Zhao Dayong’s quietly stunning documentary about life in a remote Chinese mountain village will get a series of much-deserved public screenings at venues nationwide over the next few weeks, starting with the Museum of Modern Art on Monday, March 15. Screening dates and locations are listed below.

Click here to read my interview with Zhao, which ran in conjunction with the film’s U.S. premiere at last year’s New York Film Festival, and here for GHOST TOWN’s page at dGenerate Films.

Monday, March 15 - Saturday, March 21: MoMA, NYC

Saturday, April 3 - Sunday, April 4: Union Theater, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

Thursday, April 8: Southwest Film Center, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM

Saturday, April 17: part of two-day event “China In and Beyond the Headlines,” University of Colorado, Boulder, CO

Tuesday, April 27: Melnitz Movies, James Bridges Theater, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA

— Nelson Kim

Hong Sang-soo and Bong Joon-ho aren’t just two of the best filmmakers to emerge from South Korea’s recent cinema renaissance—they’re arguably two of the best directors at work anywhere in the world right now. Both have new films showing in NYC over the next few days.

Hong’s Like You Know It All, his ninth feature (since 1996!), screens as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Film Comment Selects series next Tuesday and Wednesday. His longtime admirers will hardly be shocked to learn that once again, Hong is repeating himself. We expect no less of him. He’s a great filmmaker for a number of reasons, but variety of theme and topic isn’t one of them. All the usual elements are here: a male artist as the protagonist, soju-fueled drinkathons accompanied by bad sex followed by uncomfortable mornings after, men’s cluelessness, women’s anger at same. The only questions are: what kind of artist is the male protagonist this time? (Answer: an art-house auteur in mid-career who travels the festival circuit and lectures at film schools—where does Hong get his ideas from?) And: what kind of weird tricks does Hong play with the narrative? (Not as weird as usual—as with his previous two films, Woman on the Beach and Night and Day, he seems to be scaling back on the bold formal experimentation that marked his earlier work, though that’s not to say viewers don’t have some surprises in store.) And: how good is it? (One of his best, I think—and possibly his funniest, which is saying something.) If you like Hong’s films, this is a Hong film you’re almost certain to like. If you haven’t caught up with him yet, head over to the Walter Reade next week and get a taste. Details here. (Or, if you aren’t in New York City, add Woman On The Beach to your Netflix queue right now.)

Unlike his compatriot, Bong never steps in the same river twice. But his wildly disparate films all boast a keen and witty directorial eye, story-spinning verve, and a remarkable knack for reinventing familiar genres. BAMcinématek is offering “Monsters & Murderers: The Films of Bong Joon-ho,” a full-career retrospective starting today and going through Monday. Many HTN readers will already have seen his breakthrough film, the 2003 police procedural Memories of Murder, and his 2006 monster movie The Host, which screen tonight and Saturday, respectively. But the BAM series also features work that most local cinephiles likely haven’t had a chance to discover yet: a program of three shorts (including his contribution to the 2008 omnibus film Tokyo!); his first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), described as a “batty black comedy”; and his wonderful 2009 thriller Mother, which played at the NYFF last year and has been picked up for U.S. distribution by Magnolia Films (it opens in March). Bong will visit BAM for a Q&A at Mother on Friday and the first screening of The Host on Saturday. And tonight, he’ll appear at the Korea Society in midtown Manhattan, to be interviewed onstage by Michael Atkinson and to show clips from Mother. Go here for the BAM retrospective’s scheduling and ticketing information, and here for more about the Korea Society appearance.

— Nelson Kim

How good is Jacques Audiard’s new prison thriller A Prophet (Un prophète)? (Yes, that’s the full, official title.) Let me backtrack. I’d heard the hype from Cannes, where the film won the Grand Prix, and friends who saw it in Toronto came home slack-jawed and raving about it. But I was skeptical. I missed Audiard’s first three features, but saw his fourth, the widely acclaimed The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), a remake of James Toback’s Fingers. The Beat That My Heart Skipped boasted a terrific lead performance from Romain Duris and was clearly the work of a director with style and energy to burn, but I found it fake, hollow, and sentimental at its core. It did to Toback’s unruly ’70s cult classic what American filmmakers are usually accused of doing to European movies they remake: planed down its rough edges, gutted it of personality, and sprinkled it with happy-ending air freshener.

But the new film is a knockout. The American influence is no less pronounced than it was on Audiard’s previous opus; A Prophet is steeped in the U.S. crime-movie canon, from the old-school classics up to and including the moderns—the Godfather trilogy, GoodFellas, and Casino as well as contemporary TV dramas like The Wire and Oz, all of which it recalls in its epic sweep, ethnic specificity, and hardcore violence. (Audiard told the New York Times that he was also inspired by recent European crime films, citing Gomorrah and the Pusher trilogy in particular.) But A Prophet is no mere footnote; it stands on its own as a strong contribution to the genre tradition.

