Terms and Conditions Apply: The Cinema of Robert Ellis Miller

Peter Medak's films toy with notions of cosplay, masquerade, gamesmanship, and how power and permission structures figure into these human diversions. His filmography includes The Ruling Class (1972), The Changeling (1980), A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1971), The Krays (1990), and others, all which capitalize on these ideas. Sanity is fragile, ephemeral, and suspended from a very thin tether in all his films. This piece gets to the bottom of why Medak centers his work on such themes, and why they carry biographical weight for him personally.

Eddie Huntly, an east coast radio personality, moves to San Francisco to marry Thea, the sister of his best friend Neil, a successful entrepreneur. Shortly before Eddie's arrival, Neil is found murdered in what the police surmise was a simple mugging gone awry. As the sullen Eddie steps in as interim host of his old friend Dean's late-night talk-radio show, he obsessively makes regular visits to the forested spot where Neil's corpse was found. One such visit unleashes a chain of unpredictable events that sends Eddie snooping into the life of a sleepwalking drifter with a mysterious past.

Mixing elements of narrative, experimental, pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema, Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross), a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto, lives in the shadow of his father, the eminent intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it, in protest of the world's selfishness, a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process, the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.

Lenny Bruce's depiction on film did not start or end with Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974). Through these other often offbeat cinematic incarnations, this essay piece considers how Lenny Bruce was the perfect Bob Fosse subject, and how Fosse's focus on the lives of performers invigorated his portrait of the controversial, trail-blazing comic.

Shot on black-and-white super-16mm, A Trip to Swadades tells the story of a 74-year-old ex-professor named Schweitzer Haas who, after many years of living away from Philadelphia, the city where he came of age, returns to visit his hermit brother Ezra who has perfected his freakish steel-trap memory. As a result, however, his apartment has become an unlivable and unsanitary place. He goes out to find some cleaning supplies, only to find himself lost in a city he no longer knows. By shear happenstance, he bumps into an old friend, a world-class cut-up, who takes him to a place of importance to their past. There, Schweitzer realizes he must reconcile with the brother he has not spoken to and has refused to understand for most of his life.

Clara grew up in the Belize jungles but was sent to live in San Francisco after a childhood trauma. Her older boyfriend, Gabriel encourages a trip back to her jungle home. Once arriving, the familiar faces and tropic environment fills Clara with hope for a brighter future. She's soon reminded that the jungle has a dark side and begins to realize that Gabriel may have an even darker one himself.

"What do you do when the spark touches down-brief and hot?" So begins award-winning director Rob Nilsson's (Permission to Touch, MVFF 2015; A Bridge to a Border, MVFF 2014) provocative meditation on the Möbius relationship of fiction to reality, and the notion of creative control. In Love Twice, Luz and Ken are star-crossed lovers in screenwriter Sal's script, until their desire takes shape, inscribing itself into a movie of their own design. Risking his sanity to save the screenplay, Sal struggles to regain control of his characters and satisfy the demands of his producer Lester (legendary Velvet Underground founder John Cale), driving a wedge between the lovers with a desperate attempt to seduce Luz.

Frictions develop when Yisroel "Izzy" Jonigkeyt, a Chassidic Jew from Crown Heights, travels to San Francisco to visit Polish-born Catholic friend Marek Wisniewski with the intent of discovering why a Bay Area art-world iconoclast named Harry Kierk seeks to destroy a lifetime's worth of his own work. As the visit progresses, Izzy and Marek discover for the first time that complex historical baggage impinges on their curious friendship and, soon, they begin to understand why Kierk is driven towards destruction. Continued encounters with Marek's vaguely anti-Semitic cousin Irek (who is their only gateway to contact Kierk) only compound these tensions.

Irving Rapper is, in many ways, Hollywood's forgotten man. After getting his start as a "dialogue director" at Warner Bros. in the mid 30's, he became synonymous with the studio's "women's pictures" and rose in prominence as one of Bette Davis's most consistent collaborators, including on her biggest commercial success, Now Voyager (1942). He was a rebel who led the studio in suspensions for chronically refusing to direct the scripts handed to him by the brass, waiting instead for material that better suited his interests and thematic preoccupations. He was also one in a secretive fraternity of gay directors who had to conceal their identities and shield their private lives from potential public ruination. Daniel Kremer takes you through an unexamined and misunderstood life of a man of great artistic inclination who expressed his innermost yearnings covertly through his work in motion pictures.

During one fateful summer, Richie is forced to deal with his mom's deportation and prepare for his First Holy Communion as a Catholic while living with a caring adoptive family whose young son becomes Richie's closest friend and support.

An imagined plague diary

Canadian-born filmmaker Sidney J. Furie made his name with British hits like The Young Ones (1961), The Leather Boys (1964), and The Ipcress File (1965). When he arrived in Hollywood, Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra wreaked havoc on his first major studio productions. In 1968, the newly emigrated director joined a stable of cutting-edge filmmakers at Paramount Pictures, under the new leadership of Bob Evans. His films saw both a stylistic departure and a shift in thematic focus. What was behind the evolution, and which aspects unite all of Furie's films?

For those with an open mind about what cinema can be. Jerry Garanyan, an ambulance-chasing San Francisco lawyer, is a camera buff and a dogged collector of moving images. Though his legal career is a dead end which nevertheless pays his bills, he lives for the ordinary ghosts, extraordinary shadows, and fugitive moments he has preserved forever in his personal library of 8mm celluloid. As his dearest sister reckons with losing her hearing, he is targeted for an elaborate con by smooth film world scam artists who purport to represent the "real movies."

Sky-high housing costs, rents no one can pay, urban development, and street crime make life difficult for RV dwellers in Berkeley, California. City bureaucrats collaborate with real estate agents to gentrify neighborhoods forcing out already marginalized people living in cars, trucks, and RVs. With no more West to escape to, they contemplate turning back East.

A ten-year drought brings local ranches to the brink of disaster. The search for Bert Neville takes its toll on Rail and Mitra. They break up and Rail continues on alone. Travis, Ziggy and Karin hitchhike in high country and get lost in a burnt out forest. Taylor travels with Ukrainian gallery owners looking for the prototypical western artist. Dane introduces Rail to his mother, Violet, a full blood hewise, who remembers the horrors of the Indian schools. Her ex-husband Bedford refuses to give his real name to a white man. Her daughter April broadcasts a tribal blog on indian affairs. Dane and Rail are stopped by local militia types. Entrepreneurs propose a geothermal plant to ranchers and locals divided by political views. Rail finds an old map in an abandoned ranch and Mitra, now recovered, rejoins him. Is the mystery of Bert Neville about to be solved?

Cowboy, a senior citizen ex-lawyer and gambler, is persuaded by his spunky seventeen year old neighbor, Rachel, to seek retribution for having been cheated in Las Vegas many years ago. So begins a wild adventure that marks a young girl's rite of passage into womanhood and an old man's bittersweet final awakening to life, love and happiness. Along for the ride is Maggie, Cowboy's salty ex-girlfriend, Buddy Boy, Cowboy's best friend, and Harold, an unusually young Vegas motel owner who falls hard for Rachel.