Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Red Scare Movies (Sat., May 7, 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th and Race sts., 215-965-4099; Tue., May 10, 7 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Score one for genre. While the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s produced such memorable insanities as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Blob, the movies that deal directly with the prospect of Red infiltration tend to be an undistinguished lot, their potential camp value overshadowed by mean-spirited humorlessness. The undercurrent of misogyny inherent in screwball comedy doesn't hurt His Girl Friday too much, but it's tough to be charmed by Red Salute, in which stiff-necked G.I. Robert Young greets pinko Army brat Barbara Stanwyck with the announcement that he'd like to see her shot. Ah, love. It's like watching Woman of the Year's tacked-on ending dragged out to feature length; the movie can't decide whether it would be better to have women think only patriotic thoughts or simply not think at all. (The promising-sounding Comrade X, which shares Salute's Saturday bill, was not available for review.)

Invasion USA, screening Tuesday, is a bizarre hybrid that combines a stilted framing sequence with stock-footage simulations of an attack on American soil. The better to foster paranoia, "the enemy" is never identified and speaks with a variety of accents that could be identified as Russian, Chinese and even German. (The footage of military attacks is primarily drawn from WW II.) It's not surprising that the three stars interviewed for the DVD profess not to remember the movie, nor should it come as a shock that it's best known these days as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

Say what you like about the Commies: If the Cold War were fought at International House, we'd all be speaking Russian. In the interests of equal time, Invasion is paired with 1969's British Sounds, whose alternate title, See You at Mao, tells you all you need to know about its intentions. Co-directed by Jean-Luc Godard during his days with the collective Dziga Vertov Group, the film goes Week End one better, opening with an 11-minute pan down an automobile assembly line accompanied by voiced excerpts from The Communist Manifesto. What follows is a collage of images and (mostly) sounds which fulfills Godard's conviction, expressed in the 1970 documentary Godard in America, that "there are too many images right now. … We have to work on complexity from the sound point of view, and simplicity from the image point of view." Thus an unmoving shot of a naked woman moving in and out of a hallway while a female voice compares the relation of man and woman to the relationship between industry and labor, climaxing with, "Orgasm is a matter of merchandise." You don't have to buy the argument to be intrigued by Godard and Co.'s attempt at purely ideological cinema. Conversely, even if you're clutching a little red book in one hand and taking notes with the other, you're bound to lose the thread at some point.

Mandabi (Thu., May 5, International House, 7:30 p.m., $6) Considering that Ousmane Sembûne is the preeminent filmmaker on the African continent, the dearth of his films on home video is truly shocking (if, unfortunately, not at all surprising). New Yorker will address that gap at the end of the month with DVDs of Mandabi and Xala, Sembûne's second and fourth features, but habitués of Reel Voices' African Film Series are already ahead of the curve: Thursday's screening of a restored print of Mandabi is the fifth Sembûne film they've shown since 2002.

Released in the U.S. as The Money Order, Mandabi (1968) was the first feature Sembûne shot in the Wolof language of his native Senegal, itself a powerful declaration of postcolonial independence. Compared to Sembûne's black and white first feature, La noire de … (Black Girl), Mandabi positively explodes with color, and the shift from a French apartment to a Senegalese village is indicative of the movie's focus on purely African concerns. That Sembûne also shifts from stark melodrama to mordant comedy only sharpens his social criticisms. Mandabi's independent Senegal is rife with provincial corruption, a place where the unexpected arrival of a money order for 25,000 francs causes the man who receives it nothing but grief. A gift from his nephew in Paris, the money order sends Ibrahim (Makhouredia Gueye) on a bureaucratic odyssey: He needs a birth certificate to cash the money order, a photo to get the birth certificate, and so on. Each step of the way, his fellow Senegalese are waiting to relieve him of money he doesn't yet have. No wonder Ibrahim's wives accost the postman who delivers their unexpected windfall: "Why are you killing us with hope?"

Like most of Sembûne's features, Mandabi has an enjoyably ramshackle structure which spends as much time luxuriating in quotidian rhythms as pursuing its ostensible plot; the movie begins by introducing the money order, then seems to forget about it for a quarter of an hour, focusing on the life that will soon be disrupted. It ends with Sembûne's customary call for African self-determination, expressed more as a matter of pragmatism than principle, since aid from afar causes more problems than it solves. Nearly four decades later, Mandabi has a sad timelessness, especially given the international focus on financial aid as the solution to all Africa's ills. "As for the country, we'll change it," one man declares, a promise as heady as it is daunting.

The Corporation ($29.99 DVD) The more movies like this week's Enron doc I watch, the more I'm convinced The Corporation's is the right approach, synthesizing individual incidents into a picture of the way that corporate logic has perverted the culture at large; the Enron execs who deny knowledge of their underlings' scams might as well be Donald Rumsfeld implausibly denying responsibility for Abu Ghraib. (Remember when being the president meant having more responsibility?) Naturally, some details of the individual cases are overlooked, a compression exhaustively remedied by Zeitgeist's double DVD, whose extra footage runs twice as long as the movie itself. How can more Milton Friedman be a bad thing?