From the first-person narrators of EXPERIMENTER and MACHINE GUN OR TYPEWRITER?, only a small leap is necessary to get to the work of Ed Pincus. The UP #7 Special Program was dedicated to the films of Alfred Guzzetti and this year's program continues its examination of filmmaking in the Boston region by turning to Pincus' oeuvre. Supported by various local institutions such as Harvard University and MIT, whose film department was founded by Pincus, Boston can be considered the center of avant-garde documentary, ethnographic US film. Pincus was one of the key figures of this scene. While his first films, like BLACK NATCHEZ (1967) about the civil rights movement in the south of the US, were very much in line with the tradition of observing Direct Cinema, Pincus became more interested in documenting his own life and reflecting the work of the filmmaker in film. "Of what nature is our life and our relationships, our little lies and disappointments? A new type of filmmaker, who looks at these questions and finds his material directly in front of him, has emerged,"he said in 1977. His reflections reached a peak in DIARIES (1971–1976) (1980), an epic chronicle about his life and marriage which is one of the pioneering works of autobiographical documentary. A long creative pause followed but in the new millennium he made two more films, with Lucia Small - "The Axe in the Attic" (2007) and ONE CUT, ONE LIFE (2013). Pincus died in November 2013. It's the first time that a selection of his films is being screened in Germany.
EXPERIMENTER (Michael Almereyda, USA 2015, 3.6., guest: Michael Almereyda & 14.6.) In 1961, just as the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem was making headlines all over the world, the US academic Stanley Milgram was conducting a series of experiments on obedience, asking the question: What leads people to obey orders blindly? With shocking results: He found that a majority of test subjects were willing to obey and follow instructions even if they thought that this was causing pain to other test subjects. Having made a vampire film, "Nadja" (USA 1994), and a literary adaptation, "Hamlet" (USA 2000), Michael Almereyda has now reinterpreted the biopic in EXPERIMENTER. He has Milgram (played by Peter Sarsgaard) appear as the narrator of his own life and rejects the so beloved and popular naturalism of biographical film. Over and over, the academic speaks directly into the camera, another time he is followed through the university corridors by an elephant. "By mixing bare sets with blatantly, artificial tableaux, Michael Almereyda seems to suggest that Milgram in his quest for truth hovered, in the end, in a world situated somewhere between reality and the world of his imagination." (Manohla Dargis)
IN JACKSON HEIGHTS (Frederick Wiseman, USA 2015, 4. & 12.6.) 167 languages are said to be spoken in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood of the New York borough of Queens. Wiseman has set his 40th film in this humming melting pot. It is one of his best, a grand city symphony overflowing with colors, sounds and smells. In the course of three hours, we find out about LGBT groups, generational conflicts, the difficult life led by immigrants and the constant advance of gentrification. Wiseman's presence can be sensed in every image and his penetrating opinions as well as the passion he has for the people in front of the camera made this film one of the most important of 2015. A film about the US that opens with images of a mosque.
MACHINE GUN OR TYPEWRITER? (Travis Wilkerson, USA 2015, 5. & 13.6.) A man is looking for a woman he met in Los Angeles but who disappeared suddenly. He remembers their encounters and experiences in a radio broadcast. Is she dead or perhaps a police spy? The depiction of this love, recited by Travis Wilkerson, is painful. Simultaneously, Wilkerson creates an alternative tale of Los Angeles full of mysterious moments - the disempowerment of the trade unions, a dilapidated Jewish cemetery, various terrorist attacks - interrupting the broadcast into the Californian ether with pictures of Vietnam and the Occupy movement.
JUKE: PASSAGES FROM THE FILMS OF SPENCER WILLIAMS (USA 2015, 5. & 13.6.) Thom Andersen's new video essay is about Spencer Williams, who in the 1940s made nine independent films in Texas that are almost forgotten today and urgently need to be rediscovered.
ROSEHILL (Brigitta Wagner, USA/D 2015, 7.6., guest: Brigitta Wagner) "Rocks, women, motion, metamorphosis, and erotica." The actress Katriona (Kate Chamuris) pays a visit to her old friend Alice (Josephine Decker) a university lecturer who conducts research into pornography and lives in Indiana. They have not seen each other for a long time and Alice is glad for the change afforded her by this sudden visit. They roam through rural Indiana meeting locals. Documentary merges into fiction (or vice versa). "Perhaps the best way to make a documentary film is not to make a documentary film. I had these different fictional and documentary elements, which allowed themselves to come together organically. And I thought that was perhaps my ideal way of making a film." (Brigitta Wagner)
HENRY GAMBLE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY (Stephen Cone, USA 2015, 9. & 16.6.) Henry Gamble lives in a chic Chicago suburb. When he turns 17, he invites many friends to a pool party in his garden. There is music, lemonade and discussions about god. For Henry's environment is Christian and his father is a hip pastor. Henry goes to religious camp with his friends and his older sister is studying biology (minus the theory of evolution) at a Christian university. Unsurprisingly, plenty is bubbling beneath the surface and hypocrisy is rife. However, the way that Stephen Cone portrays the young people in tight bikinis (with crosses stitched on to them) and bathing trunks, and films their physicality is particularly empathetic in its sensuality. This is a film about about awakenings - religious, sexual - with an electro soundtrack.
