Jazz, love, death -- 45 years back -- in Kasper Collin's documentary I CALLED HIM MORGAN

It's odd, but somehow quite fitting, that the fellow we learn least about in Kasper Collin's fine documentary, I CALLED HIM MORGAN, is the title character, a jazz trumpeter named Lee Morgan. We hear his music and can easily determine how talented he was (very) but his character, his personality, his quirks and all the rest are barely there. Instead, we come much closer to the two important women in Morgan's life: Judith Johnson, still alive, who fills us in on her role as the "other woman," and Helen Morgan, Lee's common-law wife, who rescued the drug-addicted guy from the gutter, nourished him, loved him, and then shot him dead. (If you're expecting "The Helen Morgan Story," you'll be getting something quite different from those starring Polly Bergen or Ann Blyth.)

Mr. Collin, the Swedish filmmaker pictured at right, has done plenty of homework here, and the result is a smart and generous array of history, memory (provided by those two women and Lee Morgan's friends and co-musicians), and some terrific archival film and photography -- all of it set to music featuring Morgan (shown below, left), his own band and that of Dizzy Gillespie, with whom Morgan began his career. All of this makes the movie a must for jazz lovers, and for anyone who might want to take a time trip back to the the USA, the South, and then New York City in the 1960s and 70s.

The manner in which the film incorporates its music is particularly lovely: It is used in a way that the best movie soundtracks do in order to highlight emotions and events yet still manages to stay true to itself as jazz. (Interestingly enough, both Lee Morgan and Miles Davis did not appreciate the appellation of jazz to the kind of music either of them wrote and performed.)

As the movie tells its story -- which is based mostly on the only known interview that Helen Morgan ever gave after her prison term to journalist/teacher Larry Reni Thomas in 1996, as well as another with Val Wilmer in Helen's Bronx apartment back in 1971 -- we learn of Helen's life as child: given up by her mother to be raised by her grandparents, then leaving at a very young age for the "big city."

That city was, first, Wilmington, North Carolina, and then finally New York.

We learn of Helen's cooking skills, her detestation at being photographed (hence the paucity of shots of her here!), and finally of how she met, bonded with and saved Lee, after his descent into drugs. In the course of it all, we are also made acquainted with the culture of the time, and black music experience, and the black experience in general. And of course the casual, embedded racism of the day: Even in a snowstorm, how could it have taken a New York City ambulance one full hour to arrive at the scene of the shooting?

A sad story filled with wonderful music, I Called Him Morgan highlights, among other things, black male patriarchy vs strong black women, and the difficulty with which those women had to negotiate their route in life. After being released from prison, Helen -- never a religious person -- finds what salvation she can by working with and helping her local church in Wilmington, North Carolina.

From FilmRise and Submarine Deluxe, the documentary opens tomorrow, Friday, March 24,  in New York City at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and on Friday, March 31, at NYC's Metrograph and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Monica Film Center and elsewhere. Click here to view all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters listed.

You watch THIS movie in a different mode -- THE ANCHORAGE opens at NYC's AFA

Filmed in Sweden's Stockholm Archipelago, THE ANCHORAGE begins with a bit of cinema verité: a pitch-black screen from which, very eventually, sounds begins to emerge: insects, birds, wind and more. Light slowly dawns, and why not?  If it's dark out, then it's dark on-screen: No day-for-night stuff here!  Soon we have a scene of nude bathing in the Baltic Sea by a woman somewhere between middle and old age, who, my companion noted, looks better with cloths than without.  No turn-ons, either.

This woman, above, is named Ulla and it is she whom we follow for some 87 minutes, including credits, as she bathes, breakfasts, fishes, mends nets, bids goodbye to a daughter and daughter's friend, walks (a lot), watches and listen to TV/radio, checks the weather (on-line, I think), travels to what passes for a town on the island on which she lives, and only very occasionally offers a kind of diary entry featuring a thought and desire or two.  Ooops. I've broken my cardinal rule and given away the plot.  Except it isn't really a plot at all -- just life being lived, and then edited briskly down so that we don't go bonkers from boredom. And the film is not boring, exactly, nor will it be terribly involving -- unless you're willing to let go of many of the expectations that accompany normal movie-watching.

Letting go may be a struggle, but if you succeed, The Anchorage, a first-film from American C.W Winter (above, left) and Swede Anders Edström (above, right) may please and sustain you. (TrustMovies succeeded maybe halfway.)

In the directors' statement (part of the press material for the film), we are told, "Life has nothing to do with dramatic progression but is instead a long and continuous movement made up of an infinity of micro-movements."  In 1921, a young Jean Epstein issued a call-to-arms for a narrative cinema in which image would at last overturn its submission to text.  (Ed's note: I presume the quote above is from Epstein.) The Anchorage is a film made in this spirit.  It's a film that values continuous movement over predestination.  It's a consideration of the wide-open potential of a narrative cinema that is freed from the constraints of denouement.  It's a film about the passage of time, both in life and in movies themselves.  

OK. But why this woman? Well, one life as good as another, right? Maybe. However, one performer is not always as good as another, and Ulla is a performer, whether she likes it or not. Compare her "performance" with that of Nev Schulman's in Catfish, and you'll get my point. The movie's location is perhaps the key. It's special -- and worth spending time in. And since Ulla lives in this location, it is she with whom we spend our time.

When the filmmakers' camera is at work, it's generally stationary, quietly observing everything from the sea to the wind in the trees, a crossword puzzle and a needy dog.   Choice, of course, is all, and I think I might have made some different choices were I directing. Though, since I can't know all the many moment there were to choose from, who knows?

In any case, we watch daily life being lived on this sparsely inhabited island where one's existence is exceptionally "cut-off." (When Ulla listens to the news, it's all about the U.N.'s sanctions against North Korea and bull-sperm farming -- hardly things that impact on her own life. Little wonder it appears to be the weather report that interests her most.)

In one scene, as Ulla sits inside her house, we see someone approach on the outside and we think, Ah -- a visitor!  Some interaction!  Don't bet on it.  Instead we're alone with Ulla, just as she is (mostly) alone on the island. There's a nod to global warming, fish being de-boned and beheaded, thoughts of a husband left or dead, and mostly that ever-present wind. For a movie in which nothing much happens, this one is not nearly as dull or boring as you might think. It's beautiful, in its way, and may make you wonder about, and maybe wish for, a more solitary life.

The Anchorage opens today, September 17, at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan. Click here for the schedule of performances, and then click the arrow next to "Filter by Program" (in the upper right quadrant) and then click on Premiere/Revivals. Following its AFA playdate, the film is expected to move to other locations, including Cambridge's Harvard Film Archive, Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, Pointlignelan/Le Fémis in Paris and Los Angeles' California Institute of the Arts.