The Coolidge

Jonathan Demme receives Coolidge Award, premiers “Neil Young Trunk Show”

Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme was in Brookline yesterday to receive the Coolidge Award. The award is given by the Coolidge Corner Theatre as the focal point of what they accurately describe as “an annual celebration honoring a film artist whose body of work is recognized as consistently original and challenging.”

Besides being a renowned narrative filmmaker (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia), Demme is known for his ground-breaking performance films. The most notable example of the latter might be Stop Making Sense, the 1984 concert movie that made David Byrne a superstar. Demme’s latest film in this genre, Neil Young Trunk Show, had its New England premier Monday as part of the Coolidge Award festivities.

Robyn Hitchcock, the English musician who is the subject of Demme’s 1998 performance film Storefront Hitchcock, was on hand to introduce the director and perform a song. Demme talked briefly about the recent death of Larry “L.A.” Johnson, a documentary filmmaker who worked with Neil Young from Woodstock to the present. Declan Quinn, the award-winning Irish-American cinematographer who worked as director of photography on Neil Young Trunk Show, joined Demme onstage briefly.

Neil Young Trunk Show, along with Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006) and a yet-unfinished film, is part of a Neil Young trilogy being created by Demme. Both men are in their 60s and are arguably at the height of their abilities. Both are consciously creating both art and chronicle.

Neil Young: Heart of Gold was characterized by Young’s pretty music. It focused on songs from his acoustic-based album Prairie Wind, though the encore set featured a run of Harvest Moon, Heart of Gold, Old Man, and The Needle and the Damage Done–the folksy early tunes which remain Young’s most popular. Neil Young Trunk Show has a different character. It’s unabashedly-rock heavy.

It’s also built with a clear artistic vision that doesn’t waver or worry about not being accessible to everyone. As Demme told Rolling Stone, “… if you’re not a Neil Young fan, don’t waste your time…if you don’t love electric guitar, don’t go.”

For the rest of us, Neil Young Trunk Show in a truly great concert movie. After a relatively quiet opening, Young launches into a grinding, growling, tooth-rattling version of “Cinnamon Girl”, one of the few songs in the film non-hardcore Young fans will recognize. While occasionally dipping back into a mellow mood, the show’s rock and roll tension builds throughout the film.

Young doesn’t look great for his 64 years. His eyebrows are unruly, his mullet-ish hair is thin, and his neck hangs in folds from a wrinkled face lightly-stubbled with gray. Time’s harsh effect on the artiste’s mortal shell magnifies his capacity for authentic expression. The lumbering contortions of his body are captivating. His imperfect voice is perfect Neil Young. The look in his watery eyes is thrilling and terrifying. The overall effect is sublime.

As Demme shows him, Young is astounding in the literal sense, i.e. he captures the viewer’s full emotional attention. In one of the film’s most challenging numbers, Young performs a twenty minute version of No Hidden Path. Young and two other sixty-something men jam on and on in a rock and roll explosion that sounds like an orchestra of chainsaws and grizzly bears. At some point, my confidence in this song wavered and I started to wonder how I felt. Then I felt a voice whisper excitedly, “This is so good,” and realized it was my own.

As he’s done in the past, Demme makes great musical performance seem easy to capture on film. A split screen here, a grainy panorama there, and not much else demands notice. His camera lingers long, but never too long. The cinematography never competes against Young’s music for attention.

Although the eye is never hungry for images, Neil Young Trunk Show isn’t really about the show all. It’s about the sound. Tim Mulligan, the chief sound artist, should be recognized for his role in presenting noise that’s both pleasingly clean and superbly rock and roll filthy. Enjoyment of this film could be severely reduced in a venue that doesn’t have an excellent and well-maintained sound system, as does the Coolidge.

The fact that folks like Demme or past Coolidge Award winner Meryl Streep come to Massachusetts to accept their trophies is an affirmation of their support for the superb Coolidge Corner Theatre. It’s an independent, non-profit institution whose audience is highly engaged in the screenings and various cultural activities that takes place there. In addition to other events on their calendar, the Coolidge will celebrate the Akira Kurosawa Centennial with special showings of Ran (1985) (March 19) and Rashomon (1950) (Apr 16).

