Monthly Archives: June 2004

Control Room

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This weekend, I stopped by my local theatre in the hopes of seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 and both to my dismay and pleasure, every single screening was sold out even though it was showing on dual screens. The “return of the documentary,” indeed.

So I ambled down the road and checked out another film, Jehame Noujaim’s Control Room (2004), a look behind the scenes at the famed Arabic television station, Al-Jazeera. I’ve pretty much avoided all mainstream coverage of the war in Iraq from the get-go and sought alternative news sources from international reports and human rights groups rather than embedded broadcasts from Fox or CNN, but seeing Control Room underscored how slanted even my perception of the station was, given the Bush administration’s constant attempts to vilify it. Donald Rumsfeld has publicly referred to it, among other things, as “Osama bin Laden’s mouthpiece.” In fact, the station has been banned by several Arab governments for its open criticism of their policies, and its staff is not a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists with cameras, but many ex-BBC reporters and Western-trained journalists and entrepreneurial producers who praise the US Constitution and dream of sending their kids to American universities.

Al-Jazeera (which means “the island”) is widely admired in the journalistic community as well, and regularly interacts with American, British, and international reporters. It is the first independent television station in the Arabic world (although it’s still partially-subsidized by the government of Qatar), and watched by over 50 million people, regularly featuring point/counterpoint discussions and debates fueled by the station’s motto: “The opinion…and the other opinion.” While it’s arguable how well it adheres to Western myths of journalistic objectivity (and the same concern could be directed toward the US corporate-owned media), it’s a pioneering effort in the Middle East, determined to cover and debate international events for Arabic viewers, offering them their own news source rather than leaving them to fish for coverage of their own region from the BBC or other European news agencies.

Egyptian-American director Noujaim’s previous film was Startup.com, and she maintains her cinema veritÈ approach by observing a few individuals and never inserting her own voice or commentary (aside from the film’s selection and arrangement of material). In this case, the Al-Jazeera individuals include producer Sameer Khader and journalist Hassan Ibrahim, who attended grade school with Osama bin Laden and also shares my alma mater, the University of Arizona. He has over 25 years of journalistic experience, and when he tells an American journalist he used to work for the BBC (in fact, he used to head the BBC Arab News Service), the reporter replies, “Of course, everybody who works for the BBC eventually ends up working for Al-Jazeera.”

The third figure Noujaim highlights is US Lieutenant Josh Rushing, a mild-mannered and intelligent officer who tries to toe the party line, but is quick to engage Ibrahim in philosophical debates that are surprisingly even-handed and respectful. Rushing even admits to some of his own compromises, describing how difficult it is not to “spin” a news story when he feels a specific reporter has a particular agenda. “It benefits Al-Jazeera to play to Arab nationalism because that’s their audience,” he says, “just like Fox plays to American patriotism, for the exact same reason, because that’s their audience. The big thing for my generation is for these two perspectives–my perspective, the Western perspective, and the Arab perspective–to understand each other better because, truly, the two worlds are colliding at a rapid rate.” Rushing and Ibrahim’s talks make it clear that many Westerners assume the invasion is about Saddam Hussein, while most Arabs assume the invasion is about fortifying Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

And Rushing is also eloquent when describing the now-famous tension between the US media never showing severe images of violence and Al-Jazeera’s propensity to do so:

“The night they showed the P.O.W.’s and the dead [US] soldiers–Al-Jazeera showed them. It was powerful, because America doesn’t show those kind of images. Most of the time America doesn’t show those images. They showed the American soldiers on the tile floor. It was revolting. It made me sick to my stomach. What hit me [was] that the night before there had been a bombing in Basra, and Al-Jazeera had shown images of the people, and they were equally, if not more, horrifying images. I had never seen it. I thought to myself, wow, that’s gross. That’s bad. Then I went away and was eating dinner or something; it didn’t affect me as much… And people in the Al-Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn’t as bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war.”

Mostly, the film alternates between Rushing and the press conferences at CentCom (the US central communications center 10 miles from Al-Jazeera) and Khader’s bustling newsroom. Filmed in a few weeks last year, the film covers the US bombing of Al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad, which killed one of their cameramen, Tareq Ayyoub, who was broadcasting live. Despite Pentagon claims that the killing was accidental (despite the fact that Al-Jazeera gave them the coordinates to their bureau when the invasion began), two other Arab journalists were killed the same day, causing even US reporters like CNN’s Tom Mintier to express doubts. (Additionally, Al-Jazeera’s offices in Afghanistan have been bombed twice.) The international journalists’ gathering to express their solidarity at Ayyoub’s memorial is lacerated with the pleas of his widow, who begs them over the phone to “tell the truth” in their reportage at all costs.

