suicide Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In the first scene of S. A Crary's Kill Your Idols, Martin Rev of Suicide describes mainstream rock in the early 1970s as an escape from reality. To him, bands like The Rolling Stones, with their glamorous image, dramatic outfits and bigger-than-life bravado were a necessary distraction from the increasingly depressing world outside. The Viet Nam War was a constant presence, and Watergate's stunning revelation was yet another blow to the fragile American psyche. Rev and others, however, wanted to deal with the world on its own terms, and to find a way to address the horror and perceived injustice of the lives they lived. Rev expressed his fury through music and he, along with his band Suicide, was one of the first entries into what shortly became known as the No Wave scene, a short-lived punk movement rooted in New York's East Village.

Starting with the founding of Suicide in 1972, Crary's film documents the next two decades in New York punk, with a twin focus on No Wave and the small group of NY punk bands that either made it big or threatened to do so in 2002 (the best known of which are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes). Despite its narrow focus, Kill Your Idols -- which Crary directed, photographed, and edited -- should appeal to an audience well beyond the punk music niche: In addition to an historical document about the founding of an often over-looked movement, it's also a meditation on artistic creation, and the sources of inspiration.

War movies, while typically exciting, are a very depressing bunch. Even those of the genre that showcase victories or inhabit a nationalistic honor have enough casualties and horrors to affect the emotions of their audience. However, there is a kind of movie more tragic than the war movie, and that is the lost-war movie. American cinema has been dealing for decades with our defeat in Vietnam with a large number of movies that show the ill-fated battles and/or the devastating aftereffects of the war. Recently we have been given war films from other perspectives, as well. The 2004 German film Downfall presents an amazing account of Hitler's last days, while The Blood of My Brother, a documentary that screened at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, shows the consequences of our latest war with Iraq from the Iraqi point of view. And Argentina's loss of the Falklands War is dealt with in Tristán Bauer's stunning film Blessed by Fire, which was recently awarded the top narrative prize at this year's Festival.

Joe Pichler, a relatively unknown child actor who performed in the third and fourth installments of the Beethoven series and also appeared in the films Varsity Blues and The Fan, is still missing after abandoning his car near his family's home in Bremerton, Washington and leaving an alleged suicide note inside. Pichler, who is now eighteen, quit acting in 2002 to return home and finish high school. Pichler has so far not been found, though over 150 people have showed up to help search for him since he's gone missing.

Stevenson J. Palfi, a documentary filmmaker based in New Orleans and celebrated by the likes of Les Blank, has reportedly died via self-inflicted gunshot. Palfi was best known for a 1982 documentary called Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together (right), about several generations of New Orleans based musicians. Relatives say he had been severely depressed after Hurricane Katrina, which had detroyed his home, his neighborhood and most of his belongings. He had been living with his ex-wfie, Polly Waring, whose home was one of few spared n the Mid-City area where Palfi had lived, and was working on the final touches to his latest film. Called Songwriter, Unknown, it was a profile of composer (and friend of Palfi) Allen Toussaint; Palfi had been working on it for 15 years. A tribute to Palfi will take place on January 21, as part of Offbeat Magazine's "Best of the Beat" Awards ceremony at the New Orleans House of Blues. The suicide rate has supposedly skyrocketed in New Orleans since Katrina's early-September onslaught; according to the NY Times, that city's rate is now at least double the national average, a statistic made more staggering by the fact that New Orleans' post-Katrina population is surely smaller than that of any other major city.