HopkinsCinemAddicts

Very Important Persons: Period Satire in The Death of Stalin and The Favourite

In the typical fashion of political satire, monarchies and oligarchies serve as wells of comedy in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite (2018) and Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017). Its subjects, however, are out of power; The Favourite depicts the court of Queen Anne of Great Britain in the early 18th century, and The Death of Stalin, while recent history, depicts the ruling committee of a now-dissolved nation. From score to costuming to set design, these films embrace period drama conventions and root themselves in history. This genre-melding provides a viewpoint of the human condition that neither contemporary satire nor straightforward historical accounts can access on their own.

Set in the Soviet Union in 1953, The Death of Stalin portrays the central committee’s response to their leader’s demise and their ensuing power struggle, which ends in one member’s execution and Nikita Khrushchev’s rise to power. The committee members are simultaneously old friends and bitter rivals, at times timid and other times ruthless. Comic actors play many of its essential roles, most notably Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev and Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov, Stalin’s gullible successor. This casting reflects the film’s irreverent approach to depicting historical figures, as it imagines comedic situations and banter within the context of high-stakes political turmoil.

As the audience witnesses mythic figures portrayed as fallible humans, the characters themselves experience the same with Stalin’s passing. The committee finds their leader’s dead body on the floor of his office, collapsed in a puddle of urine. They perform grief, and it’s not clear who the exaggeration is meant to convince — it could be Stalin, the other ministers, even themselves. The film finds humor in this grief; Malenkov proclaims that Stalin is irreplaceable, for example, before pointing out that he’s the successor. “Calamity, calamity,” Khrushchev laments as he casually takes off his coat. As the characters state their distress, the camera remains impersonally distant rather than capturing their faces in close-up as one might expect.

There’s also the running joke of the urine puddle: After his proclamation of grief, Malenkov steps on the wet spot and asks, “Is this?” as the camera tilts down to the puddle. The others make the same mistake and then warn the others, who shuffle around the spot. Each time, the grief is quickly interrupted and abandoned. These trivial asides often occur in long shots where Stalin’s horizontal body remains in frame, rendering him an afterthought, which further minimizes the gravity of death as an individual — what his death means commands much attention. The men then hoist the body off the ground together, shuffling and giving each other commands as though they were transporting furniture.

The levity of this scene seems dissonant with the historical significance of Stalin’s death; the committee’s reactions ask us to consider the difference between what Stalin represented versus Stalin as an individual. His physical body becomes an inconvenience in this scene, and as the ministers deal with the material reality of his death rather than its abstract meaning, the film convinces us of their status as human beings rather than historical concepts.

The Favourite takes a similarly candid approach in representing Queen Anne, its highest-ranking character. I say highest ranking because Anne, while the most powerful character in name, is vulnerable to other characters’ emotional power over her. The film sees Anne most often in a passive role, reacting to her surrounding circumstances. The central conflict occurs between Anne’s trusted confidant and lover Sarah Churchill and her cousin Abigail, whose arrival changes the court’s status quo. While Sarah’s influence over Anne allows her to influence her decision-making, Abigail develops a friendship with Anne that challenges Sarah’s political and emotional power over her.

The value of winning Anne’s favor means that the smallest actions, like a certain intonation or glance, can have significant consequences for the characters’ relationships. Anne’s power — or rather, her title — actually makes her more susceptible to manipulation. She expects to be catered to and cared for, surrendering agency as an exercise of privilege.

Early in the film, Abigail pours Anne hot chocolate, but Sarah stops her, telling Anne it’s unhealthy. Anne protests; the camera captures Abigail, confused, facing the other two on the couch as they argue. She stands with the cup in a low-angle shot, as though from Anne’s vantage point. Though low-angle shots often assign the subject power, this one seems unique. This angle exemplifies the bizarre power dynamic in Anne’s close relationships, as Anne requires her subordinates to dote on her. Sarah, for instance, regulates Anne’s diet to a comical extent; although she allows Anne to drink the hot chocolate, Anne lets the cup sit untouched, signaling her faith in Sarah’s judgment.

The absurdity of this exchange also results from its contrast with Sarah and Anne’s preceding political discussion. As we watch Abigail pour the hot chocolate, the other two talk offscreen about Anne’s raising property taxes to fund the war against France, at Sarah’s insistence. “Are the people really angry about the land tax?” Anne asks. These far-reaching policy decisions take place in the background, speaking to Anne’s limited regard for her actual governing power. Severely detached from the nation she rules, she treats politics as she does interpersonal relationships. Her fickleness and naivety speak to the isolating effect that power can have on a human being, warping their perspective.

As a result, the competition for Anne’s affection is also a competition for power. Her lopsided priorities fuel much of the film’s humor, producing situational irony as the characters assign grave importance to trivial interactions. In this way, The Favourite achieves a similar tone as The Death of Stalin, balancing humor and darkness, but by depicting exaggerated reverence rather than irreverence.

Essential for both The Death of Stalin and The Favourite and distinguishing them from standard cinematic accounts of history is their focus on interpersonal pettiness, which not only brings abstract historical figures to life but makes their humanity plainly visible. The films derive humor from how their neuroses and social blunders fuel political conflict. These foibles aren’t just entertaining, though; they have major consequences for society at large. The contrast between characters’ earthly concerns and their lofty titles and responsibility allows both films to tread a fine line between comedy and darkness. With their faults amplified by considerable power, the ruling class drags subordinates and the public into their internal conflicts, a dynamic neither film allows us to forget.

Portraits of Nora Ephron and Joan Didion

The documentary, Everything is Copy, chronicles Nora Ephron’s life, focusing on her importance as an essayist and screenwriter, as well as the relationships that shaped her. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold similarly dives into the writer’s personal and professional life. Both of these documentaries focus on loss and question what it means to know another person, providing perspectives characterized both by intimacy and distance. 

Everything Is Copy is notable in how it works to explore Ephron’s life in spite of her not being alive at the time of filming. She died of leukemia in 2012, and her son, Jacob Bernstein, began working on the documentary in the years immediately afterward, ultimately releasing it in 2016. The film first opens solely with the sound of Ephron speaking, and a few seconds later, her image appears. This shift from the audio to video immediately emphasizes how film brings her to life. She looks not at the camera but at Charlie Rose, who is off-screen, as she recounts a story that results in laughter from the audience. This beginning doesn’t need context; her presence and humor are enough to establish her personality.

The subsequent ten minutes exhibit a combination of photographs, archival footage, and past and more recent interviews, exposing how film can break up time as well as extend it. In just a few minutes, we witness not just who Ephron was, but specifically the history that shaped her and her legacy into the future. The segment of her and Charlie Rose, for example, is followed by an oscillation between her present and the past. It cuts between home videos of her at nine years old, and an interview where she discusses her mother’s mantra that Bernstein chose as the title, “everything is copy.” The juxtaposition of the visuals of her as a child and her adult voice demonstrates the formative nature of this idea and how it has persisted throughout her life. Our understanding of her is immediate and personal. The film then moves from the past to the actual present, with a cut from her using a typewriter to one of Bernstein’s laptop. This technological gap marks the passage of time, while also illustrating Ephron’s impact on her son, who details how he too is a writer. Photographs of her punctuate throughout; although she is often joyous, these still images seemed to contain her and suggest that, without her alive, our understanding of her is ultimately limited.  

The documentary also points to the boundary between public and private identities, and explores the extent that such a boundary existed for Ephron. Bernstein interviews a large range of people, including David Remnick, Meryl Streep, Rob Reiner, Amy Pascal, Meg Ryan, and Rosie O’Donnell. Her demeanor in interviews with hosts like Charlie Rose matches the descriptions of those who personally knew her. Several speak of her in a way that suggests a closeness; there’s often a succession of them individually describing the same thing about her, adding to a cohesion in her portrayal. Yet many lament not knowing that she had been diagnosed with cancer. The documentary creates a parallel between the viewer and her friends; the film increasingly immerses us in her life, allowing us to get closer to her, and then it forces us to revisit the secrecy of her illness again at the end. Ephron is simultaneously knowable and elusive.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, like Everything is Copy, was directed by someone close to her, specifically her nephew, Griffin Dunne. The film's visual depiction of Didion’s loss of her husband, John Dunne, suggests its incomprehensibility for her. When Didion begins describing the night he died, we see part of their apartment in daylight, where no one is present. The tension from this absence is exacerbated by an off-center camera. As she progresses in recounting what happened, we get increasingly closer-up shots of a table, and then the piano on the side. Her words, “I remember the sense of the weight as he fell,” coincide with a cuts to a shot of trees outside, now at night and at a distance from what is presumably Didion’s window. The film conveys the emotion of this grief not through Didion’s words but in what is on screen. Another example of a key visual decision is when Dunne’s brother discusses how he and Didion went into John’s office after his death. As he talks about himself, the closet is in color, but as he talks about her, it shifts to black and white, signifying the impact of Dunne's death on her.

The documentary’s portrayal of Quintana, Didion’s daughter, is also of note. At one point, there is a shift in topics from Quintana to Didion’s journalism and political work, which centered on the El Salvadoran Civil War, as well as Dick Cheney. The documentary then returns to the topic of Quintana, and Didion discusses how her daughter had told her she was “remote” as a mother. This structure, where her political work gains prominence and is sandwiched by Quintana, seems to implicate it as creating a division between the two of them. Regarding the comment that she was “remote,” Didion insists: “I didn’t see it as possible because her father and I so clearly needed her.” There is an evident dissonance between their perspectives of her role as a mother, and there is no way for it to be reconciled.  

Next, a sequence of photographs of the three of them shifts from black and white to color; the passage in time is marked by this shift, as well as through John’s balding, and Quintana’s growth from a child to an adult. There’s a noticeable lack in what we know about Quintana from the film; photographs of her seem empty, as we don’t truly get a sense of their relationship. Soon afterward, there’s a description of how Quintana enters a coma and ultimately dies, with coincides with a photo of her smiling. Interestingly, after her death, a shot of hand-written notes from Quintana as a child is the only kind of personal evidence, other than photographs, that we get of her.

It may not be that Didion and Quintana had a uniquely distant relationship, but instead that the film specifically decided not to give the viewer a privileged perspective of them. What gets left out of such a documentary, though, is as interesting as what is put in.

Challenging conceptions of human's relationship to nature

The two documentaries, Jane and David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, appear to have differing explicit intentions. The first is a biological documentary about Jane Goodall, the primatologist renowned for her chimpanzee research. It provides a portrait of her work in the Gombe National Park of Tanzania, and how it personally shaped her life. On the other hand, the latter is more of a nature documentary rather than a biological one; it is a plea for humans to correct the devastation we have caused on the environment. Although the extent of the damage is anchored by Attenborough’s memories of his travels, the film doesn’t seek to give us a better understanding of the historian as the prior does for Goodall. What does emerge from both films, though, is the idea that humans have strayed in thinking that we are above nature, rather than a part of it. In particular, notions of a dichotomy between human and animal, as well as of rightful human dominance, are palpably flawed. 

Jane, despite the fact that Goodall’s work was key chimpanzee research, is noticeably detached from the science of it all.  Most of the film is footage of Jane’s explorations, narrated by her present self. What is crucial is how director Brett Morgen creates parallels between the chimpanzees and Jane, highlighting their similarities and her unique, emotional approach to studying them. The film, for example, often juxtaposes the behavior of the chimps with that of Goodall. We see a young Goodall sitting in trees that the chimps occupy, washing her hair in the same river that they traverse. She tends to them like they tend to one another, and treats them like humans, naming them — David Graybeard and Flo are some examples —  rather than numbering them. 

The film also deliberately pairs the developments in Jane’s relationship to the chimps with developments in her personal life. She sets up a feeding system that allows her to observe them more closely and excitedly learn about their habits’, aggressions, and mating styles. In the scenes subsequently afterward, we then learn how she shared this admiration of the chimps with the photographer, Hugo van Lawick, her eventual husband. Close-up shots of Jane’s face — smiling, sticking her tongue out —  contrast from footage of her in the beginning, that is  impersonal. As we achieve a better understanding of the chimps, we also achieve a better understanding of her.

The parallels between Jane and the chimps are especially prominent when Flo gives birth to an infant, whom Jane names Flint. Shortly afterward, Jane has her own child, and directly emphasizes the importance of seeing the relationship between Flo and Flint for her own relationship with her son. Jane mostly guides the narration, but occasionally the direction of the interviewer helps solidify the parallels. When asked what she admires about Flo, Jane says “she was playful, but being supportive.... That was the key, and of course that’s what my mother was”. Jane has such a personal bond with the chimps and learns so much from them. The film pushes us to empathize with both Jane and the chimps, and to consider our role in the world in light of this.

