Film from real life

By Kevin Thomas

Sept. 11, 2003 12 AM PT

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Times Staff Writer

The Silver Lake Film Festival, which runs through Sept. 18 at various venues with an array of challenging fare, seems exceptionally strong in documentaries this year. A case in point is James Dowell and John Kolomvakis’ “Sleep in a Nest of Flames” (Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, Sunday at 10 p.m.), an affectionate and comprehensive portrait of Charles Henri Ford, who died in 1997 at 94, having lived his long life exceptionally well.

A poet and photographer, Ford was an influential figure in the arts for close to seven decades. Trim, dapper and handsome all his life, Ford had a gift for associating himself with the great figures of his time. In 1931, he wrote “The Young and Evil” with fellow Southerner Parker Tyler, cited as the first unapologetic gay novel; launched View, a key literary journal of the ‘30s; became the longtime lover of artist Pavel Tchelitchew, whose work he astutely promoted; collaborated with Paul Bowles and many others; gave voice to the World War II emigre Surrealists with another journal; and introduced Andy Warhol to filmmaking.

Ford seemed to know everybody who was anybody; as his friend William Burroughs remarks with affection: “Charles always had a small piece of something big.” A superb film, filled with witty glimpses of the illustrious, many no longer with us.

Images dominate

“The Cedar Bar” takes its title from a venerable tavern near Washington Square Park, a hangout for postwar-era Abstract Expressionists and the scene of prolonged debate, imagined by artist-filmmaker Alfred Leslie, between them and hostile-but-powerful art critic Clement Greenberg.

Leslie, who made the classic Beat movie “Pull My Daisy” (1959) with Robert Frank, videotaped a staged reading of his play of the same name, found it boring and overlaid it with a collage of images culled from found footage. Leslie ranged far and wide, from Holocaust newsreels to pornographic films, but drew mainly on old movies, some classic but mostly forgotten kitsch. “The Cedar Bar” is sometimes wearying but makes its point about how the power of the image, even the silliest and most contrived, invariably overwhelms the word.

Inclusive feeling

“Ballroom,” by Patrick Mario Bernard, Xavier Brillat and Pierre Trividic, is an eerie, beautiful fable, at once intellectual, psychological, romantic, political and supernatural.

A pair of middle-aged lovers, Rene Bernard (Patrick Mario Bernard), an avant-garde artist, and Patrick Kerisit (Pierre Trividic), a screenwriter, live in Patrick’s old seaside family home. A public ballroom on its first floor now serves as Rene’s studio.

As Rene hears TV newscasts chronicling the plight of refugees and illegal aliens, Patrick ponders a conversation he had with a Danish scientist who challenges the notion that parallel universes never intersect.

When Rene notices a photo of the Bernard Brothers, a real American clown act of the ‘60s, that appears alongside a magazine interview with Rene, he becomes obsessed with it. Soon the Bernard Brothers in their silly plaid apron tutus with matching outsized bows on their heads begin appearing to him, and he realizes they have become Patrick and himself. When Patrick is absent, only Rene’s doppelganger appears to him.

It is not clear why the Bernards happen to appear to Rene, and it may only be a projection of Rene’s longing to bring Patrick even closer to him through a marriage ceremony. By the same token, Patrick’s musings on his conversation with the Danish scientist suggest how easy it is to regard those refugees and illegal aliens as being in a parallel universe.

Although it’s tempting to read literal meanings into “Ballroom,” the film has a spirit of inclusiveness that’s palpable; a concern with the blurring of lines between the natural and the supernatural and all other arbitrary lines of demarcation in the human condition. In its elusive -- and allusive -- way, “Ballroom” evokes a mystic sense of the unity in the universe.

A Seoul without pain

Moon Seung-wook’s bleakly beautiful “The Butterfly” imagines a time in the near future when South Korea is hit with a transient virus -- apparently spread by butterflies -- that wipes out painful memories. Cashing in on this phenomenon, the Butterfly Travel Agency offers an “Oblivion Virus Tour” which is purchased by, among many others, a Korean woman, Anna (Kim Ho-jung), who has spent most of her life in Germany but returns home to contract the virus.

She and her tour guide (Kang Hae-jung), a pregnant 17-year-old and a victim of a lead-poisoning incident, and her driver (Hyun Sung Kim), born an orphan and obsessed with locating his family, embark upon odysseys of self-discovery in a romantic-but-ominous “Blade Runner”-like Seoul that suggest a Korea trying to slough off its past and grappling with a problematic present.

‘Happiness,’ in Hungary

In 1995, when a mover was hauling away the salvageable contents of a filthy, falling-down house in a Budapest neighborhood, he came upon a cache of home movies. Five years later, the cache came into the possession of film professor Andras Suranyi, who in turn brought them to the attention of his American colleague, Benjamin Meade of Kansas. The result is Meade and Suranyi’s “Vakvagany,” which roughly translates as “the end of the railroad.”

The documentarians are intent on tracking down the now-middle-aged brother and sister, who were living in their parents’ home until it was deemed uninhabitable. They were the seemingly happy, smiling children of the happy, smiling parents of those home movies.

The father was a postwar Communist bureaucrat in charge of dispersing reparations to Jews, but somewhere along the way the father and the mother became alcoholics, dying wretchedly in 1989 and 1990, respectively.

Dysfunctional barely describes this family. The beautiful, lively infant son has become fat, alcoholic and mentally impaired, and his sister has become a recluse who lives in a hovel. In the making of the film, Meade invaded her privacy so much that it caused a permanent rift with co-director Suranyi.

Meade has novelist James Ellroy, the late experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage and psychiatrist Dr. Roy Menninger offer commentary that is largely provocative but also somewhat intrusive. The same could be said of the Alloy Orchestra’s insistent, jaunty score. “Vakvagany” is oddly compelling, suggesting how life itself can be as tantalizingly ambiguous as its found footage.

Rain on Arlen’s parade

Larry Weinstein’s “Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen” attempts to celebrate the timeless art of the great popular composer. As the elderly Arlen (Paul Soles) watches a TV special on his career, it triggers tormented memories of his beloved wife, Anya (Kim Bubbs), a beautiful showgirl and model (she was the original Breck Girl).

Their early years of happiness in Manhattan and Hollywood faded as she descended into decades of madness. The lyrics of regular Arlen collaborator Ted Koehler and other Arlen lyricists take on poignant dimensions in this context. Yet the approach seems at times inescapably contrived.

The songs are, of course, indestructible, and there are splendid renderings of “Stormy Weather” (one by Ranee Lee, another by Debbie Harry), “Come Rain or Come Shine” (by Sandra Bernhard) and “Over the Rainbow” (Jimmy Scott), among many others by various other artists.

A strong plus is the use of home movies from the Arlens’ happy times.

Silver Lake Film Festival

This marks the fourth year for an event showcasing films and filmmakers with specific ties to Silver Lake.

Selected screenings

“Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen”

10 p.m. Saturday, Barnsdall Gallery Theatre

“Sleep in a Nest of Flames”

10 p.m. Sunday, Barnsdall Gallery Theatre

“Vakvagany”

5 p.m. Sunday, Barnsdall Gallery Theatre

“The Cedar Bar”

9:30 p.m. Monday, Los Feliz 3 Cinema