Let me begin by saying this is my one hundredth blog post. That's #100, yippee! There should be some kind of celebration; it will be a long time before I reach the next big milestone. I started my blog with the 2008 True/False Film Festival, so it's appropriate to be discussing the 2010 Festival at #100.
The Festival was great this year. After sitting through 13 films, I can report one more poultry slaughter (a turkey, in Those Who Remain) and a sheep slaughter (On the Other Side of Life). Combine that with the 16 bear paws (four bears worth) found in a Chinese dumpster (Disorder), and the two chicken slaughters I reported earlier, and the animals didn’t fare too well in this year’s documentary film selections.
But it was a great weekend. I packed in as much as I could, yet there is still a long list of films that my friends raved about that I didn’t get a chance to see. At a debriefing with friends on Sunday night, about 20 people talked about their two top films from the festival, and there was a wide variety of opinion. Here are the ones I missed but want to see:
The Red Chapel (dir. Mads Brügger, 87 min.), about two Korean-Danish comedians visiting North Korea, got rave reviews from everyone who saw it.
Holy Wars (dir. Stephen Marshall, 81 min.) followed a Muslim extremist and a Christian extremist in their proselytizing efforts; the filmmaker set up a debate between them, and the outcome was remarkable.
GasLand (dir. Josh Fox, 86 min.) – everyone who saw this film said it was unbelievable and disturbing; one of my students said she cried through half of it. It’s about natural gas, Halliburton, and groundwater pollution.
Cowboys in India (dir. Simon Chambers, 78 min.), the plot of which I still haven’t figured out, sounds great and got lots of thumbs up.
The Mirror (dir. David Christensen, 85 min.) is set in the Italian Alps and explores the attempts by a small-town mayor to build a giant mirror to bring sunlight to his village. Some monkish Germans are also involved.
My husband liked Circo (dir. Aaron Schock, 78 min.) a lot, which was one of two Mexican circus films, the other being The Tightrope (dir. Núria Ibáñez, 80 min.) (which neither of us saw).
Waste Land (dir. Lucy Walker, 98 min.) is about artist Vik Muniz, whose art uses trash from the Rio de Janeiro landfill. People loved it.
Clearly, the True/False Film Festival needs to be about two days longer if a person's going to get to see everything they're interested in seeing.
Showing posts with label documentary films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label documentary films. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Why I Didn't Like Colony
Colony, dir. Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell
When my friend’s son leaned over to me and sternly warned me “Colony is bad, don’t see it,” I should have known something was up; but earlier that day a colleague had told me he thought it was good. I decided to take my chances and judge for myself. After all, I’m interested in and concerned about Colony Collapse Disorder, a thus-far unexplained phenomenon in which whole colonies of bees are dying and/or disappearing. I heard about this on NPR a couple years ago. It’s very alarming, because for one thing noone knows why it’s happening, and for another thing – most importantly – if there are no bees, there’s no food, right?
Directors Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell add to that another big concern: the demise of the beekeepers – small, independent business owners whose livelihoods are being devastated by the loss of their colonies. Let me add, too, that I’m a big fan of documentaries about American agriculture, like Food Inc. and King Corn (see my post on King Corn on August 20, 2008). Early on in my viewing of Colony I was feeling confident about this being another film in that vein; beautiful cinematography of golden fields and gray-green almond trees; authoritative-sounding “experts,” and a concern for public interest all seemed to be at the heart of this film. But then things began to go terribly wrong...
You see, it’s not just a film about bees and beekeepers and Colony Collapse Disorder. The film’s “split personality,” as I would call it, takes us on an intimate exploration of family dynamics among the Seppi family, new to the beekeeping business, whose economic situation seems very dire. But these directors, Gunn and McDonnell, focus a great deal of attention on the religious beliefs of this family, in a way that I found quite puzzling. Were they holding up the Seppis to be admired? to be ridiculed? I really don’t think the film made that clear, which is why I asked McDonnell in the Q&A “how do you position yourself with regard to the religious aspect of the film?" and "What do the Ten Commandments have to do with beekeeping?”
Let me explain what I mean. Colony begins with a clip from an old documentary on bee colonies, which describes the colonies as perfectly operating systems in which “there is no individualism,” and “the state controls everything.” The colony operates as one brain, this old film tells us; it is ruthless. Bees practice population control based on environmental conditions. The colony is completely efficient. The voice-over narration goes on and one, inviting comparison to human societies in which humans don’t look very successful after all.
Then we meet the Seppi family, beginning with the two sons, a pair of entrepreneurial young men who lead the family’s farming and beekeeping efforts. They are by far the youngest beekeepers in this industry, and their involvement is promising to those who recognize that the beekeepers are sort of a dying breed. (The average age of beekeepers is around 60 years old, according to McDonnell.) So far, so good, they totally have my support.
But then we meet the rest of the family, and learn (primarily from the mother) about how the parents have structured their family and have decided to pour all of their resources into this business for the benefit of the two sons’ beekeeping operation. All of the kids – there are seven of them, from what I could tell – have to work in the beekeeping business; and in the film it becomes apparent that the family is organized like a hive. All nine people in the family have to work towards this same goal. At their head is the real “queen bee,” Mom, who habitually berates her eldest son for his poor decisions and poor financial acumen. She beats him up (figuratively) with verbal attacks like “how are you going to support your wife and your kids?” (a frequent harangue). The son is like 19 or 20 years old, mind you, and is not even married, let alone with kids.
At the source of the family’s dysfunction is a religious mania which loosely passes as Christianity, but it’s no Christian sect that I’m familiar with. It advocates an extreme form of patriarchy, in which the interests and the futures of the female children are neglected, and women have no place in public life at all (except to go to church. The mom is always telling her son how to negotiate with the farmers, but when he says to her, “Why don’t YOU tell them?” she replies “That’s not my job, that’s your job.” As if only men are supposed to transact business? I don’t get it.
One of the daughters is interviewed, and she tells us, “I didn’t really want to be a beekeeper, but ‘honor thy father,’ right? If it’s what Dad wants to do, I should go along with it to honor him.” When the same girl describes bee society she explains that it’s a matriarchy, “but they couldn’t do it without the males. Feminists need to be reminded of that.” Poor child, I suspect she’s never even met a feminist; and she’s incapable of seeing that the patriarchy in which she lives (through no fault of her own) does not have her interests at heart.
Their religion lulls them into a certain naivete, too; at one mealtime prayer, one of the daughters asks God “to give John Boy a business education this year.” God doesn’t give a business education, business schools give a business education. And after a tough telephone negotiation over price, the young man indignantly exclaims, “and he’s a Christian!,” as if he expects Christians somehow to behave differently with regard to their economic interests than other people do.
Somehow I suspect that the filmmakers have set these people up to look like a freak show; but when I asked McDonnell about that, he of course completely disavowed anything but admiration and respect for the Seppis. Predictably, he proudly asserted that “these people deserve to have their story told!,” but he did not answer my question, “what do the Ten Commandments have to do with beekeeping?” (At a certain point in the film we see a video lecture on the Ten Commandments play on the television while John Boy is asleep on the sofa. What I gather from the Q&A is that McDonnell and Gunn did set up that scene, which was part of a videotape they found at the Seppis’ church; it didn't belong to the Seppis and wasn’t their normal viewing material.)
At this point in reading my blog post, can you still remember what the film ostensibly set out to do? Colony Collapse Disorder? The expert talking heads? I can barely remember it myself, I’m so wearied by slogging through the Seppis’ religious ideology. This is the problem with the film: these two halves don’t really work well together, in my opinion. I signed up to see a documentary about bees, not a documentary about religious fanatics. And further, if I HAD signed up to see a documentary about religious fanatics like the Seppis, there are a lot more questions I would have, that the filmmakers failed to address, such as what planet are they from, anyway? What cult do they belong to? And what kind of future do they envision for their daughters, the ones who seem to be completely neglected in this whole family enterprise? The parents lose $20,000 per year on the business, so why don’t they use that money to send John Boy and the other kids to college instead?
My question to the director was not well received by the audience, who seemed to expect the festival’s usual worshipful attitude towards visiting directors. When I left the theater, I overheard a young woman talking about me, complaining to her friends about “this woman”; so I went and talked to her. She was outraged – indignant – about my question to the director. She said that just because the film was badly edited was no reason for me to be angry. So I asked her, “what do the Ten Commandments have to do with beekeeping?” and she said “probably nothing,” but that I shouldn’t have to asked the director a question like that “in front of the whole documentary audience.” I admit that my comments went on a little too long, but I never said I was angry, I said I was “uncomfortable.” I also find it somewhat amusing that young people in Missouri (the age of our students) are themselves so embarrassed by any kind of conflict or public disagreement that they “feel sorry” for the director! Like I said to this young woman, “he can handle it.” People don’t become film directors and put their work “out there” if they can’t handle criticism from one measly film viewer.
Then there was a comment on my blog from an anonymous individual, as follows:
Word on the street is that one of your questions at a post-movie debriefing made Twitter: http://twitter.com/doowttam/status/9755188050
If you're reluctant to click through, I'll ctrl+v it:
"Why would you film them? I don't like them. You must like them." Worst question I've heard at a q&a. Have you never seen a doc film?
Since the item reported on Twitter has nothing to do with my actual question, and the person who posted it on my blog evidently wasn’t even present at the screening (probably doesn’t even know which film it was!), I can only conclude that Twitter is the last refuge of people unable to listen, think, or analyze information. (Other evidence further suggests it’s also the last refuge of people unable to spell or to write.) There’s no point in expecting they will read my side of the story, because this blog post probably exceeds their attention span capabilities.
When my friend’s son leaned over to me and sternly warned me “Colony is bad, don’t see it,” I should have known something was up; but earlier that day a colleague had told me he thought it was good. I decided to take my chances and judge for myself. After all, I’m interested in and concerned about Colony Collapse Disorder, a thus-far unexplained phenomenon in which whole colonies of bees are dying and/or disappearing. I heard about this on NPR a couple years ago. It’s very alarming, because for one thing noone knows why it’s happening, and for another thing – most importantly – if there are no bees, there’s no food, right?
Directors Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell add to that another big concern: the demise of the beekeepers – small, independent business owners whose livelihoods are being devastated by the loss of their colonies. Let me add, too, that I’m a big fan of documentaries about American agriculture, like Food Inc. and King Corn (see my post on King Corn on August 20, 2008). Early on in my viewing of Colony I was feeling confident about this being another film in that vein; beautiful cinematography of golden fields and gray-green almond trees; authoritative-sounding “experts,” and a concern for public interest all seemed to be at the heart of this film. But then things began to go terribly wrong...
You see, it’s not just a film about bees and beekeepers and Colony Collapse Disorder. The film’s “split personality,” as I would call it, takes us on an intimate exploration of family dynamics among the Seppi family, new to the beekeeping business, whose economic situation seems very dire. But these directors, Gunn and McDonnell, focus a great deal of attention on the religious beliefs of this family, in a way that I found quite puzzling. Were they holding up the Seppis to be admired? to be ridiculed? I really don’t think the film made that clear, which is why I asked McDonnell in the Q&A “how do you position yourself with regard to the religious aspect of the film?" and "What do the Ten Commandments have to do with beekeeping?”
