Also this issue:

Daddy Dearest
Father and son reunite but don't bond in the calculating How I Killed My Father.
-Sam Adams

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Continuing

Repertory Film

Showtimes

September 12-18, 2002

screen picks

Two Towns of Jasper (Sat., Sept. 14, 7:30 p.m., $10, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Broad St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) Can a community rebuild itself after unspeakable tragedy and be better than before, or will they be driven further apart? That question, bound to be on people's minds this week, is at the heart of this riveting documentary. Jasper is the East Texas town where James Byrd Jr., a black man, was dragged to death by three white men in a pickup truck, a form of death whose horror is underscored in the opening scene as the town's sheriff recalls driving down the lonely road where Byrd was killed: "The farther I went, the more evidence I found." The film later provides details about exactly what "evidence" means, but the mere implication is enough to make you shudder.

The technique used by co-directors Whitney Dow and Marco Williams is simple, if not straightforward: a black crew filmed the town's black residents, and a white crew filmed the white residents. Of course, liberalism jerks its knees at such racialized strictures, but in practically every scene, someone says something you can't imagine them saying to someone of a different color. (Of course, that leaves out the things they do say to people of a different color, but the idea is that those interactions are far more governed by social codes.) The sheriff, who is white, thinks back to his discovery, the dark crimson swath along the road's edge, and remembers "knowing a black man was dead, [and] hoping it was a black man that killed him." In the next scene, a black funeral director remembers hearing of the crime, and thinking "some white people had did it -- I just had that gut feeling."

In fact, Byrd's killers weren't just "some white people" -- they had ties to the KKK and Aryan Nation -- but it's clear that Jasper is a town where racial niceties have only been recently installed; it would be a mistake to think that Jasper's inhabitants are more racist than their better-educated neighbors, but they're more likely to say what they think directly. Over the course of a year and the three separate trials of each of the men accused of Byrd's murder, the townspeople fight to maintain relations with each other, although the title's "two towns" seems unfortunately apt. Interestingly, preserving the town's image doesn't seem as urgent an issue as it was in The Laramie Project -- the question isn't "how did this happen here?" so much as "who are we now that this has happened?" Dow and Williams will be on hand to discuss the filming and the issues it raised in this Scribe Producers Forum event.

La Belle et La Bête (Fri., Sept. 13, 8 p.m.; Sat., Sept. 14, 2 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) Jean Cocteau was one of cinema's first masters of illusion, grasping the medium's flair for poetry while others were still plodding about with literalism. His movies plod -- Cocteau treats plot as a chore, explication as a vice -- but then they explode, as when Beauty stops to examine the elaborate hand-shaped candelabra in the Beast's castle, only to see the hands curl away from her touch. Few directors have so literally approached the cinema as a place of magic, and treated the image with such reverence.