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, addresses the consequences of human behavior on the environment. Attenborough’s life is used mainly to contextualise the rapidity with which humans have had a devastating impact on the environment. 

The film grounds itself in three important statistics: world population, carbon in atmosphere, and the percentage of remaining wilderness. As Attenborough runs through the past 93 years of his life, these numbers evolve and serve as evidence of the perilous state of the planet. At the beginning of the film, we learn that in 1937, the year Attenborough was born, the population was 2.3 billion, the carbon 280 parts per million, and the remaining wilderness 66%. In 2020, the word population has tripled, the carbon has doubled, and the remaining wilderness has been cut in half. This is a warning sign to the viewers. 

The film juxtaposes a past beauty and immensity of the environment with the destructive behavior of humans. Bird’s eye shots of the Borneo rainforest, for example, expose an intense lushness and vibrancy that is now threatened. As viewers, we bear witness to tall, strong trees that are cut down, pulled down to the ground; it is unnatural that humans do so. Similarly, the film presents the ocean, its wonders in the colors and diversity of its organisms, as threatened by the constraining influence of humans. 

The first part of the film is an indictment of human behavior; in the second, Attenborough offers solutions to the crisis, that include a higher standard of living to stabilize population growth, plant-based diets and no fish zones. The last shots of the film, though, are most powerful. Attenborough exits the abandoned building in Chernobyl that the film began with, and enters surroundings full of trees, where nature is regenerating because of the absence of humans. Attenborough says: “The wild has reclaimed the space,” a reassuring statement about what the future can hold.

In Jane, Goodall emphasizes the need for conservation at the very end, and its importance has become clear through seeing her own relationship with her environment. In David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, the beauty of the world is undeniable, as well as a type of human arrogance and neglect. Both compel the reexamination of our place in nature.

How I, Tonya is Based on a True Story (Cristina)

The 2017 Tonya Harding biopic, I, Tonya, opens with a title card proclaiming that the film is "Based on the irony-free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly." From the very first seconds, the film refuses to claim it's "Based on a True Story." It's based on interviews that, the audience is told upfront, can barely be trusted because they contradict each other. The film's opening shots establish a recreation of these interviews with Tonya and Jeff, as well as Tonya's mother, Tonya's coach, Jeff's friend Shawn Eckhardt, and reporter Martin Maddox, which will serve as a framing device to walk us through Tonya's life story. 

While some films have an unreliable narrator, this film has six. 

From the very beginning, the audience is aware that everybody involved has a motive, a reason for telling their side of the story and an image of themselves they want to convey. Before we even see Tonya, we see the other interviews as the characters talk about their own reputation or Tonya's. Jeff Gillooly laments his infamy and ill-advised mustache. Tonya's mother defends herself against Tonya's assertion that she was a bad mother. Tonya's coach claims that Tonya is like America, either loved or hated. When we finally meet Tonya in the film, she rephrases the interviewer's unheard first question, "What's people's impression of me?" To which Tonya responds, "That I'm a real person."

The film seems extensively interested in how it's easy to forget that Tonya Harding is a real person when seeing her in the center of one of the most dramatic incidents in sports history. The assault on Tonya's skating rival Nancy Kerrigan, supposedly arranged by Tonya and/or Jeff, is a story still wildly disputed today.

Consistently throughout the film, the uncertainty of the narrative and the unreliability of its narrators are established in unique visual ways. A scene where Tonya chases Jeff through their home with a shotgun is broken by Tonya in the scene turning to the camera to announce, "I never did this." Some moments have Tonya's and Jeff's interviews in split-screen as they recount the same conversation, word for word, but with wildly varied intonations. A training montage of Tonya's preparation for her second attempt in the Olympics begins with her running through the woods with a bag of dog food on her back while Tonya explains while she runs, "This is how Rocky trained to fight the Russians." And as if knowing the audience would find this hard to believe, the film pans to Tonya's coach during each strange training ritual, saying, "She actually did this... and this... and this."

The audience is never allowed to forget how subjective these moments are, how hard it is to prove what is real and what is not when the people claiming to be telling the truth have such a high stake in how the story is received.

Just as often as the film continues to cast uncertainty over what is being shown, it also offers exact recreations of some of Tonya's competitions, her wedding, and actual news footage covering the assault on Nancy. Most impressive is the competition where Tonya lands the first triple axel in US women's skating history. Over the credits at the end of the film, the actual video of Tonya's performance plays, and everything from her costume to her hair to the awed and relieved expression on her face the moment after she landed the jump had been perfectly rerendered by the film. In these few scenes, the audience is grounded back in reality, in facts that can be proven and moments that were documented.

(Tonya Harding training after Nancy Kerrigan's injury at Clackamas Town Center, 1994)

Despite being based on a true story, I, Tonya never claims to have the full truth. The first half of the film shows Tonya fighting to earn her place in the skating world which is so concerned with physical presentation and reputation. The second half offers the audience the opportunity to question everything they think they know about the Incident: Tonya's reputation, Nancy's reputation, and the way those reputations were created. As Jeff himself says, "Everyone remembers the incident differently and that's a fact." The film seems satisfied with its own lack of answers, content to introduce the audience to the real person, Tonya Harding, who factually will forever be the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition. You can create your own opinion on the rest.

The (Sort of) Homestretch (Vanessa)

The last five weeks of my life have been amongst the most exhausting of my college career. However, today, the day that episode one of HOUSE will premiere alongside Studio North's two other 2018-2019 projects (which I HIGHLY recommend looking into, as they are both stellar projects) makes me realize that those five weeks are also amongst the most rewarding.

April for film majors (and from what I understand a lot of humanities majors...and other majors...let's just go with everyone) is brutal. If you are on the production track, like I am, you are either (1) helping on someone's set, (2) working on your own set, (3) editing a project, or (4) some combination of the previous three at the same time. In addition to studying for exams, writing papers, preparing for projects, balancing your other commitments, and trying to not completely self-destruct by eating and sleeping. Because I seem to like to make my life difficult, I found myself at 4 quite frequently the past few weeks. My priority, however, has been finishing up episode one (which takes viewers to the Chosen Few DJs Reunion Picnic in Chicago) for the premiere.

It has been a time of self-discovery, technical learning, pure frustration, and pure elation. And if the above words don't accurately describe editing, I don't know what does.

To start, I have learned a great deal about myself in this five-week span: from an ability to go through a whole pack of gum in two days just to give the rest of my body something to do while clicking away in Premiere, to an extreme sense of protectiveness over my project and its subjects, to the realization that to best avoid skipping meals while editing for 6 to 12+ hours at a time, one should always pack a couple of sandwiches just in case. This is all to say editing is physically and mentally draining. You are sitting, staring at a screen for hours at a time. Fun fact: the human body is not designed to sit and stare at a screen for hours at a time. I was confused the first few times I stayed at the JHU-MICA Film Center from noon to midnight as to why I would wake up and my back would tingle, my wrists would ache, and my eyes felt strained. Alas, I am not built for editing. But by day three of long editing sessions, I learned the key is really just having good posture. So I would count that as one of the things I learned as well.

As far as the protectiveness over my project goes, working on it for longer stretches of time gave me a deeper sense of attachment to it. Editing, for HOUSE, is an exercise in telling one story through many voices. I wanted to make those voices shine as best as they could. Which ties into the technical learning that occurred throughout the process of editing for a more intense amount of time than I had before.

When you first offload your footage from a camera after shooting, I think your immediate reaction, as a director, is probably "does it look good" and "does it sound ok". During editing, what looks "good" becomes "how do I make this look even better" and what sounds "ok" becomes "oh my god all the sound levels are different and anyone watching is going to know this IMMEDIATELY after the first cut between interviews." Every time I edit a project, I inevitably end up on a youtube page, internet forum, or at the mercy of my more skilled and knowledgeable film friends to figure out how to do something that ends up being incredibly easy. For the Chicago episode, this manifested in the form of three youtube videos on the "maintain power" audio transition tool in Premiere, several videos on color correction that I ended up learning a great deal from despite ultimately leaving the footage to be shown at the Studio North premiere ungraded (another fun fact: color grading images shrouded in smoke is not a simple task), and at least one forum on maintaining consistent audio levels throughout a video.

Overall, a good, albeit sometimes challenging process of absorbing and applying information, sometimes experiencing the joy in actually following the directions and ending up with a decent product, other times ending in looking up another video. Editing, like any skill, is larely about having the patience to continue learning and applying what you learn to practice. This holds true for the Chicago episode. At times it was incredibly frustrating not knowing how to do something you just KNOW can't be that hard to do. But the excitement in finding a solution, whether in terms of restructuring the sequence of your edits or by having an "ah ha!" moment when you finally DO find a solution is exciting.

Which leads me to the final two words: frustration and elation. One of my closest friends, who actually is pursuing a career as a professional editor and doing a spectacular job of doing so, once told me that with filmmaking, your lows are exceptionally low, but your highs are exceptionally low.

Editing is all about attention to detail. And not getting one detail to be as precise as you want can be incredibly frustrating. Along with the protectiveness over a project mentioned earlier comes the desire to achieve perfection. Which is at times, nearly impossible. But when a solution is found, or someone laughs at a joke you set up, or you finally just get something to WORK, it is immensely satisfying to craft a story out of raw material and see it succeed in its mission.

The Studio North premiere induces a weird mixture of excitement and anxiety for me. On one hand, I get to share this wonderful thing with people. On the other hand, this "thing" that I have been with since before it was even shot will soon be exposed to a world of opinions and grievances. Are people going to judge my work? Are people going to judge me because of my work? The long nights of adjusting audio levels, of trying to time a cut perfectly with a bit of music, of hoping and praying that I can convey how much fun house music is and how truly wonderful its fanbase is will be up to whoever is watching it. And hopefully, though an audience might not see those tiny adjustments and won't necessarily understand the long nights that went into creating, they'll feel the energy, unity, and spirituality that I hope the editing of the Chicago episode can appropriately convey.

We'll just have to see. 

On Baking and Documentary Editing: A Lot of Dough (Vanessa)

In trying to prepare for this post, I looked up quotes from two editors who have produced numerous works I admire: Dede Allen (who edited Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, The Breakfast Club, The Wiz, and more) and Thelma Schoonmaker (frequent collaborator with Martin Scorsese and known for her work on movies such as Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The King of Comedy). I came across two quotes from Thelma that I found particularly relevant in describing my own path while editing HOUSE and that I think are useful for understanding the two parts of this post: processing and process.

First, processing:

“It’s hard for people to understand editing, I think. It’s absolutely like sculpture. You get a big lump of clay and you have to form it – this raw, unedited, very long footage.”

The first few times I started truly analyzing the footage from Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, I was both amazed and overwhelmed. From Chicago alone, there is nearly five hours worth of footage. From Detroit, around two hours. And from Baltimore, an hour.

This, in many ways, is great. The interviews are fantastic, the footage looks great, the sound came out better than expected (especially in Chicago, given that we shot at what was essentially a picnic/family reunion/music festival), and overall, I like to think that the content of the interviews is insightful both about house music as a genre and as a community.

The flipside, however, is that I immediately realized that no matter how much great footage there is, I am aiming for three episodes (one for each city) lasting 5 to 7 minutes in length. The only analogy I can really think of to accurately illustrate how daunting doing so can be is inspired by the above quote, but applied to making a bunch of dough for bread. Imagine you prepare 100 pounds of dough for your favorite type of bread. This is your first time making this type of bread by scratch. You planned what you wanted to make, maybe even craved this one type of bread for a few months, got together a grocery list to make sure you had everything you needed, kneaded the dough for hours until your arms got sore, realized maybe you didn’t put in as much of one ingredient as you did another (or thought you put in too much of one ingredient versus another), finally got the dough to come out (maybe a bit lumpy in some parts, but salvageable), and then you realize…your oven does not fit all 100 pounds of dough. It doesn’t even fit 10 pounds of dough. Maybe, it fits five.

If you’re like me, you still like that you have a lot of bread dough. You are a little bit sad you cannot use all the dough at once but you can use different parts of the dough to make another loaf if the first one does not quite turn out as expected. However, you are now a little bit anxious about which bits of the dough to use to make the best possible loaf of (hopefully) delicious bread once the dough is cooked.

My first few attempts at trying to figure out what would make the best “loaf” were absolutely horrendous. Frankly, I was too attached to everything which made me fear that every single piece of footage that I thought would work in one place could easily be replaced with something better. I was frustrated with myself and with the feeling of uncertainty I got every time I even looked at the footage.