Let me explain what I mean. Colony begins with a clip from an old documentary on bee colonies, which describes the colonies as perfectly operating systems in which “there is no individualism,” and “the state controls everything.” The colony operates as one brain, this old film tells us; it is ruthless. Bees practice population control based on environmental conditions. The colony is completely efficient. The voice-over narration goes on and one, inviting comparison to human societies in which humans don’t look very successful after all.
Then we meet the Seppi family, beginning with the two sons, a pair of entrepreneurial young men who lead the family’s farming and beekeeping efforts. They are by far the youngest beekeepers in this industry, and their involvement is promising to those who recognize that the beekeepers are sort of a dying breed. (The average age of beekeepers is around 60 years old, according to McDonnell.) So far, so good, they totally have my support.
But then we meet the rest of the family, and learn (primarily from the mother) about how the parents have structured their family and have decided to pour all of their resources into this business for the benefit of the two sons’ beekeeping operation. All of the kids – there are seven of them, from what I could tell – have to work in the beekeeping business; and in the film it becomes apparent that the family is organized like a hive. All nine people in the family have to work towards this same goal. At their head is the real “queen bee,” Mom, who habitually berates her eldest son for his poor decisions and poor financial acumen. She beats him up (figuratively) with verbal attacks like “how are you going to support your wife and your kids?” (a frequent harangue). The son is like 19 or 20 years old, mind you, and is not even married, let alone with kids.
At the source of the family’s dysfunction is a religious mania which loosely passes as Christianity, but it’s no Christian sect that I’m familiar with. It advocates an extreme form of patriarchy, in which the interests and the futures of the female children are neglected, and women have no place in public life at all (except to go to church. The mom is always telling her son how to negotiate with the farmers, but when he says to her, “Why don’t YOU tell them?” she replies “That’s not my job, that’s your job.” As if only men are supposed to transact business? I don’t get it.
One of the daughters is interviewed, and she tells us, “I didn’t really want to be a beekeeper, but ‘honor thy father,’ right? If it’s what Dad wants to do, I should go along with it to honor him.” When the same girl describes bee society she explains that it’s a matriarchy, “but they couldn’t do it without the males. Feminists need to be reminded of that.” Poor child, I suspect she’s never even met a feminist; and she’s incapable of seeing that the patriarchy in which she lives (through no fault of her own) does not have her interests at heart.
Their religion lulls them into a certain naivete, too; at one mealtime prayer, one of the daughters asks God “to give John Boy a business education this year.” God doesn’t give a business education, business schools give a business education. And after a tough telephone negotiation over price, the young man indignantly exclaims, “and he’s a Christian!,” as if he expects Christians somehow to behave differently with regard to their economic interests than other people do.
Somehow I suspect that the filmmakers have set these people up to look like a freak show; but when I asked McDonnell about that, he of course completely disavowed anything but admiration and respect for the Seppis. Predictably, he proudly asserted that “these people deserve to have their story told!,” but he did not answer my question, “what do the Ten Commandments have to do with beekeeping?” (At a certain point in the film we see a video lecture on the Ten Commandments play on the television while John Boy is asleep on the sofa. What I gather from the Q&A is that McDonnell and Gunn did set up that scene, which was part of a videotape they found at the Seppis’ church; it didn't belong to the Seppis and wasn’t their normal viewing material.)
At this point in reading my blog post, can you still remember what the film ostensibly set out to do? Colony Collapse Disorder? The expert talking heads? I can barely remember it myself, I’m so wearied by slogging through the Seppis’ religious ideology. This is the problem with the film: these two halves don’t really work well together, in my opinion. I signed up to see a documentary about bees, not a documentary about religious fanatics. And further, if I HAD signed up to see a documentary about religious fanatics like the Seppis, there are a lot more questions I would have, that the filmmakers failed to address, such as what planet are they from, anyway? What cult do they belong to? And what kind of future do they envision for their daughters, the ones who seem to be completely neglected in this whole family enterprise? The parents lose $20,000 per year on the business, so why don’t they use that money to send John Boy and the other kids to college instead?
My question to the director was not well received by the audience, who seemed to expect the festival’s usual worshipful attitude towards visiting directors. When I left the theater, I overheard a young woman talking about me, complaining to her friends about “this woman”; so I went and talked to her. She was outraged – indignant – about my question to the director. She said that just because the film was badly edited was no reason for me to be angry. So I asked her, “what do the Ten Commandments have to do with beekeeping?” and she said “probably nothing,” but that I shouldn’t have to asked the director a question like that “in front of the whole documentary audience.” I admit that my comments went on a little too long, but I never said I was angry, I said I was “uncomfortable.” I also find it somewhat amusing that young people in Missouri (the age of our students) are themselves so embarrassed by any kind of conflict or public disagreement that they “feel sorry” for the director! Like I said to this young woman, “he can handle it.” People don’t become film directors and put their work “out there” if they can’t handle criticism from one measly film viewer.
Then there was a comment on my blog from an anonymous individual, as follows:
Word on the street is that one of your questions at a post-movie debriefing made Twitter: http://twitter.com/doowttam/status/9755188050
If you're reluctant to click through, I'll ctrl+v it:
"Why would you film them? I don't like them. You must like them." Worst question I've heard at a q&a. Have you never seen a doc film?
Since the item reported on Twitter has nothing to do with my actual question, and the person who posted it on my blog evidently wasn’t even present at the screening (probably doesn’t even know which film it was!), I can only conclude that Twitter is the last refuge of people unable to listen, think, or analyze information. (Other evidence further suggests it’s also the last refuge of people unable to spell or to write.) There’s no point in expecting they will read my side of the story, because this blog post probably exceeds their attention span capabilities.
True/False Films from China and Mexico
Disorder, dir. Huang Weikai, China, 66 min.
Another one of my favorite films from this year’s festival was the Chinese film Disorder. Director Huang Weikai weaves together 26 “little stories,” themselves the works of amateur videographers, which Weikai collected during 2007 and 2008. Together they provide a glimpse of everyday life in China’s overcrowded cities. The initial montage combines films shot at night, and the second part of the film (the majority of it) are scenes shot in the daytime. All were shot in grainy black-and-white digital media, and all capture the chaos to which the film’s title refers.
In the Q&A following the film, the director talked about China’s rapid urban growth at the expense of the environment, and “all the ridiculous things that are happening,” which the film captures. He said that Chinese viewers of the film find its images very familiar, because “these are things that happen in everyday life that you see all around you” – scenes like an abandoned baby, which the camera spends a great deal of time on, but whom none of the bystanders pick up and rescue from its surroundings, which are covered with litter. The baby is regarded as so much trash – a human being abandoned in a throw-away world.
Not much less disturbing is the man lying in the middle of a busy road at night, while the driver and passenger of a car that ostensibly hit him alternately berate him and offer him money to leave. They insist his “injuries” are an act, that they didn’t hit him, and that they’ve seen this scam before. We don’t know the truth – the camera didn’t capture the initial incident – and like the crowd that eventually gathers, we have to decide whom to believe. For an American viewer, the driver seems callous and heartless; but in the later montage we see an apparently homeless man wandering through traffic, as if waiting to get hit by a car so he can, perhaps, extort money from some unfortunate driver.
Human interaction with nature (such as it is) – with the river, with animals – struck me as odd and jarring much of the time. The spectacle of a truckload of pigs that have escaped onto a highway, with truckers and police trying to capture them and reload them, would surely create a major traffic disturbance anywhere in the world. Bear paws in a dumpster, a pangolin in a cage, are both quite puzzling. A man trying to fish in a sewage ditch seems to have a futile task, but eventually he does catch some fish. The poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation have created extremely dire circumstances for many, like the people whose entire neighborhood (both houses and streets) has flooded because of poor drainage, so that they have to walk down the street in knee-deep water. A crocodile has been found in the city, and it attracts a large crowd as men capture and remove it; it attracts much more attention than the abandoned infant.
Many scenes represent interactions with the police; initially the police seem like a benign, though often ineffective, force; they feed the homeless man who’s been wandering on the highway, they advocate for better treatment for the pigs; they try to negotiate a fair resolution to a dispute over money. But at the end of the film we see a demonstration of police brutality towards an individual, which leads to a near-riot as onlookers get involved and object to the police’s actions. What amazed me the most was the courage of those bystanders willing to get involved, which must be especially difficult under an authoritarian regime. Add to that the courage of the amateur videographers to capture these events on film; and the courage of Huang Weikai to put his name to it and take it around China to film festivals and universities.
Like It Felt Like a Kiss, Disorder involved some pretty amazing film editing work. If anything, Disorder is even more experimental and avant-garde than It Felt Like a Kiss because there is no overarching narrative – no voice-over and no subtitles – to tie it together. The audience has no help from the director in making sense of this seemingly random “found footage.”
Last Train Home, dir. Lixin Fan, China, 87 min.
Also from China, Last Train Home focuses on the economic desperation of families separated by the parents’ need to earn money working in urban factories, while their children stay home in the country with their grandmother. I missed the first half hour of this film, so I’m not in a position to write a review of it, but what I did see was pretty amazing. The train ride home is a nightmarish ordeal, in which seemingly hundreds of thousands of people crowd into a train station where they wait for days to board the train. The children of these poor uneducated workers suffer emotionally from the absence of their parents, and the parents suffer too, but are willing to sacrifice so much so that their children can have a better life. Yet the parents’ constant pressure takes its toll on the children; the older one rebels and quits school; the younger one brings home his school report and the parents say “Fifth in the class? That’s not good enough; last year you were third.”
Those Who Remain, dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman, Mexico, 96 min.
Poverty’s devastating effect on families is also seen in Those Who Remain, a sweet and poignant film about the families left behind by husbands and fathers who leave Mexico to work in the United States, often for years at a time. The film interweaves the stories of 11 families from all over Mexico. Some men have benefitted substantially from their economic gains, while others have paid with their lives. But in nearly all cases, the fathers’ absences leave the children very sad. We get to know these families, all of whom the filmmakers treat with compassion and respect. The film takes its time, and as American viewers we see a very different aspect of Mexican culture that undermines all the anti-immigrant rhetoric that we are unfortunately bombarded with in our own political climate.
Another one of my favorite films from this year’s festival was the Chinese film Disorder. Director Huang Weikai weaves together 26 “little stories,” themselves the works of amateur videographers, which Weikai collected during 2007 and 2008. Together they provide a glimpse of everyday life in China’s overcrowded cities. The initial montage combines films shot at night, and the second part of the film (the majority of it) are scenes shot in the daytime. All were shot in grainy black-and-white digital media, and all capture the chaos to which the film’s title refers.
In the Q&A following the film, the director talked about China’s rapid urban growth at the expense of the environment, and “all the ridiculous things that are happening,” which the film captures. He said that Chinese viewers of the film find its images very familiar, because “these are things that happen in everyday life that you see all around you” – scenes like an abandoned baby, which the camera spends a great deal of time on, but whom none of the bystanders pick up and rescue from its surroundings, which are covered with litter. The baby is regarded as so much trash – a human being abandoned in a throw-away world.
