HopkinsCinemAddicts

Are Films a Pretext for Social Dialogue?

Until recently, film had been synonymous with spectacle or entertainment: in a word, it was one more consumer good.

                                "Towards a Third Cinema," a manifesto

 

Paris is Burning is a 1990 documentary film by Jennie Livingston. This documentary explores the gay ballroom, drag culture in Harlem. Most of the people interviewed in the film achieved a fair degree of celebrity after its release. In the April of 1993 following the death of the mother of the house of Xtravaganza, Angie Xtravaganze, the New York Times ran a piece titled "Paris Has Burned," an essay about Angie. Here is a paragraph from the essay that is worth quoting at length,

Though she was only 27, Angie had been a mother more than a dozen times. Not in the usual way; she was biologically male. "But a mother is one who raises a child, not one who borns it," Hector [a member of the house of Xtravaganza] pointed out. And as mother of the House of Xtravaganza, Angie had taken many rejected, wayward, even homeless children under her wing; she had fed them, observed their birthdays, taught them all about "walking the balls." Competing in categories like High-Fashion Eveningwear and Alexis vs. Krystle, Angie was legendary, a Queen among queens, achieving in fantasy what the world had denied her in reality.

The characters of these house mothers and the nature of the relations they foster within their houses are relevant to any reading of Paris is Burning. Angie died from an AIDS-related liver disease. She was on hormones to maintain a soft feminine appearance. In the film there is a scene in which a group of men, some of them drag queens but not all, suckle on her breasts. The camera captures a run-down, shabby neighborhood, and then a group of men proclaiming Angie their mother. In fact in Paris is Burning  Angie could easily be mistaken for a woman.

When I watched this film, I became really interested in the house of Xtravaganza because of Angie and also because of Venus Xtravaganza. Venus was killed during the period in which Livingston was making the film. She was a transgender in NYC  who worked as a prostitute in order to save enough money to undergo a sex-change surgery. She was found in a hotel room four days after her death. Livingston interviews Venus only once in the film. During this interview, Livingston asks Venus about her dreams for the future. Venus' reply is arguably understandable, but also surprising. Venus tells Livingston that when she is fully female, she wants to get married, live in the suburbs, have a washing machine. She dreams of the typical bourgeois life. The life-style that she is too different—as a transgender, poor, non-white—to embody.

Paris is Burning enters a space at the fringes of mainstream American society. The expected reaction to have as a spectator watching these atypical modes of existence unfold is to feel uncomfortable, find the images indigestible. The spectator should feel disturbed by sights of awkward bodies that cannot be defined,  movements and gestures that do not fall neatly into the repertoire of appropriate female or male movements and gestures. However, this is not the reaction one gets. It is likely that people come out of the movie-theater feeling that these black (or Latino) gay men are victims. In fact the undertone of the Livingston's remarks on the film reveals that she thinks she is doing them a service. Here is another quotation from the Times "drag queens can't. "If they wanted to make a film about themselves, they would not be able," said Ms. Livingston, who grew up in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Yale University." Livingston is a white lesbian film director. She, however, still has the white-man burden mentality as these comments reveal.

bell hooks wrote about Paris is Burning in her book Race and Representations. Here is one point hooks made about the film:   

 

Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight-acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates "whiteness." These folks left the film saying it was "amazing," "marvelous," "incredibly funny," worthy of statements like, "Didn't you just love it?" And no, I didn't just love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit.  (149)

hook's observations shed light on the meanings of Venus' dream of living the bourgeois life. Livingston's work in constructed in such a way that she does not "interrogate" whiteness. As such, Livingston does not completely oppose the System, the hegemonic modes of thinking. This is an important assertion in the face of the wide-held belief that Livingston is a radical filmmaker whose films testify to social injustices. This is not to discredit the film, however. Instead, it reveals a necessary aspect of cinema's function in society.

            The film interrogates gender in an interesting way, which undoubtedly has something to do with Livingston's own interests. It reveals some of the causes underlying social injustices. The film might have changed the trajectory of some people's lives by making them celebraties even if briefly. Yet, at the same time the film also has helped maintain a particular relation of power. As hook's comments reveal, this film reproduces ideology in an important way. Cinema's role in society is interesting to explore. Away from close text filmic analysis, it is rewarding sometimes to step away and ask how cinema contributes to the creation and maintenance of social power relations. Although this might not be the most interesting conclusion to some people, it is worth it to remind oneself of the necessary political and historical dimensions of film-making, and film distribution. Let me end with a quotation from Marx: "it is not sufficient to interpret the world; it is now a question of transforming it."

Neckface, Sweet Toof, Cyclops and Swoon: The Banksy Phenomenon

Aside from providing a wealth of beautiful imagery documenting a transient art form subject to weathering, urban renewal, vandalism, and natural decay, Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) provokes a number of questions relevant to the production and consumption of art. Exit unsettles deeply rooted ideas about ownership, authenticity, the creative process and the derivative, as well the aesthetic and monetary value inherent in a piece of work. There is also an undercurrent of anxiety related to whether the film qualifies as documentary. The alien footage, urban landscapes, and candid humanity of the street artists are enthralling and cinematic. But the film retains a level of realism despite its hyperbole. The formal attention to process is quite vivid. Perhaps a narrative framework was imposed on the footage, but the footage itself could not have been contrived.

Art by Swoon. Creative Commons. Photo credit: guero:

 

Perhaps because the universe of the graffiti artist is so foreign to most viewers, we assume Thierry (who later adopts the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash) is sincere, in his words, expressions and affectations. To use his adoring quote of Banksy, we believe that he is “what he represents.” Transparency is indeed critical to Thierry, or so we are told, and we resist the idea that he might be complicit in a falsified documentary. We accept the street art universe as Thierry presents it — through footage of works by Swoon, Sweet Toof, Cyclops, Buffmonster, Neckface, Invader, Fairey and, of course, the iconic Banksy. Yet, there is more than footage to convince us; Thierry’s narrative perpetually asserts and validates his involvement in the scaling of buildings and plastering of billboards, all in an effort to record artists augmenting their landscapes.

If the environments and characters portrayed in Exit are slightly bizarre, that’s acceptable within the film’s logic. For one, the credibility of the street artist depends on his occasional ludicrous display of passion. Secondly, the graffiti artist, working invisibly and at night, symbolizes the unnerving, distorted quality of the urban night landscape. In a moment evocative of Philippe Petit’s climatic walk in Man On Wire (2008), Thierry films himself scaling a Parisian rooftop with Fairey. In that sequence, the total focus of the film is on procedural execution, not of a heist, bank robbery, or murder, but of a subversive act that claims the cityscape for the artist and for the viewer, and repudiates the concept of private ownership. The art contests authority and the status quo, even if its content are not overtly political. For however long it is preserved, the work extends a message to everyone, including the disenfranchised “other.” It upsets the uniformity and organization of the public space.

   Art by Swoon. New North Place, London. Creative Commons. Photo credit: AdversMedia.

  Art by Swoon. New Orleans. Creative Commons. Photo credit: Dingler1109.

If Thierry seems slightly “crazy” with his ever-present camera and obsessive need to film everything (“it was unimportant how it was made — it was important what it was”), his apparent authenticity is reinforced by his naiveté, expertly and inadvertently communicated whenever he comes into contact with law enforcement officials. Juxtaposed against Bansky’s cutting wit, these run-ins make Thierry seem all the more credulous. Banksy’s description cuts to the core of Thierry’s weirdness: “So this guy shows up looking like something out of the 1860s, with these, like, huge sideburns sweatin’, telling me he could do anything, he could take me anywhere, he could get me whatever I wanted. He could fix it all up.” In any other context, Thierry’s strong French accent and frequent inversion of idiomatic phrases might push the character too far, into the realm of cliché. But, in the particular world of Swoon, Invader and Neckface, where individuals regularly risk arrest to make a visual statement through installations, stencils, spray paint and drawing, Thierry is convincing.

