Film Review #170: It’s a Fact! … and it could be true
2008
Director: Takia Thompson
Cast: Takia Thompson, Jake Powell, Charles Jackson
Sometimes, years later, you still wonder how you wound up in certain unlikely conversations. This couple hailed from Baltimore; I knew her first because we were graduate students together. Since their daughter was simultaneously doing pre-med at Cornell, my friend’s husband was in Syracuse a lot during those several years. He is a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, with a deep-voiced, easy-going confidence, immensely gracious.
One day we were discussing what he had observed about the behavior of white men in public rest rooms. My friend’s husband said, “I just don’t understand it. You know, they’re in such a hurry that most of them don’t wash their hands.”
I think then he used the expression that it “skived” him.
Without needing to think it over very much, I said, “They’re not in a hurry. They’re scared of you.”
Although young filmmaker Takia Thompson has focused mostly on young African American women in her film It’s a Fact! …and it could be true, this is the sort of situation that she could turn to biting satire. And Thompson says her film grew out of similar, also unlikely conversations with her white friend Jake Powell, who plays fictional TV host Todd Broakon (and most other male bit parts) in her film. Out of such sharing and Thompson’s already-apparent talent has come this short film, just shy of 18 minutes in run-time but packing a much longer slow burn.
Last week Thompson returned to the other Emerald City – her home town of Seattle – with a filmmaker diploma in hand, the day after arranging a movie-sized screening at SU of her senior thesis project for a handful of those involved in making who hadn’t seen it yet plus assorted mothers, friends and cast. Powell was there, looking far younger than he does on film. Several cast members are well-known locally, like the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company’s Annette Adams-Brown, who plays the back-stage TV director. Sammy Award-winning singer Andrea Moore plays an assistant director who asks Broakon if his news and commentary show “isn’t a little racist?” (He scoffs, “Don’t you know racism no longer exists?”) Journalist and musician Charles “CJack” Jackson plays the best-selling author of Be Proud to be a N___, whom Broakon interviews. Jackson also supplied perfect soft jazz for the closing credits and is working with Thompson, who may return to Syracuse in the fall, in promoting the film.
Thompson structures It’s a Fact! as the taping of an episode in a TV news magazine show whose first segment reports on the results of a purported seven-year investigation of the African American community by the 147 F.B.I. agents and second segment comprises the interview with writer “Assalah Malaykam.” There are three cuts to Broakon’s back-stage interaction with the production crew that comment on the goings-on. A dead-pan Broakon opens by telling the camera that all but one of the F.B.I. agents were lost, their loyalty and attention to business overcome by the “allure” and “witchcraft” of the Black community. Three re-enactments then dramatize what the F.B.I. has since formulated as rules of conduct for whites to safely interact with African Americans. “Never ever touch a Black woman’s hair.” “Never ever tell Black people to quiet down at a movie theater.” “Never ever, ever even think about taking a Black person’s chicken.”
Like that public rest room conversation years ago, these “dramatizations” uncover stereotypes held on both sides of the action that may be uncomfortable to watch or admit – and have certain comic possibilities. The “Never touch a Black woman’s hair” vignette, for example, is an economical little gem of a scene in which three young women chatting on a corner are interrupted by a white man who strides by and raises his arm to catch a taxi, brushing one woman’s hair. Is this “accidental,” or is it a habit of simply not respecting Black women’s physical space so that it’s always her job to step out of the way? Hilariously, as if anticipating that some viewers will ask whether it was an accident, Thompson obligingly re-plays the arm-brush four times in rapid succession. Then, the offended young woman – in slow motion – raises her arms, lets out a thundering roar above the man – now crouching in terror behind a bush – and attacks.
In the second “dramatization” the same three young women set out in high spirits for the movies, much to the consternation of a lone, tight-lipped audience member who employs increasingly indignant whirling around, sighing and glaring to convey his annoyance and the fact that he feels constrained from simply asking for quiet. Actually, I’ve done some whirling and glaring myself, though about the worst offenders I ever encountered were a van-load of snowy-haired white retirees who talked the entire way through a matinee of March of the Penguins at Manlius Art Cinema.
Thompson said she was nervous in May when she showed this film to a full auditorium of other student filmmakers, relieved when most laughed in the right spots and vindicated as the laughter markedly died down. This may owe something to the Wayans brothers’ movies’ popularity among young audiences. Last week, local playwright and poet Jackie Warren Moore praised the younger artist, “This is what art is supposed to do. It’s supposed to provoke and unsettle.”
This is a demanding and provocative film that appalls you even as you’re laughing, and you may not be laughing when it’s over. It’s also well-shot, well-edited, and crisply written. Besides film fest entries, Thompson hopes for a more public local screening later in the fall, along with a talk-back. Catch her early work, because we’ll be hearing a lot more from her.
*******
An abbreviated version of this review appears in the 8/14/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not have a theatrical opening in Central New York, older films of enduring worth & occasional other films that deserve special notice.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Film Review #169: A Woman of Tokyo
1933
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Cast: Yoshiko Okada, Kinuyo Tanaka, Ureo Egawa
Last Saturday morning Owen Shapiro spoke by cell phone from Prospect Park in New York City, where he’d just dropped off his granddaughter at a birthday party. He was already anticipating this Friday evening, when he’ll introduce the screening of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s early film, A Woman of Tokyo (1933), centerpiece of the final event of this year’s 16-day Cazenovia Counterpoints arts festival on Cazenovia Lake east of Syracuse.
“Ozu is one of the most important filmmakers – period!” said Shapiro. “Not just for Japan. This is a very early work, but in his insight into the human condition and his depiction of women – their role in society and their personal angst – he was always ahead of his time.”
Shapiro heads up Syracuse International Film Festival, held each April. As one on-going popular program, SIFF presents classic silent films with live musicians performing new scores. This year’s collaboration with Neva Pilgrim and the Society for New Music, held at the Everson Museum, had some bumps in the road.
“We originally intended to do L’Age d’Or, but then couldn’t,” said Shapiro. That 1930 film, Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s first feature and a collaboration with fellow surrealist Salvador Dali, caused riots when first screened in Paris.
“But,” Shapiro went on, “Neva Pilgrim knew Wayne Horvitz had done music for a number of films, including A Woman of Tokyo, and he agreed to come.”
The Seattle-based pianist/composer also released his Gravitas Quartet’s One Dance Alone in April on the Songlines label. That CD contains a track titled “Waltz from Woman of Tokyo,” excerpted from Horvitz’s new score for the 47-minute Ozu film.
Then freak storms cancelled Horvitz’s April flight to Syracuse.
But Shapiro’s always run a film festival committed to regional outreach. That means screenings year-round across Central New York, so moving the Ozu/Horvitz program to Cazenovia Counterpoints through the Society for New Music’s connection was a natural. Commissioned by the Seattle Film Festival, the full film score has not been recorded and Friday’s performance is the Northeast premiere.
Unlike the Buñuel, Ozu’s 1933 film is not available at Netflix (though YouTube has a short clip). A Woman of Tokyo never released here until 1982 – 19 years after Ozu’s death – and commercial DVD release waited until a 2006 four-disc anthology; the lone copy currently for sale on-line sells for $79. The DVD used in Friday's screening is a Janus edition that Shapiro acquired in France. Fully a third of Ozu’s 54 films have been lost. In fact, the Singapore-based Asian Film Archives, which screened A Woman of Tokyo last year with a new score for traditional Asian instruments, documents massive destruction of early Japanese cinema, lost to studio carelessness and natural disasters, but also to post-war banning – and in 1946, burning – during the Allied Occupation.
How ironic, this slow-to-waken reception for a Japanese filmmaker so intrigued by Hollywood and American culture in general. A 1930s audience could have discerned much common ground. Japan suffered from the decade’s global economic depression too – before you know the plot you see the frosty breaths of Ozu’s characters in their bare, unheated apartments. Commentators on this film generally mention that Ozu sends his proper young dating couple, the student Ryoichi (Ureo Egawa) and shy Harué (Kinuyo Tanaka) to watch an American movie – on-screen there’s a clip from a drama, set in an American business office, by Ernst Lubitsch, whose work Ozu admired. Central New Yorkers might also notice that Ryoichi’s older sister Chikako (Yoshiko Okada) pounds away on a Smith-Corona typewriter during her day job. With immense quiet grace, Chikako supports her younger brother, his tuition and books, even his movie dates. Early on, she hands him a fresh, clean sock as he tosses aside the one with a small hole worn in the toe, suggesting he takes much of her care and sacrifice for granted.
Chikako’s night job collides with that of Harué’s brother Kinoshita (Shinyo Nara), a policeman, and so undoes them all. Supposedly a “cabaret hostess,” a heavily made-up Chikako enters a smirking man’s car late at night. Learning all this, earnest Harué cannot resist telling Ryoichi. The sheltered couple’s myopic grief and fury at Chikako’s dishonor – Ozu’s family considered his movie-making aspirations similarly shady – sadly seem less dated than we might hope.
On Friday, local Japanese instructor Tomoko Mikakawa Walter translates and reads the film’s “intertitles,” full screens of dialogue text instead of subtitles running beneath the action. The film follows other quartets by Horvitz and Ithaca composer Roberto Sierra.
*******
Thanks to Neva Pilgrim for lending A Woman of Tokyo for preview. This review appeared in the 7/31/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1933
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Cast: Yoshiko Okada, Kinuyo Tanaka, Ureo Egawa
Last Saturday morning Owen Shapiro spoke by cell phone from Prospect Park in New York City, where he’d just dropped off his granddaughter at a birthday party. He was already anticipating this Friday evening, when he’ll introduce the screening of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s early film, A Woman of Tokyo (1933), centerpiece of the final event of this year’s 16-day Cazenovia Counterpoints arts festival on Cazenovia Lake east of Syracuse.
“Ozu is one of the most important filmmakers – period!” said Shapiro. “Not just for Japan. This is a very early work, but in his insight into the human condition and his depiction of women – their role in society and their personal angst – he was always ahead of his time.”
Shapiro heads up Syracuse International Film Festival, held each April. As one on-going popular program, SIFF presents classic silent films with live musicians performing new scores. This year’s collaboration with Neva Pilgrim and the Society for New Music, held at the Everson Museum, had some bumps in the road.
“We originally intended to do L’Age d’Or, but then couldn’t,” said Shapiro. That 1930 film, Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s first feature and a collaboration with fellow surrealist Salvador Dali, caused riots when first screened in Paris.
“But,” Shapiro went on, “Neva Pilgrim knew Wayne Horvitz had done music for a number of films, including A Woman of Tokyo, and he agreed to come.”
The Seattle-based pianist/composer also released his Gravitas Quartet’s One Dance Alone in April on the Songlines label. That CD contains a track titled “Waltz from Woman of Tokyo,” excerpted from Horvitz’s new score for the 47-minute Ozu film.
Then freak storms cancelled Horvitz’s April flight to Syracuse.
But Shapiro’s always run a film festival committed to regional outreach. That means screenings year-round across Central New York, so moving the Ozu/Horvitz program to Cazenovia Counterpoints through the Society for New Music’s connection was a natural. Commissioned by the Seattle Film Festival, the full film score has not been recorded and Friday’s performance is the Northeast premiere.
Unlike the Buñuel, Ozu’s 1933 film is not available at Netflix (though YouTube has a short clip). A Woman of Tokyo never released here until 1982 – 19 years after Ozu’s death – and commercial DVD release waited until a 2006 four-disc anthology; the lone copy currently for sale on-line sells for $79. The DVD used in Friday's screening is a Janus edition that Shapiro acquired in France. Fully a third of Ozu’s 54 films have been lost. In fact, the Singapore-based Asian Film Archives, which screened A Woman of Tokyo last year with a new score for traditional Asian instruments, documents massive destruction of early Japanese cinema, lost to studio carelessness and natural disasters, but also to post-war banning – and in 1946, burning – during the Allied Occupation.
How ironic, this slow-to-waken reception for a Japanese filmmaker so intrigued by Hollywood and American culture in general. A 1930s audience could have discerned much common ground. Japan suffered from the decade’s global economic depression too – before you know the plot you see the frosty breaths of Ozu’s characters in their bare, unheated apartments. Commentators on this film generally mention that Ozu sends his proper young dating couple, the student Ryoichi (Ureo Egawa) and shy Harué (Kinuyo Tanaka) to watch an American movie – on-screen there’s a clip from a drama, set in an American business office, by Ernst Lubitsch, whose work Ozu admired. Central New Yorkers might also notice that Ryoichi’s older sister Chikako (Yoshiko Okada) pounds away on a Smith-Corona typewriter during her day job. With immense quiet grace, Chikako supports her younger brother, his tuition and books, even his movie dates. Early on, she hands him a fresh, clean sock as he tosses aside the one with a small hole worn in the toe, suggesting he takes much of her care and sacrifice for granted.
Chikako’s night job collides with that of Harué’s brother Kinoshita (Shinyo Nara), a policeman, and so undoes them all. Supposedly a “cabaret hostess,” a heavily made-up Chikako enters a smirking man’s car late at night. Learning all this, earnest Harué cannot resist telling Ryoichi. The sheltered couple’s myopic grief and fury at Chikako’s dishonor – Ozu’s family considered his movie-making aspirations similarly shady – sadly seem less dated than we might hope.
On Friday, local Japanese instructor Tomoko Mikakawa Walter translates and reads the film’s “intertitles,” full screens of dialogue text instead of subtitles running beneath the action. The film follows other quartets by Horvitz and Ithaca composer Roberto Sierra.
*******
Thanks to Neva Pilgrim for lending A Woman of Tokyo for preview. This review appeared in the 7/31/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Film Review #168: The Man Who Laughs
1928/DVD 2003
Director: Paul Leni
Cast: Conrad Veidt, Olga Baclanova, Mary Philbin
In so many ways Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is aggressively a film of our time. It’s not just that Heath Ledger’s Joker – every accolade is true – snatches us joltingly awake. No, it’s right from the opening scene, shot from a plane heading straight for the monumental, looming face of a sky-scraper. And then – just when part of your mind’s bracing for the crash – the first, establishing image of reversal occurs as, instead, the sky-scraper’s side explodes from within.
Like the resurgence of zombie movies since the Twins Towers, Nolan’s Batman films argue that barbarians-at-the-gates is an incomplete explanation, that racial scape-goating and urban decay, corruption and violence as much signify rottenness within – and that the greatest disintegration occurs when we abandon our best selves to turn on one another. Even before the Twin Towers, David Fincher’s Seven (1995) depicted a serial killer who envisioned his final masterpiece as provoking a decent, rookie cop, overwhelmed by rage and grief, to execute him.
So when the Joker baits the Gotham mob to “kill the Batman,” you suspect that’s only a first draft. Joker will really come into his own in challenging Batman’s adherence to his own code of conduct. Gary Oldman’s pragmatic Lt. Gordon first voices what’s at stake in this struggle – “Then the Joker will win!” – clearly echoing Rudy Giuliani’s “the terrorists will win” (if they alter our way of life).
The Dark Knight plays in tantalizing ways with Joker’s taunt that he and Batman are the same – both “freaks,” both outside the circle of community, both somehow mutilated, reverse sides of one coin. This reverberates in crusading D.A. Harvey Dent’s accidental mutilation and his trick coin tosses – after all, luck contains chaos at its core.
A particularly elegant reversal occurs through the mobster Gamble (Michael Jai White) when two booby-trapped ferries idle off Gotham’s shore, hostage to the Joker’s maniac threat to blow up both if the passengers on one don’t detonate the other by midnight. One boat also carries the mob bosses, now in shackles and orange jump-suits. Increasingly desperate, passengers on each ferry debate killing others to save themselves. Apparently living up to his fearsome image, Gamble tells the jumpy guy with the detonator, in a viciously silky growl, “You’re not up to taking a life. Give it to me. I’ll do what you should’ve done hours ago.”
Gamble’s haphazard scars signify a willfully violent life, but until now – when he tosses that detonator into the river through an open porthole – the film’s heavy shadows and fast action have obscured the intentional spiral scar wrapping his throat. Gamble’s scarification also mirrors the Joker’s hacked-open and basted-back-together cheeks. Whether redemptive or calculating, is any motive unambiguous?
So The Dark Knight is a superb in capturing our day, but its sophistication and resonance surely arise because our culture has been working on this story for a while. Clearly Nolan – who has his Rachel (Maggie Gyllelhaal) talk at cocktail parties about barbarians at the gates of Rome – knows this.
Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s original Batman comics in 1940 spawned legions of offspring in print and on-screen, with the Joker by turns satiric, campy and menacing. In 1928 Universal Studios – following the enormous success of deformity-as-classic-horror with Lon Chaney, Sr. in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Phantom of the Opera (1925) – had released The Man Who Laughs, directed by the German Paul Leni and starring his countryman Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, wandering son of a deposed 17th century British nobleman mutilated by gypsies – cast as the mobsters of their day – so that his face is frozen eternally in a garish grin. A traveling player, Gwynplaine’s profession and its trappings provide the opportunity to display the intertwined faces of comedy and tragedy. An outcast, tragic figure, Gwynplaine is a far cry from Batman’s nemesis, yet Bob Kane acknowledged the film inspired his original Joker. Nolan’s film also features a number of still-recognizable common images and story elements in the dangerous escape by boat, the ridicule of “freaks,” orderly society’s collapse and merging with “ruffians,” and vicious guard dogs – in Victorian melodrama, surely the “hounds of hell,” since Victor Hugo wrote the original tale in 1869, incidentally while exiled for his own political novels.
The Man Who Laughs released several years before Tod Browning’s more extreme Freaks (which also cast Olga Baclanova), but is arguably as important a template for horror film as social commentary. Restored and released on DVD in 2003, The Man Who Laughs has screened theatrically since too, for example, anticipating the premiere of The Dark Knight, earlier this month at the San Francisco Silent Film festival. Enjoy them together.
*******
This review appeared in the 7/24/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY and older films of enduring worth. The Man Who Laughs is available in both DVD and VHS formats, at Netflix, and on-line.
1928/DVD 2003
Director: Paul Leni
Cast: Conrad Veidt, Olga Baclanova, Mary Philbin
In so many ways Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is aggressively a film of our time. It’s not just that Heath Ledger’s Joker – every accolade is true – snatches us joltingly awake. No, it’s right from the opening scene, shot from a plane heading straight for the monumental, looming face of a sky-scraper. And then – just when part of your mind’s bracing for the crash – the first, establishing image of reversal occurs as, instead, the sky-scraper’s side explodes from within.
Like the resurgence of zombie movies since the Twins Towers, Nolan’s Batman films argue that barbarians-at-the-gates is an incomplete explanation, that racial scape-goating and urban decay, corruption and violence as much signify rottenness within – and that the greatest disintegration occurs when we abandon our best selves to turn on one another. Even before the Twin Towers, David Fincher’s Seven (1995) depicted a serial killer who envisioned his final masterpiece as provoking a decent, rookie cop, overwhelmed by rage and grief, to execute him.
