|
Viva Viva! And viva Varda — courting Hollywood with a Lions Love By Dennis Harvey> a&eletters@sfbg.com In the late '60s, the Hollywood studios freaked out. They'd spent decades making artless movies for everybody; when that no longer seemed to work, in desperation they let young filmmakers make art movies for themselves. A very few (notably, Easy Rider) hit the zeitgeist bull's-eye. Many others were trees whose forest falls were heard by no one. Dismissed then as pure self-indulgence, they've remained too avant for cable and video to revive. As a result, an era of sorts — roughly 1968 to 1973 — remains dominated by obscurities that fascinate because no one before or since thought to generously finance so much idealistic, alienated, and personal art. The undisputed king of movies-made-by-and-for-moi was Andy Warhol, even if he quit that medium after Valerie Solanas's gun opened holes in his pasty flesh. The Factory's parodic alterna-Hollywood created static, camp epics so indifferent to most niceties of entertainment that their very insularity became a badge of ultimate cool. Even if Warhol's seemingly unironic dream of actually succeeding within Hollywood never left the theoretical zone, his influence made itself felt. Perhaps the most blatant evidence is Agnès Varda's 1969 Lions Love, playing this weekend as part of the SF Cinematheque and SF Camerawork's "Fame as Form" series. This 1969 mirror-gaze transports underground celebrities from both sides of the Atlantic to sunny SoCal, luxuriating in their incongruity. It was fashionable at the time to import European directors, set them to examine American culture — albeit mostly within LA County limits — then cluck over how they got it wrong. Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and Jacques Demy's Model Shop were primary examples. Varda (now Demy's widow) started out as a dancer and photo-journalist, her films first anticipating the nouvelle vague, then joining it. Lions Love, by contrast, seems as deliberately op-art frivolous as a paper dress. Fabulously vacant antisexpot Viva (arguably the first "nonanonymous" performer to fuck onscreen, in Warhol's directorial effort from the same year, Blue Movie) plays herself, cohabiting in "the eternal, traditional triangle" with the cute, possibly polysexual creators of Broadway's Hair, James Rado and Jerry Ragni. They play dress-up, get naked, improvise badinage, and watch beaucoup TV in their rented LA home-with-pool, vaguely planning to become movie stars — or something. But the collective cry "We're what's happening, baby!" is a rare, energetic moment in a ménage otherwise dominated by professional and private torpor. "I hate every form of entertainment, including living," Rado opines. This druggy, pink cloud is momentarily pierced by the arrival of Shirley Clarke, NYC auteur (The Connection, Portrait of Jason) of gritty quasi-vérité fame, who — as she had in real-life — meets with producers only to find that Hollywood's supposed desire for art stops short of surrendering final cut. With Lions Love, Varda duly tips her hat to Warhol (and has the characters react to news of his shooting), but her filmmaking is far more playful, alive with visual, editorial, and musical jokes. This prank-cum-party-as-movie actually has a shape, even when guests like Eddie Constantine, Peter Bogdanovich, and Jim Morrison (the last two just glimpsed) do walk-ons, or when San Francisco poet-playwright Michael McClure's The Beard is excerpted twice. The sole questionable aspect is an unconvincing, late seizure of sincere shock over Bobby Kennedy's assassination. "Ohhh, I can't stand it! Everyone's dying!" Viva says, much as one might lament broken air-conditioning on a humid day. These people aren't lions — they're preening Persian cats, laying dazed and sullen in the Cali sun. Lions Love is a movie about the making of a movie these exotics could hardly rouse themselves to make if someone weren't paying. Trapped in such company, no wonder pragmatic Clarke grumbles, "I feel like a nut." * LIONS LOVE Sun/26, 7:30 p.m. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room 701 Mission, SF $5–$8 415 978-2787 www.ybca.org www.sfcinematheque.org
|
||||