ARTS The Michigan Daily Thursday, March 12, 1981 Page 5 U PAUL PLISHKA: Film school clunkers with a few bright lights in festival Voice of MET By DENNIS HARVEY How do you establish criteria for reacting to films at the Ann Arbor Film Festival? It definitely isn't at all like going to see something/anything at a commercial theatre, and sometimes it isn't quite like seeing a movie at all. A fair amount of the time watching the, films is somewhat closer to looking at the covers of Brian Eno albums or pictures at a very modern, very chic exhibition. We stare at the designs, sometimes 1.) hypnotized, often 2.) trying hard to remain politely in- telligent viewers and not make rude comments in our boredom. OPENING NIGHT at the festival, which runs through March 15, there was the usual healthy minority of yawningly admiration-demanding exercises in pure technical exploration, art-school artifacts that would be best served by permanent projection on the cool white walls of a museum. But the visual stimulation of Margaret Craig's Choreography, with its groups of short lines changing colors and forming geometric patterns, and the alter- nating-image flicker of Bruce Hogeland's After Images, had the arresting immediacy that mysteriously separates 1.) from 2.). Sometimes the films are like static on the radio; everyone seems to think they want something else, but what may seem meaningless from a conventional perspective can have its own fascination. Tom Leeser's Opposing Views is a blitz of jigsaw-like superim- positions in psychedelic colors; it doesn't have any discernable connec- tions or point, but it washes over the viewer, drawing us into the constant stimulation of chaos. Once in a while there's an entry that's closer to poetry than anything else: music of a different sort, based around the literary subtlety of its thoughts, in- 'Otensely personal, very serious. Sharon Couzin's Deutschland Spiegel is an oblique procession of B&W images - snapsnots of the Berlin Wall, oddly for- bidding footage of street parades - that dreamily compliments its accom- panying stream-of-consciousness spoken poem. a A FEW OF the entries are always a bit like being back in junior high, giggling helplessly at things you know you're going to find hopelessly juvenile and dumb in a couple of years. Silliness and amateurs go well together, covering each other's tracks. The har- mless religious satire of Gil Gauveau's Ex Cathedra, and Sally Kellman's I Was a Teenage Assassin for the F.B.I. (gum-chomping heroine Candy is sent after Fidel Castro), are finally rather innocuous in thier heartless cleverness falling a bit too neatly into the one-joke category. But you laugh anyway. A rare film communicates with us the way a serenely happy person can, and god knows truly happy people can win you over to almost anything. The old oh-no reaction was prompted by the title Stilt Dancers of Long Bow .Village, and it did turn out to be a documentary, about an annual festival in rural Gu Zhang of the People's Republic of China. Look, I'm a TV child too, I never liked documentaries (too good for me), OK? But filmmakers Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton dodge National Geographic straight foreign cultural reportage. Their translations of the villager's comments whimsically preserve every beside-the-point remark, every casual "Be Quiet!"; the camera, duty-bound only to pursuing its own raffish curiosity, may leave a sub- ject in mid-sentence to follow a ,small child riding by on a trike. You can feel the artists' innate gentleness and their quirks through the affection, innocence and humor they manage to find in everyone on screen. Seeing through the eyes of someone so generously spirited, we find beauty in places that promised little of interest. Oh, yeah, some of the movies actually feel like real plain-old movies, too, good movies - the sort that get you in- volved in characters and what's going on, leaving you very, very satisfied in a pleasantly conventional way. Rick Hadley's Quotations from Chairman Stu is an elaborately constructed, polished comedy, a cheery social satire of the 1960's class-conscious Goodbye, Columbus variety. THERE'S NO REAL malice or indic- tment in it, though. L*e the enduring screwball comedies of the '30's, its pokes are gentle, and the characters' foolishnesses