The Lincoln Library Film Society will resume its free screenings on the first Tuesday of the month at 7 p.m. starting on May 7, followed by a series of four films from Brazil’s “Cinema Novo” movement starting on May 14.
Inaugurating an intermittent series on “cinemavericks”—filmmakers who produced innovative and unusual work, pushing technique and invention beyond its inherited boundaries—we’ll start on May 7 with a fascinating program on an almost unknown but pioneering artist named Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983). Harnessing advanced-for-the-time techniques such as traveling mattes, multiple superimpositions, and the layered painting on glass effect favored by the legendary Oskar Fishinger, wife-and-husband team Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth created a series of startlingly imaginative, fun, and exuberant short films in New York City between 1933 and 1953. These were often seen at mainstream movie theaters preceding the main feature.
Bute and Nemeth’s films most often were made as extensions (more than mere accompaniments) to pieces of music, such as compositions by Grieg and Mussorgsky, in contrast to popular animation of the time, where the soundtrack would “mickey-mouse,” so to speak, along with the visuals. The pair utilized sculptural abstraction, calling to mind Bahaus and De Stjil, and the refracting of the image through various means to create a sort of pure cinema, an elemental culmination of geometry and light. They also worked with direct-to-celluloid hand animation, which was also to be found in the experimental works of New Zealander Len Lye, a contemporary of theirs.
In addition to the shorts made by Bute and Nemeth, we’ll see some of Bute’s long-form, live-action efforts. First is a short film starring a 12-year-old Christopher Walken about a Victorian boy who has the peculiar ability to see through walls.
We’ll also be watching a half-hour excerpt from Bute’s impossibly obscure feature film adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a loose and stylized interpretation of the book. For this film, shot over the course of three years, Bute drew dialogue directly from the text, including English subtitles that either explain or confuse things further. Loose, effervescent and hyperactive, her take on modern literature’s most playfully sprawling puzzle of a novel is nonetheless packed with daring and inventive cinematography, inspired performances, and powerful images. It also predates a popular new-wave adaptation of Ulysses from 1967, which pales in comparison to it.
The full program on May 7 is as follows:
Short films:
- Rhythm in Light (1934), 5 min.
- Synchromy No.2 (1935), 6 min.
- Dada (1936), 1 min.
- Synchromy No.4: Escape (1937), 4 min.
- Parabola (1937), 9 min.
- Spook Sport (1939), 8 min.
- Tarantella (1940), 4 min.
- The Boy Who Saw Through (1956), 25 min.
…followed by Passages from Finnegans Wake (1966), 30 min.
Look forward to later programs on such “cinemavericks” as Hiroshi Teshigahara and Alberto Cavalcanti.
Brazil’s Cinema Novo
The next set of movie nights (May 14–June 4) will focus on Brazil’s “Cinema Novo” movement of the 1950s-1980s. The lineup will be forthcoming. As always, the screening will be held in the Tarbell Room in the Lincoln Public Library at 7 p.m. Email lincolnlibraryfilmsociety@gmail.com with any questions, and be sure to tell your friends who love interesting movies!
Starting on Tuesday, May 14, the Lincoln Library Film Society is presenting a four-part series on the Brazilian “Cinema Novo” (new wave) that had its roots in the 1950s and whose effects are still being felt in films of today. We will be looking at the core time period of the 1950s and ’60s that really defined the movement and fostered some of its most essential artists.
At the end of the ’50s, the increasingly politicized filmmakers of Brazil were spurred on to create a subversive art form that was influenced equally by the raw, no-frills neorealism of postwar Italian cinema, and the formal restructuring being dealt by the French New Wave. Attempting to create works that appealed to both the masses and to intellectuals, directors such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Glabuer Rocha, and Ruy Guerra introduced radical aesthetic challenges, all the while formulating unique styles of their own. While Brazil was experiencing an astronomical economic boom and an increasingly heavy-handed dictatorship, the artists of the new cinema looked at important issues such as race, class, and poverty with a directness and an incisiveness that mainstream cinema could not manage.
