MOVIE REVIEWS : USC Student Films Exude Quality, Diversity

The four documentaries that make up the primary part of tonight’s program of USC student films (at USC’s Bovard Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.), are exceptional works by any standard. They cover subjects as diverse as used car lots and circumcision, mountain climbing and medical crises. And they hit a variety of moods. Some are poetic, some satiric. Some are broadly humorous, some soberly polemical. Some probe into life and death; some rib the daffier contortions of modern society.

But all of them give us an offbeat, wide-eyed look at the scenery and the people around us. They raise a troubling question. Nowadays, because of improved equipment, relaxed censorship and the whole post-’60s cinema verite tradition--the student documentaries may be more impressive than the fiction work. (Example: Frank Marlow’s slice-of-L.A.-life “Manatic” in the recent UCLA series.)

Eric Cohen records in “Facing the Extreme” the life style of hard-core mountain climbers in the Joshua Tree National Forest. He’s the only undergraduate of the quartet, yet his film has precocious assurance, real lyricism. The hard-core climbers he shows are a genuine counterculture. They work without ropes or picks, scaling the complicated rocks with nothing but hands, climbing shoes, raw instinct and ingenuity. Cohen adeptly shows us techniques as various as their practitioners. One climber, called “the Scrutinizer,” floats across the cracks and precarious holds of a sheer rock with the careless motion of a skittering spider. Another attacks a stubborn rock with the determination of Sisyphus in shorts.

Debra Kahn and Dave Edelson’s “St. Catherine’s Wedding Ring” is a documentary on circumcision. Through a variety of interviews with physicians, rabbis, parents and researchers the film makers build a case that the whole operation is one of life’s unkindest cuts. Perhaps so. It will probably be hard for any male in the audience to watch this movie without wincing and crossing his legs at least once.

Marc Smerling’s “Driving the American Dream” has a great subject: used car salesmen. The auto-didacts here are mini-politicians, mini-entrepreneurs, mini-moguls, always ready with the right answer, the right evasion, right on the American Dream’s cutting edge. We follow some shrewd cookies, including our old late-night TV spot friend Cal Worthington, through their daily routines, watching sales techniques that range from the friendly smile of Christian charity to the sad-eyed glower of the tough connoisseur. Worthington, surprisingly, proves meditative and introspective. At one point he even admits, shockingly, that he doesn’t like selling cars. This a dandy little film, not a spot on it. Trust me.

Lance Gentile’s “Stat” is, in some ways, the most remarkable of the quartet, simply because of its bizarre genesis and methodology. Gentile supported his way through film school as an emergency room doctor. Here, he shares with us his nightly routine: a parade of the wounded, the hypochondriac, the desperately ill, the frightened and some so near death it tears you up to watch them. Gentile--a loose, jokey type with a style that suggests Donald Sutherland in the movie “MASH”--describes the isolation of his position: working with his patients only at crises, like a medical Don Juan caught in an endless nocturnal rhythm. Some of “Stat” looks staged, but, like “MASH” it generates both wild humor and a taut, clenched pathos.

Also on the program are the following shorts: Dan Goldberg’s “Halcyon,” Alex Albanese’s “Spectacle,” Karen Kennedy’s “The Boot and the Blender” and Francesca Talenti’s “Partita.”

The program will be repeated Nov. 16 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills).