All That Jazz
This week we’re celebrating the From Below Microcinema’s 100TH SCREENING by presenting All that Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse) on Thursday, December 11th, at 7 PM.
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Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!
It almost feels unremarkable to note that we’ve reached 100 screenings at our modest little basement theatre. Ever since our first screening, Streets of Fire, in January 2024, the movies have come at such an even weekly pace that it seems like it feels like all one big, rolling celebration of enjoying moving pictures with friends new and old. Thinking back on the nearly two years that we’ve been doing this whole From Below thing, that’s one feeling that really does stick out: how natural and easy and fun it is to curate a space like this, where a little cinema-going community can come together, 16 at a time, and have it be part of a larger revitalization of the Portland film scene as well. It’s not always easy to do that kind of work, especially if you are focused on such concepts as ‘growth’ or ‘making money’ (ew), but for us, the work of research, of tracking down material for programs, of making posters, of writing these emails, is our own little monastic delight. And really, the reason why we do it is because y’all keep showing up, and filling the space with warmth and perspective even in the colder, blanket-strewn weeks around this time of year. Thank you!
All that Jazz feels like a great way to celebrate, in part because it’s one of the movies that feels like the ‘most movie’ that we’ve ever seen. Within, it’s star choreographer and director Bob Fosse’s auto-immolating self-portrait, mediating his frantic work-and-drug-and-sex spiral while simultaneously staging Chicago and completing his biopic on Lenny Bruce into an utterly rapturous fantasia. Roy Scheider is magnificent (and not a little repellent) as his surrogate Joe Gideon, a tanned and quaking lothario whose body can’t keep up with his estimable creative drive. I can’t help but think of this film as a dramatic mirror to recent FB selection Andrei Rublev, a movie about the slow, lifelong reckoning with the trickle of artistic inspiration, whereas this depicts the opposite mode of creativity: the gushing, overwhelming flow of possible projects and ideas that threatens to completely overwhelm you. In Rublev, I was struck by Tarkovsky’s thoughtful breakdown of the material of art into the material of the earth (soil, water, fire, air) and Fosse does something similar here, with the performing arts, breaking the movie down into the molecular bits necessary to create a film (movement, sound, editing, lighting, directing, acting, etc.) These are two movies that present very different but very encompassing views of art. (We were also having fun talking about the specifically gendered ways of artistic existence that both movies provide, but more on that… at the screening).
Once again, thank you for making the From Below a project worth working on, week in and week out.
100 and 200 and 500 screenings more,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark