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 film reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film reviews. 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.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Film Bookends Part III: "Blow-Up" (1966) and "Deep Red / Profondo Rosso" (1975)
David Hemmings in Dario Argento's 1975 Profondo Rosso (Deep Red)My latest entry on the theme of Film Bookends allows me to discuss two of my favorite films, both by Italian directors: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, from 1966, and Dario Argento’s Deep Red / Profondo Rosso, from 1975. Blow-Up, like so many of Antonioni’s film, is a powerfully intellectual film that operates on many different levels; one critic calls it “a deeply philosophical film.” Deep Red is, more or less, a slasher flick; Argento is known for his bloody horror films in which blood and gore are exaggerated, aestheticized, and relished. Antonioni is an auteur, but Argento has his own claims to auteur-ship, his films having something of a cult status. Argento delights in imagining ever more gruesome manners of death, and in capturing them in exquisite detail on film.
Blow-Up was Antonioni’s first English-language film, and it was set in London. It was scandalous at the time for its representation of the Swinging London scene of the 1960s, depicting pot-smoking and promiscuous sex. (The Yardbirds perform in a guest appearance.) But these aspects are secondary to its incisive character study, its formal design, and its meta-discourses on art, filmmaking, and vision.
I read Deep Red as an homage to Blow-Up, a tribute from a younger Italian director to a great Italian master. The first clue of their relationship is that both films cast the British actor David Hemmings as their star; the second clue is that they share a plot device, which is that they both involve mysteries that the Hemmings character attempts to unravel, based on visual evidence that is only available to him. Whereas Blow-Up frustrates the expectations of the “whodunit” genre by having all evidence disappear before the protagonist can expose the crime, Argento fulfills expectations by allowing the protagonist to catch and punish the murderer. Perhaps Argento wanted to compensate for Blow-Up’s lack of closure.
The films’ similarities go deeper than that: both thematize questions about the status and reliability of visual evidence, perception, and recollection. In Blow-Up, Hemmings plays a photographer who “witnesses” a crime, though in fact he does not know he has witnessed it until he finds traces of it in the film he shot that morning. However, he does meet a mysterious woman in the park (Vanessa Redgrave), whose desperation to retrieve the film from him suggests that something’s up. The Hemmings character pieces together and deduces the crime based on the sequence of shots he surreptitiously took of her and her companion; and though he passes an erotically charged afternoon with her in his flat, he never learns anything about who she is, her motives, who the murdered man might be, or who her accomplice is. The title refers to the repeated enlargements (ever larger and larger) that he prints from his negatives, which reveal (very indistinctly) the gun barrel peaking through the bushes, and the corpse.
In Deep Red, Argento contrives a pretty good mystery as well, which leaves the audience guessing up until the very end. The film begins with a psychic, a German woman named Helga, whose powers of telepathy are being demonstrated before an audience in Rome by two Italian psychologists. The murderer is in the audience, and Helga discovers the murderer’s violent thoughts. We see Helga perform the following monologue:
"There is something – someone – no – I don’t know – forgive me, I’m sorry. It was – I can’t explain it – something strange – and sharp – like the prick of a sword. It upset me, but it’s alright now. I can feel death in this room. I feel – a presence – a twisted mind – sending me thoughts – perverted, murderous thoughts. Go away! You – have killed – and you will kill again. There’s a child – singing – And that house! – death – blood – hard blood – aah! I’m scared! We must hide everything – everything in the house – back the way it was. Noone must know – noone – noone! – forget it – forget it – forget it – forever – forever – forever."
In the last two sentences the psychic is no longer stating her impressions, but serving as a medium for the thoughts and words of the murderer. In this opening scene, the director immediately makes his case for the centrality of “the house” as locus of family, of trauma, and of repression; these words will provide the clues that later will lead the Hemmings character to discover the killer’s identity.
In his interest in Freudian psychology, Argento obviously owes a huge debt to Hitchcock; but his debt to Antonioni is more pronounced. Antonioni used the photograph to represent the subjectivity of vision and perception. Argento gives his hero a few visual clues as well: the fleeting glimpse of a picture as he enters the dead woman’s flat in his attempt to rescue her (a picture which disappears almost immediately); a photograph of a haunted house, which he finds in a book that one of the paranormal psychiatrists recalls; and a child’s drawing of a murder, an image which he discovers in three separate places (and which he fails to apprehend correctly, or even to see completely). Another character discovers a clue in a word written on a steamy mirror, a word that becomes invisible as soon as the steam goes away. In all of these clues, knowledge is elusive; by not being shared, knowledge lacks its socially-agreed-upon status, just like the clues in Blow-Up.
Readers of this blog may recall that I am considering Deep Red for my course this fall on “The House in the Horror Film.” The importance of the haunted house as a plot device, and the explanation of the house’s sinister aspect being caused by traumatic events that took place there in the past, make it perfectly suited for this course. But the film has a couple drawbacks that could make it a problem for students: (A) the extreme goriness of the film; and (more significantly) (B) the dialogue’s constant switching between English and Italian, with no English subtitles available for the Italian dialogue. Most of the communication that is important to the plot takes place in English (except for an early conversation between the Hemmings character and his friend Carlo), but there is enough Italian conversation that English-speaking students could be put off by it. There is no apparent rhyme or reason for when English occurs or when Italian occurs; both languages have the appearance of being dubbed, and conversations between the same characters take place in both languages. It’s almost as if a restoration was created from two partial prints of the film, one dubbed in English and one dubbed in Italian. It’s distracting if nothing else.
But even if you speak no Italian, I urge you to see Deep Red. I also urge you to see Blow-Up, and then to watch the excellent commentary track available on the DVD.
My thanks to my friend and colleague Valerie Kaussen, who initially turned me on to Dario Argento’s work.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The House and the Horror Film (Fall 2009 Course Offering)
Last month I read the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, first published around 1958 or ’59, I believe. It was a fantastic 20th-century example of the Gothic novel, though surprisingly it is the only “ghost story” that Jackson wrote. She is probably best known for her short story “The Lottery” (first published in The New Yorker magazine). The Haunting of Hill House appealed to me because of the author’s use of architecture – a creepy old Victorian mansion – as the locus for both the apparent haunting and for the troubled psychic life of the main character. It turns out there is a film version of the novel, a 1960 movie called simply The Haunting (which is decidedly a B movie). Reading Jackson’s novel, then watching the film, convinced me that this fall, when I teach my “Architecture in Film” course, I will organize it around the theme of “The House and the Horror Film.”
This will be my third time teaching the course (which has finally been given a permanent course number), and each time I teach it, it’s slightly different. I taught it for the first time in 2006, and I covered an eclectic assortment of themes, including heterotopia, dystopia, modern and avant-garde architecture, films about architects, the postwar European city, and methods of creating horror or suspense through architecture (including the Gothic novel conventions and the uncanny, among others).
I taught the course again in 2007, and this time organized it around the theme of domestic architecture, examining various categories of domestic architecture: the hotel as temporary home (in Grand Hotel and The Shining), the aristocratic mansion (La Règle du Jeu and Gosford Park), the urban apartment (Rosemary’s Baby, Rear Window, and A Raisin in the Sun), the rural dwelling (The Birds), the suburbs. We discussed gender (for example, The Stepford Wives of 1975 as feminist critique of the suburbs), race (both in A Raisin in the Sun and Far from Heaven), and some more specifically architectural topics (e.g., the critique of New Urbanism in The Truman Show).
