Monthly Archives: November 2004

Tell Them Who You Are

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I’ve only seen renowned Hollywood cinematographer Haskell Wexler in assorted documentaries over the years and his thin body, delicate lips, and wry, strained voice always gave me the impression he might’ve been the James Stewart of cinematographers; a mild-mannered professional whose craft shines in films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Days of Heaven, and Matewan. But if his son Mark’s new documentary Tell Them Who You Are is any indication, he’s a highly irritable and difficult, sharped-tongued curmudgeon.

Mark Wexler’s film is the latest success in the blooming genre of therapeutic, first-person, digital essay films exploring the filmmaker’s personal life in the hopes of resolving, or at least documenting, some inner conflict. Seemingly a naturally quiet and sensitive child, Mark was the product of his father’s second marriage who became a cinematographer in his own right (specializing in educational films and commercials) who seems to have struggled under the shadow of his father’s legend; to make matters worse, their relationship has continually been one defined by harsh tensions and emotional distance. Like Carl-Gustav Nykvist’s recent documentary (Light Keeps Me Company) about his own father, Sven, Wexler’s film is a touching and paradoxical portrait of a talented but personally difficult artist.

Tell Them Who You Are was one of the films my friend Darren Hughes most enjoyed at TIFF last September (to this day his review is the only one listed at IMDb.com), but last night the film played to a packed and appreciative audience at UCLA, and Mark Wexler (now in his late-40s) even led a Q&A after the screening.

The film opens with Haskell berating his son for supposedly making lousy creative decisions while shooting, and despite his tentative agreement to be filmed and interviewed, he clearly isn’t comfortable allowing his son to order him around or light a scene or even choose a camera angle without attempting to critique or one-up him. Haskell tells his son that he doesn’t want a traditional career-overview type of documentary and suggests they might address their emotional relationship instead. And Mark Wexler basically adopts that approach throughout, offering a glimpse of his father’s career, but more as a personal history than an aesthetic analysis. For the most part, the slew of famous talking heads discuss Haskell’s personality and working methods rather than his artistic signature.

In the excellent 1992 documentary, Visions of Light, Haskell describes his implementation of cinÈma vÈritÈ documentary techniques to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and his decision to use “degrees of darkness and degrees of fill light so that whenever the early morning light came we would have some subliminal sense of the change in time.” But Mark Wexler’s film focuses on Haskell’s professional squabbles, his replacement on films like The Conversation and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (producer Michael Douglas claims it was the most difficult job of his life); to this day, Haskell believes director Milos Forman secretly bowed to government pressure to fire him after he photographed Emile de Antonio’s Underground, which defended the activities of the Weather Underground group of political activists.

In fact, one of Tell Them Who You Are‘s best cultural contributions is its recounting of Haskell’s anti-establishment activism (an aspect of his life he repeatedly insists Mark emphasize, which simply becomes one more source of tension when Mark, a favored documentarian of previous presidents, is personally enlisted by George W. Bush for a video project). As they drive together to San Francisco in 2003 to participate in anti-war demonstrations, Mark ironically asks his father not to discuss politics along the way.

Haskell Wexler is famous for having directed Medium Cool, a film that is equal parts fiction and documentary and was filmed during the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention of 1968. Haskell continued to make political films over the years, including documentaries such as Brazil: A Report on Torture (1971) and Introduction to the Enemy, a 1974 look at the North Vietnamese with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. In 1985, George Lucas–of all people–produced Haskell’s pro-Sandinista drama Latino which was so strenuously demonized by the Reagan administration that it was never released theatrically.

Throughout the film, Haskell continually chides and criticizes Mark, but nevertheless cooperates to a degree that suggests a hidden desire to forge a healthier bond. A moment of true solidarity occurs when Mark helps Haskell interview Julia Roberts, but that success is undermined in another scene when Haskell flies off the handle after Mark suggests a composition that differs from Haskell’s own inclinations. (“I don’t think there’s a movie I have been on that I wasn’t sure that I could direct better,” Haskell grumbles.)

The film, in fact, is probably more revealing of Haskell than Mark (its tile is a reference to a relative encouraging Mark to name drop in a professional situation, but it could equally be read as a request to his subject), and one gets the impression that Mark Wexler is the type of artist who would rather make a solid, entertaining documentary than bare his soul. But his film is nevertheless quite touching and perceptive and displays an admirable technical proficiency. Old photographs are layered together in ways that mimic three-dimensional space and shift in interesting ways according to different camera movements, and several interviews are particularly intimate and memorable, including those with Fonda (who empathizes with Mark’s relationship with an emotionally distant father) and director Irvin Kershner, who muses knowingly and lovingly on Haskell’s positive and negative traits.

It’s a film that manages to be true to a troubled relationship and the multi-faceted men who define it without sacrificing the compassion and admiration they convey towards one another in subtle, complex ways.

