Sunday Night Film Forum: First Year

Jersey City Film Forum – actually the official name may be Sunday Night Film Forum – passed its one year milestone yesterday. I first posted about the Film Forum when it was still new here. It’s held at the Jersey City Art School on Fifth Street. I’ve been going every week and that’s probably why one sees a frequency of blogs related to this neat art school/club house.

The program is run by filmmaker and bartender Yvonne Varima. She is the curator. She selects the films, after the screening a discussion is held. It’s great fun. I went to the second screening of the program, which was this Finnish New Wave film, Asphalt Lambs. Virgin Spring, the Bergman film was originally scheduled but as it happens sometimes here that had to be rescheduled to a Netflicks snafu and this one was watched instead. No one there, including myself, knew anything about this film. We were all in the same boat. A unique and enlightening experience and the discussion that followed, as it often does, echoed a shared sense of discovery and discovery is a bedrock component of film appreciation.

An astute mind when it comes to film, as well as an MFA, Yvonne also has a true gift for leading a discussion. She encourages a semi-informal, fly by the seat of your pants conversation. The Film Forum is a fun way to see movies that otherwise you might never have encountered and the discussion that follows deepens your understanding and is actually as fun as, and sometimes more fun than, the movie screened.

Besides the weekly film and discussion, as this program progressed through 2010 into 2011, some special evenings were held. For a screening of an early Chaplin, an authentic silent film projector was used, a series of Horror films were shown in October (like The Shining), an “artist” night featured a screening of Exit Through the Gift Shop and many of the local artists and one or two artisans came to weigh in on Banksy. The film was okay, the discussion truly remarkable.

In March, two films about prostitution were shown on consecutive Sundays. One was the Girl Friend Experience, which I hadn’t seen. Although flawed, I admired its ambition. Yvonne and most of the others present liked it more than I did. Yvonne explained what she liked about the film. I liked her analysis more than I liked the film. You don’t have to like a film to learn from it, to get something out of it, or to have it become another way of affirming cinema.

The year one anniversary film was Into Eternity (2010), about an underground nuclear waste dump in Finland called Onkalo (Finnish for 'hiding place'). Ironically, another Finish film, although the director was Danish. A nice book-end for me.

I brought a bottle of champagne for the celebration, which was drank but no toasts were made. Who has time for such side-notes or niceties? Flamboyance works on screen, not in Jersey City.

After we applauded the one year milestone, Yvonne, with her usual mix of background info on the film and director and thought provoking opinions, began the evening’s discussion. The inaugural year is over. The program is gaining momentum, new faces appear almost every week and a few like me, have become loyal attendees.

Here are 10 memorable film evenings from the 1st year of the Jersey City (or Sunday Night) Film Forum.

Waltz with Bashir Publicity upon its release made me think this movie was a goofy stunt. I was very wrong. A compelling documentary that is much as about the working of memory as it is about Israel’s military involvement with Lebanon. Awesome Film.

Anti-Christ. Part of the October horror series. Still not sure if I actually liked it, but I can’t forget it. One of the most original films I’ve ever seen.

Virgin Spring. Not only a superb Bergman, but I’ll never forgot this Film Forum Experience, the second screening I attended. Everyone else – and it was a good crowd that night – there had never seen a Bergman before. Witnessing their initiation into Bergman-land was heretofore undiscovered method of appreciating the master.

The Searchers. How can you discover new meanings in a familiar work? Change the context of how you see the work. One of the greatest films ever made and one of my favorite movies. I had only seen this on television sets, and except for one viewing with Nancy who could not abide John Wayne, I’ve seen it alone. In the context of the Film Forum – a bigger screen, an astute crowd, no remote on which to press pause – I watched it anew after all these years.

Mean Streets. I like more than love Scorsese and I always thought this film was more miss than hit. This was my second or maybe third viewing. My previous opinion is ignorant. This is a neo-noir masterpiece, one of the best of the genre. I’ve been playing Mickey’s Monkey on a regular basis since this was screened on Fifth Street.

Maya Deren. The evening of her films – massively influential, highly experimental, yet damn entertaining – was unforgettable. She was totally new to me. I didn’t know what to expect so of course I expected tedium. Surrealistic and psychological, this mid-20th century film maker was a dancer by trade and training. Her short films revolutionized both dance and film. I can see why. Great discussion followed each film. What a fun night!

Vivre sa vie I have seen several Goddards. I hold a contrarian view. I never liked his films much, certainly compared to Truffaut, whose work I love. I was apprehensive about seeing a Goddard film. He can be so damn pretentious. This film, which was the other half of the Prostitution Sunday series, is the best movie I’ve seen in months. The climax of this film is a discussion about the history of philosophy in a café. You do not get more French than that. I am ready to revise my thinking on his other films as well. Alert Le Monde!

Wings of Desire. How did I miss this masterpiece? This film is as close as cinema gets to poetry. It wasn’t just poetic, it was exactly like reading Elliot or Whitman. Two devotees of this film attended and offered many useful insights.

In The Mood for Love, Directed by Kar Wai Wong, a contemporary Chinese film, is a gnarly, moving love story. Also original – love between cuckolds. A man and woman whose spouses are having an affair become friends, they fall in love but they can’t consummate their love because that would make them as bad as their cheating spouses. The sadness of romance, outside of a few songs by Howlin Wolf or Bob Dylan, is rarely this uplifting.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a 1970 film from the so-called Czechoslovak New Wave. It seemed to be a film filled with Eastern European folk-lore, lots of magic and surreal happenings. It seemed to the be the story of a princess beset by problems, evil step mothers and neglectful parents and the like, in a very trippy world of sorcery. Lysergic tinged filmmaking meets Czechoslovak myth. A cool film. Then a few days it dawns on me – this film took place entirely in the head of the adolescent girl. This film was about what it is like to be an immature girl taking her first steps into maturity. I wonder if the setting, which seemed to be in the Middle Ages, was also in her mind. I wanted to have an emergency meeting of the Film Forum to discuss this new epiphany but alas, it’s only on Sundays and so far, there have been no repeat screenings.