The 2007 course on domestic architecture in film was premised on my argument that, in film, the house is always a symbol of the family; and that films featuring domestic architecture can be read as family dramas, regardless of the genre (horror, drama, comedy). I told my class this on the first day of the semester:
“The basic argument of this course is that domestic architecture in film is always used to represent the family: how the family works, or doesn’t work, is mirrored by the kind of home it occupies. For example, in The Shining, the Torrance family is highly dysfunctional, and the hotel they occupy – their temporary home – becomes more unsettling as the family unravels. Ruptures between husbands and wives (as in Rosemary’s Baby), or between parents and children (as in A Raisin in the Sun), are played out in films in which the plot centers on creating or changing homes (as in both of these examples), which often involves the addition of new children to the mix (which is a central plot device in both of these films).”
In the 2006 and 2007 classes, although very different, there was a surprising emphasis on horror films – surprising because it was unintentional on my part. I always used to say that I don’t like horror films, but given the evidence I’m forced to admit that I actually do like them (some of them, anyway, but not slasher films). There are distinct disadvantages to my choosing this theme for the course – I won’t be able to teach some of my absolute favorite films, because they’re not horror films (both Grand Hotel and La Règle du Jeu come to mind, and I also like teaching L.A. Confidential and The Ice Storm); but I do like to vary the course a bit, and this slightly different focus (still a variation on the domestic architecture theme) will open up some other possibilities. So far, I’m planning on the following films and readings:
Films:
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920, dir. Robert Weine (German Expressionism used to create horror)
Rebecca, 1940, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (based on another 20th-century Gothic novel, by Daphne du Maurier)
*The Haunting, 1963, dir. Robert Wise (note: there is also a 1999 remake that I haven't seen yet; then there's the 1958 House on Haunted Hill, with Vincent Price, unrelated but equally B-movie-ish)
The Shining, 1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick (Stephen King’s novel, in my view, owes quite a lot to Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House)
Psycho, 1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Rosemary’s Baby, 1968, dir. Roman Polanski
The Birds, 1963, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
*The Amityville Horror, 1979, dir. Stuart Rosenberg
*Poltergeist, 1982, dir. Tobe Hooper
*Profondo Rosso/Deep Red, 1975, dir. Dario Argento (Italian)
The Stepford Wives, 1975, dir. Bryan Forbes
*Panic Room, 2002, dir. David Fincher
(Films marked by an asterisk are those I have not taught previously.)
Readings from:
Bob Fear, “Evil Residence: The House and the Horror Film,” in Architecture and Film II, edited by Bob Fear
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Camille Paglia, The Birds (BFI Film Classics)
David Punter, The Gothic
Katherine Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny
So far I’ve only identified 12 films I plan to show, so there’s still room on the syllabus for two or three more. Please email me or leave a comment on this blog if you have any suggestions, either for films or for readings.
This will be my third time teaching the course (which has finally been given a permanent course number), and each time I teach it, it’s slightly different. I taught it for the first time in 2006, and I covered an eclectic assortment of themes, including heterotopia, dystopia, modern and avant-garde architecture, films about architects, the postwar European city, and methods of creating horror or suspense through architecture (including the Gothic novel conventions and the uncanny, among others).
I taught the course again in 2007, and this time organized it around the theme of domestic architecture, examining various categories of domestic architecture: the hotel as temporary home (in Grand Hotel and The Shining), the aristocratic mansion (La Règle du Jeu and Gosford Park), the urban apartment (Rosemary’s Baby, Rear Window, and A Raisin in the Sun), the rural dwelling (The Birds), the suburbs. We discussed gender (for example, The Stepford Wives of 1975 as feminist critique of the suburbs), race (both in A Raisin in the Sun and Far from Heaven), and some more specifically architectural topics (e.g., the critique of New Urbanism in The Truman Show).
The 2007 course on domestic architecture in film was premised on my argument that, in film, the house is always a symbol of the family; and that films featuring domestic architecture can be read as family dramas, regardless of the genre (horror, drama, comedy). I told my class this on the first day of the semester:
“The basic argument of this course is that domestic architecture in film is always used to represent the family: how the family works, or doesn’t work, is mirrored by the kind of home it occupies. For example, in The Shining, the Torrance family is highly dysfunctional, and the hotel they occupy – their temporary home – becomes more unsettling as the family unravels. Ruptures between husbands and wives (as in Rosemary’s Baby), or between parents and children (as in A Raisin in the Sun), are played out in films in which the plot centers on creating or changing homes (as in both of these examples), which often involves the addition of new children to the mix (which is a central plot device in both of these films).”
In the 2006 and 2007 classes, although very different, there was a surprising emphasis on horror films – surprising because it was unintentional on my part. I always used to say that I don’t like horror films, but given the evidence I’m forced to admit that I actually do like them (some of them, anyway, but not slasher films). There are distinct disadvantages to my choosing this theme for the course – I won’t be able to teach some of my absolute favorite films, because they’re not horror films (both Grand Hotel and La Règle du Jeu come to mind, and I also like teaching L.A. Confidential and The Ice Storm); but I do like to vary the course a bit, and this slightly different focus (still a variation on the domestic architecture theme) will open up some other possibilities. So far, I’m planning on the following films and readings:
Films:
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920, dir. Robert Weine (German Expressionism used to create horror)
Rebecca, 1940, dir. Alfred Hitchcock (based on another 20th-century Gothic novel, by Daphne du Maurier)
*The Haunting, 1963, dir. Robert Wise (note: there is also a 1999 remake that I haven't seen yet; then there's the 1958 House on Haunted Hill, with Vincent Price, unrelated but equally B-movie-ish)
The Shining, 1980, dir. Stanley Kubrick (Stephen King’s novel, in my view, owes quite a lot to Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House)
Psycho, 1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Rosemary’s Baby, 1968, dir. Roman Polanski
The Birds, 1963, dir. Alfred Hitchcock
*The Amityville Horror, 1979, dir. Stuart Rosenberg
*Poltergeist, 1982, dir. Tobe Hooper
*Profondo Rosso/Deep Red, 1975, dir. Dario Argento (Italian)
The Stepford Wives, 1975, dir. Bryan Forbes
*Panic Room, 2002, dir. David Fincher
(Films marked by an asterisk are those I have not taught previously.)
Readings from:
Bob Fear, “Evil Residence: The House and the Horror Film,” in Architecture and Film II, edited by Bob Fear
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Camille Paglia, The Birds (BFI Film Classics)
David Punter, The Gothic
Katherine Shonfield, Walls Have Feelings: Architecture, Film and the City
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny
So far I’ve only identified 12 films I plan to show, so there’s still room on the syllabus for two or three more. Please email me or leave a comment on this blog if you have any suggestions, either for films or for readings.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
The Passenger (film review)
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The Passenger, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Jack Nicholson, is a captivating portrait of a reporter who impulsively trades places with a dead man. What kind of person would do such a thing, and why? And will he get away with it?
I don’t want to spoil the film for you, but I will quote the Netflix plot synopsis: “Disenchanted with his life, Locke [a reporter covering an insurrection in North Africa]…assumes the dead man’s identity, not knowing that he was a gunrunner for the insurgents. By the time Locke realizes that he’s put himself in grave danger, it may be too late.”
