Beyond Baroque Film Series Gets to the Art of the Matter, as Greenaway Program Shows

Most film curators who search for interesting movies know full well that they’ll be shown in decent cinemas.

Tosh Berman is like most film curators, except that he knows the ultimate screening of the movies he tracks down is going to be, well, an adventure.

He happily admits that the central room at Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles’ oldest ongoing literary arts center, is hardly ideal for showing films. The acoustics and sightlines in the room in the Old Venice City Hall are nonexistent. Because of pillars, viewing can be like sitting in an ancient ballpark.

“I like it that way,” says Berman, 37, relaxing in his Hollywood living room. “My philosophy is that you can make things complicated, or you can make them simple. I want this simple and low-tech.” Then, his wife, Lunna, adds: “No. It’s no-tech.”

To be sure, Beyond Baroque’s burgeoning monthly film series runs absolutely counter to the programming and environs of the multiplex complex dominating American moviegoing habits. And among non-university venues, only Filmforum, the granddaddy of Los Angeles’ alternative and underground film scene, has a comparable mission: to nurture an audience for cinema as art.

Berman’s approach is perfectly reflected in the upcoming program of rarely seen short films by British painter-writer-director Peter Greenaway (screening Thursday).

Although Greenaway has recently risen to international prominence on the weight--and heated controversy--of such feature films as “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,” he has made more than 25 short films, beginning in 1959 while training to be a painter. Yet just as Berman has found film references and techniques constantly seeping into his own chosen art, poetry, so Greenaway’s painting enters into his adroitly witty, personal films.

The trio Berman has selected reflect what the wiry, thoughtful curator describes as Greenaway’s “obsessive fascination with systems, questioning who makes them, and why. Plus, he has this Monty Python-like humor that catches you off guard and lightens things.”

The brief “Windows” has been described by Greenaway as summing “up everything I’ve done afterward: It’s about statistics, it’s very eclectic, it has a very lyrical use of landscape, it’s about death. . . . “ The director himself narrates on the deaths of numerous people who fell out of windows; as he does so, his camera peers out a window onto the lush countryside.

“A Walk Through H,” which critic Tony Rayns cited as one of the best British movies of the ‘70s, is subtitled “The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist.” It retraces for the viewer a journey taken by the filmmaker’s perennial alter ego, Tulse Luper, through a land called “H.” The camera follows obscure paths across “maps,” which are actually Greenaway paintings. What typifies this baroque, absurdist odyssey is that while we never learn what “H” stands for, we are told what it doesn’t stand for. By the 92nd map, the ornithologist is “at the end”; Greenaway’s father, an amateur ornithologist, died just before the film was made.

Luper’s legacy gets a satirical once-over in “Vertical Features Remake,” a “mockumentary” about the fictitious Institute of Reclamation and Restoration’s flawed attempt to reconstruct Luper’s unfinished film “Vertical Features.” His visual protest of the destruction of England’s ecology gets lost in the institute’s bureaucratic black hole, mirroring the filmmaker’s fear of losing control of final cut.

For Berman, these works provide a context for the American filmgoer just now coming to terms with Greenaway’s movies; by situating this program after Greenaway’s “Drowning by Numbers,” which appeared last spring, and before the November release of “Prospero’s Books,” an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Berman hopes that his audience will be able to map its own walk through the filmmaker’s world.

“It’s always funny talking with someone after one of these films,” Berman notes, “because they often think it’s all true, that there really is someone named Tulse Luper who did all these things. But the films are not just make-believe; they are about make-believe, and why we believe.

“Both Greenaway and another favorite director of mine, Jean-Luc Godard, question their art, which seems to be a constantly running theme since the film program started in earnest last November. I was showing Godard’s ‘Band of Outsiders,’ which is partly about deception, just as the Gulf War started, when we were watching images which turned out to not always be the way they seemed at the time. The crowd seemed to get the connection.”

This was, of course, a case of fortuitous timing, but it exemplifies how the Beyond Baroque film program harks back to the ‘50s and ‘60s when film societies exposed audiences to non-commercial films, linking art and political concerns.

The societies have vanished, replaced by university film schools, but Berman worries about the film literacy of younger audiences. “I’ll show some works by Kenneth Anger, for instance, and the students think they’re like videos by The Cure, even supposing that Anger was influenced by them, without knowing that he came along way before MTV. In film classes I took at L.A. City College, we were asked on tests if independent films outside the studio system existed. And most students wrote, ‘No.’

“So this film program is a crusade.”

The crusade continues Oct. 4 with a screening of Jean Vigo’s documentary classic, “A propos de Nice,” with a reading by David Greenberger, editor of Duplex Planet literary magazine. Two weeks later on Oct. 18, in a co-production with Filmforum, Anne Robertson will bring her marathon act to Beyond Baroque, with a four-hour show combining her diary-like films with live performance.

“Audiences have become too specialized,” says Berman, “even at Beyond Baroque, where you have your poetry crowd, or theater crowd, or performance art crowd, but they may not overlap. Hopefully, these kind of programs will break that down.”

Berman’s father, the trailblazing assemblage artist Wallace Berman, was fond of such overlap in his collage-like works that liberally quoted from movies, politics and newspapers. Tosh and Lunna proudly display many of them on their apartment walls, next to Lunna’s own amusing artworks.

This media mix, in fact, is part of the way Berman became involved in Beyond Baroque in the first place. After hosting “Tea With Tosh,” a public access TV chat show with such artists as Philip Glass, Berman was invited by James Corcoran Gallery director Sandra Starr to curate a film program to accompany a multi-gallery show on California assemblage art. “So I hunted down films by Man Ray, Bruce Conner, James Broughton, Robert Nelson and others. That’s when I hooked up with Beyond Baroque.” The center’s readings and performance director, Benjamin Weissman, “was very eager to include cinema” as part of the center’s activity, Berman says.

“In a way, I’m just following Marcel Duchamp, who said that it was important to be influenced by as many art forms as possible. But what really motivates me, you know, is that I want to see these films, and think others should see them too.”