His distinctiveness infuses potentially banal sequences with a vivid and verbose theatricality. His flamboyant affectations, expressive language, and over-the-top art (all commissioned, mostly “meaningless”) complement Banksy’s reserve, sparse and scathing dialogue, and high quality, purposeful art.

 

Art by Sweet Toof. Regent's Canal, London. Creative Commons. Photo credit: bobaliciouslondon.

 

 

 
Art by Neckface. Creative Commons. Photo credit: urbandata.

Of course, the film challenges us when Thierry violates the “conservative” code practiced by street and studio artists. He bypasses the labor, the training, the education (independent or institutional), and the formation of an identity. Instead, he adopts a vacuous persona (MBW) and transforms himself into a corporate managerial type, delivering orders in lieu of creating work. It’s all the more horrifying because we are led to believe that Thierry wants to emulate and honor Banksy. Thierry becomes totally enamored with material excess, quantity, size and scale. He refinances his home multiple times to rent a large gallery space, which ends up resembling some kind of psychedelic mall. Viewed as a collection, the work is rather grotesque, and viewed individually, the pieces are sophomoric. Banksy’s intermittent commentary provides an analytical critique that is sufficiently cynical without completely undercutting the genuine hilarity of Thierry’s performance and dialogue.

  Art by Banksy. Chalk Farm, London. Creative Commons. Photo credit: Dan Brady.

Thierry qualifies as an odd bird, even by Banksy’s standards. This is remarkable, given some of Banksky’s stunts documented in the film. One iconic sequence reveals Banksy and his accomplices (all rather wary of Thierry) slicing through a London telephone booth and subsequently welding it back together in a newly contorted form. The altered icon communicates a sense of violent assault on the urban space. Yet, the booth is made more beautiful through its reinvention. Though static, it retains the memory of movement and dynamism, visually implying the manipulations that transfigured it. Banksy and his men, wearing official-looking neon work suits and driving a tarp-covered construction vehicle, return the surreal sculpture in a ritualistic procession and then rapidly depart the alley.

The booth provides a grim ambiance, as though the urban alley had just witnessed a violent assault. Yet, strangely, it lacks the broken glass, the jagged edges, and the generally ugly chaos that follows an attack. One Brit in his thirties snaps an image on his camera phone and declares it an effective Banksy “installation.” An older woman smiles, observing, “Someone must be annoyed with BT Telephone!” Their disparate responses suggest the artist’s hesitance to ascribe unequivocal “symbolic” meanings to his work. Banksy would rather provoke discussion than train observers to read the syntax of his visual texts.

Art by Banksy. Park Row, Bristol. Creative Commons. Photo credit: daz smith.

Whether documentary or not, the film is admirable in its subtle complexity. It frames a documentary within a documentary, and refuses to assign moral supremacy to either Thierry or Banksy. Finally, there is the question of whether any of it actually transpired. If Mr. Brainwash had succeeded in promoting his work, his persona, and his legacy prior to creating a single piece of art or selecting any of the works for his show, it leaves us feeling a bit uneasy about individuals’ capacities to judge good work. Towards the end of the film, Bansky laments, “I used to encourage everyone to make art. I don’t do that so much anymore.”

 

Art by Banksy. Brighton. Creative Commons. Photo credit: simonbooth.

 

Art by Banksy. Bristol Council Sexual Health Clinic. Creative Commons. Photo credit: nicesenzatesta.

Appropriating the Artist: One + One/Sympathy for the Devil

Looking as though it were finger-painted, the opening intertitle of Godard’s One + One/Sympathy for the Devil reads, “The Stones Rolling;” already Godard has begun to play with language.  The letters E-O-N-E-O-N, or O-N-E-O-N-E in the correct ordering of the band’s name, are highlighted in red.  One + One.  For Godard here One + One is never unified into the end result, the final product.  Instead, One + One is just that, one and one; two individual, separate pieces, together.  In many ways, this will come to define the film, as Godard presents us with two worlds, two separate realities.  The first is a world beyond Godard’s control, the world of the Rolling Stones, as he documents their process of writing and recording their song “Sympathy for the Devil.”   The second is a world the filmmaker does control, the world of film, a sphere of fragmented narratives whose figures act as his ideological mouthpieces.  He doesn’t present us with a single message, a unified ideological, social, or political critique.  Instead, these sections are meant to conflict and clash, to raise more questions than they answer, and, ultimately, to alter and shape how we view the Stones at work. 

In the opening shot, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones sit on the studio floor, guitars in hand, the camera hovering around them slowly (as it does throughout the film).  The song has yet to take shape; it is the creative process in its beginning stage, in its rawest form. Following the rhythm of the guitar, Jagger sing-speaks variations of the same few words of jumbled, even baby-like, rambling.  There are no words, just gibberish.  Language is secondary here (at least at first); we are introduced, first, to sound; pure sound, before there is any meaning assigned to it.  Whereas Godard has too much to say throughout the film, overwhelming us with multiple and conflicting voices and sounds that overlap one another into an incomprehensible noise, Jagger here speaks only gibberish.

Godard cuts from the studio to a London hotel room, where Wiazemsky (who plays Eve Democracy later on in the film) spray paints the words “Hilton” and “Stalin” onto the hotel window, crossing the two at the “t.”  It is a mixing of terms and ideologies that we will see throughout the film.  “Sovietcong.”  “Cinemarxism.”  “Freudemocracy.”  All of them are One + One; conceptual and ideological combinations he never explores specifically, only mentioning them on the walls and streets in spray paint, inviting questions and provoking questions, but ultimately offering no answers.  Over the image, the narrator begins telling us that he’s a Bolivian hiding in a London toilet to escape from the police.  He reads from a pornographic novel (which he calls a “political novel”), replacing the names of the characters with political figures and cultural icons, mixing politics, pornography and pop culture into one philosophical mess.  We are never fully sure what their connection is.  “Raising the toilet lid I could see Elizabeth’s fat white behind on which Lyndon Johnson was projecting an Andy Warhol movie,” the narrator tells us.  Like Jagger’s singing in the beginning, it is gibberish to us.  The narration will continue throughout the film, running over the image of the Stones in the studio.  What is their role in this political, cultural, and pornographic mess?  Could we just as easily substitute Jagger’s name or Richard’s for Johnson’s and Warhol’s?

“Outside Black Novel” reads the second intertitle in red, the acronym “love” spelled out this time in black.  A Black militant sits in a wheel barrel in a junkyard, reading to us about the history of the blues, its roots, its development, and ultimately its appropriation by young Whites and popular culture for White consumption. “Any group of middle class White boys who need a haircut and male hormones can be a pop group.  That’s what pop means,” he tells us.  We cannot help but think of the Stones in the studio from the scene before, and this is Godard’s intention. Originally starting as a skiffle band (a popular but now-neglected subgenre of music popular in Britain in the 1950s, combining blues, roots, and country), drawing on the styles of Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf, the Stones exemplify this appropriation of “Black music” by the White youth culture.

The camera is the unifying force in the film.  It is what connects these fragmented sections together: the Stones, the Black militant group, Eve Democracy, and even the seedy fascist bookstore later on.  It remains consistent in its style throughout, always slow and controlled in its movement, always moving laterally, always circulating back to where it started.  We watch as it hovers throughout the studio, never intruding on the band as they work, drifting around them as an observer (embodying the perspective of the filmmaker himself), capturing the artist and the creative process at work.  We watch as the song evolves from the simple strumming of Jones and primitive mumbling of Jagger into a complex and layered work.  The lyrics begin to take shape, and the guitars from the beginning disappear and are replaced by maracas, congas, and a chorus group.  We watch in real time as the band starts and stops repeatedly, tweaking different sections each time. The song is never the same twice; the instrumentation, rhythm, beat, speed, and Jagger’s lyrics and inflection change each time.  What is significant here, though, is that unlike the other figures and scenes in the film, the Stones, their process and their output, are outside Godard’s control.  The filmmaker here has no real power over them; they are not a mouthpiece for him to convey his ideological questions and theories, at least not directly.  Nor is this necessarily his intention.  Instead, he works to control everything around them, to place them within a context that he creates.

