Fun City: New York in the Movies 1967-75

A young man explores 42nd Street at night, eyes and smile widening at the sights of porn theaters and dirty bookstores. “I don’t think that was ever in a movie before,” says film critic and programmer J. Hoberman of the early sequence in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1966 comedy You’re a Big Boy Now, the opening entry in the Museum of the Moving Image’s 19-film series Fun City: New York in the Movies 1967-75. Coppola’s film was the first approved by the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, which Mayor John V. Lindsay (who called New York a “fun and exciting city even when it’s a struck city”) founded to facilitate location-based fiction filmmaking. (Norman Mailer vs. Fun City, a 1970 chronicle of the writer’s carnivalesque mayoral campaign, is the Moving Image series’ lone non-fiction film.) At the same time, says Hoberman, “they were documentaries of that period,” using actors and scripted narratives as a way to draw audiences into the city’s distinct, often skin-color-coded neighborhoods.

Several films provided viewers with vicarious journeys from innocence to experience, whether a Texas gigolo seeking his destiny amid a crowd of strangers in Midnight Cowboy (1969), an Arizona cop’s gruff impatience with hippie life as conveyed by Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff (1968), or genial group movement across a sunny, bustling street in Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), soon afterward interrupted by gunshots. Such bursts of violence were often beats away in Fun City films, reflecting a crime-ridden time whose end lay nowhere in sight. Despair surrounded trapped-in-motion, haunted main characters, whether cops (The French Connection [1971], Across 110th Street [1972]), crime bosses-by-necessity (Superfly [1972]), or lowly junkies (The Panic in Needle Park [1971], Born to Win [1971]).

Fun City’s troubles were reflected through comic parable in addition to social realism. “While the everyday inconveniences of New York life were a badge of honor, they were also a source of gallows humor,” Hoberman says. A well-meaning WASP made life worse for his black tenants in The Landlord (1970), the same year that an elderly Jewish tailor struggled to believe in the dead black title character of The Angel Levine (1970). Rosemary’s Baby (1968) dwelled on the horror of urban solitude, which Little Murders (1971) showed could get you killed unless you were ready to kill first. Little Murders starred the Jewish Elliott Gould, part of a new wave of ethnic, urban Hollywood stars that Fun City helped create. Another was the Bronx-raised Italian Al Pacino, who teamed with New York filmmaker Sidney Lumet for Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Fun City’s first period piece. Dog Day recreated a real-life bank robbery and hostage crisis led by a Vietnam-trained, bisexual motormouth. As he struts and swaggers for the media’s attention, Pacino’s character draws passerby played by local extras. “It was like a show that the city put on for itself,” Hoberman says. 

August 10-September 1, Museum of the Moving Image

Guelwaar (1992)
Directed by Ousmane Sembène
April 3 at Lincoln Center, opening night of the 20th New York African Film Festival

“Heroes do not interest me. It’s the group which acts,” says Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène in the documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema (1994). “A man leads, but the group takes action.” Sembène’s films illustrated this thought. His first feature film, and the first-ever sub-Saharan feature, was Black Girl (1966), in which a modern young Senegalese woman withers from isolation as a bourgeois Parisian family’s maid; it paved the way for the WWII-set Emitaï (1971) (named after an angry god), in which a village of Diola tribe members literally sings out in unison against the French colonial soldiers that want to oppress them. The filmmaker took inspiration from his father, who once told Sembène and his brothers that he would never work for a white man. As far as they could remember, he never did.

While preferring to write literature, Sembène—who was born in 1923 and died in 2007—saw cinema as “a kind of shared myth for the public” that could accessibly teach the need for Africa’s freedom from European colonialism and its legacy in both tragic and comic ways. The destructive plot of Ceddo (1977) (the Wolof word for “commoners”), in which the 17th-century title-tribe futilely resists enslavement and forced religious conversion, complements the restorative storyline of Sembène’s last film, Mooladé (2004) (“magical protection”), in which a woman in a Burkina Faso village saves young girls from the religious rite of forced female circumcision. The films’ generously filled, oft-musical group shots, with camerawork dictated by human movement, spoke to Sembène’s belief that people could break any frame attempting to contain them.

This belief underlies Sembène’s film Guelwaar (“The Noble One”), which opens this year’s African Film Festival. (The AFF will also screen Christine Delorme’s documentary “Ousmane Sembène: All at Once” [2008] along with Sembène’s early short film “Borom Sarret” [1963], a Dakar city-symphony narrated by a cart driver over the course of a day.) The film is sparked by news of a body that hasn’t stayed put—the corpse of recently deceased Catholic freedom fighter Pierre Henri Thioune, probably murdered by police, has disappeared from the morgue. A brief investigation reveals that the dead man has actually been buried in the cemetery of a nearby Muslim village, whose elders cry sacrilege at the thought of his excavation.

