Opening Week at Ciné

originally published March 28, 2007

The opening week lineup is intended to provide a taste of the kind of films Ciné will give Athenians an opportunity to see and talk about: foreign gems, purposeful documentaries, avant-garde cinematic experimentation, first runs of films found at international festivals by the theater’s intrepid and cinematically voracious advisors, and independent masterpieces both new and old, which only make it to the big screen in places where an accountant's calculations suggest a sufficient population of adventurous moviegoers to justify it. The following four films will be shown for the opening week festivities. Ciné cranks up its regular rotation on Friday, Apr. 6, so look for a preview in the Apr. 4 Flagpole. Thereafter, keep your eyes on Flagpole’s Movie Dope for show times and films to come.

Army Of Shadows

Monday, Apr. 2 at 6:30 p.m. & 9:30 p.m.

(NR) 1969. Adapted from Joseph Kessel’s novel of the same name and called the best film on the Resistance in numerous French periodicals, Army of Shadows , nearly 40 years after it debuted in its country of origin, finally saw an official stateside release in a very select coterie of theaters last year. The third and final of director Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinematic ruminations on the Free French, a group who defied the Nazis and puppet Vichy regime during the Second World War and counted among its membership a still quite young Melville himself - the veiled identities, intrepid escapes and brutal comeuppances - all suggest seat-gripping thriller. Yet Melville, perhaps best known for his gangster movies, coats the Gestapo beatings and furtive operations with a discomfiting veneer of the icy tedium, bloody futility and moral ambiguity of guerrilla warfare. Garnering numerous awards over the past years, including the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film in 2006, the film follows a group of Resistance fighters as they progress through a series of arrests, betrayals, revenge-killings, nick-of-time flights and cunning plots, while always dreading the uncertainty of the next knock at the door. Several decades on, the film’s statements on the harrowing personal cost of taking up arms against tyranny and the extent to which one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist retain a chilling relevance. Ciné will screen a 35 mm print recently restored under the direction of the film’s cinematographer Pierre Lhomme. Dr. Richard Neupert, a professor at the University of Georgia and the author and translator of several books about the cinematic arts, will give an introduction to Army of Shadows before both screenings and lead discussion about the film after the first screening. Dr. Neupert is perhaps best known for his critical and historical examinations of French New Wave, an artistic movement that included Melville and against which many of his later films are often seen as a reaction.

Suite Habana

Tuesday, Apr. 3 at 6:30 p.m. & 8:45 p.m.

(NR) 2003. Though Suite Habana features barely a word of actual dialogue and almost no discernible plot in the traditional sense, the movie and director Fernando Pérez are decorated with a general’s chest of awards from both their native Cuba and esteemed film festivals across the globe. Following a day in the life of 10 ordinary citizens of the capitol, from a mentally handicapped child to a septuagenarian peanut vendor, the assiduously crafted film plays, as its title suggests, like a kind of symphonic poetry - a lyrical paean to a multifarious and oft-ignored city of contradictions. Critics have called this intricate tapestry of Cuban music and its kaleidoscopic variety of life the best film from the island nation in decades and a hopeful harbinger of a new class of Cuban cinema. What is perhaps most notable about the lovingly rendered portraits is the film’s utter refusal to devolve into the populist political screed that Pérez’s methods might suggest at first blush. Rather, the film remains stalwartly defiant in its dedication to a visually and aurally stunning rendering of the scarred but resilient city and her inhabitants. Dr. José Alvarez, a distinguished UGA professor and the author of numerous books and articles on modern Cuban life, literature and culture, will provide an introduction to the film before both screenings and lead discussion about it after the early show.

The Player

Wednesday, Apr. 4 at 6:30 p.m. & 9:30 p.m.

(R) 1992. Though he was nominated for five Academy Awards, the only award Robert Altman ever received from the Academy was the honorary Oscar he took home shortly before his death in 2006. Part of the reason for the constant stream of near-misses was likely the tense relationship be had with Hollywood itself, which vacillated between shunning him and respecting him for the critical darling he often was, for most of his 50-year career in the business. One of those nominations was for The Player , a needling but wickedly funny satire of the Hollywood movie business in which quality is subjugated to the quantity of cash to be made and artists are merely a commodity. Adapted by Edgar Award-winner Michael Tolkin from his novel of the same name, The Player tells the story of a somehow not entirely repugnant movie executive by the name of Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) who, in addition to trying to unload an unsuitable lover, save his notoriously high-turnover job from a grippy upstart, and avoid being killed by a writer who he “never got back to," finds himself at the center of a murder investigation and hopelessly infatuated with the dead man’s probably Icelandic girl. Shot in and around the studios of Hollywood, the film also features cameos from no fewer than 60 major movie figures including Harry Belafonte, John Cusack, Cher, Jack Lemmon, Burt Reynolds and Julia Roberts. Heralding Altman's return from what many critics called his decade in the wilderness, The Player uses the bloodless machinations and grinding one-upmanship that constantly frustrated Altman as sublime comedic fodder without ever straying into vindictive harangue. The incisive and masterfullly-crafted script, unobtrusive but astonishing camera work (the film opens with a single, continuous eight-minute shot, paying homage to the cinematography of Welles and Hitchcock, both of whom are mentioned during it), and the genial naturalism of the performances earned him best directing plaudits at BAFTA and Cannes, two Golden Globes, and a dozen other awards. Head of the UGA Drama Department’s Dramatic Media Area, prolific film scholar, former Fulbright lecturer and filmmaker in his own right, Charles Eidsvik, will introduce the film before the early and late show and guide the discussion that follows the first screening.

Iraq In Fragments

Thursday, Apr. 5 at 6:30 p.m. & 8:45 p.m.

(NR) 2006. Shot over two years in Iraq with a handheld Panasonic HD camcorder, Iraq in Fragments is a three-part opus documenting the varying responses of ordinary Iraqis to the American invasion and occupation. The film laces together the story of an 11-year-old boy, who, after being left fatherless by Hussein’s regime, is forced to abandon schooling to work in an auto-repair shop with striking portraits of militant Shiite Sadrists clamoring to institute Sharia law and rural Kurds finally able to exercise a modicum of freedom over their own lives. Narrated in part by the very people it depicts, the film presents such a vivid portrait of the successes and monumental failures of Iraqi society under the constant threat of American and insurgent guns that it was nominated for an Oscar in 2006 and took home three awards from its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, including Best Director for the film’s mastermind James Longley. Not only has the visually harrowing and emotionally wrenching film been nearly unanimously dubbed the finest in the crowded field of Iraq War documentaries, but some critics have gone so far as to describe its “poetic agitation” the finest in the history of documentary film. Even so, the film has unfortunately been shown in no more than a few dozen cities across the United States in the year-plus since its debut. Sundance Fellow and Peabody Award-winning producer and director Senain Kheshgi will introduce the film at both screenings and guide discussion of the film after the early showing. Her upcoming documentary film Project Kashmir will depict a pair of American expats from Pakistan and India, Ms. Kheshgi being the former, who visit Kashmir to capture the stories of those who live in the disputed territory.

Brandon Waddell

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