In this regard, it’s hard to argue with Al-Jazeera’s footage of bombed civilians climbing through the rubble of their homes. To such footage relayed in Control Room, Noujaim intercuts absurd press statements from Rumsfeld, such as: “What they do is when there’s a bomb goes down, they grab some children and women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children. It seems to me that it’s up to all of us to try to tell the truth, to say what we know, to say what we don’t know, and recognize that we’re dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case.”

Given the increasing scandals and disappointments that have plagued the US administration in the last few months, those last lines may prove to backfire in ways Rumsfeld never imagined. Similarly, when President Bush is questioned about US prisoners and tosses off this line for the press, the audience in my theatre gasped in astonishment: “If there is somebody captured, I expect those people to be treated humanelyÖ Just like weíre treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely.î (The film was completed before the incidents at Abu Ghraib became public.)

Control Room is a highly informative film that helps contextualize the media wars and their importance to world events of the past year. The media people it focuses on are intelligent, articulate, and observant, and the images and juxtapositions it offers provide considerably new contexts for the invasion than have been seen on American airwaves. It’s required viewing.

LAFF, part 2

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The last two features I’ve screened at the LAFF are exemplary thrillers, both immersed in existentialist dread, both diverging in tone: CÈdric Kahn’s brooding and suggestive mood piece, Red Lights (Feux rouges, 2004), and Raoul Ruiz’s comedic and flamboyant neo-noir, A Taste of Murder (known at other festivals as A Place Among the Living from the French title, Une place parmi les vivants, 2004.) Both are filmmakers I know little about, although Ruiz’s film is the fourt of his works that I’ve seen, and the more I see, the more I want to see. (Fortunately, the filmmaker has made close to 100 films, so I have plenty of work cut out for me, as detailed in the excellent Australian film journal, Rouge.)

Red Lights begins with static aerial shots of Paris, the modern architecture and miniscule people, trails of automobiles, and geometric landscape resembling abstract art. The effect is emphasized through the use of Debussy’s “Nuages” movement from his Nocturnes and its ethereal, impressionist tones lend the images of organized civilization a graceful, disquieting edge.

Antoine (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) is leaving the office; he’ll meet up with his lawyer wife (Carole Bouquet) and the two will drive out-of-town to pick up their two children, who have just completed their stay at a summer camp. On the way home, Antoine stops at a pub and slams down a few beers. Something is clearly troubling him, and the identification and articulation of that fear will be his project for the rest of the narrative, a nebulous, undefined weight of despair and self-loathing that threatens to undo his life.

Kahn is so adept at conveying Antoine’s mounting desperation through perfectly-timed accumulations of detail–focusing on the draining of each glass of booze, the clock on the wall and the time of day, Antoine’s rendezvous with his wife and their petty squabbling, the mobility restrictions of rush hour–that each incident suggests the imminent potential to unleash disaster. The film has been described as “Hitchcockian,” but Hitchcock’s classic model for suspense, that is, the audience knows a bomb will explode under a table while two oblivious characters chat away, is given a more mysterious and ultimately more unsettling twist: the audience knows something is under the table and that it’s about to go off, but what that threat actually is or why it’s there is not clear. This psychological thriller’s absence of easily quantifiable psychological data is its primary device for creating suspense; it’s also its primary device for engaging the viewer’s empathy and emotional immersion. When Antoine’s crisis finally begins to clarify and take shape, an opposition to society’s rules and daily routines–the “red lights” of life–the film has been constructed with such precision that the audience immediately identifies with Antoine’s feelings.

Ruiz’s film is arguably just as clever, aesthetically inventive, and thematically complex as his last film, Ce Jour-l‡. Set in Paris in 1958, Ernest Ripper (Thierry Gibaut) is a struggling writer in the thriving Parisian artistic community who lacks the creativity to succeed. While the Algerian FLN plant various terrorist bombs around the city, Ripper and his friends (who continually tease him for sharing the name of the famous serial killer) are almost completely oblivious to political realities–intermittent explosions erupt throughout the film and the characters don’t so much as blink.

Instead, Ripper meets up with who he assumes is the suave and debonair serial killer, Joseph Arcimbodo (Christian Vadim), and he decides to interview the killer and chronicle the details of his violence, selling it as fiction. Without knowing the exact nature of his inspiration, Ripper’s publisher is thrilled.