If you want to see Neil Young Trunk Show before it goes to video, there are only a few theaters in the country where you’ll have the opportunity. One of them is the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, a place that’s more commercial than the Coolidge, but is still another great local venue for films that are out of the ordinary.

Boston’s Lecture Scene: Not John Stoddard Anymore

If BSO tickets or the MFA’s new prices are draining your entertainment budget, Boston’s gamut of free lectures, often followed by receptions with free food and even a little free booze, offer engaging and educational relief. The MFA’s Shapiro Celebrity Lecture Series may fetch $30+ for a ticket, but Boston’s universities rarely charge even a nominal sum. Because of their prestige and wealth, institutions like Harvard and MIT attract distinguished speakers on the national and international lecture circuits and play long term host with innumerable writer, artist, faculty, fellow, or scholar in-residence programs, where public lectures are de rigueur.

The Fluxus Manifesto

The Fluxus Manifesto

Tuesday, Alsion Knowles, one of the more indelible names associated with the Fluxus movement, gave a talk at Radcliffe (see here for more Radcliffe events, she speaks again on Nov. 12th at 6:00 p.m. at Harvard’s Carpenter Center). Fluxus begin in New York in the sixties and was immensely influential on performance and mixed media art. It absorbed a lot of John Cage’s ideas about indeterminacy in performance and was really an exciting and iconoclastic thing in the sixties that cemented the careers and styles of many of the young artists associated with it. Although Knowles had some cool slides to show, Fluxus didn’t seem all too radical Tuesday afternoon in the posh setting Radcliffe Gymnasium provides. Maybe I’m just not that hip, but I’ve found reading about Fluxus more exciting than I found it Tuesday, so here’s something to look at if you’re so inclined.

Julia Robinson, “The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles’s Beans and Variations,” Art Journal (winter 2004): 97-115 (11.5 MB PDF)

Tuesday night the Coolidge showed Victor Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) as part of their Science on Screen series. Another great freebie for Coolidge members. MIT Museum director John Durant gave a great pre-movie talk about how Victorian medicine, and later Freud, informed the novella and the film adaptations. A perspective drawn from the history of science offers a great context for Jekyll and Hyde–the black market dealings in human cadavers that Robert Louis Stevenson grew up among in Edinburgh, Darwin’s idea of the descent of man from beast, and early psychological theories of the two-sided brain manifesting itself with dual personalities. And later, substantially informing this film, Freud’s theory of the Id. Spencer Tracy’s Hyde chief malignity is his (implied) sexual violence towards Ingrid Bergman, his ‘evil’ unchecked masochistic libido. American Beauty screens December 7th, with a talk by Daniel Gilbert on happiness.

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Here are a few upcoming events of note.

John Picker, author of Victorian Soundscapes and an essay on Yankee Doodle and The Star-Spangled Banner in Harvard University Press’ recent tome A New Literary History of America, is delivering something called Transatlantic Acousmatics at MIT. I have no idea, but that only makes it more appealing.
Oct. 22, 5:00-7:00 p.m., MIT Bldg. 4-231

The Norton Lectures by Orhan Pamuk continue through November 3rd.
4:00 p.m., Harvard’s Sanders Theater
Oct. 26, Museum and Novels
Nov. 3, The Center

Shaun Donovan, United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, will speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Oct. 26, 6:00-7:00 p.m., Piper Auditorium

Harvard’s Carpenter Center current exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 has a bunch of associated events.

The new exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center Tobias Putrih & MOS: Without Out opens Oct. 23 and is also accompanied by a number of free talks.

Harvard’s Tanner Lectures by Jonathan Lear:
Lecture 1: Becoming Human Is Not That Easy, Nov. 4, 4:30 p.m., Lowell Lecture Hall
Lecture 2: Ironic Soul, Nov. 5, 4:30 p.m., Lowell Lecture Hall

MIT Communications Forum: Culture Beat and New Media: Arts Journalism in the Internet Era
Nov. 12, 5:00-7:00 p.m., MIT Bldg. 66-110
Boston’s own Bill Marx of Arts Fuse joins Doug McLennan of Arts Journal to discuss the changing face of arts journalism.

For more, keep an eye on The Harvard University Gazette calendar and Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum. And check the links in the appendix section of this site.

