Meet Marlon Brando (Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, 1965) |
Film Love
at the High, part 4:
Fall-Apart Things
Films about refusing to play along
Tuesday, April 16, 2019 | 7:00 pm
Hill Auditorium, High Museum of Art
$14.50 admission | free for High Members
The Film Love series continues its five-program retrospective at the High
Museum of Art on April 16, 2019, with a rare screening of the documentary
Meet Marlon Brando along with other selected "trickster" films curated by
series founder Andy Ditzler.
Interview, audition, advertisements,
publicity: all of these art and media rituals have their established procedures
to ensure that things run smoothly. But the films in this show are of creative
acts by people who in one way or another refuse to play along.
These are
not calculated outrages by politicians and pundits, or the familiar public
meltdowns of celebrities who happen to be promoting projects, or the
machinations of self-styled "disrupters." Nor are they simply actions that
subvert norms. Faced with mundane situations intolerable to their own sense of
integrity, the figures in this exhibition resort to becoming trickster
characters, upending business as usual, often at personal cost. They offer a
subversive counter-performance and in so doing they expose underlying
structures, teach a deeper lesson and inconvenience everyone.
Included
is Charlie Chaplin’s first public appearance in his Tramp guise, in which he and
crew crash a racecar event to film his brand new character in front of an
unwitting audience. In the hilarious I, An Actress – one of the best
films ever made about performance – director George Kuchar cannot stop himself
from interjecting his own overheated line readings into what is supposed to be
his student’s audition. Peter Kubelka’s short film Schwechater, now
admired as an influential avant-garde film, was a disaster for its original
purpose as a beer commercial. Musician Sly Stone charmingly demolishes Dick
Cavett’s attempt at a normal talk show, offering instead a subtle commentary on
race, fame and media.
A cache of strangely decontextualized Yul Brynner
publicity interviews from the 1960s leads to the show’s centerpiece: Meet
Marlon Brando, the 1965 documentary by Direct Cinema pioneers Albert and
David Maysles (of Grey Gardens fame). Obliged to attend a press
reception for his latest film – which he doesn’t seem to like very much – Brando
commandeers the event to undermine his Hollywood product and the press machine
assembled to publicize it. Nevertheless Brando is at the height of his charm and
charisma, and ironically his relentless attempt to escape being a movie star
results in a film that is both a classic documentary and an indelible screen
performance.
Kid Auto Races at Venice (Henry Lehrman,
1914, 7 min)
I, An Actress (George Kuchar, 1977, 8 min)
Schwechater (Peter Kubelka, 1958, 1 min)
Sly Stone
on the Dick Cavett Show (1970, 15 min)
Yul Brynner
Interviews Trevor Howard, Rita Hayworth, Sylvia Sorrente and Angie Dickinson
(excerpts) (1965) courtesy the Austrian Film Museum
Meet Marlon Brando (Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte
Zwerin, 1965, 29 min)
High Museum of Art
1280
Peachtree St NE
Atlanta, Georgia 30309
www.high.org
Film Love at the High: Fall-Apart Things is a Film Love event. The
Film Love series provides access to great but rarely-screened films, especially
important works unavailable on consumer video. Through public screenings and
events, Film Love preserves the communal viewing experience, provides space for
the discussion of film as art, explores diverse forms of projection and viewing,
and illuminates connections between the moving image and other art forms. Film
Love is curated by Andy Ditzler.