This strange and macabre setup gives way to a complex and playful tale of murder and obsession, writing and creativity, life and death, and all the tangled, metaphorical ways in which the subjects are interrelated. As characters quote Sartre and struggle to become men and women of action and responsibility in an indifferent world, they quickly find themselves enmeshed in layers of moral choices and unexpected ironies.

Ruiz virtually attacks the material with an acute structural and visual creativity, the noirish low-key lighting and canted frames, recurring visual motifs and stylistic flourishes throughout make it a film that never ceases to amuse and astonish. It’s a model of self-reflexive, postmodern storytelling in that the formal distancing techniques are used not simply for laughs or at the characters’ expense, but in order to contribute to a more immersive puzzle that works on several levels at the same time

Los Angeles Film Fest Diary

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It’s always great to see a film festival establish its groove, and the Los Angeles Film Festival is doing just that in its fourth incarnation since its merger of two film organizations. Evolving from a festival that specialized in independent American fare, it is now more international in scope and offers several high-profile screenings this year, even if much of the program seems directly lifted from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. (But who’s complaining?)

Last weekend, I managed to catch four rewarding films, with more screenings planned later in the week.

South of the Clouds (Zhu Wen, China, 2004)

Novelist Zhu Wen’s second feature is a quiet, studied portrait of a factory retiree, Xu Dagin (Li Xuegian), who decides to travel to the Yunnan province in Southwest China, a region close to Tibet and known for its cultural eccentricities. Living in industrialized Beijing–which Zhu films in overcast, grey tones–Xu’s family attempts to navigate the challenges of modernization. Over his protests, his daughter accepts the romantic advances of an entrepreneur in order to establish an aerobics club. As the realization of his retirement and deteriorating health begins to settle in, Xu’s journey to Yunnan becomes a symbol of his life’s unmaterialized dreams and missed opportunites.

Zhu effortlessly cuts from a shot of Bejing’s cityscape onboard Xu’s train as it passes into a dark tunnel to a shot of Yunnan’s mountainous beauty as the train emerges from the darkness of another tunnel, and the stylized transition precipitates the more ironic layers of dreams and reality that pervade the second half of the film. Xu is met by a friend of the family, who insists on being his tour guide, erroneously driving him from location to location–Xu’s journey is an inward journey as much as it is a physical one. And far from enjoying a lost paradise, Xu becomes embroiled in a strange legal case that enforces nebulous restrictions on his ability to return home. (The police chief in charge of the investigation is sensitively played by none other than Tian Zhuangzhuang, the film’s executive producer and director of such films as The Blue Kite and Springtime in a Small Town).

Zhu has called the film a tribute to his parents’ “fifth generation,” a silent generation that endured a great deal of political adversity: “The generation of our fathers has it tough. Nowadays, people love to express themselves. But their generation did not like talking too much. They bore everything in their hearts, and were burdened with heavy responsibilities. At that time, our country was not rich. Now, as good times come, they find themselves old and lonely. This is a crucial juncture in their life, and it is not an easy one.”

South of the Clouds recently took the Firebird Award at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (the jury included Marco Bellochio and Hou Hsiao-hsien as two of its members) and its subtle ambiguities and theme of inner journey in a remote locale has been compared to Rossellini masterworks like Stromboli or Voyage to Italy. The comparison is apt, though Zhu’s stately visuals render the theme with a contemporary Asian aesthetic that emphasizes the sense of realism while allowing extended reflection.

Another Road Home (Danae Elon, US, 2004)

Although the rise of 16mm camera technology occasioned the growth of documentary filmmaking, the arrival of even more flexible digital video seems to have inspired a particular breed of personal diary films in the last few years. One of the best recent entries in the genre was Yulie Cohen Gerstel’s My Terrorist (2003), an essay film exploring her controversial forgiveness of a convicted Palestinian terrorist who had once attacked an Israeli bus she was riding in. Elon’s film addresses similar ground from a different angle: Elon’s father was a career-minded academic whose absence required the assistance of a Palestinian man, Musa Obeidallah, who served as Elon’s caretaker in Israel throughout her childhood. Now a Jewish ÈmigrÈ in New York, Elon decided to locate Obeidallah’s family, now living in New Jersey, in an attempt to reconstruct her past and pay tribute to their sacrifices.

