Film

...Having said this, I should also report that the argument made in The Last Epidemic is most compelling, and forcefully stated...

...The Last Epidemic does not document the actual medical consequences of nuclear war, but a symposium devoted to them...

...It seems odd that there's nothing in Dialogue to even suggest that this woman was a film editor, and collaborated with her husband...

...In Dialogue with a Woman Departed, more so than in any other of his works, Hurwitz has realized a creative fusion of these two cinematic modes...

...The most recent evidence is Dialogue with a Woman Departed, a three-hour-forty-five-minute film eight years in the making, that Hurwitz produced, directed, edited, and photographed on his own...

...there is an enormous variety of shots in color and black and white, still photos, drawings, prints, and a number of intercut quotations from earlier Hurwitz films...

...Hurwitz was a principal collaborator on Heart of Spain, on the Spanish Civil War, and Native Land, a feature-length documentary reenactment based on the findings of the LaFollette Committee on Civil Rights...

...A beautiful and moving film setting the social and psychic dislocations of contemporary life against memories of a more stable and rooted past...

...The filmmakers (Ian and Eric Thiermann) have made an effort to heighten the film's visual impact by intercutting shots of mushroom clouds, the devastation of Hiroshima (overwhelming images which cannot be viewed too often), and missile launchings (apparently clips from Pentagon public relations films), but these remain mere illustrations—not integral expressions of the film's thesis...

...V Hits and Misses Three Brothers Italy's entry for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award, directed and co-written by Francesco Rosi...

...My admiration for Dialogue with a Woman Departed is not unreserved...

...It will not win itself a place in the history of documentary cinema, but The Last Epidemic should prove an effective tool for anti-nuclear consciousness raising and organizing...

...Of the 3,613,000 people in the greater metropolitan area, 780,000 would be killed outright, with total casualties of 1,620,500...

...I generally disagree with those who find films running over two hours (The Sorrow and the Pity, Reds) to be too long, but I think Dialogue could benefit from some cutting...

...Hurwitz's career has been extraordinary in its uncompromising dedication to independent filmmaking...

...And there is hardly less density on Dialogue's sound track: diverse natural sounds, occasional collages, the music of Bach, Woody Guthrie, Billie Holiday, and others...

...Venom A most implausible horror-thriller, starring the black mamba ("the world's most deadly and aggressive snake"), and a group of fine actors (Klaus Kinski, Nicol Williamson, Sarah Miles, Sterling Hayden, Oliver Reed, and Susan George) who should not have to earn a living appearing in such rot...

...Box 2324, Santa Cruz, CA 95063, (408) 423-1626...

...He seems to have mellowed over the years, investing his films of the past couple of decades with a broader humanism, but without compromising his politics...

...Like Joris Ivens, the Dutch documentary filmmaker who was one of his colleagues in Nykino, Hurwitz, now in his seventies, has become a model of integrity and persistence for the young and the committed in filmmaking...

...Nonetheless, there's little in this ambitious and deeply felt work to quibble over...

...It is poetic in structure, adhering more closely to the flow of memory than to the dictates of linear narrative...

...And a twenty-megaton explosion would kill 3,407,000—94 per cent of the Bay Area population...

...Hurwitz has pursued his goal in more than a half century of committed filmmaking...

...He grew up with a socialist background in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, went to Harvard, and served an apprenticeship directing and editing newsreels {Hunger 1932, Scottsboro), with the New York Film and Photo League...

...It is narrated by two voices: the filmmaker's, and a woman's expressing the thoughts of Peggy Lawson (as scripted by Hurwitz...

...Hurwitz has done some reediting, but he relies largely on clips from his early films and stock newsreel footage which will be familiar to most followers of documentary cinema...

...I'm not quite sure how to deal with such a work in a movie review...

...Nykino soon evolved into the Frontier Films collective (led by Hurwitz and Strand), the first independent company producing social documentaries...

...Exploited as well are several talented actors who ought to know better than to involve themselves in ventures of this sort, and the rediscovery of Cain's work...

...The paterfamilias is wonderfully played by the great Charles Vanel, who began in films in 1912...

...Brothers return to their southern Italian birthplace for their mother's funeral...

...The film traces "the growth of a woman's grasp of the world": the world of nature, of the inner self, of the urban environment, and of the political and social forces of her time...

...I could have done with fewer shots of flowers and cloud formations, which, toward the end of the film, are tedious...

...Its huge budget has made possible more spectacle than one ordinarily finds in caveman flicks, but it has not resulted in greater credibility...

...The numerous filmic quotations and the authorial narrative are, in some respects, more telling of Leo Hurwitz than of his wife...