10 on Ten and Voyage in Time

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Gearing up after the holiday, I find that a couple of recent DVD releases keep interacting in my thoughts, Zeitgeist’s Ten by Abbas Kiarostami and Facets’ Voyage in Time (1983) by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra (who has written several scripts for Antonioni and Angelopoulos). I’m always fascinated by the creative process, and Zeitgeist’s disc comes with Kiarostami’s 10 on Ten (2004), his master class lecture I first saw at TIFF, in which he drives around his favorite location in Tehran, a mountainous road featured in Taste of Cherry, and elucidates his approach to directing. Tarkovsky’s documentary presents his own personalized reflection on the artistic process as he too travels–around Italy in search of locations and themes for his next film (which ultimately became Nostalghia). Though Kiarostami’s film is designed as a lecture and Tarkovsky’s film is more a poetic diary, both films reveal two supremely creative artists sharing their ideas about the cinema and their individual roles in it.

Most interestingly for me, Kiarostami’s theories on film seem little more than modern elaborations on the realist school of AndrÈ Bazin (the filmmaker as listener, the director as revealer of life, the elimination of artificiality, a spontaneity of script and the use of non-professionals, etc) seen most clearly in Bazin’s beloved Italian neorealism (of which the Iranian cinema has often been compared) through Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer up through the present age. Kent Jones recently identified this tradition in the pages of Cinema Scope (an “ontology-based” tradition he sets up in opposition to a more literary cinema personified by Olivier Assayas) and Kiarostami’s musings on sound and image and revealing the inner life seem so indebted to his predecessors that he quotes Cesare Zavattini (who wrote classic neorealist films such as Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D) and Bresson twice, and summarizes his interest in actors in what can only be a direct paraphrase of the opening line of Diary of a Country Priest. (Kiarostami: “The simplest, natural, or nervous reactions can unveil the insignificant secrets of a life which is apparently ordinary and without mystery.” Diary: “I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong in writing down daily, with absolute frankness, the simplest and most insignificant secrets of a life totally lacking in mystery.”)

Kiarostami scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum recently wrote that in 10 on Ten “there’s something suspect about Kiarostami’s cookbook-style lucidity–he may be sincere, but he seems to be overestimating the role rationality plays in his decisions.” But regardless of whether or not Kiarostami describes his own creative values with perfect precision, I find his adoption of these ongoing, international values of realism and minimalism a moving affirmation of cinema’s history and its ongoing vitality.

If anything, however, Tarkovsky’s approach is even more irrational and intuitive. Voyage in Time contains many moments of silence and contemplation of architecture or landscape juxtaposed with conversations about the art of movies. (It’s too bad, therefore, that the quality of Facets’ DVD is substandard, grainy, with awkward subtitles.)

As Guerra describes their trip (and, by extension, their film about it) in his introduction to Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids, the book recently published in the UK:

“We travelled extensively from Naples southwards, where [Tarkovsky] was struck by the beauty of the Baroque architecture of Lecce and the vision of Trani Cathedral. By the time we finally arrived in Bagno Vignoni, the ideas for the structure of a film were entwined around a story he liked. I remember when we entered the little church on the edge of the water-filled square, where the mist rising from the water gave a sense of distance to the landscape of ancient houses. The warm light that morning streamed through the dusty windows and came to rest on faded decorations on a wall. He surprised me [by taking a polaroid while] sitting on a pew, as though I were just the right shadow to accentuate the caress of the sun on the walls beyond my dark body.”

Although Kiarostami and Tarkovsky have many pronounced stylistic differences, Voyage in Time and 10 on Ten suggest that some of their feelings about the creative process overlap. “It has been said that anyone can write a good novel as long as the novel is about himself,” the Iranian filmmaker notes, and when asked what advice he has for young filmmakers, Tarkovsky asserts, “Nowadays everyone makes movies . . . but the advice I can give to beginners is not to separate their work, their movie, their film from the way they live. Not to make a difference between the movie and their own life.”

Tarkovsky also cites his own cinematic references: Dovzhenko, Bresson, Antonioni, Fellini (“not for his popularity but for his humanity”), Vigo, Paradjanov, and Bergman. And Kiarostami summarizes his approach with a statement that could equally apply to the Russian cineaste: “I should say that I’ve always worked in natural settings and tried my best not to make any drastic changes to it; and to remain faithful to nature and human nature.”

Both films are revealing and inspiring portraits.

3RFF: Bright Leaves

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One of my favorite unreleased movies from last year was Ross McElwee’s essay film Bright Leaves, and just as the film ends its one-week run in Los Angeles this week, Russell Lucas has sent in his glowing review from the Three Rivers Film Festival in Pittsburgh. Here’s hoping for imminent video distribution, at least. –Doug

* * * *

By Russell Lucas

A dozen or more times in my life I’ve been in the midst of an experience so overwhelmingly beautiful and satisfying that I began to regret on the spot that the experience couldn’t last, that the clock was ticking and that after the moment passed, the ecstasy would be consigned to my imperfect memory. I would try to reconstruct it later– how could I not?–but it wouldn’t be the same. It’s that desire to fix an instant in order to
overcome the limitations of memory that causes many people to take photographs. Advances in consumer electronics added new dimensions to these memory crutches, and thus where two or three related families are gathered together, there also a whirring, blinking video camera is with them. But camcorders haven’t really solved the problem of
preserving memories. Most of us employ a “more is more” approach to filming, and events have a way of appearing more banal on videotape than they were in real life. Perhaps the real problem is that we don’t all have Ross McElwee to edit our home movies into significance.