As a first-person essay film, Elon films her search and eventual discovery of the Obeidallah family, and the conversations between them, her parents, and Musa himself (still living in Palestine) in a sensitive and penetrating fashion, underlining the humanity and difficult life decisions undergirding the Arab-Israeli conflict. The film derives genuine strength from the way she taps into the two family’s shared history while simultaneously leaving political commentary on the edges of her investigation, questions to be continuously pondered. In one of the film’s memorable scenes, she arranges for her father, Amos Elon (who has written many articles and books on Jewish history), to have dinner with the Obeidallahs and it’s telling when he shifts uncomfortably in his seat and asks if the Obeidallahs are “political,” revealing the way in which personal relations in the region have been separated by intellectual and ideological barriers, even by those who would seek reconciliation. (Of course they’re political, Elon responds.)

It’s a film that sensitively assembles candid family reunions and conversations and uses them to explore notions of home and personal/political allegiances with compelling and enlightening generosity.

Chinese Dream (Victor Quinaz, US, 2004)

This 13-minute short film preceded Unknown Soldier, and it’s a remarkably focused and accomplished piece detailing a Chinese dishwasher working in a Hong Kong restaurant who dreams of immigrating to New York and the oppressive tactics of his boss, who refuses to help him. Shot in three days for $15,000, the film is visually stylish (a standout example superimposes fast-motion footage taken at various times of the dishwasher working through a mountain of plates, creating a beautifully-layered sequence of physical movement) and succeeds in evoking the protagonist’s existential longing for life change. It is the first production of Chicago’s Immediate Theater Company and was created by “industry professionals working for free.” Many of its fleeting images are still fresh in my memory.

Unknown Soldier (Ferenc Toth, US, 2004)

Toth’s remarkable debut film depicts the gradually eroding social opportunities available to a Harlem black youth after his auto mechanic father unexpectedly passes away. The film seems like a merging of Jean-Luc Godard (energetic street camerawork set to a rousing jazz score) and neorealism (a simple plot sketched in broad strokes emphasizing its urban setting and the people and faces that inhabit it). Ellison (played with perfect understatement by Carl Louis) is an 18-year-old young adult without family savings or business opportunities, who must eek out an existence through various low-wage jobs and high rents, sleepless nights on the streets, and a growing desire for financial independence and romantic love.

The film was shot on digital video and the graininess of the low-key lighting and nighttime shoots accentuates the film’s rough-and-tumble approach to narrative drive. Emotional devices are wonderfully understated (the viewer never even learns how Ellison’s father dies and the film doesn’t slow down to emphasize Ellison’s grief) and the story evolves into an unsentimental and compelling look at the economic vortex that threatens many urban lives. As a last act of desperation, Ellison attempts to join the Army–a common destiny for many in his position–but is rejected because of physical liabilities. The film’s moral force is generated from the tension between Ellison’s desires to retain his integrity and the pressures and opportunities that make “quick fixes” (criminal compromises) alarmingly appealing.

After the film, Toth and Louis offered a Q&A and explained their pragmatic approach to the film. Toth had lived in Harlem and wanted to make a film reflecting the life patterns of people he knew there (one of the film’s actors is the superintendent of the apartment building of the film’s major setting), but his only film experience was having assisted on a friend’s production. Sticking to the social milieu he knew well, hiring a small crew of film students, and telling a simple story with a great deal of urgency and verve has created a powerful film that has deservedly won top accolades at various festivals this year.

Haibane Renmei

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My pal John Torvi up in Calgary keeps me up-to-date with the latest developments in the animation scene, and he has sent in this report concerning Pioneer’s new DVD release of Haibane Renmei, a Japanese anime series that’s getting rave reviews across the board. Here’s John. –Doug

* * * *

By John Torvi

I am fortunate in my volunteer work at the Quickdraw Animation Society to be able to peruse some of the stuff that is coming through our video library before it goes on the shelves for the membership. Found another gem–the Japanese TV series entitled Haibane Renmei (2002). Wow. A unique environment filled with mystery, beauty, betrayal, anguish, guilt, and redemption. You might as well check all your cultural references at the door though. You wonít need them.

The story concerns itself with a walled city in which haibane (angel-like creatures) are born into this world via cocoons which appear in an abandoned dormitory, the living quarters of the haibane. Not much explanation is given as to what haibane actually are, but it is suggested that they once had another life outside the wall. Haibane experience dreams within their cocoons before they “hatch” and based upon the imagery of the dream they are given a name. The haibane that hatches in the first episode is called Rakka which means “falling” for she had a dream where she was falling. We see this strange world through her eyes and her experiences.

The haibane live with humans within this walled area, and regularly help people. They are given jobs, for which they receive no pay but rather are given a notebook in which they record the amount of work they have done and use that amount to purchase items. They are only allowed second-hand items. There are many rules like this that haibane have to follow for their own protection, such as not going near or touching the outer wall, not approaching the “toga” (an outsider who trades goods with the people of the walled community), and not speaking unless permitted to when engaging the “communicators” (a group of wise priests who act like intermediaries, judicators, and council for the haibane).

