Something to ‘Shout’ About

The American Cinematheque’s “The Outsider: A Tribute to Jerzy Skolimowski” continues Friday at Raleigh Studios at 7:15 p.m. with “The Shout” (1978), a stunning 1978 film from a highly venturesome stylist long obsessed with the psychological struggle for dominance within relationships. This retrospective is a key Cinematheque event, reminding us anew of the Polish director’s unique power as a filmmaker and making available rare early films.

A mysterious, forceful stranger descends upon the isolated North Devon home of a quiet, polite married couple (Susanna York, John Hurt). Working from a Robert Graves story, Skolimowski and his co-writer Michael Austin introduce an element of the supernatural in their development of the eternal triangle.

“The Shout” opens with some perplexing, dislocating images and proceeds to a game of cricket getting underway on the grounds of an insane asylum. As Alan Bates prepares to keep score, he begins telling his character’s story to a hapless young man (Tim Curry) assisting him.

In flashback we see Bates, a wanderer, receiving the hospitality of York and Hurt, an avant-garde composer. There’s an instantaneous, powerful attraction between York and Bates, who speaks of his weird experiences in the Australian outback where he claims he learned the aborigine’s gift for shouting a person to death. Armed with earplugs, Hurt takes Bates to some nearby sand dunes for a demonstration, which serves ingeniously to unleash the element of the supernatural in the battle of wits soon underway between the two men.

“The Shout” unfolds with terrific tension and economy as it communicates through sound and image rather than through conventional exposition.

Bates is a thunderingly eloquent madman, York a poised if bored lady-turned-uninhibited-wanton and Hurt one of Skolimowski’s typical ineffectual heroes, in this instance a glib, superficial type who proves unexpectedly resourceful. Robert Stephens is the rather grand chief medical officer at the mental institution. “The Shout” screens again on Saturday at 9:30 p.m.

Screening Friday at 9:30 p.m. is the challenging and exceedingly complex “Walk-Over” (1965), which plays like a continuation of Skolimowski’s ambitious debut film, “Identification Marks: None,” which screened last weekend. “Walk-Over” has a similar, though more formal, elliptical style, and unfolds in 35 highly visual, often breathtaking takes. It’s as unsettling as the first film and is again an oblique commentary on life in a grim Communist state in which a boxer (Skolimowski, himself an amateur boxer), a onetime engineering student expelled from his university a decade ago, arrives by train in an unnamed city.

There he resumes a desultory relationship with a take-charge woman (Elzbieta Czyzewska), an upwardly mobile engineering bureaucrat. She’s an ex-Stalinist who places statistics before safety. He enters a factory boxing tournament that has decidedly ironic, equivocal consequences. Again, Skolimowski casts himself as a man who feels he’s a failure, one who senses time is running out for him and whose spirit is profoundly at odds with his rigid, stifling society.

Following “Walk-Over” is “Le Depart” (1967), which celebrates poignantly that time in a young man’s life when he discovers that girls are more important than cars. And no young man ever loved cars more than Skolimowski’s ingratiating, impoverished hero (perfectly played by Jean-Pierre Leaud).

The series of scrapes that he gets into because of his determination provides the Polish director, who’s unabashedly on the side of youth, with the opportunity to comment on the adult world Leaud is about to enter. With scarcely an exception, the adults in this film are self-centered, dishonest and quite ready to sexually exploit Leaud and his girlfriend (Catherine Duport).

Skolimowski, however, is able to see humor in these encounters, and that his resilient hero can do the same is the source of this comedy’s charm. Like other young directors who emerged from Eastern Europe, Skolimowski has a very wry sense of humor and a highly developed feel for the ridiculous combined with a great compassion and concern for the individual.

His style is appropriately skittish and stunningly set off by some wonderful camera work that dramatically captures the classic beauty of Brussels, as ancient as the hero and heroine are young, a marvelously dissonant score and, above all, by Leaud himself.

Ever since Leaud made his debut in Truffaut’s “400 Blows” he has been one of the most expressive young actors on the screen. “Le Depart” is full of funny offbeat bits by him, the best of which is his wordless alarm at a pass made at him by a rich matron.

When Polish censors refused to permit the release of “Hands Up!” (1967), which screens Saturday at 7:15 p.m., Skolimowski, who had returned to Poland after “Le Depart,” saw no alternative to leaving the country. Then in 1981 he suddenly was notified that the film would be released at last. He then created a kind of free-floating, surreal documentary introduction, with montages of devastated Beirut, where he was acting in Volker Schlondorff’s “Circle of Deceit” (1981) and with shots of him making “Moonlighting” in London and participating in “Long Live Solidarity.” He then segues, before we realize it, to “Hands Up!,” in which he plays one of four men who depart a glittery, formal party and wind up drunkenly aboard a freight car, which--with the help of drugs and champagne--takes them on a hallucinogenic journey into an imagined past, where freight trains transported so many to death camps.

This is the kind of film that invites endless interpretations of what it symbolizes of Poland present, past and future. (213) 466-FILM. Skolimowski will appear after all programs.

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Among the films screening this weekend in LACMA’s “Fassbinder and His Friends” series is the late German Wunderkind’s superb 1974 “Fox and His Friends” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), a classic tale of a naive proletarian destroyed by a bourgeois snob. But what gives this West German film its particular mordancy is that it takes place in a gay milieu so well-observed as to be universal.

Though its setting is probably Munich, it could just as easily be New York, San Francisco or Beverly Hills. And in being a film about people, their relationships and their values rather than about homosexuality, “Fox and His Friends” emerges as one of the screen’s best serious portrayal of gays.

Just as a carnival barker (Karl Scheydt) begins his spiel, he’s nabbed for tax evasion. His husky, homely lover Fox (Fassbinder), who works in the sideshow as some sort of fake head-without-a-body act, unself-consciously comes on stage and kisses his lover farewell as the authorities take him away.

Broke and unskilled, Fox hits upon the idea of entering a state lottery and convinces himself he will win--and, astoundingly, he does, garnering a 500,000-mark prize. In the meantime he’s picked up in a public bathroom by a suave, middle-aged antiques dealer (Karl-Heinz Bohm) through whom he meets Eugen (Peter Chatel), a handsome young man.

To Fox, Eugen represents everything he is not; Fox’s primary, perhaps sole attraction for Eugen is his new riches. Poor Fox, he hasn’t a chance, really. His money speedily goes to shore up Eugen’s father’s floundering bindery business and to buy a luxury condominium and expensive antiques to furnish it.

The leading of this particular lamb to the slaughter unfolds as a ferociously witty tragicomedy that gradually becomes less funny and more pathetic, told with deep compassion and high style. The gay world Fassbinder so acutely delineates becomes a microcosm for society at large.

Yet Fassbinder’s satirical thrust serves only to underline his ability to see his people in the round: His gays are no better and no worse than his straights. As sweet-natured as he is, Fox is an oaf who at times would try the patience of a saint, let alone an exploiter like Eugen. For all the bitchery that abounds there are those, both straight and gay, capable of kindness.

But “Fox and His Friends” is finally a bleak film, an indictment not of gays but of contemporary life as it is lived virtually everywhere in the so-called civilized world. As more often than not in a Fassbinder film, stunning imagery and succinct performances by his repertory of players abound. “Fox and His Friends” will be followed by Joseph Losey’s “The Servant” (1963), a kind of “Fox and His Friends” in reverse. With Dirk Bogarde and James Fox. (213) 857-6010.