‘Nine’ celebrates a century of life

A gypsy once told “Nana” Mary Mirabito Livornese Cavaliere that she would live to be 96, and as she approached her 96th birthday in 1995, her grandson, filmmaker Alex Halpern, began filming her, encouraging her to talk about her long life. Not only did Halpern, after six years of labor, fulfill his grandmother’s hope that he would finish “Nine Good Teeth” within her lifetime, but she is still alive to enjoy it at 104. The American Cinematheque presents “Nine Good Teeth” tonight in its Alternative Screen showcase.

Halpern’s embracing yet penetrating film, with its lyrical collages of archival footage giving it a vibrant flow, is above all a celebration of a life that has been lived to the fullest. Mary Cavaliere was born in Brooklyn in 1899 to a large Sicilian immigrant family. She identified with her father, a respected longshore foreman, rather than her mother, and he in turn treated her more like a son than a daughter. In any event, Mary emerged with a forceful personality that led her to become the sometimes controversial yet revered Rock of Gibraltar for her family that she remains to this day. When Cavaliere tells her grandson that she still feels young inside, she is entirely credible.

There’s a tempestuousness to Cavaliere’s family history that certainly seems very Sicilian. Halpern uncovers the melodramatic secret behind a scar on his great-grandfather’s face -- an elicited threat that was actually carried out after years of various infidelities in the family. In addition to Halpern’s mother Maria, Cavaliere also had a son, a frustrated musician who became close friends with Jack Kerouac when they were students at Columbia. Kerouac took Maria to her high school senior prom, and she in turn became one of his muses while he was writing “On the Road.” Cavaliere, who adored Jack herself, and her family appear in Kerouac’s “The Town and the City.”

While someone as outspoken and strong-willed as she is could not help but anger and even alienate her relatives from time to time, Mary Cavaliere remains a woman who has held her family together for generations with enduring bonds of love.

From Friday through Sunday the Cinematheque is presenting Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Erotic Films at the Egyptian. The craggily handsome and wiry Pasolini cast himself as a 14th century artist in 1971’s “The Decameron,” the sunniest, most enjoyable movie he ever made. He poses the question: Why produce a work of art when it’s so nice to dream about it? The answer -- as we watch this rich, sensual fresco through the eyes of the artist, who is able to perceive a transcendental beauty in every aspect of life, despite humanity’s infinite capacity for the folly, greed, duplicity and hypocrisy that overflow the film’s eight classic tales dealing with a variety of gulls and cuckolds -- is to celebrate life, no matter what.

For all his success with bringing author Giovanni Boccaccio’s work to the screen, he failed badly the following year with Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” a dull and drawn-out experience, despite its X rating at the time. Yet in the artistic ups-and-downs that characterized his entire career, Pasolini completed what he called his “trilogy of life” with the ravishing and joyously affirmative 1973 “Arabian Nights.” It’s a celebration of life, even though shot through with a sense of the dire and cruel absurdity of fate. Filmed in the most gloriously sunlit color in Ethiopia, Iran, Nepal and Yemen, “Arabian Nights” is one of Pasolini’s most beautiful films. Its various vignettes, which flow easily from one to another, are framed by a youth’s quest for his beloved, a slave girl who has been kidnapped.

Each of the three films in his trilogy will be followed by his updated adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (1975), in which Fascist dignitaries, early in World War II, take turns corrupting a kidnapped company of young people, ending with a revoltingly graphic series of tortures and murders. Shortly after completing his film, Pasolini himself was brutally murdered. At the time Michelangelo Antonioni remarked: “In the end he was a victim of his own characters -- a perfect tragedy foreseen in its own aspects -- without knowing that one day it would end up overcoming him.”

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Screenings

What: “Nine Good Teeth,”

tonight, 7:30 p.m.

Pier Paolo Pasolini:

The Erotic Films.

What: “The Decameron,”

Friday, 7:30 p.m.

What: “Canterbury Tales,” Saturday, 7 p.m.

What: “Arabian Nights,”

Sunday, 5 p.m.

Where: American Cinematheque Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles

Info: (323) 466-FILM