Much of why this is so is never explained–to the actual benefit of the story. There are a lot of holes, things left out in what I would call “appropriate” places. This really gives the story a sense of mystery and wonder. Thereís a strong sense of an old civilization with a long history of co-existing with the haibane, and a deep undercurrent of meaning. All of the reasons why I like the Myst adventure game series, why I love Miyazaki movies, and why I enjoy Satoshi Kon’s work is all here. Thereís a magical mysteriousness to it all. Yet, there is also an original voice to this series.

In the extras on the DVD, the seriesí author, Yoshitoshi ABe, claims the story deals with redemption and his ideas of the divine: becoming human through relating with others; themes of acceptance, identity, forgiveness, closure, and wounds that are difficult to mend. The muted earth tones are understated and ethereal and really add to the dream-like quality of this series. The animation is on par with other higher quality anime TV series, and is complemented with excellent backgrounds and the subtle use of effects. Itís a deeply rich environment, handled maturely by a relatively young artist.

The Western imagery is not a literal translation though–the angels in this piece are not guardians, they do not fly, or pronounce heavenly decrees. They struggle. They hurt. They experience. Rakka at one point rails against a human who considers the haibane as good luck charms for the human population, saying that they should “stay happy” for the humans’ benefit. I think the reason why the Western angelic imagery is so successful here is because it gives a sacredness to the haibane experience, that what they are going through in this walled city is very important to them and those around them.

It is suggested, though not directly, that the haibane are people who have died and have left things undone. The world they live in is a way station between two worlds. It gives them the opportunity to deal with the emotional issues that they have before moving on. In this way you might draw similarities from the series to Hirokazu Kore-edaís After Life (1998).

The series does ask for a little more time commitment than a two-hour movie would, but this gives a lot more room for character development. One might think that with all of the magicality this might be suitable for kids of all ages, something like Miyazakiís Spirited Away. However, as a friend of mine put it, what appears to be a light story, really has some darker undercurrents to it.

Itís a series that will inspire conversations with each viewing.

Jonas Mekas’ Movie Journal

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Browsing through a used bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, I came across critic/filmmaker/curator Jonas Mekas‘ out-of-print Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, a partial compilation of his writing for the Village Voice during that period. Mekas was born in Lithuania in 1922, but after graduating from college, he was arrested by the Nazis during WWII and forced to work in a labor camp. After the war, he lived as a Displaced Person for four years before the United Nations dumped him in the US–he never officially immigrated.

In New York, Mekas began a love affair with the movies and eventually convinced the Voice to begin offering a regular movie column. He was asked to write it, and it was called “Movie Journal,” an apt title for its personal, off-the-cuff, diary-like musings on the New York film scene. Movie Journal is wonderfully entertaining and informative, Mekas’ writing on experimental films, polemics against mainstream criticism (“Now I know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies: the taste for cinema”), the programmers of the New York Film Festival (“an organized and well-sponsored undertaking to prevent New Yorkers from seeing what’s really going on in cinema”), and narrative films (“Dreyer’s Gertrud alone and by itself redeemed the festival”) are as relevant as ever and provide a charming glimpse of the culturally-engaged life of a ’60s cinephile. The book is one of my best finds in some time, a pre-Internet blog.

While the bulk of the book focuses on film reviews, one of his entries, A Rendezvous With the FBI (December 21, 1961), is particulartly engaging; a personal anecdote that is by turns startling, funny, and moving:

“I dreamed J. Edgar Hoover groped me in a silent hallway of the Capitol . . .”–Allen Ginsberg in Guns of the Trees.

Two days after the Cinema 16 screening of Guns of the Trees I received an early morning telephone call.

“My name is Schwartz, from the FBI,” said a voice at the other end of the phone. “I want to ask you a few questions.”

Schwartz. A good name, I thought. FBI. I was sort of thrilled. I remembered the novels of Mickey Spillane. Adventure. We agreed to meet on Avenue B. I had always wanted to meet an FBI agent. Or a detective. I wondered if I’d be able to spot him on the street.

Spot him I did; there was no mistake about that. Nobody could have missed him on the Lower East Side. A face right out of a Carol Reed movie, with black hat and raincoat.

“You don’t have to talk to me you know, ” said Mr. Schwartz, as he flashed his card.

“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “I’m thrilled. I’m glad.”