The Passenger expresses so well many of the themes that are important to Antonioni, and they recur in his films over and over. I will explore some of these themes here, but first some background. Antonioni directed 37 films, of which I have now seen 8; my favorite ones are noted with an asterisk:
Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair), 1950 (his 12th film, but the first full-length one)
*L’Avventura (The Adventure), 1960 (first in the so-called Trilogy) (Criterion Collection; commentary by film critic Gene Youngblood)
La Notte (The Night), 1961 (second in the Trilogy)
*L’Eclisse (Eclipse), 1962 (third in the Trilogy) (also in the Criterion Collection)
*Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert), 1964 (some sources say this belongs in the “Trilogy” instead of La Notte, which I can see; and some say those four films make up a Tetrology)
*Blow-Up, 1966 (Antonioni’s first English-language film)
Zabriskie Point, 1970 (Antonioni’s first U.S. film)
*The Passenger, 1975
1. The first common theme is pursuit. In L’Avventura, a young woman disappears from an uninhabited island while there on holiday with friends. Her best friend (played by Monica Vitti) and her fiancé (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her, and for the rest of the film are seen travelling around Italy chasing after clues and falling in love. In Blow-Up (Antonioni’s first English-language film), a photographer (David Hemmings) tries to solve a murder that he thinks he has captured evidence of in his photographs. In The Passenger, David Locke (Nicholson) is being pursued by many different people and organizations, but is far from figuring out who/what they all are. (As a reporter he’s praised for being very observant, but it turns out he’s actually not very smart.)
2. The second theme that Antonioni explores in The Passenger is trust and its corollary, betrayal. These themes, as expressed through romantic relationships, are essential to nearly every Antonioni film I have seen, though in none so prominently as in The Passenger. (Like I said, Locke is very observant but not actually very smart…)
3. The third prominent theme in The Passenger is identity. David Locke assumes the identity of the dead man, David Robertson. He takes up with a young woman whose name is never given; she is listed in the film credits simply as “Girl.” (She is played by Maria Schneider, who had starred in Last Tango in Paris just 3 years earlier.) The fact that we never know her name underlines the fact that we have no idea who she is; we know nothing about her, and neither does Locke. She says she is an architecture student. Locke trusts her implicitly, but it’s not clear why; because of his trust for her, it’s easy for the viewer to be lulled into trusting her too.
4. Fourth: observation, the camera, the window, the gaze. This complex of issues permeates all of Antonioni’s films, and it’s part of what makes them so amazing. They become visual puzzles. In The Passenger Locke’s character is said to be observant, but as viewers WE need to pay close attention too. Antonioni demands a lot from the viewer, which is part of what makes his films so compelling. He thus thematizes the role of film director (the one controlling the gaze of the camera) IN the film’s structure and its narrative. David Locke in The Passenger is a television correspondent, and as such, he’s behind the camera, interviewing subjects, all the time. In one scene, the subject (an African “medicine man”) takes hold of the camera and turns it on Locke; the loss of control clearly discomfits Locke. But Locke is not the first Antonioni protagonist who works with a camera: Thomas (the Hemmings character) in Blow-Up is a photographer, and photography is central to the plot of that film.
In The Passenger, Antonioni at times frustrates our desire to observe and, hence, our desire to know. People and situations are often filmed through a window, and during the climactic final sequence, the camera focuses on what's happening outside the Hotel de la Gloria (through Locke's window) rather than the drama that is -- silently -- occurring within. An earlier crucial scene is filmed through water (a public fountain) so that we can’t be sure exactly what has happened; one man is seized in a restaurant by a group of four men, but what happened to his companion? Why wasn’t he seized? Was he complicit in the capture?
Unlike a lot of directors, Antonioni does not call attention to every detail; it’s easy to miss some of his clues. And a lot of questions go unanswered, and mysteries are never solved. In L’Avventura the girl who goes missing (Anna) is never found, and no explanation is ever given for her disappearance. In The Passenger, we can never fit all the puzzle pieces together.
I don’t want to spoil the film for you, but I will quote the Netflix plot synopsis: “Disenchanted with his life, Locke [a reporter covering an insurrection in North Africa]…assumes the dead man’s identity, not knowing that he was a gunrunner for the insurgents. By the time Locke realizes that he’s put himself in grave danger, it may be too late.”
The Passenger expresses so well many of the themes that are important to Antonioni, and they recur in his films over and over. I will explore some of these themes here, but first some background. Antonioni directed 37 films, of which I have now seen 8; my favorite ones are noted with an asterisk:
Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair), 1950 (his 12th film, but the first full-length one)
*L’Avventura (The Adventure), 1960 (first in the so-called Trilogy) (Criterion Collection; commentary by film critic Gene Youngblood)
La Notte (The Night), 1961 (second in the Trilogy)
*L’Eclisse (Eclipse), 1962 (third in the Trilogy) (also in the Criterion Collection)
*Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert), 1964 (some sources say this belongs in the “Trilogy” instead of La Notte, which I can see; and some say those four films make up a Tetrology)
*Blow-Up, 1966 (Antonioni’s first English-language film)
Zabriskie Point, 1970 (Antonioni’s first U.S. film)
*The Passenger, 1975
1. The first common theme is pursuit. In L’Avventura, a young woman disappears from an uninhabited island while there on holiday with friends. Her best friend (played by Monica Vitti) and her fiancé (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her, and for the rest of the film are seen travelling around Italy chasing after clues and falling in love. In Blow-Up (Antonioni’s first English-language film), a photographer (David Hemmings) tries to solve a murder that he thinks he has captured evidence of in his photographs. In The Passenger, David Locke (Nicholson) is being pursued by many different people and organizations, but is far from figuring out who/what they all are. (As a reporter he’s praised for being very observant, but it turns out he’s actually not very smart.)
2. The second theme that Antonioni explores in The Passenger is trust and its corollary, betrayal. These themes, as expressed through romantic relationships, are essential to nearly every Antonioni film I have seen, though in none so prominently as in The Passenger. (Like I said, Locke is very observant but not actually very smart…)
3. The third prominent theme in The Passenger is identity. David Locke assumes the identity of the dead man, David Robertson. He takes up with a young woman whose name is never given; she is listed in the film credits simply as “Girl.” (She is played by Maria Schneider, who had starred in Last Tango in Paris just 3 years earlier.) The fact that we never know her name underlines the fact that we have no idea who she is; we know nothing about her, and neither does Locke. She says she is an architecture student. Locke trusts her implicitly, but it’s not clear why; because of his trust for her, it’s easy for the viewer to be lulled into trusting her too.
4. Fourth: observation, the camera, the window, the gaze. This complex of issues permeates all of Antonioni’s films, and it’s part of what makes them so amazing. They become visual puzzles. In The Passenger Locke’s character is said to be observant, but as viewers WE need to pay close attention too. Antonioni demands a lot from the viewer, which is part of what makes his films so compelling. He thus thematizes the role of film director (the one controlling the gaze of the camera) IN the film’s structure and its narrative. David Locke in The Passenger is a television correspondent, and as such, he’s behind the camera, interviewing subjects, all the time. In one scene, the subject (an African “medicine man”) takes hold of the camera and turns it on Locke; the loss of control clearly discomfits Locke. But Locke is not the first Antonioni protagonist who works with a camera: Thomas (the Hemmings character) in Blow-Up is a photographer, and photography is central to the plot of that film.
