This is a revived version of a Line Out post about Charlie Ahearn's documentary, Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer (these posts were purged from the internet after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog).

FILM/TV Sep 20, 2013 at 1:31 pm

Photographer Jamel Shabazz Captured (and Continues to Capture) New York Cool

KATHY FENNESSY

 

• Jamel Shabazz, Rolling Partners, Downtown Brooklyn, 1982

JAMEL SHABAZZ:
STREET PHOTOGRAPHER
(Charlie Ahearn, 2013, 74 mins)

Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer celebrates two of modern America's finest contributions to the world: street photography and hiphop culture.

As his barber friend, Tony, puts it, Shabazz's black and white and color photographs from the 1970s and '80s captured "life in its purest form." 

On the basis of the slightly faded, if arresting images that dance across the screen, he was also capturing style: Kangol caps, Puma kicks, Lee jeans, Double Goose jackets, and other markers of NYC cool.

Hiphop ambassador Fab 5 Freddy (TV Party, Yo! MTV Raps) describes Shabazz's subjects as "the cool cats on the corners on the street." 

In that sense, they remind me of the style photographs Amy Arbus, the daughter of Diane Arbus, took for The Village Voice in the 1980s and '90s, except Amy gravitated more towards the punk, new wave, and cabaret set. 

Shabazz also had a preference for subway backgrounds, which means that his photographs memorialize graffiti almost as much as they do people—along with the Radio Raheem-size boomboxes of yore.

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Through the images, Shabazz talks about his life, his work, and the characters he met along the way. Interestingly, he started out by following the same path as his father, a naval photographer. 

After a stint in the military, Shabazz became a correctional officer at the infamous facility once name-checked by Jim Carroll, and didn't publish his work until the 1990s in Trace and The Source, which led to gallery shows, and the bestselling anthology, Back in the Days. (Soul singer Sharon Jones also worked as a correctional officer at Riker's Island before her music career took off. I suspect there's a lot of untapped talent in that world.)

Director Charlie Ahearn doesn't break the mold with this profile, which he bills as "a video," and nor is that his intention. He allows Shabazz to explain himself, so his subject sets the tone, but his respect for the man comes through loud and clear, and it's hard not to feel the same way in the presence of an inner-city historian who has so much love for the people who surround him—even the crack addicts, the prostitutes, and the juvenile offenders who ended up at his wing on Riker's.

Shabazz also maintains an interest in military veterans, Masons, and members of the Nation of Islam. As influences, he cites Malcolm X and photographer-turned-filmmaker Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree, Shaft). 

For all the talk of hiphop, though, the documentary is largely devoid of music—other than a few beats by Cresh Fraze and footage from a series of marching bands—and focuses more on regular folks than on celebrities, with the exception of speakers Bobbito Garcia, KRS-One, and Fab 5 Freddy, who also appeared in Ahearn's classic 1983 film Wild Style.

Jamel Shabazz: Street Photographer played at the SIFF Film Center yesterday (with Ahearn in attendance). DVD release TBA. Shabazz also appears in Cheryl Dunn's street photo survey Everybody Street.

Carnival of Souls: Dissolving the Line Between the Grind House and the Art House

This review originally appeared in Bob Ham's Portland film screenings newsletter Daily Projections on October 15, 2016.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS

(Herk Harvey, 1962, USA, 78 minutes) 

In one-feature filmmaker Herk Harvey's artful head-trip, Carnival of Souls, the line between the grind house and the art house bends and warps until it completely dissolves. 

The 1962 film, which wouldn't see formal release until 1989, starts like most youth-oriented pictures of the time as two thrill-seeking drivers race to see who can go the fastest, but when one car slides off a bridge and into the river, things shift into a very different register. The vehicle sinks beneath the water, and that appears to be the end of that. 

While the townspeople try to figure out how to dredge the car from the river, passenger Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss, a cool blonde with a strangely sympathetic manner) emerges from the water, dazed but unharmed, claiming she has no idea what happened to her companions.

 

Afterward, she leaves Lawrence behind for a job as a church organist in Salt Lake City, necessitating a long drive through dark roads. Not least because of her job, to which she feels no Christian connection, the eerie music that swirls around her fits perfectly, especially when she starts to see a strange man (played by Harvey) who may or may not exist. 