JUNUN (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA 2015, 10. & 18.6.) Paul Thomas Anderson's oeuvre is closely connected with music. In his first documentary, he accompanies Jonny Greenwood, who is recording an album with Indian and Israeli musicians, on a journey through the Indian city of Jodhpur. In his feature films, Anderson is a vehement defender of analogue but here he experiments with digital filmmaking playfully and with palpable pleasure. While the musicians record in the maharaja's sumptuous palace, a man feeds the birds on the roof, a task that his family has been fulfilling for generations. Mounted on a drone, Anderson's camera rises vertically into the heights through the swarm of birds - a euphoric and liberating moment in this equally euphoric film about music.
THE GRIEF OF OTHERS (Patrick Wang, USA 2015, 11.6., guest: Patrick Wang & 15.6.) In his second film, Patrick Wang tells the story of a family struggling to cope with the death of their newborn baby. While the parents Ricky and John try to continue their life as well as possible, the two children develop an increasingly idiosyncratic behavior. Nobody manages to find words to express their grief. Then an older daughter from John's first marriage turns up. She is pregnant. The imminent break up of a white middle-class family is one of the most popular subjects of independent cinema. But "no one else in modern American cinema is making films like Patrick Wang (Michael Tully). From the very first - pink and spectral - shot to the dreamlike last sequence, THE GRIEF OF OTHERS is a film that never falls prey to modern pessimism despite the difficult subject matter and always rejects conventions.
STINKING HEAVEN (Nathan Silver, USA 2015, 18.6.) A group of ex-alcoholics and drug addicts lives in a kind of commune, using improvised group therapy to rid themselves of addiction. Wedding ceremonies are conducted under the supervision of an idealistic married couple, dramatic experiences are re-enacted and tea is fermented in the bathtub and sold to skeptical passers-by. There is a fragile balance until a new member joins the group. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan told his fellow citizens "It’s morning in America" singing the praises of home ownership in suburbia and good honest work. Set in 1990 and filmed with an analogue beta-cam camera, Nathan Silver's fifth film seems like the chaotic and wild answer to the 1980s. When at the end the inhabitants sing kitsch love songs, horror and comedy go hand in hand.S
pecial Program Ed PincusDIARIES(1971–1976) (Ed Pincus, USA 1980, 6. & 17.6.) In 1971, Ed Pincus placed his own life in the center of his film. For five years, he recorded his family's life with a camera on his shoulder, observing his children playing, his meetings with colleagues and the affairs he had with various women. A portrait of a time when the slogan "the personal is the political" triggered all kinds of new forms of relationship, DIARIES(1971–1976) is Pincus' magnum opus. While the need to involve and reflect his own position in a film can be felt in his earlier works, in DIARIES Pincus found a form that ideally corresponded to these reflections. It is an important American film and "one of the most unusual documentaries of all time.”(Ross McElwee) Most of all, it is a film about Pincus' wife Jane, to whom he had already been married 11 years when he started shooting, and their life together. As the camera returns over and over again to Jane, it becomes clear that it is a love film.
BLACK NATCHEZ (Ed Pincus, David Neuman, USA 1967, 8. & 12.6.) In 1965, Ed Pincus and David Neuman decided to go to Natchez, Mississippi in the south of the US to document the civil rights movement. They witnessed protests, debates between radicals and the old guard, as well as secret meetings to set up an armed self-defense group. BLACK NATCHEZ is the unique document of this trip and an important contribution to American Direct Cinema. A car bomb attack on one of the leaders of the civil rights movement precipitated events and led to even more tension within the black community.
PORTRAIT OF A MCCARTHY SUPPORTER (USA 1969, 8. & 12.6.) A portrait of Pincus' father-in-law. that was commissioned by TV. Pincus and Neuman wanted to show how far removed the politics of presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy were from progressive politics.
LIFE AND OTHER ANXIETIES (Ed Pincus, Steve Ascher, USA 1977, 8. & 14.6.) When David Hancock was in the last stage of cancer at the end of his 30s he asked his friend Pincus to film him. LIFE AND OTHER ANXIETIES begins as the portrait of a man whose life alternates between chemotherapy sessions and new age courses. But the funeral takes place within a few minutes. "I didn't have the stomach to follow much of David's last days," Pincus stated years later. As fate would have it, he had been invited to shoot a film in Minneapolis exactly then. He and Steven Ascher asked people on the streets what was important to them and what they should film for them. Filmed while Pincus was working on his epic DIARIES(1971–1976), the filmis part personal documentary film, part experimental set-up, reminiscent of Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch's "Chronique d'un été" (F 1961).
ONE CUT, ONE LIFE (Ed Pincus, Lucia Small, USA 2013, 10. & 16.6.) After DIARIES (1971–1976) Pincus retreated from filmmaking and started cultivating flowers in Vermont. However, in 2007, he and Lucia Small made another film - The Axe in the Attic (USA 2007). After being diagnosed with leukemia, he decided to make another film with Lucia Small, about his illness this time, much to the frustration of his wife Jane who did not want to share her husband in the last few months of his life with another film project. Pincus' last film, ONE CUT, ONE LIFE is on the one hand a filmic legacy that presents his life and convictions passionately and surprisingly unsentimentally, and on the other a work n which two filmmakers combine their ideas and perspectives and discuss. In the end, the weight of Pincus' death dominates less than the openness with which the two filmmakers confront each other, giving the film a form that is not only about life but the future. (hb)
Unknown Pleasures #8 is supported by the US Embassy and Dolores. The program was curated by Hannes Brühwiler and Andrew Grant. Thanks to Nele Luise Fritzsche, Stephanie Morin.