In The Passenger, Antonioni at times frustrates our desire to observe and, hence, our desire to know. People and situations are often filmed through a window, and during the climactic final sequence, the camera focuses on what's happening outside the Hotel de la Gloria (through Locke's window) rather than the drama that is -- silently -- occurring within. An earlier crucial scene is filmed through water (a public fountain) so that we can’t be sure exactly what has happened; one man is seized in a restaurant by a group of four men, but what happened to his companion? Why wasn’t he seized? Was he complicit in the capture?
Unlike a lot of directors, Antonioni does not call attention to every detail; it’s easy to miss some of his clues. And a lot of questions go unanswered, and mysteries are never solved. In L’Avventura the girl who goes missing (Anna) is never found, and no explanation is ever given for her disappearance. In The Passenger, we can never fit all the puzzle pieces together.
Much of the dialogue is about seeing; Locke repeatedly asks the girl, as she looks out the window, "what can you see? what can you see now?" And he tells her this story:
“I knew a man who was blind. When he was nearly 40 years old he had an operation and regained his sight….At first he was elated, really high—faces, colors, landscapes. But then everything began to change. The world was much poorer than he had imagined. Noone had ever told him how much dirt there was, how much ugliness. He noticed ugliness everywhere. When he was blind, he used to cross the street alone with a stick. After he regained his sight, he became afraid, he began to live in darkness, he never left his room. After three years he killed himself.”
5. The fifth theme that intrigues me in Antonioni’s work is architecture. He juxtaposes historically “important” buildings with the ugly modern architectural landscape of Europe (Italy in L’Avventura, Spain in The Passenger). The main male character in L'Avventura is an architect; the girl in The Passenger says she's an architecture student. (Not to mention that she meets Locke in a building designed by Antoni Gaudi.) I think it has a lot to do with being Italian, surrounded by "great" architecture from the past and seeing the rapid transformation of the country in the post-war period. This really merits its own separate blog entry.
(Note: I taught L'Avventura in my "Architecture in Film" course two years ago, and was disappointed that students didn't like it very much, for a number of reasons. One, they generally don't like any foreign-language films; two, Antonioni demands so much from the viewer in terms of interpretation -- for people who think being asked to read subtitles is a burden, this is evidently beyond the pale! Three, his pacing is much more slow and deliberate than the kinds of American, Hollywood films they're used to watching.)
The Passenger is a must-see film (as are L’Avventura and Blow-Up). (Red Desert is great, but not yet released on DVD so harder to get a hold of). I’ve never described myself as a Jack Nicholson fan, but I never cease to be amazed by his talent as an actor (despite some films I’ve hated, including As Good As It Gets and The Witches of Eastwick). As my husband put it recently, “there’s really noone else like him.”
The Passenger is a must-see film (as are L’Avventura and Blow-Up). (Red Desert is great, but not yet released on DVD so harder to get a hold of). I’ve never described myself as a Jack Nicholson fan, but I never cease to be amazed by his talent as an actor (despite some films I’ve hated, including As Good As It Gets and The Witches of Eastwick). As my husband put it recently, “there’s really noone else like him.”
I have to say, too, that there's noone else like Antonioni. I just love his subtlety and his sense of understatement. In The Passenger, there's virtually no dialogue in the first 20 minutes, and after that it builds only gradually for another 20 minutes. His films are so utterly visual, yet the characters are incredibly nuanced psychologically.
SPOILER ALERT…Continue reading at your own risk
If you haven’t seen The Passenger, I strongly suggest you watch it BEFORE you read what follows, as I would hate to ruin what is surely one of the great pleasures of the film, i.e., figuring it out for yourself. (If you have Netflix you can watch it instantly online.)
I keep referring to Locke as very observant but not very smart, because he trusts the Maria Schneider character and never for a minute suspects her motives. This despite the fact that he saw her in London, before running into her in Barcelona. When he tells her that he believes in coincidences, it’s actually like Antonioni waving a big red flag that says “Don’t believe in coincidences! There’s no such thing!” Of course, the fact that this gorgeous woman 15 years his junior is attaching herself to him is one explanation for his failure to question her, but another factor is his own short-sightedness. On first viewing, one might not suspect her of being a spy, or of being an accomplice in his murder; but after the film’s conclusion it’s hard not to think that she was either working for the African government that was looking for Robertson, for a European government, or for the insurgents. But she seems to have gone even farther than that, persuading Locke to stick with the plan he unwittingly got himself into. But even that’s not entirely clear. Doesn’t she believe that he’s not actually Robertson? Why doesn’t that matter to her?
SPOILER ALERT…Continue reading at your own risk
If you haven’t seen The Passenger, I strongly suggest you watch it BEFORE you read what follows, as I would hate to ruin what is surely one of the great pleasures of the film, i.e., figuring it out for yourself. (If you have Netflix you can watch it instantly online.)
I keep referring to Locke as very observant but not very smart, because he trusts the Maria Schneider character and never for a minute suspects her motives. This despite the fact that he saw her in London, before running into her in Barcelona. When he tells her that he believes in coincidences, it’s actually like Antonioni waving a big red flag that says “Don’t believe in coincidences! There’s no such thing!” Of course, the fact that this gorgeous woman 15 years his junior is attaching herself to him is one explanation for his failure to question her, but another factor is his own short-sightedness. On first viewing, one might not suspect her of being a spy, or of being an accomplice in his murder; but after the film’s conclusion it’s hard not to think that she was either working for the African government that was looking for Robertson, for a European government, or for the insurgents. But she seems to have gone even farther than that, persuading Locke to stick with the plan he unwittingly got himself into. But even that’s not entirely clear. Doesn’t she believe that he’s not actually Robertson? Why doesn’t that matter to her?
And on the subject of identity: Locke's wife, Rachel, finally catches up with him at the ironically named Hotel de la Gloria, just moments after he's been killed. When asked if she recognizes him, she says, "I never knew him." Surely she recognizes that this man who went by the name Robertson WAS her husband; her statement connotes a much more fundamental lack of knowledge, rather than a lack of recognition.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (film review)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the new film directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, was inspired by a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, from which it differs considerably. Fitzgerald’s story is about a man born a septuagenarian, 5’8”, and fully developed mentally as well as physically. He smokes his father’s cigars and reads the Encyclopedia Britannica instead of playing with child’s toys. Rather than aging, the man gets younger every year.
It’s a strange story about a freak of nature, a man who is loved neither by his parents nor his own child because of his strange deformity (for lack of a better word). The fate to which this condition condemns him is to never be accepted, or even to be understood. Even his wife – when she eventually discovers his condition – blames him for it:
“I'm not going to argue with you,” she retorted. “But there's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.”
“But, Hildegarde, I can't help it.”
“You can too. You're simply stubborn. You think you don't want to be like anyone else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if everyone else looked at things as you do--what would the world be like?”
Fitzgerald’s story is, indeed, short; but the film is not. In fact the film has very little in common with the story that inspired it. Fitzgerald fleshes out none of the characters but his protagonist. (We never even meet the remarkable mother who gave birth to a 5’8” child.) Roth – who also wrote Forrest Gump – creates a number of compelling characters on which to base this touching (sometimes cloying) story about love, loss, acceptance, and forgiveness (strikingly similar themes, in fact, to this season’s animated Tale of Despereaux).
While I was watching it, I was constantly torn between Fitzgerald’s intriguing premise and Roth’s heavy-handed Gumpiness. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Tilda Swinton, as well as a fine supporting cast, make the film enjoyable to watch. As in Forrest Gump, though, the filmmakers (and I’m assuming Roth in particular) make unnecessary efforts to connect the story quite superficially with a snapshot-view of American history, culminating in a Katrina-gripped New Orleans which allows the audience to anticipate the inevitable. I’m assuming the potential for audience identification was Roth’s sole motivation for setting his story in New Orleans; Fitzgerald’s is set in Baltimore.
In the film, Benjamin is a foundling, a white child raised by a black woman, Queenie, whose love and nurturance seem infinite. But as A.O Scott points out in his review for the New York Times, Benjamin, “though he is a white Southerner raised by a black woman…seems untouched by racial turmoil or by much of anything beyond the mysteries of his peculiar destiny.”
Another Gump-like feature of the film is Benjamin’s initial naivete; he’s a child, after all, even if he looks 70 and is born with cataracts, rheumatoid arthritis, and other crippling diseases of old age. And he’s born the size of a normal baby. Fitzgerald’s Benjamin is not only adult size (which Fitzgerald never attempts to explain in naturalistic terms), but he apparently has the knowledge and experience of an old man as well. (His first words to his father, when meeting him at the hospital nursery: “Are you my father? Because if you are I wish you would get me out of this place – or, at least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here….This is a fine place to keep a youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I haven’t been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat, and they brought me a bottle of milk!”)
For all its tear-jerking poignancy, the film’s final message is a feel-good one (or two): you can be whatever you want, do whatever you want; and you have to experience pain and loss in order to experience love. As I was watching the film I kept thinking that Fitzgerald’s story must have had more of an edge, and I wondered if it was more Poe-like than Gump-like. Since the story’s in the public domain, you can read the full-text version online, which I did, and found its aesthetic spare and direct. It’s not spooky, exactly, but there’s an uncanniness about it, and it has poignant, touching moments even without Fincher’s heavy-handed melodrama. In the last chapter, Fitzgerald tells us:
In 1920 Roscoe Button's first child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it "the thing" to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby's own grandfather.
The child’s loneliness – condemned to live his life in reverse, without the sympathy or understanding of any living soul – is heartbreaking. Fitzgerald does not hit us over the head with this heartbreak, however; it hides at the margins of the story, and can easily be dismissed along with the story’s overall eccentricity.
Fincher does not condemn poor Benjamin to a lonely life; instead he gives Benjamin a soulmate, Daisy. They meet as children, fall in love, have a child together; and at the end of his life, Benjamin (now a child himself) is cared for by the aging Daisy, now more like a mother or grandmother than anything else. Their love and intimacy surpass that of normal couples; such is the stuff of Hollywood films. The New Yorker film review is rather unfavorable: “This science-fiction reverse-aging conceit, from an early F. Scott Fitzgerald story, has been rendered by the writer Eric Roth and the director David Fincher with a fanatical literalness that occasionally touches the uncanny but that often feels laborious and even pedantic.”
Some of the more intriguing aspects of the film lie outside of Benjamin’s own story. Thematically they lie in the enclosing of multiple, tangential stories within the folds of the primary one. Filmically they reside in the corresponding representations of those stories, beginning with the framing narrative – Daisy’s extended story of the blind clockmaker (Mr. Gateau, or Mr. Cake) whose son dies in the Great War, so he makes the clock for New Orleans’ new railway station to run backwards, as if to reverse time and bring back his son (alluding to Benjamin’s aging backwards). At the end of the film, when Katrina breaches the New Orleans levy, we see the waters lap at the dismantled clock in its dusty storage. Then there are Benjamin’s brief visions of the old man as he tells Benjamin he’s been hit by lightning seven times. These episodes reminded me of Magnolia, one of my favorite contemporary films (directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, released in 2000).
It’s a strange story about a freak of nature, a man who is loved neither by his parents nor his own child because of his strange deformity (for lack of a better word). The fate to which this condition condemns him is to never be accepted, or even to be understood. Even his wife – when she eventually discovers his condition – blames him for it:
“I'm not going to argue with you,” she retorted. “But there's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.”
“But, Hildegarde, I can't help it.”
“You can too. You're simply stubborn. You think you don't want to be like anyone else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if everyone else looked at things as you do--what would the world be like?”
Fitzgerald’s story is, indeed, short; but the film is not. In fact the film has very little in common with the story that inspired it. Fitzgerald fleshes out none of the characters but his protagonist. (We never even meet the remarkable mother who gave birth to a 5’8” child.) Roth – who also wrote Forrest Gump – creates a number of compelling characters on which to base this touching (sometimes cloying) story about love, loss, acceptance, and forgiveness (strikingly similar themes, in fact, to this season’s animated Tale of Despereaux).
While I was watching it, I was constantly torn between Fitzgerald’s intriguing premise and Roth’s heavy-handed Gumpiness. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Tilda Swinton, as well as a fine supporting cast, make the film enjoyable to watch. As in Forrest Gump, though, the filmmakers (and I’m assuming Roth in particular) make unnecessary efforts to connect the story quite superficially with a snapshot-view of American history, culminating in a Katrina-gripped New Orleans which allows the audience to anticipate the inevitable. I’m assuming the potential for audience identification was Roth’s sole motivation for setting his story in New Orleans; Fitzgerald’s is set in Baltimore.
In the film, Benjamin is a foundling, a white child raised by a black woman, Queenie, whose love and nurturance seem infinite. But as A.O Scott points out in his review for the New York Times, Benjamin, “though he is a white Southerner raised by a black woman…seems untouched by racial turmoil or by much of anything beyond the mysteries of his peculiar destiny.”
Another Gump-like feature of the film is Benjamin’s initial naivete; he’s a child, after all, even if he looks 70 and is born with cataracts, rheumatoid arthritis, and other crippling diseases of old age. And he’s born the size of a normal baby. Fitzgerald’s Benjamin is not only adult size (which Fitzgerald never attempts to explain in naturalistic terms), but he apparently has the knowledge and experience of an old man as well. (His first words to his father, when meeting him at the hospital nursery: “Are you my father? Because if you are I wish you would get me out of this place – or, at least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here….This is a fine place to keep a youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I haven’t been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat, and they brought me a bottle of milk!”)
For all its tear-jerking poignancy, the film’s final message is a feel-good one (or two): you can be whatever you want, do whatever you want; and you have to experience pain and loss in order to experience love. As I was watching the film I kept thinking that Fitzgerald’s story must have had more of an edge, and I wondered if it was more Poe-like than Gump-like. Since the story’s in the public domain, you can read the full-text version online, which I did, and found its aesthetic spare and direct. It’s not spooky, exactly, but there’s an uncanniness about it, and it has poignant, touching moments even without Fincher’s heavy-handed melodrama. In the last chapter, Fitzgerald tells us:
In 1920 Roscoe Button's first child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it "the thing" to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby's own grandfather.
The child’s loneliness – condemned to live his life in reverse, without the sympathy or understanding of any living soul – is heartbreaking. Fitzgerald does not hit us over the head with this heartbreak, however; it hides at the margins of the story, and can easily be dismissed along with the story’s overall eccentricity.