So when the Joker baits the Gotham mob to “kill the Batman,” you suspect that’s only a first draft. Joker will really come into his own in challenging Batman’s adherence to his own code of conduct. Gary Oldman’s pragmatic Lt. Gordon first voices what’s at stake in this struggle – “Then the Joker will win!” – clearly echoing Rudy Giuliani’s “the terrorists will win” (if they alter our way of life).
The Dark Knight plays in tantalizing ways with Joker’s taunt that he and Batman are the same – both “freaks,” both outside the circle of community, both somehow mutilated, reverse sides of one coin. This reverberates in crusading D.A. Harvey Dent’s accidental mutilation and his trick coin tosses – after all, luck contains chaos at its core.
A particularly elegant reversal occurs through the mobster Gamble (Michael Jai White) when two booby-trapped ferries idle off Gotham’s shore, hostage to the Joker’s maniac threat to blow up both if the passengers on one don’t detonate the other by midnight. One boat also carries the mob bosses, now in shackles and orange jump-suits. Increasingly desperate, passengers on each ferry debate killing others to save themselves. Apparently living up to his fearsome image, Gamble tells the jumpy guy with the detonator, in a viciously silky growl, “You’re not up to taking a life. Give it to me. I’ll do what you should’ve done hours ago.”
Gamble’s haphazard scars signify a willfully violent life, but until now – when he tosses that detonator into the river through an open porthole – the film’s heavy shadows and fast action have obscured the intentional spiral scar wrapping his throat. Gamble’s scarification also mirrors the Joker’s hacked-open and basted-back-together cheeks. Whether redemptive or calculating, is any motive unambiguous?
So The Dark Knight is a superb in capturing our day, but its sophistication and resonance surely arise because our culture has been working on this story for a while. Clearly Nolan – who has his Rachel (Maggie Gyllelhaal) talk at cocktail parties about barbarians at the gates of Rome – knows this.
Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s original Batman comics in 1940 spawned legions of offspring in print and on-screen, with the Joker by turns satiric, campy and menacing. In 1928 Universal Studios – following the enormous success of deformity-as-classic-horror with Lon Chaney, Sr. in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Phantom of the Opera (1925) – had released The Man Who Laughs, directed by the German Paul Leni and starring his countryman Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, wandering son of a deposed 17th century British nobleman mutilated by gypsies – cast as the mobsters of their day – so that his face is frozen eternally in a garish grin. A traveling player, Gwynplaine’s profession and its trappings provide the opportunity to display the intertwined faces of comedy and tragedy. An outcast, tragic figure, Gwynplaine is a far cry from Batman’s nemesis, yet Bob Kane acknowledged the film inspired his original Joker. Nolan’s film also features a number of still-recognizable common images and story elements in the dangerous escape by boat, the ridicule of “freaks,” orderly society’s collapse and merging with “ruffians,” and vicious guard dogs – in Victorian melodrama, surely the “hounds of hell,” since Victor Hugo wrote the original tale in 1869, incidentally while exiled for his own political novels.
The Man Who Laughs released several years before Tod Browning’s more extreme Freaks (which also cast Olga Baclanova), but is arguably as important a template for horror film as social commentary. Restored and released on DVD in 2003, The Man Who Laughs has screened theatrically since too, for example, anticipating the premiere of The Dark Knight, earlier this month at the San Francisco Silent Film festival. Enjoy them together.
*******
This review appeared in the 7/24/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY and older films of enduring worth. The Man Who Laughs is available in both DVD and VHS formats, at Netflix, and on-line.
Film Review #167: Control
2007/DVD 2008
Director: Anton Corbijn
Cast: Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Alexandria Maria Lara
Midway through the film Control, the Belgian fanzine reporter Annik Honoré (Alexandria Maria Lara) says to Ian Curtis (Sam Riley), “Tell me about your wife.”
They are about to embark on the steamy affair in which every contradiction in Curtis’ life unendurably converges. Curtis, original lead singer and lyricist for the British post-punk band Joy Division, pauses for a beat and says carefully of his wife Deborah (Samantha Morton), “She’s at home in Macclesfield. I’ve been trying to escape from there my whole life.”
Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film about Curtis, which released here on DVD in early June, covers the seven years between 1973, when Curtis was still is school and romancing Deborah, then his best friend’s girl, until his suicide by hanging in May 1980 at age 23, literally on the eve of Joy Division’s planned departure for a two-week concert tour in the US. A genuinely reticent young man who scribbled notebooks full of poetry and suffered epileptic seizures – at least one on-stage - Curtis stoked a band sound that has inspired the likes of U2, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, The Cure, and Interpol.
Though called “the best English film of 2007,” Control seems to begin inauspiciously. In a long, bleak, black-and-white shot, Curtis slouches along the edge of a fenced playground in a housing project, carrying a paper bag and ignoring the calls of some kids to throw their soccer ball back over the fence. I confess I looked at my watch as this scene rolled on.
But Control does pick up, and it turns out that Corbijn knows what he’s doing in that first scene, which by depicting such suffocation risks alienating viewers early on but fully informs Curtis’ later remark about a lifetime of seeking escape. This is officially Corbijn’s first feature film, but the Dutch-born photographer’s been making music videos since the mid-80s – Palm Pictures released an anthology DVD in 2005 – and he knows the lay of the land.
As for that first scene, Corbijn says he likes the 70s as an era for film precisely for its slower pace, for the opportunity to take the time to look at things. In Curtis’ early surroundings, Corbijn recreates the “great shock” of northern England’s poverty – “very bleak, very gray” – that he himself was unprepared for after growing up in Holland’s social safety net. And Corbijn chose to make a black-and-white movie because “the entire collective memory of Joy Division is black-and-white” – their album covers, their music videos and the photography by which their public knew them – a fact about which Corbijn speaks with such first-hand authority because in a very short time he directly created so much of that visual record.
Corbijn first heard Joy Division’s music at home in the Netherlands in 1979 and by October of the same year moved to London. Within two weeks he was photographing the rising band. Some of the most iconic images we have of Joy Division – and Curtis particularly – are Corbijn’s. In fact, some of the most iconic images we have of a vast number of musicians and actors over the past three decades are Corbijn’s. One pleasure in watching films like Goya’s Ghost (2006) or the 2003 Vermeer biopic, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, is their painterly look, in each case echoing how that artist saw his world. Corbijn’s film delivers recognition with a similar punch in recapping his own work as much as Curtis’ music. It doesn’t hurt that both Curtis’ widow and Annik Honoré assisted Corbijn – the script is based on Deborah Curtis’ memoir– or that Corbijn could film in the same flat where Curtis lived and even follow Sam Riley through the same streets – eerily frozen in time – to Curtis’ old day job as an employment counselor.
We’ll see lots more of Riley – a band singer multiply-honored for his first film – and Alexandria Maria Lara too, a Romanian from Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (reviewed here recently). But Samantha Morton is utterly convincing, first as a character half her own age when the film starts, then as the tense young woman she becomes. Morton’s short scene before discovering Curtis’ body – almost devoid of dialogue – is worth the ticket.
At Emerald City Video, Jason says they can’t keep Control on the shelf. And Joy Division’s saga steams on: Sunday’s Parade magazine reported that someone has just stolen Ian Curtis’ headstone from the Macclesfield graveyard.
*******
This review appeared in the 7/17/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Netflix also has Corbijn’s 2005 music video anthology plus his Depeche Mode videos.
2007/DVD 2008
Director: Anton Corbijn
Cast: Sam Riley, Samantha Morton, Alexandria Maria Lara
Midway through the film Control, the Belgian fanzine reporter Annik Honoré (Alexandria Maria Lara) says to Ian Curtis (Sam Riley), “Tell me about your wife.”
They are about to embark on the steamy affair in which every contradiction in Curtis’ life unendurably converges. Curtis, original lead singer and lyricist for the British post-punk band Joy Division, pauses for a beat and says carefully of his wife Deborah (Samantha Morton), “She’s at home in Macclesfield. I’ve been trying to escape from there my whole life.”
Anton Corbijn’s 2007 film about Curtis, which released here on DVD in early June, covers the seven years between 1973, when Curtis was still is school and romancing Deborah, then his best friend’s girl, until his suicide by hanging in May 1980 at age 23, literally on the eve of Joy Division’s planned departure for a two-week concert tour in the US. A genuinely reticent young man who scribbled notebooks full of poetry and suffered epileptic seizures – at least one on-stage - Curtis stoked a band sound that has inspired the likes of U2, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, The Cure, and Interpol.
Though called “the best English film of 2007,” Control seems to begin inauspiciously. In a long, bleak, black-and-white shot, Curtis slouches along the edge of a fenced playground in a housing project, carrying a paper bag and ignoring the calls of some kids to throw their soccer ball back over the fence. I confess I looked at my watch as this scene rolled on.
But Control does pick up, and it turns out that Corbijn knows what he’s doing in that first scene, which by depicting such suffocation risks alienating viewers early on but fully informs Curtis’ later remark about a lifetime of seeking escape. This is officially Corbijn’s first feature film, but the Dutch-born photographer’s been making music videos since the mid-80s – Palm Pictures released an anthology DVD in 2005 – and he knows the lay of the land.
As for that first scene, Corbijn says he likes the 70s as an era for film precisely for its slower pace, for the opportunity to take the time to look at things. In Curtis’ early surroundings, Corbijn recreates the “great shock” of northern England’s poverty – “very bleak, very gray” – that he himself was unprepared for after growing up in Holland’s social safety net. And Corbijn chose to make a black-and-white movie because “the entire collective memory of Joy Division is black-and-white” – their album covers, their music videos and the photography by which their public knew them – a fact about which Corbijn speaks with such first-hand authority because in a very short time he directly created so much of that visual record.
Corbijn first heard Joy Division’s music at home in the Netherlands in 1979 and by October of the same year moved to London. Within two weeks he was photographing the rising band. Some of the most iconic images we have of Joy Division – and Curtis particularly – are Corbijn’s. In fact, some of the most iconic images we have of a vast number of musicians and actors over the past three decades are Corbijn’s. One pleasure in watching films like Goya’s Ghost (2006) or the 2003 Vermeer biopic, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, is their painterly look, in each case echoing how that artist saw his world. Corbijn’s film delivers recognition with a similar punch in recapping his own work as much as Curtis’ music. It doesn’t hurt that both Curtis’ widow and Annik Honoré assisted Corbijn – the script is based on Deborah Curtis’ memoir– or that Corbijn could film in the same flat where Curtis lived and even follow Sam Riley through the same streets – eerily frozen in time – to Curtis’ old day job as an employment counselor.
We’ll see lots more of Riley – a band singer multiply-honored for his first film – and Alexandria Maria Lara too, a Romanian from Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (reviewed here recently). But Samantha Morton is utterly convincing, first as a character half her own age when the film starts, then as the tense young woman she becomes. Morton’s short scene before discovering Curtis’ body – almost devoid of dialogue – is worth the ticket.
At Emerald City Video, Jason says they can’t keep Control on the shelf. And Joy Division’s saga steams on: Sunday’s Parade magazine reported that someone has just stolen Ian Curtis’ headstone from the Macclesfield graveyard.
*******
This review appeared in the 7/17/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Netflix also has Corbijn’s 2005 music video anthology plus his Depeche Mode videos.
Film Review #166: Prisoner of the Mountains
1997/DVD 2003
Director: Sergei Bodrov
Cast: Sergei Bodrov, Jr., Oleg Menshikov, Jemal Sikharalidze, Valentina Fedotova, Aleksandr Bureyev
From the photos snapped in his off-the-set moments, Sergei Bodrov, Jr. could cut a striking and magnetic figure. When, just two days into shooting a new film in the Caucasus Mountains in 2002, the 30-year-old actor-director and several of his production crew died in an avalanche, The New York Times said Russia had lost her “hottest young movie star.” You can find him cast in the 1997 gangster hit Brat (released here on DVD last year as Brother) and the Oscar-nominated East-West (2000) – as well as in a handful of his father’s nearly 30 films – for example, both The Quickie (2001) and Bear’s Kiss (2002) are available here.
Then there’s Prisoner of the Mountains, the 1997 anti-war film that won his father honors at Cannes, both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for best foreign language film, and a huge Russian following in the midst of the 1994-96 chapter of that country’s protracted, unpopular and bloody war with Chechnya. Here, the dashing younger Bodrov began his film career as Vanya, a soft-eyed, easily embarrassed new recruit injured his first day in the field and taken hostage along with his more jaded sergeant, the sarcastic, mustachioed Sacha (Oleg Menshikov).
After ordering up “one Russian alive” from the Chechen guerillas, village elder Abdul Murat (Jemal Sikharalidze) steps calmly from behind a roadside explosion’s clearing smoke and takes both men – a spare “in case the first one croaks” – intending to exchange them for his own son, who sits in the next valley in a foul, make-shift Russian prison. A widower, Abdul Murat has lost two sons to the invaders. A third son works for the Russians now as a police officer. So Abdul Murat has only the imprisoned son, a teacher, and a not-quite-yet-marriageable daughter, Dina (Susanna Mekhraliyeva, a Muslim school-girl from the village where the film was shot).
Bodrov Sr. and his Muslim co-writer Arif Aliev adapted their script from Leo Tolstoy’s novella, Prisoner of the Caucasus, written during Russia’s 30-year war of subjugation with Chechnya in the 19th century, when Tolstoy, then a military officer supporting that war, was not exactly in touch with the natural dignity of the Chechen people. Tolstoy’s take on Chechen-Russian relations was still required reading in Soviet schools in the years Bodrov Sr. grew up, so that audience would immediately recognize this widely-known story – filmed about 20 miles from the actual fighting that Bodrov’s updated screen version depicts.
Bodrov begins Prisoner of the Mountains with Vanya’s army physical. After a doctor mostly occupied with eating lunch absent-mindedly completes Vanya’s eye exam, this diffident, naked boy joins the line of other new recruits padding barefooted down a cavernous hallway. Slender and soft-looking, these young men – as startled as birds flying up from a hedge – cover themselves identically with clasped hands, intently looking elsewhere, when a nurse suddenly strides past them, her sturdy heels echoing loudly. With exactly such tender attention to detail might these young men’s mothers imagine them slipping toward destruction.
Vanya’s mother figures importantly in the story. Improvising when the Russian commander turns down his offer, Abdul Murat orders Vanya and Sacha to write letters asking their mothers to plead for them. Vanya expects his mother, a single school-teacher living far to the north, will show up – he tells a childhood story suggesting it’s likely – and so she does. And in her brief meeting with Abdul Murat, we see enemies inch back from the ledge, however imperfectly – just as their children will do – and that earns Vanya, at the cost of enormous grief, his life.
Chechnya’s independence struggle remains a fertile subject for Russian filmmakers. Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra opened here in March, following an elderly Russian visiting her soldier grandson at the Chechen front. Oscar-nominated this year, Nikita Mikhalkov’s 12 adapted Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men to dramatize a young Chechen on trial for murdering his Russian step-father.
Also Oscar-nominated this year – the first entry from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan – Sergei Bodrov’s new film Mongol has just opened locally at Manlius Art Cinema. Already a seasoned and extremely proficient, technically confident filmmaker – across the board Prisoner of the Mountains is well written, acted, directed, shot and edited – Bodrov has spent increasing time in the West, particularly in the US, since 1993. Closer to John Adams than your standard exotic battle epic, Mongol is the first of three films about the 12th-century’s Genghis Khan suggests we have a lot to learn. Bodrov’s a welcome discovery.
*******
This review appeared in the 7/3/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy” a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth.
1997/DVD 2003
Director: Sergei Bodrov
Cast: Sergei Bodrov, Jr., Oleg Menshikov, Jemal Sikharalidze, Valentina Fedotova, Aleksandr Bureyev
From the photos snapped in his off-the-set moments, Sergei Bodrov, Jr. could cut a striking and magnetic figure. When, just two days into shooting a new film in the Caucasus Mountains in 2002, the 30-year-old actor-director and several of his production crew died in an avalanche, The New York Times said Russia had lost her “hottest young movie star.” You can find him cast in the 1997 gangster hit Brat (released here on DVD last year as Brother) and the Oscar-nominated East-West (2000) – as well as in a handful of his father’s nearly 30 films – for example, both The Quickie (2001) and Bear’s Kiss (2002) are available here.
Then there’s Prisoner of the Mountains, the 1997 anti-war film that won his father honors at Cannes, both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for best foreign language film, and a huge Russian following in the midst of the 1994-96 chapter of that country’s protracted, unpopular and bloody war with Chechnya. Here, the dashing younger Bodrov began his film career as Vanya, a soft-eyed, easily embarrassed new recruit injured his first day in the field and taken hostage along with his more jaded sergeant, the sarcastic, mustachioed Sacha (Oleg Menshikov).
After ordering up “one Russian alive” from the Chechen guerillas, village elder Abdul Murat (Jemal Sikharalidze) steps calmly from behind a roadside explosion’s clearing smoke and takes both men – a spare “in case the first one croaks” – intending to exchange them for his own son, who sits in the next valley in a foul, make-shift Russian prison. A widower, Abdul Murat has lost two sons to the invaders. A third son works for the Russians now as a police officer. So Abdul Murat has only the imprisoned son, a teacher, and a not-quite-yet-marriageable daughter, Dina (Susanna Mekhraliyeva, a Muslim school-girl from the village where the film was shot).
Bodrov Sr. and his Muslim co-writer Arif Aliev adapted their script from Leo Tolstoy’s novella, Prisoner of the Caucasus, written during Russia’s 30-year war of subjugation with Chechnya in the 19th century, when Tolstoy, then a military officer supporting that war, was not exactly in touch with the natural dignity of the Chechen people. Tolstoy’s take on Chechen-Russian relations was still required reading in Soviet schools in the years Bodrov Sr. grew up, so that audience would immediately recognize this widely-known story – filmed about 20 miles from the actual fighting that Bodrov’s updated screen version depicts.
Bodrov begins Prisoner of the Mountains with Vanya’s army physical. After a doctor mostly occupied with eating lunch absent-mindedly completes Vanya’s eye exam, this diffident, naked boy joins the line of other new recruits padding barefooted down a cavernous hallway. Slender and soft-looking, these young men – as startled as birds flying up from a hedge – cover themselves identically with clasped hands, intently looking elsewhere, when a nurse suddenly strides past them, her sturdy heels echoing loudly. With exactly such tender attention to detail might these young men’s mothers imagine them slipping toward destruction.
Vanya’s mother figures importantly in the story. Improvising when the Russian commander turns down his offer, Abdul Murat orders Vanya and Sacha to write letters asking their mothers to plead for them. Vanya expects his mother, a single school-teacher living far to the north, will show up – he tells a childhood story suggesting it’s likely – and so she does. And in her brief meeting with Abdul Murat, we see enemies inch back from the ledge, however imperfectly – just as their children will do – and that earns Vanya, at the cost of enormous grief, his life.
Chechnya’s independence struggle remains a fertile subject for Russian filmmakers. Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra opened here in March, following an elderly Russian visiting her soldier grandson at the Chechen front. Oscar-nominated this year, Nikita Mikhalkov’s 12 adapted Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men to dramatize a young Chechen on trial for murdering his Russian step-father.