aren't ridiculed - they're regarded affectionately, liked for their faults. A naively radicalized son comes home from college, bursting with good intentions, anxious to liberate. his obliviously capitalist father's factory. The blissfully funny climax has the family's palatial home invaded, during sister's wedding ceremony, by a lot of dancing illegal Haitian immigrants whom Junior has protectively stashed in the backyard. As in all the nicest, comedies, all ends well and happily for everyone. Neatly acted and resolutely sweet-tempered, Quotations was the best narrative effort of the evening. Where else can you be pushed in rapid succession through so many reac- tions, most of them positive, none of them blatantly uninteresting? Is the general audience rumble at the Festival conversational, or is it the rustling sound of minds expanding? By JANE CARL It is said that opera is a delicate balance between singing and acting. Paul Plishka, in his recital at Hill Auditorium Tuesday evening, proved that he has achieved this balance in the concert hall as well as on the opera stage. Plishka began his concert with a set of songs by Tschaikovsky and Rach- maninoff, which ranged from "Don Juan's Serenade" to "Spring Waters." A leading bass with the Metropolitan Opera since 1967, Plishka demonstrated the incredible projection which opera singers are famous for. HIS ACCOMPANIST, pianist Thomas Hrynkiw, however, suffered from ex- treme inconsistency throughout the performance. Although he did have moments of brilliancy, Hrynkiw failed to be a supportive entity on stage, prefering instead to burst forth into thunderous chords at some highly inop- portune moments. Plishka's second set of songs contained lieder by both Schubert and Schumann. What could have been the highlight of the evening, Goethe's fanciful tale of the supernatural, "Erlkonig," instead lost all of its dramatic propensity when an overzealous Plishka fan clapped before the final heart-rending line telling of the child's death. The Schumann portion was very effective and truly Germanic. The Wanderlied, a robust, fanfare-type piece reminiscent of a German drinking song, contained a kind of singing at which Plishka ex- celled, exploiting his incredible vocal range and presenting pleasing con- trasting sections. The first of the two truly operatic works of the evening was the so-called "Catalogue Aria" from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Here Plishka presented his expressive acting abilities by creating such a believable atmosphere that one expected the rest of the cast to join him on the stage at any moment. THE SECOND HALF of the concert contained a group of captivating Ukranian folk songs, part of Plishka's heritage, which he explained to the audience before their performance. The songs all had a nice folk flavor inherent in the harmonies and the flow of the melody. Most interesting were two pieces en- MANN THEATRES VILLAGE 4 315 N MAPLE Daily Discount Matinees Tuesday Buck Day All seats $1.00 Nominated for 6 ACADEMY AWARDS including BEST PICTURE BEST DIRECTOR As timely today as the day it was written. ills Hill titled "Cranes" and "Days Pass" which contained some emotions very relevant to the current strife in the: modern day Ukraine. The "Four Gambling Songs" by: Niles were in English and designed to entertain. Ranging from the essence of. an old English ballad to a cradle song to a plaintive Southern lament, tpe songs were a perfect showcase for Plishka's diverse range of dynamics, which were used to their maximum dramatic potential. Plishka ended with Verdi's "Ella giammai m'amo" from Don Carlo,an expressive, impressive work requiring much stamina and control, but being less of a blockbuster ending than was expected. This was quickly remedied by the encore presentation, which hap- pened to be everyone's favorite, "Some Enchanted Evening," and represented yet another of the diverse and highly entertaining musical sides of Paul Plishka. A ROMAN POLANSKI FILM TESS' ® A COLUMBIA PICTURES RELEASE 1:15 4:30 8:00 The Romantics, pictured above, will be appearing in concert this Saturday night at Hill Auditorium at 8 p.m. Oh those boys-first they were into red vinyl and now black leather. Bet they haven't read 'TheiPreppy Handbook.' Nominated for 2 ACADEMY AWARDS Nothing's going to stand in your way. 