My favorite documentary at AFI FEST turned out to be one I had initially passed on. The Unforeseenwas described in the catalogue as “the story of how big developers spoiled a city treasure, and about the consequences continued development has on us all,” which didn’t exactly sound like cinematic gold. But after talking with critic Robert Koehler, who assured me that I couldn’t miss it, I did some last-minute rearranging and was very glad I did. I also took in two documentaries about film personalities Pierre Rissient and Val Lewton, both of which were amiable films about interesting figures, though I don’t feel either film is essential viewing. More below.

The Unforeseen

On executive producer Terrence Malick’s initiative, filmmaker Laura Dunn has crafted a rare entry in environmentally or socially conscious documentaries of late–a movie bristling with information but also with significant formal beauty. Its juxtaposition of facts, figures, and interviews with aerial and underwater imagery, along with Wendell Berry’s poem “Santa Clara Valley” (narrated by the author himself), provides a multilayered examination of what it means for society to “develop” and “grow” while depleting its natural resources.

The setting is Austin, currently the 16th largest city in America, a lush oasissituated on the banks of the Colorado River in the rolling hills of central Texas. In the late-’60s and early-’70s, it became a hub for indie music, progressive culture, and nature lovers that soon attracted substantial commerce and real estate development–the city’s population reportedly doubles every 20 years, three times the national average. Thus, it has become a hotspot for the clash between environmentalists and developers, and no site is more controversial than the beloved Barton Springs, a popular swimming hole connected to the Edwards Aquifer, one of the major groundwater systems of Texas.

The film traces the story of Austin’s development in the last few decades through a combination of archival and original footage, and sophisticated computer graphics that fuse together real estate plans with detailed satellite maps. In a move that might surprise viewers expecting agitprop, director Dunn chooses to focus on controversial developer Gary Bradley as a kind of tragic protagonist, a failed businessman of the ’80s savings and loan crisis who collected millions of dollars for a Barton Springs subdivision he never completed; Bradley has since filed for bankruptcy but has been charged with fraud.

Yet Dunn’s film seeks Bradley’s point of view, telling his story beginning with his nostalgic west Texas childhood, and culls some of the film’s most poignant and emotional moments from his extended interview. The film is honest about its point of view–that unchecked development is detrimental to society–but adheres to systemic critiques rather than casting individuals as villains. (The closest it comes is its offscreen interview with a lobbyist who, constructing model war planes, opines about his success at promoting “grandfathering” bills that exempted developers from complying with environmental regulations.)

The film also showcases the kinds of deals that provide conduits for transnational corporations with abysmal environmental track records–like Freeport-McMoRan, the company that took control of Bradley’s project–to slip into local development. Freeport has been widely accused of human rights and ecological abuses in Indonesia, where it’s the country’s largest taxpayer, and its involvement in Austin has been no small source of controversy in recent years.

Along with politics and history, The Unforeseen is particularly good at illuminating the science of its debate, as USGS researchers explain how surface groundwater collects underground, spreads across the state, and potentially contributes to wide ranging contaminants in essential human resources. (“As a developer,” Bradley says, “all I need is water. I can’t make water, that’s something that has to be there . . . it’s the lifeblood.”)

One of the film’s central paradoxes is that development happens in beautiful places but often destroys precisely what makes those places so special in the first place, an obvious problem for anyone who has watched their favorite locales be overrun by housing tracts, but it’s particularly well articulated in the film; what really is the American Dream and is it truly sustainable? “[Developers] know the costs of everything,” one political activist says, “but the value of nothing.” One of the movie’s most effective metaphors involves comparisons to another complex system–the formation of tumors due to uncontrolled cell growth. Too much of a good thing often results in calamity.

