A reminder to those within easy travel of Cambridge's Brattle Theatre: Tonight kicks off the "Selected by... Andrew Bujalski"* series, as the local boy auteur prepares to leave Jamaica Plain behind for the sxsw city of Austin. [Again.] Be sure not to miss the mind-bending triple-and-a-half feature he's programmed.
Vertigo (1958)
dir Alfred Hitchcock w/Jimmy Stuart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes [128 min]Part one of this mindbending triple-and-a-half feature! VERTIGO has lost none of its power as a gripping thriller, but as we know in our Dr.-Phil-enlightened age, it's also an exploration of some serious untreated emotional disorders. Stewart doesn't play against type so much as he burrows into his persona to newfound and frightening depths as a San Francisco detective who finds himself obsessed by (at least) two versions of Novak. Twists, turns, the 'trombone shot,' and a philosophical moment in the redwoods that would have a profound effect on Chris Marker...
La Jetée (1962)
dir Chris Marker [28 min]The gold standard of experimental narratives, Chris Marker's 1962 short remains inimitable - even Twelve Monkeys, the ostensible remake, wisely sidesteps any attempt to recreate the mood of this haunting short told (almost) entirely in still images. A World War III survivor is sent on a time travel mission back to contemporary Paris, and stumbles onto love, the tragic secret of a childhood memory, and a Vertigo allusion...
Screens With
Sans Soleil
(1983) dir Chris Marker [100 min]
An entirely different sort of piece from Marker, this 1983 "essay film" returns explicitly to his Vertigo fascination - and his puzzlements over the nature of memory & the rings of the redwood - as an unseen female narrator describes Marker's meditations on revisiting Vertigo's San Francisco locations, as well as travels to Japan, Iceland, and elsewhere. A thick, heady philosophical trip that's no more conventional documentary than La Jetee is sci-fi.Twelve Monkeys (1995)
dir Terry Gilliam w/Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, Brad Pitt [129 min]Who knows what horrors and blasphemies were spoken at pitch meetings for this film, but through perseverance or luck or some combination, Terry Gilliam managed the delicate trick of both respecting & sweeping aside his source material in the right measures to cook up his strongest film of the 90s. Featuring the performances that were Pitt's first stab at major critical credibility and Willis', let's say, most recent... Gilliam provides catnip for the film students as Willis and Stowe seek refuge in a theater showing Vertigo, and Bernard Herrmann's score continues to swell up into the next scene...
For those not within hailing distance [a shame, really. He's got Wattstax and Written on the Wind], the cinetrix commends consoling yourself by reading the rest of the Bujalski-penned program notes.
*I know the ellipses probably show up in every such "Selected by" series title, but they seem especially apt here.
