Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

History, Memory and Cinematic Representation (through Sun., Jan. 30, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Sunday is fun day for fans of experimental found-footage collage films (who tend to shun any activity involving the words "fun day"). Catch the evening showing of Bill Morrison's Decasia (see feature at right) and you'll be free at 1 p.m. for Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's People, Life, Years and Prisoners of War 1914-1918, part of International House's multifarious series on the representation of history in and through film.

Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's career as historical reconstructionists and interrogators began in the early 1980s, with their discovery of a cache of footage shot and collected by Italian documentarian Luca Comerio. From the Pole to the Equator, still the duo's best-known film, structured Comerio's footage into a loose travelogue that excavates and condemns (perhaps a bit too glibly) the colonialist mindset. Transforming footage as often through simple editing as through a variety of artisanal techniques (stretch-printing, reframing and tinting among them), Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's films bring history face-to-face with itself. In Prisoners of War, the opening chapter of a World War I trilogy that continues through On the Heights All Is Peace (shown at I-House in 2003) and Oh, uomo (screening Feb. 10 as part of the upcoming "Experiments with Truth" series), the simple, almost bland caption "Victory. Retreat. Defeat." is followed by a sequence that ends with slowed-down footage of bodies being dragged into piles and interred en masse, a burial the movie seeks to reverse through a profound effort of memory and inquisition. After linking footage of prisoners from both sides of the conflict between the Soviet Union and Austria-Hungary (thus implicitly declaring itself beyond partisanship), the film brings in footage of war orphans, parading soldiers and ordinary citizens, suggesting that even those not kept behind fences are imprisoned by the distortions of war.

People, Life, Years (not available for preview) uses the diary of Gianikian's father as the springboard for an essay on the endangered history of the Armenian people, whose genocide at the hands of the Turkish government is the basis of Atom Egoyan's Ararat (Sun., 7 p.m.). A return to the reflexivity of Egoyan's early films, Ararat constantly challenges the boundary between fact and fiction, admitting the difficulty of staging acts of historical horror by focusing on the making of a film whose subject, if not its approach, dovetails with Ararat's own. At times, the film seems to get lost in its own investigations, losing sight of the history it seeks to uncover (an impossibility for Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi). But like the inferior Hotel Rwanda, the mere fact of Ararat's existence is an invaluable provocation; its 2002 release provoked violent (if implausible) denials from the Turkish government, who devastated the country's Armenian population through massacre and deportation in 1915.

Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity, whose investigations rewrote the history of French collaboration with the Nazis, takes up most of Saturday; the four-hour film screens at 1 p.m., with a break between its two parts. Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, which revisits the American conquest of the old West in the light of the Vietnam War, screens Friday at 7 p.m., while Thursday's program, also at 7 p.m., pairs Fernando Is Back, on Chilean investigators' attempt to restore the identity of those "disappeared" by the Pinochet regime, with Discovering Dominga, which follows an Iowa housewife back to the Guatemalan village of her birth.

Blind Shaft ($29.95 DVD) Li Yang's muckraking noir made it no closer than the Trenton Film Festival, but perhaps its scandalous depiction of modern China is best enjoyed behind closed doors. A documentary filmmaker making his fiction debut, Li begins Blind Shaft with five minutes of workers at a remote coal mine making their way to work. Effortless naturalism turns to utter shock as two miners abruptly split a third man's skull with a pickax. It turns out the two are con men of a particularly nasty variety, passing young men off as their relatives, faking their deaths in cave-ins, then collecting hush money from the owners of unregulated mines. Their coldheartedness, though, starts to thaw when their next victim turns out to be a fresh-faced boy who looks even younger than his 16 years. Noir and neorealism battle it out as the movie interweaves genre machinations and potent critique; as they enjoy a post-homicidal meal, one man spies an embezzling official on television and cries out, "He should be executed!" At once vicious satire and subversive thriller, Blind Shaft is certainly one of the angriest movies to come out of China in recent years, and one of the more exhilarating as well.