Also Oscar-nominated this year – the first entry from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan – Sergei Bodrov’s new film Mongol has just opened locally at Manlius Art Cinema. Already a seasoned and extremely proficient, technically confident filmmaker – across the board Prisoner of the Mountains is well written, acted, directed, shot and edited – Bodrov has spent increasing time in the West, particularly in the US, since 1993. Closer to John Adams than your standard exotic battle epic, Mongol is the first of three films about the 12th-century’s Genghis Khan suggests we have a lot to learn. Bodrov’s a welcome discovery.
*******
This review appeared in the 7/3/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy” a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Film Review #165: Kirikou and the Sorceress
1998/DVD 2000
Director: Michel Ocelot
Animation, originally French language; English dub
Safe beyond the summer downpour on her deep front porch, Ramone’s grandmother – you may know her by other names and accomplishments, but this one’s been on the front burner since the two-year-old arrived last Sunday from Florida – was complaining that she’d had a hard time finding The Lion King on a DVD she could buy.
“I’ve heard that Disney locks them away in a vault after the first couple years,” she went on, turning back from watching two cop cruisers and an unmarked maroon sedan streak down Valley Drive. “Then they bring out the so-called collector’s edition for more money. I don’t like that. I just want him to hear James Earl Jones’ voice!”
Well it could seem that Disney has a lock on feature animation movies. Of the top ten named last week in the American Film Institute’s updated listing – The Lion King is fourth on that list – except for DreamWorks’ Shrek (2001), the other nine are Disney products. But if we look past Hollywood’s marketing empire, brilliant animators are working around the world. I still remember a perfectly serious grown woman lighting up when she told me about The Triplets of Belleville, a 2003 French confection. Recently, in a batch of Cuban films – an on-going side project of mine – I discovered Juan Padrón’s witty and terrific Vampires in Havana, made in 1985 but re-introduced over the past several years on DVD and in some festivals because he’s now made a sequel. This week Persepolis – when they’re for adults, we call them “graphic novels” – came out on DVD too.
Then there’s Kirikou and the Sorceress. Whereas The Lion King is set in Africa, you may notice that for all its wonders, it’s strangely devoid of Africans – perhaps Disney’s solution for avoiding the dilemma of visual representation that might be taken as stereotype and thus spark offense. With a vividly differentiated cast of characters, Kirikou fills that gap. Released in 1998 and made available in an English version on DVD in 2000, it’s the first feature-length film by French animator Michel Ocelot, who’d been making award-winning shorts for two decades when his producers encouraged something longer. Kirikou was also the occasion for Senegalese composer-musician Youssou N’Dour’s first feature film score – he had previously rejected every script sent to him – and entirely employs traditional African instruments.
Ocelot spent ages six through 12 in the African nation of Guinea with his parents, who went there as teachers in the mid-1950s. He based Kirikou on the folk tale he heard as a child of an exceptionally brave and curious boy, born already able to speak and walk, who saves his village by out-witting the evil sorceress Karaba. This involves discovering why she is so “mean and nasty” to begin with – men once drove a sharp thorn deep into her spine, causing her constant agony – and twice rescuing the other village children even though they won’t play with him because he’s “too little.”
Besides these lessons, Ocelot packs a great deal more story into Kirikou’s hour and fourteen minutes, a length that’s feasible even for younger kids. Containing many elements of the classic hero’s dangerous task, Kirikou’s quest involves a journey – he must reach the Old Man in the Mountain (actually his grandfather) beyond Karaba’s fortress by getting past her guards, tunneling through the earth, vanquishing several beasts, making friends with some baby squirrels who aid him, taking flight disguised as a bird – in which he seeks answers and finally achieves unexpected transformation.
In the wonderful exchange between Kirikou and his grandfather, the old man deftly manages to support the child’s incessant questioning and still get him focused on the task at hand. Kirikou also hears the wisdom that he is safer and more powerful in his naked innocence than he would be with a special talisman, which the sorceress would only expect him to have and then turn against him. And unlike many modern movie and video game heroes, Kirikou finds something more creative and positive to do with his opponent than kill her.
Since this is a children’s film, it’s important to know that its original release was delayed four years because Ocelot refused distributors’ demands to cover or air-brush some nudity – the village’s small children are naked and the village women bare-chested – because he insisted this authentically depicted the world of this folk tale. However, there is enough else going on in this story, and the graphic style is so thoughtful and so completely unsensational, that it’s unlikely this will occupy children’s attention. If anything, this may be a welcome antidote to the hyper-sexualized bodies that saturate much of US popular culture.
Now screened or sold on DVD in over 50 countries, Kirikou and the Sorceress has been so popular that a movie sequel and a hit stage musical in Paris followed. No matter how tiny, we are all born with seeds with greatness.
*******
This review appeared in the 6/26/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not enjoy a theatrical opening in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Rent Kirikou and the Sorceress at Netflix or buy it on-line at AfricanDiasporaDVD.com. By the way, Nat Tobin & Eileen Lowell, owners of the oldest operating movie house in Onondaga County, have launched a website & weekly e-newsletter. Sign up, check movie times and coming attractions at ManliusArtCinema.com.
1998/DVD 2000
Director: Michel Ocelot
Animation, originally French language; English dub
Safe beyond the summer downpour on her deep front porch, Ramone’s grandmother – you may know her by other names and accomplishments, but this one’s been on the front burner since the two-year-old arrived last Sunday from Florida – was complaining that she’d had a hard time finding The Lion King on a DVD she could buy.
“I’ve heard that Disney locks them away in a vault after the first couple years,” she went on, turning back from watching two cop cruisers and an unmarked maroon sedan streak down Valley Drive. “Then they bring out the so-called collector’s edition for more money. I don’t like that. I just want him to hear James Earl Jones’ voice!”
Well it could seem that Disney has a lock on feature animation movies. Of the top ten named last week in the American Film Institute’s updated listing – The Lion King is fourth on that list – except for DreamWorks’ Shrek (2001), the other nine are Disney products. But if we look past Hollywood’s marketing empire, brilliant animators are working around the world. I still remember a perfectly serious grown woman lighting up when she told me about The Triplets of Belleville, a 2003 French confection. Recently, in a batch of Cuban films – an on-going side project of mine – I discovered Juan Padrón’s witty and terrific Vampires in Havana, made in 1985 but re-introduced over the past several years on DVD and in some festivals because he’s now made a sequel. This week Persepolis – when they’re for adults, we call them “graphic novels” – came out on DVD too.
Then there’s Kirikou and the Sorceress. Whereas The Lion King is set in Africa, you may notice that for all its wonders, it’s strangely devoid of Africans – perhaps Disney’s solution for avoiding the dilemma of visual representation that might be taken as stereotype and thus spark offense. With a vividly differentiated cast of characters, Kirikou fills that gap. Released in 1998 and made available in an English version on DVD in 2000, it’s the first feature-length film by French animator Michel Ocelot, who’d been making award-winning shorts for two decades when his producers encouraged something longer. Kirikou was also the occasion for Senegalese composer-musician Youssou N’Dour’s first feature film score – he had previously rejected every script sent to him – and entirely employs traditional African instruments.
Ocelot spent ages six through 12 in the African nation of Guinea with his parents, who went there as teachers in the mid-1950s. He based Kirikou on the folk tale he heard as a child of an exceptionally brave and curious boy, born already able to speak and walk, who saves his village by out-witting the evil sorceress Karaba. This involves discovering why she is so “mean and nasty” to begin with – men once drove a sharp thorn deep into her spine, causing her constant agony – and twice rescuing the other village children even though they won’t play with him because he’s “too little.”
Besides these lessons, Ocelot packs a great deal more story into Kirikou’s hour and fourteen minutes, a length that’s feasible even for younger kids. Containing many elements of the classic hero’s dangerous task, Kirikou’s quest involves a journey – he must reach the Old Man in the Mountain (actually his grandfather) beyond Karaba’s fortress by getting past her guards, tunneling through the earth, vanquishing several beasts, making friends with some baby squirrels who aid him, taking flight disguised as a bird – in which he seeks answers and finally achieves unexpected transformation.
In the wonderful exchange between Kirikou and his grandfather, the old man deftly manages to support the child’s incessant questioning and still get him focused on the task at hand. Kirikou also hears the wisdom that he is safer and more powerful in his naked innocence than he would be with a special talisman, which the sorceress would only expect him to have and then turn against him. And unlike many modern movie and video game heroes, Kirikou finds something more creative and positive to do with his opponent than kill her.
Since this is a children’s film, it’s important to know that its original release was delayed four years because Ocelot refused distributors’ demands to cover or air-brush some nudity – the village’s small children are naked and the village women bare-chested – because he insisted this authentically depicted the world of this folk tale. However, there is enough else going on in this story, and the graphic style is so thoughtful and so completely unsensational, that it’s unlikely this will occupy children’s attention. If anything, this may be a welcome antidote to the hyper-sexualized bodies that saturate much of US popular culture.
Now screened or sold on DVD in over 50 countries, Kirikou and the Sorceress has been so popular that a movie sequel and a hit stage musical in Paris followed. No matter how tiny, we are all born with seeds with greatness.
*******
This review appeared in the 6/26/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not enjoy a theatrical opening in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Rent Kirikou and the Sorceress at Netflix or buy it on-line at AfricanDiasporaDVD.com. By the way, Nat Tobin & Eileen Lowell, owners of the oldest operating movie house in Onondaga County, have launched a website & weekly e-newsletter. Sign up, check movie times and coming attractions at ManliusArtCinema.com.
Film Review #164: Youth Without Youth
2007/DVD 2008
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz
“He must have signed a three-picture deal,” mused my friend during the first moments at a Sunday matinee of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which opens with a rolling, industrial-strength sky that makes you uneasy right away. “Great production values and this cast – after the beating he took the last couple times out, he couldn’t make a film this expensive again so soon otherwise.”
M. Night Shyamalan is no Francis Ford Coppola. But four of us were there at Sunday’s matinee because we’ve found his films worth following and that over-rode the cool skittishness common now among reviewers toward his work, beginning with disappointment in Unbreakable (2000) and reaching pitched hostility with The Village (2004). I’ve always thought the trouble with The Village was mostly a bad advertising campaign that tried to sell something more ambitious as a straight monster film.
The trouble with Youth Without Youth – which opened theatrically last December for a brief 11-week run and has now been out on DVD about a month – is that for many critics, Francis Ford Coppola is no Francis Ford Coppola anymore either. Even if he takes a decade off, it’s hard to start fresh. Earlier this week, for example, network TV further enshrined the preferred “real” Coppola with the American Film Institute special, 10 Top 10, naming his Godfather films, I and II, made in the early 70s, among the best three gangster films ever made (Scorsese’s Goodfellas was second). So Coppola’s first movie since The Rainmaker (1997) – unless you count uncredited work on Walter Hill’s Supernova in 2000 – provoked some downright anger. Coppola self-finances and produces now, so he’s not bound by “three-picture deals” nor protected by diluted blame. Reviewers have called Youth Without Youth a self-indulgent mish-mash of New Age fad philosophies, the evident result of a mid-life crisis, even “a misery to watch.” (As an aside, the plot re-caps some of them offer in print suggest some lazy watching habits too, miserable or not.)
Youth Without Youth is not so much demanding as unexpected – a sort of Indiana Jones Meets Starting Out in the Evening. Visually and narratively, it’s absorbing. Coppola himself calls it “small and personal, not autobiographical.” Fair enough. So this is not Apocalypse Now re-treaded yet again. In hankering after the easy security of fixed categories, you’d miss Coppola’s still brilliant (and often drenchingly lovely) framing, Walter Murch’s nearly perfect editing, and a set of remarkably nuanced performances (including the first time I’ve ever had much sympathy for a Tim Roth character).
Based on the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade’s 1976 novella of the same title, Youth Without Youth relates the story of Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), an elderly academic linguist in a provincial – here, that would mean “backwater” – Romanian city a ways from the capital of Bucharest who reaches a personal crisis in 1938. German Nazis have occupied his country. He has never rid himself of the loss over 40 years before of his first love, Laura (Alexandra Maria Lara), who died in childbirth after leaving him because his obsession with his work had made him so distant. In despair, the old man now determines to travel to the capital and kill himself, having decided he can never finish his life’s work, an exploration of the origins of language – “the first spark of consciousness itself.”
Barely out of the train station, Matei is struck by lightning, which for this story makes that “first spark” literal and transforms intellectual argument into human terms. Miraculously, Matei survives. Unaccountably, he then flourishes, experiencing a surge in his language studies and recovering, sometimes comically, his youth and potency under the fatherly, thoughtful care of Dr. Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz). Stanciulescu arranges his escape to Switzerland when a Nazi doctor wants to “borrow” Matei for his own gruesome experiments, also involving electricity.
If Matei barely survives the spark of consciousness, Coppola’s film certainly asks whether humanity as a whole has done so well, torn by language and thought from our animal being. Matei, after all, has had a lifetime of preparation for that transporting jump-start. (One of the pleasures of Roth’s portrayal is that his rejuvenated Matei still moves like an old man, still retains a certain gravity of demeanor that embodies precisely the title.) Still, possibilities of Frankensteinian wrong turns – scientifically, personally, politically – tinge his story and his time as much as fleeting glimpses of spiritual transcendence. In one scene, Matei imagines a chat with his “double” while stretched supine and nearly naked beside a horizontal mirror and you think you may have seen this figure before. Yes, it’s Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb, suggested by some to depict Christ’s own contemplation, the night before the Crucifixtion, of his double and the rapid physical disintegration he’ll meet in death.
What awaits those less prepared? In Switzerland, Matei encounters Veronica (also played by Lara) while hiking in a mountain wood. Some reviewers assume a neat and literal correspondence – that Veronica is simply Laura returned – but I think Coppola leaves this open, and wisely. Also struck by lightning, Veronica emerges disheveled and distraught from a forest cave, speaking ancient Sanskrit, which Matei knows. They embark on trips to India, locating the cave in which Veronica’s ancient life ended - Matei finds her bones - and to the coast of Malta, where she re-lives even older lifetimes. A point comes where Matei leaves her, since his presence and the work he’s doing in recording her life-times takes grievous toll. Whereas he’s grown younger, Veronica begins to age rapidly. The work he has despaired of finishing is less important than this single life, even in the face of his discovery – which has spanned the cosmos – that any single life is only a temporary container.
Coppola’s now in Buenos Aires filming Tetro, a story of Italian immigrants in Argentina. I’m glad he’s back.
*******
This review appeared in the 6/19/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not enjoy theatrical release in Central New York and older films of enduring worth.
2007/DVD 2008
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz
“He must have signed a three-picture deal,” mused my friend during the first moments at a Sunday matinee of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which opens with a rolling, industrial-strength sky that makes you uneasy right away. “Great production values and this cast – after the beating he took the last couple times out, he couldn’t make a film this expensive again so soon otherwise.”
M. Night Shyamalan is no Francis Ford Coppola. But four of us were there at Sunday’s matinee because we’ve found his films worth following and that over-rode the cool skittishness common now among reviewers toward his work, beginning with disappointment in Unbreakable (2000) and reaching pitched hostility with The Village (2004). I’ve always thought the trouble with The Village was mostly a bad advertising campaign that tried to sell something more ambitious as a straight monster film.
The trouble with Youth Without Youth – which opened theatrically last December for a brief 11-week run and has now been out on DVD about a month – is that for many critics, Francis Ford Coppola is no Francis Ford Coppola anymore either. Even if he takes a decade off, it’s hard to start fresh. Earlier this week, for example, network TV further enshrined the preferred “real” Coppola with the American Film Institute special, 10 Top 10, naming his Godfather films, I and II, made in the early 70s, among the best three gangster films ever made (Scorsese’s Goodfellas was second). So Coppola’s first movie since The Rainmaker (1997) – unless you count uncredited work on Walter Hill’s Supernova in 2000 – provoked some downright anger. Coppola self-finances and produces now, so he’s not bound by “three-picture deals” nor protected by diluted blame. Reviewers have called Youth Without Youth a self-indulgent mish-mash of New Age fad philosophies, the evident result of a mid-life crisis, even “a misery to watch.” (As an aside, the plot re-caps some of them offer in print suggest some lazy watching habits too, miserable or not.)
Youth Without Youth is not so much demanding as unexpected – a sort of Indiana Jones Meets Starting Out in the Evening. Visually and narratively, it’s absorbing. Coppola himself calls it “small and personal, not autobiographical.” Fair enough. So this is not Apocalypse Now re-treaded yet again. In hankering after the easy security of fixed categories, you’d miss Coppola’s still brilliant (and often drenchingly lovely) framing, Walter Murch’s nearly perfect editing, and a set of remarkably nuanced performances (including the first time I’ve ever had much sympathy for a Tim Roth character).
Based on the Romanian writer Mircea Eliade’s 1976 novella of the same title, Youth Without Youth relates the story of Dominic Matei (Tim Roth), an elderly academic linguist in a provincial – here, that would mean “backwater” – Romanian city a ways from the capital of Bucharest who reaches a personal crisis in 1938. German Nazis have occupied his country. He has never rid himself of the loss over 40 years before of his first love, Laura (Alexandra Maria Lara), who died in childbirth after leaving him because his obsession with his work had made him so distant. In despair, the old man now determines to travel to the capital and kill himself, having decided he can never finish his life’s work, an exploration of the origins of language – “the first spark of consciousness itself.”
Barely out of the train station, Matei is struck by lightning, which for this story makes that “first spark” literal and transforms intellectual argument into human terms. Miraculously, Matei survives. Unaccountably, he then flourishes, experiencing a surge in his language studies and recovering, sometimes comically, his youth and potency under the fatherly, thoughtful care of Dr. Stanciulescu (Bruno Ganz). Stanciulescu arranges his escape to Switzerland when a Nazi doctor wants to “borrow” Matei for his own gruesome experiments, also involving electricity.
If Matei barely survives the spark of consciousness, Coppola’s film certainly asks whether humanity as a whole has done so well, torn by language and thought from our animal being. Matei, after all, has had a lifetime of preparation for that transporting jump-start. (One of the pleasures of Roth’s portrayal is that his rejuvenated Matei still moves like an old man, still retains a certain gravity of demeanor that embodies precisely the title.) Still, possibilities of Frankensteinian wrong turns – scientifically, personally, politically – tinge his story and his time as much as fleeting glimpses of spiritual transcendence. In one scene, Matei imagines a chat with his “double” while stretched supine and nearly naked beside a horizontal mirror and you think you may have seen this figure before. Yes, it’s Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb, suggested by some to depict Christ’s own contemplation, the night before the Crucifixtion, of his double and the rapid physical disintegration he’ll meet in death.