...Quest is pretty funny, however, and it boasts one momentous sequence revealing the discovery of coitus face a face—perhaps a greater step for mankind than the lunar landing...

...Dialogue with a Woman Departed is the most thematically and formally complex of Hurwitz's fifteen principal films...

...In 1934, in search of more artistic freedom than was possible within the League (it followed a rigid Communist Party line), Hurwitz joined with others interested in exploiting the expressive possibilities of film in forming Nykino...

...Bringing to bear the available scientific data, Geiger projects that "a single explosion of a one-megaton bomb at 700 feet over San Francisco will destroy everything within a radius of one and a half miles...

...Cannery Row From a weak, episodic, and overly sentimental Steinbeck novel of derelicts and dreamers on the Monterey waterfront—a weak, episodic, and overly sentimentalized movie...

...Plies the theme of incest, fixing on the nubile young body of movie newcomer Pia Zadora (who was no doubt assured that her physical endowments make the acting art quite irrelevant...

...Good lighting and photography by Sven Nykvist (formerly Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer), several thousand cute little frogs, but otherwise saccharine silliness...

...Essentially an informative film, it relies principally on argument rather than imaginative enterprise...

...As a documentary work dealing with the most critical issue of our time, it thus belongs, by virtue of its subject and distance from commercial filmmaking, to a tradition Hurwitz helped found...

...Lawson's death in 1971, and her husband's wish "to reflect the shared experience of [their] time together," stirred Hurwitz to make this distinctive and formally original work that incorporates aspects of conventional biography, documentary, and narrative...

...Hurwitz acknowledged in a recent interview that two of the most important influences on him have been the films of Esther Shub, the Soviet master of the compilation film, and Alexander Dovzhenko, Soviet cinema's great epic poet...

...Butterfly An up-budgeted exploitation flick, based upon the James M. Cain novel...

...The film is unusually dense in visual imagery...

...FILM Michael H. Seitz Shoot Film, Not People My long-range goal," Leo Hurwitz has written, "has been to use and to expand the film medium to dramatize the meanings of contemporary experience, its beauties, tragedies, energies, and struggles—without accommodation to fashion, without seduction, without melodramatic falsification...

...Quest for Fire Oohing-and-ahhing Saturday matinee entertainment, despite its learned pretensions (a spoken ur-language created by novelist-linguist Anthony Burgess, body language concocted by zoologist-behavioral theorist Desmond Morris, and unspecified anthropological "research...

...In terms of cinema art, Epidemic thus bears about the same relationship to Hurwitz's works as a Bill Moyers Report does to Harlan County U.S.A...

...In portraying "the growth of a woman's grasp of the world," Hurwitz also recapitulates in a most vivid way the major American and world events from the 1930s to the 1970s and the leftist struggles organized around them: the Depression, the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the A-Bomb, the Rosenberg case, the Maoist triumph in China, revolution in Cuba, the civil rights movement, the rise of the Farmworkers Union, urban riots in the 1960s, black power, the war in Vietnam...

...The cumulative effect, however, is a greater sense of the continuity of leftist struggles in our time than that achieved in any other motion picture...

...As members of this group at the height of the Depression, Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, and Paul Strand did the principal photography for Pare Lorentz's Dust Bowl film, The Plow That Broke the Plains...

...Peggy Lawson, Hurwitz's wife and coworker, is the woman departed, the woman whose experience the film seeks to capture...

...H. Jack Geiger, professor of community medicine at the City College of New York, elaborates a scenario for a nuclear attack on San Francisco...

...The film's imposing centerpiece, an address by Dr...

...and Soviet arsenals...

...Such horrors would, of course, be multiplied beyond reckoning in a full-scale exchange of the nuclear weapons now in U.S...

...Videotape (standard formats) and sixteen-millimeter film versions of the work are available from the Resource Center for Nonviolence, P.O...

...While many of his associates in these early endeavors abandoned the political battlefield for the security of advertising and the Hollywood feature film, Hurwitz, despite blacklisting during the 1950s, continued by and large to work independently and in accord with his conscience...

...And I wish that Hurwitz had attempted to relate the growth of Lawson's "grasp" of things to her life's work...

...The Last Epidemic: The Medical Consequences of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War is a thirty-six-minute videotape summary of a fall 1980 conference of Physicians for Social Responsibility held in San Francisco...

...The variegated character of the imagery and frequent rack focusing (pulling the focus within a shot so as to change the focal plane) sustain an important secondary theme of the work—that of the nature and mechanics of perception, social as well as ocular...