KINO SLANG

KINO SLANG
at the

Echo Park Film Center

Friday

September 27th, 2019

Doors at 7:30pm

$5 Suggested Donation

Echo Park Film Center

1200 North Alvarado St.

Los Angeles, CA. 90026

presents

THE BANK
(Charlie Chaplin, Essanay, U.S.A., 1915)

and Introducing...

A PLACE FOR TOMORROW

(Behrouz Rae, U.S.A., 2019)

Premiere screening for the cast and crew of the film, open to the public. Free beer.

THE BANK

1915. Essanay. U.S.A. 25 minutes

Directed by Charles Chaplin.

Assistant director: Ernest van Pelt. Photography: 'Rollie' Totheroh and Harry Ensign. Screenplay: Charles Chaplin. Scenic Artist: E.T. Mazy. With: Chaplin (the bank janitor), Edna Purviance (the secretary), Charles Insley (the bank manager), Carl Stockdale (Charlie, the cashier), Billy Armstrong (another janitor), Leo White (a customer), Fred Goodwins (the doorman), But Jamison (customer/leader of crooks), Wesley Ruggles, Frank J. Coleman, Paddy McGuire (the crooks), Jon Rand (a salesman), Carrie Clarke Ward.

"Out of the other Essanay comedies, The Bank is outstanding and probably the most popular and best known Chapin film of this period as well. Again Chaplin played a man rejected in love, covering a wider range of feeling than he had done in The Tramp (1915), suffering more tragically at the end, clowning more furiously at the beginning. Again (as at Keystone) he played an office janitor, again he did mad things with mops and buckets, outraging the feelings and faces of innumerable important people, including the manager, customers, and his fellow-janitor. Again, as ever, he was in love with an unattainable girl, this time the typist, as always played by Edna Purviance. Again, as in His Prehistoric Past (1914), a dream took him out of the drab present into unspeakable glory -- only this time it was not just a glum policeman he woke to face, but total disillusion, the collapse of his dream of happiness in love. Again he did a lot he had done before, but at a much greater depth. The Tramp had shown the pathetic, the lyrical, and the rapturously joyful Charlie, The Bank showed Charlie the tragedian."

(Isabel Quigley, Charlie Chaplin, the Early Comedies)

"Oh, the day that I was happy,

It will not come again."

"When I watch Charlie Chaplin's old films, I no longer laugh in the same way. I think of Kafka...

"I once asked him: 'Why are you sad?'

"He replied: 'Because I have become rich by playing a poor man.'"

(Jean Cocteau, 1952, Les Lettres françaises)

"At every turn the world beats him, and because he cannot fight it he puts his finger in his nose. He rescues fair damsels, and finds that they are not fair. He departs on great enterprises that crumble to rubbish at his first touch. He builds castles in the air and they fall and crush him. He picks up diamonds and they turn to broken glass and at the world's disdain he shrugs his shoulders, and answers its scorn with rude jests and extravagant antics.

"He is sometimes an ignoble Don Quixote, sometimes a gallant Pistol, and in other aspects a sort of battered Pierrot. All other figures of fun in literature and drama have associates or foils. 'Charlie,' in all his escapades, is alone. He is the outcast, the exile, sometimes getting a foot within the gates, but ultimately being driven out, hopping lamely, with ill-timed nonchalance, on the damaged foot.

"He throws a custard-pie in the world's face as a gesture of protest. He kicks policemen lest himself be kicked. There is no exuberance in the kick; it is no outburst of vitality. It is deliberate and considered. Behind every farcical gesture is a deadly intent. Never do the eyes, in his most strenuous battles with authority, lose their deep-sunken, haunting grief. Always he is the unsatisfied, venting his despair in a heart-broken levity of quips and capers. Chaplin realized that there is nothing more universally funny than the solemn clown, and in 'Charlie' he accidentally made a world-fool; though I think certain memories of early youth went to its making."

(Thomas Burke, "The Tragic Comedian")

A PLACE FOR TOMORROW

2019. U.S.A. 75 minutes

Written and Directed by Behrouz Rae.

Cinematography, Editing: Behrouz Rae. Sound: Nora Sweeney. Assistant Editor: Anna Hogg. Sound Design: Pin-Hua Chen. With: Nima Khani (Yousef Ghobadi), J.C. (J.C.), Clay Hazlewood ('Man of God'), Roza Kamali (landlord), Jon Tull (piano), Chelsea Rector (Cindy). Music: Bach (J.S., C.P.E.).

SYNOPSIS: After marrying Cindy to get U.S. citizenship, penniless Youssef comes to America, cannot find her, and faces the harsh realities of being homeless in Los Angeles.

A PLACE FOR TOMORROW (2019) is the only American film in recent memory that reflects this country's ever-increasing third world character: absolute disparity, diverse misery, total capitalist victory at every turn. Director Behrouz Rae, armed with his hatred for property and pursuit of the human, shows the concrete vastness of Los Angeles and the pure difficulty of life there in a way that I have never seen. He shows the place and the people choked by the constant insult of capitalist propaganda and class war through its signs (an abundance of signs, billboards) and desperate conditions as they threaten and strike our protagonist, a total innocent, victim, and observer, Youssef (Nima Khani), an immigrant from Iran who becomes homeless in the city. Rae shows a climb to the highest vistas of Los Angeles to hide a meager bag of clothes in the bushes, he shows confused vacant lots, conniving landlords, many closed doors, then dives to its lowest places, with tracking shots of the gutters, and plateaus beside the roar of the freeway where our new friends sleep... For it is only there that Youssef makes friends and begins to find help in his search for his lost wife Cindy (Chelsea Rector). Indeed, its occasional flaws and haste aside, A PLACE FOR TOMORROW allows one to see Los Angeles and its people as if for the first time, allied with those thrown into the streets, hungry, and starving for something more than rent.

(A.R.)

One man will fall silent because of lack of feeling; another, because his emotion chokes him. A third frees himself, not from the burden that weighs on him, but only from a feeling of unfreedom. A fourth breaks his tools because they have too long been used to exploit him. The world is not obliged to be sentimental. Defeats should be acknowledged; but one should not conclude from them that there should be no more struggles.