What awaits those less prepared? In Switzerland, Matei encounters Veronica (also played by Lara) while hiking in a mountain wood. Some reviewers assume a neat and literal correspondence – that Veronica is simply Laura returned – but I think Coppola leaves this open, and wisely. Also struck by lightning, Veronica emerges disheveled and distraught from a forest cave, speaking ancient Sanskrit, which Matei knows. They embark on trips to India, locating the cave in which Veronica’s ancient life ended - Matei finds her bones - and to the coast of Malta, where she re-lives even older lifetimes. A point comes where Matei leaves her, since his presence and the work he’s doing in recording her life-times takes grievous toll. Whereas he’s grown younger, Veronica begins to age rapidly. The work he has despaired of finishing is less important than this single life, even in the face of his discovery – which has spanned the cosmos – that any single life is only a temporary container.
Coppola’s now in Buenos Aires filming Tetro, a story of Italian immigrants in Argentina. I’m glad he’s back.
*******
This review appeared in the 6/19/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not enjoy theatrical release in Central New York and older films of enduring worth.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Film Review #163: Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
2008
Director: Katrina Browne
The Film Class
2006/DVD 2008
Director: Uri Rosenwaks
Of all the ways these two documentary films overlap and echo one another – both deal with women who film their investigations of ancestral involvement in the global slave trade – the most visceral is the moment that each captures on film of the physical recoil against stepping into the still-preserved underground dungeons where slaves were held before shipping.
Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade reports there were 70 “slave forts” on the West African coast between 1769 and 1820 (when the DeWolfe family business was at its height). In the summer of 2001, Browne led a film crew and nine other DeWolfe descendants to two of them – Cape Coast and Elmina – in Ghana. Browne is an Episcopal minister raised in Philadelphia who lived in Berkeley, California when she began this project eight years ago. Her Ghanaian trip was the second leg of a three-week journey starting in Bristol, Rhode Island – the historic DeWolfe family seat, where their mansion Linden Hall is now a museum and descendants often return for the July 4th parade – and proceeded to Cuba, where the DeWolfes owned five sugar plantations that used slave labor and supplied their rum distilleries well after the end of the US Civil War.
On the other side of the African continent, at Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar off Tanzania, Israeli filmmaker Uri Rosenwaks led his filmmaking class – five “Black Bedouin” women from the town of Rahat in the Negev Desert – on a similar pilgrimage in 2005. In southern Israel’s Negev Desert, the Rahat Black Bedouins descend from Africans kidnapped by Arab slavers during the same period but taken east.
The mirroring that occurs within each film and between the two films is frequent. In a stroke of cinematic good fortune, Katrina Browne herself carries the same DeWolfe profile that echoes in every family portrait her film puts on-screen, making somberly visible the legacy she experiences so sharply. The DeWolfe family’s return to Ghana coincided with a massive gathering that aimed to ritually cleanse the area of its slaving past; during one moment when Browne watches a procession of hereditary tribal leaders, she wonders if her ancestors and theirs “did business.” That family business was the largest single slaving enterprise in US history, an elaborate “triangle trade route” involving almost 50 ships, their own bank and distilleries, the Ghanaian and Cuban sites, a Charleston slave auction house and connections in 40 other US cities.
On both African coasts, the holding dungeons that remain are bleak gray stone affairs, squat, dank, thick-walled and half-underground, made for holding hundreds of naked human beings in almost unbelievably tight, dark spaces. And in each place – despite the distance traveled, which has required considerable commitment and overcoming – the visitors must will themselves over the threshold.
Besides celebrating Juneteenth (the date when Texas slaves belatedly got word of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) with events all month – the opening reception for Declaration of Independence-signer descendent Brantley Carroll’s photo exhibit, The Whipping Post, a book-signing at Barnes and Noble and related guest talks – Syracuse’s Community Folk Art Center is also observing the second centennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 1808. They’ll screen both Traces of the Trade and The Film Class twice this month, on the 18th and 26th, as a double bill – just over two hours combined total viewing time – an inspired change of plans from a single screening of each film on separate dates, so viewers can experience the ways each reflects and deepens the other. Mindful of the symbolism of anniversaries, Katrina Brown premiered her film at Sundance on January 12th of this year, Martin Luther King’s birthday. On June 24th, Traces of the Trade airs nationally on PBS, kicking off the new season of the documentary series, “P.O.V.” So Syracuse gets this film earlier than the rest of the country.
Led by Katrina, the ten DeWolfe descendants use their journey to address questions of forgiveness, self-indulgence, whether reparations mean process or payment, the distinctions between guilt and grief, and the need to follow-up with action in the world once they got home. While some DeWolfes went other routes – supporting reparation lawsuits, for example – Browne took her action to the Episcopal Church’s national gathering, successfully shepherding official church recognition of slaving and current racism and laying groundwork for first steps to respond.
Browne’s project began when her grandmother sent her a small booklet on the family’s history that acknowledged the true foundation of their wealth and social position. In Rosenwaks’ film class – a small project to teach new skills and community involvement to African Bedouin women begun by the Step Forward NGO in a remote, impoverished Israeli city – the process also began with grandmothers when he asked his students what they knew of their family history.
Whereas the DeWolfes’ unspoken rule was “never to mention politics, religion or the Negroes,” the Rahat women found they knew next to nothing about their family histories or how they came to reside, largely despised, in the Negev Desert. No less profoundly than the DeWolfes, the Rahat women return from their African trip to confront their mayor, in a filmed interview, about racism toward the Black Bedouin community within his city.
The Film Class includes that encounter, preceded by footage of the role-playing the women engaged in to prepare for interviewing a practiced politician and his nervous aides, and followed by their reactions afterward when the whole class gathers to watch how the interview went – comically in one spot, since one of the film’s producers, playing the mayor, offered an evasive answer in the rehearsal that predicted, almost word for word, what the real mayor then said. So we get to watch these women’s surprised delight when they watch footage of that exchange. In its own way, this sequence expresses the same profound and universal power of cinema that Katrina Browne is aiming for. Schooled in Aristotle’s theory of drama and catharsis making better citizens, Browne - who has experience with a number of projects using film for community outreach - reasoned simply, “These days, people go to the movies.”
*******
This review appeared in the 6/12/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that have not enjoyed a theatrical opening in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North premieres nationally on PBS as the season opener for the documentary series P.O.V. on Tuesday, June 24 at 10 p.m., after which the DVD is available on-line from PBS. The Film Class is available on DVD now from ruthfilms.com.
2008
Director: Katrina Browne
The Film Class
2006/DVD 2008
Director: Uri Rosenwaks
Of all the ways these two documentary films overlap and echo one another – both deal with women who film their investigations of ancestral involvement in the global slave trade – the most visceral is the moment that each captures on film of the physical recoil against stepping into the still-preserved underground dungeons where slaves were held before shipping.
Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade reports there were 70 “slave forts” on the West African coast between 1769 and 1820 (when the DeWolfe family business was at its height). In the summer of 2001, Browne led a film crew and nine other DeWolfe descendants to two of them – Cape Coast and Elmina – in Ghana. Browne is an Episcopal minister raised in Philadelphia who lived in Berkeley, California when she began this project eight years ago. Her Ghanaian trip was the second leg of a three-week journey starting in Bristol, Rhode Island – the historic DeWolfe family seat, where their mansion Linden Hall is now a museum and descendants often return for the July 4th parade – and proceeded to Cuba, where the DeWolfes owned five sugar plantations that used slave labor and supplied their rum distilleries well after the end of the US Civil War.
On the other side of the African continent, at Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar off Tanzania, Israeli filmmaker Uri Rosenwaks led his filmmaking class – five “Black Bedouin” women from the town of Rahat in the Negev Desert – on a similar pilgrimage in 2005. In southern Israel’s Negev Desert, the Rahat Black Bedouins descend from Africans kidnapped by Arab slavers during the same period but taken east.
The mirroring that occurs within each film and between the two films is frequent. In a stroke of cinematic good fortune, Katrina Browne herself carries the same DeWolfe profile that echoes in every family portrait her film puts on-screen, making somberly visible the legacy she experiences so sharply. The DeWolfe family’s return to Ghana coincided with a massive gathering that aimed to ritually cleanse the area of its slaving past; during one moment when Browne watches a procession of hereditary tribal leaders, she wonders if her ancestors and theirs “did business.” That family business was the largest single slaving enterprise in US history, an elaborate “triangle trade route” involving almost 50 ships, their own bank and distilleries, the Ghanaian and Cuban sites, a Charleston slave auction house and connections in 40 other US cities.
On both African coasts, the holding dungeons that remain are bleak gray stone affairs, squat, dank, thick-walled and half-underground, made for holding hundreds of naked human beings in almost unbelievably tight, dark spaces. And in each place – despite the distance traveled, which has required considerable commitment and overcoming – the visitors must will themselves over the threshold.
Besides celebrating Juneteenth (the date when Texas slaves belatedly got word of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation) with events all month – the opening reception for Declaration of Independence-signer descendent Brantley Carroll’s photo exhibit, The Whipping Post, a book-signing at Barnes and Noble and related guest talks – Syracuse’s Community Folk Art Center is also observing the second centennial of the abolition of the slave trade in 1808. They’ll screen both Traces of the Trade and The Film Class twice this month, on the 18th and 26th, as a double bill – just over two hours combined total viewing time – an inspired change of plans from a single screening of each film on separate dates, so viewers can experience the ways each reflects and deepens the other. Mindful of the symbolism of anniversaries, Katrina Brown premiered her film at Sundance on January 12th of this year, Martin Luther King’s birthday. On June 24th, Traces of the Trade airs nationally on PBS, kicking off the new season of the documentary series, “P.O.V.” So Syracuse gets this film earlier than the rest of the country.
Led by Katrina, the ten DeWolfe descendants use their journey to address questions of forgiveness, self-indulgence, whether reparations mean process or payment, the distinctions between guilt and grief, and the need to follow-up with action in the world once they got home. While some DeWolfes went other routes – supporting reparation lawsuits, for example – Browne took her action to the Episcopal Church’s national gathering, successfully shepherding official church recognition of slaving and current racism and laying groundwork for first steps to respond.
Browne’s project began when her grandmother sent her a small booklet on the family’s history that acknowledged the true foundation of their wealth and social position. In Rosenwaks’ film class – a small project to teach new skills and community involvement to African Bedouin women begun by the Step Forward NGO in a remote, impoverished Israeli city – the process also began with grandmothers when he asked his students what they knew of their family history.
Whereas the DeWolfes’ unspoken rule was “never to mention politics, religion or the Negroes,” the Rahat women found they knew next to nothing about their family histories or how they came to reside, largely despised, in the Negev Desert. No less profoundly than the DeWolfes, the Rahat women return from their African trip to confront their mayor, in a filmed interview, about racism toward the Black Bedouin community within his city.
The Film Class includes that encounter, preceded by footage of the role-playing the women engaged in to prepare for interviewing a practiced politician and his nervous aides, and followed by their reactions afterward when the whole class gathers to watch how the interview went – comically in one spot, since one of the film’s producers, playing the mayor, offered an evasive answer in the rehearsal that predicted, almost word for word, what the real mayor then said. So we get to watch these women’s surprised delight when they watch footage of that exchange. In its own way, this sequence expresses the same profound and universal power of cinema that Katrina Browne is aiming for. Schooled in Aristotle’s theory of drama and catharsis making better citizens, Browne - who has experience with a number of projects using film for community outreach - reasoned simply, “These days, people go to the movies.”
*******
This review appeared in the 6/12/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that have not enjoyed a theatrical opening in Central New York & older films of enduring worth. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North premieres nationally on PBS as the season opener for the documentary series P.O.V. on Tuesday, June 24 at 10 p.m., after which the DVD is available on-line from PBS. The Film Class is available on DVD now from ruthfilms.com.
Friday, June 06, 2008
Film Review #162: Every Woman Here: Remnants of Seneca 1982-2006
2007 - Documentary
Directors: Hershe Michele Kramer, Estelle Coleman for the Peace Encampment Herstory Project
“It’s so peace camp!” laughed Hershe Michele Kramer. “When we say something is ‘so peace camp,’ what we mean is, if you don’t know how to do something, that’s not a reason not to do it. You learn how. That’s what we learned there too. When we started recording these interviews in 2005, we used audio cassette tapes for the first three. Then we met Sarah Shulman from ACT-Up’s Video Project, who said, ‘You have to shoot this on video!’ We didn’t know how to shoot video. Actually, we’re still using the same borrowed video camera. It’s my brother’s.”
Estelle Coleman added, “That means we have to return it for birthdays and Christmas.”
Kramer and Coleman had stopped their day’s work for lunch early Sunday afternoon at the Women’s Information Center in Syracuse. Kramer lives on the Hudson River in Kingston and Coleman in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Travelling for the Peace Encampment Herstory Project, they’ve recorded over 80 interviews – 20 just last weekend in Syracuse– and plan to make a third DVD documentary about the Seneca Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice, a 53-acre farm on Route 96 near Romulus, New York, first purchased in 1983 by women’s peace activists because it shared a boundary line with the Seneca Army Depot.
Saturday evening about 25 people gathered at Women’s Info to watch the previous two documentaries, Stronger Than Before – which aired on PBS – and Every Woman Here: Remnants of Seneca 1982-2006, completed last year. The latter is an absorbing 32-plus minutes comprising voice-overs from nine oral “herstories,” clips of 15 songs from Sorrel Hays and Marilyn Ries’ Peace Camp Sings (1980), three songs from Average Dyke Band, video and newspaper clips, and over 300 images from “dozens” of photographers.
Immediately inspired by the women’s anti-nuclear peace encampment and huge demonstrations the previous winter outside the US Air Force base at England’s Greenham Common, the Seneca women hoped a summer’s protest would halt the deployment of US first-strike nuclear weapons to Europe that fall. About 12,000 women massed that first summer at Seneca – where they believed the military secretly stored those nuclear weapons – and 950 of them got arrested during non-violent marches, political theater and planned breaches of the Depot’s perimeter fence. Men participated too – pediatrician/peace activist Benjamin Spock addressed one crowd fondly as “all my children” – but only women and kids could camp at the farm itself. Instead of folding after Labor Day, the camp lasted until 1992 and its descendant, Women’s Peaceland, until 2006.
Every Woman Here is eminently watchable. As a film, it’s a good-looking short documentary with a strong visual narrative line and crisp, disciplined editing. It also refreshes several crucial points. First, this was a vast, global movement, involving larger numbers than may fit current hazy recollections. Those who gathered at Seneca came from across the US and every continent. The Seneca women were also acutely aware of women’s history in upstate New York – the nearby Seneca Fall’s Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 and Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad, for example - even the long-ago gathering in 1580 of Iroquois women demanding that tribal warfare end (Onondaga Nation clan mother Audrey Shenandoah came in person to bless the peace camp’s opening). Just as an inspection of the list of alums from the Civil Rights’ era Highlander School reveals a who’s who of movement leaders, the current round of interviews – in Syracuse and around the country at other interview sites – reveals that ex-peace camp women have often continued their activist ways, well known in their own communities long after they left Seneca.
Every Woman Here also documents vividly how peace camp worked in practice, women figuring out by consensus decision how to feed and shelter large numbers, build boardwalks across bumpy fields for wheelchairs, learn non-violence, manage childcare, paint murals on barns, nurture a growing spiritual dimension. Kramer says the interview project itself reflects those practices.
“Just as no one was supposed to speak for anyone else at the camp,” she went on, “this project isn’t done until every woman tells her story. So the internet archive is perfect – it can expand too. And we feel some urgency now because peace camp women are getting older.”
What’s next? The first week-end in August the two women visit Ithaca, home of Cornell University. Then, said Kramer, “Seattle. A trip south to Georgia and Florida. Vermont and Maine. We’ve got our eyes on some women in those spots who’d like to tell their stories.”
*******
On June 7th, Syracuse's daily paper, The Post-Standard, reported that the US Army will again use the Seneca Army Depot to train troops sttaioned at near-by Fort Drum and National Guard from across the country. This review appeared in the 6/5/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not enjoy a theatrical release in Central New York and older films of enduring worth. Visit the Peace Encampment Herstory Project’s website at peacecampherstory.blogspot.com.
2007 - Documentary
Directors: Hershe Michele Kramer, Estelle Coleman for the Peace Encampment Herstory Project
“It’s so peace camp!” laughed Hershe Michele Kramer. “When we say something is ‘so peace camp,’ what we mean is, if you don’t know how to do something, that’s not a reason not to do it. You learn how. That’s what we learned there too. When we started recording these interviews in 2005, we used audio cassette tapes for the first three. Then we met Sarah Shulman from ACT-Up’s Video Project, who said, ‘You have to shoot this on video!’ We didn’t know how to shoot video. Actually, we’re still using the same borrowed video camera. It’s my brother’s.”
Estelle Coleman added, “That means we have to return it for birthdays and Christmas.”
Kramer and Coleman had stopped their day’s work for lunch early Sunday afternoon at the Women’s Information Center in Syracuse. Kramer lives on the Hudson River in Kingston and Coleman in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Travelling for the Peace Encampment Herstory Project, they’ve recorded over 80 interviews – 20 just last weekend in Syracuse– and plan to make a third DVD documentary about the Seneca Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice, a 53-acre farm on Route 96 near Romulus, New York, first purchased in 1983 by women’s peace activists because it shared a boundary line with the Seneca Army Depot.
Saturday evening about 25 people gathered at Women’s Info to watch the previous two documentaries, Stronger Than Before – which aired on PBS – and Every Woman Here: Remnants of Seneca 1982-2006, completed last year. The latter is an absorbing 32-plus minutes comprising voice-overs from nine oral “herstories,” clips of 15 songs from Sorrel Hays and Marilyn Ries’ Peace Camp Sings (1980), three songs from Average Dyke Band, video and newspaper clips, and over 300 images from “dozens” of photographers.
Immediately inspired by the women’s anti-nuclear peace encampment and huge demonstrations the previous winter outside the US Air Force base at England’s Greenham Common, the Seneca women hoped a summer’s protest would halt the deployment of US first-strike nuclear weapons to Europe that fall. About 12,000 women massed that first summer at Seneca – where they believed the military secretly stored those nuclear weapons – and 950 of them got arrested during non-violent marches, political theater and planned breaches of the Depot’s perimeter fence. Men participated too – pediatrician/peace activist Benjamin Spock addressed one crowd fondly as “all my children” – but only women and kids could camp at the farm itself. Instead of folding after Labor Day, the camp lasted until 1992 and its descendant, Women’s Peaceland, until 2006.
Every Woman Here is eminently watchable. As a film, it’s a good-looking short documentary with a strong visual narrative line and crisp, disciplined editing. It also refreshes several crucial points. First, this was a vast, global movement, involving larger numbers than may fit current hazy recollections. Those who gathered at Seneca came from across the US and every continent. The Seneca women were also acutely aware of women’s history in upstate New York – the nearby Seneca Fall’s Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 and Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad, for example - even the long-ago gathering in 1580 of Iroquois women demanding that tribal warfare end (Onondaga Nation clan mother Audrey Shenandoah came in person to bless the peace camp’s opening). Just as an inspection of the list of alums from the Civil Rights’ era Highlander School reveals a who’s who of movement leaders, the current round of interviews – in Syracuse and around the country at other interview sites – reveals that ex-peace camp women have often continued their activist ways, well known in their own communities long after they left Seneca.
