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.

Battle Between Lent and Mardi Gras

The battle between Carême (Lent) and Mardi Gras (from a 17th-century print).
Source: Larousse Gastronomique, 1961

I found a copy of the Larousse Gastronomique at my grandmother's house in Woodstock when I was visiting last month, and she generously gave it to me. I am in love with this book! My favorite genre of books (one of them, anyway) is books pertaining to food, which includes cookbooks and reference books on the subject. The Larousse Gastronomique is one of the most wide-ranging encyclopedias on food, food history, and food preparation ever published. I love it because reading about food is really reading about culture. Imagine 20 encyclopedia pages on "Offal" -- every type of "variety meats" and how to prepare them.

Since Mardi Gras is almost upon us, I bring you this entry on Lent from the Larousse Gastronomique:

Forty days fast imposed by the Catholic religion, from Ash Wednesday till Easter. This period of fasting in the early Church had excellent physical effects by imposing on the digestive system, worn out by gastronomic excess during the winter season, a salutary rest.

Brillat-Savarin tells us that towards the middle of the eighteenth century the normal regime in bourgeois families consisted of four meals:

Breakfast, taking place before nine in the morning, consisting of bread, cheese, fruit, sometimes a pâté or cold meat. (The habit of drinking coffee had not yet penetrated into provincial life.)

Dinner, which took place between twelve and one, with soup, the boiled meat of the pot-au-feu, with vegetable accompaniments according to the season.

Around four o'clock there was a light meal enjoyed as a rule by the ladies of the household and the children.

Supper was at eight o'clock, with entree, roast, side dishes, salad and dessert.

During Lent breakfast was suppressed, meat was excluded from the menu at dinner, and in the evening supper was replaced by a meal which contained no eggs, butter, or anything of a live nature.

The real test of culinary art was, according to this genial gastronome, to create a rigorously apostolic meal which had all the appearance of an excellent supper.

Little by little, the Church relaxed its original severity and permitted the use of butter and eggs and, later, the flesh of 'cold-blooded' animals, such as fish and, still later, certain aquatic game considered to be cold-blooded , such as the spoon-bill, scoter-duck, moorhen, coot, teal, water-rail, curlew, heron, godwit and sand-piper.

A Lenten meal could also include an impressive list of sumptuous removes, entrees, and roasts.

Understood in these terms the Lenten diet does not differ from normal diet, from the health point of view.

Kiss Me and Smile For Me

Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary died on September 16, 2009, at the age of 72. She was born in 1936 in Louisville, Kentucky, which is also my hometown. Driving home from Louisville today after spending the Thanksgiving holiday with my family, we listened to a Peter, Paul and Mary "greatest hits" tape, and the song "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" brought back some memories. "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" was the first pop song I remember hearing and loving, and wanting to hear over and over, and learning the words so I could sing along. Surely I must have heard other songs on the radio (remember "If you want it, here it is, come and get it" - my brother and I kept asking my mom what "it" was), but 40 years later this one still stands out as my "first."

Peter, Paul and Mary's version of "Leavin' on a Jet Plane" (written by John Denver) became a radio hit in 1969; that was the year my parents divorced. I didn't realize until much later that the song's blend of heartache, remorse, and desire resonated with me because of my own loss.

My parents' divorce was the end of my childhood. I was five years old when they split up, maybe six, I don't remember exactly. I remember my life before the divorce in idealized terms - I know it wasn't a happy time for my parents, but for me it was the happiest time of my life, when I had no problems, no cares. My family was my universe, and when it fell apart, I knew real pain for the first time in my life.

Mary Travers gave a voice to my pain and longing. If the divorce was the end of my childhood, then pop music was the beginning of my adulthood. I'm not sure that was a good thing. Don't get me wrong, I love pop music - it's fun, and it can create beauty out of the banal or even the ugly. At the same time, though, it provides formulas. For me, this formula meant that a romantic relationship (preferably heterosexual, definitely monogamous) defined the ultimate terms of love, desire, and loss. Never mind that it was my parents' divorce that created my tragedy; finding a husband became the prescription to cure it. (Or at least, finding a boyfriend.) To make myself perfectly clear, I don't feel that this is a positive benefit of pop music; it may even be harmful. But I still love "Leavin' on a Jet Plane."

I don't mean to make too much out of this. One song is not going to have that much influence on anyone's life, it's part of a much larger and much more complex culture. It's just funny to me, when I hear that song, to think back on my 6-year-old self (in 1970) and my 4-year-old brother being so moved by it at such a young age that it could almost make us cry. Where did that impulse come from? It had to come from something outside the music -- the emotional devastation of having our family broken apart. When I say pop music was the beginning of adulthood for me, I guess what I mean is the ability to find some hidden meaning to a song.

My four-year-old son still thinks that "Bungle in the Jungle" is just about animals; I hope it stays that way for a long time.

Now the time has come to leave you,
One more time, let me kiss you,
Then close your eyes, I'll be on my way...

University of Missouri Homecoming Weekend

"Great! They have MU Snuggies! Let's get some!"

"Uh, what are Snuggies?"