Fincher does not condemn poor Benjamin to a lonely life; instead he gives Benjamin a soulmate, Daisy. They meet as children, fall in love, have a child together; and at the end of his life, Benjamin (now a child himself) is cared for by the aging Daisy, now more like a mother or grandmother than anything else. Their love and intimacy surpass that of normal couples; such is the stuff of Hollywood films. The New Yorker film review is rather unfavorable: “This science-fiction reverse-aging conceit, from an early F. Scott Fitzgerald story, has been rendered by the writer Eric Roth and the director David Fincher with a fanatical literalness that occasionally touches the uncanny but that often feels laborious and even pedantic.”
Some of the more intriguing aspects of the film lie outside of Benjamin’s own story. Thematically they lie in the enclosing of multiple, tangential stories within the folds of the primary one. Filmically they reside in the corresponding representations of those stories, beginning with the framing narrative – Daisy’s extended story of the blind clockmaker (Mr. Gateau, or Mr. Cake) whose son dies in the Great War, so he makes the clock for New Orleans’ new railway station to run backwards, as if to reverse time and bring back his son (alluding to Benjamin’s aging backwards). At the end of the film, when Katrina breaches the New Orleans levy, we see the waters lap at the dismantled clock in its dusty storage. Then there are Benjamin’s brief visions of the old man as he tells Benjamin he’s been hit by lightning seven times. These episodes reminded me of Magnolia, one of my favorite contemporary films (directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, released in 2000).
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Film Bookends Part II: "Amelie" and "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not"
Everyone has seen Amelie -- well, almost everyone, with the exception of those who were deliberately protesting its saccharine-sweet (and borderline fascist?) nostalgia for a sort of pre-immigrant-riots France. It was the big crossover foreign film of 2001. (Full title: Le Fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain.) I've got to admit, I liked it. The strangely quiet titular heroine, played by Audrey Tautou, was not all goodness and light; I thought her unexpected romance with the guy who collected photographs of strangers from the Metro station photo booths was borderline kinky and gave the film a subtly eccentric twist. Amelie spent all her time secretly helping improve the lives of those around her, motivated evidently by her love for humanity.The flip side of that coin is represented in the 2002 film, He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (or in French, A la folie...pas du tout). It's the same wonderful actress, Audrey Tautou, but this film is like Amelie meets, what? Run Lola Run and Fatal Attraction, maybe, with a little bit of The Sixth Sense thrown in. Sadly I don't know anyone else who has seen it, other than myself and the friend I saw it with back when I was living in Detroit for a one-year teaching gig. Since I don't know anyone else who's seen it, I haven't had much chance to discuss this film with friends. Suffice it to say, you guys are really missing out; you really ought to see this film.
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not is the flip side of Amelie; it's like, what if the character Amelie weren't actually all goodness and light? What if she were really a psychopath? The problem is, you have to sit through most of the film before it occurs to you that it might actually be a response to Amelie, and that puts the film in a whole new light. My friend who saw it with me hated it, understandably so because it is fairly odd; I would argue that it only makes sense if you read it as an anti-Amelie story. The chief clue is that Audrey Tautou plays both roles. You'll have to watch it yourself to pick up the rest.
Postscript:
Try the "Amelie" Drinking Game at this link
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Film Bookends Part I: "Casablanca" and "An American in Paris"
"We'll always have Paris."
This weekend we watched Vincente Minelli's 1951 Hollywood musical An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly. (The man can dance like nobody's business!) I had never seen it before, and my strongest impression of the film was that it was the Hollywood musical "answer" to Casablanca, the 1942 Humphrey Bogart / Ingrid Bergman classic directed by Michael Curtiz. It was uncanny. I don't know if Minelli loved Casablanca or hated it, but I do know tha
t he responded to it quite overtly in An American in Paris. Consider this:1. Casablanca is set during the war, and it was made during the war, too (in Hollywood). An American in Paris was made, and is set, after the war. Both have action that takes place in Paris; in Casablanca, it was immediately before and during the German Occupation of the city, and in An American in Paris it is set in a liberated city, one that is filled with Americans (three of the film's five main characters are Americans).
2. In Casablanca, there's a love triangle. The beautiful Ilsa Lund is secretly married to Victor Laszlo, international hero of the French Resistance. He's wanted by the Nazis, and they're hot on his trail as he tries to escape to America with Ilsa. But Ilsa is also in love with the American gunrunner Rick Blaine, with whom she had a brief but passionate affair in Paris a few years back, just before the German Occupation, while she thought Victor was dead.
In An American in Paris, there's also a love triangle. American GI-turned-painter Jerry Mulligan (Kelly) falls in love with 19-year-old Frenchwoman Lise Bouvier, but Lise is involved with famed French singer Henri Baurel. Lise is the daughter of French Resistance fighters; during the war, the parents had asked their friend, Henri Baurel, to take care of her. (We never meet her parents in the film, but I like to imagine that she's the daughter of Ilsa and Victor.)
3. In both films, men decide on the fate of the trio. In Casablanca, famously, Ilsa can't decide between Victor and Rick (she loves them both), and she tells Rick to decide her fate: "you have to think for both of us." Rick tells her he'll leave Casablanca with her, but instead he puts her on the plane to America with Victor, thus saving a crucial Resistance leader and becoming a hero. He even kills the Nazi leader to save Victor from capture.
In An American in Paris, Lise loves Jerry, but can't break up with Henri, because she "practically owes him her life." But Henri makes the decision that she should have made, freeing her to be with Jerry.
I think it is significant that these women -- Ilsa and Lise (even the names link them; Lise is pronounced "Lisa") -- aren't in control of their own fates. Only the men get to decide, and their decisions are therefore seen as noble because they have to break their own hearts to restore "the good" to the world. Women are emotional creatures; they are duplicitous and indecisive. Men are rational creatures, and they make noble decisions.
4. Casablanca has a poignant ending: our hero -- the American male -- does NOT get the girl. An American in Paris, on the other hand, has a happy ending: our hero -- the American male -- DOES get the girl. Perhaps it signals a better time for America, which became culturally dominant after its World War II victory.
5. In Casablanca, Rick's famous last words to Ilsa are "We'll always have Paris." In An American in Paris, Jerry tells Lise, "Now what have I got left? Paris. Maybe that's enough for some, but it isn't for me anymore, because the more beautiful everything is, the more it will hurt without you." How can this not be taken as a reply to the resignation, self-denial, and nostalgia expressed in Rick's farewell to his beloved? "Maybe that's enough for some [i.e., Rick and Ilsa], but it isn't for me anymore."
The message to Americans? We're entitled to it have it all -- after all, what other nation of people are told in their founding documents that they have the "right" to the "pursuit of happiness"? And if that's not enough, we earned that right in the war. And who could better represent America in the postwar period than Gene Kelly, the man with perfect teeth?
American women are the real losers in An American in Paris. The American woman who pursues Jerry, Milo Roberts (played by Nina Foch), is aggressive and domineering. She's a rich heiress who tries to win Jerry's heart by supporting him as an artist, thus undermining his masculinity both as sexual aggressor and as financial breadwinner. For Minelli, the American female is unfeminine and pushy. American women took a lot of hits from Hollywood in this postwar period -- don't even get me started on this subject.
An American in Paris is an interesting film for a lot of reasons, most of which I'm giving short shrift in this essay: the cultural stereotype of the artist; the use of artworks (paintings) in film; the myth of Paris. It's definitely worth watching. Casablanca, of course, is a classic; I've seen it so many times that I can't count them, and I could watch it again and again. It's sometimes hard to analyze something that you feel so attached to; for me, seeing An American in Paris helped me to think about an old favorite in a new way.