A tropical combination of naturalism and surrealism sets Cinema Novo apart from other new-wave movements but also proved highly influential. Its economy of means (films often made on very low budgets), visionary central figures (such as the aforementioned Rocha and Guerra), and incendiary political confrontation meant that it was embraced the world over by other emerging film scenes, especially those of Cuba and West Africa.
The group will screen two classics from the heart and soul of the new wave (Khouri’s Eros and Rocha’s Entranced Earth), followed by an important predecessor to the movement (Dos Santos’ Rio, Northern Zone) and a fascinating late-period masterpiece (Hirszman’s São Bernardo).
Films will be shown on Tuesdays starting promptly at 7 p.m. in the Lincoln Public Library’s Tarbell Room. There will be snacks and coffee throughout, and discussion afterwards.
May 14: Eros (Noite Vazia)
Brazil / 1964 / in Portuguese with English subtitles. 91 minutes
We begin the Cinema Novo series with one of 1960s Brazil’s most groundbreaking and aesthetically challenging films, Walter Hugo Khouri’s distressed psychodrama Eros. Against the backdrop of the vast and alienating city of São Paulo, two men—one wealthy and hedonistic, the other poor and moody—cruise the dark streets for a good time with prostitutes. Their all-night encounter with two women exposes the reality beneath the roles that each one of them assumes, before shattering them like plaster molds. Heavy with existential dread, the film is built on provocative performances (not to mention splendid, chiaroscuro imagery by Hungarian cinematographer Rudolph Icsey), shrouded in a truly uncanny atmosphere whose nearest parallel is Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1959).
May 21: Entranced Earth (Terra em Transe)
Brazil / 1967 / in Portuguese with English subtitles, 108 minutes
If Cinema Novo could be said to have a true enfant terrible, it would be the highly influential director Glauber Rocha, whose controversial films essentially took a match to the twin fuses of economic injustice and racial division in Brazil. A movement unto himself, and avowedly different than any of his contemporaries, Rocha favored a free-flowing narrative peopled with decadent performances, hand-held camera, and an improvisational feel. His first major film after the incredible Black God, White Devil (1964), Entranced Earth is set in the fictitious nation of Eldorado, where social upheaval is coming to a boil. Anarchist journalist Paulo wants to battle against two equally execrable powers: a conservative theocrat and an elite populist, both vying for control of the country. Paulo’s cynicism threatens to overwhelm his commitment to stave off the opposing threats, while the guilt of having supported both of them runs as a stream beneath his rage.
May 28: Rio, Northern Zone (Rio, Zona Norte)
Brazil / 1957 / in Portuguese with English subtitles, 83 minutes
Before appearing in films for both iconoclastic outsider Julio Bressane and Cinema Novo stalwart Jaoquim Pedro de Andrade, the comedic actor Grande Otelo starred in this neorealist-inspired story of a hapless Samba composer who allows his work to be stolen and exploited. Following his brief rise to fame, the favela denizen takes a painful fall back into poverty and disenfranchisement, never relinquishing his love of music. The great Nelson Pereira dos Santos (still going strong at the age of 84) directed this film as a companion to his first feature, Rio 40 Degrees (1955), and its storyline, bristling with the rhythms of everyday life, addresses social issues with a level of naturalism that would influence the emerging political filmmakers of the 1960s, while its narrative sophistication sets it apart from the mainstream offerings of the popular Atlantida studios, which dominated early Brazilian cinema.
June 4: São Bernardo
Brazil / 1972 / in Portuguese with English subtitles. 113 minutes
Leon Hirszman’s classic film, having achieved a near-legendary status in Brazil, has made its way to the U.S thanks to Cinemateca Brasileira’s marvelous, recently-restored edition. A slow-burning meditation on greed, ambition and spiritual corruption that could be considered a worthy predecessor to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), the film is both a saga of one man’s rise to power and also a portrait of his singular obsession with control. After being released from prison, the farmhand protagonist sets his sights on taking over a plantation in Brazil’s northeastern sertão, making enemies of his well-meaning wife and everyone else around him. Adapted from Graciliano Ramos’ novel, the film builds elegantly to a fevered pitch of paranoia only to give way to a deep well of soul-searching that lays bare the capitalist’s unending quest for more, more, and more.