Films This Week 7/02/21

by Gary Palmucci | 2nd July 2021 | Gary's Corner

Hello everyone. I’m vacationing this week in Wellfleet, MA on Cape Cod where Henry Thoreau once said, “A man may stand and put all America behind him.”    

One can indeed stand, hypnotized, astride the other-worldly beauty of its ocean-side beaches currently teeming with seals — which also means predatory sharks are seldom far away. The local drive in theatre, in business since the late 1950s, (where I first saw The Dirty Dozen way back in ’67), tonight features its annual screening of Jaws, this time double-billed with Jurassic Park.  

Our own virtual screen today is adding two films that recently premiered downtown at Film Forum. I first encountered Iranian filmmaker Mohammed Rasoulof with his Iron Island at Cannes 2005, and his latest There Is No Evil has been eloquently praised by the Ben Kenigsberg of the NY Times:

“…Rasoulof made the movie covertly and without the approval of Iranian authorities, and a ban on his leaving the country prevented him from accepting the top prize at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival…(each of its) four episodes involve people pressed into carrying out official executions in Iran. While the stories do not carry over, the themes do…to make a movie that ponders the moral rot of an unjust system while under the gun of that  system is courageous and artistically potent.”  

And from legendary distributor Janus Films — who over a half century ago first introduced Americans to Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, Wajda, et al — comes a rediscovery, the 1949 feature Distant Journey. Writing recently in Tablet, longtime Village Voice critic and Jewish film historian J. Hoberman described this picture as “a landmark — a movie of its time that continues to speak to ours…. It was one of the first and remains among the strongest, most original and most influential movies to deal with the murder of European Jewry. Its NY premiere in the late summer of 1950, not three months into the Korean War, was at the Stanley, a shabby theatre off Times Square that then served as the home of Yiddish movies and Israeli and Soviet imports. The film was given the title of Geto Terezin, for the “transit camp” Theresienstadt, known in Czech as Terezin, where it was largely set and partially filmed. It was so enthusiastically received that it was held for over a month.” 

Obviously neither of these films qualifies as “light entertainment,” but both are perhaps appropriate on this weekend when we annually contemplate the state of our own freedom and independence…

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema