pupkin goes back and forth between fantasy and reality, Scorsese keeps viewers on edge, not always differentiating between fiction and nonfiction; he has numerous familiar faces play versions of themselves, including radio and television announcer Ed Herlihy and bandleader Les Brown, Tony Randall as a guest host, longtime Carson producer Fred de Cordova as Bert Thomas, producer of The Jerry Langford Show, Dr. Joyce Brothers as one of Randall’s guests, and Emmy-winning producer Edgar Scherick as a network executive. Cinematographer Fred Schuler beautifully captures the hustle of early 1980s New York City, echoing what’s going on inside Pupkin’s deranged mind, while music adviser Robbie Robertson, a friend of Scorsese’s who was in the great Band documentary The Last Waltz, puts together a fab soundtrack that ranges from Ray Charles’s “Come Rain or Come Shine” and the Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang” to Robertson’s own “Between Trains” and Van Morrison’s gorgeous closing credits song, “Wonderful Remark.” Scorsese fills the film with plenty of little treats and sweet touches. Look for the Clash’s Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, and Paul Simonon as the street punks, along with Ellen Foley, Don Letts, Kosmo Vinyl, and Pearl Harbour. In the scene in which Pupkin takes Rita to dinner, a man in the back of the restaurant is curiously mimicking Pupkin’s gesticulations. And Scorsese makes an inside-joke cameo when Randall, preparing to host The Jerry Langford Show, questions something, shrugs, and says to Scorsese, “You’re the director.” The 2013 digital restoration of The King of Comedy is playing at Film Forum June 24-30; the 7:30 show on June 24 will be introduced by Gilbert Gottfried and Frank Santopadre, on June 25 by Aparna Nancherla, and on June 29 by Mario Cantone.

“NUTS!”

The bizarre story of John Romulus Brinkley is recounted in unique ways in “NUTS!”

“NUTS!” (Penny Lane, 2016)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, June 22
212-727-8110
www.nutsthefilm.com
filmforum.org

Penny Lane’s wonderfully titled, inventively told “Nuts!” tells the wacky true tale of Dr. John R. Brinkley, a pivotal twentieth-century figure who was part P. T. Barnum, part Donald Trump, a controversial doctor or a quack, a radio pioneer or a snake-oil charlatan, depending on one’s opinion. He became rich and famous by surgically implanting goat glands into men’s testicles, claiming it increased virility, but his story is about much more than that. “This is a film about John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor, amongst other things, a man who succeeded against terrible odds and powerful opposition, a man who changed the world,” narrator Gene Tognacci explains early on. Lane, who previously profiled another intriguing individual in her debut feature-length documentary, 2013’s Our Nixon, this time follows the often outrageous exploits of Brinkley, using text from Clement Wood’s 1934 book, The Life of a Man: A Biography of John R. Brinkley, home movies and photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, and actual radio broadcasts. She also has seven different animators re-create scenes from Brinkley’s life and career, and each artist or team (Drew Christie & Dane Herforth, Julia Veldman C, Michael Pisano, Krystal Downs, Ace & Son Moving Picture Co., Rose Stark, and Hazel Lee Santino & Downs) employs a unique style while maintaining the film’s overall potent sense of humor. Producer-director Lane, who cleverly edited the film with writer Thom Stylinski, initially casts Brinkley as a sympathetic character just trying to get his own piece of the American dream for him and his family in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas, but as Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, gets ever closer in his obsessive quest to discredit Brinkley, everything the goat-gland doctor has built threatens to unravel. But Lane’s genius is yet to come, as she begins to unravel our assumptions and the very process of biography and history itself as the film proceeds to its inevitable conclusion.

It’s hard to believe that “Nuts!” is true, but that’s all part of the fun. Lane just lays it out there for us to see, and you’ll be rooting for Brinkley as he grows his empire, just as you’ll be booing Fishbein for desperately trying to bring him down. Brinkley was a kind of mad genius, understanding how to get ahead in business by giving the people what they want via early infomercials, realizing the vast power of radio, and flouting the rules whenever he could — and then attempting to change them. Lane limits the talking heads to very occasional comments from historian and former Kansas councilman James Reardon, social and cultural historian Dr. Megan Seaholm, Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves coauthor Gene Fowler, and Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam author Pope Brock. “Nuts!” is all the more comic for its reality, and Lane has succeeded wildly in transferring that notion to the way she has made the film, literally revealing the hands of the artist as the pages of Wood’s sycophantic book are turned; by the end, viewers will be questioning the documentary form itself just as they’re questioning Brinkley’s validity. In fact, Lane is readying a public online database “for audiences to consider the epistemological and ethical issues at the heart of the nonfiction storytelling process.” “Nuts!” opens at Film Forum on June 22, with Lane participating in Q&As following the 8:00 shows on opening night and June 24 and after the 6:10 show on June 25.