 

The pale, spectral figure follows her to her new rooming house, conveniently located next to an abandoned carnival (Harvey used an actual location, the Saltair Pavilion, which was consumed by fire in 1970).

Aside from the intrusions of her boozy neighbor, Mr. Linden (Sidney Berger), her days are going fine until Mary exits a department store dressing room to find that no one can see her. The phenomenon only lasts momentarily, but it leads her to a psychologist who believes there must be a rational explanation. He also gets her to admit that she isn't looking for a boyfriend. No desire for male companionship? She must be nuts! 

 

 

 

The experience emboldens her to explore the depopulated carnival grounds, a mesmerizing sequence in which cinematographer Maurice Prather shoots Mary from every conceivable angle. She's a tiny figure in a cavernous room and a black shadow against the afternoon sun. 

 

In its desolate beauty, it's The Trial meets The Last Man on Earth (striking compositions compensate for clunky foley work). Though Mary emerges unscathed, the spirit of the carnival appears to have possessed her, so she keeps running and running and running until she can run no more. 

As with Charles Laughton, who invested The Night of the Hunter with Expressionist atmosphere, Harvey's only film left an indelible mark--George Romero claimed it as an influence on Night of the Living Dead. 

Mary's struggle against the dying of the light also takes on feminist form. As she tells Mr. Linden, "In the dark, your fantasies get so out of hand, but in the daylight, everything falls into place again," suggesting that she isn't just fighting to live, but to do so free from societal obligations.

It's hard to imagine female-fronted horror films, like Alejandro Amenábar's The Others or David Robert Mitchell's It Follows, without its precedent, but Carnival of Souls exerts a haunting, strangely affecting spell all its own. 

 

Carnival of Souls is available on DVD and Blu-ray through The Criterion Collection. Images from The Criterion Collection and Ciné-Histoire.

Things to Come: A Work of Empathy from French Filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve

This review originally appeared in Bob Ham's Portland film screenings newsletter Daily Projections in December 16, 2016.

THINGS TO COME

(Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016, France, 102 minutes)

Actress-turned-filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve turned 35 this year, and Things to Come is her fourth feature, but while her last film, 2014's rambling Eden, explored the pleasures and perils of youth, her new film revolves around the trials and tribulations of a 63-year-old woman. 

Aside from the fact that the writer-director, the daughter of two philosophy professors, avoids the stereotypes usually associated with films about older women, Hansen-Løve prioritizes change over age, since many of the setbacks Isabelle Huppert's Nathalie experiences could conceivably afflict younger women, too (notably, Hansen-Love met her husband, 61-year-old director Olivier Assayas, when she appeared in 2000's Les Destinées).

During the course of the film, the self-possessed philosophy teacher suffers a series of losses when her husband, Heinz (André Marcon from Hansen-Løve's Father of My Children), leaves her for a younger woman and her glamorous, acidly amusing mother, Yvette (Édith Scob, who previously appeared in Assayas's Summer Hours), ends up in a retirement home where her already-perilous mental condition quickly deteriorates. 

Nathalie also tangles with a publishing company that wants to bastardize her textbook to boost flagging sales, but just when it seems as if things can't get much worse, they don't. Hansen-Løve has something more subtle and less wrenching than melodrama in mind. 

In a more conventional film, Nathalie might seek revenge on Heinz, find her own age-inappropriate lover, or start all over again in a new town. Instead, she reconnects with her former student, Fabien (Eden's Roman Kolinka), a fellow academic. When she complains to him, "After 40, women are fit for the trash," he strenuously disagrees.

Hansen-Løve suggests that there may be some degree of physical attraction between the two, but she never pushes that angle too hard. The tall, rangy Fabien shares a cozy home with friends in the remote Rhône-Alpes where Nathalie seeks refuge when Paris gets to be too much of a drag. In their warm, if slightly critical embrace, she finds a form of salvation. 

Unlike Paul Verhoeven's Elle, in which Huppert plays the victim of a violent attack, there's no mystery at play, but the actress commands the screen as easily as she has in the films of Claude Chabrol and Michele Haneke, whether Nathalie is cooing over a baby or stressing about a cat (her mother's beloved Pandora). 