In filming the artist at work, the artist and his or her creative process come to serve different functions for this filmmaker.  For Clouzot and Parreno and Gordon, the artist is a mystery to be unraveled, a hieroglyphic to be deciphered, and yet in filming them we inevitably realize we can’t ever fully know what drives them creatively.  What, though, is Godard’s interest in capturing the Stones at work here?  What does he hope to learn from filming them?  The song itself would seemingly fit with Godard’s own political position; it is an anti-establishment statement that would come to define 60s youth, highlighting atrocities of the past and present (the Holocaust, the Kennedy assassinations, and the 100 years war) as a way to signify their own break with the generations before them.  And yet Godard here is not interested in (or at least he’s not focused on) that.  His interest instead lies in what the Stones represent and to what their creative process tends. This is a study in control: in its creation and its limits.  The limit of creative control, Godard seems to suggest, is at base in its commerciality.  Although “Sympathy for the Devil” became an anthem of the 1960s counterculture, it is also simultaneously a cultural product that is to be commodified and commercialized, bought and sold by record companies and corporations to the masses.  By placing them in the context of the Black Panthers and Eve Democracy, juxtaposing scenes of the Stones in the studio with these other fragmented narratives, we are forced to understand The Stones in a different way.  We must re-examine and re-contextualize them within a larger social, economic, and cultural frame; and in doing so, Godard is questioning not the art itself, not its content, but instead what the art and the artist are used for, how they are to be packaged and consumed.  We come to view them less as artists and more as appropriators and as tools and products.  And by placing them within this context, Godard ultimately exerts his authority as the filmmaker over the band, seizing control from them and placing it back into his hands.

A Dancer's World

A Dancer’s World, the first of Peter Glushanok’s three films on Martha Graham, cuts from the title screen of Graham’s company, standing in the dressing room stretching, to three figurines.  The figurine to the right is a dancer, its left leg raised and turned upwards at an impossible ninety-degree angle, with a third arm stretching out from its faceless head.  Next to it, on its left, is a small stone sculpture of an arm, raised on a pedestal, its hand held up like a dancer’s.  To the left of the arm is another figure of a dancer, this time standing with its feet crossed, its back arched slightly, its hands held out in front of it.  Like these three, Glushanok’s film will present us with its own representation of dance, a new, cinematic examination and experience of the medium and of one of its seminal figures.  We do not see her at first, though, only the faint shadow of her on the dressing partition behind the statues.  Over the image, her voiceover begins.  It is controlled, composed, and authoritative, speaking to us almost as a higher power.  “The theatre is a very special place,” she tells us.  “It is where the act of theatre begins.”  The camera is drawn to her here, moving upwards at the sound of her voice, floating slowly towards her shadow on the right and eventually landing on Graham herself, sitting in front of the dressing room mirror.

Glushanok’s film doesn’t focus on Graham’s past, who she is and why she’s significant.  Nor does it ever show Graham herself dancing, creating or choreographing a piece, or instructing her company.  Instead, we see her in the theatre dressing room as she applies her make-up and prepares her hair for her role as Jocasta.  Whereas others might pass it off simply as a place to prepare for the show, an interim space between the studio and stage, the dressing room, for Graham, is an integral part of the dancer’s world; it is where the dancer becomes the character she is to play. This transformation is, on one level, physical.  “Make-up,” she says, “is a magic.  It’s a ritual.  It’s the means by which you transform yourself into the character you hope to play.”  But the change is not only external for her, not only the way she styles her hair or the costume she puts on, but internal as well.  As Graham tells us, there comes a moment in which she looks into the mirror and the character looks back at her, recognizing the reflection not as Martha Graham, but as the character herself.  It is through her that her character and her character’s “hopes, fears, love and terror,” will be expressed.

 It is through dance, through how Graham communicates her character, though, that differentiates her as an artist; and yet Glushanok never shows her at work.  We never actually see her on stage or in the studio.  She is presented here not as a dancer or chorographer, but as an actress (both an actress for the stage and within Glushanok’s film).  The image of Graham at the mirror changes and we are brought out of the world of the dressing room and into the studio.  The stark setting, the plain white walls and wood floor, stands in contrast to the cluttered dressing room from before.  From this point on, the film will alternate between the two, with Graham in one, explicating and expounding her artistic philosophies that drive and shape her work, and her company in the other, illustrating the different techniques that define her style: the awareness of the head and throat, the attention on flexibility and control, the mastery of the turn of the body on its axis, the focus on contracting and releasing the breath.  Glushanok and Graham thus provide us with the tools, the raw materials with which she can construct a narrative, but not with the vocabulary of meanings attached to them, nor with the final product or narrative to be interpreted.

 Graham controls these two worlds.  She dictates the action, blocking, dances, dancers, uniforms, and setting.  The mise-en-scene belongs to her.  There is thus a certain struggle here, an inherent tension in the balance of power between Graham as both subject and actress and Glushanok as the filmmaker.  He exercises his own authority over the film, though.  The mise-en-scene may be that of Graham, but the frame is not.  We view the dancers here as Glushanok, not Graham, wants us to view them.  In the first shot of the studio, the camera follows a dancer as she enters the studio and moves across the floor; like her, it is mobile, controlled yet fluid, moving freely throughout the room.  It is its own entity, separate from Graham, elaborating what she says but presenting us with its own perspective, its own point of view. 

The filmmaker inherently imposes himself here, and by filming the dances our experience of them is different than if we were to view them in the theatre.  Dance is a medium without cuts and without close-ups.  Editing and cinematography create their own rhythm that is both intrinsically connected to and separate from the action.  The shifting angles and distances, the movement of the camera, and the length of the shots have their own beat, tempo, and pace that gives us a different emotional response.  Halfway through the film, we watch as two dancers express “youth’s lyric joy and sadness at being in love for the first time.”  It’s a light, energetic dance, captured at first through a long shot, with the two dancers making up only a small portion of the frame, their bodies and the studio in full view.  29 seconds in, though, our experience changes.  Glushanok cuts from the long shot to a medium of the two, the man standing behind the woman, holding her arms as she raises them above her, their eyes locked. There is an emotional shift here as their figures become bigger within the frame, the world around them smaller.  A stronger intimacy and spark between the characters is established, and we feel a new connection with them.  Glushanok gives a new power and significance to the moment between them. The electricity of the live performance is lost on screen, but it’s replaced by a new way to view and experience the work, by a new and different language with which the narrative and characters can be expressed and captured.  The world within the frame may be a dancer's, but our experience is something new entirely; and one that is as reliant on Glushanok as it is on Graham.

“For the Love of Movies”: A Film Review about People who Review Films

 

In today’s internet savvy society, the term “everyone’s a critic” has become a veritable reality. Now, everybody has the forum to not only express their ideas on film to their peers, but also to distribute their opinions to a vast and anonymous public audience. However, long before the advent of internet blogging and twitter, film criticism has had a long and fascinating history that, at least according to director Gerald Peary, warrants examination. “For the love of Movies: The story of American Film Criticism”— a recent documentary and Peary’s directorial debut— explores this history and follows the progression of film criticism in America. “For the Love of Movies” has two projects that work together to create a complete picture of the film reviewing industry. First, it examines the history of film criticism from small plot synopses in newspapers to the varied forms in different media that are available today. At the same time, it investigates the nature of past and contemporary individuals who have held the title “film critic” and seeks to understand this profession, define its purpose, and assess its questionable future. Ultimately, the film claims that this profession— which is threatened by the availability of film reviews on the web— is above all else the product of a profound passion for film and is a valuable asset to the industry and its audience. However, while the historical information is fascinating and the film critic industry well examined, the documentary’s relationship with, and message for, the rise of web reviews is a bit unclear. 

Peary divides “For the love of movies” into six different chapters in which he describes a two decade period as it pertains to film criticism. The first era, which is called “The Dawn of Criticism”, extends from 1907 until 1929. The earliest movie reviews, narrator Patricia Clarkson explains, began as simple plot summaries in trade papers. Quickly, some figures like Frank E Wood and Robert Sherwood began realizing the unique nature of the movies— a medium that is more than “filmed theater”— and developed theories as to how to measure their quality. These writers even formed relationship with filmmakers and obtained roles in making movies in addition to viewing them.