Much of the film’s striking cinematography is due to the work of Lee Daniel, who has done exceptional work with Richard Linklater for many years; Dunn incorporates footage Daniel shot on 8mm in the ’80s, and some of his images of a raging storm–rain drizzling horizontally across a window, flashes of lightning, and its soggy aftermath–are among the film’s most eloquent. Footage of Barton Springs’ crystal clear waters in 1996 are compared with murky views shot in 2004. The film emphasizes expansive, wide angled imagery that evokes the scale of its subject, but also helps generate a contemplative space for the viewer. Scenes of unspoiled nature and urban sprawl alike highlight timely questions rooted in physical spaces but pertain to values and decisions that will affect our material and spiritual worlds for years to come.

The Unforeseen will be distributed theatrically in Los Angeles next March, and will be broadcast on the Sundance Channel in July. (Robert Redford, who learned to swim in Barton Springs, is a co-executive producer of the film and one of its interview subjects.)

Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema

Todd McCarthy’s tribute to this energetic and hard-to-classify, high-profile cinephile sheds light on the French critic, publicist, filmmaker, and general Cannes festival insider who for decades has been a crucial link between international film critics and some of the greatest filmmakers in the world, including Jane Campion, Abbas Kiarostami, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Rissient is a charming and opinionated man of action, perennially on his cell phone, and McCarthy follows him around in various locales as Rissient recalls his career, references scads of movies, and insists on the tastes he has formed through many years of cinematic activism.

It’s a breezy, laid back portrait that incorporates a lot of celebrity statements, some eloquent (Olivier Assayas and Bertrand Tavernier), some merely gushing (Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone), and many simply repeating variations of the same mixture of bafflement and gratitude for Rissient’s early promotion of their work (Sydney Pollack and Clint Eastwood). Rissient is a fascinating figure whose life illuminates just how important good publicists can be to the careers of legitimate artists, but the film eventually loses some steam with its seemingly endless stream of complimentary voices and tributes.

Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows

Written and directed by critic/programmer Kent Jones and narrated by Martin Scorsese, this film is clearly designed as a Turner Classics spotlight on Val Lewton, the infamous producer of intelligent and atmospheric B films for RKO in the 1940s. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that it’s a great improvement on Shadows in the Dark: The Val Lewton Legacy already included with the excellent Lewton DVD box set released a couple of years ago. Both films (justifiably) begin by contrasting Lewton’s RKO rise with Welles’ RKO fall, and much of the biographical information and archival photos are from the same sources. Both films include random celebrities for talking heads–in this case, Roger Corman (who offers vague wisdom on indie production) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa–and both contain conspicuous absences (neither include Chris Fujiwara on the Tourneur films, for example).

But Jones’ film trumps its predecessor in its improved pacing and writing; at times, the previous documentary seems like a breathless montage of one or two sentence fragments by a legion of voices, whereas Jones’ film spends more time on individual titles and boasts the kind of poetic commentary heard in the excellent Jones/Scorsese project My Voyage to Italy. (The film is dedicated to one of Lewton’s earliest proponents, critic Manny Farber.) As with their previous collaboration, however, the new film contains bountiful spoilers, including summaries of the final shots of several titles, leading one to wonder who the intended audience is, Lewton cinephiles (who will probably learn little they don’t already know) or Lewton newbies (who likely won’t want to know the endings of films they haven’t seen). It’s an adequate tribute to the filmmaker, but I was hoping for something that, like its subject, might transcend its purpose.

This year’s animated shorts program at AFI FEST proved to be a mixed affair, but well worth a look. While there was the usual style-over-substance and slapstick-yelling-hitting-scatalogical humor entries, a handful of the thirteen pieces were works with a little more ambition. Here are my top five.

Tower Bawher

Bulgarian graphic designer and animator Theodore Ushev‘s exhilarating homage to Soviet constructivist art is set to Georgy Sviridov’s rousing score from Time, Forward! (also heard in Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World and, apparently, nightly on the Russian news program Vreyma). The music’s driving momentum unifies Usher’s abstract shapes and mechanical movements suggesting a utopia of machines and technology, from trains to searchlights to proletariat who could build Vladimir Tatlin’s iconic tower–and watch it crumble to the ground. Along the way, you’ll see references to a variety of works, including Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye (1924). Best of all, you can catch the entire film online while it’s still available, here. Crank the speakers and enjoy.