Not much less disturbing is the man lying in the middle of a busy road at night, while the driver and passenger of a car that ostensibly hit him alternately berate him and offer him money to leave. They insist his “injuries” are an act, that they didn’t hit him, and that they’ve seen this scam before. We don’t know the truth – the camera didn’t capture the initial incident – and like the crowd that eventually gathers, we have to decide whom to believe. For an American viewer, the driver seems callous and heartless; but in the later montage we see an apparently homeless man wandering through traffic, as if waiting to get hit by a car so he can, perhaps, extort money from some unfortunate driver.
Human interaction with nature (such as it is) – with the river, with animals – struck me as odd and jarring much of the time. The spectacle of a truckload of pigs that have escaped onto a highway, with truckers and police trying to capture them and reload them, would surely create a major traffic disturbance anywhere in the world. Bear paws in a dumpster, a pangolin in a cage, are both quite puzzling. A man trying to fish in a sewage ditch seems to have a futile task, but eventually he does catch some fish. The poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation have created extremely dire circumstances for many, like the people whose entire neighborhood (both houses and streets) has flooded because of poor drainage, so that they have to walk down the street in knee-deep water. A crocodile has been found in the city, and it attracts a large crowd as men capture and remove it; it attracts much more attention than the abandoned infant.
Many scenes represent interactions with the police; initially the police seem like a benign, though often ineffective, force; they feed the homeless man who’s been wandering on the highway, they advocate for better treatment for the pigs; they try to negotiate a fair resolution to a dispute over money. But at the end of the film we see a demonstration of police brutality towards an individual, which leads to a near-riot as onlookers get involved and object to the police’s actions. What amazed me the most was the courage of those bystanders willing to get involved, which must be especially difficult under an authoritarian regime. Add to that the courage of the amateur videographers to capture these events on film; and the courage of Huang Weikai to put his name to it and take it around China to film festivals and universities.
Like It Felt Like a Kiss, Disorder involved some pretty amazing film editing work. If anything, Disorder is even more experimental and avant-garde than It Felt Like a Kiss because there is no overarching narrative – no voice-over and no subtitles – to tie it together. The audience has no help from the director in making sense of this seemingly random “found footage.”
Last Train Home, dir. Lixin Fan, China, 87 min.
Also from China, Last Train Home focuses on the economic desperation of families separated by the parents’ need to earn money working in urban factories, while their children stay home in the country with their grandmother. I missed the first half hour of this film, so I’m not in a position to write a review of it, but what I did see was pretty amazing. The train ride home is a nightmarish ordeal, in which seemingly hundreds of thousands of people crowd into a train station where they wait for days to board the train. The children of these poor uneducated workers suffer emotionally from the absence of their parents, and the parents suffer too, but are willing to sacrifice so much so that their children can have a better life. Yet the parents’ constant pressure takes its toll on the children; the older one rebels and quits school; the younger one brings home his school report and the parents say “Fifth in the class? That’s not good enough; last year you were third.”
Those Who Remain, dir. Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman, Mexico, 96 min.
Poverty’s devastating effect on families is also seen in Those Who Remain, a sweet and poignant film about the families left behind by husbands and fathers who leave Mexico to work in the United States, often for years at a time. The film interweaves the stories of 11 families from all over Mexico. Some men have benefitted substantially from their economic gains, while others have paid with their lives. But in nearly all cases, the fathers’ absences leave the children very sad. We get to know these families, all of whom the filmmakers treat with compassion and respect. The film takes its time, and as American viewers we see a very different aspect of Mexican culture that undermines all the anti-immigrant rhetoric that we are unfortunately bombarded with in our own political climate.
My Favorite True/False Films
It Felt Like a Kiss, dir. Adam Curtis, 67 min.
Adam Curtis, whose earlier True/False Film Festival entry was The Power of Nightmares (2005), this time has brought a film he describes as much more experimental than his usual style: It Felt Like a Kiss is a frenetic, hour-long nonstop montage of historical footage, pop music, and social, cultural and political critique of America and its role in the world in the 1950s and ‘60s. Rock Hudson and Doris Day frame this story of America’s national psychosis: at home, misogyny, domestic violence, homophobia; abroad, CIA-sponsored coups, the effects of which have been felt most strongly decades later. Curtis’ premise is that every day, thousands of events happen to thousands of people; at the time they may appear meaningless, but later we tell the stories. History looks very different in retrospect.
The film has no voice-over narration; instead there are some (very crucial) subtitles, but the images mainly stand on their own. Curtis uses the montage technique to great effect, with radical juxtapositions: shocking footage of a child receiving electroshock therapy, followed by footage of Andy Warhol joking with a cameraman. The child receiving electroshock was one of the most horrific images I’ve seen in a film – it’s practically like watching a snuff film. The idea that parents would subject their child to such treatment – which was prescribed to him as a cure for “homosexual feelings” – is unimaginable. That American society was so barbaric as to permit this treatment is tragic. This is part of the meaning behind Rock Hudson appearing so prominently in the film, à la Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (the queer reading of Rock). We are then told that Lou Reed, future lead singer of the Velvet Undergrounds, received electroshock therapy at age 17 for just such a “sickness;” he reported that it left him unable to feel empathy.
Here’s another shocking secret about American culture: the title of Curtis’ film is taken from the title of a song by Carole King, which was written about her babysitter Eva who was being regularly beaten by her boyfriend. “He hit me…and it felt like a kiss.” The song is about domestic violence as an expression of love. Eva became “Little Eva” and had her own hit song, “The Locomotion.” And Tina Turner wanted to have a hit song so she could have a solo career and escape being beaten by her husband. The film is interspersed with scenes from the Miss America pageant, cosmetics ads, a woman talking about “sex appeal,” women reacting to simulated violence, and repeated imagery of a little girl (4 or 5 years old) strutting back and forth as if practicing for a beauty pageant while Mom smiles on (and Dad is presumably behind the camera).
The Manson family, Richard Nixon, and Enos the Chimp – the first chimp to orbit the earth – are all tied in as well. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys admitted to hearing “loud shrieking screams” in his head, which he could only drown out by writing happy songs; and Nixon admitted to seeking psycho therapy to treat “feelings of doom.” The director of CIA’s covert operations went mad and killed himself. All the stigma against mental illness and those who seek help was, perhaps, a contributing factor in America’s insane foreign policy of the Vietnam years. I felt a great deal of empathy for Nixon, believe it or not, as I watched this film.
All this montage is held together with an upbeat soundtrack of rock, folk, and pop music, including songs from Motown, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison, the Beach Boys, and Peggy Lee. As strange as the song "It Felt Like a Kiss" is, Peggy Lee's song "Is That All There Is?" is even more bizarre; it captures the extreme psychological detachment of this period "right before the hippies came in," as Curtis likes to say. This was one of my favorite films at this year’s True/False Film Festival, and I liked it so much that I watched it twice. But don’t look for this film to get distributed; Curtis made is as part of an enormous art installation that was put on in Manchester, England, where it was at the center of an interactive art exhibition / “experience” that sounds pretty wild. (Curtis described it to the audience before each screening here in Columbia.) The installation belonged to the genre he calls “immersive theater.” He also said that he made the film “for his own amusement,” and I heard that he has not sought permission to use any of the music. It’s a shame, but this probably won’t be shown much in the U.S.; in fact, this festival appearance was the first time it’s been shown outside of Manchester.
And Everything Is Going Fine, dir. Steven Soderbergh, 89 min.
My favorite film at the festival was And Everything Is Going Fine, the documentary about monologist and actor Spalding Gray, who committed suicide in January 2004, two years after a serious car accident left him in a state of permanent physical and mental pain. According to his wife, Kathy Russo, he had attempted suicide 8 times in those two years. The film does not focus on the tragedy of his life’s end, but rather on the brilliant life and career of this amazing individual.
If you are a Spalding Gray fan, you have to see this film; it’s amazing. We see Spalding Gray “up close and personal,” as they say, telling us the story of his life, in his own words and in his own inimitable style. The film combines clips from his performances as well as interviews conducted for the film. We learn about this shy, awkward kid, middle son of a loving but repressed family, and the mother’s tragic struggle with mental illness. For that reason the film resonated for me with It Felt Like a Kiss; the tragedy of our culture’s inability to understand and care for depression and mental illness has had such tragic effects. For Spalding Gray, this meant he spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of his mother’s emotional detachment and suicide; we see his obsession with suicide in these interviews. Gray made a career based on revealing and exploring his own neuroses, which he succeeds in making compelling to others, primarily through his humor.
For me, And Everything Is Going Fine also resonated with other films at the festival, particularly Enemies of the People, the Cambodian documentary about the genocide of 1975-1979, because Gray acted in the film The Killing Fields (dir. Roland Joffe, 1984), and in one of his monologues, Swimming to Cambodia (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1987), Gray described his experiences making the film.
Adam Curtis, whose earlier True/False Film Festival entry was The Power of Nightmares (2005), this time has brought a film he describes as much more experimental than his usual style: It Felt Like a Kiss is a frenetic, hour-long nonstop montage of historical footage, pop music, and social, cultural and political critique of America and its role in the world in the 1950s and ‘60s. Rock Hudson and Doris Day frame this story of America’s national psychosis: at home, misogyny, domestic violence, homophobia; abroad, CIA-sponsored coups, the effects of which have been felt most strongly decades later. Curtis’ premise is that every day, thousands of events happen to thousands of people; at the time they may appear meaningless, but later we tell the stories. History looks very different in retrospect.
The film has no voice-over narration; instead there are some (very crucial) subtitles, but the images mainly stand on their own. Curtis uses the montage technique to great effect, with radical juxtapositions: shocking footage of a child receiving electroshock therapy, followed by footage of Andy Warhol joking with a cameraman. The child receiving electroshock was one of the most horrific images I’ve seen in a film – it’s practically like watching a snuff film. The idea that parents would subject their child to such treatment – which was prescribed to him as a cure for “homosexual feelings” – is unimaginable. That American society was so barbaric as to permit this treatment is tragic. This is part of the meaning behind Rock Hudson appearing so prominently in the film, à la Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (the queer reading of Rock). We are then told that Lou Reed, future lead singer of the Velvet Undergrounds, received electroshock therapy at age 17 for just such a “sickness;” he reported that it left him unable to feel empathy.
Here’s another shocking secret about American culture: the title of Curtis’ film is taken from the title of a song by Carole King, which was written about her babysitter Eva who was being regularly beaten by her boyfriend. “He hit me…and it felt like a kiss.” The song is about domestic violence as an expression of love. Eva became “Little Eva” and had her own hit song, “The Locomotion.” And Tina Turner wanted to have a hit song so she could have a solo career and escape being beaten by her husband. The film is interspersed with scenes from the Miss America pageant, cosmetics ads, a woman talking about “sex appeal,” women reacting to simulated violence, and repeated imagery of a little girl (4 or 5 years old) strutting back and forth as if practicing for a beauty pageant while Mom smiles on (and Dad is presumably behind the camera).
