[ThisWeek] Manderlay at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

Manderlay (R)
Saturday & Sunday, March 18 & 19
3:50 PM & 7:00 PM
$5/adult
KFS passes accepted for Sunday showings
(see Review below)
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy

University of Idaho Women¹s Center presents
Lunafest
March 23
7:00 PM
$5/adult, $3/student or senior

An evening of bluegrass featuring
Prairie Flyer &
Grangeville Bluegrass Co.
Friday, March 24
7:00 PM
$12/adult, $8/child under 13

Transamerica (R)
March 25 - 26
4:25 & 7:00 PM
$5/adult

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $2/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films.
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, visit www.kenworthy.org

Coming in April: Sirius Idaho Theatre presents A Walk in the Woods &
Collected Stories; The Celestine Prophecy; The Best of Youth; Cache; Why we
Fight.
* * *
Also in March at the Kenworthy-

University of Idaho presents
American Indian Film Festival
March 29 - April 1

MOSCOW, Idaho ³American Indian Activism and Leadership² is the theme of this
year¹s American Indian Film Festival hosted by the University of Idaho.
            
The films selected for this year¹s festival bring to light national and
local issues and concerns, including dam removal, young tribe members
struggle with pop-culture and American Indian leadership representation.

The four day festival begins March 29 with ceremonial opening with remarks
by Rebecca Miles, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe, and the first female
elected chairman in the tribe¹s history, and ends April 1 with a
presentation by John Trudell, American Indian activist and actor.

The free films, partially funded by the Idaho Humanities Council, will be
shown at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre at 7 p.m. each day, with panel
discussions following the screening.

The following is the film schedule with brief descriptions:

Wednesday March 29

Film:   ³Thunderbird Woman-Winona LaDuke²
        Filmed on the White Earth Reservation: A story of Winona LaDuke
Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), a leading figure in the struggle for American Indian
land rights and sovereignty, vice-presidential candidate, novelist,
environmentalist, anti-nuclear activist and mother.
 
Panel: American Indian women leaders and activists, including Rebecca Miles.
 
Thursday March 30

Film:   ³Doing it?²
        An abstinence-education documentary. Three Nez Perce high school
students are influenced by the images and messages they see on television
and want to find out if everyone is ³doing it². Filmed in Lapwai in March
2005, it was produced by Nez Perce Tribe Students for Success Program.
 
Film:   ³Surviving Lewis and Clark: The Nimiipuu Story²
        This documentary focuses on the contributions of the Nez Perce
people to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Highlights the major events that
have contributed to some of the social and economic difficulties in today¹s
Nez Perce homeland.
 
Panel: Dialogue with filmmakers and actors
 
Friday March 31

Film:   ³Unconquering the Last Frontier²
        This documentary chronicles the Elwha Klallam Tribe¹s struggle to
survive in the midst of hydroelectric development in Washington.
 
Film:   ³The Snowball effect²
        Film explores the controversy surrounding the recently proposed ski
resort expansion and snowmaking with wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks.
American Indian tribal officials, spiritual leaders, Forest Service
officials and concerned citizens discuss the issues of economic
misconceptions, threats to the environment, global warming, sacred lands
protection and public health concerns associated with groundbreaking studies
on wastewater. 
 
Panel: Native Americans and non-Native Americans working with treaty rights,
salmon preservation, sacred land, economic development and private property
right issues.
 
Saturday April 1 

5 p.m. - 8 p.m. UI Native American Student Association will be selling
Indian tacos outside the Kenworthy.
 
Film:   ³Trudell - The Movie²
        A documentary about American Indian activist John Trudell, a poet,
singer and powerful voice of the human spirit. His work began as an activist
for American Indian rights and freedoms and was the national spokesperson
during the Indians of All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969.  He
assisted in the formation of American Indian Movement (AIM) in the Œ70s and
has appeared in several movies, including ³Incident at Oglala,²
³Thunderheart,² ³On Deadly Ground² and ³Smoke Signals.²
 
Presentation / Question and answer: with John Trudell.

Contacts: Katie Dahlinger, UI Communications and Marketing, (208) 885-7251,
kdahlinger at uidaho.edu
* *  *

This week¹s movie review-

Manderlay

Written and directed by Lars von Trier
Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes
Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has
strong language, nudity, and one fairly graphic sex scene.


As reviewed by Sean Axmaker writing for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The second of Lars von Trier's grand cinematic statements about "America"
(which von Trier has never actually visited) takes on nothing less than the
volatile issue of racism and the legacy of slavery. He tackles it with teeth
bared behind a sneering grin.

"Manderlay" picks up where "Dogville" left off, right down to von Trier's
sober, exaggerated theatricality, mannered dialogue (which plays like a
1930s stage play) and vast, sparsely set artificial stage.

Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard, taking over the part from Nicole Kidman with
earnestness in place of Kidman's innocence), the idealistic gangster's
daughter, stumbles across an Alabama plantation where slavery remains in
effect in 1930, 70 years after abolition.

Driven by good intentions and righteous indignation, emancipator Grace
transforms the plantation into a grand experiment in "freed enterprise." She
awards the slaves communal owners and makes the former owners indentured
servants under her "benign" dictatorship, decreeing democracy and equality
at gunpoint while posing as just another working-class comrade.

It looks more like a lampoon of communism than a satire of American liberal
idealism and social paternalism, while the scattershot spray of von Trier's
satirical potshots both lambaste and embrace racial and social stereotypes.
The timing of the release only makes the irony of a Danish director --
especially one this arrogant and intellectually garish -- criticizing race
relations in America all the more entertaining.

At heart, it's an absurdist comedy with a deadpan delivery and run through
with the very hypocrisy that von Trier mercilessly ridicules.