Disclaimer, if you have not already noticed: editing is hard for me. It takes me a while to get into the “flow”, so to speak, of what I am actually doing, which is sitting down and trying and retrying things while also keeping in mind a bigger goal of what the end product will look like, who the “characters” are and how to develop them, and also allowing yourself enough room to simply let yourself and your work breathe. And also remembering to trust yourself. I can honestly say that for the first few months of “editing” that I did (which was more or less me opening Premiere, staring at my footage, watching it, trying to write down what threads I could pull from interviews, and getting frustrated that I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing and that I didn’t even know what I wanted to do in terms of putting everything together) was difficult. I’m someone who studies in one spot for an hour and then has to move to a different room in order to make sure I don’t lose focus. And I could barely get myself to look at one minute portions of a larger, several hour project without worrying about all 100 pounds of “dough” instead of maybe an ounce.

But again, HOUSE has been and continues to be a learning process for me. Which is where the second quote comes in and how I started to understand process being just as crucial as processing:

“Editing is a lot about patience and discipline and just banging away at something, turning off the machine and going home at night because you’re frustrated and depressed, and then coming back in the morning to try again.”

I did not figure this out very quickly. But when I did, it helped me to understand that editing is as much about the process of editing as it is about processing what you are editing. And I only really figured this out once I stepped back for a moment from what I was doing and came up with a new way to work through editing as a process, in a way that would work for me without sacrificing the larger vision of HOUSE.

More or less, I worked through my footage as a writer, something I am more familiar with. I carefully transcribed every interview, making note of what was and was not working for me in a given interview and what information was gained from different interviews that could benefit the themes I think the footage as whole conveys. While also keeping in mind that HOUSE isn’t just a project that I want to convey my own feelings about a genre, but the feelings of a community about something that many folks think brings people together.

Forty-five pages of interviews for one city later, I felt relieved. I could physically see what I was doing and understand what things helped this story and what things did not. And so, I started to get to work editing and breathing again. The first lump of dough wasn’t ready for the oven, but at least I wasn’t just staring at it sitting on the counter-top anymore.

Humanizing Animals: How Nature Documentaries Tell Stories (Katie)

Imagine you’re on location in the Namib Desert in Africa. The sun is melting your skin, and you’ve only got a few hours every day to shoot, with the heat being what it is. Or perhaps you’re somewhere in the Arctic Circle, following polar bears by boat in frigid temperatures. It is impossible, of course, to hand a script to any of your subjects and ask them to follow your directions. Therefore, if you need to film a dramatic fight over territory between two alpha males, or record a father bringing long-sought food home to his hungry family, how can you get the perfect footage for your ideal narrative in time?

The probable answer to that question is you don’t.

The key to making nature documentary storylines coherent and compelling lies in post-production—in particular editing and sound design. To demonstrate the power of editing in creating a meaningful storyline—especially in regards to non-human characters—I will be discussing the well-known nature documentary by BBC, Planet Earth II. By analyzing a scene from its pilot, “Islands,” we can determine how certain shots can be stitched together to create a smooth and intricate storyline.

One of the narratives in “Islands” is that of the marine iguanas’. In this segment, newly-hatched marine iguanas find themselves far away from their adult guardians basking by the coast. In order to join their brethren, they must travel across the inlands they woke up in—and avoid every predator lying in wait for them.

How do elements of traditional editing and frame-crafting impact our feelings and get us to invest in the small, scaly characters on-screen? Even if we completely disregard David Attenborough’s engaging voiceovers, which tell us all we need to know, every story element is in the shots for us to recognize.

Our very first introduction to a newly-hatched marine iguana brings us to an extreme close-up of dark, shifting gravel and large, blinking eyes. This closeness immediately identifies us with the critter. As the camera slowly withdraws and cuts to further close-ups, we hear nothing but shaking gravel as the iguana pulls its body out of the sand. (Yes, every sound effect is probably foley, but that is almost certainly for our benefit.) The iguana takes slow first steps, and no one comes to accompany it in its journey to the shoreline. As shots pull even further back, we get establishing shots of the iguana and its environment. Now we can tell how small the iguana really is. All these moments accumulate to present the total solitude of this iguana… and it is a threatening solitude, as our iguana walks from right of frame past a large corpse of another iguana.

Here is a particularly magical edit: a parallel cut shows the adult iguanas basking in the shoreline, snorting water from their nostrils and looking in the direction of the camera. It is almost as if they are watching the small iguana make its way to them, or as if the small iguana is thinking of getting to its brethren by the shore. This small cut, potentially even a cut made to hide a lack of any other proper transition footage, brings an emotional relationship between our iguana and his community. The cut brings motivation to the iguana.

This new depth to our iguana makes the next cut more alarming, as we see a long shot with the iguana slowly moving to the left of the frame… followed by a trio of racer snakes emerging from the right of the frame. When our iguana realizes he is being hunted, he sprints (on two legs) for his life. Now, the sudden sound of a harsh drumbeat and a high-tempo, high-intensity soundtrack add to the skyrocketing tension.

Establishing shots show snakes pouring from every crack in the black, sharp rocks that line the micro-landscape, and they even capture the small form of our iguana leaping up rocks to escape his slithering predators. In a matter of seconds, the establishing shots continuously characterize both the iguana as small and precious—the “underdog” of our story—and the landscape as menacing and unknowable, with either total silence and deceptive solitude, or distressing music and swarms of snakes emerging out of hiding.

In the end, this particular marine iguana makes it out alive, according to Planet Earth II’s story. We see a victorious close-up of our iguana atop a rock, and a reverse long shot of several snakes slithering on the gravel below. The threat is vanquished for our first marine iguana.

Now that we have seen what editing can do for a short and simple animal narrative, we can look at the more famous chase between one marine iguana and a mass of racer snakes, which takes place shortly after our first iguana scene in “Islands.” This two-minute section is arguably the most tense of all iguana and snake chases in the episode.

The scene begins with some very clever cuts. We see a close-up of a hatchling hiding in the sand, his wide eyes blinking—and then a reverse shot shows a close-up of several racer snakes wrapped around the unmoving body of another iguana hatchling. The cut back to our hatchling has him jerking back, as if in fear. Even if we have no way to know if the iguana was really reacting to seeing other iguanas being captured, the cut serves its purpose magnificently well. We now understand that this hatchling is watching and learning, somehow… and that it feels fear, and a desire to live.

Thus begins that spectacular chase. Our iguana pulls himself slowly out of the sand, walking backwards to keep his gaze on something. An eyeline match cut shows the snakes continuing to wrap themselves around another iguana, and our iguana moves carefully away. This lets us project onto our iguana a careful awareness of his surroundings, whether it was truly there to begin with or not.

Further cuts change our point of view. We see the iguana from the snakes’ side of things; our foreground is in focus with the bodies of slithering snakes, and behind a rock, the heads of snakes peek out to watch the moving iguana in the background. These shots further establish just how hunted the iguana is—and then, a snake lunges for him.

Here is where the soundtrack really puts in work. There is intense, thrilling string music to accompany our iguana sprinting across sand and rock, with cuts focusing on establishing continuous action as the snake lunges for the iguana. As our iguana leaps over a boulder and lands on sand, losing the snake, silence ensues. Then, one soft step of his foot upon the gravel, and strings blare out once more to a cut of several snakes’ heads perking up at the sound.

A close-up of the iguana shows him looking around. Various eyeline matches show snakes waiting for their chance at him. (Again, this is clever editing; shots of the iguana looking around could have been recorded at any time, but they were noticed and used for this perfect moment of suspense in the chase storyline.) The soundtrack is slow and suspenseful, using an ambient noise to create tension during this downtime. It is akin to what a horror film soundtrack may sound like: David Attenborough tells us in this moment that, if the hatchling can keep its nerve and stay still, it can remain undetected from the circling snake—a classic hiding-from-the-monster scenario.

But as the snake slithers over the iguana, the latter knows it has to run. It sprints off to the sound of fast, heavy-hitting music, and several long takes follow the iguana’s sprint towards the shore, showing off with remarkable horror the myriad of snakes that emerge from the landscape to add themselves to the chase. This island is characterized as a place of trials for our iguana, and the coastline with his community as the light at the end of the tunnel. It is both literally and figuratively true that our iguana hopes to ascend, as safety lies in the top of the rocks by the shore.

As the chase comes to a climactic end, sound continues to put in work—perhaps even more work than the cutting itself. The iguana runs into the jaws of several snakes, and as silence ensues, it seems all is lost. But quietly, the iguana shakes his way out of the constrictions, and continues sprinting to the sound of a full orchestra behind him.

As the camera cuts close to the iguana and views his journey from a low-angle point of view up a wall of black rocks, we see snakes lunging for him and falling against the stone, unsuccessful in their hunt. The slow-mo applied to these cuts ups the ante even further. The soundtrack reaches a tense climax with the visuals, and the two elements work together to create an intense and distressing narrative. The resolution comes with relieving silence once our iguana joins his community by the coast, atop the large seashore rocks.

But what does it mean, really, that I can describe a nature documentary with traditional shooting and framing terms? Why does it matter that a lizard can seem like a human character in a horror movie, running from an innumerable amount of foes, and fighting against nearly impossible odds? I believe that the power of post-production, especially editing and sound design, can make any inanimate object or inhuman character feel human and relatable. With footage that could have been cobbled together from various different locations and times of day, editors of Planet Earth II excelled at creating a coherent, tense narrative with a notable arc of action and resolution using merely framing, shot relationships, and relevant soundtracks. Thanks to human films and their soundtracks, we recognize the cues to feel or project when certain cuts and sounds come to our senses; Planet Earth II was able to take advantage of our inherent reads on these cuts and use them to create a brilliant narrative based on non-human creatures.

The too long; didn’t read of this article may certainly be this: given the correct sound design and cutting, any animal can be personified and humanly relatable; any storyline can be projected upon any creature or object with the right techniques. If there’s a will, there’s a way, thanks to the magic of post-production.

Works cited in this text:

“Islands.” Planet Earth II. BBC Earth. November 6, 2016. Netflix; Television. 20:43 - 26:25.

To Be or Not To Be: The Question of What to Depict in Documentary Film (Mireille)

Documentary filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha has repeatedly suggested that the documentary film should encompass the practice that “what [one] sees is life looking at [them].” This belief, which is shared by other documentary filmmakers, stresses that the documentary film should serve only as observer, capturing solely what the camera lens reveals without any manipulation. Furthermore, neither the film director nor the audience should “impose meaning on every sign [in a film].”

The intent of David and Albert Maysles’ documentary Grey Gardens (1975) is to capture the raw, unedited elements of what is taking place in front of the camera without offering any additional auteurian input. As such, it respects the parameters that Trinh Minh-ha sets forth. In contrast, although Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Leviathan (2012) also falls within the genre of documentary film, Castaing-Taylor approaches the subject with preconception. Although he allows the camera to capture all that which is perceivable at the location, he does utilize cinematography and editing to distort what has been captured, ultimately creating what can almost be described as a dystopic reality.  

The Maysles brothers crafted Grey Gardens in the style of cinéma vérité; where they wanted the only witness to the action to be the camera. They allow the actions within the Bouvier Beale household to depict the everyday lifestyle and mentality of Edie and her mother Edith, which unfold as they simply record the unedited and unhindered experience. This determination to be faithful only to what is occurring in front of the camera is exemplified in one scene that captures Edie Bouvier Beale’s unedited dancing around the house. The depiction of the decrepit household and Edie’s bizarre behavior create a dystopic moment that arguably pushes the audience to stray away from the experience of “pure” documentary practice and cinéma vérité. Nonetheless, if this action is one that Edie would do even when there is no camera present, then it can only be a study in truth or “vérité”. The fixation to stay “true” to documentary is further noted when the directors capture a moment when both Edie and Edith are arguing. Though it is obvious that the two women do not want to be recorded, the Maysles brothers nevertheless continue filming. In this way, the film fulfills Trinh Minh-ha’s requisites for documentary film that every element is simply captured to create a film without a particular agenda, but one that is even unwilling to edit in response to the subject, and which would otherwise unintentionally make the content false.

In contrast to Grey Gardens stands anthropologist and filmmaker Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s Leviathan. Similar to Grey Gardens, Castaing-Taylor’s film unobtrusively and continually films what is occurring at his location, in this case a commercial fishing boat at sea. The long takes and lengthy sequences that linger on the details of the location are not unlike the cinematography in Grey Gardens; however, the similarity ends there. Castaing-Taylor chooses a filming approach that when paired with his chaotic and disorienting sound design at times confounds the audience. For the first several minutes of the film, it is not clear what is being pictured or what is occurring. Castaing-Taylor shows a collection of abstract images that do not immediately seem to portray anything that is pertinent to the subject of the film, but creates the sense of a removed and dystopic reality. It then becomes slowly apparent to the audience that the filmmaker is on some sort of marine vessel. In this way, this film is different from Grey Gardens as Leviathan offers a swayed perspective. It is apparent that the camera is being utilized to promote the idea that there is someone filming and observing, and that a particular audience is must be present. In fact, the audience seems to be behind the eyes of the observer, lending its unique perception and perspective. In this way, though the film seems to be capturing what is occurring at the location, the personification of the camera wreaks havoc on perception and adds an agenda to the film that arguably breaks the conventions of documentary filmmaking.