Destiny Manifesto

By her own admission, Martha Colburn grew up in Appalachia “cutting wood and bailing hay and skinning animals,” and has since become one of today’s stars of experimental animation. Her 40-plus films since the mid-’90s–mostly a combination of collage and paint-on-glass–have screened at festivals and museums worldwide. Her latest is a beautifully disturbing merging of Old West paintings and cutouts with images of the Bush Administration’s mayhem in the Middle East, a phantasmagoria of cowboys morphing into soldiers, and Native Americans morphing into Iraqis. Deserts intermingle and blood trails into pools between dead and dying civilians, figures dissolving into skeletons whose souls emanate upward like vanishing shadows; worlds collide and hundreds of visual details erupt in an organic, extended metaphor for the thirst and bitter cost of conquering frontiers. Technically, it’s astonishing, and if it sounds flippant, it’s not, not only because it appropriates the Administration’s own favored metaphor, but also because its tone is one of deep sorrow and lament.

Yours Truly

This is the second entry in Osbert Parker’s trilogy of films that pay homage to film noir. The cliches run fast and furious (rain slicked streets, a femme fatale, men in hats) but what really sets it apart is its execution: an exciting mixed media pastiche comprised of old film clips (a treat for noir fans, who can try to name the sources), paper cutouts, miniature sets, live action, and a lot of hard work. (You can see a portion of the first film here.) Like Peter Tscherkassky’s Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine and Giradet-M¸ller’s Kristall, the film recombines iconic movie imagery in ways that recontextualizes it, offering a viewing experience that is at once nostalgic and new.

Everything Will Be OK

Don Herztfeldt’s latest film won notoriety for being the first animated film to win Best Short at Sundance in many moons, and it’s not hard to appreciate why. It’s a powerful combination of the cult animator’s absurdist dark humor, brilliant pacing, minimalist drawing, and highly sophisticated camera technique. (It’s so gratifying to see someone today dedicated to the art of animation without the use of computers, and part of the thrill of his work is its tribute to the possibilities of physical, old school cinematic tricks like hand-cranked, multiple exposures.) Having said that, I can’t shake the feeling that Hertzfeldt continues to play the mocking hipster to his legion of fans, and the film’s incessant irony eventually feels too clever by half. I prefer his previous masterpiece, The Meaning of Life (2005), which tempers the farcical cynicism with astonishing visuals that invite genuine cosmic contemplation. Here, a narrator drolly recounts tragicomic episodes in the life of a man named Bill that culminate in a mental breakdown, shown through an array of artfully shifting multi-panels. Herztfeldt’s work is always witty and often hilarious, but like someone who never stops joking, it makes me long for a time when he might not always feel like he has to.

I Met the Walrus

This visually inventive film, animating James Braithewaite‘s pen drawings, is a cornucopia of detailed images that quickly and precisely illustrate key phrases of a 1969 interview with John Lennon. (The interview was conducted and recorded by then-14-year-old Jerry Levitan, who produced the film.) Lennon’s comments are idealistic and rambling, serving as a rich text to generate images that fluidly evolve from one idea to another, and the merging of the two media (spoken word and graphic animation) intensifies and enriches both of them. You can watch the film’s trailer here.

AFI FEST 2007 is progressing smoothly. With its improved emphasis on world cinema, it’s offering a better roster of higher profile titles that have played at festivals around the globe, even if it still has a way to go to compete with the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the best festival for international films in Southern California.

It’s also one of the few events here in Los Angeles sponsored by AFI worth attending, including their ongoing “100 Years, 100 Movies” series of popular “classics” (almost all of which are widely available on DVD) and their Cinema’s Legacy program that should be a lot more exciting than it actually is: filmmakers present movies that inspire them and host Q&A’s afterward. The series’ events occur every couple of months or so, but I’ve only felt the urge to attend four of them in as many years (Agnieszka Holland on Le Bonheur, Mira Nair on Aparajito, Paul Schrader on Pickpocket, and Roger Corman on The Big Sleep). Too often, the filmmakers or their choice of films can’t really compete with events at the UCLA film archive or the various cinematheques around town.