The Manson family, Richard Nixon, and Enos the Chimp – the first chimp to orbit the earth – are all tied in as well. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys admitted to hearing “loud shrieking screams” in his head, which he could only drown out by writing happy songs; and Nixon admitted to seeking psycho therapy to treat “feelings of doom.” The director of CIA’s covert operations went mad and killed himself. All the stigma against mental illness and those who seek help was, perhaps, a contributing factor in America’s insane foreign policy of the Vietnam years. I felt a great deal of empathy for Nixon, believe it or not, as I watched this film.
All this montage is held together with an upbeat soundtrack of rock, folk, and pop music, including songs from Motown, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison, the Beach Boys, and Peggy Lee. As strange as the song "It Felt Like a Kiss" is, Peggy Lee's song "Is That All There Is?" is even more bizarre; it captures the extreme psychological detachment of this period "right before the hippies came in," as Curtis likes to say. This was one of my favorite films at this year’s True/False Film Festival, and I liked it so much that I watched it twice. But don’t look for this film to get distributed; Curtis made is as part of an enormous art installation that was put on in Manchester, England, where it was at the center of an interactive art exhibition / “experience” that sounds pretty wild. (Curtis described it to the audience before each screening here in Columbia.) The installation belonged to the genre he calls “immersive theater.” He also said that he made the film “for his own amusement,” and I heard that he has not sought permission to use any of the music. It’s a shame, but this probably won’t be shown much in the U.S.; in fact, this festival appearance was the first time it’s been shown outside of Manchester.
And Everything Is Going Fine, dir. Steven Soderbergh, 89 min.
My favorite film at the festival was And Everything Is Going Fine, the documentary about monologist and actor Spalding Gray, who committed suicide in January 2004, two years after a serious car accident left him in a state of permanent physical and mental pain. According to his wife, Kathy Russo, he had attempted suicide 8 times in those two years. The film does not focus on the tragedy of his life’s end, but rather on the brilliant life and career of this amazing individual.
If you are a Spalding Gray fan, you have to see this film; it’s amazing. We see Spalding Gray “up close and personal,” as they say, telling us the story of his life, in his own words and in his own inimitable style. The film combines clips from his performances as well as interviews conducted for the film. We learn about this shy, awkward kid, middle son of a loving but repressed family, and the mother’s tragic struggle with mental illness. For that reason the film resonated for me with It Felt Like a Kiss; the tragedy of our culture’s inability to understand and care for depression and mental illness has had such tragic effects. For Spalding Gray, this meant he spent the rest of his life trying to make sense of his mother’s emotional detachment and suicide; we see his obsession with suicide in these interviews. Gray made a career based on revealing and exploring his own neuroses, which he succeeds in making compelling to others, primarily through his humor.
For me, And Everything Is Going Fine also resonated with other films at the festival, particularly Enemies of the People, the Cambodian documentary about the genocide of 1975-1979, because Gray acted in the film The Killing Fields (dir. Roland Joffe, 1984), and in one of his monologues, Swimming to Cambodia (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1987), Gray described his experiences making the film.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
True/False Film Festival 2010
It’s here again, the 7th annual True/False Festival of documentary filmmaking, which is surely the highlight of life in Columbia, Missouri. It may be the one event that draws people from out of town and out of state who are NOT Mizzou alumni coming to watch a football game. Every year I think about how I should try to convince my out-of-town friends to come next time, but then I never remember to do so; so if you’re reading this blog entry, consider yourself invited for 2011.
The first two films I saw in the festival included scenes of chickens being slaughtered – first in Cambodia, and then in Iraq. Coincidence? I have now sat through nine films so far, and there haven’t been any more chicken slaughters. Tomorrow I’m going to see four more films, and I’ll let you know what happens.
Enemies of the People, dir. Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin, 93 min.
One common theme among documentary films is heroism. Filmmakers choose a heroic subject – or are themselves heroic – and reveal to us over an hour and a half or two hours what this person has done that is extraordinary. The first such film I saw was Enemies of the People, which documented the one-man peace-and-reconciliation program that Thet Sambath has undertaken in Cambodia. Sambath, a Cambodian journalist, has devoted some 10 years of his life to finding the killers from Cambodia’s “Killing Fields” under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. His own father died in the Killing Fields; his mother was then forced to marry a Khmer Rouge soldier, and his brother was taken away by them and never seen again. Sambath befriended these men, gained their trust by treating them with respect, and elicited their stories in their own words. He poured all his weekends and all his resources into this project; at one point he said, “my wife has no money for food this week because it’s all going into the project.”
Sambath became friends with Nuon Chea, the top surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge; Pol Pot was known as “Brother Number One,” and Nuon Chea as “Brother Number Two.” From this man, as well as from Communist party members at the bottom of the chain of authority, the audience gets confessions, expressions of remorse, and apologies. It is very moving.
Rob Lemkin is a British journalist who went to Cambodia to cover the U.N. trial of Nuon Chea; he discovered Sambath and his project, and became involved in it himself. The crowd on Thursday night gave Sambath a standing ovation for the important work he’s been conducting. Enemies of the People is the True/Life Fund Film for this year’s True/False Film Festival, meaning that the festival collects money from festival-goers to donate to the subject of the film.
My Country, My Country, dir. Laura Poitras, 90 min.
The next film on my festival agenda was My Country, My Country, the 2007 film directed by Laura Poitras, winner of this year’s True Vision Award from the True/False gang. Her new film, The Oath, I got to see on Saturday night, but on Friday I got to go to the much more intimate screening of the first film in her trilogy about “America after 9/11.” My Country, My Country is set in Baghdad and chronicles the life of Dr. Riyadh and his family in the time leading up to the January 2005 Iraqi elections (two years after the U.S. invasion). As Poitras describes it, the film is about “civilians paying the price for the United States occupation.” But Dr. Riyadh is not just an ordinary person; he’s a medical doctor who volunteers at a free clinic, and he was on the ballot in those elections.
Laura Poitras herself is also a hero in my eyes. She was an embedded reporter in Iraq, but spent a lot of time “unembedded,” outside the American “Green Zone” following the story of Dr. Riyadh. She lived at the Riyadh’s home, and became close to the family – Mrs. Riyadh and their six children – and was able to film intimate family life.
I loved this film. It’s too bad there was only one screening at the festival, because more people should have seen it, but the festival’s focus is on showing new documentaries. Each year, the festival shows one older film by the winner of the True Vision Award in addition to that person’s new work.
The Oath, dir. Laura Poitras, 95 min.
Unlike My Country, My Country, the second film in Poitras’ trilogy, The Oath, does not feature a hero, but rather one of America’s enemies. Abu Jandal is the former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, now living in Yemen with his family and driving a taxi. He recruited his brother in-law to join Al Qaeda, and his brother in-law spent seven years in Guatanamo Bay prison, after Abu Jandal named him in FBI interrogation conducted at the Yemeni prison where Abu Jandal was imprisoned for two years on suspicion of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole.
Poitras said she set out to make a film about Guantanamo, but this film is shot primarily in Yemen. It is an exceptional film – as Poitras said in the Q&A, we are living in complicated times, and we need to have more complex conversations. In The Oath, Poitras really does a remarkable job of recording this man’s vast knowledge of the Al Qaeda operation as well as his thoughts on terrorism – which he rejects. He says he does not believe in taking innocent life, and did not participate in any terrorist operations, though he clearly sympathizes with their political views. In Yemen’s prison system, Abu Jandal participated in a program called The Dialogue Project, which was intended to reprogram Islamic jihadist. Using dialogue and talking about the Koran, workers in The Dialogue Project convince these men – apparently successfully – that violent political acts committed in the name of religion are, in fact, NOT condoned under Islam. I was surprised to learn that Yemen has such a program. In fact, the program helps these men find jobs after prison, and they gave Abu Jandal the money he needed to buy a taxi.
The film also followed the trial of Abu Jandal’s brother in-law, who won a landmark Supreme Court case, and who was eventually returned to Yemen. He refused to be interviewed for the film, and we never meet him, but we do meet his heroic attorney, and it is good to see the efforts of some Americans to preserve justice in a period in history when there’s so much injustice. Now I’m eager for Laura Poitras’ next film; if it's as good at My Country, My Country and The Oath, we're going to learn a lot from it.
The first two films I saw in the festival included scenes of chickens being slaughtered – first in Cambodia, and then in Iraq. Coincidence? I have now sat through nine films so far, and there haven’t been any more chicken slaughters. Tomorrow I’m going to see four more films, and I’ll let you know what happens.
Enemies of the People, dir. Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin, 93 min.
One common theme among documentary films is heroism. Filmmakers choose a heroic subject – or are themselves heroic – and reveal to us over an hour and a half or two hours what this person has done that is extraordinary. The first such film I saw was Enemies of the People, which documented the one-man peace-and-reconciliation program that Thet Sambath has undertaken in Cambodia. Sambath, a Cambodian journalist, has devoted some 10 years of his life to finding the killers from Cambodia’s “Killing Fields” under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. His own father died in the Killing Fields; his mother was then forced to marry a Khmer Rouge soldier, and his brother was taken away by them and never seen again. Sambath befriended these men, gained their trust by treating them with respect, and elicited their stories in their own words. He poured all his weekends and all his resources into this project; at one point he said, “my wife has no money for food this week because it’s all going into the project.”
Sambath became friends with Nuon Chea, the top surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge; Pol Pot was known as “Brother Number One,” and Nuon Chea as “Brother Number Two.” From this man, as well as from Communist party members at the bottom of the chain of authority, the audience gets confessions, expressions of remorse, and apologies. It is very moving.
Rob Lemkin is a British journalist who went to Cambodia to cover the U.N. trial of Nuon Chea; he discovered Sambath and his project, and became involved in it himself. The crowd on Thursday night gave Sambath a standing ovation for the important work he’s been conducting. Enemies of the People is the True/Life Fund Film for this year’s True/False Film Festival, meaning that the festival collects money from festival-goers to donate to the subject of the film.
My Country, My Country, dir. Laura Poitras, 90 min.
The next film on my festival agenda was My Country, My Country, the 2007 film directed by Laura Poitras, winner of this year’s True Vision Award from the True/False gang. Her new film, The Oath, I got to see on Saturday night, but on Friday I got to go to the much more intimate screening of the first film in her trilogy about “America after 9/11.” My Country, My Country is set in Baghdad and chronicles the life of Dr. Riyadh and his family in the time leading up to the January 2005 Iraqi elections (two years after the U.S. invasion). As Poitras describes it, the film is about “civilians paying the price for the United States occupation.” But Dr. Riyadh is not just an ordinary person; he’s a medical doctor who volunteers at a free clinic, and he was on the ballot in those elections.
Laura Poitras herself is also a hero in my eyes. She was an embedded reporter in Iraq, but spent a lot of time “unembedded,” outside the American “Green Zone” following the story of Dr. Riyadh. She lived at the Riyadh’s home, and became close to the family – Mrs. Riyadh and their six children – and was able to film intimate family life.
I loved this film. It’s too bad there was only one screening at the festival, because more people should have seen it, but the festival’s focus is on showing new documentaries. Each year, the festival shows one older film by the winner of the True Vision Award in addition to that person’s new work.
The Oath, dir. Laura Poitras, 95 min.
