FILM AT REDCAT PRESENTS Mon Nov 22 | 8:30 pm Jack H. Skirball Series $9 [students $7, CalArts $5] Additional screening: Tuesday Nov 23 | 8:30 pm Jack H. Skirball Series $9 [students $7, CalArts $5] Thom Andersen: Out of the Car and into the Music of the Streets These three sad, funny, beautiful works take you through Los Angeles, 2009, and Munich, 1967/1968. Thom Andersen’s new film Get Out of the Car (2010, 34 min., 16mm) responds to his award-winning documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself by recording the city’s most evanescent signs, memorializing some of its vanished monuments and musical history. Get Out of the Car is screened with two 1960s shorts that served as points of inspiration and departure: The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp, (1968, 23 min., 35 mm) by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, with music by Johann Sebastian Bach, dialogue by Saint John of the Cross, and a radical condensation of Ferdinand Bruckner’s three-act play Sickness of Youth; and The Little Chaos (1967, 10 min., 35mm) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a mordant commentary on the sickness of contemporary German youth, with music by the Troggs. Thom Andersen will be present at both screenings. “Andersen’s film frees images from the yoke of instrumentality, revealing the city for what it is and allowing us to see what we otherwise cannot. It is at once theory and practice; not content to www.redcat.org | 1 simply describe the new cinema, it embodies it… It teaches us how to see. ” – Bright Lights Film Journal "Get Out Of The Car… is an elegiac portrait of the back patio of the city: Latin quarters, empty spaces that had been communal spaces, a culture in disappearance, a culture in transformation." – Cahiers du Cinéma España “Over a 45 year career that has combined filmmaking, criticism, and teaching, Thom Andersen has completed a handful of carefully crafted documentaries that demonstrate an exquisite regard for both intellectual and aesthetic rigor. Comprised primarily of found images and video clips, unified by voiceover, Edward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974), Red Hollywood (1995 – co-directed with Noël Burch) and Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) analyze the production of images and their theoretical, social, and political consequences… His latest film, Get Out of the Car (2010), which premiered in Locarno and is being screened in dozens of festivals is a direct response to Los Angeles Plays Itself. But it also returns him to his unself-conscious roots. This is Andersen’s other side, last heard from in the ‘60s with Melting (1964-65, a time lapse shot of an ice cream sundae), the “deliberately unpronounceable: --- ----- (1966-67, with Malcolm Brodwick, a sensory exploration of rock and roll subculture in Los Angeles) and Olivia’s Place (1966/74, a portrait of a Santa Monica coffee shop and its patrons). These short 16mm films reveal an artist with an original take on film as document, who is energized by popular music and an idiosyncratic sense of humor.” – Cinema Scope “Originally the film was going to be much more centered on the images, and the sound was just going to be ambient sounds… I got interested in the responses people had to us when we were filming. And I quite enjoyed the conversations that occurred… And, in the end, I think the soundtrack is probably more important than the images, which is the opposite of the way it began… There’s an impressionistic history of black jazz and rhythm and blues in Los Angeles, which is part of the city’s heritage which should be better known. It has been forgotten to a surprising extent… My conviction about the importance of music to films has intensified over the years. Bad music, bad sound-tracks, have destroyed a lot of movies. The best filmmakers are always the ones with the best musical sense, like Pedro Costa, Jean-Marie [Straub], or even Stan Brackhage… One of the most significant advances in modern cinema was the abandonment of non-diegetic music…” – Thom Andersen, interviewed by Cinema Scope www.redcat.org | 2 “Get Out of the Car [is] a sporadically funny and poignant study of Los Angeles from Thom Andersen, whose disgust for that city is matched only by his transparent love. Working in film, Mr. Andersen tours Los Angeles largely through one of the most despised, contested and quotidian elements clouding our collective field of vision: the billboard. Instead of garish new signs, though, Mr. Andersen reserves his camera and intermittently audible dry wit for weather-beaten, tattered billboard ads in which the original images are absent or hardly recognizable. Like the brightly hued, hand-painted wall murals that also capture his interest here, these derelict billboards fill this film with ephemeral beauty.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp (Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter, AKA Le fiancé, la comédienne et le maquereau, 1968) – with Lilith Ungerer (Lilith), Jimmy Powell (James), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (the pimp), Irm Hermann, Kristin Peterson, Hanna Schygulla. “Machorka-Muff had been a Vampire film; Not Reconciled or Only Violence Serves where Violence Reigns is a mystic film; The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach was a Marxist film. The Bridegroom, the Actress and the Pimp is a film-film, which is not something to be sneezed at. It is also the most aleatory of [our] films and the most political since (1) it is a little like the Final Judgment of Mao or of the Third World on our world; (2) it was born out of the impossible May revolution in Paris – all the final scenes and the music at beginning and end refer to it; and (3) it is based on a news-item (there is nothing more political than a news-item) about the romance between an ex-prostitute and a black man, seen in relation to a text extracted from a play by Ferdinand Bruckner.” – Jean-Marie Straub Jean-Marie Straub (born January 8, 1933) and Danièle Huillet (May 1, 1936 – October 9, 2006) made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006, including Machorka-Muff (1963), Not Reconciled or Only Violence Serves where Violence Reigns (1965), Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), Moses und Aron (1975), Fortini/Cani (1976), Trop tôt, trop tard (1982), Class Relations (1984), Der Tod des Empedokles (1987), Antigone (1992), Lothringen! (1994), Sicilia! (1999) and Operai, contadini (2001). Their unique collaboration is documented in Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001), shot during the editing of Sicilia! www.redcat.org | 3 The Little Chaos (Das Kleine Chaos, 1967) A playful take on the American gangster film and the film noir – also showing Godard’s influence on the young Fassbinder. Theo (Christoph Roser), Marite (Marite Greiselis), and Franz (Fassbinder) cannot make any money selling magazines door to door – not even from a Frau Eder (played by Fassbinder's mother). Franz grouses, "I'd like to see a gangster movie that ends well for once." The three friends use their knowledge of American crime movies to rob, and in Franz's case to humiliate, a woman. Among other things, he asks her point blank, "Do you love the Führer?..." The Little Chaos (shown in DVD in tonight’s program) was the third short directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (May 31, 1945 – June 10, 1982) – the first one, The Night (1965), being considered lost – before realizing the two films that first attracted attention to him, Love is Colder than Death and Katzelmacher in 1969. The best-known representative of the New German Cinema, in the course of his too- brief career, he directed 40 feature length films – including The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Effie Briest (1974), Fox and His Friends (1975), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lili Marleen (1981) and Querelle (1982); a remarkable episode in the collective film Germany in Autumn (1978); television films and film series, such as the mammoth Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980); four video productions; twenty-four stage plays and four radio plays; he also played thirty roles in his own and others’ films, including that of the pimp in the Straub/Huillet short. ### www.redcat.org | 4 .