Audiard doesn’t waste any time getting down to business. The film puts us in a state of buzzing alertness from its first few minutes, and never releases us until the end. Nineteen-year-old Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) arrives at the prison where he’s to serve a six-year sentence for assaulting a cop—his first time in adult lockup, following a series of stretches in juvenile facilities. Malik is the mixed-race son of a white woman and an Arab man, but he’s cut off from his family and has no close friends. He speaks both French and Arabic but can’t read or write either; he’s too uneducated and untrained for mainstream society but not yet hardened enough for criminal life. However, he’s exceptionally smart and resourceful, and from the moment he lands behind bars he begins to piece together not only what it will take for him to survive from moment to moment, but what he’ll need to learn in order to prosper over the long haul.

And so A Prophet becomes the story of Malik’s education, in several senses. A gang of Corsican convicts dominates the prison hierarchy, and they recruit Malik to do some of their dirty work—granting him status and protection, but also alienating him from the burgeoning population of Arab prisoners. Gradually Malik comes into his own, setting up money-making operations inside and outside the prison walls, making himself indispensible to the Corsicans even as he schemes to play one side against the other. Before our eyes, he grows into a criminal mastermind. Newcomer Rahim achieves something remarkable, bringing us inside Malik’s head for every stage in his evolution (always followed by Stéphane Fontaine’s restless, darting handheld camera). Even his physiognomy seems to alter—his body language gains in power and focus, and his features sharpen; by the end, the shivering, soft-faced adolescent of the early scenes has taken on something of the cool command and daggerlike handsomeness of the young Alain Delon.

So how good is A Prophet, finally? Perhaps one measure of its ultimate limitations is that, unlike the truly great works, it doesn’t grow in stature with repeated viewings. I can state this with some confidence, because I saw it three times. After the first NYC press screening ended, and I unscrewed myself from my chair, I knew I had to watch it again. No, it didn’t get deeper the second and third time—it didn’t expand in the mind, didn’t take on new emotional textures, didn’t provide any fresh illuminations. And the thriller aspects of the story can’t carry the same high-wire tension once you know how the plot plays out. But at all three screenings, I was royally entertained for every minute of the movie’s two and a half hours. Audiard has hinted in interviews that he’s open to making a sequel someday, a possibility that fills me with greedy anticipation. In the meantime, I’ll just have to content myself with watching A Prophet again.

— Nelson Kim

Don Argott’s new documentary starts off recounting the story behind the creation of the Barnes Foundation. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) was a Pennsylvania physician whose development of a popular antimicrobial medicine made him rich. He used his wealth to build one of the great modern art collections in private hands, with dozens of works apiece by Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Renoir, plus some of the best paintings by Seurat, Van Gogh, and many others. The Foundation, housed in Barnes’s former residence in Merion, a suburb a few miles outside of Philadelphia, was intended as an educational institution first and foremost, its collection primarily available for viewing by its lecturers and students. Anyone else had to apply for permission to visit. A self-made man and a firm believer in democratic principles, Barnes was also something of an anti-establishment extremist and a deep-dyed eccentric. As one interviewee admiringly notes in The Art of the Steal, if Barnes received a request from, say, the art critic of the New York Times, he would likely say no—and would have his dog sign the letter denying permission with an inky paw-print. But given a similar request from a plumber who lived in New York, Barnes would roll out the metaphorical red carpet.

The early scenes of The Art of the Steal are informative, if fairly plodding and conventional in execution. But much of the film’s remaining running time, which details what became of the Foundation in the decades since Barnes’s death, is thrilling and revelatory. (It’s also somewhat problematic, in ways I’ll get to in a moment.) As the Foundation ran low on funds, and as its board of trustees expanded to include new members less devoted to Barnes’s ideals, the strict conditions laid out in the founder’s will were at first watered down gradually, then disregarded entirely. The old man had stipulated that the collection was never to be broken up, loaned out, or sold, but in 1991 the Foundation’s president sent dozens of its best-known paintings on a grand international tour to raise revenue. After that, a group of city and state political leaders, business interests, and nonprofit foundations, hungry for control over this world-class cultural treasure, pushed through a plan to move the entire collection out of Merion, to a location in downtown Philadelphia. The collection’s new home is scheduled to open in 2012, and is expected to reap a pirate’s bounty of tourist money for the city.

So The Art of the Steal becomes a kind of crime thriller about the violation of a dead man’s wishes and the theft of a great art collection. Argott and his team have pulled off a coup of investigative journalism. They name several names, and produce more than one smoking gun. The main achievement of the film comes in the way it anatomizes the circulation of money, power, and influence through a number of American social structures: politics, higher education, the justice system, the museum world, charitable foundations, and more. Rare is the documentary that gives such a clear sense of how these worlds operate. And all this is carried off with impressive filmmaking skill and storytelling panache; the movie is a fun, fast-paced whodunit that before long gives us the answer: here’s whodunit, and why, and how.

And there we come to the problem. The Art of the Steal’s argument is delivered with the crusading zeal of a prosecuting attorney. But all prosecutors lie—or, shall we say, all prosecutors willfully fail to tell anything resembling the whole truth. (The same applies equally to all defense attorneys, of course.) This is to be expected: it’s in the nature of the job. But isn’t it fair to hold serious documentary filmmakers to a different standard, one more nuanced, complex, and ambiguous, more open to the many-sidedness of reality? The Art of the Steal is so intent on working our sense of moral indignation that it taints its own claims to truth.