In the press notes, Hansen-Løve, who wrote the part specifically for Huppert, states, "I rate her as the greatest French actress." At the film's outset, Nathalie asks, "Can we put ourselves in the place of the other?" It’s exactly what her director has done, and Things to Come is as much a work of empathy as a portrait of the kind of woman usually consigned to the margins of American cinema.

Images from Film Comment (Isabelle Huppert), the IMDb (Huppert and André Marcon), and TIME (Huppert and Roman Kolinka). 

Shirley Clarke's The Connection: "Men Held Captive by the Power of Drugs"

This is a revived version of a Line Out post about Shirley Clarke's 1961 film, The Connection (these posts were purged from the internet after The Stranger pulled the plug on their music blog). 

Film/TV Oct 21, 2012 at 1:15 pm

Shirley Clarke's The Connection

Kathy Fennessy

• Milestone Films

THE CONNECTION
(Shirley Clarke, US, 1961, 35mm, 110 mins)

"Sordid and disagreeable."
—Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

The Connection is a jazz film and a film about junkies. Not all jazz films revolve around substance abuse, but many do, namely Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm and Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight.

In her first feature, the fearless Shirley Clarke (Cool World, the Oscar-winning Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World) shuns the heretofore glamorized, Hollywood image of the drug addict. These guys, who frequent the same Manhattan tenement, are a motley-looking bunch, even though den father—and Steve Buscemi lookalike—Leach (Obie winner Warren Finnerty) prides himself on his housekeeping skills.

Though Leach sports a stylish neckerchief, it's just his attempt to hide a boil. If he can't stop talking, his compatriots spend most of their time nodding off. Soon, fictional filmmaker Dunn (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's William Redfield) steps in front of the camera to get them to "act naturally," but they see no point unless he pays them more. Since he already gave them cash to shoot up, ethics don't seem too high on his agenda.

• Milestone Films
• Set design by Richard Sylbert (The Manchurian Candidate, Rosemary's Baby)

The film-within-a-film's cinematographer, J.J. Burden (The Liberation of L.B. Jones' Roscoe Lee Browne in his first film role), however, comes from their world, but left it behind for greener climes. He serves as a mediator between the self-justifying junkies and the self-justifying director.

Clarke shoots the film, Jack Gelber's adaptation of his 1959 Living Theater play, like a documentary, and the characters address the viewer as they would have addressed a live audience (Finnerty was part of the original cast). It's unavoidably stagy, but she has fun with the concept by keeping the camera moving, and when the gents jam on saxophone, piano, drums, and stand-up bass—that's Jackie McLean on sax—it's easy to see why jazz fans embraced the soundtrack, even as the New York State Censorship Board cancelled the Manhattan run after only two screenings for "obscenity."

Clearly, the Board didn't get it. Clarke, a dancer-turned-independent filmmaker, was no finger-wagging moralist, then or ever. Her depiction of junkies may have been more realistic than most up until that time, but the entire film serves as a distinct disincentive to try the stuff. This is spelled out plainly by the tagline: "Men held captive by the power of drugs."

• Milestone Films
• Blue Note recording artist Jackie McLean (1931-2006) on alto sax

It's ironic that the musicians play with such dexterity, because they move in slow-motion the rest of the time. Some of them, like the dealer Cowboy (Carl Lee, also part of the original cast), whose neckerchief is purely decorative, even have a "jazzy" way of speaking; Cowboy tends to place the emphasis on unexpected words and syllables. He is, ultimately, "the connection" of the title, making him the real director of the scenario.

This is only the second Clarke film I've seen after 1967's Portrait of Jason--not counting Agnès Varda's Lion's Love, in which she appears--where she takes an open-minded approach to her subject's homosexuality at a time when such things were either disguised or condemned. Similarly, when Leach's pals mention that he might be gay, they criticize his denial rather than his nature, though their views on women aren't quite so progressive.

I didn't know this going into it, but The Connection has more to do with junk than jazz, though it's worth noting that Clarke also directed 1985's Ornette: Made in America, her final film. By the way the men in her first feature look, I can only assume that it made a big impression on—or at least predicted—John Lurie, Tom Waits, and Jim Jarmusch, who have all dressed, played music, or made movies that reflect the same low-rent, bebop-beatnik world of pork pie hats and stained overcoats.

The Connection plays the Northwest Film Forum through Oct 25 as part of the 2012 Earshot Jazz Festival, Oct 19-28. More information here.