Word on the street has been attributing the better reach at this year’s festival to artistic director Rose Kuo, who actually references filmmakers like Bresson and Cassavetes in her program notes. Here’s hoping future AFI events will grow increasingly ambitious in scope.

Having said that, my viewing this week (focusing on films I haven’t seen at other festivals, or in the case of something like Secret Sunshine, isn’t already available on import DVD) has only been fair, with the clear standout being the one revival I’ve seen, Edward Yang’s The Terrorizer, which, coming on the heels of UCLA’s recent screening of the director’s cut of A Brighter Summer Day, could get a hopeful man excited at the potential for a Yang revival. (DVD producers, are you listening?)

Nosaltres

It has been said that immigration is shaping up to be the great cinematic theme of the new millennium, and I pretty much concur. As wealth is confined to select countries and labor and resources originate elsewhere, border crossings are increasingly inevitable. Moussa Toure’s film is the third (or maybe fourth) penetrating documentary I’ve seen on the subject this year, after Copacabana and The Legend of Time, a film that tackles this subject within the same setting: Catalonia, on the northeastern coast of Spain. Catalonia has become a destination spot for a large number of African workers from Mali. Like many communities, however, Catalonians and Malians remain culturally segregated, rarely offering even token pleasantries despite their close proximity; rumors, suspicions and myths abound.

Toure (who has assisted Truffaut and Sembene) interviews a couple dozen representatives of the two groups separately and then convinces them to meet, engage in dialogue, and suggest paths toward better integration. It’s a straightforward documentary consisting almost entirely of interviews, but its creative spark is the role it plays as social intermediary. Toure poses questions to his subjects offscreen, often asking for clarification or examples, or inverting their assumptions by framing their questions from the point of view of the other.

“Nosaltres” means “us,” and this fascinating film asks its participants (and its viewers) to deconstruct their notions of identity and what it means to share home, place and work with culturally diverse people.

The Terrorizer

Edward Yang’s 1986 masterpiece may not initially seem like it, dense with characters and enigmatic plotting that takes odd, unexpected turns up until its very last, intensely (but perfectly) awkward shot of a woman about to vomit. But the woman is a writer, and upon reflection, the entire film is about the painful, invasive, messy process of creation in a city in cultural transition, and it contains enough elliptical, eccentric juxtapositions to keep commentators busy for years. (If it hasn’t yet permeated cinephile conversations in this country, it’s because the film remains unavailable on video in any format and is rarely screened.) John Anderson, who wrote a Contemporary Film Directors book on Yang, describes the movie as “Yang’s most difficult, intellectually provocative, and structurally challenging film.” I don’t doubt it.

As in Yi Yi, Taipei (particularly its modern highrises) is virtually a character in itself in a fractured narrative that loosely connects a devious prank caller, a conniving doctor, a frustrated novelist and the editor with whom she has an affair, and a self-absorbed photographer. Those expecting another warm family saga a la Yi Yi might be shocked by the film’s distinctly cold and remote tone, and its emphasis on neutral characters in distraught or inert relationships. Blogger Kevin Lee accurately compares the tone of the film to Bresson’s severe L’Argent, and Yang’s distinctly modernist themes about the relationship between life and art and the moral responsibility of the artist are what ultimately determine the bizarre intricacies of the plot.

What makes the film especially compelling is its odd distancing effect, as self-reflexive and playful as Godard, even though it might take a while (or repeat viewings) to notice; its jumbled drama (with its own crisscrossing layers of fiction and nonfiction) featuring random acts of creativity suggests a city of isolated voices with no one left to listen.