Friday, September 5, 2008
"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" (film review)
Readers of this blog know I'm a huge fan of Scarlett Johansson, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona delivers not only Scarlett but also the stunning sexiness of Spanish actors Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. I found the film to be satisfying all around, despite the abrupt ending that some viewers left the theater grumbling about; after all, how can that many gorgeous, young, wealthy characters in a smart Woody Allen screenplay fail to excite and amuse? This is my favorite Woody Allen film in years (despite the presence of one of my least favorite actresses, Patricia Clarkson).
Rather than discussing the obvious aspects of the film, though - a realm thoroughly covered by all the other reviews - I wanted to say something about a theme of the film that has been of special interest to me this semester as I am teaching a film studies & art history class called "Artists' Lives on Film." Vicky Cristina Barcelona has at its Spanish center (as opposed to its American center, represented by the Vicky and Cristina characters) a pair of painters. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena (played by Bardem and Cruz) are a divorced couple embroiled in the, dare I say, stereotypical Latin romance, in which heated passion takes the form of violent fighting more often than of reckless sexual abandon. They are also artists.
Many of the films I have taught in my class treat famous artist couples: Surviving Picasso, about Pablo Picasso and his lover Francoise Gilot; Frida, about Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera; Pollock, about Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner; and Camille Claudel, about the French sculptress Claudel and her lover, Auguste Rodin. All of these biopics (fictionalized biographies) take as their subject matter actual, historical artists, and therefore have to maintain at least some slight level of historical veracity. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, with its fictional artiststs, is entirely free to invent those characters from scratch. Woody Allen nonetheless adopts and reifies many of the stereotypes that are associated with artists in the popular imagination, but he subtly undermines some of them, especially the negative stereotypes about male artists. (Not surprising given that he is one.)
In all of the above-mentioned biopics, the artistic couple follows a familiar pattern of the male as domineering womanizer, and the female partner as either driven mad or driven away by his cruelty. Those men - Picasso, Rivera, Pollock, and Rodin - are megalomaniacs whose success (based on their artistic genius) overshadows the careers of their partners. The women, meanwhile, struggle for recognition in a male-dominated world. As women they are victimized both by their male partners and by their societies which see women as less creative and less "important" artistically. The men are egotistical, destructive and/or self destructive; the partnerships are destroyed by the partners' competition and their unequal power in their relationships. At the same time, the women are expected to subordinate themselves and to support their men's careers.
This is not to say that those films misrepresent the nature of those relationships, but rather that filmmakers (Hollywood and otherwise) are drawn to that subject matter as the kind of story that audiences want to see, in part because of the implicit moralizing that underlies those narratives.
Three common artist mythologies prevail in these films. Two of these myths are gender-neutral: the artist as crazy (Camille Claudel is eventually committed to an insane asylum), and the artist as self-destructive - a slight variation on the "crazy" theme. Attempts to commit suicide, or at least very high-risk behaviors, characterize artists like Jackson Pollock, who dies as a result of drunk driving (he's a major alcoholic). The third common artist mythology applies specifically to female artists: the woman as victim, driven to desparation by her faithless and cruel husband. Picasso, Rivera, Pollock, and Rodin all are womanizers who subject their partners to emotional cruelty. Frida Kahlo is portrayed as the most victim-like female artist in that her very paintings are read (by art historians as well as filmmakers) as testaments to her pain and victimization.
Woody Allen's male artist, Juan Antonio, is a womanizer, but he's not cruel. He's represented as a generous lover to all the women he sleeps with, guilty only of a libertine lifestyle that flies in the face of bourgeois notions of monogamy, but noble for his honesty and for the great respect he shows to these women (none of whom are bourgeois enough to demand monogamy from him, with the exception of his wife). Woody Allen, whose own relationship history has been the subject of scandal, wants us to believe that a man who sleeps with as many women as he likes (up to 15 years his junior in this film) can be blameless; Juan Antonio is a very sympathetic character.
Surely this is, to some extent, Allen's fantasy (and that of many middle-aged males) projected on the big screen. But what is the alternative? Is the stereotypical artist biopic, in which the men are cruel womanizers, any more desireable as a message? Allen avoids moralizing, which is part of what's so refreshing about his films.
And it's not only a male fantasy we see projected here; the film offers women the fantasy of being swept off their feet by a gorgeous stranger in an exotic land. One of the best scenes in the film is Juan Antonio's first encounter with Vicky and Cristina, in which the two women debate whether to accept his invitation to spend the weekend with him. While Vicky (the voice of reason) has all the dialogue, Cristina (the risk-taker) has all the body language. The conflict between their responses to Juan Antonio could almost be the inner dialogue of any woman in such a situation, trying to decide between safety and adventure.
Penelope Cruz's Maria Elena falls more squarely into both the artist-as-crazy and the artist-as-destructive stereotypes. She enters the film after a failed suicide attempt, and her last scene is one in which she brandishes a gun, trying either to kill herself or Juan Antonio, or both (it's unclear). One of the best essays on artist mythologies in film is Griselda Pollock's “Artists Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History,” in Screen, vol. 21, no. 3 (1980), pp. 57-96. In discussing this essay in class yesterday, I learned that many of my students do strongly believe that artists ("great" ones, anyway), genuinely are mad, despite Pollock's arguments to the contrary. (For the record let me say that I do not share this opinion.)
Some of my students believe that commitment to one's work (which some call obsession) exhibited by some artists is a sure sign of insanity. I, on the other hand, believe that passionate commitment to one's work (which might also be described as being a workaholic) is the one characteristic shared by all highly successful people in ANY profession. Even the great comedian George Carlin, whose public persona was the slacker and anti-establishment rebel, was a genuine workaholic; noone could rise to his level of accomplishment without such dedication to his art.
Getting back to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we do see these two artists, Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, at work. Both create abstract painting in the manner of Jackson Pollock. We see Juan Antonio slathering paint on his canvas with enormous brushes and fluid brushstrokes. We see Maria Elena (dressed in a teddy) dripping and drizzling paint onto a canvas that lies flat on the floor (Pollock's famous method). When Juan Antonio performs the same type of art-making ritual outside in his garden it appears to be a deliberate quotation of the famous Hans Namuth documentary of Jackson Pollock at work. Woody Allen has his painters work in this manner, I think, because it is a shorthand for the modern artist. The paintings themselves are unremarkable, but what is remarkable is the fact that the two painters produce stylistically similar works rather than having individualized artistic styles. (I also like the poster for a Paris exhibition of Juan Antonio's work that is discreetly displayed in the artist's kitchen, which serves to confirm his identity as a significant painter.)
It is Juan Antonio and Maria Elena's artistic productivity and creativity that Cristina envies. Together the two encourage and inspire Cristina to develop her own creativity as a photographer, so that in the film she becomes the third artist represented on screen. At the heart of their creativity, for all three artists, is sexuality, and herein lies yet another favorite theme for films about artists. In their menage a trois, uninhibited sexuality provides the creative energy for both work and inspiration.