0?RICHARD Kinnell: The poet's view of nature ' , . DREYFUISS -IRVING A COLUMBIA PICTURES RELEASE lb >1:45 4:15 7:15 9:45 By CAROL WIERZBICKI Reading to a packed audience at Rackham Ampitheater on Monday, Galway Kinnell, surely one of the most important poets of our time, conveyed quiet energy. He confidently and elegantly read a variety of well-known poems and new manuscripts, reciting even his "scribblings" with sensitivity and expertise. Kinnell, whose achievements include winning the Guggenheim awards as well as several prizes in 'translating, has an open-air style akin to Gary Snyder's, yet it is tempered with a discipline that suggests Native American and Chinese influences. 'Perhaps one of the reasons for his wide appeal is that he brings natural details into sharp focus and then applies them to some larger aspect of life. His ter- seness often evolves into an emotional vision, as in "the Fly": The fly I've just brushed from my face keeps buzzing about me, flesh- eater starved for the soul. One day I may learn to suffer his mizzling, sporadic stroll over eyelid and cheek, even seize on his burnt singing with love. HAVING MEMORIZED much of his poetry from Body Rags, The Book of Nightmares, and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, Kinnell read as if transfixed by something directly in front of him. The serious mood was broken, however, by two hilarious poems about his son, Fergus. One of them, called "Kissing the Toad", describes a toad that Fergus is trying to make his sister kiss, as having a belly "like those old en- trepreneurs sprawling on Mediterranean beaches". Another poem, "Crying," involved an unusual form of audience participation: a volunteer from the audience laughed loudly at specified intervals. The poet also read selections from new, yt-to-be-finished works; from the intricate imagery of "Meditations on Papaya," to the exotic landscape of a poem about a volcanic crater in Hawaii, he threw out colorful images that appealed to taste, touch and smell. Especially in these last poems, one sees that his concerns are esoteric, sharply focused, and deeply introspective. Kinnell's world, peopled with bears, frogs, and sometimes destructive humans, could be described as a kind of spiritual "survival of the fittest". His anti-war politics were evident in the urgency in his voice as he read "A White Flash Sparkled", a cinematic treatment of the interrupted lives in Hiroshima on the day of the bomb. "The tragedy I saw", Kinnell ex- plained, "was in the roughness and homeliness of the homemade objects found in the rubble and then placed on exhibit in the Japanese memorials at Hiroshima and Nagasaki." At the reading, one saw in Galway Kinnell a poet who improves with time, and who possesses a concentrated energy that grows and grows.,Kinnell's surefootedness and lack of ambiguity, as demonstrated in his themes of self- sacrifice and renewal, show him to be not only a writer of talent and skill, but one who has a great tap root to the cen- ter of the earth. Nominated for 6 ACADEMY AWARDS OrdinaryPeople 1:30 4:00 7:15 945 ROAD GAMES 1:15 3:15 5:15 9:30 (R) 7:30 PPIF UM SHOWC ASE RODUCTION "All The Way Home" BY TAD MOSEL MARCH 11-14 8 PM TRUEBLOOD THEATRE TICKETS AT PTP 764 -0450 r\ Screenings at the Michigan Theatre: 7:00, 9:00 & 11:00 p.m Saturday: 1:00, 7:00 & 9:00 p.m. All programs are different and of substantially equal quality. Award winners screened Sunday at 7:00, 9:00 & 11:00 p.m. Single admission: $2.00. Daily series: $5.00 (not available Sunday). Advance sales begin at 6:00 p.m. for that day only. $20.00 series tickets on sale the opening day of the Festival at 5:30 p.m. All tickets are sold at the Michigan Theatre. CINEMA 11 ZO4y PRESENTS March 12-LORCH HALL (Old A&D) - OPEN CITY 7 (Roberto Rossellini, 1945). Shot during the last days of the Nazis in Rome, this powerful film of human drama spawned Italian neo-realism. Most of the PM people in the film are not professional actors, and much of the'footage was shot by hidden cameras. The tensions of the times and the heroic resis- tance of the people are so intensely captufed as to make this film a master- piece. (103 min.) SATURDAT, MARCH 21, 1 PM MICHIGAN THEATRE $8.50 RESERVED Tickets at Herb David's Guitar Studios, Schoolkids' Records and the Ark. No checks 4~(******************** *