The comparison between Grey Gardens and Leviathan begs the question of whether or not it is ever possible for a filmmaker not to impose some sort of auteurian input when depicting a particular subject in a documentary film even when he or she includes every detail of the location and the subject. On one hand, decisions can be made that ignore the will of the subject of the film that ultimately lends a feeling of violation. On the other hand, the film maker can open up the content to allow for personal perspective to shape what is being shown.  What is clear is that in either case, it could be argued that each of these documentary films has, nevertheless, adhered to Trinh Minh-ha’s stipulations with respect to documentary film making. That is, each depicts images that are presented without the filmmaker himself imposing meaning or deducting context. Rather, the images are presented for the audience to perceive as rudimentary elements that they have to reconstruct for meaning without judgment. The means are different, but the ends can be said to be same. To be present in a location after a filmmaker has provided the details of the context as in Grey Gardens might be considered easier; however, it is still possible to recreate the context of a location even when all the details of the context seem not to be visually present as in Leviathan.

What is HOUSE (and house music)? (Vanessa)

This web series would not be possible without my parents, who have always raised me and my siblings to love and respect music both as solace and as art.

My dad is a Navy man, which resulted in me living in eight states and attending a combined total of seven elementary, middle, and high schools before I attended college. The things that were stable in my childhood as a result: family road trips and discussions about music, a deep love for my parents and siblings, and a fascination with how people interact with the world around them.

HOUSE, in particular, comes from the stories of my dad. My parents attended undergrad and met at the University of Illinois at Chicago during the late 80s and early 90s. The Chicago house music scene has its roots in the early and mid-80s as radio personalities and club DJs mixed elements of disco, electro-pop, synthesizers and drum machines (such as the Roland TR-808, the Korg Poly-61 synthesizer, and the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer) and eventually hip-hop to create new sounds that were danceable and innovative. Thus, came the emergence of house music. By the time my parents would arrive in Chicago, house music had expanded to an international audience, included several sub-genres, and became a unique community with a plethora of stories about who exactly made up various house music scenes.

Never one to shy from a good story, my dad would both play house music and tell me stories of what it was like to witness the house scene as a young person living in Chicago during the late-80s. And from that, the inspiration for HOUSE was born as I wondered “what must it have been like to be immersed in something that sounds so vibrant?” and “what must have it felt like to create something like house music?”

If you are a beginner to the world of house music or even to the realm of film production (especially documentary film production), there are three things that I think are important to know for a better grasp on both of these worlds: (1) house music and film production are all about community and being supported by a community, (2) house music and film production are all about passion (for others, music, movies, art, etc.), and (3) house music and film production are all about expression.

Film and house music are both blends of other mediums from which a certain “language” has emerged. At least in my experience, the language of video media (film especially) and of house music is reliant on emotion and experience. With this in mind, I like to think that a documentary web-series about house music, and documentary storytelling of all kinds, is some sort of weird blend of the subjective and objective. You capture someone’s truth while acknowledging that yes, “truth” itself is sometimes informed by emotion, experience, and expression. What is a good story, really, aside from someone communicating what it means to embody an identity, be part of a community, or simply exist as someone experiencing the strangeness that is life?

HOUSE at its simplest, is a story of community and connection within the house music fan bases in Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, told through the voices of fans and creators alike. It goes through all three cities and features interviews with those who consider themselves “house heads” or part of the house music community. HOUSE explores how a genre of music can be a sound and a feeling.

Just as importantly, HOUSE’s production is also a story of community and connection between people who love storytelling. Those people have ranged from my dad and my professors who have supported me and helped me create this project (shout outs especially to Meredith Ward, Matt Porterfield, and Lawrence Jackson!!!) to my friends and fellow students who have been a part of the production team, individuals who have been interviewed (and people who have offered tremendous amounts of help in pursuing people to interview), and everyone else who got roped into this ride. One of my friends (another film major) and I constantly joke about how any sort of film/tv/web-series/visual media effort is really just a massive group project. BECAUSE IT IS! And hopefully, to anyone reading this, you’ll get to see that through this blog!

Picture from Chosen Few Picnic and Festival, July 2018 (where we shot part of the Chicago episode!)

Next time: “Casting" a Documentary, Producing and Logistics, and Directing

Until then, some house music:

In The Beginning (There Was Jack)

Move Your Body

Hot Stuff (Ralphi Rosario And Erick Ibiza 2018 Rework)

 

The Camera in Film: Active Persona or Passive Observer? (Mireille)

What is it about the filmic apparatus that entices us? And what is the camera’s role in the depiction of a reality that often spawns from a single mind, but then is manipulated by many? In some films the camera simply is an observer of the action, but in others it seems to have its own personal agenda. For example, in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) the camera takes on the persona of both tool and protagonist. In contrast, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) the camera distances itself from the chaos that surrounds it and simply observes. Whether the camera should be a potent machine that conceives images that should always alter the reality it tries to capture, or if it is simply “just capturing” what is occurring on the other side, it is, nevertheless, the job of the film to transport us into the reality created by its auteur.

French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry argues that with respect to film, the camera as an apparatus and instrument actually produces specific ideological effects. Baudry suggests that since film is simply a series of still images that have minute differences, the projection of these images during a movie creates a whole new experience, an epiphenomenon of sorts, which the still images alone are incapable of producing without the machine. This idea is consistent with Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s approach, which he called “cine-eye” (kino pravda). Vertov believed that the camera is able to capture information beyond what the human eye can. Rather than using the camera to attempt to mimic reality, Vertov’s “cine-eye” creates a new perception that the audience would not be privy to without the aid of the apparatus. In his Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov intentionally manipulates the film such that the camera and what it is capable of portraying, rather than the story, is the most important and relevant feature of the film.

The camera is surrealistically large, and Vertov creates a superimposition in which he, as the camera operator, is shown standing on top of the camera. In this way, Vertov exaggerates the supernatural ability of the camera to capture much more than what is simply observable. Although in his film Vertov depicts common city life and the banal activities that unfold within it, he pays particular attention to geometry and composition such that every element in the mise-en-scène of a particular shot contributes to the unworldly feel of the film. For example, in the portrayal of laborers working in a mine/factory, Vertov uses high contrast lighting to show the workers completely cloaked in black shadows and almost “swallowed” by the harsh and darkened horizontal and vertical lines that compose the frame. Then, Vertov cuts to a shot where the audience can see someone with an actual camera filming the scenario, and at this point, the faces of the workers and details of the scene become obvious. In this way, Vertov shows us that the camera can capture events that are occurring in a given reality, but also that the camera itself has individualism and power that render it capable of manipulating reality and creating a “new dimension” in the film.

In contrast, Hitchcock prefers that the camera simply observe. One could argue that this is virtually impossible due to the effect of auteurism, which consciously or subconsciously impacts the making of a film even if only minimally. However, in Rear Window, Hitchcock attempts simply to “unmask” the reality that is taking place in front of the camera. Normally, this type of camera use is mainly reserved for documentary films; however, in the case of Rear Window Hitchcock intends to convey that the camera is removed from the action and need not interfere with what is occurring between the characters.

Throughout Rear Window, Hitchcock utilizes static extreme long and wide shots, resting on the action for lengthy takes at a time. The characters present in the film also never truly leave their filmic space, and are “captured” only when the camera “comes” to their location and does not interfere or follow any other action that may be happening when off camera. Additionally, Hitchcock utilizes geometry to emphasize the separation of the characters in the film, allowing the audience to peer into the individual realities without any heavy handed direction or influence from other characters or even the director. Slow and smooth pans between the windows of the apartment complex in which the film takes place create a voyeuristic perspective not only for the main character Jeff, in fact the camera is primarily present in his apartment, but also for the spectator. Hitchcock’s use of geometry also limits what the spectator can see, and as a result, influences the viewing experience of the audience. This begs the question of whether the camera is simply capturing the drama that occurs in the secluded apartment complex as an impartial observer or if there is some inevitable auteurism behind the lens.

Though it may not be the job of the audience to understand completely how images in a film are created or what the camera’s intentions are in a particular film, the fascination behind the “magic” that a camera can capture often has the power to push an audience’s perceptions and awareness. This power comes from an amalgamation of technology, technique, and auteurism. Whether or not, and how much, a camera influences the reality it tries to capture is a matter of opinion. However, it is less a matter of opinion that every film has the potential to influence other films, other art forms, and even personal lives.

 

Timing Is Everything: Creating The Real and Imagined Timescapes in Film (Mireille)

The passage of time for a character either to portray a “coming of age” or simply to recount the events of a life is a recurrent theme in many films. Unless the piece is a documentary that intentionally depicts the life of a single individual over time, such films most often use will cast actors of different ages to show the passage of time as a character matures. The exception to the rule is Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), a feature length fictional film which uses the same actors over a twelve year span. Boyhood is unique in its manipulation of cinematic time. It is the only fictional film, which by virtue of using the same actors over an extended period of time, seamlessly meshes together the changes that the characters undergo as part of the script with the physical and emotional changes that the actors endure as a result of change in age and maturity.  

Though Boyhood follows the lives of all of the members of a dysfunctional family it focuses specifically on Mason Jr., the main character. As such, the film follows Mason Jr. from the time he is in elementary school until he starts college. The strength of Boyhood lies in its ability to capture the authenticity of the cultural trends of each of the moments in time in which the film is being shot without forfeiting continuity. The end result is that Boyhood proceeds linearly and seamlessly. Despite the dramatic changes in Mason Jr.’s appearance as well as that of those around him, there are no moments of hesitation, leaps of faith or incongruence. Rather than specifically indicating a change or switch in time, in this film long periods are condensed into fragments which can sometimes take the viewer by surprise. This approach to the depiction of time gives the film an almost mundane and banal feeling. The passing of time in Boyhood captures the normalcy and individual moments of the film's fictional family without a lot of emphasis and interjection from Linklater or even the characters.

Unlike in Boyhood in which the lives of the characters continue to play out regardless of the outcome and the film persists from year to year, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010) takes the five day experience of a single character and transforms it into an agonizing ninety minute film that provides no respite from anxiety for the audience. In 127 Hours, Boyle recounts the true story of Aron Ralston, a hiker who becomes stranded alone in a canyon after a boulder falls on top of him and traps his arm. Ralston’s suffering in the film is portrayed as a “neo-documentary” as he is able to record his ordeal due to the fact that he had a camera with him during his accident, creating a video diary as events unfolded in real time. In fact, the use of the camera in both films exacerbates the sense of time being manipulated. Although the long shots in Boyhood give the feeling that the camera is acting as an observer over stretches of time, in 127 Hours the camera truly observes Ralston’s attempt to free himself from his situation, and at times is also very intimate. The moments of re-enacted actual footage from Ralston’s personal camera are interspersed with flashbacks of his past memories, which have a hallucinatory feel and give the film a sense of time warping. 

Though Boyhood was shot in segments over a long period of time and is a fictional film, it is still able to provide a feeling of “real time” and authentic setting without so much as a hint of a lack of continuity. On the other hand 127 Hours, which is a true story that by virtue of relying on video documentation must be continuous, still manages to warp time and detach the audience from the “realistic” perception of time. This innovation and genius of manipulation of time in Boyhood, 127 Hours, and many other films rests firmly in the ability to have the audience feel its passage, real or imagined, without lulling us into boredom or disbelief.  

 

On the Beach at Night Alone: Are We Spectators or Participators? (Jin)

Hong Sang-soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone is strangely aloof and just as strangely piercing. At first glance, it is hard to grasp why the film strikes such an emotional chord; the story is clean and simple, lingering on scene after scene of leisurely smoking, drinking coffee, and clinking soju shot glasses. However, with each alcohol-heavy conversation, a strong poeticism takes shape that encapsulates more than plain loneliness.

The film explores the emotional aftermath of a forgotten love affair between an actress and a film director. The main character, the actress, speaks in a peculiarly straightforward manner, to the extent in which her words waver between poetic and sparse. The film, despite being executed in a similarly straightforward manner, also wavers between dream and reality, a tasteful performance and improvised outbursts. When examining the film background, the lack of clarity is understandable. The film is a metaphor for a real love affair that had occurred between Kim Min-hee, who plays the actress protagonist Young-hee, and the already married director of the film, Hong Sang-soo. The film was released shortly after their infamous scandal, and just as the film’s stylistic choices mingle the narrative and real fact, Young-hee seems to push the boundary between scripted acting and real revelation.