Every Woman Here also documents vividly how peace camp worked in practice, women figuring out by consensus decision how to feed and shelter large numbers, build boardwalks across bumpy fields for wheelchairs, learn non-violence, manage childcare, paint murals on barns, nurture a growing spiritual dimension. Kramer says the interview project itself reflects those practices.
“Just as no one was supposed to speak for anyone else at the camp,” she went on, “this project isn’t done until every woman tells her story. So the internet archive is perfect – it can expand too. And we feel some urgency now because peace camp women are getting older.”
What’s next? The first week-end in August the two women visit Ithaca, home of Cornell University. Then, said Kramer, “Seattle. A trip south to Georgia and Florida. Vermont and Maine. We’ve got our eyes on some women in those spots who’d like to tell their stories.”
*******
On June 7th, Syracuse's daily paper, The Post-Standard, reported that the US Army will again use the Seneca Army Depot to train troops sttaioned at near-by Fort Drum and National Guard from across the country. This review appeared in the 6/5/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not enjoy a theatrical release in Central New York and older films of enduring worth. Visit the Peace Encampment Herstory Project’s website at peacecampherstory.blogspot.com.
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Film Review #161: 2007 Oscar Nominated Shorts
DVD released & distributed by Magnolia Pictures
Once I had a roommate enthusiastically preoccupied with the study of karate and getting ready to test for the black belt. Late-night shopping at Wegman’s during this period often involved sudden high kicks and startling whirls in the course of delivering bags of frozen peas or heads of lettuce to the shopping cart. I thought fondly of those moments while watching Tanghi Argentini, one of the five live-action short films nominated for the 80th Oscars that were awarded in February.
Just 14 minutes long, this Belgian film by Belgians Guido Thys and Anja Daelemans, relates how an office nebbish named Andres (Dirk van Dijck) gives his imperious colleague Franz (Koen van Impe) a most unusual Christmas present in the form of the tango-dancing blind-date Suzanne (Hilda Norga). But first the irritated, unsuspecting Franz must consent to do Andres the favor of teaching him the tango in two weeks’ time – hence several impromptu mini-sessions down a row of dour gray file cabinets – then tag along to the date for moral support and take over when the two-left-footed Andres manifestly isn’t up to the task.
Tanghi Argentini did not take the Oscar – that went to France’s Philippe Pollet-Villard for The Mozart of Pickpockets, in which he also stars as one of two hapless thieves who adopt a deaf-mute Arab boy – but it easily might have. If not for Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International, it’s unlikely most of us would see either one. For the third year, Magnolia has distributed the Oscar-nominated shorts together – five live-action films and five animations - first a brief outing in some 50 US theaters some weeks before the Oscars ceremony, just recently on DVD and beginning two weeks ago, another limited theatrical run around the country through late August. (Alas, no far not in Central New York.)
The neglected orphans of mainstream movie audiences, short films are gaining new attention in the US with such DVD collections after confinement to gallery and museum spaces and the film festival circuit. The Syracuse International Film Festival’s shorts program has consistently been strong throughout its five years – this year showing 25 live-action short fiction films and another 31 in a combined animation/experimental category. Even so, for scheduling reasons, SIFF usually splits up its shorts to fill out the feature film time slots instead of showing them together. As SIFF’s offshoot DVD distribution project gets rolling, let’s hope a selection of Best of Fest shorts joins the features roster.
Magnolia’s Oscar shorts DVD is just the tip of a very large iceberg cruising past mall multiplexes. For example, the Washington Post reported that this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which ended Sunday, screened 2,148 short films. The “big” feature-length entries at Cannes screen in the 2,300-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière to an audience in formal dress. Meanwhile, at the festival’s Short Film Corner, you watch films “in a cubicle, alone, like at work, on a computer,” or – at their official premieres – in a nine-seat screening room.
The 2007 Oscar live-action shorts are consistently excellent – well-written, deftly acted, crisply shot and – more than many a meandering feature – superbly edited. Live-action nominees also include Denmark’s somberly wrenching At Night, by Christian Christiansen and Louise Vesth, about three college-aged women who share late night confidences, New Year’s hopes and family secrets, not in a campus dorm but a cancer ward. From the UK, there’s Daniel Barber and Matthew Brown’s The Tonto Woman, adapted from an early Elmore Leonard Western story about a cattle rustler who befriends an outcast woman. That stars Francesco Quinn, son of Anthony, an actor to look out for. From Italy, Andrea Jublin’s succinct and hilarious The Substitute.
Of the animations, Suzie Templeton’s new treatment of Prokofiev’s classic Peter and the Wolf – a joint UK-Poland production – took the Oscar. A stop-frame animation reminiscent of fellow Brit Nick Park’s hit Wallace and Gromit series, this new version successfully eliminates dialogue and voice-over narrative. Stop-frame animation was also used for the two fantasies, Samuel Tourneaux and Simon Vanesse’s Even Pigeons Go to Heaven (from France) and Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s Madame Tutli-Putli (from Canada). The Canadians have long been animation masters, so it’s no surprise they’re represented a second time here with Josh Raskin’s I Met the Walrus, a cartoon-collage illustration of a 1969 recorded interview with John Lennon by a 14-year-old Toronto fan. From Russia, Alexander Petrov’s lush and gorgeously painted romance of youth, My Love. Take a break from the mall and discover something new and wonderful in small packages.
*******
This review appears in the 5/29/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not enjoy a theatrical opening in CNY and older films of enduring worth.
DVD released & distributed by Magnolia Pictures
Once I had a roommate enthusiastically preoccupied with the study of karate and getting ready to test for the black belt. Late-night shopping at Wegman’s during this period often involved sudden high kicks and startling whirls in the course of delivering bags of frozen peas or heads of lettuce to the shopping cart. I thought fondly of those moments while watching Tanghi Argentini, one of the five live-action short films nominated for the 80th Oscars that were awarded in February.
Just 14 minutes long, this Belgian film by Belgians Guido Thys and Anja Daelemans, relates how an office nebbish named Andres (Dirk van Dijck) gives his imperious colleague Franz (Koen van Impe) a most unusual Christmas present in the form of the tango-dancing blind-date Suzanne (Hilda Norga). But first the irritated, unsuspecting Franz must consent to do Andres the favor of teaching him the tango in two weeks’ time – hence several impromptu mini-sessions down a row of dour gray file cabinets – then tag along to the date for moral support and take over when the two-left-footed Andres manifestly isn’t up to the task.
Tanghi Argentini did not take the Oscar – that went to France’s Philippe Pollet-Villard for The Mozart of Pickpockets, in which he also stars as one of two hapless thieves who adopt a deaf-mute Arab boy – but it easily might have. If not for Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International, it’s unlikely most of us would see either one. For the third year, Magnolia has distributed the Oscar-nominated shorts together – five live-action films and five animations - first a brief outing in some 50 US theaters some weeks before the Oscars ceremony, just recently on DVD and beginning two weeks ago, another limited theatrical run around the country through late August. (Alas, no far not in Central New York.)
The neglected orphans of mainstream movie audiences, short films are gaining new attention in the US with such DVD collections after confinement to gallery and museum spaces and the film festival circuit. The Syracuse International Film Festival’s shorts program has consistently been strong throughout its five years – this year showing 25 live-action short fiction films and another 31 in a combined animation/experimental category. Even so, for scheduling reasons, SIFF usually splits up its shorts to fill out the feature film time slots instead of showing them together. As SIFF’s offshoot DVD distribution project gets rolling, let’s hope a selection of Best of Fest shorts joins the features roster.
Magnolia’s Oscar shorts DVD is just the tip of a very large iceberg cruising past mall multiplexes. For example, the Washington Post reported that this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which ended Sunday, screened 2,148 short films. The “big” feature-length entries at Cannes screen in the 2,300-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière to an audience in formal dress. Meanwhile, at the festival’s Short Film Corner, you watch films “in a cubicle, alone, like at work, on a computer,” or – at their official premieres – in a nine-seat screening room.
The 2007 Oscar live-action shorts are consistently excellent – well-written, deftly acted, crisply shot and – more than many a meandering feature – superbly edited. Live-action nominees also include Denmark’s somberly wrenching At Night, by Christian Christiansen and Louise Vesth, about three college-aged women who share late night confidences, New Year’s hopes and family secrets, not in a campus dorm but a cancer ward. From the UK, there’s Daniel Barber and Matthew Brown’s The Tonto Woman, adapted from an early Elmore Leonard Western story about a cattle rustler who befriends an outcast woman. That stars Francesco Quinn, son of Anthony, an actor to look out for. From Italy, Andrea Jublin’s succinct and hilarious The Substitute.
Of the animations, Suzie Templeton’s new treatment of Prokofiev’s classic Peter and the Wolf – a joint UK-Poland production – took the Oscar. A stop-frame animation reminiscent of fellow Brit Nick Park’s hit Wallace and Gromit series, this new version successfully eliminates dialogue and voice-over narrative. Stop-frame animation was also used for the two fantasies, Samuel Tourneaux and Simon Vanesse’s Even Pigeons Go to Heaven (from France) and Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s Madame Tutli-Putli (from Canada). The Canadians have long been animation masters, so it’s no surprise they’re represented a second time here with Josh Raskin’s I Met the Walrus, a cartoon-collage illustration of a 1969 recorded interview with John Lennon by a 14-year-old Toronto fan. From Russia, Alexander Petrov’s lush and gorgeously painted romance of youth, My Love. Take a break from the mall and discover something new and wonderful in small packages.
*******
This review appears in the 5/29/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not enjoy a theatrical opening in CNY and older films of enduring worth.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Film Review #160: Miller’s Crossing
1990/ DVD 2003
Joel & Ethan Coen
Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, Marcia Gaye Harden, John Turturro
This year’s Oscar-winner, the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, is a film some see as a parable of how little we know who we are as a nation since the rogue violence of some of our soldiers in the war in Iraq. Actually No Country is set earlier, in 1980, and Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a Vietnam vet, the little distance of that conflict allowing enough breathing room so that echoes of My Lai stand in for Abu Ghraib and Haditha. When the decent old-school Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones speaks of a “new” kind of criminal loose in the land, it’s dialogue lifted almost verbatim from Ed Tom Bell’s ruminations in Cormac McCarthy’s novel.
But it’s the filmmakers – Joel and Ethan Coen – who supply the repeated, haunting cinematic image of these male characters staring at blank TV screens, seeing not some foreign terrorist act there but only their own dark, reflected silhouettes. The criss-crossing, tantalizing, dissolving shadows of Sheriff Bell (Jones) and assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in the hotel room after Moss’ murder elaborate and extend this image, making of the murder scene a cave fraught with shadows in which we know not what’s true and what’s illusion.
The Coens have mined this shaft before. Their third feature, Miller’s Crossing (1990), also adapts the work of a novelist, Dashiell Hammett – two novels this time – plus echoes of the 1920s Prohibition-era turf war between Chicago’s Irish O’Banion gang and the Italians of Al Capone and Johnny Torrio. The film never specifies the city whose control see-saws between old boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) and usurper Johnny Casper (Jon Polito), though the Coens filmed in New Orleans for its working street-car system and whole neighborhoods of still-intact period architecture. The film’s title comes from a cold, bleak woods outside town where both gangs take men for execution. This might locate the story in New York or New Jersey (for example, think of the Pine Barrens episode from The Sopranos), but the Coens make the location cagily all-American.
Miller’s Crossing is really the story of Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), a recent immigrant who’s first O’Bannon’s right-hand man and then – perhaps – Casper’s, see-sawing himself, working out just which hat he’ll wear. (In No Country, the Coens play similarly with images of boots and bare feet.) Reagan wants neither O’Bannon’s gifts of cash to cover his gambling debts nor, later, his forgiveness. Tom Reagan’s black fedora threads its way through the film, an arresting image for the selves we try on, that accumulates nuance along the way: thrown on the forest floor and gusted away by wind even before the opening titles, dreamed about, lost in a poker game, stolen by the two-timing Verna Bernbaum (Marcia Gay Harden) so that Reagan will come after it, tossed contemptuously in his face after O’Bannon publicly thrashes him for sleeping with Verna, pulled low over his eyes when his job as henchman demands tasks like executing Verna’s brother Bernie (John Turturro).
Contemptuously dubbed “the Schmata” by crooks on both sides, Bernie – along with the loan shark Lazar, whom we never see, though his thugs’ beatings are the worst of many that Reagan suffers – injects a third ethnic issue into this entrepreneurial mix. Casper, O’Bannon and Reagan wrestle with their versions of “friendship, character and ethics.” The film begins with Casper asking O’Bannon’s permission to kill Bernie, who’s been cashing in on fixed boxing matches, because, Casper says, “If you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?”
Bernie is so thoroughly and comfortably corrupt that only Turturro’s bravura performance – set against the preternatural watchfulness and calculation of Byrne’s Reagan – distinguishes Bernie from the anti-Semitic stereotypes held by the other characters. Bernie’s “Look into your heart!” scene in the forest with Reagan is worth the rental price by itself.
“In the American melting pot,” wrote Richard Corliss for Time magazine in 1990, “gangsters were the indigestible pieces of ethnic gristle; country of origin was as crucial as turf.”
As Corliss observed, that decade began with a resurgent slew of gangster movies. Besides Miller’s Crossing, audiences that year were watching Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Herb Ross’ My Blue Heaven, two takes on mobster Henry Hill; Phil Joanou’s State of Grace, based on a Hell’s Kitchen Irish gang called the Westies and their friction with encroaching Italians; and Francis Ford Coppola’s final Corleone installment, Godfather III. Explaining these movies as one part nostalgia from directors who “love the form because its speed and anarchy spoke to them as young movie-goers,” Corliss added there was something more important: the gangster movie “allows them to confront, in code, the awful ethnic schisms of American life; Italian versus Wasp stands in for black versus white.”
That schism still runs deep.
*******
This review appeared in the 5/22/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing recent movies that did not enjoy a theatrical opening in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Miller’s Crossing is still available on VHS & has had five DVD releases since 2003, most recently in February. See Nancy’s interview with filmmaker Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter, reviewed in last week’s column) at FilmSlashmagazine.com.
1990/ DVD 2003
Joel & Ethan Coen
Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, Marcia Gaye Harden, John Turturro
This year’s Oscar-winner, the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, is a film some see as a parable of how little we know who we are as a nation since the rogue violence of some of our soldiers in the war in Iraq. Actually No Country is set earlier, in 1980, and Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a Vietnam vet, the little distance of that conflict allowing enough breathing room so that echoes of My Lai stand in for Abu Ghraib and Haditha. When the decent old-school Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones speaks of a “new” kind of criminal loose in the land, it’s dialogue lifted almost verbatim from Ed Tom Bell’s ruminations in Cormac McCarthy’s novel.
But it’s the filmmakers – Joel and Ethan Coen – who supply the repeated, haunting cinematic image of these male characters staring at blank TV screens, seeing not some foreign terrorist act there but only their own dark, reflected silhouettes. The criss-crossing, tantalizing, dissolving shadows of Sheriff Bell (Jones) and assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in the hotel room after Moss’ murder elaborate and extend this image, making of the murder scene a cave fraught with shadows in which we know not what’s true and what’s illusion.
The Coens have mined this shaft before. Their third feature, Miller’s Crossing (1990), also adapts the work of a novelist, Dashiell Hammett – two novels this time – plus echoes of the 1920s Prohibition-era turf war between Chicago’s Irish O’Banion gang and the Italians of Al Capone and Johnny Torrio. The film never specifies the city whose control see-saws between old boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) and usurper Johnny Casper (Jon Polito), though the Coens filmed in New Orleans for its working street-car system and whole neighborhoods of still-intact period architecture. The film’s title comes from a cold, bleak woods outside town where both gangs take men for execution. This might locate the story in New York or New Jersey (for example, think of the Pine Barrens episode from The Sopranos), but the Coens make the location cagily all-American.
Miller’s Crossing is really the story of Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), a recent immigrant who’s first O’Bannon’s right-hand man and then – perhaps – Casper’s, see-sawing himself, working out just which hat he’ll wear. (In No Country, the Coens play similarly with images of boots and bare feet.) Reagan wants neither O’Bannon’s gifts of cash to cover his gambling debts nor, later, his forgiveness. Tom Reagan’s black fedora threads its way through the film, an arresting image for the selves we try on, that accumulates nuance along the way: thrown on the forest floor and gusted away by wind even before the opening titles, dreamed about, lost in a poker game, stolen by the two-timing Verna Bernbaum (Marcia Gay Harden) so that Reagan will come after it, tossed contemptuously in his face after O’Bannon publicly thrashes him for sleeping with Verna, pulled low over his eyes when his job as henchman demands tasks like executing Verna’s brother Bernie (John Turturro).
Contemptuously dubbed “the Schmata” by crooks on both sides, Bernie – along with the loan shark Lazar, whom we never see, though his thugs’ beatings are the worst of many that Reagan suffers – injects a third ethnic issue into this entrepreneurial mix. Casper, O’Bannon and Reagan wrestle with their versions of “friendship, character and ethics.” The film begins with Casper asking O’Bannon’s permission to kill Bernie, who’s been cashing in on fixed boxing matches, because, Casper says, “If you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?”
Bernie is so thoroughly and comfortably corrupt that only Turturro’s bravura performance – set against the preternatural watchfulness and calculation of Byrne’s Reagan – distinguishes Bernie from the anti-Semitic stereotypes held by the other characters. Bernie’s “Look into your heart!” scene in the forest with Reagan is worth the rental price by itself.
“In the American melting pot,” wrote Richard Corliss for Time magazine in 1990, “gangsters were the indigestible pieces of ethnic gristle; country of origin was as crucial as turf.”
As Corliss observed, that decade began with a resurgent slew of gangster movies. Besides Miller’s Crossing, audiences that year were watching Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Herb Ross’ My Blue Heaven, two takes on mobster Henry Hill; Phil Joanou’s State of Grace, based on a Hell’s Kitchen Irish gang called the Westies and their friction with encroaching Italians; and Francis Ford Coppola’s final Corleone installment, Godfather III. Explaining these movies as one part nostalgia from directors who “love the form because its speed and anarchy spoke to them as young movie-goers,” Corliss added there was something more important: the gangster movie “allows them to confront, in code, the awful ethnic schisms of American life; Italian versus Wasp stands in for black versus white.”
That schism still runs deep.
*******
This review appeared in the 5/22/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing recent movies that did not enjoy a theatrical opening in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Miller’s Crossing is still available on VHS & has had five DVD releases since 2003, most recently in February. See Nancy’s interview with filmmaker Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter, reviewed in last week’s column) at FilmSlashmagazine.com.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Film Review #159: The Last Winter
2006/DVD 2008
Director: Larry Fessenden
Cast: Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton
My baby don’t care for shows,
My baby don’t care for clothes,
My baby just cares for me.
Nina Simone’s throaty, caressing ballad, with its soft percussion and piano back-up, belongs to some smoky jazz club. It’s startling in the vast, snowy Alaskan night, especially at a point where we expect something different – sound that will do the dramatic work that, say, the driving theme in Jaws did for that film’s first moonlight swim.