Unlike My Country, My Country, the second film in Poitras’ trilogy, The Oath, does not feature a hero, but rather one of America’s enemies. Abu Jandal is the former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, now living in Yemen with his family and driving a taxi. He recruited his brother in-law to join Al Qaeda, and his brother in-law spent seven years in Guatanamo Bay prison, after Abu Jandal named him in FBI interrogation conducted at the Yemeni prison where Abu Jandal was imprisoned for two years on suspicion of the terrorist attack on the USS Cole.
Poitras said she set out to make a film about Guantanamo, but this film is shot primarily in Yemen. It is an exceptional film – as Poitras said in the Q&A, we are living in complicated times, and we need to have more complex conversations. In The Oath, Poitras really does a remarkable job of recording this man’s vast knowledge of the Al Qaeda operation as well as his thoughts on terrorism – which he rejects. He says he does not believe in taking innocent life, and did not participate in any terrorist operations, though he clearly sympathizes with their political views. In Yemen’s prison system, Abu Jandal participated in a program called The Dialogue Project, which was intended to reprogram Islamic jihadist. Using dialogue and talking about the Koran, workers in The Dialogue Project convince these men – apparently successfully – that violent political acts committed in the name of religion are, in fact, NOT condoned under Islam. I was surprised to learn that Yemen has such a program. In fact, the program helps these men find jobs after prison, and they gave Abu Jandal the money he needed to buy a taxi.
The film also followed the trial of Abu Jandal’s brother in-law, who won a landmark Supreme Court case, and who was eventually returned to Yemen. He refused to be interviewed for the film, and we never meet him, but we do meet his heroic attorney, and it is good to see the efforts of some Americans to preserve justice in a period in history when there’s so much injustice. Now I’m eager for Laura Poitras’ next film; if it's as good at My Country, My Country and The Oath, we're going to learn a lot from it.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
"Leimert Park: The Story of a Village in South Central Los Angeles" (film review) at the Black International Film Festival, Berlin
"Leimert Park: The Story of a Village in South Central Los Angeles”
Tonight we had a little taste of Los Angeles in Berlin, at the 24th Black International Cinema, Berlin, 2009 film festival. The documentary film “Leimert Park: The Story of a Village in South Central Los Angeles” celebrates the cultural boom time of the 1990s in this small village in the South Central heart of L.A. Here’s the official description of the film:
“In April 1992, Richard Fulton, a formerly homeless man who had been living on Los Angeles’ skid row, opened Fifth Street Dick’s coffeehouse in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Leimert Park.
“A few days later, the 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out. For five days and five nights, a group of dedicated merchants and artists stood guard to protect their village from the fires that raged through the streets of South Central Los Angeles.
“Richard’s coffeehouse soon became a gathering spot for the community, and ultimately sparked a remarkable underground renaissance of African American art and culture. Leimert Park became a stopover for world-class jazz musicians who might drop in to jam until 3 or 4 in the morning. The sidewalks overflowed with people of all ages and races, absorbing the jazz, hip-hop, blues and spoken-word poetry performed in the park and various music venues.
“Told through the powerful words, art and music of the community, this film articulates and celebrates the profound struggles and deep spirit of the extraordinary artists and musicians who transformed a few blocks of modest storefronts into a vibrant and inspiring cultural oasis. Intimate and compelling, “Leimert Park” is also a universal tale of the struggles and triumphs of artists everywhere and of the power and importance of art and music in our lives.”
The film is based largely on interviews conducted in 1998, when the Leimert Park Village was at its height. I like the use of the word “renaissance” in this description, because the cultural blossoming of Leimert Park in the 1990s reminded me (on a smaller scale) of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I will be teaching an Honors College course on the Harlem Renaissance this fall in the Art History Department, so that era has been on my mind a lot lately.
Director Jeannette Lindsay explores the range of artistic projects that flourished in Leimert Park in the 1990s: painting, music, dance, poetry, and film, all made by African-Americans, had a vibrant home and a supportive community. Legendary jazz musicians like Horace Tapscott (leader of the Pan African People’s Arkestra) and Billy Higgins (legendary drummer) were a regular part of this scene; both are now deceased.
Richard Fulton, seen extensively in interview footage, was such a charismatic, warm, and funny person. He describes how he, as a homeless man, created this coffee shop which became a real anchor to the community. One of the funniest lines was when he described how/why his project made him happy; it combines “my three favorite things to do: A, sit on my ass; B, drink coffee; and C, listen to jazz.”
His coffee house opened just a few days before the infamous L.A. riots broke out after the verdict was read in the Rodney King trial. He said that some of the first cups of coffee he served were to the National Guardsmen.
I remember those days; the L.A. riots were probably the most surreal days that I experienced during my 14 years living in L.A. County. I was in downtown L.A. at the theater (an interracial version of “Richard II”) when the riots began, and had to drive home on surface streets because the freeways had all been shut down; the curfews and the run on the grocery stores and video stores as people prepared for the lock-down; the smell of smoke from all the fires filled the air as far west as Santa Monica, where I lived; the National Guard occupying Venice Beach, so you couldn’t walk or skate there at any time of day (which gave the local crazy – one of many – lots of material for loud public rants).
In the aftermath of the riots, all kinds of local, state, and national politicians and dignitaries rushed in to survey the damage and assure the residents that it would be rebuilt, would be better than before, and that the politicians wouldn’t turn their backs on the community like they had done after the Watts riots of the 1960s. Being politicians, they didn’t keep their promises; for years afterwards, the anniversary of the 1992 riots brought journalistic analyses of how the community was being neglected, detailing stories of how banks wouldn’t lend money, there were no grocery stores, and so on.
“Leimert Park” gives evidence to the contrary, showing us in loving detail a community that rose from the ashes of the 1992 riots. This is one case where, the film claims, the riots were the catalyst for the community to join together in creating something meaningful and positive, even transformational. Former gang members becoming poets.
That was all in the first hour. The last 30 minutes dealt with the community’s demise at the hands of politicians and commercial interests for the “redevelopment” of Leimert Park. Inevitably they ruined it, driving out the people who had made the community what it was through rents almost quadrupling overnight.
The film could be stronger – its narrative style does not, in my view, adequately foreground the historical status of the Leimert Park cultural renaissance. (“Historical” as in “it does not exist any more.”) The story about Leimert Park’s redevelopment and commercialization seem to be tacked on at the end, after an hour of what seems to be a complete, fully developed story in itself, the demise of which is never even hinted at in that first hour. Who is behind this redevelopment? It doesn’t even tell us who was the mayor at the time, or how the city council member representing Leimert Park responded to this redevelopment.
I suppose the film can’t be all things to all people. It does a much better job of telling us about the art, the poetry, and the music than about issues of urban development and gentrification.
(I like this image because it was hanging on the podium in front of where the Leimert Park poets stood to read their poems to the assembled audience.)
The 24th Black International Cinema film festival, Berlin, 2009
This was a quirky little film festival that seemed to have more sponsors than audience members. (There were no more than 20 people at the film we attended.) It’s almost like a little Mom-and-Pop film festival, except that it’s incredibly well funded, with support from the Commissioner for Integration of the Templehof-Schöneberg borough of Berlin and the German Commission for UNESCO among its many sponsors. Admission to all films was free, and tonight – the first night of the festival – this included a free buffet of very tasty Caribbean food catered by Ya-Man Caribbean Soul Food of Berlin (in the Tiergarten neighborhood).
The Mom-and-Pop feel of the film festival is reflected in the program, about 50 pages long; no fewer than 6 of these pages are devoted to photos of the husband-and-wife organizers, their two kids, and even their family going back generations! I kid you not. Inside the front cover is a full-color collage of three photos – one shows President Barack Obama, and right next to Obama is a photo of their son, dressed nicely and holding a basketball in the manner of senior class photos for the high school yearbook.
Another irony was the presence at the opening ceremony of a dignitary from the Embassy of the United States of America, Berlin; the embassy may not have been aware beforehand of this image printed in the film program on the page listing their supporters and affiliations:
Joe Louis and Fidel Castro, 1959
But the organizers did put together an impressive program of films from around the world, with emphasis on films from the U.S., Germany, Iran, and India. Several other African and European nations are represented with a single film, as well as Haiti. Most are documentary films, but some are narrative, and some are experimental shorts.
The projection left a lot to be desired. The top of the screen image was cut off, enough to be really annoying; and the sound synchronization was off.
I would love to see as many of these films as I could, but unfortunately that won’t be possible. The venue is clear on the other side of the city and takes an hour to get there; tonight’s film started 90 minutes after the time that was advertised on the website, which is a real inconvenience when you have a babysitter at home with your child. Given those factors, plus the fact that all the films are in the evening and weekend when child care is an issue, I will have to miss out on this great opportunity. Oh, well, that’s life in the big city.
Tonight we had a little taste of Los Angeles in Berlin, at the 24th Black International Cinema, Berlin, 2009 film festival. The documentary film “Leimert Park: The Story of a Village in South Central Los Angeles” celebrates the cultural boom time of the 1990s in this small village in the South Central heart of L.A. Here’s the official description of the film:
“In April 1992, Richard Fulton, a formerly homeless man who had been living on Los Angeles’ skid row, opened Fifth Street Dick’s coffeehouse in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Leimert Park.
“A few days later, the 1992 Los Angeles riots broke out. For five days and five nights, a group of dedicated merchants and artists stood guard to protect their village from the fires that raged through the streets of South Central Los Angeles.
“Richard’s coffeehouse soon became a gathering spot for the community, and ultimately sparked a remarkable underground renaissance of African American art and culture. Leimert Park became a stopover for world-class jazz musicians who might drop in to jam until 3 or 4 in the morning. The sidewalks overflowed with people of all ages and races, absorbing the jazz, hip-hop, blues and spoken-word poetry performed in the park and various music venues.
“Told through the powerful words, art and music of the community, this film articulates and celebrates the profound struggles and deep spirit of the extraordinary artists and musicians who transformed a few blocks of modest storefronts into a vibrant and inspiring cultural oasis. Intimate and compelling, “Leimert Park” is also a universal tale of the struggles and triumphs of artists everywhere and of the power and importance of art and music in our lives.”
The film is based largely on interviews conducted in 1998, when the Leimert Park Village was at its height. I like the use of the word “renaissance” in this description, because the cultural blossoming of Leimert Park in the 1990s reminded me (on a smaller scale) of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I will be teaching an Honors College course on the Harlem Renaissance this fall in the Art History Department, so that era has been on my mind a lot lately.
Director Jeannette Lindsay explores the range of artistic projects that flourished in Leimert Park in the 1990s: painting, music, dance, poetry, and film, all made by African-Americans, had a vibrant home and a supportive community. Legendary jazz musicians like Horace Tapscott (leader of the Pan African People’s Arkestra) and Billy Higgins (legendary drummer) were a regular part of this scene; both are now deceased.
Richard Fulton, seen extensively in interview footage, was such a charismatic, warm, and funny person. He describes how he, as a homeless man, created this coffee shop which became a real anchor to the community. One of the funniest lines was when he described how/why his project made him happy; it combines “my three favorite things to do: A, sit on my ass; B, drink coffee; and C, listen to jazz.”