Ross McElwee is a southerner transplanted to Boston, where he teaches at Harvard. After dreaming one night about the wide and bright leaves of tobacco plants, his wife encourages him to take a trip to his childhood home in North Carolina. He agrees, and his first visit is to the house of a second cousin who is a passionate collector of all things related to obscure Hollywood cinema. Among the cousin’s finds is a little-known studio film called Bright Leaf (Michael Curtiz, 1950), based on a book by the same name. Bright Leaf tells the story of two competing tobacco barons vying for dominance during the industrial revolution and the resulting financial collapse of one of
the rivals, who is played by Gary Cooper.

The film immediately resonates with McElwee because his great-grandfather was a prominent tobacco grower and merchant who developed the Bull Durham blend of tobacco and waged a protracted losing battle–involving competition, intimidation and
litigation–with the patriarch of the Duke tobacco fortune. McElwee is ambivalent and uncomfortable concerning his ancestor’s role in the rise of the tobacco culture, but he’s also disgruntled with his family’s relative anonymity in Raleigh-Durham while the Duke history is well-told and widely-preserved. Bright Leaf represents an opportunity for McElwee to validate his great-grandfather’s historical significance and to interpret
the past, and he devotes himself to investigating the film’s origins.

If Bright Leaves was only that–an attempt to find some meaning and perspective
in McElwee’s family history–it would be an impressive achievement. Happily, it’s so much more. As he questions primary and secondary sources for information about Curtiz’s film, McElwee’s film looks at how his parents viewed his ancestors and, in turn, how he views his own parents. He turns the lens on himself and thinks about how he appears to his son, and whether he’s been successful in teaching his son about his work and the things he values.

In one stunning sequence, we see just how impossible it is to hold on to the present. McElwee’s son, aged seven or eight, is shown in vacation footage playing idly in some puddles on the beach and posing for a picture with his cousins at a beach house, and McElwee speaks hopefully about his son’s enjoyment of life and the things he hopes to
teach him. He holds the shot, and we share his optimism while watching the boy enjoy his carefree moments. In the instant it takes to cut from this shot to another, his son becomes a teenager. He finds joy in different things. He’s more self-aware. He’s less malleable. We’re led to think the son McElwee is trying to understand is just a boy, only to find that the boy he’s reaching out for has already come out the other side of youth. It’s an amazing moment.

McElwee is careful to avoid descending into paralyzing nostalgia, though, and his concerns are less about the missed opportunities of youth than about the way in which visual images, rooted in memory or videotape, animate our consciousness. He likens the compulsive behavior of smokers to his own addiction to the filmed image, as both are
pleasures which stop time for a moment.

Along the way, McElwee observes segments of the tobacco culture, but he understands that the larger issues of corporate responsibility versus individual freedom and the intertwining of economic health with an unhealthy product are too unwieldy for this context, and he treads lightly and deftly. The images speak for themselves. An annual tobacco harvest parade with its young and pretty princesses just doesn’t seem appropriate anymore, and its organizers have discontinued it starting next year. A young newly-married couple, friends of McElwee’s, have vowed to quit smoking before their wedding, and they ask him to record their declarations on film. When they break their pledges, though, they keep inviting him back to record their revised plans, as if by putting their words on film they can make them truer than if they were merely spoken.

And so McElwee, too, tries his best to discover whether the filmed images in an obscure Gary Cooper film can outweigh or correct the incomplete oral histories of his ancestral hometown. It’s not surprising that he learns that the past is sufficiently complex and
inscrutable that it can’t be understood by merely identifying oneself with Gary Cooper. What is surprising, though, is that his subtle and unassuming voice convinced me of two seemingly contradictory things: both that images are not enough, and that they are singularly powerful creations.

DVD of the Year?

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Not only is this a great way to promote some kind of DVD community consensus, but we Masters of Cinema editors get to a) hear from our readers, and b) sometimes learn about discs we missed.

“The Masters of Cinema DVD Award of the Year 2004 will be announced here on Xmas Eve. As usual, it is voted for by our readers. The voting period is from now until December 23.

We’d like our readers to vote for their favourite DVD released in 2004, so here are some simple guidelines that may help you decide: 1.) The DVD can be from anywhere in the world and must have been released sometime in 2004; 2.) You can vote for box sets; 3.) Choose your personal favourite release; 4.) Please don’t vote for MoC DVDs, the vote will receive a glowing smile but won’t be counted. Thanks.”

Recent notes

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A few notes…

ïI’ve come down with a cold this week, so permit me a moment of persnickety cinephile bitchiness. Most of the folks I know consider Jonathan Rosenbaum’s critique of the first Top 100 Movies list by the American Film Institute to be one of the most inspiring critical essays of the last few years, so it’s sad to say that with each successive list the AFI releases, their excuses for promoting pretty much the same Hollywood videos over and over again become even more suspect and absurd. Their latest in a long line of TV-special mediocrities posing as cinema appreciation? AFI’s 100 Years…100 Quotes “most memorable phrases from film.” It’s amazing to think that America’s most “preeminent national organization dedicated to advancing and preserving film” (their own description; forgetting, say, the Library of Congress) has nothing better to do with its funds or time. When 50% of all American films produced before 1950 have vanished and 90% of classic film prints in the US are currently in very poor condition, the inanity of the AFI’s faux-appreciation advertising schemes becomes all the more gruesome.