Still, I looked around. I felt I was entering a dark conspiracy. And although I knew I wasn’t guilty of any crime, I felt the huge power of the State Department behind this Carol Reed man.

Mr. Schwartz didn’t waste any time: “Have you seen any Soviet citizens lately?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. There was no point in denying my contacts with filmmakers or film critics of any country.

“Did you see them professionally? You know, as a photographer?”

I looked at him. There was a queer smile on his face. It was very clear what he was driving at: photographs, secret documents, cameras–all the spy stuff. I remembered Five Fingers.

“No,” I said. “I saw them on personal matters.”

I thought that was vague enough. Mr. Schwartz walked along silently for a moment. It was cold. He looked into a coffee shop, but I preferred the cold morning air.

“Did they ever offer you any kind of money?” he asked suddenly.

Money! I had better deny it, and fast, I thought. This was a dangerous question.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t received any money from any Soviet citizen, and you needn’t worry about it, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

That should do it, I thought. It didn’t.

“I have information that you have received money from Soviet citizens in this country,” said Mr. Schwartz.

We walked on silently. If he doesn’t believe what I say, why does he bother asking me, I thought. It was insulting. What had first seemed like an innocent adventure, a game, suddenly became disgusting.

“I’d be glad to get some money from somebody,” I said. “I could use some.”

The joke didn’t come off. Mr. Schwartz was waiting for a direct answer or a sudden confession. I had made a mistake, I thought. You should never say that you need money–that may be proof that you accepted money. You are forgetting your movies, I thought.

“You are avoiding the answer,” said Mr. Schwartz. I found myself wondering: is he recording, taping down what I say? “But the question is ridiculous,” I said.

“It’s my duty to find out the facts,” said Mr. Schwartz.

“But how are you going to do that if you don’t believe what I say? It’s useless,” I said. “You are wasting taxpayers’ money on useless investigations.”

“Do you pay taxes?” the agent asked.

I shut up. Hell, I said to myself, he may dig into my taxes. He probably has a book on me, ten inches thick.

“Did you receive the money, yes or no?” insisted the man from the FBI.

I was in it, but good. I wanted to say “No,” but the sound disappeared in my mouth. My “No” was completely meaningless by now. I knew that if I said “No,” it would sound exactly like “Yes.”

I saw the East River in front of me. But I smelled the Un-American Activities Committee, the Gestapo, the NKVD, and all the secret agents, cops, and armies that I’ve already been through–the Flies of the 20th century.

“No,” I said. “I refuse to answer this question. I think I’ve had enough of this. And then to tell you the truth, I hate agents. All agents.”

I stopped. I looked at Mr. Schwartz and could clearly see that he no longer had any doubt: I was guilty. I had refused to answer; that meant I was evading the truth; that I was guilty. I had received money from Grigori Chukhrai, perhaps, or Sergei Bondarchuk, or Tatjana Samailova.

“Yes, I hate agents,” I said. I thought I would repeat it for the sake of the East River. “And then, do you think that by answering yes or no, it would change anything? Do you mean to tell me you will burn my file after this? My answer will change nothing. Once you satisfy your suspicions you’ll stick to them. So I may as well tell you right here and now that I refuse to cooperate with the FBI.”

Suddenly I felt like a crusader. “Who is going to tell me what to do and say? I’m free to exchange any artistic knowledge I have with whomever I please–whether he’s Russian, Greek, or Chinese. My knowledge is universal.”

“No,” interrupted Mr. Schwartz. “I’m the one who knows what you can and what you can’t tell to others. I’m paid for it, this is my profession, this is my field. I’m the authority on it.”

That shut me up. I was astounded.

“But I’m an artist,” I said, “and you’re only an FBI agent. I have knowledge that is not available to you. I have knowledge of the arts and human experience. I myself will decide how and where to use my experience and my knowledge, okay? You should think about it, I’m telling you this as one human being to another.”

“You are wrong,” said Mr. Schwartz.

The street was cold as Hell. The chimneys of the Con Edison plant were cold. The agent’s face was cold.

Suddenly everything seemed so stupid. Here I am, walking with an FBI agent on this cold December morning, on the Lower East Side, with Christmas wreaths hanging in the store windows, talking to him, trying to prove something–to prove what?

“Okay,” I said finally. “I admit it. I’m working in a huge munitions factory and I have files and files of secret materials and I am selling them for money to the Russian filmmakers–you know, one has to eat. . . . “

We walked on silently now. Communication was breaking down rapidly.

“This is stupid,” I said. “I’m going home.”