The documentary lays out five more of these time periods, however, mostly focuses on Sherwood’s and Wood’s inheritors— the critical innovators of subsequent eras. Writers like Manny Farber, Vincent Canby, Bosley Crowther, Andrew Sarris, and Pauline Kael all contributed to the discipline in their own significant and unprecedented way. “For the Love of Movies,” which details these contributions by quoting passages from their articles and showing interview footage of these individuals, wonderfully exhibits these personalities and puts a human face to these figures who are so often reduced to a name in a newspaper.

The film also lays out the different tensions and dynamics that defined this profession. For instance, Bosley Crowther, the New York Time’s main critic and the most powerful critical voice in film in the forties and fifties, would look for the moral element in the film, and promote movies with a positive message. However, the younger generation— writers like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris— felt that movies should be judged on aesthetic merit alone. They did not feel that the movie’s moral fiber was relevant to the review and believed that Crowther was “out of touch.”

While Kael and Sarris fell on the same side in this debate, the movie spends a lot of time on the famous conflict between these two powerful voices in the movie review business. During the sixties, Sarris, who wrote for the village voice, and Kael, who wrote for the New Yorker, became the two of the most influential critiques. Their conflict started with Sarris’ acceptance of the French Auteur theory that was popular in the seventies. Kael strongly discredited the auteur theory— which states that the director determined the movie and was an artist no different than a painter— and unabashedly slighted Sarris’s ideas. However, eventually Kael also became somewhat of an aurterist herself, only she supported her directors while Sarris championed other directors. This rivalry is an interesting one and demonstrates the internal dynamics of the word of movie criticism quite well. With the exploration of these tensions, “For the Love of Movies” shows that the film criticism industry was also changing and dynamic and any recent challenge, it suggests, is only the newest point on the evolution of this medium.

Interwoven into this narrative are questions that are posed to a number of contemporary critics— Liza Shwatrzbaum, AO Scott, and Owen Gleiberman to name a few— on the nature of their profession. Questions like “what qualifies you to be a film critic?” “did you always want to be a film critique” “Does your partner have to also be movie-crazy?” are peppered throughout and serve as a supplement to the historical account. In the responses to “what qualifies you as a film critic,” the general consensus is reached that critics do not actually have anything that proves their ability. “There is no degree or piece of paper” AO Scott explains that gives a critic the authority to relay his opinions on film. One critic even goes so far as to say that it actually is only to due to “sheer dumb luck” that he gets to have the job of attending movies.

While I believe that the documentary relays a fascinating history and successfully characterizes the role of a film critic, the take-home message is somewhat unclear. The movie opens up with a quote that is more in the nature of a hurricane relief ad, “Today film criticism is under siege... 28 reporters have lost their jobs over the last several years” The obvious reason for these jobs losses is the virtual (no pun intended) obsolescence of printed film criticism because of the availability of free film reviews on the web. However, while they seem to bemoan that fact of this loss, in actuality the film does not critique this newer form of criticism. In fact, they name a few reasons why this new trend is good for movie audiences and the movies in general.

First, at least according to film blogging king, Harry Knowles, the rise in the citizen as film reviewer is sign that more people are “thinking critically.” Film criticism on the web does not signify a decline is the standards of film critique, as some may think, but is rather a testament to the younger generation’s engagement with higher thought. Moreover, as America does not have a monolithic pop culture, there is no one critic who can speak for everyone. The cacophony of voices on films is well suited to the heterogeneous society we live in. Michael Bay, for instance, is hated by movie critics and yet adored by many viewers. Perhaps, there is a need then to have people with different aesthetic sentiments to cater to different tastes.

Ultimately, the film decides that it is and has always been a field that is about the eponymous “love of movies.” The critics do their job because of their passion for film but also the entire profession is really for the continued improvement of the film industry. Directors and actors benefit have an added incentive to make a movie as good as possible and critics have a long tradition, dating back to Sherwood’s time, of giving their opinions in the movie-making process. Most importantly, these critics spark conversations, whether it be between Kael and Sarris or a cab driver and AO Scott, and elicit ideas and dialogue over the common viewing of films. With these reasons, they certainly make a convincing case for the continued importance of this profession; however, I had trouble shedding any tears over the rise of online film criticism— especially as I consider the forum in which this is being published.

Vive le Tour!: Vignettes from the Tour de France

 

Louis Malle’s Vive le Tour!, a 19-minute homage, chronicle, and examination of the 1962 Tour de France, does not adhere to the typical sports documentary structure or formula.  The viewer is never told where or when the race takes place, who is competing (only Van Looy’s name is mentioned), what stage of the race it is, or what the standings are.  It doesn’t follow a linear sense of time, focus on or highlight the pivotal moments or key individual battles (such as in Joel Santoni’s La course en tete), nor follow a specific rider or team of riders (like Pepe Danquart’s Hollentour, or Hell on Wheels); and although there are lyrical qualities to its editing, cinematography, and narration, it is not a visual poem (such as Claude Lelouch’s …Pour un Maillot Jaune).  Shirking a traditional narrative, Malle creates a montage of random, individual moments connected mostly by their idiosyncrasy.  We see the drinking raids, where riders loot bars and restaurants for drinks (beer, lemonade, champagne, etc.), and we watch as the motorcyclists following the pack try to pick up the cyclists’ food bags with their feet.  We see two riders share a Fudgesicle, one rider hold another’s seat steady as he tries to pee and pedal simultaneously, and a rider with a fractured skull muttering “My head is cold.  Cover my head with something.  I’m cold” as he is airlifted away from the course by helicopter.  In weaving these vignettes together, Malle creates a layered emotional palette that captures everything from the short, subtle moments of humor of the Tour, to the darker, more tragic ones of pain and struggle.

Despite not adhering to the typical sports documentary formula, Vive le Tour! still captures the intensity, tension, and drama of the race.  At one point the music stops, and we hear only the sound of wheels, pedals, and gears in motion.  The riders’ lax style from before has disappeared, and now they are leaning forward, their weight shifted towards the front of the bike, their eyes narrowed and focused on the road ahead of them.  The physical strain is unimaginable as they climb from 600 feet to 6000, then descend to 800, and then climb again to 9000.  Malle cuts in on the faces of the different individual riders, and we watch as they struggle for breath, their mouths open and white around the lips, their eyes bulging and their veins popping from their neck and face.  For each moment of light hearted humor there is one of struggle, physical and emotional strain, and tragedy.  Riders crash, and even some of the toughest are carried off in ambulances.  One racer, his face and shirt covered in blood, pedals on as he is being bandaged up.  Another, pushed beyond his limits from doping (or, as Malle calls it, “charging”), quits, claiming he’d “eaten some bad fish.”  In one of the film’s most extended and dramatic scenes, a rider, virtually unconscious from exhaustion, climbs back onto his bike and attempts to ride on, eventually collapsing on the side of the road.

Malle works on another level in the film, though, demonstrating his skills as a filmmaker.  In the opening segment, he chooses not to focus on the riders or the race itself, but instead the spectacle that surrounds them, the carnival-like atmosphere, the anticipation and celebration of that brief moment when the riders pass by.  We see a nun giving a thumbs up, a man eating a sandwich, a group of boys wearing paper hats, the parade of cars and floats, and the swarms of people lining the street.  This spectacle is lost on the riders, though.  As Malle tells us in voiceover, they “…can’t see the crowd.  They think, ‘I’ll see my wife or my mom,’ but they don’t see a thing.”  On the word “think,” the perspective changes.  The camera shifts from static shots of the crowd as the blur of riders passes by to the point-of-view of the riders themselves.   The camera moves quickly down the road here, the crowd now transformed into the blur of figures and colors.  We are brought into the internal world of the cyclists; we hear what they hear (the “incredibly loud” sound of the crowd around them), we see what they see (the camera becomes their eyes), and we think what they think (Malle’s voiceover telling us what runs through their minds).  Malle thus presents us with two different perspectives, two alternating realities that he will shift throughout the film.  By doing so, he moves beyond the typical, objective portrayal of the Tour de France and allows us to see it from multiple viewpoints, to experience it as both observer and participant.  Malle is thus able to capture in 19-minutes what few filmmakers are able to in 90, presenting us with a layered and captivating examination of one of sports’ most intense and historic competitions.  He does not simply document the race, highlighting the significant moments and characters, but instead gives us a complex and unique experience that alternates between comedy and tragedy, subjective and objective, spectator and racer.