ïBy way of contrast, I have been attending the Yasujiro Ozu retrospective at the famed UCLA Film and Television Archive, a genuinely progressive institution that preserves and restores scores of films each year and holds a festival each fall of the movies most recently saved from oblivion. I’ll never forget the glowing print of Charles Laughton’s masterpiece The Night of the Hunter (1955) they screened a few years ago, complete with surviving alternate takes.

The Ozu retrospective (initially organized for the 2003 NYFF) is progressing wonderfully. To see early Ozu works like his gangster films Walk Cheerfully (1930) and Dragnet Girl (1933), and appreciate his Michael Curtiz-like use of proto-noir character types and low-key chiaroscuro lighting is a revelation. But even these films are sorely in need of whatever restoration can be made–our screening of the serene and beautiful Early Summer (1951) last night was introduced by a UCLA curator who apologized beforehand for the film’s significant scratches and audio dropouts, noting that it was nevertheless the best quality print in the world.

ïIn other news, I co-organize a screening club here at Caltech (where I work), and on Tuesday we watched Raoul Peck’s Lumumba (2000), a fairly straightforward but effective account of Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium in 1960 and the activism of Patrice Lumumba, its first prime minister. But like many third world nations, the country’s politics were heavily monitored and manipulated by covert CIA operations. (Covert to US voters, anyway.) In light of this week’s public CIA makeover and the comments by its director, Porter Goss (“We do not make policy, though we do inform those who make it; we avoid political involvement, especially political partisanship”), the film’s example of an opposite CIA policy in the world seems all the more damning.

Specifically, one scene in the film depicts a meeting between Lumumba’s opposition and CIA operatives in which the American ambassador Claire Timberlake and his secretary, Frank Carlucci, are portrayed, speaking ominously about remaining aloof from international policies in a manner that makes their opposite intentions clear. But Carlucci, who later became the CIA Deputy Chief under Carter, Secretary of Defense under Reagan, personal friends with Donald Rumsfeld, and current chairman of the powerful Carlyle group, threatened to sue HBO and Zeitgeist Films if they released the scene intact. They subsequently did not. Knowing of this controversy, I expected the scene to be cut from the DVD, but instead, Carlucci’s name is simply, unceremoniously, bleeped out. “Mr. —-beep—-, what is your opinion on the matter?” they ask. Such an obvious moment of political censorship is so overt, it would be downright funny if it wasn’t so serious.

Art by Film Directors

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Preparatory drawing for The 39 Steps (1935) by Alfred Hitchcock

I’m always fascinated by the double artistic lives of established directors, people with a significant skill in an art form that requires the assistance of sometimes hundreds of technicians, artists, and actors. But what about their private, personal pursuits? A new book published in the UK, Art by Film Directors, is a glossy coffee table book that offers a taste of the non-film artwork by several notable filmmakers.

At 200 pages with large photos and plentiful use of white space, it’s not even remotely a comprehensive summary of the offscreen creative pursuits of even the filmmakers it addresses, much less the field in general. And reading through it, I was struck by the fairly superficial tone of the writing; a basic career summary of each director and a few paragraphs generalizing their artistic interests. Then I noticed the author, Karl French, is credited as “a writer and journalist specializing in cinema and popular culture” who has published in Esquire and written Cult Movies and This is Spinal Tap: The Official Companion. I’m sure these are fine publications and French is certainly not a bad writer, but the field is so open to serious scholarship and artistic analysis that I would have preferred a more rigorous, critical approach.

Nevertheless, this is far from fluff; the selected art works and notoriety of the directors are genuinely sound. From graphic artists like Sergei Eisenstein, Terry Gilliam and Satyajit Ray who graduated to filmmaking, to draftsmen like Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, to directors with legitimate art careers like Jean Cocteau, Mike Figgis, Peter Greenaway, and Dennis Hopper, the book includes works by 23 people in all. To his credit, French is quick to admit the book’s limitations: “[other material] could even warrant a second volume, with the inclusion perhaps of the sculptures of AndrÈ de Toth, the early paintings of John Ford, and the ceramics of Jean Renoir. . . . There are other images that one would like to have included but that have been destroyed or are otherwise unavailable–for example, the paintings that Jean-Luc Godard made when he was a teenager in Switzerland, and similarly Robert Bresson’s paintings.”

But the book includes many standout examples of mature art-making. I was particularly surprised with Hitchcock’s production sketches, not typical director storyboards (Martin Scorsese’s energetic scribbles are also included here), but fully-rendered and atmospheric drawings. Eisenstein’s sketches for Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible Part I (1945) are detailed realizations etched with a sure hand. John Huston’s lifelong love of painting produced some magnificent pieces, including the brilliantly-hued, cubist “The Spirit of St. Clerans,” which evokes his beloved hunting and fishing trips in the region. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book is its three beautiful oil paintings (two cityscapes and a still life) by Josef von Sternberg, which it claims have never been publicly exhibited or published in any form.

Art by Film Directors is definitely an interesting and at times relevatory book that sheds light on an important and neglected subject, even if it’s easy to wish it had been more.

