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©1959 MARGOT BENACERRAF AND 2009 MILESTONE FILM & VIDEO
NEWS OF ATHENS' CINEMA SCENE
A Voice of Nonconformity: At the center of
the latest trifecta of film industry deaths
a few weeks ago—between those of Quentin
Tarantino's editor Sally Menke, who died while
hiking in L.A.'s Griffith Park on an afternoon
when the temperature reached 113 degrees,
and the 85-year-old Tony Curtis, whom I'll
always remember most vividly as the des
perately hustling press agent Sidney Falco
in Sweet Smell of Success—was the passing
of one of the founding figures of the New
American Cinema: Arthur Penn. The director
was best known for his culture-shifting 1967
masterpiece Bonnie and Clyde, but Penn had
been engaged for years before that in an artis
tic dialogue with the European art cinema—
particularly the upstarts of the French New
Wave who would exert such a profound influ
ence on the rising generation of mavericks in
Hollywood.
A key component of that conversation is
Penn's fascinating Mickey One, which has
recently peeked out from obscurity courtesy
of—surprise—Turner Classic Movies, which
aired it in early August and will again at
11:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 25 (Athens film
junkies last had an opportunity to see it a
couple of years ago when it was screened
in Todd Kelly and Jeff Owens' invaluable,
much-missed Strayhorn Film Series at Flicker).
Having admired Penn's 1959 feature debut
The Left-Handed Gun, Jean-Luc Godard and
Francois Truffaut both visited Penn on the
Chicago set of Mickey One at a time when both
French directors were separately consider
ing signing on to direct Bonnie and Clyde—a
lengthy flirtation whose plentiful fits and
starts are described in intimate detail in Mark
Harris' essential 2008 book Pictures at a
Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the
New Hollywood.
Mickey One, which first paired Penn with
Warren Beatty, the future Clyde Barrow, is a
compelling oddity: a difficult, uncompromis
ing art film produced by a major American
studio (Columbia). Its story of a doomed man
who is almost redeemed by the love of an
equally lost woman could have come straight
from the fiction of David Goodis, who wrote
the novel on which Truffaut's 1959 Shoot the
Piano Player, an obvious touchstone, was
based. An impressionistic montage of the hor
rors of an auto salvage yard and a surreal plot
thread involving a mute tramp who climacti-
cally unveils an elaborate kinetic sculpture on
Chicago's downtown riverfront are thrillingly
out of place in a Hollywood film, and Penn's
grainy, urban location shooting and reliance
on unknown and non-professional actors
owe as much to Neorealism as the New Wave.
Bonnie and Clyde, along with major later works
in Penn's unfortunately sparse career like Little
Big Man and Night Moves, are the statements
by which most of us have become acquainted
with his voice, but Mickey One is more than
worth seeking out as an informative glimpse
at a cinema on the verge of transformation.
V Mirar Muchas Peliculas: Cine and UGA will
present the first edition of Dias de cine:
Latin American Film Festival from Friday,
Oct. 22 to Sunday, Oct. 24. The festival
includes five feature films from five Latin
American countries, each with its own guest
speaker, plus an opening night event with live
music and catered food from Cali-N-Titos. The
lineup looks terrific;
check out www.athen-
scine.com for the full
schedule... Returning
to Cine that same week
end is Gonzoriffic, the
insanely prolific local
collective of horror and
schlock filmmakers, with
an all-new program of
films. The Gonzoriffic
Underground Horror
Show screens at 10
and midnight Friday
and again at midnight
Saturday. Check Cine's
website or www.gon-
zoriffic.com for more
details.
Expansive, Not
Expensive: The Next to
Last Festival, a colos
sal local undertaking that will put about 50
bands and artists in front of Athens audiences
starting Oct. 27, warms up this weekend with
a lineup of films that's nearly as ample and
eclectic as the musical roster—and it's free,
to boot. Friday, Oct. 22 to Sunday, Oct. 24 at
Ben's Bikes, Next to Last Films will present
20 features and numerous trailers and shorts,
as well as a multi-media performance between
films on Friday. I'm pretty sure this is the
only place in town you'll see Disney's Escape
to Witch Mountain followed by Jodorowsky's
Holy Mountain, so don't be a sucker: check
out the full schedule at www.nexttolastfest.
com and get on down there.
Land of the Free: The ACC Library's iFilms
series, in honor of Halloween, has temporar
ily re-christened itself "EYE-Films" and is
focusing (get it?) on foriegn and indepen
dent horror for the rest of the month. The
Oct. 21 offering is Them—the 2006 French
thriller, not the one with the giant ants—
and Oct. 28 is Cold Prey, a very amped-up
2006 slasher flick from Norway. Screenings
are at 7 p.m. Thursdays in the library audito
rium, 2025 Baxter St.... ICE-Vision screen
ings at the Lamar Dodd School of Art: Eric
Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach Oct. 21 and
The Seventh Victim, a 1943 chiller directed
by Mark Robson and produced by Val Lewton.
Screenings are Thursdays at 8 p.m. in Room
SI50 of the art school— find 'em on Facebook
to learn more!
Dave Marr film@flagpole.com
Araya will screen at Cine as part of the Latin American Film Festival.
THE
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on MAKING AN EXIT
PEOPLE SHOULD
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are to see YOU GO.
OCTOBER 20,2010 FlAGPOLE.COM 19