Film

...The Night of the Shooting Stars An uncommonly beautiful and affecting film that depicts the experiences of the inhabitants of a small Tuscan town in the days just before U.S...

...but it won't soothe you...

...The Plowshares Eight were convicted on charges of trespassing, conspiracy, and criminal mischief, and were handed prison sentences ranging from one-half-to-five years to three-to-ten...

...The Eight could only spare a few days for filming the reenacted courtroom sequences, and that didn't leave enough time for them to learn their lines, or for retakes...

...Our stars don't have press agents, they have passion and strength...

...The good guys entered private property and hammered away on nuclear nosecones...

...Expert witnesses were to testify that U.S...

...It must be said that In the King of Prussia is not an especially good-looking movie (except for the title sequence...

...While it may be true that most glossy, state-of-the-art productions tend to lull the viewer into a state of thoughtless complacency, I can think of many films of "meaning and content" that make more expressive use of the resources of cinema than In the King of Prussia: the early work of Eisen-stein, Pudovkin, and Vertov, films of Joris Ivens and Marcel Ophuls, Alain Resnais's Night & Fog, Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, films of Jean-Luc Godard, and more...

...De Antonio's work is more provocative in form and content, and will not let itself be enjoyed as entertainment...

...De Antonio's film is something of a hybrid, combining dramatic reenactment of the trial with documentary footage of events that surrounded it...

...Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the judge refused to admit such testimony on the grounds that the U.S...

...The real child is still missing, but people who expect such verisimilitude at the end of Without a Trace simply don't know their Hollywood movies...

...The film, however, allows the full "greater danger" case to be heard: We are given the testimony of some of the barred witnesses—George Wald, Robert J. Lifton, Richard Falk—in press conferences outside the courthouse...

...In the former, everyone is bundled and shivering, and in the latter close-ups reveal droplets of sweat...

...But I didn't want to make it look rich—I wanted it to be what it is...

...The damaged property—a pair of dented nosecones—is introduced as evidence, but in what turns out to be a theater of the absurd, not one of the prosecution witnesses, all long-time employees at the G.E...

...Washington to Moscow Peacewalk—The Road to Global Sanity (fifteen minutes, color...

...Washington to Moscow is notably upbeat, and in its depiction of concerned people of all ages organizing and acting for change, it provides a valuable reminder that there are alternatives to despondency and frustration, tf Hits and Misses Camera Buff (Amator) A tragicomic dramatization of the perils, contradictions, and occasional satisfactions (including that of being taken seriously by those in power) of filmmaking in Eastern Europe...

...forces liberated it from the German army...

...A moving but resolutely unsentimental drama by young writer-director Srdjan Karanovic, who proves himself to be one of the most talented Yugoslav filmmakers to emerge since the party purges of the early 1970s...

...It concentrates on a 1981 protest march from Washington, Vermont, to its symbolic twin, Moscow, Vermont...

...bt the King of Prussia makes no pretense of objectivity...

...A Question of Survival has been edited with visual imagination, and goes further than its film cousin did in exploring the economic and social consequences of the arms race...

...Your honor," two of them declare, "we did that, we broke those bombs...

...Budgetary limitations compelled de Antonio to shoot on videotape...

...nuclear policy poses real dangers and violates international law...

...At first, de Antonio had assumed that relaxed rules permitting cameras in the courtroom would allow him to film the trial live...

...A Question of Survival (twenty-five minutes, color...

...I was interested in a film of meaning and content...

...And it is a cheap movie, after all—about $240,000...

...Petria's Wreath This film chronicles the life of a Serbian peasant woman through several separate decades in the middle of the century...

...The screenplay is by Beth Gutcheon (based on her novel, Still Missing), a neighbor of the bereft Soho family...

...The Plowshares Eight defended their actions as a response to a "greater danger"—the right of a citizen who has a gun pointed at his head to protect and defend himself...

...The narrative suffers from an overdose of coincidence and contrivance, but Voight is a convincing errant father, Marie Christine Barrault is appealing as a new woman in his life, and the children are difficult but charming...

...There is little in it that will be news to those who keep themselves informed on the subject, but the filmmakers have produced a well-made and persuasive primer...

...No other filmmaker, however, seems to regard underproduction as the basis for a leftist aesthetic...

...And though the documentary scenes were shot in the winter snows of Pennsylvania, the interior trial scenes had to be made in the sweltering heat of New York in midsummer...

...In the courtroom, deprived of their most promising legal defense, the defendants proudly admit their "guilt...

...Viewers are thus treated to the enlightening spectacle of the weapons makers pleading ignorance and innocence, while the defendants lay claim to knowledge and take responsibility for their own actions...

...available on sixteen-millimeter film and videocassette from Mark Robbins, 143 East 37th Street, New York, NY 10016, (212) 684-7319) documents the grass-roots origins of the Nuclear Freeze Campaign...

...In the final work, the Plowshares Eight play themselves and actors play the judge, prosecuting attorney, witnesses, police, and jurors...

