By JERRY TALLMER
It was while Jonas Mekas was talking with Phil Hartman about a proposed East Village Film Festival, and getting more and more excited about it, that Mekas suddenly realized something. “You know,” he said to Hartman, “the first screening I ever did — at 7 Avenue A — was in September 1953, just 50 years ago.”
And you can trace the beginning of everything to that.
Fifty years later, the first-ever East Village Film Festival — a festival within a festival — will screen more than 75 works in the next six days, tonight (Wednesday, Aug. 20) through next Tuesday night, Aug. 26, at Jonas’s Anthology Film Archives plus six other indoor venues plus six outdoor East Village gardens.
The wrap-around jamboree is of course the HOWL! Festival of East Village Arts, its very name a tribute to East Villager Allen Ginsberg, who pinpointed an entire ethos and an entire generation with that poem, not to mention his whole gallant life.
Cinematically, the heritage of Mekas and Ginsberg and the heroic 1950s/1960s will be celebrated in the next six days by, among highlights too many to list:
“Rockets Redglare!” — Luis Fernandez de la Reguera’s 88-minute tribute to the late 350-pound actor and bodyguard whose friends, testifying on film here, include Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, Julian Schnabel. Wed. Aug. 20 9 p.m. Loew’s Theater Village VII 66 3rd Ave. 212-982-2116
“Ornette: Made in America” — the late Shirley Clarke’s 1986 biodoc on rebel saxophonist Ornette Coleman; also getting screened, Ms. Clarke’s 1963 “The Cool World,” starring Carl Lee, with music by Mal Waldron, Dizzie Gillespie, Yusef Lateef. Aug. 22 7:30 p.m. at Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave. 212-505-5181.
“Gotham Fish Tales” — a 73-minute exploration by Robert Maass of the anecdote-rich daily adventures of New York City fishermen who plumb the depths of local waters for 250 edible species. Wed. – Fri. Aug. 20-22 at 8 p.m. Cinema Classics, 332 E. 11th St. 212-677-6309.
“7th Street” — 72-minute documentation by Joseph Pais of a neighborhood that has gone from drugs to worse, i.e., gentrification, in the 10 years 1992-2002. Sat, Sun, Mon, Aug. 23 – 25 at 8 pm. Appearance by filmmaker at Sunday show.
“Naked City” — Not the 1948 Jules Dassin movie but a 50-minute 1963 look at a blind, disturbed Brooklyn boy who gets off a bus and is lost in the East Village. Sat. Aug. 23 at 9 pm. Den of Cin, 44 Ave. A.
“Birth of a Nation” — Not the much-debated 1915 D.W. Griffith classic but Jonas Mekas’s own 85-minute portraiture of 160 independent filmmakers. Mekas, 1960 organizer of the (even now) seminal Film-Makers Cooperative, will attend this screening. Sunday, August 24 at 6 p.m. At Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue. 212-505-5181
Riot Night — Footage shot by Paul Garrin and Clayton Patterson during the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots. Mon. Aug. 25 at 9 p.m. at Den of Cin, 44 Ave. A.
“Die Mommie Die!” — A preview (before its October commercial opening) of the Sundance-prizewinning melodrama written by and starring the (West) Village’s own Charles Busch. Fri. Aug. 22 at 9 p.m., Loew’s Theater Village VII, 66 3rd Ave.
This first East Village Film Festival is the brainchild of filmmaker, Two Boots restaurateur, and Pioneer Theater founder/owner Phil Hartman, who was upset when vital East Village events like the Charlie Parker Festival were discontinued last year. (It’s now been reborn, to keep company with the first-ever Allen Ginsberg Poetry Festival.)
“It made me think,” says Hartman, “of all the other great things that had started in the East Village and now had died: Wigstock, Art Around the Park, all that. When all this started taking shape a year ago, I went to Bob Rosenthal, who runs the Allen Ginsberg trust, to get his blessing.”
Thus HOWL! And thus SCOWL, an EVFF series at the Pioneer, curated by musician and novelist Richard Hell, of 14 memorable “anti-social” motion pictures from Todd Browning’s 1932 “Freaks” to Harmony Korine’s 1997 “Gummo.” The offbeat selection, which includes “Taxi Driver,” the original “Frankenstein,” “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “Nightmare Alley,” and “Stranger Than Paradise,” runs from Aug. 20 through Sept. 2.
When M.M. Serra went back to Phil Hartman and Phil’s wife-and-partner Doris Kornish to report that she, M.M., had lined up a garden, Peter Kramer’s Le Petit Versailles, on Houston near Avenue C, as well as a projector supplied by filmmaker Stephen Kent, it was Mrs. Hartman (according to Mr. Hartman) or M.M. Serra (according to M.M. Serra), who said: “Let’s do seven screenings in seven gardens.” (As it turns out, actually six.)
Say, Mary Margaret, what if it rains?
“It’s not going to rain,” says M.M. Serra, like any nicely raised Roman Catholic from coal-town Jeannette, Pennsylvania. “It’s not going to rain.”
And Phil Hartman: Is there going to be a second East Village Film Festival, and a third?
“There’d better be,” says Hartman, speaking for himself and “co-conspirator” David Leslie, Festival artistic director. “There’s been a hell of a lot of work went into this one.”
He’s much gratified, as is M.M., that the gardens aspect has been funded in good part by Bette Midler, and what has even more delighted and surprised Hartman is “how enthusiastic and enormously supportive” the Loew’s chain has been.
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