THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five THE MICHiGAN DAILY Poge Five Th Film its u anir men Pr Arts the hour tonig turd Th unde ed b ages pen coM "I d'etr film Th ent, it i exac real defir self Ren Annual Film Festival offers creative films By JO MARCOTTY who cater to movies like L o v e prize winner; John Schotts a he Twelfth Annual Ann Arbor Story; or Mary Poppins, for to photographer and graphic artist; n Festival begins tonight with enjoy it, the audience must dlso David Robinson, a film maker usual gamut of experimental, be willing to explore. from Ohio University, and K r- mated, conceptual, and dou- Film freaks recognize some of en Sayre Higgins, buyer f.r the tary films. the previous prize winners pre- University's audio-visual films. resented by the Dramatie sented in this year's collection of Following the screenings in Center and Cinema Guild, films including Kurt McDowell, Ann Arbor, the award winning festival will show over 25 an old favorite and a special films will be sent on tour to rs of artistic pieces, starting guest of the festival. Some of his nine other Universities. ght and running through Sa- pieces are Siamese Twin Pin- The films will be shown in the ay. heads, Ronnie and Nosy Tosy. Architecture Auditorium Tuesday he films, often referred to as James Manupelli, one of the through Saturday at 7 p.m., 9 erground films, were describ- original organizers of the Film p.m., and 11 p.m. Tickets will be y Jay Cassidy, Festival man- Festival, is presenting (a real on sale beginning at 5:30 in the r, as "representative o: inde- mouthful) Portraits, Self-P o r- lobby before the shows, and ser- dent film makers who aren't traits, and Still Lives, 1972-1973, ies tickets can be Daught for missioned to do their films." with Special Reference to the $13. n other words, the raison Assassination of President John The special awards Showing will re of the film becomes the F. Kennedy, or, This is Not Auf- be presented on Sunday at the makers choice." weidersehn, this is Good-by. same time in the Architecture Auditorium, and in Auditorium A hey can be called independ- But these films are just a of Angell Hall. experimental, personal, but glimpse of what's to come. Bring a pillow to protect your- s difficult to pin down an Cinema Guild and the Dramatic self from the auditorium seats, ct definition of waat they Arts Center have selected judges a bag of popocrn to muucn on, ly are. Probably the b e s t from in and outside the Univer- and prepare yourself, not neces- nition is an artist's means of sity to present over $2,500 hi sarily for entertainment, b u t expression, or as Sheldon awards for the best films, which certainly for something creative an observed i his book on will be shown in Ann Aroor on and new. VOTE APtU I CINEMA GUILD proundly presents the 12th A-nn, Arbor Film Festival underground films, " medium of and for the individual as an ex- plorer and aun artist." And the individual's expression comes through in anyzhing from a documentary, to an animated cartoon, to an abstract expression of an idea, with a wide variety of camera and film te~hrique. But the Festival is not for those Sunday. Awards Jury consists of people who have shown an interest in past festivals, but are not neces- sarily film makers. This year they include Richard Weigand, the art editor of Esquire Maga- zine; Widge Powell, a graduate of the University's Art School: Doug Wendt, a previous Festival I Daily Photo by KEN FINK John Prine Attention Advertisers for total campus saturation over air call 763-3501 The Rock of Ann Arbor 4 Series $ 13.00 Single: $1.00 I ohn great By MARNIE HEYN With a twang, a mild manner, and three chords, John Prine laid back two sardine-like audiences at the. Ark Sunday night, and left them lungry for 'more. Prine shambled up to me mic- rophone carrying a coffee mug filled with something and opened the first show with "Spanish Pipe Dream." He explained that he wrote the song for a friend of his, a Puerto Rican dishwasher from Chicago, who kept asking for a song. Prine said, "He's not a dishwasher any more. I think he's a taxidermist, but he's still a Puerto Rican." His second number was "They don't know how lucky they are," written about "a girl