A Burning Hot Summer Weekend

Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

 A Burning Hot Summer (Philippe Garrel)

Moana (Robert Flaherty)

This past weekend began with a rare screening of R.W. Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore. Besides its many behavioral and formal beauties, sardonic humor and painfully honest autobiographical representation of a tortured location shoot, it afforded me one last chance to see Werner Schroeter and his muse Magdalena Montezuma onscreen again following the great month-long Schroeter retrospective at MoMA. Fassbinder gives Montezuma a gorgeous last shot in a boat retreating from the film's turmoil after she's been thrown off the set by the tyrannical director, scored to an aria Schroeter himself might have chosen.

I don't have much to say about Philippe Garrel's A Burning Hot Summer except that it deals with love, death, politics and cinema in intriguing if not completely satisfying ways.

The great revelation of the weekend was Robert Flaherty's remarkable 1926 docudrama Moana, receiving a rare screening at Anthology with the new soundtrack created for it in 1981 by Flaherty's daughter Monica. This new soundtrack attempts to recreate authentic music, sound effects and dialogue to accompany the film's original silent images and succeeds remarkably well. Flaherty manages to place his camera to capture every detail of the island's natural beauty, the light playing on the trees and water, the work rituals and coming-of-age ceremonies, and the casual eroticism of this harmonious Samoan community. The film in many ways anticipates Murnau and Flaherty's 1931 masterpiece Tabu but is far less well known.

Bonus image:

Magdalena Montezuma (right) in Werner Schroeter's The Death of Maria Malibran