Probably the city has been written about and filmed more often than any other topic of serious human endeavor—certainly more than war, science, and art, and probably religion, too. Go to Wikipedia and run your eyes down the lengthy list of films about cities. Wikipedia admits its list is incomplete.

And why not? Cities have figured more prominently in human history, both in the history of suffering and the history of achievement, than the field, the stream, the temple, the museum or the library. Cities embody all of these manifestations of human hope and sorrow. Cities are never static. They change, change, change. Older cities are layered. You dig down and find alternative manifestations. Usually the deeper layers represent less democracy, fewer opportunities, and certainly less humane planning.

Filmworks has shown a few films about cities over the years, notably Waste Land and City of God. This pair of films is representative of how writers and filmmakers see cities, ranging from romanticized to negative points of view. Waste Land exhibits, first, problems—the disease and degradation of uncontrolled garbage pile-up, and second, the transformation of lowly dump workers who band together to produce lending libraries, clinics, and, unexpectedly, art. City of God is much darker, depicting gangs run amock and adopting violence as a way of life.

Cities are humankind’s greatest invention; no one descriptor covers it all. It’s like nuclear power—both a grand source of energy and a terrible killer. That’s probably why Ric Burns took 14 ½ hours to capture New York City in his seven-part documentary about NYC (New York: a Documentary)—the standard two-hour format just would not do.

Books and films about cities tend to take these two routes, positive opportunities and despair. Some attempt both, thin blankets thrown over a very large subject.

On Friday January 13, Filmworks will show Urbanized, the last film of Gary Hustwit’s trilogy on design. Hustwit is fascinated with the process of making a better can opener or mouse trap—anything, small or large, that rests on some kind of intelligence for the betterment of society. In Urbanized, Hustwit takes on the largest tool of all, the city. Critic Bob Turnbull, in a website implausibly (or brilliantly) called “Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind,” writes this about Urbanized:

Gary Hustwit’s final film in his design trilogy is essentially a call for engagement in the democratic process and a treatise on the power of community action. You should walk out of his film talking, arguing and, most importantly, thinking. Thinking about your city, thinking about your living conditions and thinking about what you and your government should be doing.

Thus Urbanized is a positive rumination on cities worldwide. It also renders them wondrous to look at. Hustwit’s cinematographer Luke Geissbuhler sprinkles the film with fetching images. Go back to our home page and watch the trailer with its amenable domes, arches, bike paths, greenswards, and busy streets in which randomness achieves its own aesthetic. Yes, there are shots of packed-together squalor and too-crowded streets, but these are rendered as part of the wonderful diversity of cosmopolitan living.

Bill Weber of Slant Magazine notes an attempt to present the city in a balanced way in Urbanized.

Even defenders of dubious concepts such as the ever-growing sprawl of metropolitan Phoenix are given voice without being framed as villains, but the film’s concerns are decidedly with people who will never have a pool or a backyard—and in Mumbai or Santiago, whose lives are transformed by access to private toilets and bathtubs.

Is Hustwit’s vision too optimistic?  When does the pendulum start to swing back from beauty and livability to blight as the poor continue to pour into cities? How will the problems of crowded cities be resolved? In our lifetime? The next? Never? It’s going to take a lot of Hustwits to turn the corner. Maybe all of us need to assess what we as individuals can do—from something as committed to serving on neighborhood planning committees to bothering to pick up a piece of trash in a park. It takes a society.

Click here to purchase tickets for Urbanized.

We all know now that movies like the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is really about communist subversion in the U.S. You can read the story on its surface. Or you can read it for sinister politics. It’s a little harder maybe to follow a Spider-Man movie as an expression of a teen’s budding maturity and his need to prove himself, but there you are: believe it or not.

A website maintained by Daniel Field called “Read Junk” (http://www.readjunk.com/articles/hollywoods-10-most-controversial-political-allegories-on-film/) discusses allegory in ten films you might not at first suspect as allegorical. I’ll just mention a few: Saw is really about Maoist China; Fight Club down deep was financed by the C.I.A. to toughen American youth; and 2001: A Space Odyssey is actually a primer on Scientology. The topper is the innocent Stand by Me, which to Field is an allegory about homosexuality.

