The Fan and the Movie Camera

"Long live the consciousness of the pure who can see and hear!"

That statement by pioneer Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov kept reverberating in my brain after my prime movie experience this year -- watching his silent extravaganza The Man With the Movie Camera (1929), with a score performed live by the astonishing three-man Alloy Orchestra, at the 1,500-seat Castro movie palace in San Francisco. (The show returns to the Castro Feb. 7.) The sold-out house handed it a five-minute standing ovation that would have gone on longer if the staff hadn't had to clear the theater.

Attending The Man with the Movie Camera with a crowd alive to every nuance reminded me of how electric it can be when a huge audience -- not a clique or a cult or a coterie -- connects with something worth appreciating. Vertov's chef-d'oeuvre isn't merely a celebration of the joy of movement and the gift of sight. With unbounded optimism, Vertov salutes the variety of everyday urban life. Setting his prototype cameraman loose to chronicle an unnamed Soviet city from dawn to dusk, Vertov, without any narrative, wrings lyricism from the commotion in the street and the trolley yard and comedy from newfangled exercise devices and a bureau that handles both divorce and marriage. His protean style deploys every device from split and superimposed images to pixelation and freeze-frames.

Every now and then, you need a Man With the Movie Camera to remind you of the basic reasons any sane person watches movies: the promise of open-minded, eye-filling explorations of an infinite variety of subject matter; unjaded delight in technique; the revelation of hidden pleasures in milieus you thought you knew from your own experience; and the chance to discover something fresh and to do it with viewers who are lifted beyond schisms of race or class or gender.

"On the movie-house habitue," Vertov once wrote, "the ordinary fiction film acts like a cigarette on a smoker. Intoxicated by the cine-nicotine, the spectator sucks from the screen the substance which soothes his nerves. A cine-object made with the materials of newsreel largely sobers him up, and gives him the impression of a disagreeable antidote to the poison." Aided by the suitably dubbed Alloy Orchestra, The Man With the Movie Camera defogs the brain and renews the gusto of any movie addict.

If Vertov had been able to attend American art theaters in the 1990s and had seen the reverence bequeathed to dogs like Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, he might have been moved to stand up and proclaim (as he did in a 1924 journal), "We are carrying the battle against art cinema, and it is hurled back at us a hundredfold!" When art-house audiences continue to confer respect on chic, snickery art things such as the Coen brothers' Fargo, you may echo Vertov's demand for "Conscious people, not an unconscious mass, ready to yield to any suggestion!" If they weep through flabby religious exotica like Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and applaud the heavenly church bells of the ending, you might want to take up Vertov's slogan "Down with the scented veil of kisses, murders, doves, and conjuring tricks!"

With the split in the general movie audience becoming ever more pronounced between crowds who go out to action hits like Broken Arrow and those who eat up feckless Jane Austen adaptations such as Emma, the debate over what constitutes a "chick flick" and a "guy flick" has entered serious conversations. The best movies obliterate those categories.

Alan Taylor's Palookaville (written by David Epstein) may sound like a guy flick, but its wry, fond manner wins over women too. This North Jersey street fantasy centers on a trio of buddies -- stolid William Forsythe, antsy Vincent Gallo, and genial Adam Trese -- who think that plotting a major theft will help them kick-start their stalled lives. If Taylor and Epstein's touch were less sharp and affectionate, you could say the film described dysfunctional friendship. But it's really about sticking together through thin and thin. The cinematographer, John Thomas, gives the film a mulchy, autumnal richness, and the performers are droll -- they don't tip their hands to the audience or condescend to their roles. And there's something daring in a male-hanging-out film that gets you rooting for one of its heroes not to pull the trigger on a gun.

Writer/director Matthew Bright's spunky Freeway jumps the lane divider but stays on its own wayward course. This feminist update of "Little Red Riding Hood" gets you rooting for the wrong-side-of-the-tracks teen heroine (Reese Witherspoon) to pull a gun, a knife, or anything lethal on the movie's Big Bad Wolf (Kiefer Sutherland) -- a child psychologist turned serial killer. Also shot by the reliable John Thomas, this time in a lurid, cartoonish style, it's one of the year's wittiest, most audacious and free-spirited indies. Freeway wins over men because, unlike Thelma & Louise, it takes the heroine and the audience through the whole ugly/exhilarating/depleting cycle of revenge without whitewashing or ennobling it. Witherspoon's performance is a thrill -- fearless and funky -- and Sutherland matches her, bringing a smart spin to the kind of feral pig he regularly plays in commercial clunkers such as A Time to Kill.