Neo-colonial police, who arrogantly speak French in front of the Wolof-tongued villagers, stir up holy war between the two sides; meanwhile, flashbacks reveal how Thioune (played by Thierno Ndiaye and inspired by the French-resisting West African leader Samori Ture) believed that all Africans should stand united. He appears giving a public speech decrying reliance on foreign aid, which robs his “assisted people” not just of dignity but also of their free wills. “If you want to kill a proud man, give him what he needs to live every day,” he says, quoting the Senegalese philosopher Kocc Barma. “In the long run you’ve made him a serf.” Another flashback shows him arguing with his wife, Nogoy Marie Thioune (Mame Ndoumbe Diop), about their three grown children. While she feels ashamed that all three do work that makes them social outcasts, he swells with pride that they work and will never beg. The film’s present-day scenes show the children, along with other villagers from both sides, working to bring Catholics and Muslims together against their deceitful leaders rather than against each other; they all come to carry on their father’s legacy.

A joyful Guelwaar scene shows young villagers slicing European sacks of rice and flour open to spill their contents on the ground. The need for an Africa free of First World reliance has been espoused subsequently by many of the continent’s filmmakers, several of whose work will be showing at this year’s AFF. (A personal favorite is the tender Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, often working in Mali, whose October [1992] and Life on Earth [1998] will screen, and whose film Bamako [2006] stages a fictional trial to argue that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund should remove Africa’s debt.) The commonly held view of Ousmane Sembène as Africa’s greatest filmmaker is limited. He should rather be seen as what he was: a starting point.

Thanks to Violet Lucca for research help.

Poetic Justice (1972)
Directed by Hollis Frampton
March 26 at Light Industry with Beatrice Gibson’s “The Tiger’s Mind”

“In the beginning it was just about trying to learn to speak, speak better or speak differently,” says the voiceover in British artist Beatrice Gibson’s short 2012 film “The Tiger’s Mind.” The film’s setting is a villa where some people may have been murdered. The female narrator tells, with ominous musical accompaniment (a 1967 narrative score composed by Cornelius Cardew that shares this film’s title), of developing relationships between six mysterious figures named Tiger, Mind, Tree, Wind, Circle, and Amy. Verbal language, she says, should be replaced with the language of things. The camera moves slowly through a living room in which a curtain blows. In the grounds outside echoes a woman’s scream, followed by malevolent laughter. A porcelain tiger statue looms somewhere indoors. The viewer imagines an unfolding film. Gibson told me by email that, for her, “The Tiger’s Mind” tries “to trigger a more active kind of spectator by leaving certain things unanswered.”

So does Poetic Justice, which Light Industry will screen on a double-bill with “The Tiger’s Mind.” The American Hollis Frampton’s second film in a seven-part series called Hapax Legomena (“things said once”) is about seeking the right language. Frampton even later turned the film into a book, in whose introduction he wrote that his goal had been “to recapitulate some of the history of film art as though it were my own life to recollect.” The setting is a table. On the left-hand side is a small potted cactus; on the right-hand side is a cup of coffee; in the middle sits a pile of white paper sheets. The sheets follow each other in numbered succession, each containing handwritten words that describe a tableau.

For instance, the members in one series each begin with “Bedroom. Lovemaking. Outside the window are” before individual sights: spruces and juniper under snow; peacocks strutting on a turf green; men and women in evening dress; hyenas disputing a carcass; strands and bladders of kelp; wrestlers in a tag match; an automatic turret lathe in operation; a calm inland sea; a squadron of pipers; rings of Saturn, looming; little girls skipping rope; tumbled stacks of cordwood; a display of ophthalmoscopes; a party of mountaineers; a park of bay trees; a sky full of wheeling pigeons; truck wheels splashing in muddy water; three red-haired women rolling dice; a beached whale, gasping; a double circle of monoliths; red and white corpuscles; a procession by torchlight; smoking ingots of refined cobalt; a field of daisies and mallows; two surgeons amputating a limb; walls and turrets of obsidian; silver dirigibles trailing advertisements; parrotfish schooling in dim light; a classroom festooned with crepe paper; a small crowd pointing at the sky; a spinning brass anemometer; a pearl necklace on green baize; six or seven zebras, grazing; two farmers scalding a hog; an inverted enamel saucepan; a heap of spoiled fruit; bolts of striped twill; a seated audience, applauding; fern shoots; a cracked jug leaking milk; a storm on the rim of the sun; a consort of trombonists; crystals of pure nicotine; the Statue of Liberty; lavender sea anemones; knives and bright axes; a child licking a spoon; a frigate advancing under sail; a clutter of nude plaster mannequins; feathers and bloody tracks; a blue arc struck between electrodes; stalagmites of tinted paraffin; grizzled drovers herding sheep; eggs hatching baby turtles; a great suspension bridge, foreshortened; an enormous hexagonal mirror; I am aiming a camera; a lilac in bloom.