Exactly ten minutes into Larry Fessenden’s horror parable on global warming, The Last Winter, a sequence commences that lasts nearly two and a half patient minutes. Rooted in horror movie conventions, it produces a more complex, unsettling result.
North Oil’s advance team intends to re-open an old drilling site inside Alaska’s remote eastern wild-life refuge. Project boss Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) has flown back to camp with orders to step up the pace. He clashes with Jim Hoffman (James Le Gros) and Elliot (Jamie Harrold), environmental scientists contracted by North Oil whom he expects to rubber-stamp his plans. Hoffman’s also romancing Pollack’s girl Abby (Connie Britton). The North Oil CEO’s son Maxwell (Zach Gilford), sent out here to “toughen up,” is acting strange. The weather’s fluctuating bizarrely and unaccountably. There’s a mechanic named Motor (Kevin Corrigan) who drinks too much and two Inuit - roustabout Lee (Pato Hoffman) and nurse-cook Dawn Russell (Joanne Shenandoah) - who may see significance in certain signs before the others.
The Last Winter opens with Pollack’s plane flying into camp over the tundra. Ten minutes in, we see the camp from above again through the eyes of something large, something able to sweep gracefully through the air at great heights yet spy in each window at the crew – as that Nina Simone track entwines with wind and snow. This long arcing shot ends up behind Maxwell, outside again, staring back at the night, then twists around to share his view. Here is where the piano flourish runs seamlessly into distant thundering, a ghostly caribou stampede across the black horizon. Here’s where we’re supposed to see monsters.
Instead, Fessenden has replaced that standard gambit with a longing and sadness familiar to anyone who’s ever looked into warmly-lit houses from a cold, dark street. The Manhattan-based filmmaker sees such disconnection at the heart of Earth’s ecological crisis. It’s an undertow that moves through every Fessenden movie since his first videos from the late 70s. Gruesome disaster ensues in The Last Winter – death by freezing, fiery plane crash and ravenous crows – but Fessenden’s interested in how a “reinvigorated” horror genre can serve environmental ends.
Though set in Alaska, The Last Winter was shot mostly in Iceland. Premiering at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006, The Last Winter opened theatrically in New York City last September. Since then it’s continued to screen in limited release and at festivals. This February, the film came to Syracuse’s Palace Theater in Eastwood as part of a Native American film festival organized by Joanne Shenandoah, who plays Dawn Russell in the film.
The same day The Last Winter premiered in Toronto, Fessenden launched his extensive ecology-themed website, RunningOutofRoad.com, a leap beyond Low Impact Filmmaking, his 1992 guide for filmmakers that details ecologically sound production and uses his film No Telling (1991) as a case example. Released abroad as The Frankenstein Complex, that film explored the arrogance of unchecked animal experimentation against a backdrop of toxic pesticide manufacturers’ profit-driven and equally arrogant contamination of upstate farmland. Fessenden also starred in Habit (1997), his riff on vampirism in society set largely in his own Lower East Side with forays to Long Island and Central Park. Wendigo (2001) completed the decade-long “horror trilogy” with another upstate tale, this one about an angry deer god that attacks a transgressing vacationer from the city but spares – for now – his artifact-carrying son.
This should be a good year for Fessenden. In late March Image Comics released The Last Winter as a graphic novel. Fessenden acts in several forthcoming films produced by Scareflix, the ultra low-budget division of his Glass Eye Pix, including Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell the Dead (with Ron Perlman and Dominic Monaghan) and Graham Reznick’s I Can See You. He’s a producer for, and has a part in, Kelly Reichardt’s new road trip movie, Wendy and Lucy, which premiers at Cannes this month. And he’s directing an episode of NBC’s summer anthology series, Fear Itself, which starts airing Thursdays at 10 PM on June 5th. He’s a taste worth acquiring.
*******
This review appeared in the 5/15/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly & is a shorter version of the introduction to an interview with Larry Fessenden published on 5/18/08 at FilmSlashmagazine.com. The Last Winter releases on rental DVD on May 20 as a Blockbuster Exclusive (for sale elsewhere, with many extras, on July 22). “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not have a CNY theatrical opening & older films of enduring worth.
2006/DVD 2008
Director: Larry Fessenden
Cast: Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton
My baby don’t care for shows,
My baby don’t care for clothes,
My baby just cares for me.
Nina Simone’s throaty, caressing ballad, with its soft percussion and piano back-up, belongs to some smoky jazz club. It’s startling in the vast, snowy Alaskan night, especially at a point where we expect something different – sound that will do the dramatic work that, say, the driving theme in Jaws did for that film’s first moonlight swim.
Exactly ten minutes into Larry Fessenden’s horror parable on global warming, The Last Winter, a sequence commences that lasts nearly two and a half patient minutes. Rooted in horror movie conventions, it produces a more complex, unsettling result.
North Oil’s advance team intends to re-open an old drilling site inside Alaska’s remote eastern wild-life refuge. Project boss Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) has flown back to camp with orders to step up the pace. He clashes with Jim Hoffman (James Le Gros) and Elliot (Jamie Harrold), environmental scientists contracted by North Oil whom he expects to rubber-stamp his plans. Hoffman’s also romancing Pollack’s girl Abby (Connie Britton). The North Oil CEO’s son Maxwell (Zach Gilford), sent out here to “toughen up,” is acting strange. The weather’s fluctuating bizarrely and unaccountably. There’s a mechanic named Motor (Kevin Corrigan) who drinks too much and two Inuit - roustabout Lee (Pato Hoffman) and nurse-cook Dawn Russell (Joanne Shenandoah) - who may see significance in certain signs before the others.
The Last Winter opens with Pollack’s plane flying into camp over the tundra. Ten minutes in, we see the camp from above again through the eyes of something large, something able to sweep gracefully through the air at great heights yet spy in each window at the crew – as that Nina Simone track entwines with wind and snow. This long arcing shot ends up behind Maxwell, outside again, staring back at the night, then twists around to share his view. Here is where the piano flourish runs seamlessly into distant thundering, a ghostly caribou stampede across the black horizon. Here’s where we’re supposed to see monsters.
Instead, Fessenden has replaced that standard gambit with a longing and sadness familiar to anyone who’s ever looked into warmly-lit houses from a cold, dark street. The Manhattan-based filmmaker sees such disconnection at the heart of Earth’s ecological crisis. It’s an undertow that moves through every Fessenden movie since his first videos from the late 70s. Gruesome disaster ensues in The Last Winter – death by freezing, fiery plane crash and ravenous crows – but Fessenden’s interested in how a “reinvigorated” horror genre can serve environmental ends.
Though set in Alaska, The Last Winter was shot mostly in Iceland. Premiering at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006, The Last Winter opened theatrically in New York City last September. Since then it’s continued to screen in limited release and at festivals. This February, the film came to Syracuse’s Palace Theater in Eastwood as part of a Native American film festival organized by Joanne Shenandoah, who plays Dawn Russell in the film.
The same day The Last Winter premiered in Toronto, Fessenden launched his extensive ecology-themed website, RunningOutofRoad.com, a leap beyond Low Impact Filmmaking, his 1992 guide for filmmakers that details ecologically sound production and uses his film No Telling (1991) as a case example. Released abroad as The Frankenstein Complex, that film explored the arrogance of unchecked animal experimentation against a backdrop of toxic pesticide manufacturers’ profit-driven and equally arrogant contamination of upstate farmland. Fessenden also starred in Habit (1997), his riff on vampirism in society set largely in his own Lower East Side with forays to Long Island and Central Park. Wendigo (2001) completed the decade-long “horror trilogy” with another upstate tale, this one about an angry deer god that attacks a transgressing vacationer from the city but spares – for now – his artifact-carrying son.
This should be a good year for Fessenden. In late March Image Comics released The Last Winter as a graphic novel. Fessenden acts in several forthcoming films produced by Scareflix, the ultra low-budget division of his Glass Eye Pix, including Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell the Dead (with Ron Perlman and Dominic Monaghan) and Graham Reznick’s I Can See You. He’s a producer for, and has a part in, Kelly Reichardt’s new road trip movie, Wendy and Lucy, which premiers at Cannes this month. And he’s directing an episode of NBC’s summer anthology series, Fear Itself, which starts airing Thursdays at 10 PM on June 5th. He’s a taste worth acquiring.
*******
This review appeared in the 5/15/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly & is a shorter version of the introduction to an interview with Larry Fessenden published on 5/18/08 at FilmSlashmagazine.com. The Last Winter releases on rental DVD on May 20 as a Blockbuster Exclusive (for sale elsewhere, with many extras, on July 22). “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not have a CNY theatrical opening & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Puerto Rican comedy hit worth staying up for
Maldeamores a late film fest entry on Friday night
(Syracuse City Eagle weekly, 5/1/2008)
Tere Paniagua, who manages Point of Contact Gallery and many of the details that make the Syracuse International Film Festival hum, said she and her sister, Rita, who directs the West Side’s La Liga, were “rolling on the floor.”
This was just a week ago, right after Puerto Rico’s official 2008 Oscar entry for best foreign language film, Maldeamores, skidded into town. The ensemble comedy, executive-produced by Benicio del Toro and featuring the great character actor Luis Guzman, wasn’t even on SIFF’s screening schedule. But a handful of festival folk plus one sister made room to watch the 85-minute screener in the hurried days just before Friday’s opening and – along with repeated outbursts of, “You gotta see this movie!” – quickly shoe-horned Maldeamores into a midnight screening slot Friday night at the Syracuse Center 4 the Arts on East Genesee Street, just a short walk across Foreman Park from the Renaissance Hotel, which lodges many filmmakers and other festival visitors.
Maldeamores is beautifully shot and edited, uniformly well-acted, and has a smart, witty, large-spirited script that turns on a dime. Like the Cuban cinema its makers admire, it combines tragedy and laughter in ways seemingly lost on Hollywood. It’s the first feature film from San Juan’s Pajaritos Peñaos Films, the indie production company of husband and wife team Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz and Mariem Pérez Riera. A four-year project shot in May 2006, it’s among early beneficiaries of Puerto Rico’s 2001 legislation to encourage the island’s film industry via tax credits, interest-free loans and other services to filmmakers. That environment plus the hands-on support of Puerto Rican native del Toro got Maldeamores made.
The film shuttles gracefully among three parallel stories about love’s troubles, framed by a hilarious young couple bickering in a car – uncredited and de-glamorized, these two suspiciously resemble Ruiz and Pérez – whose brief story runs before opening titles and again after closing credits. First, young Ismaelito (Fernando Tarrazo) is stuck tearfully in a car with his parents Lourdes (Teresa Hernandez) and Ismael (Luis Guzman), forced to leave what looked like the baseball championships by his great-grandmother’s sudden death. Although he gets his first kiss after the wake, his father’s dalliance with Lourdes’ cousin Tati (Eduali Figueroa) comes explosively to light. Meanwhile, forlorn Miguel (Luis Gonzaga), who’s been stalking bus-driver Marta (Dolores Pedro), proposes marriage and takes the bus hostage to provide incentive. Also meanwhile, 72-year-old Flora (Silvia Brito, who will be at Saturday’s screening) is already housing one ex-husband, Cirilo (Chavito Marrero), when she reluctantly takes in wayward first spouse Pellín (Miguel Alvarez) after 30 years’ absence. A rum-soaked birthday party, a rooster’s attack in the shower, and a big-hearted accommodation ensue.
Maldeamores premiered last April at Tribeca – all screenings sold out – and had a short San Juan theatrical release in September to qualify for the Oscars – also sold out. Limited theatrical release here in the States followed in March along with the festival circuit, where Brito has taken honors for her Flora and the film has been an audience favorite. Although there’s no US distributor yet for a wide release, the sound track is on CD and DVD follows in September.
Carlitos Ruiz spent last Friday at bread-and-butter work – shooting a commercial – but Saturday afternoon he spoke by phone from San Juan. Here’s part of our conversation:
How did you come to make this film?
Well Mariem, my wife, made the story. There is no film school here in Puerto Rico, though our parents are actors and musicians. I was raised in a theater and raised on Latin American film. The first time I saw Cuban films, I said, that’s what I want to do. Mariem studied film in Cuba and New York City and me, in Chicago. We realized we liked the same films. We had not known each other during film school, only afterward. We wanted to make a film about real love, about the claustrophobic journey. We Latin Americans enjoy suffering more than love itself! Actually we wrote the script with friends – the actor Israel Lugo and the writer Jorge Gonzalez – over four months together. We wanted several stories only united by the theme of love. Two weeks into the project, we weren’t finding the right stories, so we asked each other, how was your first kiss? We told each other stories. The grandmother with two lovers, the first kiss – these became stories about every stage of life. They were simple and tender and showed that even with the bad aspects of love, it doesn’t matter how hard it is to get there. We’re all film freaks and what we get the most satisfaction from is how audiences have connected with the film. We’ve just been invited to Bosnia. And it’s shown in many festivals since Tribeca – in Argentina, Spain, the US, Cairo, Israel, Italy, France.
The film had a limited theatrical release earlier this year too?
Yes. In Puerto Rico it’s broken all the records. It’s still in theaters here after two and a half months. Also it’s been in New York and Orlando. We opened last fall for one week in San Juan in time to qualify for Oscar entry and people stood in line for six hours.
Can you talk about Benicio del Toro's involvement?
Actually he commissioned the film. He’d seen my film school thesis – a short that played in a theater here. Then we developed a professional relationship. We developed a workshop on film for kids here and after two years he said, “You have to make your own film.” He was really the godfather – his name, he helped with casting, he and Mariem edited the film. At first we had three chronological stories – he suggested parallel stories. We didn’t want to be compared to Alejandro González Iñárritu [whose 2006 film Babel with Brad Pitt chopped up both chronology and multiple plots], but he said, “Hey, it’s your first feature! If you are compared to Iñárritu, that’s not so bad.” When Mariem started adapting the stories that way, the film started talking back to us. And I love the editing – it’s like a symphony the way it moves among the stories.
The cast are local actors?
Puerto Rican actors and two Cubans – one was Silvia Brito. Benicio found her in New York City. A lot of the actresses said no to that role – at her age, living with two men – because they were too conservative. The other Cuban actress plays the bus driver. We have great actors here, but one of the weaknesses of Puerto Rican films is sometimes the acting because of weak dialogue in our scripts. We wanted real acting. We did a lot of work-shopping and rehearsing. It’s not an improvised film – 95 % of the film is scripted. Then we shot the three stories separately over a total of 18 days.
Can you talk about the scene on the bus where Miguel takes Marta and the riders hostage? When I was watching the film I was immediately struck by how difficult that scene would be to shoot and how very well it flowed.
It’s a very claustrophobic scene. I believe the camera works for the actors, the actors don’t work for the camera. We shot that scene with a very small camera – a 16mm A-minima – so it’s not that intrusive. The whole film was story-boarded. Another thing, the actors in each story didn’t know the other stories – I only gave them their part of the script. So the first story – the kid’s story – is very laid back. When we had the wrap they all caught up on each other’s parts and they were amazed. I wanted the actors to feel closed in for eight hours. And we told the hostages in the bus scene not to talk to the main actor in that scene between takes.
Are you working on a next project?
Yes, we’ve started a comedy, set in America. In fact we have three projects in development. We are making the films we want to make. We’re here to make films. We are storytellers. It’s hard to distribute Spanish language films in the States, but we’re moving on. You know, the name of our company – Pajaritos Peñaos Films – in English that’s “pregnant birds,” and we have a saying that it stands for possibilities.
*******
Maldeamores a late film fest entry on Friday night
(Syracuse City Eagle weekly, 5/1/2008)
Tere Paniagua, who manages Point of Contact Gallery and many of the details that make the Syracuse International Film Festival hum, said she and her sister, Rita, who directs the West Side’s La Liga, were “rolling on the floor.”
This was just a week ago, right after Puerto Rico’s official 2008 Oscar entry for best foreign language film, Maldeamores, skidded into town. The ensemble comedy, executive-produced by Benicio del Toro and featuring the great character actor Luis Guzman, wasn’t even on SIFF’s screening schedule. But a handful of festival folk plus one sister made room to watch the 85-minute screener in the hurried days just before Friday’s opening and – along with repeated outbursts of, “You gotta see this movie!” – quickly shoe-horned Maldeamores into a midnight screening slot Friday night at the Syracuse Center 4 the Arts on East Genesee Street, just a short walk across Foreman Park from the Renaissance Hotel, which lodges many filmmakers and other festival visitors.
Maldeamores is beautifully shot and edited, uniformly well-acted, and has a smart, witty, large-spirited script that turns on a dime. Like the Cuban cinema its makers admire, it combines tragedy and laughter in ways seemingly lost on Hollywood. It’s the first feature film from San Juan’s Pajaritos Peñaos Films, the indie production company of husband and wife team Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz and Mariem Pérez Riera. A four-year project shot in May 2006, it’s among early beneficiaries of Puerto Rico’s 2001 legislation to encourage the island’s film industry via tax credits, interest-free loans and other services to filmmakers. That environment plus the hands-on support of Puerto Rican native del Toro got Maldeamores made.
The film shuttles gracefully among three parallel stories about love’s troubles, framed by a hilarious young couple bickering in a car – uncredited and de-glamorized, these two suspiciously resemble Ruiz and Pérez – whose brief story runs before opening titles and again after closing credits. First, young Ismaelito (Fernando Tarrazo) is stuck tearfully in a car with his parents Lourdes (Teresa Hernandez) and Ismael (Luis Guzman), forced to leave what looked like the baseball championships by his great-grandmother’s sudden death. Although he gets his first kiss after the wake, his father’s dalliance with Lourdes’ cousin Tati (Eduali Figueroa) comes explosively to light. Meanwhile, forlorn Miguel (Luis Gonzaga), who’s been stalking bus-driver Marta (Dolores Pedro), proposes marriage and takes the bus hostage to provide incentive. Also meanwhile, 72-year-old Flora (Silvia Brito, who will be at Saturday’s screening) is already housing one ex-husband, Cirilo (Chavito Marrero), when she reluctantly takes in wayward first spouse Pellín (Miguel Alvarez) after 30 years’ absence. A rum-soaked birthday party, a rooster’s attack in the shower, and a big-hearted accommodation ensue.
Maldeamores premiered last April at Tribeca – all screenings sold out – and had a short San Juan theatrical release in September to qualify for the Oscars – also sold out. Limited theatrical release here in the States followed in March along with the festival circuit, where Brito has taken honors for her Flora and the film has been an audience favorite. Although there’s no US distributor yet for a wide release, the sound track is on CD and DVD follows in September.
Carlitos Ruiz spent last Friday at bread-and-butter work – shooting a commercial – but Saturday afternoon he spoke by phone from San Juan. Here’s part of our conversation:
How did you come to make this film?
