Newport nudes

Local film festival gets exposure

Like most film critics, I've got a great bod, and I got a rare chance to unveil it all last month at the Newport International Film Festival. In conjunction with the US premiere screening of Arlene Donnelly's feature documentary Naked States, those at the fest were invited for a happening, to do what the amateur models in the film did: make like Adam and Eve for still-photographer Spencer Tunick, who has crossed America, all 50 states, smooth-talking regular people into stripping down to nothing for his art photographs. Some of the photos are of individual nudes. Many more are group shoots (1200 strong at a Phish concert), bodies as geometric patterns.

Who would be there for his "site-specific installation" on an Atlantic Beach right outside Newport? Christine Schomer, the fest's executive director, and Nancy Donahoe, the program director, both good sports, said they'd be among the bare, and I cheerily volunteered also, though apprehensive about the shoot's prohibitively early time. Five a.m. Sunrise. Could I get up? No clothes and no coffee?

I made it there somehow, a caffeine-less drive in the semi-dark, and so did, incredibly, 75 others. A few of them I knew. Everybody looked drugged, pulled from his or her bed. But photographer Tunick was all energetic business, quickly getting us all to sign something (maybe a disclaimer, I was too sleepy to read what it said), then urging us to hop out of our clothes and spread out on a designated rock, our faces turned away from the camera. We followed instructions obediently, pretending not to notice all those buff parts around us (everyone, I think, was peeking), and definitely acting as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be buck naked long before breakfast among 75 mostly strangers.

"No watches, no glasses," Tunick shouted out instructions. "Hold glasses hidden, in your left hands." The rock was slimy and freezing; it felt like lying on a huge, serpentine tongue. The body positions were dentist-visit painful. Tunick took a bunch of shots, then shuffled us to another rock. "No yoga positions," he said. "Fall like you are sleeping, or dying."

Finally, Tunick set us before flowers and shrubbery -- "I'm doing color photography; I want some green" -- and had us on pavement in a parking lot. For the only time, he moved some folks around from where they spontaneously lay. For his lovely photos, he didn't like their tan lines. "This isn't Saint-Tropez," he explained.

Then it was over. Everyone raced for his or her clothes. The hearty ones drove up the road to a designated breakfast spot for eggs-over-easy and toast with their new, liberated friends. Feet and hands frozen, I scurried back to my noncommunal hotel bed.

Tunick's Newport pictures could be part of his next exhibit. Look for a brave, bare-derriered film critic. Meanwhile, Tunick has his sights on a mass shoot in Fenway Park. "I'd like to make the Green Monster the Pink Monster," he told the Herald.

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Unless you love skiing and the worst kind of shmoozing, why bother with the Sundance Film Festival each January? It becomes clearer each year that few of the much-hyped films that premiere there actually pan out. Maybe four or five are okay, and they're shown at other festivals and get put into distribution. But what I find more damning of Sundance (and I have to confess I've never been there), and proof of the impoverished taste of the selectors, is the number of estimable American films that they don't choose to show.

Just look at what happened this year at Newport. The deserving jury winners for Best Feature and Best Documentary -- David Gordon Green's George Washington and Amir Bar-Lev's Fighter -- were both rejected by Sundance. How could that be? George Washington is an amazing American regional indie shot in rural North Carolina with a sublime ensemble of black children and adolescents, a gentle tale of an accidental death that was influenced by the great African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett. Fighter is an extraordinary journey across Europe by Arnost Lustig and Jan Weiner, two septuagenarian Jewish refugees from Naziism and Czechoslovak Communism. They talk, more often they quarrel, and their conversations are the tastiest and most thrillingly philosophical since Wally Shawn sat down with Andre Gregory for My Dinner with Andre.

George Washington, distributed by Cowboy Booking, will play in Boston this fall. Fighter has yet to find a distributor, but I'm hoping for a major local screening through the Boston Jewish Film Festival.

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Everybody is sorry that Betsy Sherman has been forced to forgo most of her Boston Globe film-reviewing and interview assignments because of health problems. I'm pleased that, for now, some of the slack has been taken up by freelancer Loren King, who is a fine writer and a nice person and knows her cinema.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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