 

Director Hong Sang-soo with actress Kim Min-hee

To the South Korean audience, who violently condemned the adulterous love, the underlying question was glaring: how will Kim Min-hee and Hong Sang-soo justify their relationship? The film, surprisingly, leaves room for interpretation. It is far from being a gimmicky allegory or desperate plea for public sympathy. Instead, it is reminiscent of the primitive driving force behind all cinema: the expression of universal emotions. Cinema, at its core, is both an imitation of the real life and an imposed reduction of reality into something more understandable. By masking unavoidably real people in a metaphysical, semi-fictional setting, the film awakens the audience’s awareness of this intention.

The film invites the audience to become witnesses of an objective documentation of human emotion. Conspicuous zoom shots are a constant reminder that the actors are real human subjects shot on camera, and the blunt dialogue erects a barrier just thick enough to cast a slight emotional distance between the viewer and the film. We are obliged to take a step back and become observers, or perhaps judges, of a quiet cinematic argument. We have the warm satisfaction of having the power to clearly examine the whole situation; we can easily read the emotional context and motives behind the characters’ words and actions, whether it be repeatedly claiming that someone looks older than his age or hurriedly pouring another shot of soju.

Just as we are getting comfortable in this position of power, however, Hong Sang-soo throws in shockingly direct verbal confrontations between the protagonist and other characters. A drunk Young-hee lashes out, violently spitting words across the dining table at her equally drunk accompaniment, declaring, “You can’t love! You are not capable of love and you do not deserve to be loved!” With her outburst, we are abruptly dragged into the heat of the moment and forced to reckon with the full force of unbridled emotion. We are no longer spectators but participants guilty of playing the same messy game of love.

Overall, the film's quiet revelation of human thought suggests a sort of beauty born from conditional ignorance. We are beautiful because we are unaware; despite how the world may seem frightfully simple, we are hopelessly trapped in our inward distresses. It is only when this inner turmoil becomes mute and when one becomes a distant observer, that one is able to then notice a hushed poeticism hiding in daily conversations and actions. Through film, Hong Sang-soo grants us this privilege of lingering on others’ suffering as though we do not suffer from our own. We are, very briefly, gods.

The Third Eye View of Avant-Garde Cinema (Mireille)

For a while now, and especially this summer, I have noticed a marked paucity of more conceptually and cinematographically intricate films. Though a smattering of movies released within the last couple of years managed to break the “typical” mold of strict continuity and predictable plots frequently evident in the traditional blockbuster, all too often new releases and their audiences are satisfied with repetitive content that is frequently vapid. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that production is most often guided by market consumption, mass appeal and economics, but I still wish that some of the more artistic and experimental films would gain more attention and possibly spark a greater interest and openness in the general population. The reason for this is that avant-garde films provide heaps of fodder for contemplation. It’s true that experimental films may sometimes defy logic in their approach to storylines or seem a little over-the-top when it comes to the cinematography, but they almost always stay with you for hours or maybe days, leaving you to contemplate for a long while on the visual experience you have just had.

Two short films that are wonderful little introductions to the world of experimental and surrealistic film are Bruce Baillie’s film Here I Am (1962) and Ben Rivers’ Ah, Liberty (2008). Both weave together the interplay between innocence, environment and identity through the eyes of children. Although each film approaches this theme with very different narratives and subject matter, in both the eerie feel and otherworldly mood is sublimely conveyed through shot composition, framing and use of sound.

Baillie’s Here I Am opens with a series of unsteady hand held shots of the tree line and horizon in a non-descript neighborhood. The presence of a distorting fog as well as the contrast between the crispness and dullness of the elements in the frame create a heightened sense of tension and anxiety. Baillie also uses a high frequency ring in this opening sequence that only adds to a growing sensation of foreboding and insecurity. In fact, you start to feel that you are entering a world that represents a separate reality. Equally discomfiting is that Baillie has yet to introduce any human element – until suddenly the camera becomes extremely personal. It literally comes face to face with a little girl on a swing. The camera allows the audience to experience the movement of the child on the swing, lulling it into a sense of peacefulness. Without warning the movement becomes extremely disorienting, and the audience catches glimpses of the child grimacing. At this point the sound has also transitioned from the eerie high frequency pitch sound to completely diegetic sound that pulls the audience into the scene. And then, Baillie forcibly shifts the audience from the emotionally laden moment by cutting to a static shot of the little girl continuing to swing. This time, however, the camera is removed from her immediate personal space. The swing and the little girl are confined to the left hand third of the frame. This change in shot removes the immediacy of the little girl as well as the detail and the emotion present in her face and replaces it with a view of her as simply another element in the frame. Now, the audience must passively accept what is happening in the environment, at once taking in the whole, but also acknowledging the restriction and oppression of the child. Welcome - you have now entered the world of avant-garde film where intensity is not merely a visceral sensation, but one in which you are transported by the camera to look at the world in a different way. The camera now functions as a “third eye” that allows you to see into the psychological makeup of the different “personas” it thrusts in front of you.  

Although Ben Rivers’ Ah, Liberty also begins with a series of shots that display only natural elements and no human subjects, Rivers shoots his beginning sequence with a static camera. His focus is on the intensity and grandeur of the natural world. Rivers chooses simply to capture any motion within the frame, while leaving the camera itself as a still component of the shot. As the film progresses, Rivers begin to incorporate the human subject, and like in Baillie’s film, these are children. However, Rivers chooses to depict children in action, rather than focusing only on facial expressions. Nonetheless, Rivers does incorporate the use of visages. In his film the children put on elaborate masks, which allow them to metamorphose into components of incredibly ornate and complex frames. By the end of the film, the children’s identities have been effaced. They simply become objects among other objects within the shots. In other words, the children have been transformed from protagonists to small informalities present in the vast landscape that Rivers depicts throughout the film. In this way, Rivers has used the camera to erase the individuality of his subjects. Rivers wants the audience to witness the nearly silent swallowing of the insignificance of the individual against the larger world.

Through their films both Baillie and Rivers attempt to convey their intent of effacing the individual. However, whereas Baillie’s cinematographic techniques pull and push us through the convulsive psyche of an innocent child by using camera movement and artificial sound, Rivers silently allows us to bear witness to the enormity of the world where the child is but one small element. Baillie erases identity by physically moving the focus away from his subject; Rivers confounds his subjects within a landscape. In very different ways, both have successfully downplayed the importance of individual identity. Both have left you questioning what your place in the world might be. So, maybe next time you have to watch some experimental work, remember that what might at first glance seem like randomly assorted artistic shots, may actually be beckoning to look at things through a new third eye.

 

Fake News: The Truman Show and Media (Tori)

When I logged into my Facebook account yesterday, I was greeted by an alert describing a new experiment on the popular social networking site.  This trial will introduce banners teaching Facebook users how to “spot fake news” given the recent controversies regarding the accuracy of news sources.  Also, users will be given the opportunity to mark unreliable news stories as “disputed.”  The media plays an influential role in our world today—we are constantly bombarded with news everywhere we look.  I think it’s good that Facebook and other sites like Google, which has recently unveiled plans for a similar experiment, are taking an active stance in attempting to improve the way users consume media.  But is that enough?  Can we be certain that what we know is true?  To tackle these questions, I turned to one of my favorite movies, Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. 

The Truman Show tells the story of a TV show starring a man named Truman Burbank.  The twist is that everybody knows the show is a TV show except for Truman himself.  The town Truman lives in, Seahaven Island, was created just for him.  His friends and family are all actors.  Truman was born on camera and has gone his entire life believing that this constructed studio world is all there is—it’s all he has ever known.  After a couple of things go wrong on the show (a studio light falls from the sky, Truman hears cues being given as he drives down the street, and Truman sees extras waiting in a green room) Truman begins to question everything he has ever been told.  In the end, Truman finally discovers the truth—or, rather, falsity—of his situation. 

This type of show is very appealing to viewers both within the film and in our world.  Shows like The Bachelor, The Real Housewives, Keeping Up with the Kardashians are some of the most widely watched and talked about shows on television.  While billed as “reality” shows, these shows are calculated to a high degree to ensure engaging drama and high ratings.  Within the film, viewers also cannot get enough.  A man is consistently shown watching Truman in his bathtub; it seems his entire life revolves around the 24/7 footage of Truman’s life.  We even see waitresses watching the show at a Truman bar, in which people can go watch the footage and buy Truman merchandise.  So why are these types of shows so appealing?  Marlon, Truman’s best friend on the show, explains about the show: “It’s all true.  It’s all real.  Nothing you see on this show is fake.  It’s merely controlled.” It seems this is exactly why it’s so appealing.  Though it’s controlled, people feel that the show contains a degree of realism due to Truman himself.  But is that a legitimate distinction to make?  Can something “controlled” be real?  Isn’t calculation and falsity the same thing? 

I am fascinated by the complicated concept of truth, and perhaps that’s why I find myself watching this movie over and over again.  How can we ever be sure what we’re being told is accurate?  Christof, the creator of the television show, is asked in an interview at one point in the film why it took Truman so long to begin questioning his life.  Christof responds: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”  Though this clearly applies to Truman, who accepted the reality of his world for thirty years, this also applies to each and every one of us on a smaller scale.  We are endlessly bombarded with facts and information from varying sources.  If you aren’t willing to scrutinize—to dig deep and work hard until you can determine what is true and what is not—you can really be led to believe anything.

It seems that this scrutiny is exactly what Facebook and Google are trying to do with these new tools.  But my question is…what if that isn’t enough?  The Truman Show has a happy ending.  Truman is committed to figuring out what is going on and doesn’t give in until he has discovered the truth.  With this ending, the film seems to say that the media is inherently calculated and misleading, but its deceptiveness is not impossible to overcome.  The truth is out there waiting to be uncovered.  However, I think this might be an old-fashioned, idealistic hope in today’s society – a society in which technology is further integrated into our lives every day, and thus falsities become easier and easier to disseminate.  The perpetration of inaccurate information is more concerning than ever.  Is it possible to escape The Truman Show in 2017?

My first time with "The Bachelor" (Madison)

April is the month for trickery; national poetry month; and, according to Eliot, the cruelest month. It has always seemed a mistake, then, that Valentine’s Day doesn’t fall during these first few weeks of spring; April feels designed for love and love’s vicissitudes. Sudden storms thunder in the morning, then peter out in time for the birds to chitter at the receding sun by dinnertime. Heavy coats are tucked into storage, then brought back out again as a wintry afternoon inserts itself in a week of 60-degree weather. Cherry trees blossom so suddenly that, in a blink, whole streets are covered in a flowery snow.  

And now that I’m in my twenties, I’m even more aware of spring’s potential for romance. My happily-coupled friends spend evenings discussing their post-graduation plans to buy houses and host engagement parties. Even the advertisers on my podcasts seem in the mood for love; a chipper woman from Match.com implores me to try the site that “leads to the most second dates!”

For the terminally single, the season of the birds and the bees can start to lose its luster quickly. A truly cynical girl might, on a warm, weekday evening, even find herself turning to the truly absurd for comfort: the latest season of The Bachelor. This show is bafflingly popular among my female friends, especially the younger ones, but I myself had never seen it until I began writing this blog post.

It is hard to escape the cultural zeitgeist that is The Bachelor, it’s true; I’ve watched a close cousin of the show, I Wanna Marry Harry, which saw twenty-odd American women competing for the heart of a Prince Harry look-alike (the fact that their suitor was not actual royalty was hidden from them until the final episode), and have partaken in the parody series Burning Love. Lately, as a salvo to the show itself, I started watching Unreal, a Lifetime series (I know, but stay with me) about the dramatic lives of the producers of a Bachelor-type program.  

It feels difficult to write anything truly novel about this sort of show; everyone knows that the world of reality TV is highly contrived, oversexed, and nakedly misogynistic (or, at the very least, post-feminist, relying as it does on a divorce of individual narrative from social context). There are hundreds of blogs poking fun at the poor suckers who really think they can find true love on cable. But as I watched my first episode of The Bachelor (Nick flew one of his darlings to Finland, first class), I didn’t want to laugh. Scoff, sure—the bachelor’s self-assured smile, his stilted conversations (one romantic dinner was filled with chatter about whether or not an iron or a steamer is better for getting wrinkles out of clothes), and the very fact of his having dated up to 29 women at a single time, made the whole premise difficult to take seriously.

But I didn’t find the episode hilarious. The women all seemed so sincere, so ready to love a near stranger; an invisible hand behind the camera was clearly prompting them to confess deep feelings to their suitor, and several tearfully admitted to having fallen in love with the scruffy-but-personable Nick. Watching them I felt, uncomfortably, that I understood where they were coming from. After all, I’m trying to date, and have an intimate knowledge of how truly terrible it is (a memorable one-liner from the Tinder-sphere: “You want to be my cardio this evening? It’s cutting season.”) If you’re going to couple-up in the modern age, why not get a few months’ vacation in a mansion as well?

