Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

M/The Cabinet of Caligari (Thu., May 12, 8 p.m., free, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.) No, not those ones. The latest installment of Andrew Repasky McElhinney's screening series doubles up on unknown remakes. Obscurity is more or less earned by Roger Kay's 1962 Caligari, a loose-as-they-come redo in which Glynis Johns' waylaid traveler gets trapped in Dan O'Herlihy's creepy manse. But if Joseph Losey's 1951 M inevitably suffers next to Fritz Lang's original masterpiece, it's full of nifty restagings (and a few bad ones, like a cat-and-mouse sequence in a warehouse full of disarticulated mannequins). David Wayne's fugitive child-killer isn't a patch on Peter Lorre's, but the character of an alcoholic mob lawyer struggling to regain his decency, an addition of Waldo Salt's screenplay, successfully rewrites Lang's mob-rule cautionary tale as a parable of individual responsibility. Both rarely screened films will be shown on bootleg video, Caligari in a pan-and-scan transfer that bisects the Cinemascope image.

Directors in Focus: Jean Vigo (Sat., May 14, 7:30 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) This year marks the 100th anniversary of Jean Vigo's birth and the 71st anniversary of his death. In the 29 years before his death from tuberculosis, Vigo saw three films through to completion, with a fourth, L'Atalante, edited according to his instructions when he was too weak to get out of bed. All told, Vigo's oeuvre runs less than three hours, short enough to be screened in a single evening, as International House will Saturday night. But it takes only 41 minutes, the length of Vigo's Zéro de Conduite, to confirm his place in the pantheon.

The son of a militant anarchist who was murdered when Vigo was 12, Vigo grew up in places not unlike Zéro's repressive school for boys and made the scathing, satirical À propos de Nice when he was 25. Shot, like all Vigo's films, by Dziga Vertov's brother Boris Kaufman, who would go on to be a celebrated Hollywood cinematographer, the innocuously titled documentary begins with human figurines being swept up by a croupier's rake, dismantling the image of a tourist paradise and revealing the poverty underneath. Although didactic compared to Vigo's later works, À propos demonstrates at the outset his gift for lyrical realism, using surrealism's tools to reveal the world rather than escape it.

The brief documentary Taris, whose full title is Swimming by Jean Taris, France's Champion, is Vigo's least-known, but its straightforward subject throws his technique into sharp relief. Using slow, fast and reverse motion, Vigo deconstructs the gangly grace of Taris' swimming , prefiguring the awkward children's processional in Zéro de Conduite and the underwater climax of L'Atalante. Vigo's least essential work perhaps, but its inventive leaps are a consistent delight.

Vigo's anarchist upbringing comes to the fore in Zéro de Conduite, whose magical approach to childhood trauma profoundly influenced the young Franois Truffaut. Vigo's young toughs, like his films, are playful but unsentimental: When they discover that a man in their train compartment had died en route, they shove the body aside and resume their games. Apart from a teacher who does headstands and imitates Charlie Chaplin, the school's authorities are portrayed as vindictive, self-important boobs, their smallness of spirit reflected in the 4-foot-tall body of their headmaster (played by a dwarf with an egregiously fake beard). The slow-motion pillow fight that turns into all-out rebellion is the most-quoted moment in all of Vigo's work, but a tone of antic anti-authoritarianism pervades every frame (clearly, something was in the air: 1933 was also the year of Duck Soup). Unfortunately, exhibitors detested the movie, and its hostility to authority did not escape the censors, who banned Zéro de Conduite until 12 years after Vigo's death.

Attempting to tame Vigo's outlandishness without undermining his gift, Vigo's producer convinced him to make his next film from a deliberately soppy and anodyne script about a barge captain's floating honeymoon. But Vigo knew the film would be his last and was determined to pull out all the stops. From a distance, L'Atalante has a traditional structure, but the neat line of romantic estrangement and reconciliation keeps twisting into subconscious squiggles. The barge is infested with cats who fling themselves at newlywed Jean Dasté as soon as he boards. (Actually, it was Vigo doing the flinging.) Michel Simon's skipper keeps his best friend's hands in a jar and repeats every sentence as if learning a strange language.

Repeating Zéro's chilly reception, L'Atalante was again reviled, and this time the distributors got their way: Vigo died during editing, and the film was recut and retitled after a popular song, not restored until 1990. The film's unfinished quality only enhances the sense of dreamlike dislocation, the sensation Dita Parlo's bride feels as she swings onto the boat's deck for the first time. Once established, that sense of matrimonial panic fills in the movie's ellipses, so it never feels like surrealism for surrealism's sake.

Z Channel Weekend (Independent Film Channel, Sat., May 14-Sun., May 15) Since the best thing about Xan Cassavetes' documentary Z Channel is the movies it quotes, it's good news that IFC has rechristened itself IFZ and will devote a weekend to favorites from the long-gone L.A. cable station. Of particular note are three not currently available on video. Stuart Cooper's Overlord interweaves WWII newsreels and new footage to investigate the allure of dehumanization, fixating on aerial views at once beautiful and impersonal. Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing stars a blazing Theresa Russell as an unstable young woman who gets tangled up with Art Garfunkel's chilly psychiatrist. The movie's squirmy climax caused its distributor to publicly denounce it as "a sick film made by sick people for sick people," a description even its admirers might endorse; you think the movie's not working because Garfunkel comes off as a frigid creep, until you realize he's supposed to be a frigid creep. The Important Thing Is To Love, described as "the quintessential Z Channel movie," did not arrive in time for perusal, so the presence of Romy Schneider, Jacques Dutronc and Fabio Testi will have to be sufficient enticement.