I am happy to report that our December film is plausible allegory. The film is called Take Shelter; it’s about a construction worker who feels something bad is about to descend on the land, which is rural Ohio. Undeniably strange things are perceived by our main character, who goes by Curtis LaForche in the film. Rain thick as motor oil falls; birds dance in the sky in near-unbelievable patterns. The pet dog attacks the head of the household and furniture levitates.

Only Curtis perceives these phenomena. There is rain in the story, but most likely it takes the form of ordinary drops of H2O.

Might there be plausible explanations for all this weirdness? At first you want to believe there are. But apparently alone in his bizarre perceptions, he seems to be a nutcase or a seer.

(Here is a video of avian coordinated air dancing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE . But what Curtis perceives is far more elaborate, and as I say, fanciful.)

Curtis finally commits himself to a mental hospital, but your curiosity, your movie mind-quest is not satisfied. You can’t help but go allegorical. You broaden the meaning of the film. You understand that Curtis is the uncomfortable soothsayer, the tortured oracle. Your mind ranges from apocalypse to apocalypse—environmental, nuclear, destructive weather, global contagion.

Director Jeff Nichols has built a reputation for himself as a maker of small but compelling art films. Critic Alissa Wilkinson calls Nichols’ “Shotgun Stories, a wise, measured tale of family and revenge.” (It also stars Shannon).

Marjorie Baumgarten has written: “Take Shelter is a deeply unsettling movie. Nichols … doles out information as strategy economically as a government official. Curtis doesn’t confide in [his wife] Samantha [Jessica Chastain from The Tree of Life] until late in the story, although his increasingly erratic behavior becomes harder for everyone to ignore. What Nichols excels at in his storytelling is mixing these strange events with life’s mundanities. Normalcy and abnormality fluidly co-exist in Take Shelter, and it’s sometimes a challenge for the viewer to know which is which.”

Wilkinson augments her point of view with a poem by Auden:

“Not so long ago, the poet W. H. Auden wrote of the ‘Age of Anxiety’—
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out
The music must always play …
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.”

Maybe the poetic sensibility delivers more of what we need to understand Take Shelter.

Oscar Nominated Short Films 2012

Friday, February 10, 2012
5:30 p.m. Live Action shorts
8:30 p.m. Animated shorts

Sunday, February 12, 2012
3 p.m. Animated shorts
5:30 p.m. Documentary shorts
8:30 p.m. Live Action shorts

The Tower Theatre
815 E. Olive Avenue
Fresno, CA 93728

[ view details ]
[ buy tickets ]

“She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.”  So ends Graham Greene’s 1938 novel, Brighton Rock.   Greene’s readers know exactly what awaits the sixteen-year old Rose in the squalid flat she had briefly shared with the novel’s razor-wielding anti-hero, Pinkie Brown: she will listen to a recording made by the boy gangster just days earlier.  However, instead of the expression of redeeming love she expects, Rose will hear Pinkie’s venomous hatred for her, which, according to her Roman Catholic beliefs, means implacable damnation for the unrepentant killer and a lifetime of despair for her.  Of all the changes that Greene incorporated into his screenplay for the 1947 film adaptation, none is more significant, or more disturbing, than those for this final scene.

No other twentieth-century novelist, not even Raymond Chandler, is more identified with the cinema than Graham Greene: his short stories and novels have provided the source material for more than forty films (with two new releases planned for 2012, remakes of This Gun for Hire and The Fallen Idol); as a young film critic, he reviewed hundreds of movies, establishing himself as a respected and demanding cinéaste; and, once invited to try his hand at screenwriting, he worked on more than a dozen film projects—adaptations of his own works and those of other writers as well as original screenplays, one of which is perhaps the most celebrated ever written, that for Carol Reed’s The Third Man.   Greene also succeeded like no other novelist of his time in attaining both highbrow acclaim and popular success, incorporating dark moral ambiguities in entertaining thrillers, making them a perfect literary complement to the mid-century appetite for film noir.   Given his own dark tales and the expectation of pessimistic themes and tragic ends for these “black films,” Greene’s inclination toward lighter endings for his screen work is all the more perplexing.