And, though the environment is obviously staged for the screen, the fairy-tale effect is never quite punctured; despite myself, the sweeping orchestral score and the lights of cabin windows glittering on a fjord made me quickly invested in the (thin) narrative (the Southern belle has never had an orgasm, and can’t figure out how to tell her beau). It is easy to believe that the pair are sharing an intimate exchange over dinner when one is distracted by candlelight, by the stylish fair-isle sweaters, and impeccable makeup.

This is partly what drove me to watch Unreal; one always suspects that the contestants’ every move is choreographed to maximize interest, that the editing is, at best, misleading and at worst malicious, and that the results are predetermined, and watching these suspicions unfold in a Lifetime drama is undoubtedly satisfying. One gets to feel not only that they were too clever to have been duped by reality TV, but also that they are no longer complicit in reality TV’s bullying and, therefore, can indulge in the drama without doing harm to any real people.

And it’s true, Unreal is as dramatic as any afternoon soap; 6 episodes in and the main character has already been blackmailed, her boss has nearly died of a heart attack, a contestant was outed on national TV, and a girl has jumped off of the roof. Watching the self-serving behind-the-scenes world of reality TV production is entertaining, if slightly nausea-inducing. But, still, it can’t quite compare to what I felt watching the real deal.  

Even with the glitz and the glamour attendant to The Bachelor, there is something searingly genuine about it. If the impulse to display one’s love life to an audience of millions is foreign to me, if the contestants seem chillingly like American standards of beauty personified, if the much-discussed “Fantasy Suite” smacks a bit of coercive sex, the overwhelming desire to be close to another person (any person, even a person who wears too many turtlenecks and makes you wait in the cold while he sips whiskey with the host) is so… normal. It is so much like the April afternoons I spend here, in Baltimore, downloading a dating app for the fourth time (even though I swore after I deleted it last time that I was done for good), that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at the people on my screen. In this season of love, I’m not that unlike them. The Bachelor might have won itself another fan.

The Line Between Fiction and Reality Was Overrated Anyway (Treva)

I have discovered a new favorite niche genre: paranormal mockumentary. Or whatever Mermaids: The Body Found can be defined as. Because this film, aired on Animal Planet in May 2012 and The Discovery Channel three weeks later, isn’t funny per se. There is no joke, no “mock” in sight. All 90 minutes are presented as an entirely straightforward, scientifically factual documentary on how mermaids exist—having branched off from human evolution some seven million years ago—and the US Navy is engaged in a vast conspiracy to conceal this from the public so they can continue testing SONAR weapons in the ocean.

I could make this up if I tried, which is why Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel should really hire me to write and direct a similar film on dragons—which they’ve made before, in Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real, but that took the coward’s way out and admitted that dragons do not, in fact, exist today. Mermaids: The Body Found does not for a moment admit to being fiction. In fact, it over and over includes just enough factual data to leave the viewer wondering, just briefly, “could this be real?”

Because there really has been debate about the Navy testing SONAR weapons and how those may or may not have a harmful affect on marine mammals. The “aquatic ape” hypothesis has been proposed twice, independently, in 1942 and 1960. Christopher Columbus really did claim to have seen mermaids on his way to the “New World”, there really are people in Brazil who partner with dolphins to fish, and there really is a cave in Egypt, in the desert by what used to be a shore, with primitive paintings of what anthropologists think are humans swimming.

Mind you, the people in the paintings don’t have tails, as Mermaids depicts. And historians are fairly sure Columbus saw manatees—he certainly didn’t describe them as having “pale, speckled bellies, dark blue backs, and paddle-shaped tails.” There was never a mass whale beaching in Washington in April 2004, and the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has been discredited and disproved every time it’s been suggested.

Yet the film stands in fascinating contrast to something like What We Do in the Shadows, a 2014 mockumentary in which, per the explanation provided in text at the start, “each crew member wore a crucifix and was granted protection by the subjects of the film.” Yes, that’s right: it followed vampires around in their nightly lives.

In Wellington, New Zealand.

What We Do in the Shadows has all the mock. It parodies the sort of documentary that explores subcultures by presenting a subculture that obviously does not exist. It makes fun of vampires (and werewolves, zombies, witches…) by continuously playing with the incongruity between the darkness, terror, and perhaps even erotic intrigue the audience is led to expect from legends like Dracula and Nosferatu and the mundane details of living in a flat in Wellington, NZ. They bicker over the chore roster. Viago (Taika Waititi) puts down towels before he kills people, so the blood doesn’t get everywhere. And, my favorite (SPOILERS AHEAD): the romantic intrigue does enter with the Dracula-like character of Vladislav (Jemaine Clement), who once tyrannically ruled a small chunk of Eastern Europe before he was defeated in epic battle by his arch-nemesis “the Beast.” In classic documentary style, manuscripts and artwork of the battle are shown while Vladislav narrates his tragic story.

…Only for it to later be revealed that “the Beast” is his name for his ex-girlfriend, Pauline, who refers to him as “Asshole.”

Mermaids, however, has none of that. Even one of the most potentially incongruous moments, the one and only time a live mermaid appears onscreen in the modern day (rather than in the openly CGI segments set millions of years in the past) is absolutely serious. In Shadows, the head-height, handheld camera removes a great deal of grandeur from the occasional fights—as does the fact that the vampires look anything but elegant when they take to the air or hiss at each other like angry cats. It’s amateurish and ridiculous. Whereas the brief attack of two boys by a SONAR-wounded merman, shot with a shaky cameraphone from 2004, is amateur in a way that evokes true terror, not to mention unofficialism. That is, this is what the government doesn’t want you to see. The merman, too, hisses, as it lunges sideways into the narrow frame (who knows what else could be beyond the viewer’s field of vision…) But where the vampires, grown men is costumes from the 1700s and before, seem absurd, the mermaid is fierce and animalistic.

And terrified, and hurt. It’s already been established at that point that the other beached beings—whales—were literally bleeding from their ears, and had been something like physically bombarded by subsonic SONAR. They had blunt force trauma. It’s easy to see the merman’s distress as human, too. When the vampires in Shadows are humanized, they are made petty and amusing, with chore charts and ex-girlfriends—normal problems. The mermaids, on the other hand, are humanized with emotion, such as in the segment set 1.6 million years ago, in which one sacrifices himself to distract a megalodon shark away from the rest of his migrating pod. Though the voiceover calls the group of mermaids a “pod”, as if they were dolphins, rather than something more human like “clan” or “tribe”, the emotion in the merman’s eyes is as real as CGI can make it, and the music swells with piping sorrow as he awaits the megalodon’s jaws.

Yet the narration is dehumanizing, and it is the only words spoken in these part of the film in which the story of the NOAA scientists investigating mermaids in the modern day is punctuated with the same sort of flashback one would expect to see in any documentary on some animal’s evolution. The mermaids don’t speak a recognizable language, but the narrator has the same sort of deep, serious voice that always narrates nature documentaries. And we have all seen tragic nature documentaries, with death-by-predator and soaring, tragic pipes in the soundtrack. The conceit here is simply that instead of CGIing ancient mammoths or crocodiles or whatever, the teams at Animal Planet and The Discovery Channel have simulated mermaids. With just as much factual data as they would the mammoths and crocodiles.

I want more. I’m an imaginative woman; I can go along, laughing, with the conceit that there are awkward vampires living in Wellington. I’m perfectly to accept that as reality, just for fun. But it’s even better that every varyingly-accurate “fact” cited in this article was something I actually paused Mermaids: The Body Found in order to google, because I wasn’t sure whether to believe them or not. The film was entirely scientific, no magic in sight, but that only made it easier for my logic-conditioned mind to accept that the world might really be more magical than I had thought. That’s a gift.

So yes, I’d like one on dragons next, and then fairies—I know there’s a blurry photo of them somewhere from late 19^th century England or so. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that on the internet. Then maybe unicorns? Bigfoot? The Loch Ness Monster? I’m sure those already exist, but not professionally, by people actively making things up to support the theory. Yes, it might be confusing—but what’s wrong with looking up half a dozen different scientific and historical facts in an hour and a half? I learned things! And if you can’t be bothered to hit the search bar, well, the line between fiction and reality is overrated anyway

Why Can't a Documentary Win "Best Picture"? Looking to the industry’s most unappreciated genre (Ian)

ACT I: Speaking of which, what does "Best" Picture even mean?

If nobody’s said this to you yet, let me be the first to welcome you to Oscar season.  If you're a movie fan of any degree you're probably somewhat familiar with the award ceremony--theoretically, the awards represent the highest honor filmmakers and film talents can achieve in the industry. Meryl Streep has three trophies. Celebs get dressed up. They laugh. They cry. They aren’t allowed to drink alcohol. They receive lavish gift bags. Everyone leaves happy, even the losers (unless you’re Eddie Murphy, but is that guy ever happy?).

First things first: I am addicted to the Oscars.  No, really.  I stuff winners of Best Picture/Director/Actor/Actress/Screenplay (original and adapted) into my little brain.  Oh wait, you didn't win an Oscar?  You were only nominated for one?  No problem, I've probably memorized that about you, too (the Ghyllenhaals/Michelle Williams/Amy Adams/Mark Wahlberg/Julianne Moore/Annette Bening/Joaquin Pheonix/P.T. Anderson/David Fincher/need I go on?).  Seriously, memorizing these actually uses up a lot of my time, people.

At the same time, I recognize the Oscars for what they are: a self-indulgent system devised by Hollywood for Hollywood, the industry’s way of keeping the big films big, and the little films little.  Truthfully, winning an Oscar nowadays is not so much an "honor" as it is a political rat-race, with producers like the Weinstein brothers routinely dominating the competition because...well....they out-promote their adversaries, and produce films designed to win Oscars.

Okay, now let's think about that last statement for a second: how can one "design" a film to win an Oscar?  Good question.  I don't want to detract from the main purpose of the article, but it is a point worth examining, so we’ll do so quickly.  Here’s how you win an Oscar:

-Best Actor:  Are you above forty, and did you play a real-life person?  Sounds good to us.

-Best Actress: Are you hot and under forty?  Is your character struggling with mental illness?  OR, did you play a real-life inspirational female?  Sweet.

-Best Supporting Actor/Actress: Did you undergo a physical change for your role?  Are you a beloved character actor that delivered a semi-powerful dramatic performance?  Are you Christoph Waltz? Enjoy your trophy.

-In order to win Best Picture, you need to be epic in scope.  No one is quite sure what the Academy means by "epic", and indeed their definition seems to be quite fluid.  Oh, and the films should be inspirational, and preferably have happy endings.  Bonus points if it focuses on a real-life person.  Films with darker tones/blood/sex need not apply (with the occasional anomaly--No Country for Old Men, Midnight Cowboy).

Interestingly, however, if the Academy hasn't changed their preference for "Best Picture" winners, it has become more liberal in what films they'll nominate for best picture.  Increasingly, animated films are entering the "Best Picture conversation", along with films that blatantly value technical achievement over all other filmic aspects (ie Avatar and, unfortunately, the heinous Gravity).

Yet, while animation and techie films are now allowed "in the club", how many documentaries have been nominated for Best Picture, ever?  Zero.  Yup, zero.

Let's take a look at why this might be:

 

ACT II: Is it something we said?  Is it Michael Moore?

I have a semi-private list of my Top 100 films--obviously the list is inherently subjective and prone to frequent change, however the very top films tend to remain the same.  As of early 2013, however, I made a significant change to the list.  Why?  Because I saw a documentary by unknown filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing.

And it rocked my world.  It didn't just place in my top 100; it placed at #3.

Netflix now screens the film, so don’t walk, run to your streaming device and watch it.  The film is at once horrifying, entrancing, and eye-opening.  It was, without a doubt, not only one of the best films of 2013, but also the most important film I saw that year--and maybe ever.  I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but in brief: the documentary examines the government sanctioned mass murderers of supposed communists in 1960’s Indonesia, focusing in particular on the head honcho behind the killings, Anwar Congo.  Oppenheimer gives Congo and some of his fellow gangsters filmmaking equipment with which they can recreate their “heroic conquests”.  First Anwar and his groupies are nothing short of horrifying.  Then, however, as the film continues Anwar becomes shockingly human.  The film makes evil human.  The film gives evil a face.

