September 11-17, 2003

cover story

Rep Present

Pirate music: The Prince will screen Douglas Fairbanks' The Black Pirate with a new, live score.

Blockbusters aside, there’s a lot going on in the philly film scene this fall.

by Sam Adams

Box office be damned. This has been the best movie summer in recent memory. While Iím often caught flatfooted when asked for a recommendation, this time I found myself running out of breath. Screw The Matrix -- reload Swimming Pool or Dirty Pretty Things or Finding Nemo or The Secret Lives of Dentists or American Splendor, even Pirates of the Caribbean, the best movie Terry Gilliam never made. And those are just the ones that stuck around long enough to recommend.

Fall is usually the time when you stop holding your nose against the stench of summer blockbusters, but this year's autumn has a tough act to follow. As is often the case in a close race, it's the little things that count, so let's skip past the high-profile entries, the Human Stains and Kill Bills and give some respect to the little guys. Not, not the latest faux indie -- the real little guys, the hard-working repertory film programmers who knock themselves out programming hard-to-see films for your ungrateful butt. Here's what they've got in store for the fall.

Film at the Prince program director Gretjen Clausing promises a silent film with live accompaniment each of the next six months, starting with the Alloy Orchestra's new score for Douglas Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (Sept. 26—27). October finds the Prince joining ranks with Media Tank and Nexus Gallery to break the law, illegal-art style: Look for screenings of several quasi-legit movies as well as an appearance by Negativland's Mark Hosler on the 17th. In connection with the Rosenbach Museum's exhibit of Bram Stoker's manuscript for Dracula, look for a marathon of neck-biters leading up to Halloween, including a freshly minted print of F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (more live accompaniment), Near Dark, Nadja, the Daffy Duck-starring Quackbusters and Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, a Day of the Dead special.

The County Theater gets the jump on Halloween with a run of Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary starting Oct. 22. (As with most of the County's programs, its run finishes up with a screening at its sister theater in Ambler.) Leading up to that is more spooky stuff, including John Carpenter's The Fog (starts Oct. 15) and "The Horror!" (Oct. 16, 7 p.m.), an evening of horror clips and appreciation hosted by Andrew Repasky McElhinney. Scary in a different way are Cinemania (starts Nov. 12), a look at obsessive cinema nuts and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (starts Oct. 8), a portrait of encroaching fascism that tumbles into gay-bashing, but features some of Vittorio Storaro's most stunning photography.

More vampires? Sure. Tony Scott's chicks-with-elongated-incisors softcore The Hunger comes right in the middle of the Colonial Theater's Susan Sarandon month, part of their "Classic Sundays" series. Look for it on Sept. 21, bookended by Atlantic City (Sept. 14) and Thelma and Louise (Sept. 28). Successive Sundays in October find a series of puzzlers: Gaslight, The Spiral Staircase, Dial M for Murder and Picnic at Hanging Rock (the last less a whodunit, more a wh'appened).

Laying our vampire segue to rest, International House has a full fall ahead as well. Following its Silk Road series (see Screenpicks, p. 39), I-House cues up the El Festival Cubano, which kicks off Oct. 2 with a screening of Mikhail Kalatozov's legendary I Am Cuba, followed by several new works and the obligatory Agnès Varda short. Oct. 15 brings On Guard!, a newish film by King of Hearts director Philippe de Broca, a description that will thrill some and make others cringe. Punk legend and cinephile Richard Hell, who dropped in on the spring screening of Godard's Le Gai Savoir, takes the stage Nov. 7 to introduce Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably, while in even more French cinema news, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Son gets its Philadelphia premiere Nov. 12. (And yes, I know they're Belgian, but it's better than calling them vampires.) Mid-November brings a series of new Italian films and December should bring a retrospective of The War Game's Peter Watkins, including the Philadelphia premiere of his six-hour La Commune (Paris, 1871).

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