This photo, by The Isthmus’ film critic Kenneth Burns, is from last night’s WIFF opening night screening of The Art of the Steal.  This is festival director/superhero Meg Hamel.  I’m at the upper left of the photo, with my wife Anne leaning in.  The full article is here and captures the WIFF atmosphere pretty well.

Tonight: another documentary!  Tomorrow – probably another documentary I think!  For some reason I ended up with a doc-heavy schedule this year.  You always end up with a schedule different from what you intended, but somehow, at the end, you’re more than pleased.

The Wisconsin Film Festival launched one day earlier this year, in festival director Meg Hamel’s tentative steps in expanding the scope of WIFF to five days rather than the typical four.  This is the twelfth year of the festival and it’s been growing in popularity each year; I moved to Madison from Salt Lake City, so it’s nice to have exchanged one film festival (Park City’s Sundance) for another that, who knows, one day might be just as big (we did get the world’s second Sundance Cinema, so at least Robert Redford has faith in us).  At WIFF I’ve watched Roger Ebert introduce A Hard Day’s Night and Laura; I’ve seen giant spiders crush Buicks beside fellow Wisconsinite and B-movie auteur Bill Rebane; I’ve solved Timecrimes and watched Sita sing the blues.  This year brings the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis to the festival (introducing Michael Mann’s Collateral); an extensive Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Mother) retrospective; the U.K.’s much-praised Red Riding Trilogy; a Wisconsin film starring Tony Shalhoub and another directed by The Straight Story’s screenwriter Mary Sweeney; and more – but my list was compromised from the start.  Of course everything you really want to see if playing only once and at the exact same time.  That’s how it always works.  You make the sacrifices, you take some risks, you end up seeing a lot of films with a number of extremely enthusiastic local film buffs.  It’s become one of the major events I look forward to every year.  And this year, on WIFF’s “bonus day” (as Meg called it in her introduction), I began my cluttered program with one of the most controversial documentaries of the last year.  (I’d wanted to start with Historias Extraordinarias, the 4-hour-long Argentinian film, but…not on a Wednesday night, and not at the campus’ Play Circle Theater.  Just couldn’t do it.)

The Art of the Steal (U.S., 2009)
D: Don Argott

There was a small uproar when Don Argott’s The Art of the Steal opened a few months back in select cities, particularly from certain persons in Philadelphia portrayed in a very negative light.  That’s because the documentary is an exposé of the underhanded, and quite possibly illegal, methods applied to uproot and violate one of the most distinguished art collections in the world: the Barnes Foundation, an art school and museum, featuring an astonishing array of key works of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Modern Art as collected by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in the first half of the twentieth century.  Barnes fought to keep his collection intact and as he had arranged it: and as the film shows us, the arrangements did not just display exquisite taste, but were astonishing, clustering together disparate works into an unexpected harmony.  He also insisted upon the Foundation operating primarily as a school, closed to the public for most (but not all) days of the week.  Located in Merion, PA, about four miles from Philadelphia, Dr. Barnes’ collection was misunderstood at first - but soon his purchased works by Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso and others would become invaluable as the art world caught up with him; it would be the source of envy of Philadelphia’s art museum and bitter scorn from Barnes’ political enemies.  And the film is never better than in its first half, as it illustrates the battles Dr. Barnes fought to keep his collection intact – he drew up a will which seemed flawless in its foresight and rigidity.  The museum would not be moved, the collection would remain together, the paintings would not leave the walls, and the primary function of the Barnes Foundation would be as a school.  How this will was slowly undermined and then completely undone is the subject of the second half of the film.  In recent years, the Barnes Foundation has fallen back under the sway of Philadelphia, and key players, including Governor Ed Rendell, found a way to undermine the Foundation’s core principles so that it could be appropriated to become, as one interview subject puts it, a “McBarnes.”  The politics so carefully dissected in this half of the film are fascinating to a point – it’s like a how-to guide for using power, influence, and money to get what you want no matter what the obstacle - but ultimately are either maddening or just dispiriting.  That’s the point, naturally.  The Art of the Steal is an Argument Film, a polemic that’s been the fashion of the documentary for the last ten years or so, with a score that pushes all your buttons, sometimes with head-smacking obviousness (keep an ear out for the electric guitar anytime someone’s up to no good); it’s a film about great art that can be accused of being quite inartful.  Much of the last portion of the film is spent hanging out with protesters wielding angry wooden signs.  This film can sometimes be just another one of those screaming signs.  But on the other hand, I can’t help but admire the cause behind the transparent manipulation; this is an Argument Film making a very strong case for something which is actually quite subtle, or - well, not easily comprehended by moneymen and power brokers.  Art resists commodification.  What Dr. Barnes did with his Foundation was to create, essentially, a new work of art, one that could only be appreciated the way he intended it, in the building that had been constructed by his design, with his original displays, in Merion, PA.  It was a school because in the presence of the art you were to be the student.  This is why Matisse called the Barnes Foundation the only “sane” way to appreciate art in America.  The artist’s stamp is important, because he recognized the institute as a work of art in itself.  You cannot, for example, pack up Taliesin or Fallingwater and relocate it inside the walls of a museum – that would betray the essence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s intentions.  The “new” Barnes building being constructed, currently, in downtown Philadelphia, is glimpsed only by its outdoor “under construction” facade, with paintings of representative artwork slapped on in pale representation - paintings of paintings, essentially.  And there, as the final irony: a painting of a portrait of Dr. Barnes.  They needn’t have gained his approval – he’s dead, after all.  They only needed to steal his image for their own wallpaper.