Triple Agent

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84-year-old Eric Rohmer’s latest film, Triple Agent (2004), has recently been released as a handsome DVD in France. It’s partly a continuation of his fortÈ–verbose adults parcing the emotional and ethical twists and turns of their lives–and partly (like his previous The Lady and the Duke) a thoughtful period piece. Rohmer’s oeuvre is famous for its contemporary settings and long (but thoroughly charming) pontifications on love, romance, and philosophy that often seem more concerned for timeless ideals than social problems or specific political moments in time. If anything, his last two films (who knows, perhaps his last two films ever) admirably place their stories within overt historical contexts, the French Revolution and the politically tumultuous time in Europe immediately preceding World War II.

Triple Agent is the latter setting, beginning in France in 1936 just as the left rallied together, uniting communists, socialists, liberals, and large portions of the working class and bourgeoisie to form the Popular Front political majority in order to subdue the growing threat of fascism seen in Germany, Italy, Japan, and elsewhere. Spain would also form a Frente Popular that would only last a few months before Franco would initiate his own fascist rebellion, resulting in the Spanish Civil War. This multilateral leftist response was a result of Stalin’s laissez-faire attitude toward international communism during the ’30s as he was conducting his brutal purges, arresting, executing, or deporting vast numbers of real and imagined dissenters. One opposition group in particular, the Whites, were Czarists who had fought the Red Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, and many of them later emigrated to Europe in order to spare their own lives. But Stalin had his fingers in European politics as well, mixing and matching relations with various powers as the major countries circled one another warily and perpetuated a complex network of international spies.

Rohmer thrusts the viewer directly into this complicated milieu without much explanation and evokes the times through a judicious use of costumes, historic architecture, and occasional vintage automobiles juxtaposed with newsreel footage documenting key events. For the uninitiated, it might seem a bit overwhelming, so if you don’t consider yourself an expert on the era, simply print the preceding paragraph for reference. You’ll need it.

Based partly on a true story, ArsinoÈ (played by a typically Rohmerian intelligent beauty, Katerina Didaskalu) is a Greek stay-at-home artist in Paris who spends her days painting images of local color–street markets, beaches, children playing–while her Russian White husband, Fiodor (Serge Renko) spends his days on ambiguous missions of diplomacy and intelligence. ArsinoÈ and Fiodor have a loving relationship, but it’s complicated by the fact that each of them live in their own worlds; she in her art, he in the shifting loyalties and secrecies of pre-war Europe.

Despite the semi-lurid sound of the film’s title, Rohmer carefully arranges his plot, with his ever-solid attention to logic and detail, so that most of the espionage occurs offscreen, leaving the focus on the relationships that exist apart from the more conventionally exciting elements. Rohmer derives great pleasure from the verbal explanations, justifications, and persuasions that occur between his various characters: the Russian communists who live next door to ArsinoÈ, Fiodor’s immigrant cousin and loyal White, the White spy organization in Paris. And the film develops considerable romantic tension along the way in its study of a married couple who don’t fully know each other’s secrets, two people in love yet because of Fiodor’s career, constantly having to make personal assumptions and draw their own conclusions.

Like The Lady and the Duke, the film emphasizes painting, but rather than its function in that film as a commentary on the representation of 18th century reality, Triple Agent uses the medium as a commentary on ArsinoÈ’s worldview. An apolitical artist who sketches quickly on the streets of Paris in order to escape the stares of strangers but then retreats to her apartment for extended embellishments in oil, ArsinoÈ is a picture of domestic tranquility who is happy to leave political discussions to her scheming husband . . . until she tragically finds herself too deeply embroiled in current affairs to escape them. In some ways, it’s a refreshing corrective to Rohmer’s previous work, a movie about the dangers of political naivetÈ despite the relative comforts of art and love.

As with nearly all of Rohmer’s films, the camerawork is elegantly understated, with little camera movement and straight cuts, presenting a clear-eyed examination of his characters’ emotions and reasoning. It’s not a typical espionage film, but a subtly moving and complex one by an aged and masterful filmmaker.

3RFF

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I’ve known Russell for several years now and I’m always trying to get him to write more often; he’s full of great insights. Here are his first reviews from the Three Rivers Film Festival currently in progress in Pittsburgh. The festival is surprisingly low-profile given its exemplary line-up. -Doug

* * * * *

By Russell Lucas

Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) started life as an installation exhibit at a Toronto art gallery. The film, which is comprised of ten six-minute episodes, was originally shown through ten individual knotholes so that a viewer could watch the chapters individually and in progression. At the screening, Maddin explained that the exhibit was not successful, largely because each hole was filled with one of those fisheye apartment-door lookouts, so each chapter could only be seen through that distorting and
disorienting lens. There are apparently very good reasons why people never look through those sorts of holes for six minutes at a time, and after complaints of headaches and eyestrain, Maddin prevailed upon the gallery owner to pull the lenses out, and later, to allow him to pull the films from gallery exhibition in favor of a more conventional presentation.

Plot-wise, the film is about a Winnipeg hockey player who learns on the night his team wins the championship that his girlfriend is pregnant. While escorting her in her distraught state to the back room of a combination beauty parlor/bordello for a quick abortion, he falls head over heels for the madam’s daughter, the appropriately-named Meta. Meta is all too willing to help him forget his girlfriend’s moment of need, but she
won’t let him touch her until he agrees to kill her mother to avenge her murder of Meta’s beloved father. Meta’s devotion to her father extends to keeping his rotting severed hands, which she plots to have grafted onto her new beau’s arms by the hockey team’s physician. The player’s hands begin behaving violently and mysteriously. There are casualties. Oh, and the player is named Guy Maddin. And the film is autobiographical, says the real Guy.