 

Football and Hieroglyphics: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait

Directors Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno immediately establish the context of their film: Madrid, Saturday, April 23, 2005, “from the first kick of the ball until the final whistle.”  They open with an establishing shot of the field, the 22 players positioned on their sides waiting for the kick-off.  The image itself is grainy, similar to that of a television broadcast, and a commentator speaks in Spanish in the background; it's the typical view of a football [soccer] game.  The camera then moves in, cutting closer to the field as the game begins.  It follows the action at first, tracking the ball as it moves between the Villarreal players from the center spot to the backfield, and then to the far sideline.  We watch the right-winger as he moves up field with the ball; in this moment though, our focus is no longer on the ball, where it is and who has possession, but instead on the figure of Zidane, the number 5, as he enters the center of the frame.  He stands out immediately to the viewer, almost ascetic in his disposition; his monk-like bald spot and slouching frame, reserved and collected in his expression and movement.  He closes off the midfield lane and a defender comes to his support to block the sideline to his left.  The ball is passed forward off screen and the other two figures sprint out of frame after it.  The camera doesn’t follow them or the ball though, choosing instead to sit on Zidane as he walks back into position; it will stay on him for the remainder of the film.

The image is then transformed, as the grain of the picture is broken into small, green, individual pixels.  Gordon and Parreno redefine the pitch here, restructure it from the space in which the game takes place to a stage, a set, a canvas, a screen, the place in which Zidane will establish and express himself as a player-artist, an individual; it will become a space for him to be studied.  The letters Z-I-D-A-N-E appear individually over the pixels, before being placed on top each other to form a single symbol, a hieroglyphic of his name.  The camera zooms out slightly, the number of pixels multiplying, and the faint figure of Zidane once again becomes recognizable.  Like the pitch, Zidane here is broken down into pixels, signifying that he too is to be looked at and examined differently, to be broken down and analyzed in a new way.

The pixilated image reforms back into the grainy television screen as the ball moves from the Villarreal half to the Madrid 18-yard box.  A low cross cuts across the face of goal and Madrid are pushed onto the back foot.  The left back, Roberto Carlos, takes the ball, fighting off a Villarreal striker and passes it forward to Zidane.  The camera then cuts to the Frenchman just as he is about to receive the ball.  The visual style changes here, as the blurry long shot of the field becomes a high definition medium of the player.  The camera cuts back to the grainy image as Zidane takes the ball in stride, and we watch as he carries it forward, driving up field past a defender.  He sends a pass low and cross field through the defense, ahead of a Madrid forward, pushing him and the flow of the game to the opposite end of the pitch.  His genius, his artistry is established here; in less than six touches he has demonstrated his control, accuracy, reading of the game, his ability to turn defense almost instantly into attack, his ability to create, to transform and dictate the flow of the game.

Zidane is in many ways similar to a filmed poem, lyrical in its examination and use of rhythm, movement, space, and sound.  German filmmaker Hellmuth Costard used a similar approach in his 1971 film Football as Never Before, in which he filmed George Best with eight 16mm cameras over the course of a game.  What is interesting though is that Gordon and Parreno seem to share less in common with Costard as they do with French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot.  Whereas Costard focused more on capturing the balletic quality of Best and the footballer, Gordon and Parreno, like Clouzot in The Mystery of Picasso (his own examination of the artist), go beyond the medium they’re documenting and raise a deeper question of film as a medium, how we film the artist, and of the artist himself.  Like the Mystery of Picasso, the film forces us to ask, what can we really learn about the artist from watching him work, about his “secret process” (as Clouzot calls it), about his internal world and what drives him.  Unlike Clouzot though, who eliminates the face and figure of the artist, showing instead only the canvas and the work as it unfolds, Gordon and Parreno focus on Zidane, the artist, and not on what he produces.  We are thus forced to try and understand Zidane not through his role on the field and what he contributes to the game, but instead on him, his movement, his behavior, and his interactions with others.

In the opening segment Gordon and Parreno tell us we will be “face to face,” with Zidane, “as close as [we] can.”  We learn a number of different things about him through the film.  We see his incredible touch, control, balance and technical ability.  We’re able to notice the simple shifts in his movement, the subtle changes in his position as he receives and feeds the ball.  He is a solitary figure, rarely interacting with any of the other players, and speaking only once (when he tells the referee he should “be ashamed” after awarding the other team an undeserved penalty).  We watch as he wanders the pitch, roaming the field more as an observer than an active participant.  He is reserved, economical in his play and movement, neutral in his expression.  And yet he becomes the game’s central character, the protagonist to a narrative we can’t really see.  He creates one goal with a brilliant run down the left wing past three defenders, sending a lofted cross to Ronaldo on the back post for an easy header (changing the flow of the game in Madrid’s favor), and he is issued a red card in the end after hitting a Villarreal player when a fight breaks out on the pitch (a strange foreshadowing of his exit from the World Cup final a year later after he head butted Italian defender Marco Materazzi).

The medium of film and the different techniques of the filmmakers also allow us to better understand Zidane and his internal world.  The shifts in diegetic (the sounds from the pitch, the noise of the crowd around him) and non-diegetic sound (the soundtrack, the sounds of kids playing), and the text over the image (excerpts taken from an interview with the player) help bring us into his inner world.  We learn what goes through his mind, his strange shifts in consciousness, his acute awareness of everything around him.  But do we ever fully understand Zidane through filming him as he works?  Do we understand or unravel his “mystery,” his internal workings.  Through the 17 different camera angles, the use of text, the layered sound, through breaking his figure down into pixels, do we come to understand what drives him, what pushes him, what goes through his mind as he receives and passes the ball.  He is a mobile character, constantly in motion, constantly forcing the camera (and us) to follow him, to readjust, to change focus.  We never fully move into his inner world, never share that visual connection with him or seeing the field as he sees it; only once are we given a shot from his perspective, an eye line match of the scoreboard reading 0-1 in the second half.  Even as we see him from 17 different angles, even as the text, his internal voice, hints at what he hears and experiences on the field, he remains elusive to us.

The filmmakers use the letters of Zidane’s name to form a symbol in the beginning of the film that they deconstruct in the end.  This symbol, this hieroglyphic suggests that Zidane himself, as a player and artist, is a symbol, a hieroglyphic we try to understand.  When this figure is dismantled, we are forced to question whether we have dismantled Zidane’s character, whether we have deciphered the hieroglyphic?  By bringing us face to face with Zidane, as close as we can get, are Gordon and Parreno allowing us to better understand him or are they suggesting that no matter how close we get to him, we can never fully know what drives him, never know his “secret process.”  What makes him play the way he plays, what makes him do the things he does?  In the final scene, when Zidane rushes into a fight he’s seemingly uninvolved in and hits an opposing player in the face, we are left confused.  How is this the same expressionless ascetic-like figure from before?  We never learn why he hits the other player, or what drove him to enter the dispute in the first place. There was no provocation, no personal attack on him, nothing to justify this sudden burst of anger; instead, like his play, this act seems to be an instantaneous surge of energy and emotion that only he understands.  In the moment after though, when Zidane has been shown the red card and given his marching orders, he calmly and collectedly untucks his shirt and leaves the pitch. 