"Does it matter? They have MU logos on them, that's all that matters!"

Happy Homecoming Weekend, Columbia!

(I will be out of town this weekend, thank goodness!)

More Complaints about "Living in Misery"

I have a bone to pick with the blog entitled “Living in Misery.” For those who don’t live in Columbia, Missouri, the blog’s name refers to that lovely town (technically it’s a city) that I have called home for the past six years. (My husband has lived here for 11 years, so I’ve been acquainted with it for that long myself.) In case you don’t get the joke, “Misery” is a pun on “Missouri.” (Original, no? No.) Columbia is locally referred to as COMO for short.

I’ve written about this before, beginning in March 2008 and with a couple of follow-up posts in May (May 5 and May 9). I received lots of positive comments on those posts (via Facebook and verbally as well as on this blog) from folks in Columbia who are also annoyed by the blog’s persistent negativism. My position is that Columbia is a pretty darn good community in which to live. It’s not perfect, but no place is perfect. (Though if you read the “Living in Misery” blog you’d be told that Columbus, Ohio, IS perfect – it sounds like some sort of utopia, where there are no stupid politicians, no bad drivers, no evil police officers, no stupid people who don't know how to spell. I won’t dare to challenge THOSE sacred beliefs.)

Since I’ve given plenty of reasons in the past why I think COMO is a good place to live, I won’t recapitulate them here. Instead, I will point out the things that annoy me about the "Living in Misery" blog. Chiefly, there is something seriously wrong with his logic, which goes something like this:

A) Columbia, Missouri, sucks because there’s nothing good here.
B) Columbia, Missouri, sucks because there’s something great here but the local people are clueless and unable or unwilling to appreciate it.
C) Columbia, Missouri, sucks because there is something really great here, but I can’t get access to it because it’s so popular and everyone wants it.

Examples:

A) First, the name of the blog implies “Columbia, Missouri, sucks because there’s nothing good here.” That attitude pervades the blog, even when he’s trying to say something nice about Columbia. Like this sentence from March 2008: “Since moving to COMO, we have struggled to find a place that made it just a little less miserable. The new Ragtag/Uprise/Ninth Street Video complex has done that for us.”

B) In his end-of-the-year post on “Best of 2008: Homegrown in COMO,” he asserts that “most COMO-ians don’t know what they’ve got” (actually the quote comes from a Facebook exchange about the post, but same author). The quote illustrates my pet peeve about the blog, which is the supposition that, really, most of the rest of us are ignoramuses. As if noone knew about the RagTag and Sparky’s before he came to town and enlightened us. His bloggings and rants are a subterfuge, because in fact HE is the one who believes “Walmart owns this town. Literally.” Those of us who thought all along that Columbia is a great place (and who didn't shop at Walmart) were evidently oblivious to Walmart’s dominance. NOW, it turns out, we were oblivious to the great local, non-corporate businesses. But I’m glad to see that the author has finally come around to my point of view.

C) In another "Living in Misery" post, he was complaining about how hard it was to get tickets to the True/False Film Festival screenings, even as a pass-holder. I'm afraid I can't provide a link to that post, I haven't been able to locate it on his blog. (He's a very prolific blogger and there are way too many posts for me to go back through all of them!) But he compared it to his experience in Columbus, Ohio, when a new Trader Joe's opened and very few people knew about it, so shopping there was a pleasant experience. Then the word got out, and in a matter of months it was mobbed (like all the other TJ's in the country!), so shopping there meant battling crowds in the parking lot and in the aisles. He likened the True/False Film Festival to that experience -- it's so popular now that even us longtime supporters can't get tickets to the films we want to see.

Here's my second major point: he does not always know whereof he speaks. In one of our exhanges in May 2008, he complained (on my blog) that "the gay community is rather invisible. We were here for several weeks before we saw any signs of a LGBT community. The only gay bars in town are nowhere near the supposedly progressive downtown." But in June 2009, he posted an essay called "The Gay of COMO," in which he reversed his previous position, writing the following:

"It's hard to believe that R and I moved here nearly four years ago. One of the things we felt was absent was the gay scene. There was (and still is) no gay bar downtown. No stores flew rainbow flags. We couldn't find the gay community anywhere. The place from which we came - Columbus, OH - is a gay mecca of sorts. So, this was a bit of culture shock for us.

"Then, R walked into Main Squeeze and things began to become clearer. I joined the Prism board. New friends came out to us and invited us to SoCo. The world regained its balance.

"There is a strong gay community in this town. Support it."

There's something to be said for being open-minded and willing to admit when you were wrong. But there's also something to be said for reserving judgment, and maybe waiting more than A WEEK to get to know a place before you pass judgment on it and declare yourself an ardent and vocal detractor of it.

Ian McEwan

I came late to Ian McEwan’s writing, but I finally have to admit that I’m a big fan. I’ve just read my third McEwan novel – I devoured it in about 24 hours – the short, concisely plotted Amsterdam (1998), and have been filled with admiration for McEwan’s ingenuity at creating the perfect blend of satire, surprise, and keen observation of the human psyche. Previously I read Enduring Love (1997) and Atonement (2001), and have found all his novels equally compelling.