The process of adaptation—I prefer to think of it as translation—is, of course, filled with compromise and change.  In the case of the John and Ray Boulting production of Brighton Rock (1947), budget concerns would confine the film’s action to the titular setting, shifting the climax from the high cliffs at Peacehaven to Brighton Pier, thereby losing one of Greene’s dark, verbal ironies—there is no “haven for peace” in Greene’s bleak vision.  Objections from the censors eliminated Pinkie’s vial of disfiguring acid, its loss undercutting his menace and more importantly altering the manner of his demise, a point I will return to later.  However, it was the censor-mandated elimination from the script of Pinkie’s recurring quotations from Catholic Mass that most disappointed Greene.  Their deletion obscured the film’s theology and all but eliminated the novel’s link to Paradise Lost: Pinkie, as Brighton’s fallen angel, cast in the mold of Milton’s anti-hero, Satan, hurtles toward damnation because that is what he chooses.  In the novel, after intoning, “Dona nobis pacem” (“Give us peace”), Pinkie thinks, “he wasn’t made for peace, he couldn‘t believe in it.  Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust.”   For the final shooting script, Pinkie’s refusal of divine grace is reduced to “you can have your Heaven by yourself.”

An illusionary Heaven-on-earth is exactly what Rose enters in the final scene.  After a nun’s homily about the “appalling strangeness” of God’s mercy, Rose listens to the damaged recording Pinkie made for her: instead of the vitriolic “truth” we heard him record, the needle sticks, playing over and over, “I love you,” as the camera tracks into a close-up of a crucifix on the wall behind her.   It was playwright Terence Rattigan who introduced this change from the novel in the first treatment for the film.  When Greene took over from Rattigan, he insisted on a major rewrite but kept this particular change, arguing that the novel’s ending was too harsh for moviegoers.

This was not to be Greene’s only softened ending.  His work with Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) the year after Brighton Rock and his even more celebrated collaboration with Reed on The Third Man (1949) involved questionable choices about plot resolutions.  For The Fallen Idol, based on his 1935 short story “The Basement Room” about a young boy exposing his family’s butler as a killer, Greene added not just a happy ending but an entire third act, in which the police investigate and ultimately exonerate the mannerly servant.  The film is justly celebrated for its visual panache (anticipating the glories of The Third Man); a fine performance from Ralph Richardson as the butler, Baines; and the theme of adult deceit confounding childhood innocence.  Still, the toughness of the original ending—the boy’s willful renunciation of his idol and the disillusionment that will be his future—is sacrificed for a conventional resolution.

For The Third Man, Greene, allied now with American producer David O. Selznick, argued for the same kind of upbeat ending.  In his first treatment for the screenplay—published as a novella the year after the film’s release—Rollo (Holly in the film) reconciles with his love interest, Anna:  after Harry Lime’s true burial, “He caught her up and they walked side by side.  I don’t think he said a word to her: it was like the end of a story except that before they turned out of my sight her hand was through his arm—which is how a story usually begins.”  Reed insisted that the film have a darker ending, and thankfully prevailed: in a suspenseful long take, Anna walks past Holly, without word or gesture of acknowledgment.  Instead of another near miss, the film became a masterpiece, still hailed by the British Film Institute as the greatest British film ever produced.

On the same list, the 1947 Brighton Rock is ranked at #15.  To avoid head-to-head comparisons with the original, writer-director Rowan Joffe says his 2010 Brighton Rock is a new adaptation, not a remake.   To further distance the new film from the Boulting version, Joffe has moved the time period from the 1930s to the 1960s, setting Pinkie’s mob war alongside the larger cultural turmoil in Britain between the Mods and Rockers, which culminated in the Brighton riots of 1964. Consistent with Joffe’s claim about using the novel as his source, the new version does reintroduce the sea cliffs for the climactic physical and moral struggle between Pinkie and Rose.  It also reintroduces the vial of acid, forbidden to Greene and the Boultings, the burning agony of the novel that offers a final link to Milton’s Satan.  And yet for the most important aspect of Pinkie’s end, Joffe seems to look to Attenborough’s performance for inspiration rather than the novel: instead of running toward his doom, both Attenborough’s and Sam Riley’s Pinkie fall by accident, the deaths more pitiable than tragic.

And most significantly, the final scene of the new film, despite Joffe’s claims, does not look to the novel as source, but again takes its lead from the Boulting-Greene version: with Rose listening to the record.  Rather than give away the new ending, I’ll let you discover for yourself whether the record skips or she hears the crushing words of Pinkie’s venom, whether the film takes pity on Rose or delivers Greene’s “worst horror of all.”