The film’s peephole origins are in keeping with a recurring emphasis on the voyeuristic nature of cinema. This isn’t the first time Maddin’s made this point, but here it’s taken further: the film’s first shot is of a man looking at a slide under a microscope and seeing a hockey game through the lens. The game becomes the narrative “reality.” Later, there are several great shots in the back room of the beauty shop bordello. The wall mirrors in front of the beauticians’ chairs are filled with one-way glass, so the viewer watches the characters acting out their back room misdeeds while watching the unsuspecting hairdressers and customers. There’s something striking about the way in which the customers look through the glass, seeing something in their own reflection, but not seeing or knowing that they are being seen.

I admire the way in which Maddin continues to pursue his unique aesthetic. His use of two modes of cinema language which were “replaced” long before they outgrew their usefulness–silent film and black and white–is engaging. His intertitles sometimes speak with an ironic voice that’s not in keeping with the general tenor of silent film, and the deliberate attempts to make the film look like an early film creates an interesting
opportunity to view his images of postmodern surrealism through an older lens.

When all’s said and done, though, does this retro silent film–coupled with ironic self-deprecation, bolstered by noir and genre film language and laden with Freudian sexual humiliation–add up? Oh, and it’s autobiographical, Maddin reminds us, in an aside that makes me both laugh and squirm. Honestly, I don’t know whether it does add up. An unannounced screening of Maddin’s silent-film short The Heart of the World (2000) preceded the screening of Cowards, and having not seen it before and knowing nothing about it, I’d readily call that short the six-minute answer to the question of why I love movies. Cowards can’t match that frenetic, sustained energy (but what can?). I’m not ready to say it isn’t successful on its own terms, though I do wonder whether those terms necessarily emphasize arresting images and technical cleverness over a real emotional core.

Ousmane Sembene’s MoolaadÈ has been making the festival rounds and garnering acclaim at each stop. The praise is well-deserved. The film documents a few tempestuous days in a small Muslim village presumably located in Sembene’s Senegal. Colle, the second wife (in age and seniority) of her husband’s three, is faithful and conscientious, but she acquired a long reputation of refusing to submit her daughter to ritual genital mutilation. In response to this, four young girls who are about to be cut flee the ceremony and come to Colle’s home in the hope that she will protect them.

Colle and the senior wife make their home into a safe haven by invoking the tradition of “MoolaadÈ,” and a cord draped over the threshhold creates a line over which the village’s red-gowned ceremonial priestesses cannot pass. An uproar is created in the village among the male council (who decry Colle) and the priestesses and other “purified” women (who scowl and curse at her).

Her husband is away on business and returns to find his household in the heart of a maelstrom in which the people are up in arms and the ruling council has decreed that the radios which link the villagers to music and the outside world are to be confiscated. At the same time, the village is eagerly awaiting the return of the council leader’s distinguished son from a trip to France. Colle’s adolescent (and “unpurified”) daughter is even more eager to see him, as she’s informally betrothed to him.

The film works the story through the many layers of conflict, and we come to appreciate the way in which each person or group has authority which is precisely-defined. A wife is bound to her place in relation to her husband, and also bound to her place within the other wives. The women and their daughters are collectively bound to obey the priestesses, whose authority is granted by the council. The council presumably draws its
authority from the temple where the men worship alone. Of course, when Colle reports what she heard an imam say on the radio about the theological justifications for genital mutilation and it conflicts with the council, the whole structure of authority shows its seams. The film so skillfully constructs the concentric circles of duty and authority that bind and define the members of the village to the point that each of them is locked into a course of conduct, whether it brings happiness or misery.

I’ve seen hundreds of subtitled films, but I’ve never before seen one which spoke to me so much through the design of the titles. The film’s modest amount of dialogue allowed for some experimentation. The font is not a standard typeface, but more than that, the
subtitles repeatedly and consistently capitalize the four spoken words central to this film, irrespective of whether the speaker is saying the particular word casually, angrily or desperately. We hear/read that the girls sought the MOOLAAD… protection because they did not want to be CUT, but the elders tell them that no one will marry a BILAKORO, or one who has not been PURIFIED. On its face, it sounds like gimmickry, but it works so well to focus attention at all points on the basic elements driving the story forward: the real threat of violence, the perception of purity and the need for protection.

There’s a moment at the end when I was uncertain about whether the film’s heavy emotional spell would be broken. As the conflict is rushing to its seemingly-doomed end, there are a series of events which will be immediately familiar to anyone who has seen a single Hollywood teen film of the past twenty years: the continuing injustice leads to an
unforeseen, tragic death. The authority figures and the rebel literally stand across from each other. The rebel refuses to back down, and continues to assert the justice of the cause.