Mr. Schwartz didn’t look at me.

“Do you refuse to cooperate?” he asked. The voice was cold as metal. “You don’t want to help the government? You know, you are making a mistake by not cooperating.”

“Yes, I refuse to cooperate because the whole thing makes no sense. That’s what you should say in your report.”

The agent turned away and walked toward Avenue A. I bought a loaf of bread and walked home. What the hell did he want, I thought. What is behind all this? What kind of scheme? How the hell do they get such ideas? And how many people, how many are being harassed like this, every day, with stupid suspicions and senseless questions?

Or perhaps I’m guilty? Maybe I’ve sinned in my sleep? And who left the tip after that vodka with the Russian director (I don’t dare mention his name now)? Or perhaps I revealed the secret of the size of our Cinemascope screen? You never know. I was searching through my memory.

The telephone rang. Is it tapped? Has it been tapped for weeks now? I thought I heard a strange click in it. I sat by the table. The telephone rang again. I stared at it.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire

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I haven’t seen The Day After Tomorrow, and given its scathing reviews, I don’t intend to any time soon, but seeing Rialto’s new print of the original Godzilla (1954) last night (certainly a much smoother, dramatically cohere film than its American makeover), I found myself pondering end-of-the-earth films in general, and one my own favorite entries in the genre, Val Guest’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), in particular.

Available as a superb DVD from Anchor Bay (with a beautiful widescreen transfer and Guest commentary), the movie is an unusually literate and thematically nuanced genre film. Peter Stenning (a sardonic Edward Judd) is a reporter for a major London newspaper who tries to work through emotional turmoil as a result of his recent divorce. His fast-talking coworkers, in a milieu not unlike a Hawks picture, critique his new drinking habit and diminishing job performance while quietly cutting him some slack and offering help whenever they can. As Stenning navigates his inner life and begins a new relationship with a sympathetic but independent woman, Jeannie Craig (Janet Monro), the newspaper staff begins to piece together evidence regarding London’s dramatically-shifting weather patterns that point toward nuclear testing and imminent worldwide disaster.

Val Guest co-wrote and directed the film. He was a competent craftsman within the British studio system with his share of successes (the Quatermass series) and flops (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth), but his early experience working in the London office of the Hollywood Reporter clearly must have inspired the authentic newsroom atmosphere in the film. The award-winning script was co-written by screenwriter/playwright Wolf Mankowitz, and the dialogue is surprisingly witty. When Stenning returns late to his office, his friend, science reporter Maguire (Leo McKern) sarcastically quips, “If you borrow my car at lunch, why bother to hurry back at 6:30?” “I saw my kid today,” Stenning muses. “She lets me see him from time to time, itís my legal right, you know.” Maguire nods, “Sandyís been screaming for you.” “Heís a nice kid, too,” Stenning continues, “remembered me after ten minutes.” Maguire proclaims, “The biggest experimental bang of all time is ten days old, but instead of being proud the public demands we stop it.” “Oh, I donít know,” Stenning shrugs, “the best science man on the street ought to be able to pull off a job like that. Make a trick film, maybe. Yeah, you know, the mushroom goes back into the bomb, the bomb goes back into the plane, which flies backwards over the task force, streaming back into the Antarctic.” “You better start climbing backwards to Sandyís office,” Maguire suggests.

But Guest also manages some visual flair. The film was shot in anamorphic widescreen, and the extended frame is always perfectly balanced with groups of people, city vistas, or detailed settings, whether bustling newsrooms, congested streets, or humid apartments. Although the film’s special effects aren’t particularly noteworthy, matte paintings and the incorporation of real London locations work to good atmospheric advantage (heavy rains buffet the windows; thick, unexpected fog wafts through the city; a raging hurricane crashes into the British coast). Guest also cleverly incorporates stock footage to depict floods and meteorological disasters worldwide. The visual style of the film is straightforward and classical, but each scene is rendered with a great degree of realism and sense of place.

The disaster genre is not generally known for its insights into characters or its clever dialogue, but The Day the Earth Caught Fire is an admirable exception. Its attention to the inner and outer lives of its protagonists makes its physical doom an externalized metaphor for Stenning’s personal life, off-kilter and spinning out of control, both fates equally weighted between hope and despair. My advice for those seeking end-of-the-world entertainment? Skip the multiplex this weekend and rent this intelligent and bittersweet film, fully deserving of a rediscovery.

Film Archive Action

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“Increasingly some of the greatest international film archives–currently the CinÈmathËque franÁaise and Britainís National Film and Television Archive–are under acute threat from official economic cut-backs and the incursion of ill-informed new bureaucracies.