I hope so. I’m going to discuss four rough-and-tumble cops in this piece on my way to The Guard, which is the film we’ll run at The Tower on Oct 14. It’s about a cop, too, played by fadeless Brendan Gleeson. Gerry Boyle isn’t quite in the same nastiness league as Gene Hackman’s Popeye, who is a NY terror after a notorious French drug dealer. Hackman’s role was one of the first to question the tiresome Jack Webbization of cops, probably nurtured through all those “This Is Your FBI” radio and TV dramas. Hackman slaps people around, drinks too much, is an outed bigot, and even kills an innocent person with apparently no remorse. This was heavy-duty police brutality for 1971.

Dirty Harry—Callahan, played famously by Clint Eastwood—was just plain involving (funny now) to watch as he tortured suspects, scorned topless dancers, gave the finger to namby-pamby police chiefs, mayors, and (mutedly) to sociology majors. Eastwood made it so. The film is high on my list of guilty cinematic pleasures, not because of its politics, but because Eastwood makes such a good Harry.

The French Connection and Dirty Harry both came out in 1971. It was quite a year. One contributor to imdb.com commented:

Something about Harry Callahan’s political incorrectness resonates in a disturbing way with people who have only examined police work and the justice system through their televisions. The reality of this aspect of modern life is far less interesting, dramatic, and straightforward. And the critique of “American justice” is at least as powerfully made in The French Connection as it is here. Furthermore, The French Connection was an extremely innovative film, while Dirty Harry was a fairly typical stylized police-fantasy. The only explanations for the on-going popularity of this film, then, are Eastwood’s charisma and the sheer entertainment value of this gutsy, gritty, hardcore crime drama.

A more interesting bad-cop film perhaps is Sidney Lumet’s little-praised Q&A of 1990, which stars Nick Nolte as detective Michael Brennan, a man who threatens to kill people who rat on him. What makes this film so engrossingly joyless is Nolte himself, at his best, playing off the young Timothy Hutton as a naïve Assistant D.A. Normally Lumet’s films are full of regret and anguish about doing the right thing. But not Brennan.

The champ bad-cop film is The Bad Lieutenant (1992), directed by Abel Ferrara. Harvey Keitel plays the drug-addicted, gambling-hooked, girl-hassling cop working on a case involving the rape of a nun. No cop in filmdom comes off as lonely and despicable as Keitel’s nameless lieutenant, always making mud of the waters of morality. Ferrara is reaching deep down here and ends up with a moving story of redemption.

You find redemption in a lot of Lumet films—Prince of the City, Network, even in the foul Even the Devil Knows You’re Dead. But not in The Guard. Brendan Gleeson’s cop doesn’t need redeeming. He’s bad, but not evil, as Roger Ebert points out. Mainly he’s a funny piece of wooly realism Sure, he drinks too much and visits hookers too often, but he displays a kind of cop-smart solid grip on life. He’s a good guy to drink with, and he visits his ailing mother in a nursing home with commendable regularity. That’s the kind of thing writer-director John Michael McDonagh aims for— irascibility, bearishness, yet always around for Mum.

Need more story?  It arrives in the form of Don Cheadle, an FBI agent working on an international drug thing. He wants to ride around in Gleeson’s cruiser. Gleeson says “I’m Irish, sir, racism is a part of me culture.”

Baya, played by a lively ­­­­­­Sara Forestier, is generally successful in converting the right-wing men who share her bed to leftish views. Then she meets Arthur (Jacques Gamblin), a rather resistant target and a Jew. Since his parents lived ­through the Vichy version of the Holocaust, you’d expect Arthur would be leaning left, but no—he’s more apolitical than anything. Mainly he’s staid and “out of it,” as we used to say in the sixties which the film shamelessly evokes. Arthur is a scientist more interested in—brace yourself here—animal communicable diseases. But by the time Baya is through with him, he’s voting socialist.

Improbably but delightfully, the pair fall in love and gradually the meaning of the title emerges. Love is sex, love is politics, love is about opposites. Writer Baya Kasmi and co-writer and director Michel Leclerc craftily pull these themes from the story with commendable believability. Critics like the way such a far-fetched premise goes down. Ryan Wells of Cinespect calls the film “brilliantly uncomfortable.” Wells is relieved that The Names of Love didn’t turn into “Amélie” sweetness. He writes: “What’s more arresting is the insertion of personal entrapments that happen to us when we grow up (i.e. non-societal or political). They’re unfortunate and sad but they’re so on point that, looked at from another angle, is so perfectly fitting for the adults they become and the mindsets they adopt: it’s what binds them. And this binding is funny as hell and Leclerc and Kasmi are clever enough to spot these in French society [with a] style inclusive enough to admit all manner of coupling.”