Confessions of a Superhero

I’ll admit that I’m not always the most commercially observant person walking the streets of Hollywood, but until I saw this warm and unpretentious documentary, I had no idea the costumed characters loitering around the Chinese Theatre were freelance actors posing in tourist photos for tips. Not only that, they’re also somewhat controversial; apparently, some consider them little more than costumed vagrants, but I can vouch that in all my trips to the American Cinematheque down the street, I’ve never been approached by a single caped crusader wanting a snapshot or a couple of bucks.

The film follows four of these actors–with serious aspirations, all–telling the story of their lives and giving audiences a glimpse of the people behind the getups through candid interviews and home footage. Given the film’s poetic poster image of Superman lying a couch, you might expect it to delve into cultural or philosophical issues relating to America’s pop worship of comic icons, but it’s character study only, though as with any film that conveys the lives of real individuals, it’s emotionally compelling; it’s impossible not to admire the tenacious optimism of these performers.

Jennifer Gehrt (who plays Wonder Woman) and Joe McQueen (who plays The Hulk and spent several years homeless in Los Angeles) seem especially charming and well-adjusted, while ultimate fanboy Christopher Dennis (who plays Superman) seems as professional about his job as he is obsessed with his character (which is no small feat). Maxwell Allen comes across as the most problematic (and not only because he does therapy in his Batman costume or because his wife says only half of what he says is true), but because his personal salesmanship includes “remorse” over all the people he claims to have beaten up in the past: Batman has serious anger problems.

I came out of the film admiring its subjects more than the film itself, though there’s nothing objectionable about it. Granted, these are only four of the tens of thousands of struggling actors in Hollywood, but I really wish them the best.

Tracey Fragments

This quasi-experimental narrative film by Canadian Bruce MacDonald is based on a novel reflecting the histrionic teen angst of a bitter 15-year-old, her twisted family, abusive school culture, comically inept therapist, and assorted down-and-outers roving the mean streets of Winnipeg. Although its constantly subdivided and shifting frames–conveying scenes from multiple perspectives (and times) like a nonlinear editing program gone berserk–should have been impressive (if not immersive), I began to feel it was too much of a good thing around the ten-minute mark. The film clearly aspires to be the teen film to end all teen films for a particularly cynical postmodern generation, but its rampant antipathy for nearly every character and shrill emotional pitch caused me to kind of hate it. Despite an undeniably powerhouse lead performance by an actress whom Robert Koehler described to me as the new It Girl, Ellen Page, I couldn’t accept the film’s jokey, universal derision or its desperate rage against the system, and especially couldn’t wait for it to end.

More as the week progresses…

AFI FEST is about halfway through now (expect my midpoint summary tomorrow), but I ran into critic Robert Koehler last night and he offered to post his recommendations for films that are still screening. If you live in Los Angeles and you haven’t yet gotten a ticket or two, <a href="
” target=_blank>get a move on! –Doug

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THE SECOND HALF OF AFI FEST

With AFI Fest at roughly mid-point, I thought it might be helpful to suggest several strong films screening either once or twice between now (Wednesday afternoon) and closing day Sunday. Given the dramatic improvement in AFI’s programming this year, there are many more films to consider than in recent years: the bad news in this regard is that there are some impossible choices; the good news is that the festival is finally serious about considering current world cinema that matters, so that there are more options than in any AFI Fest edition in at least the past 15 years. Titles are asterisked for must-see/essential/masterworks… –Robert Koehler

FUNUKE, SHOW SOME LOVE YOU LOSERS
*USED PARTS
*THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAIS
*HAPPY DESERT
CLOUDS OVER CONAKRY
*SILENT LIGHT
SHAME
THE AERIAL
*MUNYURANGABO
IRINA PALM
*THE YEAR OF THE NAIL
*THE UNFORESEEN
THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS: VAL LEWTON
THE SAVAGES
MR. WARMTH
*NIGHT TRAIN
*THE FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON
PIERRE RISSIENT: MAN OF CINEMA
*THE LIVING WAKE
*THE PASSENGER
*AN EVENING WITH JENNIFER REEVES
SMILEY FACE
CHRIS & DON: A LOVE STORY