To take the example that bothered me the most: the various talking heads the filmmakers put on display, and the film’s very structure and mode of address, argue that the main story here is the contravention of Barnes’s will. But what is so sacrosanct about one individual’s decades-old will, especially when public access to so much significant modern art is at stake? Granted that the co-optation of the collection was a money-and-power grab made in secret, a point the film makes convincingly—but is it ultimately so terrible that the art is being moved to a place where many more people will be able to see it every day? Why does the movie fail to provide any information about Barnes’s ideas on art education (which determined his rules regarding everything from how his paintings were hung to who had the right to see them), while asserting that those ideas were of such great value that the rules needed to be preserved in perpetuity after his death?

Such questions will probably occur to many viewers of The Art of the Steal. The movie stridently avoids addressing any of them. Yes, I know—the filmmakers have only so much time to tell their story and only so much ground they can cover, and they’re obligated to choose a point of view, and so on. But The Art of the Steal goes further than it needs to in simplifying the issues it explores, and as far as I can tell, it does so in order to be more “entertaining” and “accessible,” to score easy points, and to get the crowd’s fists pumping. Self-righteousness is as disagreeable a quality in art as it is in life, and this movie is bloated with it.

That said, if the film helps to shine a light on the Barnes’s recent history, and to reinvigorate the debate over its future, it will have performed a real service. And despite my misgivings, I’m grateful the movie exists—not only for its own merits, but because seeing it spurred me to take a weekend trip to the Philly area with my girlfriend to visit the Barnes before the collection moves. The house is less grand than one might expect; each room is fairly small and each wall is packed to near overcrowding. It’s an intimate experience. You’re surrounded by what seems like a picture book on modern art come to vivid, roiling life: several of the most beautiful paintings of the last 150 years are all around you, sometimes mere inches away. These masterpieces share the walls with less exalted paintings and drawings, African sculptures, Native American ceramics, everyday household objects, and much else, giving the collection a very different feeling from the antiseptic, uncluttered spaces of most contemporary museums and galleries. Barnes arranged the works not by artist or period, but by a more unorthodox and intuitive sense of connections—subject matter, line, color, and design. All this argues in favor of the perspective put forth by one of the pro-Barnes faction quoted in the film: that Barnes’s vision for the collection represents a genuinely “hand-made thing in the machine world.” Still: while the house in Merion provides a unique and pleasant atmosphere, that’s nothing compared to the overwhelming aesthetic rush generated by the paintings themselves, and I remain as yet unconvinced that the profound thrill I experienced standing before works like Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre and Cézanne’s The Card Players would be measurably diminished in a different setting, as The Art of the Steal noisily insists. But see the film, and make up your own mind about it—and far more importantly, if you haven’t already, go see the Barnes itself. Now.

— Nelson Kim

The challenge is to see things with a fresh eye. When a film has been called a “classic” for too long, it comes to us cloaked in a fog of received opinion, textbook platitude, knee-jerk veneration, and other impediments to clear perception. In the case of Rome Open City (1945)—the first film in the Criterion Collection’s new DVD box set, Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy—the fog is especially thick. We’re not talking about your average, everyday classic here. This is one of the epochal, paradigm-shifting events in cinema history, the grubby, stitched-together DIY indie that announced a renaissance in the cultural life of its nation and set off the Italian Neorealist movement—a movement whose influence was immediate, worldwide in scope, and enduring: to this day, whenever filmmakers reject studio artifice and escapist story formulas in favor of capturing observable social reality and everyday behavior, they’re said to be working in the Neorealist tradition.

One of the first things a contemporary viewer notices about Rome Open City is that it doesn’t really conform to the standard definition of what a Neorealist film is supposed to be. Rossellini casts polished professional actors alongside plucked-from-the-streets amateurs, alternates highly stylized lighting and studio sets with the newsreel-like immediacy of the on-location sequences, and employs crowd-pleasing melodrama and thriller devices to leaven his tough critiques of the moral, social, and political squalor of wartime Italy. But so what? We can hardly fault a work of art for not fitting neatly into the categories that critics generate after the fact—and this mixture of modes provides much of the film’s vigor.

However, the mixture doesn’t completely gel; this certifiably Great Film isn’t always a very good movie. The problem isn’t melodrama. The problem is thuddingly crude melodrama of the sort that intelligent audiences in the silent era would’ve jeered at. Take the two primary villains of the piece, the gay Nazi commanding officer and his drug-pushing lesbian henchwoman. It’s not even a question of contemporary sensibilities finding such caricatures ludicrously outdated—no, the loathsome queers represent a larger artistic failure: not only are the actors’ performances embarrassing to behold, but by reducing the evil of Nazism to sexual “perversion,” Rossellini nearly tanks the entire film’s attempt to give an honest account of life under Fascism, and sullies its claim to seriousness, as drama, as reportage, as history.