in high school-t went out of my way on Fridays to walk down the same hall with her - she wore this sailor outfit." The crowd went quietly berserk when he broke into "Illegal Smile," singing along on the chorus-with gusto. Prine paused at one point to say that the song was one in which people heard their own words. "That happened to me once with Fats Domino's 'My Lil' Margie.' I thought that the last two words of the chorus were 'grumbly bean,' and when I got a copy of 'Hit Parade' with the words in it, there was no grumbly bean at all." Prine then sang a series of songs well-known to fans from his records, "Donald and Lydia," "Sam Stone," which completely altered the mood in the room from euphoria to introspection, and "Dear Abby," "about a wo- inan I run into whether I want to or not." Before s i n g i n g "Paradise" Prine explained some of the song's history. "My parents are from the town of Paradise in Meuhlenberg County, Kentucky. They moved to Chicago about 16 years ago so that my dad could make some money, and they al- ways planned to move back. But they never made enough money. "I had a cousin there, and we did a lot of bumming around. The place we like to go to best was this abandoned prison that had been empty since the Civil War. But that was forbidden territory. When my aunt found out we'd been there-my aunt, she is this short, square person with a scary voice-she used to say 'I love you' in this deep rumbly voice and she scared the shit out of us. "She was really frightened about our playing near the. pris- on, because there was lots of - TONIGHT - Series Tickets go on sale at 5:30 in the Architecture Auditorium Prine gives performance Man and Family: loony British rock Shows at 7, 9, and I1 (each different) Tuesday - Saturday Sunday: Winners and Highlights in both Auditorium A and Architecture Aud INFO: 662-8871 snakes. She said we had to take a pistol with us whenever we went, and if anything smelled like cucumbers, we were sup- posed to shoot like mad. But we never saw any. "Then Mr. Peabody and his company-they'd been buying up land for a long time-decided that they were gonna dig up all the coal. I don't know if you peo- ple have ever seen a strip mine. Now the' place looks like the moon-that was the most disap- pointing thing I ever saw. I ex- pected Judy Garland and stuff." During .the second half of the show, Prine delivered more fine music, playing straight-forward and effective guitar and address- ing the mike in an easy, con- versational way. Called back by a delighted crowd for a three- song encore, he performed "An- gel from Montgomery" with a different m e lo d y -than people were expecting from his record- ing of the song. "I liked this tune, but I was too lazy to write new words to it, so I just used it with these." After being barraged with re- quests, and responding to one for "Christmas in Prison," Prine talked about one of the events described in "Everybody needs somebody that they can talk to." "This guy wo'd run Jesus down with-his boat realized that the only people wo'd seen Jesus in a long time were the ones who subscribed to the (National) Enquirer." Prine began the second show with "They oughta name a drink after you" and "Torch Singer" from his Diamonds in the Rough album. He told the audience that he had played in Buffalo the night before. Loud groans were heard. He said, "Guh. I only been there three times but it feels like thirty." He introduced his next song: "This song is about bein' left. Everybody gets left once or twice-if they haven't been, they oughta." After a couple more numbers, Prine got tanged in the logistics of pulling on his coffee mug and cigarette and balancing his gui- tar ,and sort of lurched into the piano. He chuckled and said "I can see it now. Years from now you'll be reading the Variety obits and come across my name and say, 'Prine? Oh yeah, he played Ann Arbor once and got his ass caught in the piano.' " As a prelude to "The Great Compromise," P r i n e told an anecdote: "Me and Francis Scott Key wrote this next song. He hadn't had a hit in 200 years, and it was between basketball and football seasons so he wasn't even getting any residuals. He set out to, find America, and found it the first place he