The Names of Love is much broader in scope than just the union of an oddly-matched couple. Arthur’s parents are a show unto themselves. They meet at an anti-Pinochet event and because it was chic at the time, long to marry nonFrench. The Names of Love delves into a diverse variety of topics: immigration, anti-semitism, the nature of national identity after WWII, fear of foreigners, and bigotry. Somehow Leclerc and Kasmi successfully swing back and forth between the romance of Baya and Arthur and this succession of Gallic concerns, without depersonalizing Baya and Arthur. It’s a rich film.

Several critics have compared The Names of Love to Annie Hall  in its breadth. In fact, Leclerc has named Woody Allen as the filmmaker who most inspired him. Mellisa Anderson, writing for the Village Voice, claims that “Technically, Baya is a whore, but a whore with a grander more positive purpose; whose body is used as a weapon of mass destruction.”

Anderson looks deeper. She equates the story to a kind of growing up, both “unfortunate and sad,” but also right on target and “perfectly fitting for adults. Looked at from another angle, [the relationship is] so…fitting for the adults they become and the mindsets they adopt: it’s what binds them. And this binding is funny as hell … Leclerc and Kasmi are clever enough to spot these types that represent such a wide swath of French society and shave it down to this tiny, odd pairing.”

It’s always fun to make lists of films. Here are two short ones by me. The first is of films about outsiders who want in:

• Elephant Man—short of major surgery, the title character is never going to make it inside.
• Welcome to the Dollhouse—Dawn is unremarkable, not pretty or poised, lacking in social skills, neglected by her parents and teachers.
• Edward Scissorhands—You are pretty much going to remain an outsider if you have weird hands that look threatening.
• The Conversation—Professional bugger is kept an outsider by his conscience. He knows what he does is immoral and in fact leads to the deaths of three persons.
• Fatso—A little-seen film by Australian director Irina Goundortseva, about a lonely elevator operator.

Here are a few films about characters who relish being outside: Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Crumb, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Bonnie and Clyde. But our August film, Terri, is about the other kind of outsider, the one who would like to be on the inside or at least have a few friends.

Terri, played by Jacob Wysocki, has so much going against him. He’s still in school. He is “overweight” or “obese,” depending on how you feel about him. He has given up on any kind of respectability in clothing and simply wears pajamas to school, inviting ridicule. Worse, he is burdened by having to care for his dementia-stricken uncle almost all the time when he’s not in school.

Often plots about outsiders insert characters who want to rescue the outsiders, even bring them inside if possible. In Edward Scissorhands, it’s Peg, played by Dianne Weist, who discovers Edward living alone in his gloomy old castle. She bring Edward into opposite surroundings, her tract house. In Terri, directed by Azazel Jacobs, the caring character is one of the school’s principals, played by John C. Riley, himself a former outsider.

Writers and directors of indie outsider films have to be careful. They run the risk of tipping the film too far toward sentimentalism. It’s easy for audiences to turn off to social outlanders. Critics apparently don’t feel this way about Terri. For example, Karina Longworth, writing for The Village Voice, comments (with a lexicon all her own):

“[Terri’s] climax, a glorious extended three-hander in which Terri, his love interest and a frenemy get wasted and confront their basest impulses, is perfectly modulated. The kind of scene that would be played for nihilist shock in a typical Amerindie, [director] Jacobs stages it to reveal depths, layers, and vulnerabilities to characters who couldn’t reveal their vulnerabilities until forced by intoxicants. Crowd pleasing without being pandering, Terri above all else feels true.”

Amy Tauben of Film Comment too is sensitive to the film’s balance:

“Neither sentimental nor exploitative, Terri depicts high school as a place where, as the assistant principal (John C. Reilly) explains, Terri has the opportunity to come to terms with the fact that “life is a mess, dude, but we are all just doing the best we can.” Terri bonds with this unusually honest adult and with two other students who are also receiving counseling: anxiety-ridden Chad, who compulsively pulls out his own hair strand by strand, and gorgeous Heather, whose popularity takes a sudden plunge after she allows her boyfriend to [do sex on] her in plain sight… “

You watch (or choose not to watch) Hollywood summer movies about teens; all seem insiders, boringly hip, preoccupied with inconsequentiana.  Their angst is ultimately low-grade and contrived. Terri comes round this season to remind us of what real outsiders do and think, and explore their chances for integration. Maybe the film reminds us of times when we too were outsiders. Or maybe Terri is most valuable for suggesting what we ourselves might do to rescue lonely souls from the purgatory of being outside.

