December 2–9, 1999

movies

Screen Picks

An Evening with Errol Morris (Dec. 3, 8 p.m., IFC) In a climate which favors the measured voiceover and the bland, "balanced" POV, the continued commercial existence of Errol Morris is nothing short of a miracle. With films like The Thin Blue Line and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Morris pushes the boundary between documentation and self-expression — or rather, shows that its existence was only ever an illusion. IFC’s mini-retro kicks off with the brand-new A Brief History of Errol Morris, which goes all the way from the making of Gates of Heaven (1978) to Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., scheduled for release early next year. (Showings of Heaven and Vernon, Florida follow at 9 and 10:30.) In between, Morris demonstrates the interrotron, his custom-made device for allowing interviewees to look directly into the camera lens, and Werner Herzog recalls how he wagered Morris he couldn’t finish his first film. (Herzog lost and fulfilled his side of the bargain — as memorialized in Les Blank’s 1980 short Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.) Appropriate that Morris’ career began on a bet; he’s been raising the stakes ever since. Look for International House to mount a more comprehensive Morris retrospective at the end of January.

—Sam Adams

Greed (Dec. 5, 8 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., TCM) The true tragedy of artistic desecration is that it can almost never be put right; for every restored director’s cut, there’s a movie whose extra footage was ashcanned before anyone hatched the idea of archival preservation. One of the most egregious examples is Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1925), once a nine-hour adaptation of Frank Norris’ McTeague, later hacked to 140 minutes by MGM’s Irving Thalberg, its excised footage melted down for the silver in the nitrate film stock. This epic reconstruction by archivist Rick Schmidlin (who most recently restored Touch of Evil) doesn’t do anything like return the film to its former shape, a true impossibility. What he has done is to use 650 production stills and a well-conceived score by Robert Israel to offer some approximation of Stroheim’s 4 1/2-hour cut, which he wanted released as a two-part film. Characters totally absent from the familiar version, like a couple of elderly tenants who pine for each other without ever speaking, reappear as if from nowhere, vastly amplifying the epic sweep of von Stroheim’s conception. Borrowed from Ken Burns’ documentaries, the techniques used to bring the stills "to life" can be problematic and distracting, calling attention to what’s already a fairly intrusive process. But it’s doubtful the process could have been done any other way; the sheer length of some of the restored sequences (including a 16-minute prologue) would have made them deadly without any kind of camera movement. This is most assuredly not how Erich von Stroheim wanted Greed to look, but without the use of a time machine, it’s as close as anyone living today will ever get.

—Sam Adams

Songs for Cassavetes (VHS, $20) In the opening scene of this indie-rockumentary, Calvin Johnson, arguably the most legendary figure to come out of the northwest since Bigfoot, recounts the early days of his K records label, and the scene that grew around his particular brand of pop music. "In the ’80s, things were so conservative. There was what we were doing in the underground, there was Huey Lewis and the News, and there was nothing in between." The next 80 or so minutes explore the network of fans, artists and record labels that grew out of the early ’90s indie-rock explosion. Focusing mainly on Calvin’s gang in Olympia, WA, and their cohorts in Washington, D.C., the film examines the ideals that fueled the subculture. Live concert footage underscores testimonials from some of the scene’s luminaries. The Peechees, The Hi-Fives and Sleater-Kinney all give their two cents, but it’s the evangelistic fervor of Make-Up front man Ian Svenonius and the disturbing tunnel vision of Some Velvet Sidewalk’s Al Larsen that drive the point firmly home. While it may not convert the masses, the film does provide a good overview of the scene and should be the perfect narcissistic indulgence for any self-respecting record dork. Available from www.insound.com/annex, or by sending check/money order to Breadcrumb Trail Films, 440 Raymond Ave. #8, Santa Monica, CA 90405 ($22 Canada/$25 elsewhere).

—Brett Burton