Just Beat It

THE FLOWER THIEF

Directed by Ron Rice

At Anthology Film Archives March 18-24

Ron Rice's The Flower Thief introduces its man-child hero with close-ups of his shadow shambling along the bright sidewalks of San Francisco's North Beach. Like everything else in Rice's underground classic, this choice is so striking that at first it seems counterintuitive-awkward, even. But it feels right because it isn't quite like anything else you've seen. Rice's poem-calling it "experimental" doesn't quite capture its sweetness-cleanses the mind of commercial narrative grout and opens you up to purer ways of seeing. Never released on home video, and screened mainly in fractured, truncated form, The Flower Thief is the fullest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema. It's not as well known as John Cassavetes' landmark improvisational drama Shadows or Alfred Leslie's narrated featurette Pull My Daisy, which premiered on a double bill in 1959, a year before Rice's movie. But it's arguably more daring and simple, and therefore more durable, than either. The film's limited engagement at Anthology Film Archives-in a reconstructed 75-minute print-is a rare repertory screening that deserves to be called an event.

Shot on location in San Francisco on leftover, military-issue black and white film cartridges used to record World War II aerial dogfights, The Flower Thief is a picaresque silent comedy, scored with fractured bits of pop and jazz. The title character is a mid-century cousin of Chaplin's Little Tramp: a sweet anarchist and borderline Holy Fool, minus the whiff of sanctimony that often makes such characters tiresome. As played by actor, poet, Beat icon and future Andy Warhol repertory player Taylor Mead-whose loving infant's gaze, delicate gestures and palsied shuffle imply battered yet indestructible innocence-he's Christ by way of Harpo Marx. His anonymity and opacity disguise a limitless capacity to feel.

The movie's simplicity-hell, vagueness-is the source of its power. Rice and Mead never give us the mystery-killing backstory most movies feel obliged to provide-the stuff Holden Caulfield dismissed as "where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap." We get to know the Flower Thief by watching him wander San Francisco. He checks out people and buildings, chats with grinning Asian kids on a playground, rides a child's wagon down a steep hill and joins other free spirits in a spontaneous bit of public theater involving a flagpole-an evocative but undefined act that alternately suggests a witch burning, a crucifixion and a flag-raising. He pilfers flowers from a vendor instinctively, helplessly, just because they're beautiful.

The Flower Thief erases the arbitrary border that normally separates prosaic film storytelling-i.e., cinema that's mainly interested in devising fictional, supposedly "believable" situations, then photographing them-and a more heightened, expressive, structurally intricate type of moviemaking (writing in pictures). Rice doesn't just satisfy both sets of characteristics, he merges them. As you watch the mostly reactive Flower Thief drift through his day-inhabiting a series of self-contained, "realistic" vignettes that could all be summarized as "guy goes here, does stuff, moves on"-the movie accumulates poetic force, until this seeming nonstory evokes all stories.

The film satisfies popular stereotypes of Beat culture by making things up as it goes, but it shatters those same stereotypes by refusing to declaim, harangue or summarize. Its innocence is willed but never calculating; Rice and Mead never let adolescent preening corrupt their decency (the "I feel, therefore I feel more than anyone, therefore I'm better than everyone" equation, which deforms sensitivity into vanity). The snippets of Beat poetry on the soundtrack aren't intended to explain, much less hype, the Flower Thief's adventures, or advertise the cultural movement that created him. They're just another kind of music in a movie shot and edited with musical spontaneity. (Rice's street-corner improvs, apropos-of-nothing handheld tracking shots and high-angled, restlessly moving wide shots were Scorsesean before the world knew who Scorsese was.)

Stylistically, the film has less in common with Shadows and Pull My Daisy than Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley's 1953 classic kidflick The Little Fugitive, another picaresque mid-century silent that arranged strong, simple images into lyrical chapters. Like Fugitive, Rice's film is tiny, fragile-a daisy pressed between neglected pages of film history. But its purity of feeling makes bigger films seem small, and its gentle bravery validates young artists' fantasies of crazy, healing innocence.

SCHIZO

Directed by Gulshat Omarova

Sad movies can be uplifting if they tell the truth about human behavior. Gulshat Omarova's Schizo, about a poor boy who recruits men for bare-knuckle brawls, is that kind of movie. There are no dazzling cinematic leaps in it, just foursquare minimalist drama played out by a mostly nonprofessional cast that's more honest than polished. Set in early-90s Kazahkstan, it's another diamond-hard Neorealist drama from the ex-USSR, the geographical epicenter of a film scene that threatens to become as bluntly vital as Iran's cinema five to 10 years ago (or the Czech scene 35 years ago).

The hero is 15-year-old Muslim named Mustafa, a.k.a. Schizo (Oldzhas Nusupbayev), who lives with his single mom and her tough Caucasian boyfriend in a shack out on the steppes. The boyfriend hooks Schizo up with a job scouting brawlers for an underground fight club. Omarova presents him as a strategically numb survivor-young but not innocent, like a real poor kid as opposed to the movie kind. Unlike most American directors, Omarova understands the power of the wide shot, and deploys it to make his unselfconscious strivers-Schizo and his surrogate dad puttering through a field on a motorcycle, unemployed day laborers swarming around a potential contractor-seem like bipedal insects trapped between earth and sky. This talented first-time filmmaker hates what people do to each other, but he loves people. And because he understands poverty's corrosive effect on kindness, he doesn't caricature or condemn even his most ruthless characters. Schizo isn't a bad kid; he's just a desensitized survivor trying to make a little pocket money. And his mom's boyfriend isn't evil; he's a strong, caring man who gets Schizo his bloody job as a gesture of affection, to do something nice for a boy he can picture becoming his son. Every character has good intentions; you know where those lead.