NEW YORK: The coolest noise in town this spring and summer may be at the Museum of Modern Art's "Jazz Score" series (April 17--September 15), which offers "a gallery installation, live concerts, and a panel discussion," as well as a series of features and shorts powered by original jazz soundtracks. Whether by design or just the luck of the draw, the selection makes it clear that the use of an original jazz score, whether composed by Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder) or Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm), reveals a certain level of artistic aspiration, often coupled with a lust for the lower things in life. At the simplest level, music by Miles Davis or by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet can do wonders for a thriller such as Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows or Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, with Robert Ryan as a racist crook and Harry Belafonte as his unhappy partner in crime. At the other extreme, there's Arthur Penn's Mickey One, a fascinating, incoherent, art-damaged movie that seems to be trying to take its cues from Stan Getz's saxophone improvisations on the soundtrack--bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch just for the visions it gives you of the studio executive's heads melting when they first saw it--and such artifacts as Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, with music by Ornette Coleman, and Shirley Clarke's off-Broadway verite films The Cool World and The Connection, reminders that the American independent film movement once seemed to be an offshoot of the Beats' world. There are also some international obscurities that sound better than intriguing, notable Dilemma, a 1962 film made in apartheid-era Johannesburg by the Danish director Henning Carlsen (Hunger), starring Zakes Mokae and with music by Max Roach.
LOS ANGELES: Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film" at the Linwood Dunn Theater will include screenings of the two great military documentaries that Huston made during World War II, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light. Although made with the cooperation of the U. S. military and officially intended as part of the war effort, San Pietro--which is both a strikingly clear and cogent account of a battle and a nonfiction war poem composed on film--met with some grumblings from the higher-ups, and Light, a harrowing visit to a medical ward full of soldiers suffering from the psychological effects of war, was actually kept from public view until the early 1980s. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Susan King makes the point that Huston had to deal with much more interference than some of the people now making documentaries about the Iraq war, but many of those current filmmakers could still learn a lot from his work. She also reminds us that Huston had a ready answer for the jarheads who clucked that his movies seemed "anti-war': ""Whenever I make a film that's for war, you can take me out and shoot me." The screening will be introduced by Huston's son Tony and followed by a panel discussion including Dr. Charles Wolfe, Dr. Betsy McLane, and Richard E. Robbins, the producer-director of the Oscar-nominated doceumentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.