It all reminds one of the Golden Age of the public lecture:
lecture-poster

The Revolution Will Be Screened: The Baader Meinhof Complex

Ihave no idea how the international film circuit works, but it’s shame that foreign films don’t screen here a little bit sooner. The Coolidge is currently running the 2008 German action ‘based-on-a-true-story’ political film, The Baader Meinhof Complex, released on DVD in Europe (and on the Web) months ago. Directed by Uli Edel, who did Christiane F., the cautionary tale of drug use featuring David Bowie.  The film follows the founding commando of Germany’s Red Army Faction through their origins, capture, imprisonment, trial, individual deaths, and the collective suicide of those remaining, through a genre-lens of a crime thriller cum rock ‘n’ roll biopic (even the title sounds like something out of a 1970s thriller). Other than a few obvious jabs at current anti-terrorism efforts and montages of recognizable stock footage bearing political cachet (Martin Luther King, Nixon doing that peace sign thing, bombings in Vietnam, the ’72 Olympics, the point-blank assassination of a suspected Vietcong in Saigon), it really isn’t a political movie at all. Its structure is more akin to a rock star biopic: part 1, the origins and rise to fame; part 2, the glamorous zenith of their career; part 3, the tragic decline where things go wrong, people go to jail, band-mates turn on each other, and some end up dead.

In fact, the first two parts of the film revel in rock ‘n’ roll revolution. The opening scene takes place at a nude beach where left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) and her left-wing publisher husband (a bit of a swinger) are vacationing with their children while Janis Joplin croons Mercedes Benz in the background. Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) relaxes topless in a bathtub and invites a comrade in so as to ‘save water,’ all while reading something by Trotsky. They cruise around at high speeds in stolen cars, firing guns out the windows. When the group takes off to Jordan to train at a PFLP camp, they shake things up like college kids on spring break; insisting on coed barracks, notwithstanding Islamic law and the camp commander’s objections. Further shenanigans ensue when our guerrillas’  ammo privileges are revoked after going wild west with machine guns on the firing range. They respond by ‘going on strike,’ i.e. taking up topless sunbathing (to the chagrin of Palestinian soldiers), because, as they say ‘screwing and shooting are the same.’

Back in Germany, the urban guerrillas embark on a campaign of bombings and bank robberies, pursued by homeland security prototype Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz) who resembles, more than anyone else, Melvin Purvis of the Dillinger adaptations. He even comes up with the idea to use a computer to narrow the search (an ancestor of the NSA?) and the guerrilla’s wanted photos are crossed off as they are captured, just as in Dillinger (1973).

The easiest way to criticize this film is to doubt its historical accuracy or call it a shallow account of history, that enhances fact with tits and original music and editing for its action sequences straight out of the Bourne movies. There have been documentaries made and books written about the RAF, so if you’re looking for politics and history, you better look to those. But, then again, the RAF’s politics were rather shallow to begin with and The Baader Meinhof Complex doesn’t take them so seriously either. One of the last lines of the film, spoken after a band of second-generation revolutionaries hear of their idols’ prison suicides and quickly assume some kind of fascist conspiracy is at work, is ‘You never knew them, stop seeing them as they never were.’

As I see it, the movie is an exercise in genre bending and a self-referential exploration into the cultural deification (proliferated by films not unlike itself) of those who were once or considered, by some, villains. It plays off our (often cinematic) fascination with revolutionaries (see Soderbergh’s two-part Che or The Motorcycle Diaries) and that similar fascination we have (on and off screen) with criminals—at least the smart stylized ones. The only one in the film who understands the big picture is Herold, who when asked what motivates Germany’s youth to form new terrorist units, responds ‘a myth.’ What the movie really engages with–using its True Hollywood Story structure (sans the reunion), action movie aesthetic and score (Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind follows Bourne-like music during the credits), and crime thriller references–is the myth of ‘the revolution.’

By the way, the Coolidge is the most worthwhile place to see a movie in town, at least if it’s in one of their two larger theaters. This year they’re offering one of the best membership deals you’ll find in Boston. For $75 you get free admission on Tuesdays, $3 off the rest of the week, and some area discounts and free popcorns thrown in. Special events are usually free or discounted for members as well. I saw a Ray Kurzweil lecture and a fantastic screening of Lawrence of Arabia for free. If the philanthropist in you doesn’t prompt you to join, the bargain-hunter should.