Reviews

I watched 13 episodes of this for a Theater Studies class at City College of San Francisco. Overall, it was a good collection of abridged plays, introduced informatively by good ol' Jose.

The plays were as follows: Miss Julie - August Strindberg (featuring Patrick Stewart!) Peer Gynt - Henrick Ibsen The Wild Duck - Henrick Ibsen The Three Sisters - Anton Chekhov The Ghost Sonata - August Strindberg Oedipus Tyrannus - Sophocles (featuring Patrick Stewart again!) Macbeth - Shakespeare Woyzeck - Georg Buchner St. Joan - Bernard Shaw The Venetian Twins - Carlo Goldoni The Way of the World - William Congreve Ubu Roi - Alfred Jarry (featuring Donald Pleasance!) Sizwe Banzi is Dead - Athol Fugerd, John Kani and Winston Ntosha Six Characters in Search of an Author - Luigi Pirandello

I'm not sure if these plays were put on just for this series, or if it drew from stock TV productions that were shown in full elsewhere. I also don't know if there were just 13 episodes.

Some I enjoyed more than others, but all were nicely performed. The guy playing Peer Gynt was a bit pretentious (somewhere between Shatner and Brando)...Patrick Stewart was magnificent as ever. It's fun to discover he's had the exact same majestic voice for over 30 years. Donald Pleasance was GREAT as Pa Ubu. Reminded me a lot of Rod Steiger in "Fistful of Dynamite" (or Eli Wallach in the Good the Bad and the Ugly). His daughter Angela did nicely as Joan of Arc.

Those are most of the bits that stood out off the top of my head.

An interesting 70-something minute avante-garde opus, a real patience-tester to those with only a passing interest in non-narrative experiments. But the average movie-goer is not only outside this film's intended audience. It is not availaible. I saw it at a film class at City Collge.

It consiststs a series of unedited static shots, taken from inside a train, from the back seat of a crowded car, behind some golfers, looking at a tractor lumbering across a field. In two instances, Bob Dylan's Black Diamond Bay (from "Desire") plays out its full duration. And it's long -- seven and a half minutes. The first is of two women in bed, in extreme slow-motion. The second is of a chimney. An industrial chimney made of brick simply puffs out smoke for the entire time it takes for the song to finish. Perhaps comparing the lyrics themselves to these images can shed light on an intended meaning or significance -- or is that over-analyzing.

It's basically an 80-minute slideshow. It looks like moving slide photos taken on someone's summer road trip. On paper, the idea of something so plain and simple would seem to be deathly dull, but there is in eerie quality that arisesas you approach an hour of watching these shots. Occasionally seeing people, their faces always slightly obscure, creates a sensation of spying. You're not following their story or absorbing their character; you're just watching them. In all the slow, static shots, the sum of the whole thing seems to hint at some sort of broad impression of Americana.

I understand that the filmmaker, James Benning has no interest in transferring this 16 mm celluloid opus to DVD (along with all his films I assume) so I recommend taking notes. Savor it. Think about it. It might be the only time you see 11 x 14.

PS I still don't know what "11 x 14" refers to, if I find out I'll let you know.