 

 

The Painted Screen: Le mystére Picasso, The Mystery of Picasso, The Picasso Mystery

“We’d love to know the secret process guiding the creator through his perilous adventures.”– Henri-Georges Clouzot, Le Mystére Picasso (1956)

Picasso, seated shirtless in the studio, stares at the easel opposite him (its back turned to us), a rare moment in which the figure of the artist is shown.  Two paintings hang on a wood partition to his left, positioned between the artist and his canvas.  As Picasso stands and approaches the partition, Clouzot cuts to the painter examining his work, his eyes staring intently, matador-like, before cutting to the works themselves.  Even without the filmmaker’s voiceover, his question, his underlying conundrum is stated clearly in these opening three shots.  There is the artist and there is his completed work; what, though, was his process in making them, what was his “secret” method?  In the 75 minutes that follow Clouzot will challenge his viewer to examine this question, to try and understand the artist not through his biography, past work, or what he says about himself, but instead through what he creates before us.

Clouzot cuts to the easel, the blank canvas standing out in the shadows of the studio.  A cloud of smoke is blown from the right into the frame, an introduction to the painter as he approaches the paper.  Picasso doesn’t pause or wait to examine the canvas as he did before with the previous two, but instead begins drawing immediately.  We don’t see him put the pen to paper, though, as Clouzot cuts from the wide angle of the artist and easel to a close-up of the canvas.  Picasso’s hand moves across the paper, sketching a cartoon-like face with a dove behind it.  The filmmaker then cuts to the shadowed face of the artist and back again to the paper.  It is only after he’s finished drawing that Picasso steps back to examine his work.  The artist and canvas are separated here.  It is the hand that connects them; and it is through the hand, as Clouzot states in voiceover, that we can see and experience “what’s going through [his] mind.”  Although this here is made as a statement, it seems as though the filmmaker is inherently asking whether we can ever truly know the inner dynamics that drive the artist’s work.

Clouzot narrates over these opening shots that we can only wonder what Rimbaud was thinking when he wrote “The Drunken Boat,” or Mozart when he composed his symphony “Jupiter.”  What were their secret processes?  Painting, Clouzot says, is different in that it allows us to follow the artist’s hand at work.  By mounting the camera on a frame behind a semi-translucent piece of canvas, Clouzot is able to make the figure of Picasso (and thus his hand) disappear, leaving only the lines, colors (the only instances of color in the film.  All the shots of Picasso and Clouzot in the studio are filmed in black and white), and figures that he paints visible to the audience.  Image is layered over image, constantly changing and transforming.  Characters are drawn, altered, erased, redrawn, erased again, and redrawn again.  Clouzot here raises a question of medium.  As he states in the film, “what is impossible to know for poetry and music is not the case for painting.”  It is difficult to know whether Clouzot is intentionally elliptical here or not.  What is it that separates the painter from the poet or musician?  Couldn’t we just as easily follow the artistic processes of music and poetry as with painting?  It is film, as a medium, that stands apart here then.  It is film, with its unique temporality that makes it possible for us to view the artist at work.  Like Picasso who paints himself painting in the studio throughout the film, Clouzot films himself filming the painter in the studio.  The Mystery of Picasso thus has as much to do with the medium of film as it does with painting; it is a film that exemplifies Clouzot’s skills as a filmmaker as much as it does Picasso’s as a painter.

In Clouzot’s earlier film The Wages of Fear (1953), four men must drive two trucks of nitroglycerine 300 miles from Las Piedras over mountainous roads in South America.  Over the course of the film, Clouzot (often referred to as the French Hitchcock) creates one of the most intense experiences in cinematic history.  There is an undercurrent of suspense and tension in The Mystery of Picasso as well.  The drama here, though, comes from the creation and transformation of the images, their construction and deconstruction, from imagining what will appear next, from watching the scene as it unfolds. The subject matter of many of these is deeply personal for the painter, as Picasso often portrays himself and his friends and inspirations (Matisse, Delacroix, and Miró and his then lover Jacqueline)[1].  Like a film, these works tell stories, they employ a cinematic narrative; they have settings and situations, characters and relationships that grow, change and develop.

By filming Picasso in process, Clouzot forces us to establish a complex relationship with these paintings.  Our emotions are manipulated as the artist blots out large sections he’s meticulously crafted or repetitively tinkers with a face, shape, or detail over and over again.  By watching the artist work, layering figures, colors, and new designs on top of each other and weaving them seamlessly together, the images become inextricable from one another.  As viewers, we’re unable to look at the final product without seeing the series of transformations and changes that went into creating it.  We can hate the image one minute, love it the next, hate it again, and be ultimately left unsure of how to feel.

But what is the value of seeing these works transform and unfold, what is our fascination with the process?  Is there the hope that by watching Picasso work we will somehow unravel what pushes him, what drives him creatively, artistically, or intellectually?  Clouzot creates a “documentary” on Picasso in process in order to reveal to the viewer the inner dynamics that compel his work.  But while it shows us the transformative stages and evolution his paintings undergo, does it ever truly reveal anything about the artist himself?  As Clouzot leads us to believe (and as the film’s title would suggest), the artist is a mystery, something to be to solved or unraveled.  And yet, is the real Picasso revealed here through his work, or is he simply putting on a show for the viewer.  Even by the end of the film, we are still left wondering, who is Picasso?  Is he a performer, a showman?  Is he the creative genius we expect him to be?  To a certain extent, Clouzot is right; we can follow what the painter is thinking through his hand.  The creation and evolution of these images give us a momentary glimpse into the artist’s mind, and through filming the transformation of the image Clouzot allows us to see what Picasso sees, experience what Picasso experiences.  But by allowing us to follow Picasso’s hand as he works, Clouzot is ultimately showing us that we cannot solve the mystery of the artist, especially in the case of Picasso.  The painter’s secret process is not simply how his works transform on the canvas, but instead what happens internally, the psychologically charged creative forces that drive his hand.  Clouzot’s true focus in the film then is not simply in unraveling the process behind the artist’s work to better understand him, but instead to raise a certain deeper question of media.

What is this final product, what is the medium here?  Does Clouzot transform the screen into a canvas or the canvas into a screen?  Is this painting, is it film?  Is it animation, or maybe a medium in between?  Clouzot doesn’t necessarily create something entirely new; the photographer Hans Namuth had worked on a similar project with Jackson Pollock previously in 1951.  But where as Namuth’s film focuses only on Pollock’s process of working, Clouzot moves further by creating something that challenges us to define it, that pushes us to respond to a work of art in a different way.  The Mystery of Picasso is, in the literal sense, painting filmed.  And yet by turning the dimensions of the screen into the canvas we are no longer able to view the film as we would a typical narrative or documentary; our approach and response is inherently different.  We’re driven to look at and consider these works as paintings as well, and yet somehow we can’t.  The temporality of film changes our experience with them; by seeing how they transform and evolve, we’re unable to look at them as if they were hanging on a wall.

Currently Watching: The Wages of Fear (Clouzot, 1953), The Class (Cantet, 2009), Moon (Jones, 2009), Sugar (Boden and Fleck, 2008), In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000), Bio-Dome (Bloom, 1996), The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009), Breaking Away (Yates, 1979), Gomorrah (Garrone, 2009), The New World (Malick, 2005), The Pest (Miller, 1997), Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009), The Limits of Control (Jarmusch, 2009)

 

 

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[1] Archie Rand, painter and professor of Art at Columbia University

Waltz with Bashir: life imitates art, calls for animation (Inhye)

Waltz with Bashir (2008) follows director/producer Ari Folman in his journey to rediscover his past from the 1982 Lebanon War. Initially, his pursuit is to confirm an ambiguous scene he witnessed as a soldier by interviewing veterans and interpreting their memories with a psychologist friend.  The film shifts from a series of personal recollections to a diplomatic appeal when each man’s account reveals the haphazardness of the soldiers, commanders, general public and war in general.

