Local heroes

From Starving to Super at the HFA

by Peter Keough

SUPER CHIEF, Written and directed by Nick Kurzon. At the Harvard Film Archive March 6.

STARVING ARTISTS, Written and directed by Allan Piper. With Allan Piper, Sandi Carroll, Joe Smith, and Bess Wohl. At the Harvard Film Archive March 5.

They're only movies, true, but what's infuriating about crap like 200 Cigarettes and Jawbreaker is that they're being promoted as "independent" films while genuinely talented filmmakers with aspirations beyond main-stream mediocrity toil in obscurity. Two films screening this weekend at the Harvard Film Archive (three including Bette Gordon's Luminous Motion, which will receive a theatrical release later this spring) showcase local directors struggling with tiny budgets and big ambitions and achieving results of passion and originality. Despite some occasional, understandable unevenness, their work is a lot more satisfying than most of what the studios are dumping on the screen in this lean season.

That struggle takes literal form in Cambridge filmmaker Allan Piper's shamelessly crude and witty, self-reflexive and exuberant Starving Artists. With some movies you can see all the money that went into it on the screen; here you can see the names of the people who paid it. Anyone who invested at least a buck in the production got his or her name included somehow in the finished film -- a phone message, a blurb on the cover of a porn magazine. Far from being a gimmick or a distraction, this ploy fits in nicely with the film's theme of art transforming life, and vice versa.

Piper himself is breezy in the role of Zach Coolidge, a motormouthed gadfly of a playwright who's inspired by a series of Slacker-like street encounters to stage a musical comedy about the end of the world. Chief among these chance meetings is that with Mildred (Bess Wohl, who brings some of the sly sweetness of a Hope Davis), a local critic and graphic novelist with whom he's smitten but can't seem to help offending, either by his cursing (she's a Mormon -- and why not if Neil LaBute can be one?) or by accidentally punching her in the nose and spilling scalding tea in her lap. Meanwhile, in the apartment next to Zach's, wanna-be filmmaker Jay (Joe Smith) desperately tries to piece together a Tarantino-esque debut feature that Zach's fratty roommate mistakes for actual mob violence.

The illusion/reality border wears pretty thin as each character finds confusion and inspiration, à la Shakespeare in Love, in everyday irritation and absurdity, and they unwittingly shape one another's artistic endeavors, with tragic and downright silly results. Lest this seem too hifalutin, be it known that Piper has a weakness for puns, and the sight gags and comic shtick are nonstop and largely successful. Starving Artists might not be a convincing argument for true love and the triumph of the imagination, but it makes a strong case for persistence and audacity.

Nowhere has the line between illusion and reality blurred as much lately as in politics, and Super Chief, the genial and illuminating documentary by another Cantabrigian, Nick Kurzon, seeks clarity in the microcosm of a tribal election. The opening shots of Minnesota's White Earth Ojibwa Reservation are a series of contrasts: geese in unspoiled waterlands, a "Bingo" sign and a crammed parking lot, rundown clapboard housing. Under chairman Darrell "Chip" Wadena, White Earth has been pulling in millions through its Shooting Star casino, but not much has trickled down to rank-and-file members of the tribe. Invited by his friend Erma, a tribal activist, Kurzon brings his camera crew to observe the unfolding drama of the tribe's upcoming election.

Wadena, the self-styled "Super Chief," is widely regarded as "Super Thief" by his constituency, but protected by his network of patronage, kickbacks, election fraud, and intimidation, he's retained power for 20 years. Neither can the federal government intervene much because of the reservation's autonomous status. A couple of determined candidates seeking change make a run at him, but Super Chief is not an exposé or diatribe so much as a moving character study and an affirmation of common decency.

One challenger is Lowell Bellenger, a curmudgeonly retired welder reminiscent of Vermont mock-senatorial candidate Fred Tuttle in The Man with a Plan. He's first seen in his backyard fishing for dinner -- his net is nearly empty. More polished is Eugene "Bugger" McArthur, who doggedly canvases for votes door-to-door with hearty handshakes and earnest smiles. Both are viable alternatives to Wadena's corruption, but even that has its appeal -- paunchy, grinning, playing with the big rings on his fingers, Wadena wears his guilt with an air of innocence. The process, in the end, triumphs. For Kurzon, too: years in the making, Super Chief has been picked up by HBO.