And yet, the bad walks hand in hand with the good: that same drive toward melodrama lends many of the film’s strongest scenes an operatic, larger-than-life emotional intensity: Anna Magnani’s aria-like lament to the priest (”How will we ever forget all this suffering… Doesn’t Christ see us?”), the heroic refusal of the Communist Resistance fighter to break under torture, the wrenching moment when the priest curses his Nazi captors and then, seconds later, begs God’s forgiveness for allowing hatred to get the better of him. Everything Rossellini is aiming for—documentary rawness fused with the total audience involvement of great pop filmmaking—comes together perfectly in the long sequence that ends the first half of the film: the raid on the apartment building, which rivals anything in Hitchcock for white-knuckle suspense, and culminates in Magnani’s murder, one of the most famous scenes in world cinema. As with Potemkin’s Odessa Steps massacre or the shower stabbing in Psycho, overfamiliarity can never dull the power of this series of images; all the ubiquitous picture-book frame enlargements and reams of critical commentary vanish from the mind once the scene begins to unfold.

Even before Open City was released to massive international acclaim, Rossellini had begun preparing its follow-up. Paisan (1946) consists of six short stories, each taking place in a different region of Italy, all linked by a common subject—the relationship between the Americans who arrived in 1943 and the Italians who saw them as both occupiers and liberators—and a common theme: the necessity, and the difficulty, of bridging the gap between nations, cultures, and languages. A Sicilian peasant girl and an infantryman from New Jersey spend a few hours waiting for his platoon to return from a recon mission. A Neapolitan street urchin befriends a black M.P., who comes to a belated recognition of their shared suffering. In Rome, a G.I. reunites with a girl he’d fallen for months earlier, but the hardships both have endured since make them strangers to each other now. An American nurse and a partisan sympathizer set out on a hazardous journey through a Florence under fire. Three U.S. Army chaplains receive a strange and unexpected welcome at a monastery in Romagna. A beleaguered band of OSS operatives and partisans fight side by side in the marshlands of the Po River Valley.

Rossellini hits upon a brilliant device to buttress the authenticity of his fiction with facts: he begins each section with newsreel footage as an announcer sets the scene—”On the night of July 10, 1943, the Allied fleet opened fire on the southern coast of Sicily,” and so on—before smoothly easing us into the invented tale. Though Paisan is as much a synthesis of different forms and styles as Open City, the multipart construction of the narrative hides the seams better, paradoxically giving the entire work a greater sense of unity. The conclusions of most of the stories are grim—communication breaks down, hope gives way to despair, the enemy takes the upper hand—but the film is shot through with flashes of moral illumination and mutual understanding, fleeting moments of connection and compassion. Paisan is a deeper, more searching exploration of the territory Open City had scouted; its break with earlier cinematic traditions is cleaner, its embrace of the new more assured and decisive.

Rossellini closes out his war trilogy with an investigation of what the war had done to Germany, Italy’s former ally turned oppressor, now fallen into defeat and disgrace. The previous films had been ensemble pieces; Germany Year Zero (1948) is a single-character study—and what a study, what a character! Thirteen-year-old Edmund (Edmund Meschke) lives in an overcrowded Berlin tenement his family shares with several others. His father is old, ailing, and wracked by self-pity; his older brother, who fought in the German Army, refuses to register with the new government for fear of being arrested as a war criminal, and thus can’t work or put food on the table; his older sister is dangerously close to turning tricks to help them all survive. Edmund navigates the rubble of his broken city, in search of sustenance of any kind—money, food, guidance, companionship, a reason to live. None are to be found. (Rossellini had lost his young son Romano to illness in 1946, which presumably added to the story’s unremitting bleakness.)

Germany Year Zero burns through its 73 minutes with relentless energy, powered by a fluent moving camera and drum-tight narrative logic. In the nearly wordless ten-minute sequence that concludes the film—which Rossellini would later claim was his sole motivation for making it—Edmund, having committed a horrible crime and then realizing he’s beyond redemption, wanders the streets aimlessly until he reaches the end of the road, in every sense. Emotionally, the sequence is depressing, but as a piece of filmmaking, it’s exhilarating: Rossellini is pointing the way forward to much that is most fruitful in modern cinema, a cinema that seeks to depict interior states of mind and feeling without relying on hand-me-downs from 19th-century literature and theater. His younger compatriots Fellini (who had worked on the scripts for Open City and Paisan), Antonioni, and Pasolini, among others, would contribute to this new way of seeing—but so would Rossellini himself; by the time of his 1950s collaborations with Ingrid Bergman, he had left Neorealism behind to be part of this second vanguard, using modernist formal innovations to express a personal vision of spirituality. (1953’s Voyage to Italy, in particular, is as radical as L’Avventura or any films of the French New Wave, whose leading lights were proud to name Rossellini as a progenitor.) Picasso-like in his metamorphoses, he would then move on to a third major phase in the ’60s and ’70s, with a highly original series of biographical/historical portraits. But it all begins with the wartime trilogy. Criterion has once again done film lovers a great service in making these essential works available to a wider audience.