Well Mariem, my wife, made the story. There is no film school here in Puerto Rico, though our parents are actors and musicians. I was raised in a theater and raised on Latin American film. The first time I saw Cuban films, I said, that’s what I want to do. Mariem studied film in Cuba and New York City and me, in Chicago. We realized we liked the same films. We had not known each other during film school, only afterward. We wanted to make a film about real love, about the claustrophobic journey. We Latin Americans enjoy suffering more than love itself! Actually we wrote the script with friends – the actor Israel Lugo and the writer Jorge Gonzalez – over four months together. We wanted several stories only united by the theme of love. Two weeks into the project, we weren’t finding the right stories, so we asked each other, how was your first kiss? We told each other stories. The grandmother with two lovers, the first kiss – these became stories about every stage of life. They were simple and tender and showed that even with the bad aspects of love, it doesn’t matter how hard it is to get there. We’re all film freaks and what we get the most satisfaction from is how audiences have connected with the film. We’ve just been invited to Bosnia. And it’s shown in many festivals since Tribeca – in Argentina, Spain, the US, Cairo, Israel, Italy, France.
The film had a limited theatrical release earlier this year too?
Yes. In Puerto Rico it’s broken all the records. It’s still in theaters here after two and a half months. Also it’s been in New York and Orlando. We opened last fall for one week in San Juan in time to qualify for Oscar entry and people stood in line for six hours.
Can you talk about Benicio del Toro's involvement?
Actually he commissioned the film. He’d seen my film school thesis – a short that played in a theater here. Then we developed a professional relationship. We developed a workshop on film for kids here and after two years he said, “You have to make your own film.” He was really the godfather – his name, he helped with casting, he and Mariem edited the film. At first we had three chronological stories – he suggested parallel stories. We didn’t want to be compared to Alejandro González Iñárritu [whose 2006 film Babel with Brad Pitt chopped up both chronology and multiple plots], but he said, “Hey, it’s your first feature! If you are compared to Iñárritu, that’s not so bad.” When Mariem started adapting the stories that way, the film started talking back to us. And I love the editing – it’s like a symphony the way it moves among the stories.
The cast are local actors?
Puerto Rican actors and two Cubans – one was Silvia Brito. Benicio found her in New York City. A lot of the actresses said no to that role – at her age, living with two men – because they were too conservative. The other Cuban actress plays the bus driver. We have great actors here, but one of the weaknesses of Puerto Rican films is sometimes the acting because of weak dialogue in our scripts. We wanted real acting. We did a lot of work-shopping and rehearsing. It’s not an improvised film – 95 % of the film is scripted. Then we shot the three stories separately over a total of 18 days.
Can you talk about the scene on the bus where Miguel takes Marta and the riders hostage? When I was watching the film I was immediately struck by how difficult that scene would be to shoot and how very well it flowed.
It’s a very claustrophobic scene. I believe the camera works for the actors, the actors don’t work for the camera. We shot that scene with a very small camera – a 16mm A-minima – so it’s not that intrusive. The whole film was story-boarded. Another thing, the actors in each story didn’t know the other stories – I only gave them their part of the script. So the first story – the kid’s story – is very laid back. When we had the wrap they all caught up on each other’s parts and they were amazed. I wanted the actors to feel closed in for eight hours. And we told the hostages in the bus scene not to talk to the main actor in that scene between takes.
Are you working on a next project?
Yes, we’ve started a comedy, set in America. In fact we have three projects in development. We are making the films we want to make. We’re here to make films. We are storytellers. It’s hard to distribute Spanish language films in the States, but we’re moving on. You know, the name of our company – Pajaritos Peñaos Films – in English that’s “pregnant birds,” and we have a saying that it stands for possibilities.
*******
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Film Review #158: Moolaadé
2004/DVD 2008
Director: Ousmane Sembene
Cast: Fatoumata Coulibaly, Maimouna Hélène Diarra, Théophile Sowié
Many thundering, indignant tirades have rained upon another’s head already by the time Ciré Bathily’s first wife Kharjatou (Maimouna Hélène Diarra) finally loses her temper with his middle wife Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), whom she cherishes, lies for sometimes and secretly agrees with. Stopping the second wife dead in her tracks with an icy glare and pointed finger, Kharjatou commands Collé never to raise her voice again and banishes the younger woman to her quarters. And Collé meekly goes.
When this startling exchange occurs, Collé has the entire contemporary West African village of Djerisso in an uproar. In their husband’s absence, she’s allowed four runaway girls to seek refuge in the Bathily family compound, avoiding the purification rite of female circumcision that their local custom requires. (Two other little girls who also ran away threw themselves down the village well rather than submit to cutting.) Oumy, Diatou, Awa and Nafi – who look to be somewhere between the ages of five and maybe eight – tell Collé they sought her out because they’d heard that seven years ago Collé refused her own daughter’s purification. Then, Ciré (Rasmane Ouedraogo) and Kharjatou both let that defiance pass.
Now, with the simple act of tying a rope across the outer gate to their compound – so low that toddlers, chickens and baby goats routinely step right over it – Collé invokes the indigenous, ancient protection of “moolaadé” that only she can lift by uttering a single word aloud. Moolaadé alone trumps the relative new-comer Islam and leaves the red-robed Salindana – dour women who perform the circumcisions – thwarted, fuming, cooling their heels beyond the rope.
Worse, this all coincides with the triumphant return from Paris of Ibrahima Doucouré (Théophile Sowié), who passes out currency, pays his prominent father’s debts to the peddler Mercenaire (Dominique Zeïda) and expects to marry Collé’s daughter Amsatou (Salimata Traoré). He is undeterred that she is “bilakora” (uncut). His father initially let that pass too, despite several brief, wry scenes in which the older men vigorously reassure one another that they would never consider intimacy with such a woman.
More dramatic events follow – a public flogging, Ibrahima’s disinheritance, the forced and fatal cutting of little asylum-seeker Diatou (lured from safety by her mother), the peddler’s murder for interference, the furious confiscation and burning of the women’s radios. Guttenberg’s printing press sparked Europe’s Protestant Reformation by making Holy Scripture available to whoever could read. In remote Djerisso, this analogue of subversive blend of literacy with forbidden knowledge boils over when Collé tells the assembled village that – on the radio – she has heard the Grand Imam himself say that Islam does not require cutting. For good measure, she reports that a million uncut women make the pilgrimage to Mecca themselves every year, to which one elder responds, “You are Satan!”
Set in the West African nation of Burkina Faso and made in 2003, Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembene’s final film, honored first at Cannes and many times since, actually came to Syracuse last April, when Jean Jonassaint, liaison for French-language films to the Syracuse International Film Festival, screened it late one afternoon at Syracuse University’s Hall of Languages. Long available on DVD in Canada because of Quebec’s robust French-language cinema – indeed, films made in French hail from several continents and the Caribbean – Moolaadé only recently made it to US DVD.
It’s tempting to draw parallels between this film and current headlines on the basis of surface similarities – the seizure of children in Texas from the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints over possible sexual abuse and on-going custody hearings – but that lens can be distorting. Last June we lost Sembene, an old lion’s death overshadowed here by the twin losses in July of Bergman and Antonioni, both – shades of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – on the same day. Moolaadé is a good place to start if you don’t know Sembene’s work, with its finely calibrated performances and characters torn by the real dilemmas of personal affection competing with rigorous custom. With all the larger furor in their village, Collé earns Kharjatou’s rebuke because she embarrasses the older woman before her adult son with a moment of demanding, insistent inquiries, much as Ciré’s harsh older brother goads him into bullying Collé – his favorite wife – and so on. It’s a lovely and important film, likely to bust your categories.
2004/DVD 2008
Director: Ousmane Sembene
Cast: Fatoumata Coulibaly, Maimouna Hélène Diarra, Théophile Sowié
Many thundering, indignant tirades have rained upon another’s head already by the time Ciré Bathily’s first wife Kharjatou (Maimouna Hélène Diarra) finally loses her temper with his middle wife Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), whom she cherishes, lies for sometimes and secretly agrees with. Stopping the second wife dead in her tracks with an icy glare and pointed finger, Kharjatou commands Collé never to raise her voice again and banishes the younger woman to her quarters. And Collé meekly goes.
When this startling exchange occurs, Collé has the entire contemporary West African village of Djerisso in an uproar. In their husband’s absence, she’s allowed four runaway girls to seek refuge in the Bathily family compound, avoiding the purification rite of female circumcision that their local custom requires. (Two other little girls who also ran away threw themselves down the village well rather than submit to cutting.) Oumy, Diatou, Awa and Nafi – who look to be somewhere between the ages of five and maybe eight – tell Collé they sought her out because they’d heard that seven years ago Collé refused her own daughter’s purification. Then, Ciré (Rasmane Ouedraogo) and Kharjatou both let that defiance pass.
Now, with the simple act of tying a rope across the outer gate to their compound – so low that toddlers, chickens and baby goats routinely step right over it – Collé invokes the indigenous, ancient protection of “moolaadé” that only she can lift by uttering a single word aloud. Moolaadé alone trumps the relative new-comer Islam and leaves the red-robed Salindana – dour women who perform the circumcisions – thwarted, fuming, cooling their heels beyond the rope.
Worse, this all coincides with the triumphant return from Paris of Ibrahima Doucouré (Théophile Sowié), who passes out currency, pays his prominent father’s debts to the peddler Mercenaire (Dominique Zeïda) and expects to marry Collé’s daughter Amsatou (Salimata Traoré). He is undeterred that she is “bilakora” (uncut). His father initially let that pass too, despite several brief, wry scenes in which the older men vigorously reassure one another that they would never consider intimacy with such a woman.
More dramatic events follow – a public flogging, Ibrahima’s disinheritance, the forced and fatal cutting of little asylum-seeker Diatou (lured from safety by her mother), the peddler’s murder for interference, the furious confiscation and burning of the women’s radios. Guttenberg’s printing press sparked Europe’s Protestant Reformation by making Holy Scripture available to whoever could read. In remote Djerisso, this analogue of subversive blend of literacy with forbidden knowledge boils over when Collé tells the assembled village that – on the radio – she has heard the Grand Imam himself say that Islam does not require cutting. For good measure, she reports that a million uncut women make the pilgrimage to Mecca themselves every year, to which one elder responds, “You are Satan!”
Set in the West African nation of Burkina Faso and made in 2003, Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembene’s final film, honored first at Cannes and many times since, actually came to Syracuse last April, when Jean Jonassaint, liaison for French-language films to the Syracuse International Film Festival, screened it late one afternoon at Syracuse University’s Hall of Languages. Long available on DVD in Canada because of Quebec’s robust French-language cinema – indeed, films made in French hail from several continents and the Caribbean – Moolaadé only recently made it to US DVD.
It’s tempting to draw parallels between this film and current headlines on the basis of surface similarities – the seizure of children in Texas from the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints over possible sexual abuse and on-going custody hearings – but that lens can be distorting. Last June we lost Sembene, an old lion’s death overshadowed here by the twin losses in July of Bergman and Antonioni, both – shades of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – on the same day. Moolaadé is a good place to start if you don’t know Sembene’s work, with its finely calibrated performances and characters torn by the real dilemmas of personal affection competing with rigorous custom. With all the larger furor in their village, Collé earns Kharjatou’s rebuke because she embarrasses the older woman before her adult son with a moment of demanding, insistent inquiries, much as Ciré’s harsh older brother goads him into bullying Collé – his favorite wife – and so on. It’s a lovely and important film, likely to bust your categories.
*******
Find Moolaadé as well as Sembene’s Black Girl, Xala, &Mandabi at Netflix.com. Jean Jonassaint reports that SIFF plans a Sembene retrospective as part of its 2009 program. This review appeared in the 4/24/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Find Moolaadé as well as Sembene’s Black Girl, Xala, &Mandabi at Netflix.com. Jean Jonassaint reports that SIFF plans a Sembene retrospective as part of its 2009 program. This review appeared in the 4/24/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Film Review #157: Madame Rosa
1977/DVD forthcoming
Director: Moshe Mizrahi
Cast: Simone Signoret, Samy Ben-Youb, Michal Bat-Adam
When the jittery, shifty-eyed Kadir Youssef shows up, banging at Madame Rosa’s door eleven years after leaving his toddler son in her care, Madame Rosa (the incomparable Simone Signoret) improvises a demonstration for the boy so he can choose whether he wishes this man to be his father. Kadir Youssef is just released from the psychiatric hospital that held him all those years after he shot his wife, who turned fifteen tricks a day for him in the Paris streets. Now 65, in badly failing health and destitute, Madame Rosa has just two boys left from her international brood, children of younger, still working prostitutes left with her for a monthly fee. Roughly the same age, one is a Jewish boy in a skull cap, the other a Muslim boy named Momo (Samy Ben-Youb’s only film role), who has lately taken to introducing himself as “Algerian” to satisfy his own questions.
As a make-shift foster mother, Madame Rosa has conscientiously attached each of her charges to someone from their own background – a Vietnamese boy to a Vietnamese grocer, an African child to the jovial Senegalese pimp Amèdée (musician Ibrahim Seek), and Momo to Mr. Hamil (Gabriel Jabbour), an elderly Arab rug dealer fond of Victor Hugo whose admonitions include the idea that one cannot live without love. Madame Rosa herself survived Auschwitz to return to Paris after World War II. (In one harrowing scene, her mind fragile, she imagines she’s again ordered to take just one bag and report for the train trip east.) She boasts she now keeps identity papers that go back many generations and prove she’s not Jewish, just in case. Madame Rosa also has a secret, locked cellar room with a Menorah that she calls her “Jewish hide-away.” She retreats there when plagued by nightmares or, with Momo’s help, when the aged Dr. Katz (Claude Dauphin) tries to put her in the hospital, where she fears she’d be kept alive for experiments.
So Madame Rosa has not mixed up these boys. But she tells Kadir Youssef, shrugging after she checks her records – here we see the contents of that battered suitcase – and nodding toward Moïse, who’s clearly accustomed to going along with her tales to strangers, “I made a mistake. I mixed up the religions. I brought up Mohamed as a good little Jew. He’s a little bit Jewish, he’s still your son.”
An apoplectic Kadir Youssef screams, “I want my son back in an Arab state!”
Serenely, Madame Rosa answers, “In this household we have no Jewish states or Arab states.”
In this moment, the luminous Madame Rosa – she who retired from prostituting after age 50 “for aesthetic reasons” – also alters each boy from his past enough that he becomes free to choose it, to change his own beginning and hence his own ending. Israeli filmmaker Moshe Mizrahi makes such self-invention a means of transcendence, a species of art itself. Thus for example Momo’s concocted alibi about Madame Rosa’s long-lost Israeli relatives sending for her. Or his grieving, distracted exchange with the statuesque black hooker Madame Lola (Stella Annicette), whom he tells he's stopped eating. When Lola, an ex-boxer who “took injections,” scoffs that hunger is a law of nature, Momo retorts, “I could care less about nature’s laws!” After a beat, Lola laughs, “Well, neither could I!” And when Momo follows the young film editor Nadine, who becomes his life-line (Michal Bat-Adam, herself a noted filmmaker, Mizrahi’s wife and later his frequent lead), he’s mesmerized precisely by cinema’s capacity to “make the world go backwards.”
Winner of 1978’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Madame Rosa is hard to find in the US unless you’re willing to pay big bucks on-line. Only a handful of Mizrahi’s films are currently available in the US, some on netflix and several more on-line. Lately Netflix has promised a new DVD of Madame Rosa that you can reserve, maybe because Mizrahi has a new film entitled Weekend in Galilee. See both on the big screen right here in Syracuse later this month, with Mizrahi himself making the trip too, thanks to the Syracuse International Film Festival.
*******
Madame Rosa is part of SIFF 2008’s retrospective honoring Moshe Mizrahi. Screenings include I Love You Rosa, Madame Rosa, Every Time We Say Good-bye & the USA premier of Mizrahi’s new film, Weekend in Galilee. USA premier of Michal Bat-Adam’s new film, Rita Working Title also at SIFF. Complete SIFF schedule at syrfilm.com.
1977/DVD forthcoming
Director: Moshe Mizrahi
Cast: Simone Signoret, Samy Ben-Youb, Michal Bat-Adam
When the jittery, shifty-eyed Kadir Youssef shows up, banging at Madame Rosa’s door eleven years after leaving his toddler son in her care, Madame Rosa (the incomparable Simone Signoret) improvises a demonstration for the boy so he can choose whether he wishes this man to be his father. Kadir Youssef is just released from the psychiatric hospital that held him all those years after he shot his wife, who turned fifteen tricks a day for him in the Paris streets. Now 65, in badly failing health and destitute, Madame Rosa has just two boys left from her international brood, children of younger, still working prostitutes left with her for a monthly fee. Roughly the same age, one is a Jewish boy in a skull cap, the other a Muslim boy named Momo (Samy Ben-Youb’s only film role), who has lately taken to introducing himself as “Algerian” to satisfy his own questions.
As a make-shift foster mother, Madame Rosa has conscientiously attached each of her charges to someone from their own background – a Vietnamese boy to a Vietnamese grocer, an African child to the jovial Senegalese pimp Amèdée (musician Ibrahim Seek), and Momo to Mr. Hamil (Gabriel Jabbour), an elderly Arab rug dealer fond of Victor Hugo whose admonitions include the idea that one cannot live without love. Madame Rosa herself survived Auschwitz to return to Paris after World War II. (In one harrowing scene, her mind fragile, she imagines she’s again ordered to take just one bag and report for the train trip east.) She boasts she now keeps identity papers that go back many generations and prove she’s not Jewish, just in case. Madame Rosa also has a secret, locked cellar room with a Menorah that she calls her “Jewish hide-away.” She retreats there when plagued by nightmares or, with Momo’s help, when the aged Dr. Katz (Claude Dauphin) tries to put her in the hospital, where she fears she’d be kept alive for experiments.
So Madame Rosa has not mixed up these boys. But she tells Kadir Youssef, shrugging after she checks her records – here we see the contents of that battered suitcase – and nodding toward Moïse, who’s clearly accustomed to going along with her tales to strangers, “I made a mistake. I mixed up the religions. I brought up Mohamed as a good little Jew. He’s a little bit Jewish, he’s still your son.”
An apoplectic Kadir Youssef screams, “I want my son back in an Arab state!”
Serenely, Madame Rosa answers, “In this household we have no Jewish states or Arab states.”
In this moment, the luminous Madame Rosa – she who retired from prostituting after age 50 “for aesthetic reasons” – also alters each boy from his past enough that he becomes free to choose it, to change his own beginning and hence his own ending. Israeli filmmaker Moshe Mizrahi makes such self-invention a means of transcendence, a species of art itself. Thus for example Momo’s concocted alibi about Madame Rosa’s long-lost Israeli relatives sending for her. Or his grieving, distracted exchange with the statuesque black hooker Madame Lola (Stella Annicette), whom he tells he's stopped eating. When Lola, an ex-boxer who “took injections,” scoffs that hunger is a law of nature, Momo retorts, “I could care less about nature’s laws!” After a beat, Lola laughs, “Well, neither could I!” And when Momo follows the young film editor Nadine, who becomes his life-line (Michal Bat-Adam, herself a noted filmmaker, Mizrahi’s wife and later his frequent lead), he’s mesmerized precisely by cinema’s capacity to “make the world go backwards.”
