The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 8-14
Who’s Crazy? (1966)
Directed by Thomas White
This obscure anarchic masterwork is a jazz-infused free-for-all, starring actors from the New York-based avant-garde Living Theatre company. Who’s Crazy? screened at the Cannes Film Festival but it rarely, if ever, got to see the light of day until about a year ago when Anthology Film Archives resurrected a rare, worn-out print for a limited release.
The film begins in the middle of a cold landscape in rural Belgium, where a bus full of seeming psychiatric patients breaks down in the bleak countryside. Quite amusingly, they manage to escape their captors and take refuge in an empty outbuilding where they cohabit together and act out ceremonial formalities including trials, weddings, and religious-type rituals.
The cast’s tireless and improvised performance is matched by its soundtrack, courtesy of free-jazz legend Ornette Coleman. Coleman’s incredible score is a masterpiece of its own. Coleman and his trio are responsible for the film’s transcendence from playful lawlessness into pure, exhilarating freedom. Frenzied saxophone and violin measures synchronize with the performers’ voices; their few coherent dialogue lines, singing and howling. Coleman and the Living Theatre might be a crazy marriage but it’s a pairing one would have to be crazier to overlook. Alejandro Veciana (March 10-16, showtimes daily at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in a new digital restoration)
