MOVIE REVIEWS : Ambitious Anthropos Festival Offers 100 Documentaries

Anthropos, a certainly ambitious weeklong documentary festival presenting 100 films on a wide cross-section of subjects, will open tonight with a jolt in its scheduling.

In celebration of the 90th birthday year of Joris Ivens, the noted Dutch-born documentary maker, his newest work, “A Tale of the Wind,” was to open the proceedings with Ivens in attendance. Now word has come that Ivens cannot travel, “for reasons of health,” and he does not want his newest film played without him.

So in its place is Nick Broomfield’s “Driving Me Crazy,” which might be subtitled “A Tale of the Windy,” a long, larky account of a theatrical venture that seemed as destined for disaster as “Springtime for Hitler” was in “The Producers.” The film is, after all, the backstage and financial machinations of an all-black musical, “Body and Soul,” scheduled to open in Munich, rehearsing in New York, with its budget abruptly cut from $1.6 million to $300,000 and with a European director, Andre Heller, who likens it to the vision of someone falling from the Empire State Building who sees a different slice of black American life at each floor on the way down. Whew!

At times, film maker Broomfield seems his own worst enemy. Even with his crew cut to two, those two can’t seem to get out of their own or anyone else’s way--dancers, singers or writers. As the funding begins to unravel, tempers mount until they almost match the show’s pretentions and/or naivete. (Producer Andrew Braunsberg has to be dissuaded from his notion that the mere presence of an all-black cast in Munich will prove electrifying to German audiences.) A few heroes emerge, notably the tart-tongued assistant director and one of the three choreographers to survive the melee, and there is a certain horrified fascination to what we see of the show itself. But this is a film that cries out for incisiveness and crisp editing and instead, we get undifferentiated, gavel-to-gavel coverage.

Opening night aside, the festival is structured into six competitive categories: Social Issues, Anthropological Subjects, Women’s Subjects, Jewish Subjects, Music and Poetry, Student Films; plus a selection of special films, some of them classic and all of them out of competition; a retrospective of the work of Joris Ivens and an Amnesty International series focusing on human rights in Chile.

No one could fault Anthropos’ intention; Los Angeles could certainly use a decently mounted festival that presented the new at the same time that it rounded up films that have already played here and on television the last year or two. (In the festival, for example, is the Maysles’ “Horowitz Plays Mozart,” which aired on PBS, and was reviewed just this week.)

And this year, after the opener at the Directors Guild of America, Anthropos will take place on three of the screens at the Monica 4-Plex; with this change it’s hoped that some of the irksome projection and reel-fumbling problems of last year will be ironed out. It also has a pair of new sponsors, the Discovery Channel and the American Film Institute, where Thursday and Friday’s daytime video programmings will screen.

Unfortunately, it has not been possible to press-screen from anything but video tapes, and duplicated tapes at that, hardly film’s finest hour. If a pattern of decidedly un-first-rate films has emerged from this very random sampling of the festival’s competitive section, it is hoped that some of the un-previewed films and some of the classics from other sections will counterbalance such sluggishness.

Samples from Friday’s opening night at the Monica 4-Plex: There’s the austere, 13-minute “Devant Le Mur,” which follows a monk who has left his monastery but not his faith. Now homeless, he waves at every passing car as he trots up and down his bleak French country road, repeating his prayer, “Give them hope and peace.” Cold and wretched, Paul is clearly meant to be a symbol of tenacious love, yet film maker Daisy Lamothe does not entirely convince us that her half-mad suffering subject represents faith, not simply derangement.

“Wise Guys!” is triviality on both sides of the camera: USC student film maker David Hartwell’s frenetic portrait of five “Jeopardy!” contestants during that game show’s Tournament of Champions. We learn nothing pithy about these super-contestants and a good deal about Hartwell’s condescension to his subject and subjects.

“Cane Toads” is a nicely deadpan but overextended portrait of ecological muddling that occurred 50 years ago when Australia imported the cane toad to devour the sugar cane beetle, overlooking the fact that the beetles could fly (away) and the ferociously fecund toads could not. Mark Lewis’ film and Lewis himself were just here during UCLA’s Australian festival--another example of Anthropos’ strangely overlapping programming.

“Joe Leahy’s Neighbors” is a sequel to “First Contact” in which, 50 years ago, an untouched colony of New Guinea highlanders set eyes on their first invaders, Australian prospectors. Now film makers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson extend their portrait of the changes since then, including the clashes between traditionalism, colonialism and entrepreneurship, as practiced by Joe Leahy, son of a Ganiga woman and Australian Michael Leahy. After a marvelously brisk beginning, this meanders considerably as it draws its 110 -minute portrait of Leahy, a complex and interesting man, but it is certainly the strongest of the openers.

Much of the rest of the programming prescreened falls into the not-wonderful category, many of them on heartfelt subjects. In “Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction” a Palestinian film maker visits the site of his ancestral village destroyed by the Israeli army in 1948, and now captured by a mural in which the houses can be “seen” again by their old occupants.

In “Classified People” Yolande Zauberman’s point about the arbitrariness of South Africa’s color-classification is undercut by bad sound and rambling structure, although the bitter irony of her subject’s story is perfectly clear. (It is possible that a bad videotape contributed to this incomprehensibility.)

The best? Many of these come from the out-of-competition section. Robert Gardner’s towering, wordless “Forest of Bliss,” an hypnotic mantra of images of life along the Ganges at the holy city of Benares. “Threat” Stefan Jarl’s sternly heart-rending study of the desecration of the Lapplanders way of life after Chernobyl. The piercingly funny “Cannibal Tours” as Dennis O’Rourke looks at the super-rich who have come to photograph, to bargain with and to pontificate about Papuans living along the Sepik River.

The Mexican “Jaguar Fights,” by Alfredo Portilla (who has since tragically died, hit by a car in New York) and Alberto Becerril has magnificent imagery and great sotto voce banter among the men making the jaguar masks for their village’s ritual battles, done to bring on rain. Compared to the preceding three, it is imperfect but endearing, nonetheless. “Weapons of the Spirit,” which the Los Angeles Film Critics chose as the best documentary of last year, is Pierre Sauvage’s film about Le Chambon, a French town whose 5,000 Christian inhabitants hid 5,000 Jews for four years during World War II, Sauvage, born in March, 1944, being one of them.

From critical appraisal in other cities, there is reason to look forward to “Shattered Dreams,” a panoramic portrait of the first 40 years of the state of Israel that the San Francisco Chronicle’s Judy Stone called “a work of passion and principal that can stand with . . . ‘The Sorrow and the Pity.’ ” Australian Merilee Bennett’s short, distilled film “A Song of Air,” a tribute to an autocratic father from his rebellious daughter, comes with praise from its Cannes screenings.

You could miss: “Inheritance” whose rich, gun-carrying, obnoxious subject, a would-be politician in Aspen, Colo., was shot, mid-portrait. Film maker Bill Donovan has shifted into the thinnest pop psychology and even thinner interviews to “explain” his subject’s rich-but-loveless childhood. Snore.

Always, there is the fear that something fine has been overlooked. The best remedy for this is to follow your hunches; if a film’s subject interests you, give it a try. There’s “Lowest of the Low,” by John Schwartz about Germany’s premiere investigative journalist, Gunter Wallraff who disguised himself to live as “Ali” a Turkish “guest worker” for 2 1/2 years, to taste German hostility and racism firsthand. Could be fascinating. Could also be another Geraldo Rivera. Take a chance.

For scheduling information call (213) 520-2000. Tickets will be available only on the day of each screening at Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex box office, 1332 Second St., Santa Monica; and tonight after 5 at the Directors Guild, 7950 W. Sunset Blvd.