— Nelson Kim

Nearly three hours long, Ghost Town is divided into three parts. The first, “Voices,” introduces us to two of the village’s Christian pastors, the 80-something John the Elder, and his son, Pastor John. John the Elder recounts the tale of his conversion by Western missionaries, and his 20-year prison sentence when the Communist Party took power and cracked down on Christianity. His son later confides to Zhao that his father has become a hard, difficult old man, a stranger to him in many ways. The second part, “Recollections,” presents a series of personal narratives in which various townspeople confront the local lack of economic opportunities: a pair of young lovers who face a dilemma when the woman’s family is offered a substantial dowry for her hand in marriage; an older couple working out the terms of their divorce; a young woman who moved to the city looking for work, only to find herself tricked into marriage. In “Innocence,” we follow a 12-year-old boy who lives on his own, hunting and foraging for food, finding something like a community among other lost children like himself.

Zhao films in long takes, usually from wide or medium-wide distance, a patient, reserved style of observation that immerses us in the flow of the villagers’ day-to-day existence. There’s no narrator, no clear timeline, no easily legible chain of cause and effect—it’s as if we, like Zhao, are ghostly visitors drifting through the town, bearing witness to the events, encounters, and images that pass before us: a prayer service in a dilapidated church; a group of men attempting to neuter a bull; the little boy’s hunting and cooking routines; the heartsick, exhausted middle-aged divorcé negotiating his settlement with his ex-wife. Perhaps the most affecting moments come when the villagers are alone with Zhao’s camera and speak openly of their dashed dreams and their hopes for something better. Ghost Town’s meditative pace drew me in, and the stories Zhao found kept me riveted from beginning to end.

I sat down with Zhao two days after the film’s NYFF screening, with Vincent (Tzu-Wen) Chang serving as our translator.

HAMMER TO NAIL: Are you pleased with the reception that your film has had so far [here]?

ZHAO DAYONG: I think it’s wonderful. I didn’t expect that the American audience would actually enjoy the film this much.

H2N: You come out of a group of filmmakers who are working independently, and you don’t have many opportunities to show your work in China. Does it bother you that you aren’t able to reach the audience your films are made for?

ZD: I’m used to it. This is part of our lives.

H2N: Do you have any optimism that things may improve?

ZD: I really don’t have the time to think about it, because it’s outside of my control. The only thing I can do is persist in making my films. That is something I have control over. For Chinese independent filmmakers, it’s important for us to be persistent, to insist on making good quality films, and that will hopefully change the environment in the future.

H2N: You were a painter, and you worked in advertising. How did that lead to becoming a documentary filmmaker?

ZD: When I was a professional painter, the overall goal was the same, to find the best method to create art. As you mentioned, I was working for an advertising agency making commercials, but I don’t see that as creating art—that is just a way to pay the bills. Going back to this idea of finding different ways to make things—during that process, I did installations, performance art, voice, painting of course; I used different media to express my creative energy. I think it was a process of exploration, of finding what would be the best medium for me. Right now, film is something with which I can capture the essence of the subject matter I want to depict. The time is right for me to use film.

H2N: When did you first start visiting the village, and what made you want to make a film about this area?

ZD: I went there in 2001 for the first time, when I was working on a narrative feature film, to look for locations. And while I was there, I was very impressed by the place and really enjoyed the people and the community. The narrative film didn’t pan out the way I wanted it to, so I decided to go back there in 2005 to start making this documentary.

H2N: How did you arrive at the structure of the film—I assume it was something you found in the editing room?

ZD: During the process of making it, I’d already decided on what kind of structure the end product would have, [one that would] reflect my experience living in the community. I had a very clear, subjective concept that I wanted to express in this film, and that’s why I used these three different episodes—even the titles of the three episodes, I had in mind while shooting. Of course, during post-production I had to go through all the raw material, but it went very quickly because I already knew what I wanted for each particular episode. It’s actually more of a portrait of myself than the people I filmed. And that’s why I never really considered this a quote-unquote documentary, because in regards to this particular village, its history, its people, and the events happening there—I think those are unimportant. What’s more important is how I depict the stories, the images I compose. So that’s why I think it’s more a movie about me than about them.

[NOTE: I wish I'd followed up on Zhao's answer above, as I'd like to have heard more about his "clear, subjective concept" for the film. And I doubt he meant to imply that the people he filmed were "unimportant"—only that his perspective, as the filmmaker, would ultimately take precedence over theirs.]

H2N: I was thinking about the title and how it relates to the three different parts. You speak in the press kit of wanting to explore “lost histories,” especially the histories that were lost after the Cultural Revolution, and that seemed clear in the first part, when John the Elder mentions that when he was converted, he no longer believed in ghosts, he believed in God. In the second section, it seemed that the ghosts there had to do with the fact that the town was in some ways more dead than alive, that the young people felt they had to leave the town in order to lead a more full life. And then in the third section, the young boy takes part in the ghost exorcism ceremony. Is that a fair reading of the title?