Yet it's so ruthlessly witty and meticulously plotted -- unexpectedly so,
given its messy dramatic sprawl -- that it delivers a satisfying kick. Not
for von Trier's sarcastic satirical jabs but for his shameless bravado, his
flagrant desire to offend everyone, and his brazen take on poetic justice in
a fantasy America only he could imagine.


As reviewed by Philip French writing for the (London) Observer

A sequel to Dogville, Manderlay is the second film in a projected trilogy of
smug Scandinavian sermons that Lars von Trier is delivering (in a form of
English) on America, its sins and hypocrisies. This one, in 12 chapters, is
set in 1935 Alabama, where the do-gooding heroine Grace (Bryce Dallas
Howard) discovers a plantation where slavery is preserved and takes a bet
with her cynical gangster father (Willem Dafoe) that she can liberate the
slaves and turn them into a self-respecting liberal community.

Naturally, everything goes wrong because the blacks have been conditioned to
servitude and the whites intend to keep them that way. As in Dogville, the
heroine is humiliated in every possible way. Staged like an impressionist
play of the 1940s (the skeletal sets are reminiscent of Brecht), Manderlay
is a puerile film, its thinking much like the crude Soviet view of American
history. One can well understand Nicole Kidman not wishing to continue
playing Grace after Dogville.


As reviewed by Stephen Holden writing for the New York Times

To warm to "Manderlay," the chilly second installment of Lars von Trier's
not-yet-finished three-part Brechtian allegory examining United States
history, you must be willing to tolerate the derision and moral arrogance of
a snide European intellectual thumbing his nose at American barbarism.

That might not be such a bad thing given today's climate of national
self-congratulation, in which the phrase "the American people" is wielded as
a synonym for collective virtue.

Set in Alabama in 1933, the movie lays out an excoriating examination of the
legacy of slavery in the United States. If there's nothing in the film that
hasn't been said before about America's persistent racial strife and the
reasons for it, its tone is that of a practical joker strewing whoopee
cushions at a gathering, then sitting back to cackle at the rude noises made
by credulous fools taking their seats.

As in its notorious forerunner, "Dogville," "Manderlay's" main character is
Grace, the guilt-ridden, Candide-like do-good daughter of a cynical gangster
(Willem Dafoe) who doesn't have an idealistic bone in his body.

As he did in "Dogville," John Hurt narrates in an unctuous, flowery voice
that suggests a sardonic parody of Alistair Cooke on "Masterpiece Theater"
inflected with echoes of Lionel Barrymore reading Dickens's "Christmas
Carol."

Mr. von Trier cited "The Threepenny Opera" as an inspiration for "Dogville,"
which was set in an imaginary Colorado town in the months before "Manderlay"
begins. The inspiration for the sequel is Jean Paulhan's preface to Pauline
Reage's "Story of O," which describes a rebellion in 1838 by newly liberated
slaves in Barbados. When they asked the owner who had freed them to
re-enslave them, he refused, and they responded by killing him and his
family, moving back to their old quarters, and resuming their old ways ‹ the
point being that institutionalized oppression and self-loathing, instilled
over generations, form habits not easily broken.

A version of those events takes place in "Manderlay" after Grace, while
traveling through Alabama with her father and his slicked-up goons, stops in
front of a plantation (named Manderlay) where a young black woman appears,
begging for help. Against her father's advice, Grace follows the woman
through its iron gates where she finds a community of slaves under the thumb
of a tyrannical, shotgun-wielding white matriarch, Mam (Lauren Bacall).

Because slavery was abolished 70 years earlier, Grace is outraged, but also
feels guilty and indirectly responsible. "We brought them here, we abused
them, and made them what they are," she tells her father, pleading that he
leave her there with four of his henchmen and a lawyer.

No sooner has Grace arrived than Mam dies, Grace takes over and consigns the
plantation's white overseers to hard labor (in one scene she even forces
them to serve a meal in blackface). But Manderlay's oppressive social order,
codified in a book, "Mam's Law," continues as before. The belatedly freed
inhabitants prove more resentful than grateful. To understand them, Grace
enlists the co-operation of Wilhelm (Danny Glover), Mam's sly, mild-mannered
house slave who eventually emerges as the cautious, well-meaning architect
of the oppressive system. And as time passes, Grace herself gradually
becomes more Mam-like.

Grace's reforms initially bear fruit. She teaches the people how to vote,
and the lawyer draws up contracts that turn the plantation into a productive
co-operative whose residents are equal shareholders. Grace, however, is not
prepared for the thieves and gamblers inside and outside the community. Nor
is she equipped to deal with natural disasters that include a dust storm
that nearly destroys the first cotton crop. A barrier of trees known as the
Old Lady's Garden once protected the fields but is removed when Grace has
the trees cut down for timber. The parallels between the dust storm and the
recent New Orleans catastrophe are inescapable.

The movie bluntly and leeringly confronts the stereotype of the black man as
a sexual superman, when Grace finds herself consumed by desire for Timothy
(Isaach De Bankolé), a proud, contemptuous young stud claiming descent from
African royalty, who makes her cover her face during their brutal coupling.

In "Manderlay" Mr. von Trier uses the same Brechtian distancing techniques
that he brought to "Dogville." The movie was filmed on a nearly bare stage,
in which pieces of wood denote a fence and shacks; the names of locations on
the plantation are stenciled on the floor like directions for blocking. The
brownish-gray cinematography underscores a bleak, Depression-era mood.

But make no mistake: this deeply misanthropic, anti-American film insists
the United States is ruled by crooks and gangsters and cursed by the legacy
of slavery whose poison has seeped to its very core.

Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart

* * *
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
http://www.kenworthy.org

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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