I’m always excited to peruse the month’s cinema schedule, but this month I’m particularly excited. Looking at the schedule, you might wonder why—after the first week of April, no sleeper blockbuster like Quartet, no big-budget digital showcase like Life of Pi, no Oscar-winning documentary like Searching for Sugarman. But that’s exactly why I’m itching to get in the popcorn line. Instead of stuff (even great stuff) that you might catch in the cineplex—Though why would you when you could support your local indie cinema?—for the rest of the month the programming is full of those wonderful gems whose shine usually gets drowned out by the media glare that’s trained on the latest blockbusters.
The
thing that indie bookstores and cinemas do that chains and cineplexes don’t is
to introduce you to the book or movie you didn’t know you’d love, and this
month is full of potential cinematic trysts, from Leviathan, a cutting-edge
documentary that chronicles the blood and rough beauty of life inside an
industrial fishing trawler, to The Gatekeepers, which gives a
previously-unreachable perspective on Middle East politics from inside one of
the most efficient and secretive security organizations in the world, Israel’s
Shin Bet. Or, on the fiction side, we range from the Godfather, the classic
American immigrant film that is both startlingly violent and unexpectedly
moving, to No, a Chilean film about an
advertiser who helped a crowd of overly-earnest leftists use marketing to fight
a dictator.
But
there are two films I’m especially excited about. The first is the Essential
Cinema screening of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, a film that is achingly
beautiful and romantic—and by romantic, I’m referring to the deeper sense of
that word, in which love is a bold leap (or, in this case, fall) whose joy is
intensified and purified by the acceptance of its inescapable transience. It’s
no accident that in order to fall in love, the angel Damiel also has to fall
into time, or that this blooming relationship between celestial being and sublunary
trapeze artist is set in the bleak, wall-scarred landscape of cold-war Berlin,
“the front line of the last gasp,” as Bruce Cockburn put it. The result is a
visual and verbal poem that seduces the eye and stirs the heart. People who love cinema usually fall hard for it.
The
second film this week that I’m eagerly anticipating (which, now that I think
about it, also focuses on time), is 56 Up, director Michael Apted’s latest
installment in what is commonly acknowledged to be one of the greatest
documentary projects ever undertaken. In 1964, Apted was a researcher for a British
documentary film called Seven Up! which followed twenty seven-year-olds from a
broad spectrum of social classes and situations. Since then, he has checked in
with fourteen of the children every seven years and made a series of
documentaries based on where they are at in their lives, following them through
education and work, achieved ambitions and lost dreams, long-lasting marriages
and personal disasters. Those children are now 56, and watching their lives
unfold over the course of the eight films and fifty years suggests so much not
only about the individual paths of the participants, but about life itself and
what determines how we negotiate it. The Up films provide endless fodder for
conversation about people, eras, and ideas. If you’re hopping in at this point
in the series, no worries; Apted gives introductions to each of the people in
his films as he goes, and you can always catch up either before or after the
film by renting the films from your friendly independent video store or
browsing about on the web.
- Bruce
Wings of Desire: Tuesday 8:30, Wednesday 6:30
56 Up: Thursday 6:30, Saturday & Sunday 1:30
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