It’s also rather breathtaking to consider how many of his novels have been translated into film – Atonement, Enduring Love, The Comfort of Strangers, and The Cement Garden – in addition to his authorship of original screenplays (The Good Son and others). Taken together, his novels and screenplays represent a world that is, to use my friend Amy’s word, unnerving. In some – The Comfort of Strangers comes to mind immediately – “unnerving” is an understatement.

On reading Enduring Love last month I recognized what is not exactly a formula for McEwan’s novel, but may be more accurately described as a trope, or a technique for developing the plot: he throws together a group of people (mostly strangers), subjects them to an intense emotional experience, and then explores what happens to them (as individuals and in relationship to each other) as a result of the traumatic incident. He devotes lavish attention to setting up the situation, the emotional crucible, which is most fully developed in Atonement: the climactic event – the rape of a visiting young cousin – is preceded by the description of one day’s events which takes up practically the first half of this novel. In Enduring Love, the first chapter was described by one critic as the best first chapter of any novel he’d ever read.

The characters McEwan throws together are either complete strangers or a mix of strangers and intimates. In The Comfort of Strangers they are two couples; in Amsterdam they are four men whose connection is that they all loved the same woman (the glamorous Molly, whom we never meet – the story begins with her funeral). Two are best friends, but all four are rivals.

McEwan explores consequences, the effects of events upon individuals’ emotional and psychological states. He’s interested in perceptions: the differences among different people’s perceptions of an event, the subjectivity (and hence unreliability) of perceptions, and the way our perceptions color our responses and reactions. Perception may be unreliable and sometimes completely wrong, but we are trapped within our own perceptual boundaries; perception is all we have for understanding our world, our relationships, our lives.

Another common feature of McEwan’s novels is that they always end up being about something completely different from what the reader initially thinks they’re going to be about. By the end of the novel, the main character is doing something that would have been wholly unthinkable at the beginning of the novel, yet McEwan takes them (and us) there in a convincing manner.

McEwan is interested in the darker sides of the human psyche. Sometimes this takes the form of extreme sexual perversity, but more often it’s an exploration of jealousy, obsession, delusions of grandeur, rationalization, selfishness, malice. He presents moral and ethical dilemmas, and his characters’ failure to act nobly. My, how they rationalize their behavior! Only in Atonement does the main character display remorse over her action and its dire, irreversible consequences.

As it happens, one of my first posts on this blog was a review of Atonement; here I will say a few words about the other two McEwan novels I’ve read recently:

Enduring Love

This novel is about something called “de Clérambault’s syndrome,” or erotomania, and includes as an appendix an article on the syndrome published in the British Review of Psychiatry. It’s very well researched, and in fact is based on the true story described in BRP. Initially I thought it might turn out to be like the film Notes on a Scandal (based on the novel What Was She Thinking? By Zoe Heller), with an unreliable narrator, but it wasn’t at all.

Coincidentally, erotomania is the subject of the French film He Loves Me…He Loves Me Not, starring Audrey Tautou, which is one of my favorite films. (See my review of He Loves Me...He Loves Me Not elsewhere on this blog.)

Amsterdam

This is the shortest and funniest of the three McEwan novels I’ve read, and it won the Booker Prize in 1998. It’s a work of biting satire in which McEwan ridicules politicians, journalists, and bohemian artsy types. The rivalry among four men involved with one woman reminded me too of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel about four men, three of whom are involved (successively) with one woman. The Fountainhead is not a work of satire by any means – it’s more like an allegory of capitalism in which each of the men represents a different political ideology. Like Amsterdam, The Fountainhead’s cast of characters includes a publisher and an artist (the architect Howard Roarke). Other than that, Amsterdam and The Fountainhead have nothing in common; Ayn Rand has virtually no sense of humor, but she does write a compelling tale.

"Rambling" - a poem by Mescal Hornbeck

(This poem was written by my grandmother, Mescal Hornbeck, who turned 98 last month. Mescal is an active writer of poetry, essays, and letters to the editor of the local papers. She lives in Woodstock, New York. When I asked her if I could publish this poem on my blog, she agreed, and commented on what a funny word "blog" is. Then she said "I'd rather be blogged than flogged!")

Rambling

If God created the universe
Who created God?
If the world BEGAN with those
Wee microscopic elements
Where did they come from?
Must we know
What and where the things
We see came to be?
Pain and futility
Are what we’ll get
And little joy if
We can’t be content
Just to be, feel, and see.
Aha, I know
Where God came from!!!
Because man has always
Thought that there just has to be
A cause for everything
He believed there had to be
A cause for you and me.
And so man invented God.
In Man’s own image
Invented he Him.
Unable to see that
Some things that be are
Quite inexplicable
For instance, do you really know
What makes the things
We do happen?
Can you possibly explain
What invisible force
Causes a man and woman
To Suddenly feel a strong
Magnetic pulling together?
And this does happen to
Any couple of people.
And none can say they just know
When the two happen to be
The same gender it is
Because they decided it
It should be that way,
As if their minds
Made the decision.
Not believing some things are mysteries.