The 2010 Wisconsin Film Festival begins this week Wednesday, running through Sunday at various venues across Madison, Wisconsin.  My annual tradition is to blog the festival, and I’ll be doing so again right here.  Here’s my lineup:

Wednesday:
The Art of the Steal

Thursday:
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg & the Pentagon Papers

Friday:
The Thorn in the Heart (the new Michel Gondry film)
The Exploding Girl
The Bug & the Fox [The Tale of the Fox/The Bug Trainer]
It Came from Kuchar

Saturday:
Waking Sleeping Beauty
A Town Called Panic
Shameless
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Sunday:
The Magic Sword (with Bert I. Gordon in attendance!)
Paddle to Seattle: Journey Through the Inside Passage
Terribly Happy
Mother

Joseph Losey’s These are the Damned (aka The Damned) is one of the better thrillers to ever be released by Hammer Studios, although, apart from the presence of studio mainstay Oliver Reed, it hardly seems to fit into their repertoire. Yet they can claim it proudly – there, it says “shot in Hammerscope” in bright white type – and now that it’s finally been released on DVD, in Sony/Columbia’s new set Icons of Suspense: Hammer Films, it can at last reclaim its title as one of the studio’s most unique and striking efforts. Losey is something of a cult director, having made The Boy with Green Hair (now available from the Warner Archives) some years earlier; but These Are the Damned shows Losey at the height of his talents.

The film begins most impressively, with crisp black-and-white photography and elegant widescreen compositions that recall the work of Fellini; no surprise, then, that the main character’s boat is called Dolce Vita.  Set on the rocky English coastline, the film meanders its way, almost reluctantly, toward a plot.  We follow the middle-aged American Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey), who picks up the bait when a pretty young woman named Joan (Shirley Anne Field) casually flirts with him; she leads him straight into a brutal mugging led by her brother King (Reed).  But Joan is intrigued by Simon, and seeks him out again, this time with no apparent motive but curiosity.  Simon, wary at first, escapes with her on his boat with King and his gang of leather-clad teddy-boys in pursuit.  Awkwardly he tries to seduce her, but it becomes clear that Joan is a virgin, any previous contacts with males sabotaged by her jealous brother, who’s psychotically afraid of his sister becoming “dirty.”  (Whether or not this jealousy is caused by sublimated incestuous longings if left for the viewer to determine.)  To hide from King, Simon and Joan decide to break into the home of a resident sculptor (Viveca Lindfors) and lay low, but when the gang arrives with switchblades and motorcycles, the couple flees over barbed wire into a top-secret installation built upon an abandoned quarry.  And here, almost halfway through the film’s running time, we arrive at the real story, for which we’ve only received fleeting hints hitherto: there is something sinister going on underground, at the center of which are the nine children who welcome Simon, Joan, and eventually the unpredictable King into their home.  The kids seem to be living alone, isolated from the outside world.  They have assembled strange shrines to their absent parents in a hideout in a cave.  They seem to know nothing of the outside world.  They can open electronically-sealed doors with a wave of the palm.  And they are utterly cold to the touch.