ZD: Depending on the audience, they can come up with different interpretations. Yours is a correct one from your perspective. And at the same time I value other people’s interpretations as well. Because I really don’t have any control over how you see it, how you read it, how you interpret it—actually, it really doesn’t matter to me, because I have gotten what I want out of the process of making it, and whether your interpretation is the same as mine is completely irrelevant. For me, I have what I want, and however you want to interpret it is just as valid as any others I have listened to or read.

H2N: I’d like to ask a few questions about the specific parts of the film. In part one, “Voices,” I was wondering, how prevalent is Christianity in this town? It seemed that there weren’t that many people in the church, but then there weren’t many people in the town in general.

ZD: It’s about 55 percent of the people living in that particular neighborhood, but the numbers are definitely dwindling, and that probably has something to do with the impact of modern life and the effect it has on the community. But I think that when people go outside the community, and go to the big city to work, a lot of them realize they feel totally lost, and then return to the village, due to these feelings of loneliness and isolation.

H2N: Then in part two, rather than focus on one or two people, you create a group portrait. Instead of one individual story, it’s several different stories all grouped around the theme of staying or leaving.

ZD: Yes, that was done intentionally, I wanted to have that contrast between the first and the second parts, from the one family in the first part to numerous families in the second.

H2N: I was curious what happened to the young couple after the shooting.

ZD: They got married. They returned to the town and opened up a grocery shop and they’re enjoying their life together.

H2N: And in part three, it’s never explained what happened to the young boy’s parents. Did they die, did they move away…

ZD: The parents divorced, and the kid didn’t want to live with either parent. He was very naughty, very mischievous, and he decided he didn’t want to have anything to do with either of them. The parents divorced when the kid was five years old, and both remarried, and that’s another reason he didn’t want to live with either of them. So he lived with his grandmother for a few years, and then he decided that he didn’t want to go to school, and wanted to live on his own, without his family members.

H2N: When part three began, I felt the child was living an almost unimaginably difficult life—he was all by himself, he was fighting all the time, he was hunting for food, but as the story went on, I began to get the sense that he was a part of the community. He mentions his grandmother is nearby, he has friends, he has people he cares for and people who help care for him. And it made the story less painful than I thought it was at first, if not exactly optimistic—even if he didn’t have his family, he still belonged to a community here, to some extent.

ZD: In Chinese society [there's the importance] of connection, of networks, guanxi, as we say—you can always find something to eat and a place to stay, unlike here in the United States, where if you don’t have a job, you may have to be homeless and be all by yourself.

H2N: You’re working on a documentary about the underground Nigerian Christian community in China—when do you think that might be finished?

ZD: That one actually has been completed.

H2N: Well, I hope we’ll get to see it here soon.

ZD: Yes, of course.

H2N: Thank you very much for the interview, it’s a beautiful and thoughtful film.

ZD: Thank you.

—Nelson Kim

(For more information on Ghost Town, visit the film’s pages at Lantern Films, Zhao and David Bandurski’s production company, and dGenerate Films, which is representing it in the U.S.)

Sometimes ordinary filmcrit hyperbole just won’t do. So let’s try this: take the last ten movies someone described to you as “one of a kind,” “highly original,” and/or “like nothing else I’ve seen before.” Then line ‘em all up against Trent Harris’s Beaver Trilogy, and watch as your ten are revealed as the mere ho-hum, been-there-seen-that knockoffs they surely are. Beaver Trilogy is a stunt that somehow exploded into a work of art, and a documentary/fiction hybrid that raises all kinds of endlessly chewable questions about the nature of performance, the ethics of representation, and much more.

The trilogy begins in 1979 with a documentary portrait of a young man from Beaver, Utah nicknamed “Groovin’ Gary”. Harris, who was working at the time as a news cameraman for a Salt Lake City television station, was testing out a new video camera in the station’s parking lot when Gary spotted him. Convinced that Harris had the ability to make him a star by putting him on TV, Gary—the self-proclaimed “Rich Little of Beaver”—ran through a series of underwhelming celebrity impersonations. Weeks later, Harris went to visit Gary in Beaver, where Gary was performing in a talent show. Harris taped Gary’s preparations for the show, and the performance itself, which didn’t go over well: Gary’s Olivia Newton-John drag routine received a dismissive reaction from the baffled small-town crowd.

Harris was left with a bizarre, hilarious, and unexpectedly poignant chunk of footage. But in the pre-YouTube era, there was no outlet for it to be shown. By 1981, he had moved to LA, and decided to re-enact and re-shoot the parking-lot and talent-show scenes with an actor playing Gary, and with new dialogue written to bring out what he saw as the subtext of Gary’s earlier performances. The young actor he cast was a no-name who’d just landed his first major movie role, as a teenage stoner in something called Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Sean Penn’s rendition of Gary was, of course, spookily spot-on—and also more than that: Penn brilliantly brought to the surface the undercurrents of sexual insecurity, fear of rejection, and hunger for fame that were all there, in amorphous and artless form, in Gary’s original footage. Harris’s weird and wild gamble paid off: this second part of the trilogy gives us a great performing artist playing a mediocre performing artist, and playing him with such empathy and insight that Penn seems far more Gary than Gary did—more believable, more complex, somehow more true, though we know that can’t be true. We’re confronted with the paradox that the best actors create characters who can seem more real to us than many people we know.

