Joe's View

Even though hard-core pornography has been widely available in this country for more than three decades — some of us saw “Deep Throat” 36 years ago in theaters, long before the advent of Internet and hotel room porn — we still live in a culture that keeps behaving as if it is “shocked” by nudity and overt sexuality in the media.
The recent madness over the Miley Cyrus photos in Vanity Fair is a sign of either rampant neo-Puritanism (bare shoulders equals porn?) or cynical PR machinery.
So, I don’t know what to expect Wednesday night in Stamford when I host a gathering at the non-profit Avon Theatre Film Center devoted to the issue of sex in cinema that will include a screening of the 1972 Bernardo Bertolucci classic “Last Tango in Paris” along with the striking new black-and-white short film, “Leave You in Me,” by Stamford filmmaker Dutch Doscher.
Doscher’s film is an honest treatment of a young couple in crisis, played out in their bedroom, with both participants nude the whole time.
The film’s premise is that after the intimacy of their lovemaking, the man and woman then have a primal discussion about the man’s infidelity. Doscher believes it would be dishonest to have the characters clutching at sheets and/or towels before they start talking, and that the viewer should accept the nudity as being entirely natural.
Doscher gave me a DVD of the film at another Avon screening a few months ago and told me he was having a hard time getting the picture screened in the area because of the frontal nudity. I suggested to Avon programmer Adam Birnbaum that he show Doscher’s short with a feature that deals with sex in a frank, adult manner.
When Birnbaum learned that prints of “Last Tango in Paris” were again available — in conjunction with the 90th anniversary celebration of United Artists — it seemed like the perfect pairing with “Leave You in Me.”
It will be interesting to see if the 1972 Marlon Brando vehicle has any shock value left and how the audience will respond to Doscher’s striking contemporary vision of romantic and sexual strife.
(The screening of “Leave You in Me” and “Last Tango in Paris” will be Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. The Avon Theatre is at 272 Bedford St. in Stamford. For more information, call 967-3660.)

I borrowed a phrase from the film critic Michael Atkinson for my headline, because I agree with his assessment of the current position of the 72-year-old creator of “The War Game,” “Culloden,” “Edvard Munch” and several other modern classics that are known by too few movie buffs.
Peter Watkins first made a name for himself in the 1960s as a director of documentaries for the BBC. Perhaps frustrated by the limits of fact-based films, Watkins began to make dramatized documentaries. The director’s first major effort in this new genre — “Culloden” (1964) — was widely acclaimed for its startling use of documentary film techniques in the presentation of the Jacobite uprising of 1745.
The BBC commissioned Watkins to follow “Culloden” with another pseudo-documentary that would show the impact of a nuclear war on England. The results were so strong that government officials forced the BBC to cancel the airing of the film.
“The War Game” went on to have a long and powerful life as a theatrical film (I saw it on a double-bill with a revival of “Dr. Strangelove” in 1968). In a bizarre but happy event for Watkins, the filmmaker received an Oscar for “best documentary film.”
The publicity for “The War Game” earned Watkins a studio gig, the 1967 Universal production of “Privilege,” about the exploitation of a rock singer by the British government and religious leaders.
Again using a semi-documentary style — and rocker Paul Jones in the lead — the movie was an intriguing social satire that divided critics and audiences and never made back the studio’s investment.
From that point on, Watkins has wandered the world making films where he has been able to secure financing, including several projects in Scandinavia. The 1973 bio-pic “Edvard Munch” is one of the best dramas about the life of an artist that I’ve ever seen, but it was so poorly distributed that it has no listing in the encyclopedic Leonard Maltin “Movie Guide.”
Things may be changing, however. New Yorker Films put out a five DVD Watkins set last fall and tomorrow night, the director’s rarely seen 1970 feature “Punishment Park” is being shown on the Sundance Channel as part of an evening marking the 40th anniversary of the spring 1968 explosion of student radicalism all over the world.
“Punishment Park” is a chilling docudrama about the government and police response to radical Vietnam War protestors. Just as “The War Game” speculated about what post-nuclear war life might be like, Watkins’s 1970 film is set in a post-martial law America in which student protestors are sent to an experimental law enforcement facility known as Punishment Park.
The student radicals are given the choice of extended jail time or a three-day survival odyssey in the desert under pursuit by armed National Guardsmen.
Watkins makes everything look real and the director has said that he often feared during filming that real violence would erupt among his nonprofessional actors.
(“Punishment Park” will be shown by the Sundance Channel Saturday at 7:30 p.m., with a repeat airing set for May 13 at 2:30 a.m.)

When you go to a big movie press gathering, it is standard operating procedure for reporters to be offered T-shirts or soundtrack CDs or even backpacks promoting the film in question.
Usually, I say thanks but no thanks.
Last Sunday at the press conference for “Iron Man,” some reporters grumbled about the absence of the usual movie promo booty, but I was thrilled when a publicist handed me an oblong paperback book, “Making Iron Man,” consisting of photos taken on the set by Jeff Bridges who gets third billing under Robert Downey Jr.
Bridges has been one of my favorite actors for more than 30 years, but I also love the gritty, behind-the-scenes photos he has been taking on sets since “Starman” in 1984.
On the movies he’s made since then, the actor has made gift books of his production pictures and given them to the cast and crew.
Five years ago, powerHouse books published a collection of the actor’s photos — “Pictures” — and it has become one of my most treasured Hollywood books because of the way Bridges shows us the nuts and bolts of making movies.
I was surprised by the number of reporters at the Sunday event who didn’t know about this remarkable book. Critic David Thomson has called Bridges “the taker of some of the best on-set still photographs I have ever seen.”
The actor uses a Widelux camera which produces an extraordinarily wide image. In the foreword to “Pictures” director Peter Bogdanovich writes that “Jeff’s choice of…camera is emblematic of his own vision, which generously includes as much as possible of the ragtag world in which he has spent so much of his life.”
The actor’s respect for the crew — and his understanding of the important role they play on any film — is illustrated by shot after shot that includes make-up people, lighting men, costume fitters.
“Jeff is America’s best actor,” director Terry Gilliam told Bogdanovich. “He’s a Zen actor — he knows the frame, the plane of the film he’s acting in — which is very useful and pretty spooky for the crew because he really knows how films are made. It’s rare for an actor to be so incredibly technical yet real at the same time. He never cheats.”
In the book and in his acting, Bridges makes what he does look entirely natural. The actor-photographer includes several shots of his “Texasville” and “The Last Picture Show” co-star Timothy Bottoms in his book and writes in a caption, “I have always felt that Tim’s performance in ‘The Last Picture Show’ should have won him an Academy Award. He disappeared into his character, Sonny, so completely that his acting was invisible, which is probably why he wasn’t nominated. His acting was too good to be noticed.”
What Bridges said about the acting of Timothy Bottoms is the way I feel about “Pictures.”