The most acute current crisis is the threat to the National Film and Television Archive. The British Film Institute, the body currently entrusted with its administration, has drawn up an ill-considered ìPlanî for financial cut-back and reorganisation of the Archive.”

Click FilmArchiveAction.org for more information and to sign a petition in support of the Archive.

Take Care of My Cat

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Back in 1995, I had the pleasure of living in South Korea for the summer months teaching conversational English to a variety of young adults. It was a wonderful experience being immersed in a culture which had recently modernized but nevertheless retained its roots in a rich historical tradition.

While I was there, I eagerly sought Korean films, but after several weeks, I came to the aggravating realization that the only movies readily being distributed in Korea were Hollywood blockbusters like Pocahontas, Batman Forever, Apollo 13, and, yes, Waterworld. Koreans told me they thought Disney’s Native American heroine actually looked like them, but the same couldn’t be said for Kim Basinger, whose blonde visage was hawking her fashion wares on billboards all over Seoul.

So it has been with some genuine delight that I’ve watched the New Korean Cinema blossom into a bona fide commercial and artistic movement in the last few years. (A few recent landmarks: the action epic Shiri outgrossed Titanic at the Korean box office in ’99; Im Kwon-taek won Best Director for Chihwaeson at Cannes and Lee Chang-dong won Best Director for Oasis at Venice in ’01; several Hong Sang-soo retrospectives have played around the States, and most recently, Park Chan-wook’s Old Boy won the Grand Prix at Cannes.)

Most of the Koreans I met during my visit were fresh out of high school–an intensely competitive arena in a country smaller than the state of California, populated by 48 million people. I was regailed with stories of exhausting study hours and looming career questions, family pressures and decisions requiring serious commitments. Nevertheless, people would drop everything at a moment’s notice to buy me ice cream or scamper up the misty slopes of Pukhansan mountain. I was impressed with all of the young men and women I met and admired their resilience and enthusiasm.

On Tuesday [edit: July 6], Jeong Jae-eun’s debut feature, Take Care of My Cat (2001), is being released on DVD by Kino. It’s a breezy portrait of five young women who recently graduated from high school and now face various individual challenges while hoping to maintain their group bond. “There have been no movies in the past that have depicted well how young Korean women think, how they play and what they worry about,” Jeong said when the movie was released. “I hope that this film can give audiences a sense of what young Korean women are like and how beautiful they are.”

Jeong, who wrote and directed the film, focuses on her characters: Tae-hee is the caretaker of the group, arranging meetings and facilitating reconciliations while working for her father without pay and feeling overshadowed by her brothers; Ji-young lives with her poor grandparents in a shack that threatens to collapse at any moment; Hae-joo moves to Seoul and lands a lucky job at a brokerage firm while trying to constantly improve her impeccable looks and wear the latest fashions; Chinese twins, Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo, live fairly unfettered and playful lives as street vendors.

Set predominantly in the industrialized port town of Inchon, Jeong captures the transient, wandering nature of her characters by emphasizing their promenades through the city streets and their various forms of transportation. Two primary elements underline their nomadic lifestyle and questionable futures–a flexible, independent feline that alternately trades hands from character to character throughout the film, and a novel formal trick which superimposes the numbers and text characters punch into cell phones or typewriters onto various parts of the film screen. Jeong’s women often interact via cell phone messaging, and one of the film’s primary themes arises in the way contemporary relationships exist through wireless communication.

“When beepers were commonly used in the past, I would feel as if a mixture of numbers were floating in the air, going from person to person in the city,” Jeong says. “In recent years, text messages are used a lot . . . I keep picturing words flying here and there and words floating around as they meet and part.”

The film falls into the genre of the young adult coming-of-age movie, and although it (pleasantly) has somewhat modest ambitions, it far surpasses the usual teen drivel both in its seriousness and sensitivity to its characters. These are not restless adventurers seeking fast cars and good times, but thoughtful and unique characters worried about their future while holding onto the past.

The Holy Mountain

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The official website for the Masters of Cinema Series from Eureka Video in the UK is now online, featuring our first release, Arnold Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926). Unlike the Kino region 1 version, this 2-disc set contains the original German intertitles (subtitled), the complete three-hour 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (which Kino only sells separately), and a new essay by yours truly, which can be previewed here.

The film represents a key work of a pretty fascinating genre in German film, the “mountain film,” or Bergfilm, which did not survive World War II.

DVDBeaver has posted screenshots showcasing the film’s impressive cinematography, here.