...With its huge scale, exotic settings, stars, and personalizing of the issues, Gandhi managed to appeal to viewers across the political spectrum (and will no doubt be honored by the distributors of Academy Awards...

...I know nothing about the specific uses of the Mark 12A," says the manager of shop operations...

...But the film's roughness is also a deliberate choice...

...But by their actions and through their statements, the Eight placed the onus of guilt on the prosecution...

...Table for Five Engaging drama, starring Jon Voight as a divorced and long-absent father seeking to reenter the lives of his children...

...The unanimous approval it received makes one wonder whether Gandhian principles were considered or just the film—whether viewers were, indeed, lulled into a state of thoughtless passivity...

...The ailing economy and the prospect of unprecedented budget deficits have deepened concern over military spending...

...Now is a good time for a "peace offensive," and two recently released films could serve as weapons in that effort...

...plant, will admit to knowing what they are or what they are used for...

...policies were not on trial...

...The retreating German occupation troops and the advancing Americans remain largely unseen, as the film homes in on the reactions of the townspeople—their personal, political, and class conflicts—at this critical moment in modern Italian history...

...the defendants sought to convince the jurors that this gun was pointed at their heads as well...

...nuclear policy will be outraged...

...Hollywood's Martin Sheen plays the judge...

...On September 9,1980, they stole into the General Electric Reentry Systems Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, hammered two nosecones for nuclear bombs, poured some of their blood on the damaged hardware, and were arrested by police...

...But he quickly discovered that "they never allow you to do political stuff, just murders and things...

...By readily acknowledging their responsibility, the Plowshares Eight expose the moral irresponsibility of the prosecution and its witnesses—and the system they serve...

...It also includes highlights of the Children's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was co-founded by sixteen-year-old Susan Rabin, who was also an organizer of the March...

...De Antonio is not convincing when he tries to find political and aesthetic justification for the unavoidable...

...Given an opportunity to trace his moral development and explain his actions, Daniel Berrigan concludes, "I could not not have done what I did...

...available in all video formats and sixteen-millimeter film from High Hopes Media, 932 Twelfth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98122, (206)322-9010) was produced for Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, and draws on material taped at a Seattle symposium in April 1981...

...In the King of Prussia is about the civil disobedience and subsequent trial of the Plowshares Eight—Daniel and Philip Ber-rigan and six other radical Catholic pacifists...

...Confronted with the film, supporters of U.S...

...They forcefully demonstrated that it is necessary, at times, to commit civil disobedience against unjust authority...

...I know my film will be attacked for its cheap look," de Antonio told an interviewer for The Village Voice...

...This is partly the result of the conditions under which it was made...

...Some of these filmmakers suggested more radical structural alternatives than anything essayed by de Antonio, and some made deliberate use of underproduction, as de Antonio did...

...Only the Eight were to be judged, he said, on thirteen charges, the most serious of which was destruction of private property...

...To me the thing that's antihuman about film is its essential lulling capabilities...

...And that will make Emile de Antonio very happy...

...The dryness of its aesthetic would be more interesting than all that lace-and-teapot stuff...

...All we do is manufacture the hardware...

...In short, real people are themselves in the documentary segments, while in the reconstructed scenes, real people act as themselves and actors play real people...

...It is, de Antonio has written, "a film of commitment which is entirely supportive of the actions of the Plowshares Eight"—the work of an unabashed leftist filmmaker who believes that "objectivity" is an illusion that sustains the status quo, whether it is used in cinema verite or television network news...

...And you surrender to it, you're a passive object being worked over by that screen...

...The Night of the Shooting Stars was written and directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Padre Padrone...

...And the recent fiasco in Washington over an arms control negotiator has caused more Americans to doubt the Government's commitment to ending the arms race...

...Yet for all its lack of polish, In the King of Prussia is persuasive in the case it makes for disruptive pacifism—perhaps just as persuasive as the superproduction Gandhi...

...In this instance, they asserted, the gun was the threat of nuclear destruction...

...The didacticism and solemnity of some documentary works about nuclear madness tend to create a feeling of discouragement...

...As far as I know, this is the first film to be released in America by Krzystof Kieslowski, who is regarded as one of the most original and outspoken Polish filmmakers...

...Barred from the actual proceedings, the filmmaker contemplated "a new kind of film," and decided to intermix verite footage with a scripted reconstruction of the trial based on court transcripts...

...De Antonio's film helps us see this by providing an example of resistance to nuclear armament that carries risk and honor...

...You go into that beautiful, dark, womb-like theater, and you spend all that money, the sound is perfectly mixed, the images are nongrating...

...This one quite shamelessly transforms the story of a young boy who mysteriously disappeared in New York's Soho section a few years ago into tearful, melodramatic pap...

...Neo-realism has given way to a more subjective vision of events in this movie...

...In several respects it's similar to The Last Epidemic, which focused on a PSR symposium in San Francisco, but it relies less heavily on talking heads...

...This is not a nuclear facility...

...Without a Trace One of several recent films that exploit human-interest news...

...it mixes the recollections of a woman who was six at the time with the collective memories of her compatriots...