This sequence, its tone, even its blocking has been rendered something of a clichÈ by a succession of movies about girls at northeastern prep schools whose parents want them to live boring lives, or misfit boys who want to dance at their high school prom. MoolaadÈ‘s replication of those scenes made me hold my breath. I was worried that the story’s visceral impact would be diluted by employing a familiar, pat resolution to such an intense and irresolvable conflict. I am happy to say that, for myself at least, it didn’t happen, and the film’s vibrant significance isn’t lessened by the ending. This film, unlike the others I mentioned, has the thematic heft and human stakes needed to bring it sincere meaning. Indeed, it’s not even a uniformly happy ending in this context; too much has already been needlessly lost, and it can’t be recovered.

Election review

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Given the result of the election this week, I’ve been feeling sporadically nauseous, hopeless, and angry. (I concur with Filmjourney discussion participant Michael Kerpan, who writes, “not even an Ozu film could possibly cheer me up.” But in a twist of irony, the Ozu retrospective in Los Angeles began this week.) The idea of four more years of neoconservative extremism both here and abroad fills me with despair, yet the most aggravating aspect of the election has undoubtedly been the mainstream media response to it–a desperate effort to squelch the last four years of dissent and deny that the country is deeply fractured. Headlines proclaim that Bush absurdly “seeks broad support,” that Kerry’s final flip-flop called for “a time of healing” (even though nothing has changed), and that–stop the presses–Laura Bush is getting a puppy for Christmas! The retail industry is already filling my inbox with holiday spam. It’s as if the debates (as stunted and tepid as they were) were nothing more than a sporting match, requiring no greater response than a handshake rather than widespread cultural renewal. Then it occurred to me–for most of the media, the presidential debates were nothing more than a sporting match, a ready-made drama that wrote its own headlines and sold its own newspaper and cable subscriptions. The election is over now, it won’t generate any more cash, let’s just kiss and make-up.

But I’ve got news for the news. The majority of America–the millions of Kerry voters, third party supporters, disillusioned non-voters, and conservatives who are deeply opposed to Bush and his destructive unilateralism–are not going away. Our international coalition of websites, blogs, independent publishing, and political organization will continue to forge new relationships, share the human experience, gather together, exchange new ideas, and rally others to our cause. None of the major demonstrations against Bush’s policies of the last four years were organized by the Democratic Party; this election was not a defeat for us, merely a renewed battle against our foe.

A few years back, a friend of mine was sitting in a university classroom and struck up a conversation with a student from China. “What type of movies do you like?” the student eventually asked, and when my friend replied that she typically watched international films, the student glowingly responded, “Oh, I could tell. Whenever someone tells me they like foreign films, I know they are a special person.” Now don’t be fooled into thinking she was expressing artistic elitism, just the opposite; her comments were a genuine affirmation of the bond, mutual respect, and shared language that’s crucial for international communication. Serious political problems and injustices exist, but expressions of human solidarity through the universal language of art are a pretty good place to begin talking about them.

I’m taking stock of my energies the last few years. The desire to break free from the corporate media’s iron fist of spin doctors and Hollywood reports, box office rankings and isolationist venues was certainly a primary impetus behind Masters of Cinema, a website I co-founded in 2003 with an American immigrant from Poland, a Canadian immigrant from Norway, and a friend living in the UK. Our vision was to step beyond the corporate-enforced region restrictions on DVDs that keep, say, Americans from purchasing DVDs from Europe and playing them at home. And this is simply because a lot of great films–even American ones–are released on DVD in Europe and not in America. (And visa versa.) We act as crusading cinephiles, exposing more people to the aesthetic diversity and human unity of global cinema that is also a political stance, challenging the power structure that hopes to define what people can watch and where they can do it. This past year, we began distributing our own line of DVDs.

I also began Filmjourney in 2003, part critical blog, part open discussion, and dedicated it to AndrÈ Bazin (1918-1958). It has often been said that all critics today are children of the French New Wave, and if that is so, we’re certainly children of their mentor. Bazin began writing film criticism during WWII and the Occupation of France, forming cinÈ clubs and pedaling his bicycle around Paris to obtain bootleg films for his screenings week after week. After the war, he became a leading figure in the cultural reconstruction of France, developing his club discussions into a traveling series of educational classes on the cinema, which he would deliver despite his stutter to packed rooms in attics and factories and convents–wherever people wanted to learn about movies and develop a critical understanding.

According to his biographer, Dudley Andrew, Bazin sometimes felt guilty for staying in Paris during the Resistance. And the growth of post-structural political film criticism in the ’70s (after Bazin’s death) was not kind to his “humanist” or even “apolitical” approach. But anyone familiar with Bazin’s precarious health and sensitive disposition will be hard pressed to fault his lack of overt activism, and anyone familiar with his intelligence, commitment, and tireless energy cannot deny his significant cultural impact. His friend and politically-engaged filmmaker Chris Marker has said, “He spent long hours in the factories these radicals write about from comfortable desks. Bazin was out there using his life to bring about a renewed culture. I wish he had been with us in May of ’68.”

Bazin’s cultural engagement was more moral, progressive, spiritual–even Christian–than the conservative half of the American electorate could possibly dream. “His goodness was almost legendary,” FranÁois Truffaut has written. “We sometimes made fun of it to hide the emotion it inspired.” Yet Bazin’s goodness also expressed itself in the way he built communities of cinephiles, promoted the work of humanist filmmakers, championed the value of international cinema–particularly the socially-conscious works of Italian neorealism–educated viewers throughout Europe and argued for aesthetics that inspired them to look rather than to receive, and mentored a generation of filmmakers who revolutionized the medium and are still beloved throughout the world.