stop- ped-with a girl in a drive-in movie-you know when we were driving in on 1-94 this morning, we passed a drive-in and there was just this one car, all steam- ed up with the top down." Prine talked about his long, relationships with his guitars: "i started playing 12 years ago- it doesn't show. My parents bought me my first guitar--from Sears I. think-JC Higgins-it was a lot like their bikes-it was metallic blue with a white heart on it. I learned seven chords in six months and thought I was a musical genius. Then the neck fell off and the strings came apart. It was okay because I wanted a good guitar anyhow- but I had no money so I got a job dusting pews. I must have dusted 18 or 19 hundred pews that summer, and I got a red Gibson with a white humming- bird on it. I wrote a lot of songs with that guitar, but eventually it got busted up. I traded it in on this one. But I kinda missed the old one and I wrote it a song: 'Souvenirs.' " Prine tickled his listeners with "Billy the Bum," a story about his booking agency and "Onoma- topoeia,"and a. slew oftother songs, each number getting a warm response and close atten- tion from the crowd. Prine again returned for an encore, closing with "Everybody needs somebody that they can talk to." Every- body had sore palms. We'll try to be patient. And please come back to Ann Arbor soon. ANN ARBOR MOVIE THEATRE GUIDE By TOM OLSON Man brings us another varie- ty of loony British' rock, a dou- ble album called Back Into the Future '(United Artists LA179- H2). The best songs all arrive on the first side, and they all have the odd quality of a wind- up toy gone berserk. "Just for You" brings togeth- er Emerson, Lake, and Palmer moog-ery and the rhythmic style of John Philip, Sousa. Mid- way through, the group breaks out in wacky Beatle harmonies that sound like a lullaby in the middle of a military march. The album photograph would have you believe that Man has, regressed to the turn of the cen- tury, but really they are just do- ing some creative tinkering with the music of the past dec- ade. Unfortunately, only about half of the material on these two discs is good enough to justify using up precious vinyl. Like ev- ery double album, this one has its share of padding. An "A" to Man for making two sides of good music, and a "C" to their producers for not stopping with that. It's Only a Movie (United Ar- tists LA181F) brings the 7-year career of the fine British band Family to a dazzling close. Fam- ily's music sounds like a collabo- ration between Charlie Chapin and the Rolling Stones: 95-mile- an-hour rock and roll propelled by 426 cubic inches of irony on the back. What other group has written a song - a song you could dance to - about the night life of a child molester? Vocalist Roger Chapman has refined his deadpan to the point that he could make you smirk by singing about your mother's funeral. Chapman and lead gui- tarist Charlie Whitney are the Lennon and McCartney of the lunatic fringe, patiently craft- ing-pretty rock songs that mock everything in sight. They de- serve to be cultural heroes, but over here they are nobodies. It's Only a Movie is the madcap album of the year. -_ TON IGHT!-Tuesday at 7 & 9 p.m, Summner of '42 JENNIFER O'NEILL, GARY GRIMES, with Jerry Houser and Oliver Conant DIRECTED BY ROBERT MULLIGAN An end-of-innocence sage, set in the movies' favorite season for this ritual, and during World War 11 An endearing film. WIen Hermie, 15, first sees Dorothy, 22, whose husband is in the service, he knows he will never quite be the same again. MUSIC by Michel Legrand. 'WED. & THURS. at7 & 9p.m. Philippe De Bgroe "kig HCAW With ALAN BATES, GENEVIEVE BUJOLD OUR MOST POPULAR FILM RETURNS AGAIN, AFTER ALL! (if you like this movie be sure to see the same dIrector's DEV- IL BY THE TAIL, March 27th) M~h n . . . fil . . . aiv auditorium a, angell hall NEXT TUESDAY-McCABE AND MRS. MILLER. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20-FRITZ THE CAT "Uproariously amusing!" N.Y. Times HAPPY ENDING and DAY OF ABSENCE Two comedies by Douglas Turner Ward Obie Award Winners of the Negro Ensemble Co. GUEST DIRECTOR CARLTON MOLETTE II, Spelman College MARCH 13-16, 1974-8:00 P.M. 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