Lincoln Center Catches the Spirit of '68

Movies

By STEVE DOLLAR
April 29, 2008

Moviegoers who fail to get their fix for radical politics from Film Forum's Godard series can load up for the next two weeks as the Film Society of Lincoln Center commemorates 1968 — also known as "the year of the pig" in documentarian Emile de Antonio's parlance — with a survey of the Vietnam War era's greatest hits.

Four decades on, it's hard to imagine any cinephile who hasn't grooved to Pink Floyd's "Heart Beat, Pig Meat" oscillating trippily on the soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni's fight-the-power travelogue "Zabriskie Point," or reveled in Dusan Makavejev's subversively Reichian musical, "W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism" (which is finally available on domestic DVD). So these screenings really function as a general audience primer, with an emphasis on documentaries that are practically required study for the period. Notable among them: "The War at Home," about violent antiwar clashes at the University of Wisconsin, and "King: A Filmed Record ... Montgomery to Memphis," Sidney Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's three-hour history of Martin Luther King Jr., compiled after his assassination on April 4, 1968.

But the Film Society has included some genuine rarities. Júlio Bressane's "Killed the Family and Went to the Movies," made when the director was only 23, reacts to the Brazilian government's clampdown on civil liberties with dark, absurdist satire. The actions of the title play out in the opening minutes of the film before the homicidal protagonist watches a sequence of short films that shift between a Sapphic song-and-dance love story and scenes of a prisoner's grueling torture. Before long, the boundary separating real life and celluloid fantasy has dissolved into even more sex and violence.

For his efforts, Mr. Bressane was chased out of Brazil and into exile in London, along with such undesirables (and future national icons) as the songwriter Caetano Veloso. His debut flaunts the kind of insane bravura that marks the most enduring films of the era, a welcome respite from the dry, didactic nature of so much "political" filmmaking.

Another budding auteur, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, makes an early screen appearance with his Munich anti-theater troupe in Jean-Marie Straub's short "The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp."

A footnote in a career not known for documentary outings, "Dionysius '69," finds Brian De Palma experimenting with split screens — a signature of his 1970s thrillers — as he films the Performance Group's free-love variation on Euripides's "Bacchae." With its scenes of explicit eroticism and welcome participation from the audience, this may be the last time anyone got to have sex in a De Palma film without dying a gruesome death. Make love, not war.

Through May 14 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, at Broadway and West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).