But just as you’re processing all this, and wondering what its implications are for the way we all “perform” our lives every day, we move on to the third and final part of the trilogy. In 1985, Harris shot yet another re-enactment, with further variations on the original dialogue and situations, and (when Penn proved unavailable) with yet another young actor on the verge of mainstream recognition playing Gary: Crispin Glover. Thanks to funding by the American Film Institute, the third section is the only one shot on film, and the only one with any production values to speak of. Glover, natch, did his thing—though I think this section is a slight anticlimax after the dizzying revelations of the first two, the future George McFly still energizes the proceedings with his uniquely scatterbrained, screw-loose talent.

In 1999, Harris availed himself of the newly affordable video-editing setups and cut the three parts together into an 84-minute feature film, which played the New York Video Festival in 2000, and Sundance in 2001. Due to clearance issues involving the music rights, it’s never been officially, commercially released in theaters, although underground copies have been circulating for years—and Harris is now offering DVDs for sale on his website. But it’s a great movie to discover with a crowd, so if you’re in or near NYC this weekend, get on over to the 92YTribeca.

— Nelson Kim

To commemorate Criterion’s DVD release of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles on August 25, 2009, we’re reposting Nelson Kim’s review originally written for the movie’s run at Film Forum this past January. Buy the DVD at Amazon.

A fortyish brunette, slender, pretty, perfectly composed and precise in her movements, prepares a meal in her kitchen. A buzzer rings. She opens the door for an unsmiling older man—and here, the attentive viewer might note what I missed my first time around: our heroine holds her hands clasped tightly together in a gesture that could be read as simple Euro-bourgeois politeness, but could also suggest some darker impulse bubbling beneath that smooth veneer. The woman leads the man down the hall. Jump cut to some time later: now the woman stands waiting as the man dons his hat and coat, gives her some money, and leaves. Then she goes into her bedroom, removes a towel from the slightly mussed bedspread, and cracks open the window. She scrubs herself off in the bath, and returns to the kitchen to finish making dinner for her teenaged son, who’ll soon be home from school.

This is Jeanne Dielman, single mother, widow, and one-john-a-day prostitute. And this is Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feature, now playing at Film Forum in a glorious new 35mm print. As several critics have pointed out over the years, Jeanne Dielman’s storyline verges on lip-smacking melodrama—hot single mom turns tricks to get by!—but Akerman has purged her tale of any traces of cheap thrills or sudsy emotionalism. The movie’s formal strategy bears the influence of the minimalist/structuralist strains of 1960s and ’70s avant-garde filmmaking: Warhol, Straub and Huillet, Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, and others who pushed the limits of spareness, slowness, duration, and repetition. Nearly three and a half hours long, Jeanne Dielman is a severe and demanding viewing experience, but if you’re up for the challenge, you might leave the theater convinced you’ve seen one of the towering masterpieces of modern cinema.

Jeanne Dielman takes place over a roughly 48-hour period, from a Tuesday afternoon to a Thursday afternoon. For the first 24 hours of story time, about half the length of the film, Jeanne is a study in inscrutable calm, going about her business with a half-smile glued to her face that might put you in mind of the Sphinx, or the Mona Lisa. The camera never moves, cinematographer Babette Mangolte’s compositions are resolutely undynamic, the scenes unfold in real-time long takes, and the actions within the scenes are the most mundane of domestic routines—cooking, cleaning, shopping. (Though Akerman has denounced simplistic gender-based readings of Jeanne Dielman, she once told an interviewer, “I do think it’s a feminist film because I give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like the daily gestures of a woman.”) When Jeanne eats a sandwich, or makes the bed, the tasks take as long as they would in real life. And yet, these chores are never a chore to watch. The laserlike focus of Delphine Seyrig’s performance, and Akerman’s exquisite formal mastery, draw you in to the point where your metabolism seems to wind down to match the film’s metronomic slow-but-steady pulse. Something remarkable begins to happen: the smallest movements of face and body absorb your complete attention, the subtle shifts of light as late afternoon turns to evening and dawn to morning become spellbinding mini-dramas, the most banal lines of dialogue loom in the air heavy with portent.

All this is preparation for the film’s second half, after Jeanne’s Wednesday-afternoon customer takes his leave. The film repeats the actions of the first half: Jeanne finishes cooking dinner, her son comes home, they eat, take a walk, and turn in for the night; the next day, Jeanne goes through her morning routine, runs errands, and prepares dinner while awaiting her Thursday-afternoon john. But this time, things have changed. Little cracks in Jeanne’s armor start to appear. Her hair is out of place. She neglects to fasten a button on her robe. She leaves food on the stove too long. By now we’re so immersed in the film’s pace, so attuned to the minutiae of Jeanne’s everyday grind, that these tiny deviations from the norm are jarring; when she drops a spoon, the clatter it makes as it hits the floor resounds like a gunshot.

