Conversations In World Cinema: Jane Campion

(Sundance) 9 tonight

Although it runs only a half-hour, this discussion with New Zealand writer-director Jane Campion -- which launches Sundance Channel's monthly series "Conversations in World Cinema" -- is a model profile of a working artist. "Conversations" begins where many other profiles forget to go, with an interior view of Campion's artistic vision. With the camera closing in on Campion in the show's first moments, we learn what makes film personal for her. The telecast is off to a good start.

For Campion, filmmaking begins with finding strength in personal memory -- those images no one else could have. Hearing this, it's not much of a leap to understanding Campion's very personal and highly stylized films.

Campion's so-far brief body of work is on view -- not to shape a clip-driven review of her films but to flesh out the intimate knowledge of her we already have. Scenes from "Sweetie," "An Angel at My Table," the much-heralded "The Piano," "The Portrait of a Lady" and the very recent "Holy Smoke" are on the table here. Together, they point to an independent filmmaker who has managed to affect mainstream viewers, as well. The telecast is produced by Scott Hopper and is from Sundance Channel produced in collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Marilyn Moss



ELLIS MARSALIS: JAZZ IS SPOKEN HERE

(KCET) 10 tonight

Here is an indirect paean to a patriarch from the cradle of jazz who has given us four greatly talented sons. Wynton, Branford, Jason and Delfeayo are young jazz musicians who are fighting a rear guard action as the jazz century expires and another kind of century begins.

Produced and directed by Nancy Yasecko and funded by numerous grants, the narrative wanders somewhat over-ambitiously from Wynton's aerie in New York, where he is the jazz maestro at Lincoln Center, to a storefront stage in New Orleans where guitarist Danny Barker introduces this "party town" patterned after gay Paree.

You visit Ellis Marsalis in his classroom at the University of New Orleans, where he teaches from the piano keyboard. But it isn't jazz that he teaches, or so he says. "I teach a process by which students can learn to construct in a particular genre that we use which is called jazz," he explains. There are several impenetrable profundities like that.

But there is sense. His father does not teach by methodology, trumpeter Wynton explains, he throws off a spirit through which many intangible but fundamental things are conveyed. He persuades you to be serious, saxophonist Branford finds. Whatever he does, it works.

Younger sons Jason, a drummer, and Delfeayo, a trombonist, join Branford and Ellis in a stage performance that conveys the father's genius better than words. The tune by Delfeayo is charming and hip, and his trombone solo has sweep. You can hear in it a generation or two of New Orleans street musicians; Branford's solo adds a touch of New York and Los Angeles, and Ellis jumps in there and struggles successfully with all the little twists and turns he finds in the interior of the piece, advancing no pat solutions.

Tony Gieske