At the Berlin Film Festival in February 2000, moviegoers got an early introduction to the work of a very young writer-director who would become one of the new century’s most important American filmmaking artists, then 24-year-old David Gordon Green. The world premiere of Green’s low-budget, independently made, and mysteriously titled George Washington was cause for celebration in the way it favored poetic visuals and real human behavior in telling the story of a group of youngsters in a poor North Carolina town. Shunning conventional narrative, controlled performances, and overly emphatic dialogue, George Washington was hailed by critics who welcomed it as a movie in the tradition of Charles Burnett and Terrence Malick.
Green’s follow-up, All the Real Girls, tells of the rehabilitation and heartbreak of a young ladies’ man (Paul Schneider) when he falls for a no-less-innocent teenage girl (Zooey Deschanel). While the love story is honestly heartfelt, Green never loses his touch for injecting humor into painful and awkward situations. All the Real Girls premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded a special jury prize “for emotional truth.”
Undertow, Green’s third feature, found him working with his idol, Terrence Malick, who served as co-producer and introduced Green to the story of an adolescent boy and his younger brother on the run from their murderous uncle. Featuring rapturous images lensed on Savannah, Georgia locations by Green’s steadfast cinematographer, Tim Orr, Undertow pays homage to other films like The Night of the Hunter and Southern-set action classics from the ’70s like Macon County Line, while always maintaining its own offbeat sensibility.
Another major force in independent filmmaking, University of Rochester graduate Lisa Muskat has been Green’s primary producer on all four of his feature films to date, and they will both appear in person at the Dryden on March 6 to present the local premiere of their latest collaboration, Snow Angels. Another deeply personal project that uniquely mixes humor with tragedy, Snow Angels tells converging stories of love and loss among two couples: one adult and one adolescent. Green’s most mature work to date also features his most impressive cast of experienced and fledgling actors: Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale, Griffin Dunne, Amy Sedaris, Michael Angarano, and Olivia Thirlby.
The Snow Angels screening kicks off a David Gordon Green & Lisa Muskat retrospective that includes all of the above-mentioned films, some of which will be preceded by Green’s student films made at the North Carolina School of the Arts. The series will also include showings of three new independent features produced by Green and Muskat: Great World of Sound, directed by Green’s fellow NCSA-alum Craig Zobel; Jeff Nichols’ stunning debut, Shotgun Stories; and Chop Shop, Ramin Bahrani’s follow-up to his acclaimed Man Push Cart.
—Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
(David Lynch, US 1999, 111 min., 35mm)
Based on a true story, this film depicts the journey of 73-year-old Alvin Straight (Oscar® nominee Richard Farnsworth) who travels from Iowa to visit his estranged brother in Wisconsin on a John Deere lawnmower. Although not entirely without its idiosyncrasies, this G-rated departure from Lynch’s typically bizarre style reveals his genuine versatility as a director.
(LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN, France 1973, 210 min., French/subtitles)
Often considered the last film of La Nouvelle Vague, Eustache’s intellectual epic follows young Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud) who spends his days hanging out in cafés talking, and ultimately drifts into affairs with the older Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and the younger Veronika (Françoise Lebrun).
Program Notes
Jean Eustache was first introduced to the French New Wave through his visits to the Cahiers du Cinema office. His wife was the Cahiers secretary and he increasingly spent more time there while coming to pick her up. Eustache was inspired to begin making films in the early 1960s after seeing Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales (1963), which experimented with handheld silent film cameras. Despite Eustache’s early obscurity, big names in French cinema, such as Francois Truffaut and critic Andre Bazin, were soon applauding his semi-autobiographical shorts. Jean-Luc Godard provided film stock and produced his second film, Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1966). In the late 1960s while living in poverty, Eustache started to make ethnographic documentaries for television. In 1973, Barbet Schroeder, a friend from the Cinematheque Francais, financed Eustache so he could spend three months scripting what would become his first feature length film, The Mother and the Whore.
The Mother and the Whore was shot in black and white with a small budget of about 700,000 francs. Despite its running time of over three and a half hours, the film was shot in only four weeks. In a refusal to “prettify” the film, Eustache used only natural sounds and shot on location in his own apartment and in cafes. And although the film has a raw documentary feel, Eustache carefully orchestrated each episode. He allowed little deviation from the 300 page script and it took him over three months to edit the film.
The film follows an unemployed aspiring intellectual, Alexandre, and his simultaneous relationships with an older independent business woman, Marie, and a promiscuous nurse, Veronika. The film deals with French society immediately following the failures of the student protests and has been regarded as central to post-1968 French cinema. As Alexandre claims, “we had the cultural revolution, the Rolling Stones, May 1968, the Black Panthers, the Palestinians, the Underground and then nothing for the last two or three years.”
More central to the film are the many dialogues entirely about sex. Dan Yakir championed the film as “a rare instance in French cinema where the battle of the sexes is portrayed not from the male point of view alone.” While Eustache’s other films are often accused of being sexist and at times misogynist, in The Mother and the Whore it is not the male, but the female characters who are independent and self-supporting. However, as Jill Forbes claims, Eustache in the end adopts the rather misanthropic view that “it is the individual’s sexual desires, whether that individual is male or female, that make him or her vulnerable to others and this is seen as a weakness.”
The film won both the special jury prize and the critics’ prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. This success allowed Eustache to raise the money to make My Little Loves (1975), a feature length autobiographical film he had been writing for years. Eustache continued making TV documentaries until 1980, when after an accident he became immobilized, rarely leaving his house. He became self-absorbed and depressed by his own marginality, and in September 1981 he shot himself.
~ John Klacsmann, Student, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
FOR FURTHER READING
(David Lynch, US 1984, 140 min.)
After his success with The Elephant Man, director Lynch applied his talents to another commercial project: bringing to life the dark, futuristic universe of the bestselling science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. The complex plot revolves around the son of the ruling house of Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan) who attempts to save the desert planet Arakis, the only source of a life-giving spice.
(Andrew Dominik, US 2007, 160 min.)
“My film of the year…beautiful and fascinating and utterly original”—Jack Garner,Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Brad Pitt stars as Jesse James, the troubled legendary outlaw living out his final days in the American Midwest. In his Oscar®- nominated performance, Casey Affleck is Bob Ford, whose lifelong dream of riding with Jesse’s gang leads him toward an act of betrayal that will seal his own tragic destiny. Overlooked upon its original release, don’t miss your opportunity to see this grand and beautifully photographed masterwork on the big screen.