The film climaxes with a sudden, startling action that immediately—as soon as the shock subsides—sets you wondering. What did that mean? Have we just been witness to an existentialist acte gratuit? Is Akerman playing one final anti-narrative trick on us, throwing back in our faces the desire for closure or “significance”? Or were we carefully led here all along? The mind runs back through the story searching for clues, and they’re there to be found, but it’s like an Easter-egg hunt that never ends; the movie is a machine that generates purposefully alternating, or ambiguous, readings. Was Jeanne the victim of a repressive social order, or of her own willing submission to a rigorously circumscribed existence? Did she hate men, and hate what they made her do, or (as the ending suggests) was she horrified to discover that she actually liked what she was doing? Was it the disruption of her routines in the second half that pushed this creature of fixed habits to the breaking point? (But what caused the disruption to begin with?) And what about those too-tightly clasped hands that greet her male visitors—surely it means something that the gesture recurs when her son comes home? Every possible interpretation glides off the film’s impeccable, impenetrable surfaces. So we’ll have to go on watching, thinking about, and discussing Jeanne Dielman. If it’s not a movie for all time, it’ll probably hold our interest as long as men and women have sex, women bear children, human beings occupy domestic interiors, and the day-after-day regularity of our lives chills our hearts with hints of dread.

— Nelson Kim

In A Lonely Place screens at Film Forum from August 21-29, 2009. Or if you aren’t in NYC, you can buy the DVD at Amazon.)

As its Nicholas Ray retrospective draws to a close, Film Forum is bringing back Ray’s 1950 noir classic In A Lonely Place for a return engagement. This corrosively brilliant tale of thwarted love inspired career-best work from its director as well as its two stars, Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. Bogart plays Dixon Steele, a middlingly successful Hollywood screenwriter with problems: a drinking problem, a violence problem, women problems, and violent-with-women-when-drinking problems. When a hat-check girl he entices to his apartment one night ends up dead, only the alibi provided by his neighbor, Laurel Grey (Grahame) saves him from arrest. Laurel and Dix fall hard for each other, but soon she has reason to wonder whether the man whose innocence she fought for may, in fact, be guilty—and whether she may be his next victim.

Exegetes have long read a political subtext into In A Lonely Place: Ray, a committed lefty, may have intended the story to stand as a metaphor for McCarthy-era fear and paranoia. But along with the subtext, there’s a lot of text going on here as well. The film is thick with multiple meanings, and part of its enduring fascination is how Ray makes it work on so many seemingly contradictory levels. It’s a great and achingly romantic love story that also, no less than Hitchcock’s Vertigo, lays bare the fetishization, the willful blindness, and the madness of romantic obsession. It’s a portrait of an artist that valorizes the artist’s solitary stance against conformity even as it exposes the egotism of that stance. It’s a film noir in which the hard-boiled hero meets a mysteriously alluring femme fatale—and then, in one of the boldest audience-identification switcheroos I’ve ever seen in a movie, it subtly but definitively shifts our POV over to Laurel as her doubts about Dix take hold. We start out grooving to Bogie’s tough-guy routine, but by the end we’re shrieking at Grahame, “Get away from him, girl! Can’t you see he’s no good?”

By 1950 Bogart had already enjoyed nearly a decade as one of Hollywood’s top box-office draws, and his star persona was well established. But for this movie, the star (and partial backer of the film, through his production company, Santana) fully committed to a ruthless deconstruction of his own image. It’s as if he and Ray were asking what the beloved Bogie persona would be like in real life, stripped of all movie-made glamour and grace, and the answer is: an acid-tongued, violence-prone drunk. Along with everything else, In A Lonely Place offers the riveting spectacle of an actor—guided by a director who identified to no small degree with both actor and character—seeming to reveal the darkest recesses of his own personality to the camera.

— Nelson Kim

I also want to draw H2N readers’ attention to another low-budget indie gem that’s well worth getting out of the house for. H.P. Mendoza, co-writer, composer, and star of 2006’s cult hit Colma: The Musical, closes out the festival on Sunday night with his new musical Fruit Fly. Bethesda (L.A. Renigen) is a Filipina American performance artist who arrives in San Francisco to pursue her art and to find out about the mother she never knew. She moves into an artists’ commune, parties with her gay friends (”fruit fly” being the marginally more polite term for “fag hag”), and prepares for her first SF show. That’s the plot, anyway, but the plot here is a pretty ragged, undercooked thing. The movie has a few bumpy moments, but for most of its running time, it’s a blast—inventive, energetic, touching, and hilariously filthy. Mendoza’s tunes are infectious synth-pop concoctions, and his lyrics gleam with wit. The number “We Have So Much In Common” is the high point of the film; it starts as a tender flirtation-and-courtship duet before morphing into an ode to “versatile bottoms” that would gross out the boys from South Park. (The soundtrack is available on iTunes and elsewhere; go here for details.) Fruit Fly is an excellent choice for a closing-night film—there are going to be a lot of smiling faces streaming out of Clearview Cinemas on Sunday.

There are several other narrative features screening this year, along with a handful of documentaries, and nine shorts programs, plus panels, workshops, and more. Go here for the complete schedule and ticket information.

— Nelson Kim