Back to basics

Origins in Lumière, the id in Possession

Not a lot of folks know about Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981), but those who do are often fervent about it, clutching onto the 81-minute American version while cursing the unavailability of the Polish director's 127-minute cut. What possibly more could happen, they thirst to discover, in an additional 46 minutes? Even crazier, more excessive stuff?

You betcha. After arduous negotiations with the European distributor, the Harvard Film Archive and the ICA have brought back squirming the real beast in an imported 35mm print. The complete Possession shows May 24 at 9 p.m. at the ICA as a centerpiece of its "Gothic Film and Video" series, then moves to Harvard for screenings May 29 and 31 and June 1.

If your taste is off-center kooky, Possession certainly can't be missed. Over the top? Try, out of the stratosphere, Roman Polanski baying at the moon with advanced rabies, or Alfred Hitchcock bloody and buck naked. Imagine Rosemary eagerly fucking a monster so she can have the Devil's baby. Imagine the Psycho bodies piling up and left about to rot, sliced Marion next to diced detective Arbogast. Something like that.

Here's a bit of the story: a wired young Brit, Mark (Sam Neill), arrives home in Cold War Berlin from some kind of espionage assignment in Russia. In the meantime, his French wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), doesn't want him any more. She's wild-eyed, tormented, but won't inform him what's up. And she's determined to leave him, even though they have Bob, a nice little boy.

To judge by our introduction, Mark is already a frenzied, crazy-acting man. He only gets loonier as he races about West Berlin trying to figure out how he's lost his wife, and to whom. First, he uncovers Anna's German lover, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent), who, like everyone in Possession, is a total space shot. But that's not the end of it: Anna has moved far beyond Heinrich to . . . ?

"He makes love to me all night," Anna brags to her husband, though Mark has no idea what this "he" might be.

The Twilight Zone.

In an empty apartment near the Berlin Wall, Anna has seemingly created her own monster from the id. That's Mark's competition. The Possession payoff is a dandy one, this lizardy bloodsoaked thing lying there with wormy tentacles. But to visit it, to see it, is to die! Each time someone sites the gross-out creature, he's driven into a whirling-dervish mad fit. Anna, deep under a spell, scotches him.

These brutal scenes are definitely inspired by Catherine Deneuve's stoned-out executions in Polanski's Repulsion. But Zulawski pushes his story farther. There's stuff with doubles at the end, doppelgängers of Mark and Anna, that I don't begin to understand. There's a long scene in the Berlin underground of Anna swooning like a suicidal Ophelia, on the way to an operatic miscarriage.

And don't worry: the scene's intact that everybody waits and waits and waits to see. Mark walks into the bedroom of the empty apartment, and there, on the bed, is his wife on her back, as naked as Lady Godiva; and she doesn't even notice him because she's so enraptured, so wrapped up, with that which lies on top of her . . . writhing! . . . writhing!

Eeek!

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France's Lumière brothers started cinema with both eyes open, and it could be argued that the century of subsequent filmmaking is already there, encapsulated in the Lumières' 50-second, turn-of-the-century micro-movies. There's documentary (trains arriving at the station), human interest (a cute baby being fed), comedy (a man squirted by a suddenly animated hose), and so on. There are hundreds of these tiny films, and many remain forceful and magical.

For Lumière & Company (1995), playing May 23 through 28 at the Harvard Film Archive, 40 filmmakers from around the world were challenged to make their own petite Lumière-style movies, using a refurbished original Lumière camera, a Cinématographe. It's a wooden box on a tripod that has to be hand-cranked. There's no panning, though the camera can be mounted on a dolly. The film is 35mm black-and-white, the light is natural exterior. A real Lumière film is a sequence shot of 50 seconds of continuous action.

Among the directors who tried a little movie: Liv Ullmann, Arthur Penn, Jacques Rivette, James Ivory, Peter Greenaway, and Zhang Yimou. Spike Lee's is a faltering attempt to get his infant son to say "Dada!"

How did today's cinéastes do? Not bad. In my estimation, there are two mini-masterworks among the 40 efforts. The first is Romanian Lucian Pintilie's extreme long shot of newlyweds running to a helicopter through a field of unruly children, a man dancing about with a white horse, and other fun things to see. The helicopter rises with the couple, revealing a seated crowd watching as if at a tennis match. Anarchy, exaltation, a surprise ending -- all in 50 seconds.

The other great film is David Lynch's less-than-a-minute horror flick of truly macabre images, smoke and mystery, 1950s cops invading a middle-class home, paranoia and poetry, a compact Lost Highway in which, this time, nothing goes astray.