The close connection between art and sex is the theme of another of my favorite essays on artist biopics: Susan Felleman's “Dirty Pictures, Mud Lust, and Abject Desire: Myths of Origin and the Cinematic Object,” Film Quarterly 55/1 (2001): 27-40. Felleman discusses both Camille Claudel and Artemesia as prime examples in which the sexual relationship between artist couples is the prerequisite for artistic greatness. Woody Allen gives further credence to this notion in his latest film. Art equals sex, and artists are incredibly sexy, despite any emotional imbalances they might suffer from.
Rather than discussing the obvious aspects of the film, though - a realm thoroughly covered by all the other reviews - I wanted to say something about a theme of the film that has been of special interest to me this semester as I am teaching a film studies & art history class called "Artists' Lives on Film." Vicky Cristina Barcelona has at its Spanish center (as opposed to its American center, represented by the Vicky and Cristina characters) a pair of painters. Juan Antonio and Maria Elena (played by Bardem and Cruz) are a divorced couple embroiled in the, dare I say, stereotypical Latin romance, in which heated passion takes the form of violent fighting more often than of reckless sexual abandon. They are also artists.
Many of the films I have taught in my class treat famous artist couples: Surviving Picasso, about Pablo Picasso and his lover Francoise Gilot; Frida, about Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera; Pollock, about Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner; and Camille Claudel, about the French sculptress Claudel and her lover, Auguste Rodin. All of these biopics (fictionalized biographies) take as their subject matter actual, historical artists, and therefore have to maintain at least some slight level of historical veracity. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, with its fictional artiststs, is entirely free to invent those characters from scratch. Woody Allen nonetheless adopts and reifies many of the stereotypes that are associated with artists in the popular imagination, but he subtly undermines some of them, especially the negative stereotypes about male artists. (Not surprising given that he is one.)
In all of the above-mentioned biopics, the artistic couple follows a familiar pattern of the male as domineering womanizer, and the female partner as either driven mad or driven away by his cruelty. Those men - Picasso, Rivera, Pollock, and Rodin - are megalomaniacs whose success (based on their artistic genius) overshadows the careers of their partners. The women, meanwhile, struggle for recognition in a male-dominated world. As women they are victimized both by their male partners and by their societies which see women as less creative and less "important" artistically. The men are egotistical, destructive and/or self destructive; the partnerships are destroyed by the partners' competition and their unequal power in their relationships. At the same time, the women are expected to subordinate themselves and to support their men's careers.
This is not to say that those films misrepresent the nature of those relationships, but rather that filmmakers (Hollywood and otherwise) are drawn to that subject matter as the kind of story that audiences want to see, in part because of the implicit moralizing that underlies those narratives.
Three common artist mythologies prevail in these films. Two of these myths are gender-neutral: the artist as crazy (Camille Claudel is eventually committed to an insane asylum), and the artist as self-destructive - a slight variation on the "crazy" theme. Attempts to commit suicide, or at least very high-risk behaviors, characterize artists like Jackson Pollock, who dies as a result of drunk driving (he's a major alcoholic). The third common artist mythology applies specifically to female artists: the woman as victim, driven to desparation by her faithless and cruel husband. Picasso, Rivera, Pollock, and Rodin all are womanizers who subject their partners to emotional cruelty. Frida Kahlo is portrayed as the most victim-like female artist in that her very paintings are read (by art historians as well as filmmakers) as testaments to her pain and victimization.
Woody Allen's male artist, Juan Antonio, is a womanizer, but he's not cruel. He's represented as a generous lover to all the women he sleeps with, guilty only of a libertine lifestyle that flies in the face of bourgeois notions of monogamy, but noble for his honesty and for the great respect he shows to these women (none of whom are bourgeois enough to demand monogamy from him, with the exception of his wife). Woody Allen, whose own relationship history has been the subject of scandal, wants us to believe that a man who sleeps with as many women as he likes (up to 15 years his junior in this film) can be blameless; Juan Antonio is a very sympathetic character.
Surely this is, to some extent, Allen's fantasy (and that of many middle-aged males) projected on the big screen. But what is the alternative? Is the stereotypical artist biopic, in which the men are cruel womanizers, any more desireable as a message? Allen avoids moralizing, which is part of what's so refreshing about his films.
And it's not only a male fantasy we see projected here; the film offers women the fantasy of being swept off their feet by a gorgeous stranger in an exotic land. One of the best scenes in the film is Juan Antonio's first encounter with Vicky and Cristina, in which the two women debate whether to accept his invitation to spend the weekend with him. While Vicky (the voice of reason) has all the dialogue, Cristina (the risk-taker) has all the body language. The conflict between their responses to Juan Antonio could almost be the inner dialogue of any woman in such a situation, trying to decide between safety and adventure.
Penelope Cruz's Maria Elena falls more squarely into both the artist-as-crazy and the artist-as-destructive stereotypes. She enters the film after a failed suicide attempt, and her last scene is one in which she brandishes a gun, trying either to kill herself or Juan Antonio, or both (it's unclear). One of the best essays on artist mythologies in film is Griselda Pollock's “Artists Mythologies and Media Genius, Madness and Art History,” in Screen, vol. 21, no. 3 (1980), pp. 57-96. In discussing this essay in class yesterday, I learned that many of my students do strongly believe that artists ("great" ones, anyway), genuinely are mad, despite Pollock's arguments to the contrary. (For the record let me say that I do not share this opinion.)
Some of my students believe that commitment to one's work (which some call obsession) exhibited by some artists is a sure sign of insanity. I, on the other hand, believe that passionate commitment to one's work (which might also be described as being a workaholic) is the one characteristic shared by all highly successful people in ANY profession. Even the great comedian George Carlin, whose public persona was the slacker and anti-establishment rebel, was a genuine workaholic; noone could rise to his level of accomplishment without such dedication to his art.
Getting back to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, we do see these two artists, Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, at work. Both create abstract painting in the manner of Jackson Pollock. We see Juan Antonio slathering paint on his canvas with enormous brushes and fluid brushstrokes. We see Maria Elena (dressed in a teddy) dripping and drizzling paint onto a canvas that lies flat on the floor (Pollock's famous method). When Juan Antonio performs the same type of art-making ritual outside in his garden it appears to be a deliberate quotation of the famous Hans Namuth documentary of Jackson Pollock at work. Woody Allen has his painters work in this manner, I think, because it is a shorthand for the modern artist. The paintings themselves are unremarkable, but what is remarkable is the fact that the two painters produce stylistically similar works rather than having individualized artistic styles. (I also like the poster for a Paris exhibition of Juan Antonio's work that is discreetly displayed in the artist's kitchen, which serves to confirm his identity as a significant painter.)
It is Juan Antonio and Maria Elena's artistic productivity and creativity that Cristina envies. Together the two encourage and inspire Cristina to develop her own creativity as a photographer, so that in the film she becomes the third artist represented on screen. At the heart of their creativity, for all three artists, is sexuality, and herein lies yet another favorite theme for films about artists. In their menage a trois, uninhibited sexuality provides the creative energy for both work and inspiration.
The close connection between art and sex is the theme of another of my favorite essays on artist biopics: Susan Felleman's “Dirty Pictures, Mud Lust, and Abject Desire: Myths of Origin and the Cinematic Object,” Film Quarterly 55/1 (2001): 27-40. Felleman discusses both Camille Claudel and Artemesia as prime examples in which the sexual relationship between artist couples is the prerequisite for artistic greatness. Woody Allen gives further credence to this notion in his latest film. Art equals sex, and artists are incredibly sexy, despite any emotional imbalances they might suffer from.
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
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