 
Waltz with Bashir is a hand-drawn animated documentary with careful attention to details. Waltz with Bashir. Flickr Creative Commons.¹

The genre is an interesting hybrid of documentary and animation: actual people are represented in cartoon versions of themselves yet dialogue is intact. Visually, it’s bold, stylish and impressively meticulous.  Over 3,000 frames were hand-drawn with tactful consideration to various visual cues (shadows, motion parallax and fine texture details) reminding us of the incredible effort and patience often overlooked in animation. With visual language this captivating, it's not hard to forget this is an educational documentary: Folman learned from previous documentary projects that cartoon-izing interviewees makes them readily familiar and accessible, thus more engaging to the audience. ²

And to portray each man’s shell shock, only the flexibility of animation can cater to human memory’s distortion, an underlying theme in the film. Whereas Folman’s memory is elusive, his friends can explicitly recall every dog that was shot, dismembered body parts floating amidst demolition, or their escapist wet dreams. “War is like a very bad acid trip,” Folman said, and that “animation is the only way to tell this story, with memories, lost memories, dreams and the subconscious.”³ Here, it's clear Waltz with Bashir proves life does indeed imitate art.

What then sustain the integrity of documentary amidst the punchy animation are the real voice recordings. Actual testimonials anchor us in reality so no matter how embellished the stories seem, the weariness and vulnerability in each veteran’s voice remind us that war is impossible to exaggerate. Appropriately, the film ends with real footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre aftermath that Folman himself witnessed: the camera pans slowly across stacks of dirty corpses yet can barely keep up with the hysterical women that follow. We see it all through Folman’s cartoon eyes, emphasizing the contrast between the fanciful, imaginative world to the real.

Although animation will indefinitely be known for the naïve, childish fables of Saturday mornings, it is perhaps that stigma of novelty and innocence that accounts for Waltz with Bashir’s ingenuity: we are not used to seeing explicit content in cartoon, making the scenes all the more compelling. Funnily enough, lavishly funded war dramas with Hollywood actors can rarely resist glamorized action scenes or romantic conflicts. Waltz with Bashir ultimately does not challenge the seriousness of war and gives animated films the last laugh.

Image Credits

¹"Waltz with Bashir poster." Flickr Creative Commons. Wolf Gang. 11 Nov. 2008.

Works Cited

²"Ari Folman: "Animation, or Not at All"" Interview by David D'Arcy. GreenCine. All Media Guide, 23 June 2009. Web. 23 Nov. 2009. <https://greencine.com/central/arifolman>.

³"Ari Folman Finds Freedom in Animation." Interview by Steve Erickson. Film and Video. Studio Daily, 18 Dec. 2008. Web. 23 Nov. 2009. <http://www.studiodaily.com/filmandvideo/currentissue/10304.html>.

 

Havana, Lisbon and Wim Wenders (Shauna)

It is in an incredible risk to create a film about the struggle of making a film.  A movie partly devoted to the study of sound, not only the production of music by trained vocalists and musicians, but the accumulation of everyday noises by a man with a boom mic seems equally ambitious.  For anyone else, the results might be forced and superficial, but Wim Wenders' products are at once astounding and spontaneous.  Both in Lisbon Story and Buena Vista Social Club, Wenders seamlessly integrates the passionate, fatal and trivial aspects of cinema and musical performance.  Whether staged or improvised his narratives never veer into the dreadful realm of predictability.  It is through his profound sensitivity to place, reflected in the local musical and chromatic vibrancy of Cuba in Buena Vista, and the hybrid medieval-industrialized Lisbon basking in Mediterranean light, that the questions of art, music and cinema are raised.  He grounds the two films so authentically in their locales that we eagerly embrace the topics of music and movie-making.

Wenders is not interested in strictly replicating the structure, lighting, energy and mood of the two respective cities, though he masterfully captures the form and atmosphere of each urban place.  He goes beyond simply conveying the essence of a city as an entity: he suggests the emotional sentiments a city might elicit and characterizes the bond between his characters and their environments.  The crosscut is used particularly effectively in Buena Vista to create a coherent portrait of an intimate cast of characters who retain their mannerisms, humor, technical skill, wit and dignity whether at home or on the stage, whether in Cuba, Amsterdam, or New York.  A specific building, street, figure or piece of debris might trigger the memory of another place or time, but Wenders plays visually with nostalgia in such a way that he avoids overt sentimentalism. 

 

Guitarist Ochoa Bustamante (left) and vocalist/guitarist Compay Segundo. Creative Commons, by Hiabba (2008). http://search.creativecommons.org/

Most of the emotional responses and dynamics between character and place are sufficiently subtle to require full attention and multiple viewings.  In Buena Vista, a group of elderly Cuban male musicians and one female vocalist come together to record and perform the nation's provincial and popular music.  They are musicians who have been forgotten or fazed out -- some had abandoned their instruments for a decade or more -- but performers endowed with a striking vitality, humanity and appreciation for their Caribbean culture.  Working with Ry Cooder, Wenders captures the centrality of music to their lives: in the studio, on the streets, in ornate pre-Revolution gambling houses and in abandoned bars.  Rhythm is inescapable, permeating all aspects of life.  Wenders recognizes that the discovery of a culture and locale so inherently bound to music constitutes something refreshing and unique.  Particularly from the European or American perspective, he acknowledged in the commentary, we tend to think of music as a separate entity, something we listen to for a duration and then set aside.  We occasionally go to concerts, listen to the radio or improvise, but these are less integral elements in the fabric of life than they are exceptional circumstances.  In contrast, Cubans constantly discover, produce and collaborate in formal and informal musical exchanges. 

 

Extreme Right: Trumpet player Manuel Mirabal Vázquez. Creative Commons, by Moyo Taxiguerrilla (2006).

One of the film's most revealing sequences occurs when singer Omara Portuondo, clad in a bold print dress, strolls down the street of her old neighborhood amid residents standing on the curbs and in front of dilapidated buildings.  As she wanders through the street, Portuondo sings, partly to herself and partly offering an impromptu performance to the audience that has gathered for her.  One woman of African descent joins her in song, invoking their common career experience and suggesting Cuba's ethnoracial heterogeneity.  During the commentary, Wenders emphasized that the neighborhood promenade scene unfolded spontaneously, a fact that is at first difficult to believe.  The individuals who gather to hear Portuondo balance reverence with anonymity.  They convey interest and desire to hear her voice, yet maintain relative nonchalance and refrain from pressuring or bombarding their locale celebrity.  Their expressions also appear unaffected by the presence of the camera.  The audience embodies civility and appreciation, without the self-consciousness or egotism that often accompanies the presence of a camera.  Indeed, as Wenders asserted, there is nothing "fake" about the people of Cuba. 

Interestingly, the concept of cinematic authenticity is a motif that recurs in Lisbon Story.  Towards the conclusion of the film, the mysterious German filmmaker Frederick challenges the very act of movie-making.  In his diatribe with his sound recorder he equates "Pointing a camera" with "pointing a weapon" and reflects, "...Every time I pointed at something, I had the feeling of depriving things of their life."  The very presence of the camera changes the subject, and the very eye of the cinematographer distorts it even further.  That is Frederick's unhappy conclusion, anyway.  The only way to escape these limitations is to capture figures without their knowledge or consent and without the corrupting influence of the filmmaker's own eye.  Frederick fashions plastic shopping bags, small backpacks and garbage cans into vessels for hidden cameras.  The flimsy blue plastic shopping bag seems appropriated directly from Buena Vista, where it also functioned as a vehicle, but one holding sacred visual elements from the past, rather than illicitly capturing unknown moments in the present. Cuban pianist Rubén González's uses a blue plastic bag to transport photographs of himself and other musicians at the height of their careers.  Against his characteristic orange zigzag button down, Rubén's insubstantial bag of treasured images intimates the pervasiveness of Cuban poverty, but also visually encapsulates Cuban values of relationships, authenticity and meaning in images and lyrics.  Armed only with a minimal plastic shopping bag, Rubén manages to protect the photographs from any blemish, indentation or tear.

 

Bassist Orland Lopez "Cachaito." Creative Commons, by Volume12 (2008).

