Film on Paul Bowles kicks off Film Society's season

Staff Report

A film by a U.Va. alumnus about a former U.Va. student -- Owsley Brown's "Night Waltz -- The Music of Paul Bowles," kicks off the Virginia Festival Film Society's 2000-01 season.

In the film, Brown, a San Francisco-based filmmaker and 1993 graduate of U.Va. (B.A., cultural anthropology), reveals the lesser-known elements of writer Paul Bowles' artistry ­ his work as a composer. Bowles, who also attended U.Va. for a year, had a lengthy career as a composer before publishing The Sheltering Sky in 1949.

The film, which will be screened at Vinegar Hill Theatre on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m., conveys Bowles' fears that his music would not be popular without his literary fame. 'Night Waltz' blends location and interview into footage of Bowles, shot in Morocco by Brown, with seven visual essays by Nathanial Dorsky, Rudy Burckhardt and Jerome Hiler, set to Bowles' music.

"The last thing anyone wants to be in America is charming," says Bowles in the film. "Being charming is finished." Critic George Paul Csiscery asserts, however, that "Everything about 'Night Waltz,' a feast of serendipitous audio-visual marriages, refutes that statement. The film demolishes any resistance to its elegant playfulness very early on, forcing even the most hardened viewer to surrender to its buoyant absence of analysis, its simple celebrations of uncluttered images and sounds."

The Film Society, co-sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, provides year-round screenings to the Charlottesville area with special guest filmmakers, as part of the Southern Circuit Film Tour, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.