If it were up to me, The Act of Killing wouldn't have just won “Best Documentary" (it didn’t, losing to the far less compelling Twenty Feet from Stardom), as that prize simply wouldn’t have done the film justice.  I would have give it the mother of all prizes, "Best Picture".  And yet, there was never a chance of the Academy handing their major award over to Oppenheimer’s masterpiece. This sad truth begs the question: why is the documentary viewed as an inherently “lesser” genre to fictional narratives?  I have a few thoughts:

1) People don't realize how sophisticated documentaries have become formally and stylistically.  The Act of Killing is a documentary, yet it feels like fiction because of its subject matter and, perhaps more importantly, its presentation.  Formally, Killing works like a narrative because Oppenheimer doesn’t simply sit back and observe his subjects or collect data, but rather because he intervenes with the world of his film in order to spur observation.  Scientists are interested in watching a mouse to see if he can learn the route that leads him to cheese--not so much just because the scientists like seeing the mouse run.  Perhaps that’s why the 1975 Grey Gardens also watches like a fiction more than a traditional documentary--the Maysles brothers famously and controversially interacted with their delusional subjects in order to trigger and capture some of their most disturbing behavior.  By laying the foundation for an interesting documentary without necessarily compromising the integrity of their observations, filmmakers are starting to produce documentary works that entertain as much as they inform.  Alas, people haven’t noticed this trend, because most people don't watch documentaries, because everyone still thinks that watching a documentary is like watching March of the Penguins.  

People seemed to like March of the Penguins when it was first released, but in no universe was the film cherished.  And why should it be?  It comes across like an extended Animal Planet feature, meaning its sole mission is informative in nature.  And people don't want to be "informed" when they go to the movies; movie making 101 says that audiences want to escape into the picture.  The documentary doesn't change us like fiction films can.  Now, however, with The Act of Killing, or Leviathan, documentaries are an escape.  They take us to a different world--only after the credits roll does the audience remember, either with joy or horror, that what they've just seen is real.  If anything, I think that this realization would make the content of the film more affecting than any tear-jerking narrative biopic.

2) Documentaries still advertise like...documentaries:  this one is pretty self-explanatory:  go to The Godfather’s Wikipedia page and look at the poster used as the page’s profile picture. Now do the same for The Act of Killing.  Judging purely by the films’ posters, which movie would you rather see? (Note: apologies, I am not allowed to post the pictures on CinemAddicts myself, due to university policy. Guess you’ll just have to toughen up and do this the hard way.)

If you answered that you’d rather see The Godfather, you’re right.  The posters used for The Act of Killing aren't ugly; personally, I find them aesthetically appealing.  However, the posters just...don't tell us anything about the film.  They don't provide us with any sense of tone, of narrative, or of what the audience can expect.  And, especially in this economy, people aren't going to spend $12 on a movie they know nothing about.  Meanwhile, while The Godfather's poster is minimalistic and dark, these qualities are purposeful, and give the viewer a sense of tone and atmosphere before they even see the movie.

Now type into Google Images “Jay Shaw Mondo print the act of killing” and look at the first image that comes up.  The image shows a limited edition print of an alternate poster for Killing, designed by Jay Shaw and sold by Mondo a while back.

Now THIS is a poster worthy of the film.  Just as The Godfather's poster, even with its startling minimalism, sets the tone for the film, so does Shaw's Killing print.  Sure, the bloody image of Anwar Congo’s face may alienate mothers who were considering viewing the film; but it's going to attract a WHOLE lot of other people who like crime/thriller/psychological drama films.  And trust me, that trade off is worth it.  My mom doesn't like movies much, anyways.

3) Most importantly, advertising in a way that punctuates style would have aided Oppenheimer's Killing to enter a conversation; ironically, emphasizing style over substance in the film’s promotional materials probably would’ve worked better to quickly pique interest within the population  The print has a story to show, not observations to tell.  And only when films enter conversations do they generate awards buzz--and only once buzz is generated can a film garner the attention of good ol' Oscar.

Act III: Does it matter?

Does winning Best Picture matter?  No.  Plenty of great films (Shame, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Inside Llewyn Davis, The Honeymoon Killers, even Rosemary's Baby) have been largely or completely ignored by the Academy.  But passing over some deserving fictions doesn't matter as much as passing over deserving documentaries, because every fiction genre has an audience that is going to see the film, no matter if the Academy likes it or not.  But the documentary?  Not so much.  Sure, it might win "Best Documentary", but that simply keeps it pegged as the very thing people aren’t that interested in seeing: a documentary.  In order to give the documentary a now much-deserved image boost, one must break down the barrier that documentaries are simply "documentaries", not "pictures."  Because trust me, documentaries now give us pictures that are worth consuming and loving.

His Homecoming (Abby)

As much as I’ve written about the concept of “home” through my own experience, and what this place means to me, the space seems to have pervaded the entirety of my experience this year, including an infiltration into other projects.

For three years, fellow JHU student Michael Nakan and I have been working on a documentary based in Baltimore, which has served as our home during our education here; Mike is from London and I’m from Minnesota.

Originally the project was research-heavy, focusing on the juvenile system in Baltimore and Maryland as a whole. As it developed, we met two young men with experience in the juvenile system: Vernon Crowffey and Justin Felder. The film and project shifted focus to provide insight through their personal experiences, and their stories are now at the forefront of the piece.

As we wrapped up the project this year, most of our time was spent on editing (a very long process for documentaries, especially those with observational elements), and I spent most of my time in editing with Justin, pictured above, and his family. We’ve been in contact with Justin’s mother for several years, but I was only able to meet Justin once, in July of 2013.

Justin was on house arrest when I met him, after being shuffled through the juvenile justice system for nearly a year due to fights and other conflicts he had while in detention. In the juvenile system, sentences restart with each move to a new facility. Justin’s sentence was therefore much longer than expected, and as a result, he spent his 18^th birthday, along with several holidays, in detention.

I’ve had a very close relative face the sentence of house arrest, and I know that this experience can be a strange one; you are home, but your home becomes a place of confinement, only a place of comfort in that it is not jail or detention. Facing mental health issues simultaneously, it was clear that the transition was not an easy one for Justin. Only a few months after getting his ankle bracelet removed, he was arrested as an adult and convicted of first-degree assault over an incident involving a gifted tattoo gun, and is currently serving a ten-year sentence in the Baltimore County Detention Center. He’s due out on parole later this year.

My limited experience with Justin face-to-face serves to note how briefly he’s actually been out of detention and incarceration in the past few years; it has only been a few months over the past summer, which makes me wonder about how he thinks about his own home and family. Justin is an 18 year-old incarcerated in BCDC. When I was 18 I was also away from home, but for college, halfway across the country. He and I represent two very different experiences of what it means to come home, a strange thing to consider given that Justin is a subject of our documentary; being so close in age to him, seeing him as a subject has sometimes been difficult, and I connect with his story more than I might have thought. The connection may sprout from my experience with my relative, or from an idea as abstract (yet common) as coming home. My relationship with his story brings a whole slew of other questions to the forefront, but what I can take away from the experience of making both films is that coming home is oftentimes far from smooth, a displacement, even, but one that we might long for regardless, if for no other reason than as an escape from confinement into a more comfortable form of it.  

 

Tanner '88 (Taylor)

   

 

 I’m going to assume that most of the people reading this haven’t watched or heard of Tanner ‘88. I hadn’t heard of it myself before doing research for this blog. So my goal with this post is to convince you in no uncertain terms to WATCH TANNER 88. Right now. Or as soon as possible. Or over summer vacation. Or whenever you can get your hands on a Hulu Plus account.

    Tanner ’88 is a one season political mockumentary directed by Robert Altman. First broadcast by HBO during the early stages of the 1988 U.S. presidential election, it goes on the campaign trail with former Michigan U.S. representative Jack Tanner, during his bid to secure the Democratic party’s nomination for President of the United States.

    Tanner is an unknown liberal Democrat who struggles to find a voice and make a name for himself during the early stages of the democratic primaries, until his campaign manager, T.J. Cavanaugh, uses an unscripted but passionate hotel-room speech caught on camera to produce an advertising campaign focusing on Tanner’s authenticity. After the success of the ads, which use the slogan, “For Real,” Tanner takes the lead in the polls and begins competing with two high profile, (real life) candidates: Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis.

    So what is it exactly that makes Tanner ’88 amazing? For one thing, it provides striking commentary about the artificiality of modern political campaigns, and the truly backbreaking effort involved in taking an obscure politician from low-level public figure to 1600 Penn. For another thing, it’s hilarious.

    Tanner is marketed as an honest, authentic, “what you see is what you get” candidate. His campaign slogan, “For Real,” is slapped on posters, stickers and television ads. However, viewers also get to see all of the focus groups, image consultations, and strategy work that are meant to shape him into a candidate that could actually get elected. Midway through the series, Tanner wearily says, “I feel like I’m becoming an innocent bystander in my own campaign.”

    The show also refreshingly depicts something that isn’t typically covered on television: the political campaign. This might at first seem like dull subject matter, but in the unglamorous, bus-touring world of primary elections, you really get a glimpse into the heart of politics. Because at this stage in the game, the work isn’t always fun and odds are that a candidate is not going to win. Every single campaign is a bootstrap operation and a level playing field at the beginning, with both seasoned politicos and still-green unknowns traveling all over the country, trying to get a leg up on the competition.

    Furthermore, with its faux-documentary style, Tanner 88 really gets at what it means to produce excellent political comedy and satire. A few weeks back on the blog, we discussed the satirical shortcomings of Veep. But it wasn’t until I watched Tanner ’88 that I realized exactly what Veep was missing; Tanner and Veep have many of the same absurd political foils- (image issues, groveling politicians, harebrained staffers, etc) but the verisimilitude of Tanner 88 really raises the stakes and gives the satire more bite. Jokes are the funniest when they’re making fun of real life. And Tanner 88 feels so real that it even fooled Bob Dole.

    In fact, while campaigning in New Hampshire in 1988, Republican candidate Bob Dole ran into an unfamiliar Democratic candidate who was walking around with his daughter and a camera crew. Dole did not recognize the candidate, but because there were cameras around, he greeted the man like an old friend, pretending to know him and wishing him luck before walking away. Unfortunately for Bob Dole, the unknown democratic candidate was Jack Tanner, and Dole had unwittingly earned himself a cameo on the show’s pilot episode.

     It’s this kind of near magic moment that makes Tanner feel like a modern political comedy, despite the scrunchies, pantsuits, obsessive Reagan references (and a young Joe Biden,) that would otherwise make it feel hopelessly dated. 

      Conceptually, it feels like The Office or Parks and Rec, with its guerilla documentary shooting style and deadpan commentary. And all of the political issues being made fun of in 1988 are still very relevant today. The modern election process tends to force candidates to become absurd caricatures of themselves.

       The downside of Tanner 88 is that it only ran for one season. We should have more shows depicting the saga involved with getting someone to the Oval Office. Too often we have a tendency to hide the blood, sweat, and tears that went into major accomplishments; the 110 pound starlet feigning an aversion to the gym and boasting a diet heavy in pizza.  The Dean’s List Johns Hopkins student self-consciously downplaying hours spent in the library before acing a midterm exam.

       Sometimes in life, as in presidential campaigns, you have to spend some time in the trenches in order to win the war. And if you can’t laugh at yourself while you’re doing it, well then, I think I’ve got some House of Cards episodes left on my DVR with your name on them.

 

From Homewood to CERN and Back Again: Search for the Higgs Boson in "Particle Fever" (Helen)

 

3D view of an event recorded with the CMS detector in 2012 at a proton-proton centre of mass energy of 8 TeV

 

Johns Hopkins University's very own theoretical physicist, Professor David E. Kaplan, and director Mark Levinson’s first collaborative documentary Particle Fever (2013) hit the national film circuit this past month. It is first feature length film chronicling the four major experiments of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the five-year quest for the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Although Particle Fever had a relatively slow start at the box office, this film is as much of an achievement in aesthetics as it is in documenting one of the biggest scientific events in recent history.  Assisted by such film titans as editor Walter Murch and composer Robert Miller, Levinson follows David Kaplan and his academic contemporaries through the ups and downs of the largest particle accelerator ever constructed. 

I attended the sold out debut at the Charles Theater last Sunday with the entire graduate physics department. David Kaplan also attended the screening, introducing the film to an audience composed entirely of Hopkins PhD students, and one undergraduate film major. To further my anticipatory anxiety, my only academic exposure to basic physics concepts ended sophomore year and I haven’t looked back since. While particle physics may seem a little intimidating to the average viewer, Kaplan’s scientific explanations in the film provided just the right amount of information to help me understand as well as receiving the approving nods of the more qualified audience members. Beyond that, the passion and excitement beaming from the cast of scientists involved in the LHC appeared to be contagious, as I found myself actually sitting up at the edge of my seat.

