Screen Picks

The Devil Is a Woman

A Tribute to Susan Sontag (Fri., July 22 - Sun., July 24, 7 p.m., $5-6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) It's been 10 years since Susan Sontag proclaimed that cinephilia was dead, an ironic milestone for a writer whose best film writing keeps the flame burning. Sontag, who died last December at the age of 71, made her share of wrongheaded pronouncements: "the death of cinephilia" was doozy, and even "Notes on "Camp,'" the 1964 essay that established her reputation, now seems like a mass of overstatements and mischaracterizations. (For one thing, while establishing camp as a primarily homosexual sensibility, she neglected its potential as an offensive, not merely defensive, weapon.) But if one were to judge Sontag simply by compiling a list of the films she championed, the evidence would be irrefutable that she was on the side of the angels.

For proof, look no farther than this weekend's Sontag tribute, presented by International House and curated by BAMcinématek's Jake Perlin. The series opens with Josef von Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman, whose "outrageous aestheticism" Sontag noted in "Notes." In her last film with von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich plays Concha, an Spanish coquette who lures men to the edge of doom and then dances away. Von Sternberg, whose obsession with Dietrich was personal as well as professional, tended to set Dietrich free only to punish her in the end, a hypocrisy that runs deeper than the mandates of the production code. Concha is among the most light-hearted of Dietrich's sultry sirens, but that doesn't save her from an offstage beating that is uglier for being concealed. If there's nothing in Devil as excessive as the "Hot Voodoo" number from Blonde Venus, which finds Dietrich emerging from a massive gorilla suit, the movie still has style to burn, particularly the carnival scenes where streamers fill the screen like undersea plants. (Von Sternberg handled photographic duties himself.) Style of a more consciously artless sort will be on display beforehand in the form of the six screen tests Sontag shot for Andy Warhol.

In her later years, Sontag cast her lot with the long-take cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Béla Tarr, among others, claiming the world record for repeat viewings of Tarr's seven-and-a-half-hour Sátántángó. (Given that her criticism was increasingly devoted to photography, the development is not surprising.) Kiarostami's Close-Up, screening Saturday, isn't the most ostentatiously unfiltered of his films, but it was Sontag's favorite, and her second-favorite of the 1990s. The film is usually cited for its indefinable mixture of documentary and fiction, using real-life players to reenact the story of a man arrested for impersonating Kiarostami's fellow cinema giant, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. But Sontag was also moved by the movie's profound proletarianism; attempting to explain the devotion which spawned his charade, the fitfully employed printer Sabzian returns again and again to Makhmalbaf's depiction of "suffering," a condition that clearly has a prominent place in his life. If Sabzian's climactic encounter with his cinematic idol moved Sontag to tears, it wasn't the fracturing of the fourth wall but the profound sense of exchange between artist and audience that did it. (Kiarostami perversely showed his respect by faking audio difficulties that make most of their dialogue unintelligible.)

The series closes Sunday with Chris Marker's ¡Cuba, Sí!, an intimate picture of the island shortly after the Communist revolution. I-House's print, directly from the British Film Institute, is an archival beauty that, oddly, is missing both commentary and subtitles, which makes the film both more aesthetic and less political than Marker intended. (The version does contain some extra footage, and I-House will have program notes on hand.) Even without words, it isn't hard to get the gist, and the film's pro-revolutionary portrait isn't without an acknowledgment of its costs. Accompanying the short feature are In the Darkness of Time, a late-period short from Sontag mainstay Jean-Luc Godard, and Joseph Strick's harrowing Interviews with My Lai Veterans.

Art Nerd Flip the Bird (Fri., July 22, 8:30, Space 1026, 1026 Arch St., 2d Floor) Recontextualization is the order of the day at Small Change's remix-oriented program. The standout is Virgil Widrich's Fast Film, whose eye-popping 14 minutes deftly mix digital and handmade techniques. Composed of individual frames color-copied and manipulated by hand, Fast Film practices origami in time as well as space, folding together movies as disparate as Videodrome and North by Northwest. One moment Cary Grant's chasing Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, the next he's running after Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, a canny comment on the interchangeability of Hitchcock blondes. Widrich reportedly copied over 65,000 frames, and the effort pays off in a crafty, clever and above all delightful film.

Unfortunately, the program is clogged with predictable culture-crit salvos. John Allen Gibel's Cremasstic Parkinator III knits together scenes from the Jurassic Park, Terminator and Cremaster franchises to little effect, while Tara Mateik's attempt to demonstrate "theoretical and cultural transvesti[sm]" by boogieing to Michael Jackson's "PYT" in a Peter Pan costume lands with a pronounced thud. Hilda Rasula's Umm at least makes its point quickly, building overlapping images of stuttering movie blondes to a harmonic climax in two minutes flat.

One more possible highlight: deco dawson's film(DZAMA). Though dawson's lowercase moniker (nice try, Darryl) and disinclination to title his films reek of sophomore pretension, his silent-movie fetishism and 8 mm distortions can be as transporting as his mentor Guy Maddin's. film(DAZMA) was not available for review, but other installments in the series promise it'll be something to see.

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