So what at first seems to be a docudrama about teenage gangs in early-60’s England shifts gradually into a science-fiction cautionary tale for the Cold War, and a shockingly cynical one at that.  The film is eerie and almost muted throughout, the dialogue delivered tentatively or in short bursts, the soundtrack silent apart from the occasional snatches of a rock and roll song which the bikers sing and whistle, reducing it to just a few bars, as the tune comes to sound increasingly unsettling.  The film has the atmosphere of a seaside ghost town.  What makes These Are the Damned so effective is that both distinct halves are solid, although in oddly different ways.  The opening shows off Losey’s skill at doing much with very, very little: it is rarely as compelling as these opening scenes, as the camera hangs back and pans left and right across streets – tracking footchases - and waterways, as Simon speeds away in his boat with the gang leaping into the water or mounting motorcycles to pursue by land.  A bridging section, ostensibly building up the romance between the leads, seems deliberately undercut by the threatening atmosphere, which makes one wonder if the film is headed into Roman Polanski/Cul-de-Sac territory.  Then we slowly realize that the film is transitioning into its second half, which has a slightly different flavor, and steps into genre territory.  The change is less awkward than it might have been because the mystery is so intriguing: we know that something is going on in that quarry and we want to decipher just what it is.  Indeed, there is little reason for the first half of this story to be scotch-taped to the second, except, perhaps, to ratchet up the tension when King is thrust into the mix, now that we know what he’s capable of. 

Critics in 1963 might have seen the story’s structure as a flaw, dismissed the film as a curiosity, but almost fifty years later it sets These Are the Damned stunningly apart from the other films Hammer was making during this period, be they monster movies, pirate films, or Jimmy Sangster-scripted Diabolique homages.  It now can be seen for what it is: a complete original, a brilliant Cold War parable, and much more hauntingly effective than Hammer’s standard output.  (I should warn you that this is one of the most outrageously downbeat endings you’ll ever see.)  Restored and uncut on the new DVD, the film can now take its place as a classic of 60’s British cinema.

Glenn McQuaid’s homage-driven I Sell the Dead is a film of small but welcome pleasures – for those who get the homages, at least. In this day and age, the Age of the Geek, that’s not such an obstacle. The film begins in the 19th century with the execution by guillotine of notorious gravedigger (and accused murderer) Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden). Meanwhile, his partner Arthur Blake (The Lord of the Rings’ Merry, Dominic Monaghan) awaits his own execution, and bides his time by entertaining an Irish priest (genre staple Ron Perlman) with stories of his adventures with Grimes. Essentially it’s an anthology film in the style of the Amicus pictures of the 60’s and 70’s (Vault of Horror, The House That Dripped Blood, etc.), except that the individual tales are woven more tightly together and into the semblance of a narrative, thanks to the persistent presence of Blake and Grimes, the comical pair stumbling from one paranormal, macabre, or grisly episode to the next. These episodes build into a climactic tale, a confrontation with bandits and zombies on an island beach, which has a Robert Louis Stevenson flavor, and further unfolds into the framing device in a way that would have pleased Scheherazade. Truly, the screenplay is a major element to the film’s success. The dialogue is sharp and feels authentic – which is more important than being authentic. It never goes for an easy glibness which you see in post-Joss Whedon genre comedies. (Not to knock Whedon, whose work I generally like.) It’s nice to see this kind of commitment to the flavor of the period, as well as to the flavor of an older horror mode. That does much to overcome the obvious weakness of the film, which is its budget: it is impossible to not be conscious that the film is compensating for its limited means with some moments that feel too assembled-in-a-computer (such as the many CG-enhanced montages). Personally, I’d rather see those moments go; I am perfectly content watching Larry Fessenden and Dominic Monaghan on a tiny set whose borders are clouded by a fog machine, bickering over a corpse that won’t stay dead. I’d like more of these two – apparently McQuaid made a comic book to accompany the film, and I’ll try to seek it out. But the gleefully macabre finale seems a suitable enough ending for this tale, summoning an image I won’t spoil for you, but which promises more adventures – more twisted than ever – improbably spiraling on ahead for Blake & Grimes.