Besides recording one of the most important scientific events in my lifetime from the ground floor, Particle Fever piqued my curiosity by functioning as a human-interest piece on the top particle physicists in the world. What is perhaps more impressive, is that a group of people operating on such a high level of a subject I knew very little about were so incredibly relatable. Very early on in the film, Kaplan interviews his mentor Dr. Savas Dimopoulos, who explains his motivation behind his work in theoretical particle physics as something between art and science. He explains the process in which he chooses his next research endeavor as such; to put it simply he looks for questions that are intellectually fascinating but also reflect an artistic creativity that sets him apart from other scientists in his field. The film also follows Kaplan’s peers such as Nima Arkani-Hamed, one of the most famous particle physicists not only of his age group but also on a global scale. Levinson manages to capture the finesse and skill of Nima’s chalkboard equations in a way that resembles Leonardo da Vinci and his sketchbook to a particle physicist. My favorite character within the film however, was first year CERN post-doc student Monica Dunford. The film contained many of her own video logs as well as a variety of interviews at her work and home spanning the entire five year journey of the ATLAS project, the most publicized experiment at the LHC. As an experimental particle physicist, she explained the distinction, or really delightfully trash talked, the theoretical side of her field. Playfully begrudged, she admitted the symbiotic relationship between the dreamers and the doers, with a slight bias towards the experimental side.

In addition to inspiring an academic passion I didn’t anticipate, the film also resonated with me as human being who has admired the night sky and wondered about the vast interworkings of the universe. The crux of the film, finding the Higgs Boson, now had a much greater significance than when I originally read about it in the fall of 2012. It wasn’t just another particle discovery; the existence of the Higgs had the entire field of physics hinging on it. Everything we knew up to this point about our world and the infinite space surrounding it was supported by two basic particle theories, “Super Symmetry” and “Macroverse”. Both required the Higgs discovery to be possible, but also, data from the experiment could potentially confirm which theory was correct. The mass of the Higgs Boson particle was the deciding factor. It was projected to be around one of two masses: a lighter ~115 GeV and a heavy ~140 GeV corresponding to “Super Symmetry” and “Macroverse” theory respectively. While this is treading into esoteric territory, the simplified version is that “Super Symmetry” supported the existence of more particles that created a stable and balanced universe. “Macroverse” on the other hand, negated the possibility for the discovery of new particles and perhaps the notion that our universe is unstable and unfortunately temporary. Not only was this a dramatic climax in any ficitional sense, the fact that this was a reality was both exciting and terrifying. To summarize, space is as fascinating as it is potentially lethal and particle physics is 'much' cooler than it sounds.

 

“A Leader, Not a Politician”: Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way (Ingrid)

             This past Wednesday, the Film and Media Studies Program hosted a screening of Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way. Directed and produced by Ferraro’s own daughter, Donna Zaccaro, the documentary offers an intimate insight into the life and legacy of the first woman ever to be nominated as a vice presidential candidate. Zaccaro was among the screening’s attendees, along with Maryland senator, Barbara Mikulski, who appears in the documentary and was a close friend of Ferraro. Mikulski, a trailblazer in her own right, being the first independent Democratic woman to enter office, joined Zaccaro in a Q&A session following the screening.

            The film paints a more complete and humanizing portrait of a figure that was both idolized and misrepresented by the public and by the media. Guided by interviews of her family and childhood friends, by political affiliates and even adversaries, and by Geraldine Ferraro, herself, the documentary uncovers sides of Ferraro that stayed out of the limelight of fame and popularity.

            Ferraro, who points to her father’s early and untimely death as the impetus for her self-motivation and diligence, grew from a difficult and underprivileged childhood in New York. Her scrappy and hard-working character earned her a scholarship and success at Marymount College. She continued her academic career at Fordham Law School, where she graduated in the top ten percent of her class. After joining the D.A. office in Queens County, she went on to make a name for herself as a hardy and determined prosecutor. Ferraro’s entrance into the political scene came at a time where the female representation in Washington consisted of sixteen women in the House and only one in the Senate. I think it’s difficult for our progressive minds to fully understand the set of expectations and limitations she faced. Regardless, she quickly navigated the ranks of the House as the representative for New York, proving herself a smart and formidable presence. Before long, she caught the attention of many other leaders, including her future running mate, Walter Mondale.

            “You can do whatever you want to do. You can be whoever you want to be,” says Ferraro about her personal beliefs. Coming from anyone else, this statement would sound impractical, absurd, and delusional, but when it came out of Ferraro’s mouth, I found myself sincerely believing it. The intrigue of her story lies in the realistic realization of the American Dream. The vice-presidential nomination in 1984 did not simply fall into her lap, and it wasn’t simply symbolic. Her achievement was undeniably hard-won and wholly well-deserved.

            Ferraro took a fresh approach to feminism—one that traded confrontation for savvy and charisma. In effect, she reinvigorated the agency in women across America. It’s for this reason Nancy Pelosi calls her “a leader, not a politician.”

            By the end of the documentary I was stunned to feel tears forming at the corners of my eyes.  When the credits began rolling everyone in the audience held their applause. It was almost as if we all collectively took a moment a silence to honor this truly magnificent figure in history. Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way is a powerful and moving tribute to a woman whose impact will continue to be felt in generations to come.

Stroszek: Truth and Power (Steven)

Stroszek, Werner Herzog's 1977 tragic comedy, concerns the lives of three friends: Bruno, a street musician; Eva, a prostitute; and Scheitz, an older retiree. It begins with Bruno's release from prison in Berlin and an attack from Eva's pimps and tracks the friends as they try to make a new life in Wisconsin, where Bruno becomes employed with Scheitz's nephew Clayton. While Scheitz is an old eccentric, Bruno comes across as innocent (in both the usual sense and the more archaic meaning of mentally ill), if we can ignore the inherent ridiculousness of using that term to describe an alcoholic who has lived through prison and learned how to get by as an accordion player in Berlin's grimy squares. Eva has a more average outlook, but as the bills in Wisconsin pile up she becomes increasingly apathetic and depressed, spending many of her shots eating on the bed or couch or being forced back into her old job as prostitute. The hopeless defiance with which she thrusts one of their last payments at the man who collects their bills contrasts harshly with the happiness we saw when she got the money for the trip to America. Both of these sums come from what seems like the only way the impoverished friends can make any upward strides against their debts: Eva's prostitution. Bruno certainly never appears to make much money at all, and it's possible Clayton is underpaying him.

In Stroszek, Herzog explores the boundary between truth and fiction in an unusual way. While he implements many documentary-like techniques, such as a lack of saturation, a quick and low-budget shooting, a cast of non-professional actors who often play as themselves, an impartial, almost indifferent gaze, and a tarnished, peeling-paint realism, the plot is bizarre and dream-like and the characters, especially Bruno and Scheitz, bring with them an atmosphere of unpredictability. This juxtaposition lets a bleak film double as a very watchable comedy. In one scene, Scheitz walks along a grain-surrounded fence, testing the wood with a voltmeter. He comes across two American hunters and asks, in German, whether he can test a strange theory about “animal magnetism”. The bemusement we share with the hunters, who react naturally (and were probably not actors), is what makes the scene so humorous. They play along, not understanding German, but we know that even if they did it wouldn't matter since Scheitz's theory is so incomprehensible.

A Farm in Wisconsin. Licensed under CC at wikimedia commons.

When viewing Stroszek as a documentary, we naturally search for a slant. The most obvious one is its indictment, perhaps not of capitalism itself, but of its tendency to build and reinforce income and power inequalities. To build upon this premise, Herzog inverts many of the promises of America and wealth. The friends' tragic arc is a sad shadow of the American dream, and the predatory tendencies brought about by power are revealed through pimps' harassment, through an immigration office's confiscation of Bruno's bird (which occurs off-screen and gives Bruno yet another darkly funny line), and through the gleam from the gold rings of a painfully apologetic “man from the bank”. The auction, a staple representative of citizens' purchasing power, acts as a ruthless reminder of these cruelties. Rather than the fine art or antiques auctions so often portrayed in film, this one is for the humble prefabricated house on which Bruno and Scheitz have been unable to keep up with the payments. As the auction ends, Bruno walks aimlessly backwards with his usual inscrutable expression, homeless, while dogs cross the scene looking for food or attention. It's winter still and everything is a dull brown smeared with white and the trees are leafless against the drab sky. 

Are Films a Pretext for Social Dialogue? (Nour)

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 becausethe film in no way interrogates "whiteness." These folks left the filmsaying 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 (Shauna)

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 (Mike)

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 (Mike)

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 (Hannah)

 

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 (Mike)

 

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 (Mike)

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 (Mike)

“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.

Against the Odds - Chris & Don: A Love Story (Carlos)

You could argue that “Chris & Don: A Love Story” is a documentary about two gay men who serendipitously meet and fall in love. You could also say that it's about a thirty-plus year relationship between two individuals thirty years of age apart. It's also about an acclaimed and accomplished novelist who takes a young lover under his wing and inspires him to become a prolific portrait artist. The filmmakers contend that these aspects, while relevant, are merely incidental: the documentary at its core is a moving story about two people who felt an ineffable connection to one another and fell madly in love, and a lot of good can come from just that.

British author Christopher Isherwood (The Berlin Stories) meets 18-year-old LA-native Don Bachardy at a Santa Monica beach on Valentine's Day 1953. He and Chris hit it off with a bang: their clumsy first kiss smashed a glass window. This event was the start of an unconventional thirty-four year relationship between two openly gay men embedded in Hollywood society at a time where such a thing was strictly taboo. 

 

Don Bachardy recalls the early years as ecstasy. Despite the jeers and homophobic remarks from such people as actor Joseph Cotton, who regarded Chris and Don as "half-men" (never to Chris's face, of course), the electric couple was blissfully happy, each man confessing that they'd finally felt complete. Don explains that although he was born and bred in California, he began to develop a British accent and a heightened tone of speaking, as a result of spending so much time with Chris during those years. He likened himself to a chameleon, unconsciously mimicking his lover, idol, and father figure. As the documentary states, Don had successfully cloned himself... "In some weird way." 

 

“Chris & Don” is peppered with enriching anecdotes, of both the relevant and extraneous sort. One of the more memorable stories involves Bachardy's first encounter with hashish on a trip to Morocco with Isherwood. The drug doesn't sit well with him and he spends the rest of the night in a state of horrific paranoia. Curled up in bed, Chris holds and comforts Don throughout the night. Filmmakers Guido Santi and Tina Mascara have chosen all the right events to recount. Moments like these are particularly poignant in that they illustrate a truly affectionate and unconditional romance between two men who care deeply for one another. 

 

What make the film a treat to watch are the featured clips of home movies captured by Chris and Don themselves. The 16mm color film footage is vibrant and pristine -- without any evidence of deterioration or discoloration. It looked as though it could have been shot yesterday. After the screening the directors concurred it was miracle the footage had survived all this time. Don had "stored" them for years at room temperature, in the living room cabinet, facing the ocean. The footage documents the couple passing time with friends and traveling together, giving all the talk about a loyal and loving relationship weight and texture. Also interwoven are animated sequences reflecting Chris’s and Don's correspondences in which each was assigned a symbolic animal: a horse and a kitten, respectfully. Over these sequences we hear their letters spoken. What first appears to be a silly and playful exercise develops into a device demonstrating stalwart devotion and mutual respect, introducing a dimension of tenderness that continues to resonate throughout the length of the film. 

 

A brilliant and thoughtful move by the filmmakers was their approach to documenting Isherwood's passing. Stricken with prostate cancer, the last months of Chris's life were tough on the couple. Don stayed very close and tended to Chris's every need. He continued to sketch portraits of Chris until his dying day -- sometimes up to nine or ten drawings a day. Over Don's narration, the documentary runs through these intimate portraits and the result is incredibly moving. Don asserts that as an artist he cannot help but identify with his subjects, and in Chris's case Don was dying alongside him. 

 

Always in the shadow of his accomplished significant other, it was very difficult for Don Bachardy during the early years of their relationship. It was only until Don established himself as a gifted portrait artist that he was able to overcome this stigma. The tail end of the film documents Don's prolific artistic career, which was spurred by Chris's insistence that he attend art school. Even today, at 74 Don continues to paint and sketch portraits, most notably of celebrities and other painters. It's clear Don's talent is all his own; the filmmakers confirm for any lingering doubters that “Chris & Don” is a story about not one, but two extraordinary men in their own right. 

 

“Chris & Don” for others may be about two gay men triumphing over constraining societal conventions, but for me it stands well enough as a touching love story that craftily and elegantly pulls at the heart strings and convinces viewers to acknowledge, quite persuasively, that love can happen between anyone, and if you give it your all it gives back plenty.

 

"Chris & Don: A Love Story" (2007). 90 minutes. Directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara

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.