Bazin’s passion for global community and grassroots organization, social justice and artistic engagement will be a model we can all benefit from for years to come. After five years of campaigning, Bush may have finally been elected by 3% of American voters, but almost never before has a sitting wartime president and his aggressively isolationist policies come so close to being expelled. It didn’t happen this week, but for those of us committed to true global community, it probably doesn’t matter at all.

We Wuz Robbed and Election Day

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I recently reviewed the short film compilation Ten Minutes Older (2002) and fear that I didn’t emphasize Spike Lee’s contribution, We Wuz Robbed, and its timely relevance enough; although it’s a straightforward collection of talking heads, its subject–the illegal purging of thousands of voters (including a large number of black people) from Florida’s 2000 voting rolls–couldn’t be more relevant four years later.

Although I don’t think voting in general is the most powerful political tool in our personal arsenal of resources, it should go without saying that this particular election deserves every American’s participation. If you’re reading this and you haven’t already voted, let me be the zillionth individual to implore you to do so immediately.

Moreover, I’m simply amazed at the relatively little election reform that has occurred since 2000, as if the nation was quick to forget the hassle until polls once again suggested a close race. Most political commentators agree that voting inaccuracies and irregularities have most likely always been with us in America, but that the razor-thin margins of success have suddenly brought the issue to the attention of the middle class majority.

This article, for example, offers a sobering account of recent voter intimidation, oppression, and suppression–particularly against ethnic groups–that continues to this day. It has been astonishingly deflating to follow voting watchdog news sources the past few weeks as problem after problem continues to surface, and recognize the relative indifference of the national media toward these stories, leaving them for local coverage. Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!, one of the few dependable sources of non-corporate, progressive news in this country, has listed a smattering of examples of voter suppression the past few days, to which I’ve added links to a variety of media for further information:

ï Ion Sancho, the supervisor of elections in Leon County in Florida, told the Washington Post, “In my 16 years as an election administrator, I’ve never seen anything like this.” In Florida thousands of students have learned that not only was their party registration switched to Republican but their home address was changed without their knowledge. This means that when they show up to vote at their local precinct, their names won’t appear on the voting rolls.

ïIn Pittsburgh, fliers were handed out on what looked like county letterhead that claimed voting had been extended an extra day “due to immense voter turnout expected on Tuesday.” The fliers said Republicans should vote on Tuesday and Democrats should vote on Wednesday.

ïIn Wisconsin fliers purportedly from a group calling itself the “Milwaukee Black Voters League” told voters, “If you’ve already voted in any election this year, you can’t vote in the presidential election. If you violate any of these laws, you can get ten years in prison and your children will get taken away from you.”

ïIn South Carolina, a letter purportedly from the NAACP warned voters they cannot vote if they have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay child support.

ïIn Georgia’s Atkinson County, the Republicans attempted to challenge the voting eligibility of 78 percent of the county’s registered Latino voters. But on Thursday the Board of Registrars dismissed the Republican complaint. The county attorney said, “The challenges … are legally insufficient because they are based solely on race.”

ïIn Ohio, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the Republican Party from challenging the voting rights of 35,000 people ahead of the election. Local election boards were preparing to hold hearings in the next few days to decide on the eligibility of the voters in question. The Democratic Party hailed the decision. The head of its Voter Protection Program said, “The Republican assault on tens of thousands of Ohio voters was an unprecedented effort to intimidate voters, especially minorities, but it has backfired.” But Republican attorneys said the party will now be forced to challenge the voters on Election Day at the polls in order to prevent voting fraud.

ïIn Nevada, fallout continues after it emerged that a group registering voters had destroyed possibly hundreds of ballots of voters who identified themselves as Democrats.

ï The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Bush administration lawyers are now attempting to overturn decades of legal precedence by claiming that only Attorney General John Ashcroft, and not individual voters, has a right to ask federal courts to enforce voting rights set forth in the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

ïAs many as 58,000 absentee ballots have gone missing in the heavily Democratic Broward County in Florida. The ballots were said to have been mailed two weeks ago but many have disappeared. The county is blaming the postal service but the post office denied it is at fault. Now county officials are attempting to get ballots sent out in time to voters.

ïThe newly formed Election Assistance Commission officially announced yesterday that the country will likely have 500,000 fewer poll workers than needed for [today's] elections. The Commission called on businesses to allow employees to take the day off from work so they could work at the polls.

ïAnd investigative reporter Greg Palast obtained a secret document from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida. The document suggests a plan–possibly in violation of the law–to disrupt voting in the state’s African-American voting districts. Two emails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign’s national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called “caging list”. It lists more than 1,800 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democratic areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

The moral in all of this? Other than the dire need for real election reform in a country that considers itself a model of democracy, we should know our rights, support the rights of other voters, and register complaints with poll supervisors, voting rights attorneys, and election monitoring organizations. For a particularly sobering and detailed view, check out the Election Incident Reporting System’s US map of “election incidents” or VotersUnite!’s collection of media stories.

Update: a list of more voting problems today.