His coffee house opened just a few days before the infamous L.A. riots broke out after the verdict was read in the Rodney King trial. He said that some of the first cups of coffee he served were to the National Guardsmen.
I remember those days; the L.A. riots were probably the most surreal days that I experienced during my 14 years living in L.A. County. I was in downtown L.A. at the theater (an interracial version of “Richard II”) when the riots began, and had to drive home on surface streets because the freeways had all been shut down; the curfews and the run on the grocery stores and video stores as people prepared for the lock-down; the smell of smoke from all the fires filled the air as far west as Santa Monica, where I lived; the National Guard occupying Venice Beach, so you couldn’t walk or skate there at any time of day (which gave the local crazy – one of many – lots of material for loud public rants).
In the aftermath of the riots, all kinds of local, state, and national politicians and dignitaries rushed in to survey the damage and assure the residents that it would be rebuilt, would be better than before, and that the politicians wouldn’t turn their backs on the community like they had done after the Watts riots of the 1960s. Being politicians, they didn’t keep their promises; for years afterwards, the anniversary of the 1992 riots brought journalistic analyses of how the community was being neglected, detailing stories of how banks wouldn’t lend money, there were no grocery stores, and so on.
“Leimert Park” gives evidence to the contrary, showing us in loving detail a community that rose from the ashes of the 1992 riots. This is one case where, the film claims, the riots were the catalyst for the community to join together in creating something meaningful and positive, even transformational. Former gang members becoming poets.
That was all in the first hour. The last 30 minutes dealt with the community’s demise at the hands of politicians and commercial interests for the “redevelopment” of Leimert Park. Inevitably they ruined it, driving out the people who had made the community what it was through rents almost quadrupling overnight.
The film could be stronger – its narrative style does not, in my view, adequately foreground the historical status of the Leimert Park cultural renaissance. (“Historical” as in “it does not exist any more.”) The story about Leimert Park’s redevelopment and commercialization seem to be tacked on at the end, after an hour of what seems to be a complete, fully developed story in itself, the demise of which is never even hinted at in that first hour. Who is behind this redevelopment? It doesn’t even tell us who was the mayor at the time, or how the city council member representing Leimert Park responded to this redevelopment.
I suppose the film can’t be all things to all people. It does a much better job of telling us about the art, the poetry, and the music than about issues of urban development and gentrification.
(I like this image because it was hanging on the podium in front of where the Leimert Park poets stood to read their poems to the assembled audience.)The 24th Black International Cinema film festival, Berlin, 2009
This was a quirky little film festival that seemed to have more sponsors than audience members. (There were no more than 20 people at the film we attended.) It’s almost like a little Mom-and-Pop film festival, except that it’s incredibly well funded, with support from the Commissioner for Integration of the Templehof-Schöneberg borough of Berlin and the German Commission for UNESCO among its many sponsors. Admission to all films was free, and tonight – the first night of the festival – this included a free buffet of very tasty Caribbean food catered by Ya-Man Caribbean Soul Food of Berlin (in the Tiergarten neighborhood).
The Mom-and-Pop feel of the film festival is reflected in the program, about 50 pages long; no fewer than 6 of these pages are devoted to photos of the husband-and-wife organizers, their two kids, and even their family going back generations! I kid you not. Inside the front cover is a full-color collage of three photos – one shows President Barack Obama, and right next to Obama is a photo of their son, dressed nicely and holding a basketball in the manner of senior class photos for the high school yearbook.
Another irony was the presence at the opening ceremony of a dignitary from the Embassy of the United States of America, Berlin; the embassy may not have been aware beforehand of this image printed in the film program on the page listing their supporters and affiliations:
Joe Louis and Fidel Castro, 1959But the organizers did put together an impressive program of films from around the world, with emphasis on films from the U.S., Germany, Iran, and India. Several other African and European nations are represented with a single film, as well as Haiti. Most are documentary films, but some are narrative, and some are experimental shorts.
The projection left a lot to be desired. The top of the screen image was cut off, enough to be really annoying; and the sound synchronization was off.
I would love to see as many of these films as I could, but unfortunately that won’t be possible. The venue is clear on the other side of the city and takes an hour to get there; tonight’s film started 90 minutes after the time that was advertised on the website, which is a real inconvenience when you have a babysitter at home with your child. Given those factors, plus the fact that all the films are in the evening and weekend when child care is an issue, I will have to miss out on this great opportunity. Oh, well, that’s life in the big city.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Age of Plenty - Review of documentary film "King Corn"
Tonight I watched Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis' first feature documentary, King Corn, which records their year spent in Greene, Iowa, growing one acre of corn. This turned out to be a thorough investigation not only of modern industrial corn farming, but also industrial beef feed lots, American agriculture subsidies, the high-fructose corn syrup industry, and the health crises caused by our national diet (specifically obesity and diabetes). The filmmakers do a nice job of tying together all these various causes and effects. As one of the experts interviewed for the film put it, "the subsidy system that rewards the overproduction of cheap corn makes the raw material available for an overweight society. We subsidize the happy meals but we don’t subsidize the healthy ones."
Cheap food was the goal of agriculture policies put in place in 1973 by Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz, who today sees his program as an unqualified success. He refers to "the age of plenty" (today's world) in which food costs us about half of what it did in the first half of the century.
Cheney and Ellis' film was inspired by Michael Pollan's work, and Pollan himself appears in the film being interviewed about corn and beef. I was pleased to see him, as I am also a huge fan of Michael Pollan. A few years back Pollan undertook the same sort of agricultural experiment represented in King Corn by purchasing a steer and following it from feed lot to dining table; his experience is described in the essay "Power Steer," New York Times, March 31, 2002. That essay made an enormous impression on me. I was already a vegetarian (moreso than I am today, in fact), but Pollan revealed in that article that more than half of the antibiotics consumed in this country are fed to cattle, and why (a fact also explained in King Corn). Pollan also revealed the connection between high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and obesity, and it makes sense: cattle are fed corn to fatten them up more quickly, so it makes sense that this insidious sweetener can't be good for us humans. I have tried to avoid HFCS since reading that article in 2002.
Cheap food was the goal of agriculture policies put in place in 1973 by Secretary of Agriculture Earl L. Butz, who today sees his program as an unqualified success. He refers to "the age of plenty" (today's world) in which food costs us about half of what it did in the first half of the century.
Cheney and Ellis' film was inspired by Michael Pollan's work, and Pollan himself appears in the film being interviewed about corn and beef. I was pleased to see him, as I am also a huge fan of Michael Pollan. A few years back Pollan undertook the same sort of agricultural experiment represented in King Corn by purchasing a steer and following it from feed lot to dining table; his experience is described in the essay "Power Steer," New York Times, March 31, 2002. That essay made an enormous impression on me. I was already a vegetarian (moreso than I am today, in fact), but Pollan revealed in that article that more than half of the antibiotics consumed in this country are fed to cattle, and why (a fact also explained in King Corn). Pollan also revealed the connection between high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and obesity, and it makes sense: cattle are fed corn to fatten them up more quickly, so it makes sense that this insidious sweetener can't be good for us humans. I have tried to avoid HFCS since reading that article in 2002.
Pollan is the author of a number of books on food, including The Botany of Desire (2002), The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008). He has also been a contributing writer for the New York Times since at least 1998; for a sample of his work see "When a Crop Become King," New York Times, July 19, 2002; "Our National Eating Disorder," New York Times, October 17, 2004; "The Modern Hunter-Gatherer," NYT March 26, 2006; "Mass Natural," NYT June 4, 2006; "The Vegetable-Industrial Complex," NYT October 15, 2006; and "Unhappy Meals," NYT January 28, 2007. Or search the New York Times website under his name and you will come up with dozens more essays and articles.
I didn't intend to write a post about Michael Pollan, but rather Cheney & Ellis's film King Corn. However, the debt that the latter owes to the former is phenomenal. Nonetheless, they interview a large number of "experts" on various subjects, all of whom contribute significantly to our deeper understanding of these complex issues. Following are some of the ideas and facts that emerge in the film:
- “America’s favorite meat is ground beef, hamburger meat. Hamburger meat is really not meat, but it’s rather fat disguised as meat. It contains 65 percent of its calories by energy as fat.” - Loren Cordain, University of California. (A grain-fed steak contains 9 grams of saturated fat compared with 1.3 grams in grass-fed beef.)
- If you were born in the last 30 years in America, chances are you’ve only ever tasted corn-fed beef.
- In the last 30 years, America’s consumption of table sugar has fallen, but our overall consumption of sweeteners has gone up more than 30 percent, largely because of a dramatic increase in our consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.
- Drinking one soda per day almost doubled the risk of developing Type II diabetes compared with drinking it only occasionally or not at all.
- The agriculture our great-grandparents had helped build is now growing fast food.
- “It [the corn in Iowa] has been selected for high productivity. This means a high-value starch production. Well you never get something for nothing in the world of biophysics, and what you give up in the bargain is nutritional value.” -- Ricardo Salvador, Iowa State University
- “Most of what we’ve done in agricultural so-called improvements and in food processing have actually degraded our food supply from a nutritional standpoint.” -- Walter Willet, Harvard University
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Mud, Salt Crystals, Rocks, Water
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty persists as an earthwork almost 4 decades after it was created, sculpted from the earth, jutting out into the Great Salt Lake. It has fluctuated with the changing water level – it was submerged for more than 20 years – and the accretion of salt deposits. For those who’ve never heard of earthworks, this was an unconventional artistic medium popular in the 1960s, one that defied the norms of the commercial art world that regarded art as a commodity.Spiral Jetty is also a movie, a documentary film that is more than documentary, it is a work of art in its own right. In 1970, Smithson and his wife Nancy Holt, with some friends and supporters, created this fascinating 35-minute film that adds new dimensions to the earthwork and reveals some of the artist’s more esoteric points of reference. The film informs the earthwork to such an extent that the earthwork seems incomplete without it.
The earthwork spirals out into the lake, suggesting movement; the film, on the other hand, simulates that movement in a dizzying, almost nauseating centrifugal journey, tracing that earth-spiral from the air, by helicopter, while Smithson repeats his mantra “mud, salt crystals, rocks, wat
er” for each of the jetty’s directional coordinates. The camera, from the helicopter, also follows Smithson as he runs along the jetty, showing us the artist’s seeming intention that the work is to be experienced physically, in three, even four dimensions, not simply to be looked at in photographs (which is how 99 percent of viewers have experienced it).Another fascinating aspect of the film was its extended, slow tracking shots through a paleontological museum, with dinosaur bones and reconstructions of dinosaurs and pictures of dinosaurs, all filtered red as if the past could be viewed better through some kind of an infrared eye. The soundtrack for the paleontology segment was a muffled drone, like something heard under water.
The editing work contributes both to the visual pleasure of the film and the conceptual links that Smithson makes between machines and dinosaurs. Scenes of the dusty road, shot from the moving vehicle, are intercut with those slow tracking shots in the museum with its bones in glass cases, as well as the large earth-moving machines as they put the boulders and other sediment into place on the jetty.