Home in Denmark, Anton’s relationship with his wife, Marianne (Trine Dryholm), is as broken and ailing as the plight of the camp he ministers to; the two seem unable to come together. Anton and Marianne have a child, a 12-year-old boy, Elias (Markus Rygaard), who is badly bullied badly at school.

Soon Elias befriends Christian, a boy his age, and discloses the acts of bullying he has had to endure. Christian leads Elias down the path of revenge.

In a Better World is a high-minded film that raises many moral issues and offers many layers of meaning. Western guilt and need for expiation concerning colonialism may undergird Anton’s charitable works in Africa. How can such a noble man be in a failed marriage? The film looks into multiple roles—Anton’s giving nature, his difficulty with Marianne, his neglect of Elias. The film seems to suggest that if one spends a lot of time with activity A, he runs the risk of failing in activity B, unless he is Superman. For all his virtues, Anton is not Superman. The consequence of not paying attention to Elias is tragic. Maybe In A Better World is finally about how impossible it is for sensitive people to succeed in far-flung endeavors which demand differing mindsets and skills. Such people ask too much of themselves, or don’t realize what they are getting into.

In a Better World was directed by the Dane Suzanne Bier and won this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Bier may be best known in the U.S. for her brooding After the Wedding of 2006. In this film, a Dane lives in Bombay and struggles mightily to keep an orphanage afloat. This is how Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times summarizes Bier’s career: “Director Susanne Bier mainlines emotion. She has a connection to feelings and passions that is as direct and potent as an addict’s needle piercing a vein. Her fierce and compelling dramas, like the new “After the Wedding,” serve it up straight, no chaser, and dare anyone to flinch.”

In a Better World put off a few critics for its moralizing tone, but most raved about it. Andrew L. Urban of Urban Cinefile wrote: “There are so many rich layers and moral quandaries in this latest Jensen/Bier collaboration [Anders Thomas Jensen wrote the screenplay], it’s almost overwhelming. And this makes for a highly emotional and satisfying experience, as the characters journey through a jungle of dangers that beset the human condition.”

Stefan S at A Nutshell Review praised Anton’s character: “Anton is a fascinating character… and Mikael Persbrandt shows his charisma in chewing up the scenes each time he appears, from the opening frame to the last.” Stefan S also hints at complications which only deepen the film: “In a foreign land he [Anton] is almost worshipped as a hero, but back home he’s ridiculed and even abused by a stranger with whom he had no fight against, and his non-confrontational nature may seem unreal even, preferring never to stoop as low as his abuser, and hopefully imparting the correct values to his children….”

The film is called Certified Copy and challenges viewers to distinguish between what is real and what is fake.

Binoche, entering her prime, is known world-wide for taking chances. She turned down a role running away from Tyrannosauruses in Spieburg’s Jurassic Park in favor of a contemplative, inward role in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue (1993), part of a trilogy (Red, White) about the effects of the death of loved ones. In Blue, Binoche acts in, not out. She has lost her family to a car accident and wishes to cut herself off from human contact and most of the world.

Binoche captured the world with her role in The Unbearable Lightness of Being of 1988, based on a novel by Milan Kundera and directed by the American Phillip Kaufman. Binoche plays a sensitive photographer documenting the “Prague Spring” of 1968 when Poles rose up against the occupying Soviets.

Binoche is probably best known around the world for her role in The English Patient (1996), directed by Anthony Minghella, a story about a nurse caring for a badly burned pilot (Ralph Fiennes). This film won nine Oscars; Binoche won for best supporting actress.

In Certified Copy, Binoche plays the owner of an art gallery and print shop in Tuscany who meets a writer who has just brought out a book having to do with copies of great art.

Iranian-born Kiarostami enjoys an international reputation for making films about universal themes which transcend national or regional origins. In The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) a documentary filmmaker goes into a small town in Iran to film an obscure funeral ritual. A women is dying but hangs on, and the longer she lives the more money the filmmaker has to spend to board and feed his crew. It’s a curious moral dilemma.

