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where all he can do is pace the floor, mumble to himself, anticipate the rotten meals he's given, and almost certainly go

horrifically insane. The subject recalls Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the cinematic style is clearly modeled on that of Aleksandr

Sokurov, employing lengthy takes, leisurely digressions to people and activities outside the main "action," and occasional interpolated shots whose purpose is deliberately

ambiguous. The film is at once unreservedly physical and unobtrusively metaphysical, contemplating the nature and effects of time while recording a real-world atrocity that's

all the more distressing when you remember that the American penal buy tiffany bangles system has become a

cutting-edge innovator in this particular form of torture.

August is a textbook specimen of nontheatrical film, and Cinema Guild deserves great credit for circulating

it. My one complaint is that the minimalist packaging, with no extras and skimpy liner notes, provides virtually nothing in the way of background information on the filmmakers

or the circumstances of the production, which would be especially interesting to have in the case of this highly unusual documentary. The same goes for most of the releases I'm

discussing here; it's the most unfortunate downside buy tiffany bracelets to DVD distribution of

nontheatrical works.

Moving in a different direction, I checked out a few entries in the author-biography genre, to which I've always been partial. The most

conventional of the films, ironically, focuses on the most unconventional of the authors. Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker? (), directed by Barbara Caspar and released by Women Make

Movies, chronicles the postpunk novelist, poet, and all-around free spirit who gathered a cult following in the Seventies and early Eighties, grew more widely famous when Grove

Press published her novel Blood and Guts in High School in , and completed many additional books before her death from cancer at age fifty. She also wrote Bette Gordon's

marvelous film buy tiffany Pendants Variety ().

Caspar fleshes out the history with talking- head

comments by Carolee Schneemann, Barney Rosset, Sylvère Lotringer, and others. Culturally, the film places Acker's work into the context of postmodern American literature,

bearing as it does the heavy influence of William S. Burroughs and Jackson Mac Low alongside the likes of Charles Dickens and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose prose she
href="http://www.discountiffany.com/tiffany-earrings-c-.html">buy tiffany earrings cheerfully, um, recycled in her own books. Perhaps alerted by some of her titles-Great

Expectations (), My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini ()-more conservative souls said this wasn't recycling but plagiarism, raising one of many ruckuses that punctuated her

career. Another was the banning of Blood and Guts in High School in Germany, which deemed it a threat to youth (again, must have been the title). The documentary hammers too

hard on Acker's down-and-dirty persona-much of Blood and Guts in High School, for example, is more linear and literary than the film's "fuck"-filled excerpts suggest-and I wish

Caspar told more about Acker's last months, when she went to Mexico seeking alternative treatments for her cancer. Still and all, the film makes a lively case for a

controversial career.

I'm even more pleased with two releases from Icarus Films, drawn from the TV interview show Le Sel de la semaine (literally, Salt of the Week),

which aired weekly in Quebec from to . An hour-long episode from features Henry Miller, who is winning and witty as buy tiffany necklaces he banters with host Fernand Seguin in French that actually, positively has a Brooklyn accent. French was Jack Kerouac's first language, so

he's on solid linguistic ground in his half-hour episode from , but he seems somewhat dazed (probably because he's somewhat drunk; alcoholism killed him two years later) as he

talks about his early life in a working-class Massachusetts town and finishes by pronouncing himself a great writer. These interviews are vintage material in every

sense.