In his own statements about the film, Smithson explained some of these connections between his work on the Spiral Jetty and his interest in paleontology:
“Back in New York, the urban desert, I contacted Bob Fiore and Barbara Jarvis and asked them to help me put my movie together. The movie began as a set of disconnections, a bramble of stabilized fragments taken from things obscure and fluid, ingredients trapped in a succession of frames, a stream of viscosities both still and moving. And the movie editor, bending over such a chaos of ‘takes’ resembles a paleontologist sorting out glimpses of a world not yet together, a land that has yet to come to completion, a span of time unfinished, a spaceless limbo on some spiral reels. Film strips hung from the cutter’s rack, bits and pieces of Utah, out-takes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material. The sun, the spiral, the salt buried in lengths of footage. Everything about movies and moviemaking is archaic and crude. One is transported by this Archeozoic medium into the earliest known geological eras. The movieola becomes a ‘time machine’ that transforms trucks into dinosaurs.” (My thanks to John Klein for bringing this statement to my attention.)
I love this statement, especially the end; it’s very Flintstones, isn’t it? Seriously, Smithson’s statement shows great insight into the filmmaking process, and his reference to the “spiral reels” of the filmstrip underscores even more the Spiral Jetty’s (i.e., the earthwork’s) being best understood as a dynamic gesture through the dimension of time, just like film itself.
The film was non-narrative in its exposition. Contrast that with the 2003 documentary about artist Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides, which was beautiful yet very conventional and straightforward in its emphasis on episodic narration. Both of these artists enjoy watching the transitory effects which nature exerts on their creations. In that respect Goldsworthy’s art appears similar to Smithson’s, but in fact I think it’s much more romantic in its love of nature. Smithson, on the other hand, loved machines as much as he loved nature.
I enjoyed this film so much that I've decided to use it in my Art History / Film Studies class this fall, "Artists Lives on Film." The last time I taught the course I used only biopics, but this time I plan to show a few documentaries and a few films made by artists as well.
For more information on Smithson, who died in 1973, visit his website.
(Viewed at a screening of the film in the Art History department on April 8; the department helped purchase a copy of this film for MU on DVD, which is available through Academic Support.)
Monday, March 3, 2008
2008 True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri (Part I)
This weekend was the fifth annual True/False festival of nonfiction films (aka documentaries) and it was an overwhelming success. I was part of a 1200-member audience at Jesse Auditorium on Sunday night that gave festival organizers David Wilson and Paul Sturtz a standing ovation, which they richly deserve for their many years of hard work at creating this amazing event. This year’s festival was much bigger than in the past, but they still kept ticket prices affordable ($55 for the basic festival pass, which got me into over a dozen films). I always thought film festivals were exclusive affairs held in really ritzy places like Cannes, and affordable only to celebrities, that is, until True/False started up in my hometown of the past several years, Columbia, MO. This is one of the things I appreciate about what Paul and David have done – they’ve made it accessible to everyone, and have still kept it intellectually challenging, politically relevant, and artistically intriguing. That, and they’re such modest guys, they would be the first to point out that they’ve had tons of support and involvement from other folks who’ve helped maintain that vision.
I saw so many films, yet missed so many others that people raved about. I will try to share some of my impressions, though I realize this can in no way be a comprehensive overview even of my own limited participation.
The Greening of Southie (dir. Ian Cheney, 82 min.) was the one “architecture” film at the festival so naturally I had to see it. It was about the building of the Macallen Boston building, the first “green” building to be built in South Boston, and a real groundbreaker; a postscript to the film announced that the mayor of Boston has since mandated that all new buildings in Boston must be “green.” (What does that mean, exactly? It seems like a fairly vague mandate.) The filmmakers followed the construction from start to finish, allowing us to see all the stages of a construction site. If that doesn’t sound exciting to you, you don’t know what you’re missing! It was pretty funny to hear everyone, from construction workers to yuppie condo owners, explaining the double-flush toilet in the most euphemistic terms they could muster. (“It has two buttons, the yellow button and the brown button.”) The filmmakers, who were at the screening, admitted that the process got interesting for them (as it does for the audience) when things started to go wrong. An expensive floor material, bamboo, imported from mainland China (environmentally friendly because it’s a rapidly renewable resource) was installed using low-VOC glue (glue that doesn’t give off a lot of toxic chemicals), and a month or so later ALL the floors in the building started buckling and had to be ripped out! Many of these “green” products have been on the market for less than 10 years, so their advantages and disadvantages are not fully known, not to mention that a lot of construction workers have no experience with them. The film touched on the class tensions that are resulting from this luxury condo development ($500,000 to $2 million per unit) being inserted into a very working-class part of the city, and the effects on the local economy. Small mom-and-pop businesses that had been there for decades were being pushed out. The filmmakers really could have explored that issue a bit more, but that’s not the film they were making, and so I don’t fault them for it too much. Another documentary film I saw recently (though it was not at True/False) did a marvelous job at examining the effects of development on an older, poorer neighborhood, and that film was called Greetings from Asbury Park (dir. Christina Eliopoulos, 2007, 93 min.). This was shown at the annual meeting of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History in October 2007, and I was hoping it would come to True/False because I’d love for people to see it. (Asbury Park is really more about eminent domain abuse, but its strength lies in the personal stories it tells.) This is sort of the flip side of The Greening of Southie, though not exactly.
Although The Greening of Southie was the only feature-length film specifically devoted to the architectural profession and its activities, the festival’s grand closing film, Man on Wire, told a story that was inextricably linked to the history of one of the 20th century’s architectural marvels, the World Trade Center. French guerrilla high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked on a wire he and his friends and accomplices had managed to string between the two towers, and he crossed that wire no fewer than 8 times. This feat – his third such stunt – occurred shortly after the twin towers were completed, and in fact it seemed that some of the top floors were still under construction. It was a beautiful, funny, and upbeat note on which to end the festival, despite the haunting knowledge of the WTC’s imminent demise which no one watching the film could ignore. Attendees of last year's True/False festival will remember the documentary film about 9/11 called Falling Man; Petit's potential for disaster reminded us all of images of such images from 2001. The director stated afterwards that it was part of his project to remind us all of the buildings’ more elegiac history, and for that reason the film is profound. This man’s achievement – walking on a high wire across the world’s tallest buildings – had a sublimity about it that is incomparable. It took my breath away to see the photos of him grinning as he achieved a dream that he had formed from the very first moment he learned of the plans for the building. Even the cop who arrested him, who is memorable for such astute comments as “his associates started speaking to him in French, being that he was from France,” recognized how sublime that moment was; “you knew you was never gonna see this again.”
A short film entitled 200,000 Phantoms (dir. Jean-Gabriel Periot, 10 min.) showed the “history of 20th-century Hiroshima as told through 600 photographs of the iconic Gembaku Dome between 1914-2006.” [The Genbaku Dome -- aka the Hiroshima Peace Memorial -- is a World Heritage Site.] The film was so beautiful and poetic, and the archival work of collecting all those photos (mostly postcards) alone is mind-boggling. Then the images were put in chronological order and superimposed on each other in sequence, sometimes traveling around the building to create a sense of a moving camera and of the building in 3 dimensions. This building was one of the few left standing after the A-bomb – standing in a skeletal state, that is — and the city of Hiroshima neither destroyed that skeletal structure, yet never rebuilt the walls to make it a functional building again. Instead this architectural phantom stands as a perpetual memorial to what was destroyed and a perpetual reminder of the senseless destruction and loss, and the stupid brutality (or is it brutal stupidity?), of war.
[Another architecture-themed short, called Under Construction (dir. Zhenchen Liu, 10 min.) played at the festival, but I missed it. My husband saw it and said it was intense. That reminds me of another documentary I missed at last year’s True/False festival on China called Manufactured Landscapes.]
I really enjoy short films and so I went out of my way to see several line-ups of short films. Some of the highlights included:
La Corona (dir. Amanda Micheli & Isabel Vega, 40 min.), about a beauty pageant in a Bogota, Columbia, women’s prison; quite captivating, it was nominated for an Academy Award. You really get to know these 6 women who are competing for a crown that carries with it no real remuneration, just bragging rights, and the opportunity to think about something other than their miserable lives for a while. However, at the end of the film the winner got released on parole, and it was entirely unclear if this had anything to do with the attention she got (in local newspapers) for winning. There was a bit of racism expressed after the queen was chosen, the only black contestant; some of the sore losers claimed it was because the judges were all black (which they weren't, not all of them) and expressed some negative feelings towards black people. Fortunately that kind of ugliness was not the dominant note of the film.
I Met the Walrus (dir. Josh Raskin, 8 min.), wonderful animation in the spirit of Yellow Submarine, illustrating a 1970s-era audiotape of an interview John Lennon gave to a 14-year-old boy. This delightful short is a must-see! (Note: BK just informed me that I Met the Walrus was nominated for an Academy Award in the "Best Animated Short Film" category.)
The Man Who Ate Badgers (dir. Daniel Vernon, 38 min.) had some moments where I had to cover my eyes – gathering roadkill for dinner – but overall I enjoyed its quirky characters. Roadkill man had a wife who stayed in hiding whenever the camera was in the house because she didn’t want to appear on film, but I think that made the director all the more curious about her. He asked Roadkill man lots of questions, like “does your wife eat badgers too?” (answer: “no, she’s a vegetarian” – which got a huge laugh from the audience).
One program of shorts called “Working Title” gathered together 5 films on that theme, though it occurred to me as I was watching it that the majority of films at the festival were about work. Man on Wire – I guess tightrope walking was his “work,” though he didn’t seem to be getting paid for it. Salim Baba (dir. Timothy Steinberg, 14 min.), which played as part of the “Oscar Shorts” program, followed the owner of a 100-year-old hand-cranked movie projector who takes his equipment through the slums of Kolkota showing discarded fragments from Bollywood films. His mastery of the equipment reminded me of the amazing ingenuity I’ve seen in places like India and Mexico where things that we in the industrialized world would through in the trash heap are preserved and used and maintained. Speaking of the Indian subcontinent, Flying on One Engine (dir. Joshua Weinberg) told about the work of one Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet, a plastic surgeon who performs operations free of charge for children in India with severe facial deformities. For a humanitarian the guy was a total egotist. The Tailor (dir. Oscar Perez, 29 min.) showed an outrageous Pakistani tailor with his Indian assistant(s) working in a closet-sized shop in Barcelona and fighting with his customers. Somehow I think he’s too passive-aggressive to be in that line of work. The film is funny, but what’s even more funny is listening to my friend BP describe it. And my favorite of the “Working Title” shorts was Shika Shika (dir. Stephen Hyde, 10 min.), which “follows one family that for three generations has scaled the Peruvian Andes to ‘harvest’ ice for shika shika, a colorful shaved ice treat they sell in the market.” I guess it was kind of a fluffy film, but it was pretty, and colorful, and fun, with enjoyable Peruvian folk music. Visually it reminded me of the many short films made by Charles and Ray Eames in the 1950s, who were masters of the form. I will post a separate blog entry about the Eameses soon, I promise!
(Caution: spoiler ahead!)