Kiorastami’s Taste of Cherry concerns a middle-aged man, one Mr. Baddii, who desires to commit suicide. Trouble is, in Muslim Iran, tradition dictates that the deceased receive a speedy burial. Basdii spends practically the whole film finding someone who will throw dirt on him dead in his grave.

Kiarostami is a man of many talents. Imdb.com lists him as the writer of 42 films, including The White Balloon, directed by Jafar Panahi. This film is about a child who wants to buy a goldfish to celebrate the New Year. But adults hustle her out of her money. Iranian filmmakers like to make films about children to get around censorship, but often their stories contain metaphors which reflect oppressive conditions in Iranian society. Kiarostami has also written poetry and novels and mastered photography.

Kiarostami’s films are often ambiguous and symbolic. Often one viewing is not enough. (Consider seeing Certified Copy at 5:30, having dinner, then returning for the 8 pm screening.) Here is imdb.com’s sparse description of the story of Certified Copy.

In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged British writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano. While there, a chance question reveals something deeper.

Look how Stephen Holden of the New York Times starts his review:

The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s delicious brain tickler, “Certified Copy,” is an endless hall of mirrors whose reflections multiply as its story of a middle-aged couple driving through Tuscany carries them into a metaphysical labyrinth.

What follows is four-way contemplation among married vs. not married and real art vs. copied art, and the implications of all these. Kiarostami’s films have been compared to the work of Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up, L’avventura) in their mind-messing challenges. Certified Copy is certainly a “labyrinth,” but one you enjoy being in. You may not find your way out by the end, but you don’t have to. Just enjoy the metaphysics of it.

Christmas and other religious seasons were often based on festivals of eating and merriment. Lent, a period of denial in many Christian denominations, was broken by feasts, costuming, grand parades and dancing. Festivals have always been intermittent, with energy focused on high holidays and special occasions. They are meant to contrast with the rest of the year, characterized by workaday existence.

Festival-like social events are found in nearly every society. In some societies, elders instruct the young on living; in others, youthful energy is unleashed. Often festivals are seasonal. The harvest is universally an occasion for thanksgiving. Ancient Egyptians celebrated the flooding of the Nile and the success of the rice crop.

Beer festivals are not just held in Germany. There are beer festivals in Serbia, Norway, and even in China, Australia, and New Zealand. Beer festivals amount to happy rewards to for hard work leading down to inebriation.

The arts have long provided occasions for festivals. In England, festivals of visual arts, often called “fairs” (with or without the “e” at the end) have long been popular. The Three Choirs musical festival is held in the West of England. Arts festivals in England have been held since the 18th century in Norfolk, Norwich, and Brighton. These festivals, like all festivals, attract people who celebrate, eat, mingle.

What all festivals have in common is love and reward—love for religious figures, love for tasks completed, love for food brought to the table, love for art, fellowship and community. Festivals require work, nearly always given on a volunteer basis, for the greater good, for the enrichment of the whole. Festival organizers feel blessed that they can lift their communities above the everyday and recognize solitary labor. The community is grateful that priests, musicians, artisans, brewers, craftspeople, and local officials have toiled together to enrich the community.

Film festivals came into being a scant five years after the dawn of talking movies. The earliest festivals came to us from London, Berlin, and Cannes. The Edinburgh Film Festival is the oldest continuously-running film festival in the world, commencing in 1947.

American film historians point to the Columbus International Film and Video Festival as the first American film festival. It began showing motion pictures in 1953. Four years later the San Francisco Film Festival began operations and is credited with introducing many important foreign films to the U.S., including Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. This is the seventh year Fresno Filmworks has festivalized.

Film festivals too are about love. Film lovers weary of predictable Hollywood fare expect the fresh and novel at Filmworks festivals, held every April. There are so many worthy films in the world whose creators long to have people see and appreciate their art. They have virtually no chance of exhibiting their art beyond their countries except for the existence of festivals around the world. Now at this year’s Filmworks festival patrons can see films from Spain, Germany, and even Thailand, as well as little-known quality films made in the U.S. You are as big-hearted as people who over the centuries have gotten drunk at beer festivals or have had their souls moved at music festivals. Our motto this year: Come here. Watch films. Simple, basic, loving. Get drunk on our films.