Daily Archives: August 11, 1989

The Navigator

The virtues as well as the limitations of this bizarre fantasy from New Zealand, winner of half a dozen Australian Oscars, stem from its literary conception. Though the story is an original (by director Vincent Ward), and Ward’s use of both black and white and color gives it a very distinctive look, it feels like an idea translated into cinematic terms rather than a cinematic conception. In a remote English mining village threatened by the Black Death in 1348, a visionary boy (Hamish McFarlane) has a troubled dream that spells out possible salvation, which involves digging through the center of the earth to a celestial city and placing across on the spire of a cathedral. He sets out with four miners to fulfill this mission, and they eventually wind up in a modern (i.e., 1988) metropolis. Rather than play this conceit for satire, Ward and his cowriters Kely Lyons and Geoff Chapple stick pretty close to the funereal rhythm and doom-ridden mood that they establish at the outset. What emerges is not entirely successful; the switches between black and white and color often seem more mechanical than integral, and the hallucinatory atmosphere is occasionally diluted rather than enhanced by the blocky narrative continuity. Read more

Films by Fred Marx

Four films by an Illinois-based film and video maker whose experimental and political interests pointedly inform and reinforce one another. Dream Documentary (1981), which is especially impressive, uses found footage, inventive editing, and an effectively selective sound track to comment on the ways that we look at the third world. Hiding Out for Heaven (1982), which l haven’t seen yet, is a two-film projection piece about grading student writers. House of Un-American Activities (1983) is a documentary that mixes personal and public history as it describes the 1956 persecution of Marx’s father–a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in 1939 and joined the Communist Party in 1945. Dreams of China was shot while Marx was working as an English teacher in China between 1983 and 1985 and was finished only recently; the portrait of China that it presents is highly personal, full of fascinating details, and, for the most part, given Marx ‘s leftist background, unfashionably negative. Marx will be present at the screening. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Friday, August 11, 8:15, 443-3737) Read more