Visual parallels between the two films run far more deeply than mere recurrent props.  In fact, Wenders captures environmental structures and geographies with suggestive doubles in Havana and Lisbon.  Train tracks function as one structural motif and symbol of transport, change, interconnectedness and, paradoxically, divisiveness.  In Buena Vista Social Club, Ochoa Bustamante sings and plays his guitar with a provincial folksiness as he walks towards the steady cam, following the tracks.  In Lisbon, the pace of life around the tracks is slightly more frantic and mechanized.  Trolley tracks in Lisbon Story help propel the protagonist Winter towards the mysterious child employed by Frederick.  Other analogues to the Lisbon trolleys are the putrid green and pink buses imported from the Soviet Union, seeming anachronisms that are actually critical to Havana's contemporary transport infrastructure.   

Wenders grapples with the environmental opposition between old and new in both films, and plays extensively with boundaries.  Boundaries may be physical thresholds, such as the coastal waters crashing against Havana's highways, or may exist in space and time, as with the cross cuts between the group's performance in Amsterdam and their work in the Cuban recording studio weeks earlier.  Diegetic sound bridges across these cuts (Silencio, sung by Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo) lend a sense of continuity to an editing technique that might otherwise create temporal confusion. 

In both films, cinematography works to suggest navigation and exploration.  It evokes another breed of tension, this time between familiarity and newness.  The mobile camera ventures through the streets of Havana and Lisbon in a series of long takes that capture not only the neighborhood architecture and lighting, but the residents' attitudes and body language.  Wenders relied fully on the mobile cam and two heavier cameras with tripods (no tracking or dolleying), and the subtle irregularities in camera stability humanize the framing.  We are somewhat conscious of the street venturer recording the sights.  He is not a blatant tourist, but rather a selective observer, an outsider who also experiences a sense of connection with the new city.  In Lisbon Story, Winter embodies that "outsider."  En route to Lisbon, he listens to a Portuguese language cassette and struggles to replicate comical phrases.  Yet, although certain cultural and linguistic aspects of life in Lisbon are quite foreign, other elements -- like the exotic voice of Madredeus (Teresa Salgueiro) -- exist independent of national bounds and deeply resound with Winter.  A similar tension arises in Buena Vista Social Club, when the members of the band arrive in New York City for the first time.  In souvenir shops, the musicians recognize certain bobble-heads (Charlie Chaplin, for instance), but struggle and fail to name others (Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy).  By including such sequences detailing cultural connections and deviations, the director reveals something about himself.  Wenders has thoroughly established himself as an international figure in cinema.  Yet, he too must experience the strange, exciting imbalance that comes from traveling: the alien and unsettling juxtaposed with the familiar and universal.  And this opposition is what makes his local environments so vivid, so authentic and so approachable, regardless of a viewer's experiences or background.

Battle in Seattle: An Emotional View of the 1999 WTO Conferences (Alexandra)

In 1999, protesters opposing the World Trade Organization’s ministerial conference on American soil blockaded Seattle’s downtown.  These demonstrators were trying peacefully to make their voices heard concerning the problems with conglomerate globalization.  But peaceful protests became violent riots when anarchist groups took over, police brutality broke out, civil rights were defied, and mass illegal arrests were made.  These events that occurred in late November were a rude awakening to many.  Though the protests were overall successful in stopping the WTO conference, the events that transpired created much controversy over how the city reacted to the protesters.  Many were appalled by the governmental response.  Similar to the riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, the protests in Seattle have been an important part of history.  And just as Haskell Wexler made Medium Cool (1969) about the DNC riots, budding director Stuart Townsend made Battle in Seattle (2007).

Irish actor, Stuart Townsend, successfully makes his directorial debut with this film.  Townsend addresses the WTO conferences through the lens of many different people, all of whom are effected differently by the convention.  There are the activists.  These are the characters that have been organizing the peaceful protests against the WTO to raise awareness about the risks of globalization in Third World countries.  There are the politicians.  These are the ones who are at the heart of the convention, mainly Seattle’s mayor Jim Tobin (Ray Liotta).  There are the policemen.  The ones who are on the streets making sure that peace ensue.  And lastly, there is the media, which is responsible for how the convention and protests are portrayed to the general public.

The meshing and crossing paths of each type of character is engaging but since there are so many important roles, none of the relationships among them get enough playing time.  It seems that the audience is only allowed to go a little bit under the surface of many of the characters.  Leader of the activists, Jay (Martin Henderson), is constantly fighting against corporation expansion, but also seems to be fighting something that is within him.  The viewers (and even some of the other characters) learn what troubles Jay in snip-its, but never fully come to grips with what bothers him.  Even when a reporter covering the convention turns sides and joins the protests, her actions seem somewhat half-hearted and the audience is not only left asking why she did this, but also wanting to know more about her.  These characters and others’ stories are intriguing, but many of them are flat.  They are little more than plot devices.  A policeman’s wife, Ella (Charlize Theron), is attacked by his fellow officers, but her character’s purpose doesn’t go much further than that.  She is simply a plot device to show another side of police brutality, to show that everyone was a target during the riots.  Many of these character portrayals are only snapshots, a disadvantage to having so many characters.

But that’s not to say that aren’t any characters in the film that have meaning.  Mayor Jim Tobin, the fictionalization of former Mayor Paul Schell, is continually at odds with how to save his city from violence while doing what is right.  Often shot behind objects (obscured by glass, items on his desk, or someone else), Tobin struggles with his past as a Vietnam protester and his current political position.  These shots make him appear as though he is lost behind a sort of barrier that constricts him from making proper decisions.  He tells the protesters to “be tough on your issues, but be gentle on my town,” but when they don’t abide he calls in the National Guard to assuage the government’s nerves.   On the other side of the issues is Ella’s husband, police officer Dale (Woody Harrelson), who is forced to patrol the streets though dealing with life-altering home issues.  The audience sees Dale in heavy protective garb, wearing a helmet, and holding a billy club while crying.  The discord of a powerful, strong man weeping is an emotion that resonates quite strongly.  The image makes it clear that not everyone involved in the five-day protest wants to be there, not everyone agrees with what is being done, but still many have no choice.

The most poignant and heart-wrenching character though may be the one who has the least amount of screen time.  Dr. Maric (Rade Sherbedzija), a physician representing Doctors Without Borders, depends on the WTO conference to inform and get support from the delegates so he can raise money for the prevention and treatment of disease in Third World countries.  But as the activists work to stop the convention, Dr. Maric is left without an audience to plead to.  His silent desperation is saddening.  It’s an emotion that is furthered by the shot of Maric in is his empty lecture hall looking dolefully out the window at the protesters and rioters.  They are making their point on the outside, while he is trying to make the same point on the inside.

It is more the composition of shots than the film’s characters that truly make the movie what it is.  In order to keep the movie’s pace at a steady, heart-palpitating, and utterly nerve-racking rate, shots are never very long.  Townsend is incessantly cutting from shot to shot in order to show many different types of action and perspective, but also to keep the viewers alert.  The quickness of the camera imitates the high tensions, stress, and nerves of those involved - even the governmental officials in their offices with large desks and leather-bound books, move at a fast, anxious speed.

Another interesting technique Townsend employs is the use of actual footage from the 1999 protests.  Just as other historical fiction films before it (such as Emilio Estevez’s Bobby [2006]), Battle flawlessly weaves this live footage of the events into its storyline.  This creates an even more urgent sense to the film. The viewers realize that what is being depicted fictionally actually occurred.  Along with this emotional intensity created by the footage, realism is created with statistics.  The film’s opening credits roll as a voice over explains what the WTO is and how it’s gotten to Seattle.  The viewers are thrust into what they believe to be a illusory story, while all the while being constantly reminded that what is happening was, at one time, real.  And though the audience sighs a breath of relief when the WTO conferences are officially canceled and the activists seem to have won, there is an ominous afterword.  Words move menacingly across the screen reminding the viewers that the WTO still exists, that conglomerates are still ruining Third World countries, animals are still being killed, and these same protesters are still fighting an uphill battle.

Battle’s character’s may not be developed enough for our liking, but the emotion that trickles out of them along with the sentiments that the film’s cinematography creates is enough to make Townsend’s film a triumph.  It’s a movie that should be seen as a reminder of not only what happened on the rainy streets of Seattle many years ago, but also as a reminder of the passion that protesters hold within them, even those in today’s political forum.