Freeheld (dir. Cynthia Wade, 40 min.), which won the Academy Award for Best Short Film, was an uplifting story, though sad at the same time as we watched Laurel Hester, a retired police detective, dying of cancer and fighting for the right to leave her police pension to her lesbian domestic partner. The State of New Jersey had passed a law allowing counties to award domestic partners of gay employees the same rights as married, heterosexual partners. However, this particular county had not opted to extend rights to gay couples, hence this legal fight. As I was watching footage of citizens, many of them police officers, going before the Freeholders Board (which is what they call their county government officials), I kept waiting to hear from the people who supported the Freeholders in their ridiculous refusal to give Laurel's pension to her partner, Stacie. Guess what -- there were NO members of the public (citizens or tax-payers or whatever you want to call it) who supported the Freeholders in their decision! This board of 5 middle aged white men seemed completely unconcerned with the viewpoint of the people whom they supposedly represented. (New Jersey is a democracy, isn't it?) In the end, it was the governor of New Jersey who intervened and called the Freeholders personally, asking them to reconsider their positions. Even the Freeholders gave Hester a standing ovation when she won her fight -- all except for the one guy, evidently the main opponent, who did not show up for that meeting! A postscript to the film announced that after the Laurel Hester case, the New Jersey legislature passed a law making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
I have said nothing yet about the spectacular film Gonzo (dir. Alex Gibney, 2007, 118 min.), nor about many of the other films that gave me lots to think about. Those will be the subject of my next blog entry, coming soon.
Check out these links for more on the 2008 True/False Film Festival:
Eugene Hernandez in IndieWire.com; Joe Meyer in the Columbia Daily Tribune
I saw so many films, yet missed so many others that people raved about. I will try to share some of my impressions, though I realize this can in no way be a comprehensive overview even of my own limited participation.
The Greening of Southie (dir. Ian Cheney, 82 min.) was the one “architecture” film at the festival so naturally I had to see it. It was about the building of the Macallen Boston building, the first “green” building to be built in South Boston, and a real groundbreaker; a postscript to the film announced that the mayor of Boston has since mandated that all new buildings in Boston must be “green.” (What does that mean, exactly? It seems like a fairly vague mandate.) The filmmakers followed the construction from start to finish, allowing us to see all the stages of a construction site. If that doesn’t sound exciting to you, you don’t know what you’re missing! It was pretty funny to hear everyone, from construction workers to yuppie condo owners, explaining the double-flush toilet in the most euphemistic terms they could muster. (“It has two buttons, the yellow button and the brown button.”) The filmmakers, who were at the screening, admitted that the process got interesting for them (as it does for the audience) when things started to go wrong. An expensive floor material, bamboo, imported from mainland China (environmentally friendly because it’s a rapidly renewable resource) was installed using low-VOC glue (glue that doesn’t give off a lot of toxic chemicals), and a month or so later ALL the floors in the building started buckling and had to be ripped out! Many of these “green” products have been on the market for less than 10 years, so their advantages and disadvantages are not fully known, not to mention that a lot of construction workers have no experience with them. The film touched on the class tensions that are resulting from this luxury condo development ($500,000 to $2 million per unit) being inserted into a very working-class part of the city, and the effects on the local economy. Small mom-and-pop businesses that had been there for decades were being pushed out. The filmmakers really could have explored that issue a bit more, but that’s not the film they were making, and so I don’t fault them for it too much. Another documentary film I saw recently (though it was not at True/False) did a marvelous job at examining the effects of development on an older, poorer neighborhood, and that film was called Greetings from Asbury Park (dir. Christina Eliopoulos, 2007, 93 min.). This was shown at the annual meeting of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History in October 2007, and I was hoping it would come to True/False because I’d love for people to see it. (Asbury Park is really more about eminent domain abuse, but its strength lies in the personal stories it tells.) This is sort of the flip side of The Greening of Southie, though not exactly.
Although The Greening of Southie was the only feature-length film specifically devoted to the architectural profession and its activities, the festival’s grand closing film, Man on Wire, told a story that was inextricably linked to the history of one of the 20th century’s architectural marvels, the World Trade Center. French guerrilla high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked on a wire he and his friends and accomplices had managed to string between the two towers, and he crossed that wire no fewer than 8 times. This feat – his third such stunt – occurred shortly after the twin towers were completed, and in fact it seemed that some of the top floors were still under construction. It was a beautiful, funny, and upbeat note on which to end the festival, despite the haunting knowledge of the WTC’s imminent demise which no one watching the film could ignore. Attendees of last year's True/False festival will remember the documentary film about 9/11 called Falling Man; Petit's potential for disaster reminded us all of images of such images from 2001. The director stated afterwards that it was part of his project to remind us all of the buildings’ more elegiac history, and for that reason the film is profound. This man’s achievement – walking on a high wire across the world’s tallest buildings – had a sublimity about it that is incomparable. It took my breath away to see the photos of him grinning as he achieved a dream that he had formed from the very first moment he learned of the plans for the building. Even the cop who arrested him, who is memorable for such astute comments as “his associates started speaking to him in French, being that he was from France,” recognized how sublime that moment was; “you knew you was never gonna see this again.”
A short film entitled 200,000 Phantoms (dir. Jean-Gabriel Periot, 10 min.) showed the “history of 20th-century Hiroshima as told through 600 photographs of the iconic Gembaku Dome between 1914-2006.” [The Genbaku Dome -- aka the Hiroshima Peace Memorial -- is a World Heritage Site.] The film was so beautiful and poetic, and the archival work of collecting all those photos (mostly postcards) alone is mind-boggling. Then the images were put in chronological order and superimposed on each other in sequence, sometimes traveling around the building to create a sense of a moving camera and of the building in 3 dimensions. This building was one of the few left standing after the A-bomb – standing in a skeletal state, that is — and the city of Hiroshima neither destroyed that skeletal structure, yet never rebuilt the walls to make it a functional building again. Instead this architectural phantom stands as a perpetual memorial to what was destroyed and a perpetual reminder of the senseless destruction and loss, and the stupid brutality (or is it brutal stupidity?), of war.[Another architecture-themed short, called Under Construction (dir. Zhenchen Liu, 10 min.) played at the festival, but I missed it. My husband saw it and said it was intense. That reminds me of another documentary I missed at last year’s True/False festival on China called Manufactured Landscapes.]
I really enjoy short films and so I went out of my way to see several line-ups of short films. Some of the highlights included:
La Corona (dir. Amanda Micheli & Isabel Vega, 40 min.), about a beauty pageant in a Bogota, Columbia, women’s prison; quite captivating, it was nominated for an Academy Award. You really get to know these 6 women who are competing for a crown that carries with it no real remuneration, just bragging rights, and the opportunity to think about something other than their miserable lives for a while. However, at the end of the film the winner got released on parole, and it was entirely unclear if this had anything to do with the attention she got (in local newspapers) for winning. There was a bit of racism expressed after the queen was chosen, the only black contestant; some of the sore losers claimed it was because the judges were all black (which they weren't, not all of them) and expressed some negative feelings towards black people. Fortunately that kind of ugliness was not the dominant note of the film.
I Met the Walrus (dir. Josh Raskin, 8 min.), wonderful animation in the spirit of Yellow Submarine, illustrating a 1970s-era audiotape of an interview John Lennon gave to a 14-year-old boy. This delightful short is a must-see! (Note: BK just informed me that I Met the Walrus was nominated for an Academy Award in the "Best Animated Short Film" category.)
The Man Who Ate Badgers (dir. Daniel Vernon, 38 min.) had some moments where I had to cover my eyes – gathering roadkill for dinner – but overall I enjoyed its quirky characters. Roadkill man had a wife who stayed in hiding whenever the camera was in the house because she didn’t want to appear on film, but I think that made the director all the more curious about her. He asked Roadkill man lots of questions, like “does your wife eat badgers too?” (answer: “no, she’s a vegetarian” – which got a huge laugh from the audience).
One program of shorts called “Working Title” gathered together 5 films on that theme, though it occurred to me as I was watching it that the majority of films at the festival were about work. Man on Wire – I guess tightrope walking was his “work,” though he didn’t seem to be getting paid for it. Salim Baba (dir. Timothy Steinberg, 14 min.), which played as part of the “Oscar Shorts” program, followed the owner of a 100-year-old hand-cranked movie projector who takes his equipment through the slums of Kolkota showing discarded fragments from Bollywood films. His mastery of the equipment reminded me of the amazing ingenuity I’ve seen in places like India and Mexico where things that we in the industrialized world would through in the trash heap are preserved and used and maintained. Speaking of the Indian subcontinent, Flying on One Engine (dir. Joshua Weinberg) told about the work of one Dr. Sharadkumar Dicksheet, a plastic surgeon who performs operations free of charge for children in India with severe facial deformities. For a humanitarian the guy was a total egotist. The Tailor (dir. Oscar Perez, 29 min.) showed an outrageous Pakistani tailor with his Indian assistant(s) working in a closet-sized shop in Barcelona and fighting with his customers. Somehow I think he’s too passive-aggressive to be in that line of work. The film is funny, but what’s even more funny is listening to my friend BP describe it. And my favorite of the “Working Title” shorts was Shika Shika (dir. Stephen Hyde, 10 min.), which “follows one family that for three generations has scaled the Peruvian Andes to ‘harvest’ ice for shika shika, a colorful shaved ice treat they sell in the market.” I guess it was kind of a fluffy film, but it was pretty, and colorful, and fun, with enjoyable Peruvian folk music. Visually it reminded me of the many short films made by Charles and Ray Eames in the 1950s, who were masters of the form. I will post a separate blog entry about the Eameses soon, I promise!
(Caution: spoiler ahead!)
Freeheld (dir. Cynthia Wade, 40 min.), which won the Academy Award for Best Short Film, was an uplifting story, though sad at the same time as we watched Laurel Hester, a retired police detective, dying of cancer and fighting for the right to leave her police pension to her lesbian domestic partner. The State of New Jersey had passed a law allowing counties to award domestic partners of gay employees the same rights as married, heterosexual partners. However, this particular county had not opted to extend rights to gay couples, hence this legal fight. As I was watching footage of citizens, many of them police officers, going before the Freeholders Board (which is what they call their county government officials), I kept waiting to hear from the people who supported the Freeholders in their ridiculous refusal to give Laurel's pension to her partner, Stacie. Guess what -- there were NO members of the public (citizens or tax-payers or whatever you want to call it) who supported the Freeholders in their decision! This board of 5 middle aged white men seemed completely unconcerned with the viewpoint of the people whom they supposedly represented. (New Jersey is a democracy, isn't it?) In the end, it was the governor of New Jersey who intervened and called the Freeholders personally, asking them to reconsider their positions. Even the Freeholders gave Hester a standing ovation when she won her fight -- all except for the one guy, evidently the main opponent, who did not show up for that meeting! A postscript to the film announced that after the Laurel Hester case, the New Jersey legislature passed a law making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
I have said nothing yet about the spectacular film Gonzo (dir. Alex Gibney, 2007, 118 min.), nor about many of the other films that gave me lots to think about. Those will be the subject of my next blog entry, coming soon.
Check out these links for more on the 2008 True/False Film Festival:
Eugene Hernandez in IndieWire.com; Joe Meyer in the Columbia Daily Tribune
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