Throughout Poetic Justice you can sense an offscreen person writing, both by hand and with a camera, then leaving the text for others to finish. But perhaps some things must remain incomplete.

Thanks to Beatrice Gibson and to Bruce Jenkins, editor of Frampton’s collected writings.

A Hen in the Wind (1948)
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
March 9 at 92YTribeca

Yasujiro Ozu’s films changed as his society did. His films, frequently dealing with the problems of poor and working-class people, often responded to specific Japanese social conditions. The rapid editing of the melodrama That Night’s Wife (1930) helps the viewer sympathize with a man who’s stolen medicine for his sick daughter and must escape police at a time when Japan was in an economic crisis. In his wonderful early comedies, such as I Was Born, But… (1932), the camera roams as freely and as openly as the mischievous pair of young brothers it follows, reflecting playful optimism for a country returning to prosperous times. The Only Son (1936) looks with conflicted eyes upon Japan’s increasing industrialization, however, as its gaze literally floats between that of an old woman who’s sentenced herself to a lifetime of factory labor for her son’s sake and that of the grown man himself, a poor doctor ashamed to show her that he hasn’t done better.

Ozu stopped making films between 1937 and 1939 in order to serve in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and then again between 1943 and 1946 as the result of a military deployment to Singapore. A Hen in the Wind was the second film (following 1947’s Record of a Tenement Gentleman) that he made after returning to a country devastated by WWII. Hen takes place in a US-occupied Tokyo filled with high metal towers and low ramshackle homes. The poor young woman Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) raises her four-year-old son alone while waiting for her husband Shuichi to return from the war. She’s helped by friends and neighbors to the extent that their rationed food can be shared. When her son suddenly grows sick, she must prostitute herself in order to pay for his doctor. A friend angrily asks Tokiko afterwards why she didn’t try to borrow money from her, to which Tokiko responds, “Because you’re poor, too.”

Shuichi (Shûji Sano) eventually comes home, and the husband and wife’s initial uncontainable pleasure at seeing each other is soon confronted with two moral choices. First, she must choose whether to tell him what she has done in order to save their child’s life; then, if she does, he must choose whether to forgive her for doing something that will bring them disgrace. As with both earlier and later Ozu films, the film balances different characters’ perspectives, earning sympathy for each—Tokiko, like many women, is doomed to suffer, while Shuichi’s mind struggles against rigid guidelines of how a man should behave.

Hen contains solitary people, whether isolated in close-up or walking alone, who want to break their solitude to help each other, but believe that they can only go so far. Throughout, it is suggested that Japanese society has repressed people so thoroughly that they have grown expert at punishing themselves. This sense remains in Ozu’s subsequent films, such as the celebrated Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953), both domestic tragedies of aging parents sacrificing themselves for their children, and both made while Japan was still recovering from the war and on its way to the multi-sector boom that has since become known as “the Japanese post-war economic miracle.”

Even the great prosperity reflected in a late film like Equinox Flower (1958)—screening on a double-bill with A Hen in the Wind, and the first of four color films Ozu made before dying on his 60th birthday—is complicated by an awareness of future, perhaps necessary, loss. The film orchestrates bright color, smooth movement, and light music in what seems to be cheerful unison as a family goes out to a park together for one of the last times. The patriarch Wataru (Shin Saburi) is a successful Tokyo businessman whose advice for a young married couple to find happiness contradicts his own goal of an arranged marriage for his adult daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), who has already chosen her future husband. One day the man, Taniguchi (Keiji Sada), a junior executive soon to be transferred to Hiroshima, enters Hirayama’s office and asks for Setsuko’s hand. The old man must decide whether to maintain tradition or grant his daughter her wish, and Setsuko’s response to his initial resistance is simple: “Why can’t I find happiness on my own?”

Unlike in earlier Ozu films, the characters in Equinox Flower are not poor or working-class but upper middle-class, frequently placed among trees and flowers, suggesting how they are firmly established within a newly blooming culture. The presence of the responsible, ambitious Taniguchi, who will soon move his talents from Tokyo to another rebuilding city, suggests that in the future it can continue to bloom. The war is long gone, to be remembered only with fond sadness as a time when survival dictated that the family unit stay intact. “In the dark, we used to think we might all die together,” says Setsuko’s mother Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka), who longs for everyone to remain together while still supporting her daughter’s desire to leave. Things are different now, after all, and the old ways shouldn’t stay. Unlike A Hen in the Wind, the mood surrounding Equinox’s central conflicts is gently melancholic rather than desperate. A man must still decide how great an obstacle he will be to his family’s future peace and happiness, but in this film one senses that things will work out for the best.

Thanks to Chuck Stephens for research help.