Winner of 1978’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Madame Rosa is hard to find in the US unless you’re willing to pay big bucks on-line. Only a handful of Mizrahi’s films are currently available in the US, some on netflix and several more on-line. Lately Netflix has promised a new DVD of Madame Rosa that you can reserve, maybe because Mizrahi has a new film entitled Weekend in Galilee. See both on the big screen right here in Syracuse later this month, with Mizrahi himself making the trip too, thanks to the Syracuse International Film Festival.
*******
Madame Rosa is part of SIFF 2008’s retrospective honoring Moshe Mizrahi. Screenings include I Love You Rosa, Madame Rosa, Every Time We Say Good-bye & the USA premier of Mizrahi’s new film, Weekend in Galilee. USA premier of Michal Bat-Adam’s new film, Rita Working Title also at SIFF. Complete SIFF schedule at syrfilm.com.
Film Review #156: The Night of the Shooting Stars
1982/DVD 2008
Directors: Paolo & Vittorio Taviani
Cast: Omero Antonutti, Margarita Lozano, Mauro Monni
As of last week, a colleague in Italy advises by email, the latest film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, filmmaker brothers from Tuscany, had not yet been sold to a US distributor. Set in 1915 during the historic Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks, Skylark’s Farm premiered in February 2007 at the Berlin Film Festival, albeit outside the main line-up and greeted with “stony silence.” This was shortly after the sensational assassination of outspoken Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, during threats and even criminal charges in Turkey against Turkish novelists Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak and others. The growing movement there among artists, journalists and writers to speak openly about “the Armenian question” – something Turkey’s government has long officially denied – has been fanned by the issue of whether Turkey would join the European Union.
So making a film about the Armenian genocide – a project of artistic solidarity – would be right up the Taviani brothers’ alley. A year-plus after Berlin, Skylark’s Farm has opened in seven other countries and opens in Russia in late April. So the time is about right for Skylark’s Farm to show up state-side. Perhaps anticipating this, on April 1st Koch Lorber released a three-disc DVD set of three major Taviani films. Their signature film and certainly the best-known here, The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) has screened for years in Italian cinema courses on US college campuses. Kaos (1984) and Fiorile (1993) took more hunting to find, the first a three-hour adaptation of four Pirandello stories tied by the flight of the ill-omened raven, the second following a family curse over several generations and starring Michael Vartan (well before his spy in TV’s Alias) as a Napoleonic soldier and two of his spitting-image descendants, a role reminiscent of Ralph Fiennes’ similar turn in the Hungarian Itzvan Szabo’s wonderful Sunshine.
It’s a good sign that Emerald City Video immediately got this set on their racks. Releasing these three films together – watching them in a row is a fine way to spend three evenings – refreshes familiarity with one of the most fruitful and enduring partnerships in movie-making, highlights the resonance of shared locales and actors over a body of work, and prepares us for what may be an important cinematic response to the long-festering political and ethnic impasse in Turkey.
Beginning in 1954 – a yeasty time for Italian cinema – Paolo and Vittorio Taviani made the first of over 20 films, most set in Italy. Like so much of Italy's art since World War II, the Taviani’s work has wrestled deeply and expansively with the process of Fascism’s growth and its echoing consequences across families and communities. Their own home village of San Miniato and a neighboring village, Sant’Angelo, in the northwest region of Tuscany, figure prominently in both Night of the Shooting Stars and Fiorile, while the three-hour-long Kaos is set in 19th century Sicily. In the DVD interview on this set, Vittorio Taviani relates that their parents took them to Florence to see a Pirandello play when they were barely ten or eleven. This would have been the early 1940s. Intriguingly, the crystallizing experience of performed drama, he says – as Fascism roiled on every side – “was the end of our childhood – discovering the world is not as it seems.”
Taviani films are always good yarns, many narrated by a storytelling character. In Night of the Shooting Stars, a grown-up character named Cecilia recalls to her own sleeping infant how San Miniato split during a crucial moment in 1944, when she was a child and one man decided he should not believe the assurances of authority, even delivered from his bishop’s mouth. At that time, US troops were fighting their way up Italy's boot and San Miniato tensely awaited liberation. Ordered by the Germans to gather inside the cathedral, the plain, poor, elderly Galvano (Omero Antonutti) instead proposes they flee and takes half the village with him by night. When the few injured survivors of those who remained stagger from the dynamited cathedral, the bishop and a townswoman briefly struggle in the square, their eyes locked in grief and anger, over the body of a young pregnant bride whose modest wedding opened the film. The rigors of the road allow Galvano and childhood sweetheart Concetta (Margarita Lozano), now far above him in means and status, a brief and lovely moment out of time when their hosts in another town mistake them for a married couple and offer them their own room for the night. And Night of the Shooting Stars offers one of cinema's most memorable and mythically charged battles, when partisans and Fascists clash over one bloody afternoon in a golden wheat field, as neighbors and brothers and friends battle one another, conjuring the very heroes of Troy. With moviemaking this good, you don't mind knowing the end.
*******
This review appeared in the 4/10/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1982/DVD 2008
Directors: Paolo & Vittorio Taviani
Cast: Omero Antonutti, Margarita Lozano, Mauro Monni
As of last week, a colleague in Italy advises by email, the latest film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, filmmaker brothers from Tuscany, had not yet been sold to a US distributor. Set in 1915 during the historic Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks, Skylark’s Farm premiered in February 2007 at the Berlin Film Festival, albeit outside the main line-up and greeted with “stony silence.” This was shortly after the sensational assassination of outspoken Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, during threats and even criminal charges in Turkey against Turkish novelists Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak and others. The growing movement there among artists, journalists and writers to speak openly about “the Armenian question” – something Turkey’s government has long officially denied – has been fanned by the issue of whether Turkey would join the European Union.
So making a film about the Armenian genocide – a project of artistic solidarity – would be right up the Taviani brothers’ alley. A year-plus after Berlin, Skylark’s Farm has opened in seven other countries and opens in Russia in late April. So the time is about right for Skylark’s Farm to show up state-side. Perhaps anticipating this, on April 1st Koch Lorber released a three-disc DVD set of three major Taviani films. Their signature film and certainly the best-known here, The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) has screened for years in Italian cinema courses on US college campuses. Kaos (1984) and Fiorile (1993) took more hunting to find, the first a three-hour adaptation of four Pirandello stories tied by the flight of the ill-omened raven, the second following a family curse over several generations and starring Michael Vartan (well before his spy in TV’s Alias) as a Napoleonic soldier and two of his spitting-image descendants, a role reminiscent of Ralph Fiennes’ similar turn in the Hungarian Itzvan Szabo’s wonderful Sunshine.
It’s a good sign that Emerald City Video immediately got this set on their racks. Releasing these three films together – watching them in a row is a fine way to spend three evenings – refreshes familiarity with one of the most fruitful and enduring partnerships in movie-making, highlights the resonance of shared locales and actors over a body of work, and prepares us for what may be an important cinematic response to the long-festering political and ethnic impasse in Turkey.
Beginning in 1954 – a yeasty time for Italian cinema – Paolo and Vittorio Taviani made the first of over 20 films, most set in Italy. Like so much of Italy's art since World War II, the Taviani’s work has wrestled deeply and expansively with the process of Fascism’s growth and its echoing consequences across families and communities. Their own home village of San Miniato and a neighboring village, Sant’Angelo, in the northwest region of Tuscany, figure prominently in both Night of the Shooting Stars and Fiorile, while the three-hour-long Kaos is set in 19th century Sicily. In the DVD interview on this set, Vittorio Taviani relates that their parents took them to Florence to see a Pirandello play when they were barely ten or eleven. This would have been the early 1940s. Intriguingly, the crystallizing experience of performed drama, he says – as Fascism roiled on every side – “was the end of our childhood – discovering the world is not as it seems.”
Taviani films are always good yarns, many narrated by a storytelling character. In Night of the Shooting Stars, a grown-up character named Cecilia recalls to her own sleeping infant how San Miniato split during a crucial moment in 1944, when she was a child and one man decided he should not believe the assurances of authority, even delivered from his bishop’s mouth. At that time, US troops were fighting their way up Italy's boot and San Miniato tensely awaited liberation. Ordered by the Germans to gather inside the cathedral, the plain, poor, elderly Galvano (Omero Antonutti) instead proposes they flee and takes half the village with him by night. When the few injured survivors of those who remained stagger from the dynamited cathedral, the bishop and a townswoman briefly struggle in the square, their eyes locked in grief and anger, over the body of a young pregnant bride whose modest wedding opened the film. The rigors of the road allow Galvano and childhood sweetheart Concetta (Margarita Lozano), now far above him in means and status, a brief and lovely moment out of time when their hosts in another town mistake them for a married couple and offer them their own room for the night. And Night of the Shooting Stars offers one of cinema's most memorable and mythically charged battles, when partisans and Fascists clash over one bloody afternoon in a golden wheat field, as neighbors and brothers and friends battle one another, conjuring the very heroes of Troy. With moviemaking this good, you don't mind knowing the end.
*******
This review appeared in the 4/10/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Film Review #155: Time of the Wolf
2003/DVD 2006
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Hakim Taleb, Lucas Biscombe
In early January 2006, I saw my first Michael Haneke film at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City one cold, slushy night. There’s a moment in Caché – in English, it means Hidden – where, utterly without warning, a man slits his own throat, loosing a jet of blood across a kitchen. Even now, I feel my own head jerk back, how my hands clenched the seat arms, hear our – the rest of the audience’s – noisy collective gasp. The success of Caché – with its meditation on how camera surveillance has penetrated our lives and its riff on the costs of colonialism at a time when North African migrant workers were rioting in French suburbs – introduced the Austrian’s work to a wider US audience. DVD release of earlier Haneke films quickly followed that spring. Tellingly, Caché’s own DVD cover features a white background rent with a single jagged red slash.
Such moments of disorienting recoil are Haneke’s calling cards. In The Piano Teacher (2001), a film with certainly more than one such moment, my candidate for most viscerally gasp-inducing is that in which Isabelle Huppert’s teacher leaves the auditorium during her nervous star pupil’s dazzling recital and booby-traps the girl’s coat pocket with shards of broken glass. Somehow this moment is more unsettling than successive ones - it's as though Haneke has broken the act itself into shards - in which we first hear her scream, then see the blood-drenched hand held mid-air.
Haneke’s most violent moments sometimes occur just off-screen – we see the resulting bloodspray, after which his women, literally unable to stomach events, vomit – or the violence is other than merely physical. That gash on Caché’s DVD cover as much represents another boundary violated: the breaking of the “fourth wall” convention of live drama – from which Haneke comes to cinema – in which action spills off the stage, characters speak directly to audiences or some provocation occurs that transforms one’s safe spectator experience to participatory immediacy. Haneke opens the cage door. And from The Seventh Continent (1989) on, in most of his scripts – except for adapting novels twice – this occurs over and over with characters named some variant of Anne and Georges Laurent; their children, when present, often named Ben and Eva. As if, as a culture, we keep not getting the lesson right.
In Haneke’s new Funny Games, set on Long Island and pretty much a shot-for-shot re-make of his 1997 film of the same title, the moment of most recoil for me arrives near the end. As Ann (Naomi Watts) – bound, gagged, her husband and son dead – crosses a small lake in her sailboat, perched on the edge of the deck, one of her captors, Paul (Michael Pitt), with a cheery “Ciao, bella!” and not so much as a glance in her direction, shoves her overboard. (She drops from sight as quickly, as disposably, as that first kid shot in the library dropped from the frame in Gus Van Sant’s 2003 Columbine-inspired Elephant). But much of what repulses people about this film, with its veneer of opera scores and lovely God’s-eye cinematography, occurs earlier – during the three times Paul or Peter turn to the camera to taunt the audience about torture-as-entertainment and then during a truly disorienting sequence in which Ann shoots one kidnapper, we may momentarily exult and Paul uses a TV remote to re-wind – erase – that possible outcome. Funny Games is assaultive, masterful and left Carousel quickly. In the shorthand parlance of my group of regular movie buddies, it’s “not for Laurinda.”
Despite making Funny Games anew – and he’s working on a film now about how ritual punishment in a rural northern German school in 1913 contributed to Fascism’s rise, the working title of which is The Teacher’s Tale – Haneke did make one film – his first after 9/11 – that’s gentler, comparatively easier on his women, and full of grief for us all. Well, it’s not exactly without its violence. But one appreciates Time of the Wolf (2003) more, understanding Haneke’s usual bent.
Here, affluent city-dweller Anne Laurent (Isabelle Huppert) – a panicked looter shoots husband Georges very early - crosses the French countryside with teen-aged daughter Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) and young son Ben (Lucas Biscombe) after some convulsive catastrophe turns Europe to wasteland. Because she has “behaved correctly” in the past to a local woman we assume was a shopkeeper or maid, Anne receives a bag of biscuits through a narrowly cracked door. A violent feral boy (Hakim Taleb) hesitantly joins them and soon pulls an overcoat from a corpse which he offers to Eva. Initially she’s repulsed, but in the next scene she’s wearing it, and Eva remains this boy’s single tenuous thread to any make-shift community. An unstopping refugee train zooms by but he guides them to a country train station. Several incidents of frail generosity occur, flickering before the tide of chaos – an old man shares a cup of milk with his wife, one woman calms another down, in a fitful night there’s a faint, scratchy Beethoven sonata on a tape recorder.
Fragile, traumatized, increasingly given to wandering off, Ben hears garbled talk from some travelers of the Jewish legend of “the Just” – those 36 humans whose presence offsets all humanity’s evil-doing – and decides to sacrifice himself. Beside a signal fire on the tracks in a vast night, a sentry stops him, cradles him, says his willingness is enough. Then someone watches from an open box-car door, rumbling monotonously across an empty land. Haneke’s endings are aggressively ambiguous. Of course we might prefer it meant the next train stopped for Anne and her children. But it’s hard not think that “Never again” is the simple lesson that we’re still missing, all of us fellow travelers.
*******
This review appeared in the 4/3/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2003/DVD 2006
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Hakim Taleb, Lucas Biscombe
In early January 2006, I saw my first Michael Haneke film at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City one cold, slushy night. There’s a moment in Caché – in English, it means Hidden – where, utterly without warning, a man slits his own throat, loosing a jet of blood across a kitchen. Even now, I feel my own head jerk back, how my hands clenched the seat arms, hear our – the rest of the audience’s – noisy collective gasp. The success of Caché – with its meditation on how camera surveillance has penetrated our lives and its riff on the costs of colonialism at a time when North African migrant workers were rioting in French suburbs – introduced the Austrian’s work to a wider US audience. DVD release of earlier Haneke films quickly followed that spring. Tellingly, Caché’s own DVD cover features a white background rent with a single jagged red slash.
Such moments of disorienting recoil are Haneke’s calling cards. In The Piano Teacher (2001), a film with certainly more than one such moment, my candidate for most viscerally gasp-inducing is that in which Isabelle Huppert’s teacher leaves the auditorium during her nervous star pupil’s dazzling recital and booby-traps the girl’s coat pocket with shards of broken glass. Somehow this moment is more unsettling than successive ones - it's as though Haneke has broken the act itself into shards - in which we first hear her scream, then see the blood-drenched hand held mid-air.
Haneke’s most violent moments sometimes occur just off-screen – we see the resulting bloodspray, after which his women, literally unable to stomach events, vomit – or the violence is other than merely physical. That gash on Caché’s DVD cover as much represents another boundary violated: the breaking of the “fourth wall” convention of live drama – from which Haneke comes to cinema – in which action spills off the stage, characters speak directly to audiences or some provocation occurs that transforms one’s safe spectator experience to participatory immediacy. Haneke opens the cage door. And from The Seventh Continent (1989) on, in most of his scripts – except for adapting novels twice – this occurs over and over with characters named some variant of Anne and Georges Laurent; their children, when present, often named Ben and Eva. As if, as a culture, we keep not getting the lesson right.
In Haneke’s new Funny Games, set on Long Island and pretty much a shot-for-shot re-make of his 1997 film of the same title, the moment of most recoil for me arrives near the end. As Ann (Naomi Watts) – bound, gagged, her husband and son dead – crosses a small lake in her sailboat, perched on the edge of the deck, one of her captors, Paul (Michael Pitt), with a cheery “Ciao, bella!” and not so much as a glance in her direction, shoves her overboard. (She drops from sight as quickly, as disposably, as that first kid shot in the library dropped from the frame in Gus Van Sant’s 2003 Columbine-inspired Elephant). But much of what repulses people about this film, with its veneer of opera scores and lovely God’s-eye cinematography, occurs earlier – during the three times Paul or Peter turn to the camera to taunt the audience about torture-as-entertainment and then during a truly disorienting sequence in which Ann shoots one kidnapper, we may momentarily exult and Paul uses a TV remote to re-wind – erase – that possible outcome. Funny Games is assaultive, masterful and left Carousel quickly. In the shorthand parlance of my group of regular movie buddies, it’s “not for Laurinda.”
Despite making Funny Games anew – and he’s working on a film now about how ritual punishment in a rural northern German school in 1913 contributed to Fascism’s rise, the working title of which is The Teacher’s Tale – Haneke did make one film – his first after 9/11 – that’s gentler, comparatively easier on his women, and full of grief for us all. Well, it’s not exactly without its violence. But one appreciates Time of the Wolf (2003) more, understanding Haneke’s usual bent.
Here, affluent city-dweller Anne Laurent (Isabelle Huppert) – a panicked looter shoots husband Georges very early - crosses the French countryside with teen-aged daughter Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) and young son Ben (Lucas Biscombe) after some convulsive catastrophe turns Europe to wasteland. Because she has “behaved correctly” in the past to a local woman we assume was a shopkeeper or maid, Anne receives a bag of biscuits through a narrowly cracked door. A violent feral boy (Hakim Taleb) hesitantly joins them and soon pulls an overcoat from a corpse which he offers to Eva. Initially she’s repulsed, but in the next scene she’s wearing it, and Eva remains this boy’s single tenuous thread to any make-shift community. An unstopping refugee train zooms by but he guides them to a country train station. Several incidents of frail generosity occur, flickering before the tide of chaos – an old man shares a cup of milk with his wife, one woman calms another down, in a fitful night there’s a faint, scratchy Beethoven sonata on a tape recorder.
Fragile, traumatized, increasingly given to wandering off, Ben hears garbled talk from some travelers of the Jewish legend of “the Just” – those 36 humans whose presence offsets all humanity’s evil-doing – and decides to sacrifice himself. Beside a signal fire on the tracks in a vast night, a sentry stops him, cradles him, says his willingness is enough. Then someone watches from an open box-car door, rumbling monotonously across an empty land. Haneke’s endings are aggressively ambiguous. Of course we might prefer it meant the next train stopped for Anne and her children. But it’s hard not think that “Never again” is the simple lesson that we’re still missing, all of us fellow travelers.
*******
This review appeared in the 4/3/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
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