Film Review #212: Nigger
2009
Director: Thea St. Omer
Documentary

“I don’t audible-ize the word,” says one of the interviewees, a middle-aged white man and presumably a teacher. He says that he will write “nigger” and he will refer to it, just never “audible-ize” it.

I suppose he really means “say out loud.” Generally I take a dim view of the practice of interchanging parts of speech – using “impact” as a verb is just lazy – and now here is a further alarming foray into adjectival contortion. “Audible-ize” may exist somewhere, probably as a technological term, but this is the first time I’ve heard it used. And perhaps it shows up here to illustrate unwittingly the lengths to which we’ll go in seeking linguistic escape from the snares of another word. Thea St. Omer takes on the many-shaded malignancy of that word in her masterful documentary, Nigger.

An instructor at the Newhouse School of Syracuse University, St. Omer screened an earlier version of Nigger there last spring and later at New York University. Now she’s finished the film – 59 minutes and shot in digital video – and she hosts a premiere screening next Wednesday at ArtRage Gallery in the Hawley-Greene neighborhood, just a short hop north from the SU campus near James and Lodi.

St. Omer distills Nigger from over 100 interviews. The majority of her interviewees are of African descent, but there are also Latinos, a number of whites including a German mother whose school-age daughter uses the term “digger” as code for the forbidden “nigger,” and several Asians including a slender young man who says he’s never been called a “nigger” and adds wistfully, “I’m not that cool.” One thing that film as a visual medium accomplishes here, without making any fuss about it at all, is the accumulation of a pool of subjects who are astonishingly varied in their range of age, style, accent, dress, station and degree of worldliness, stance and hue. This of course makes its own point given the film’s consideration of blunt-force stereotype.

St. Omer’s set-up is simple and intimate: acting as her own cameraperson and shooting in closeup, she interviews subjects against a black backdrop. In letting me watch the film for review she extracted a for-my-eyes-only promise because the dvcam master was delayed, getting its final color correction elsewhere. She needn’t have worried. The film’s look is very nice indeed.

She has taken what are evidently lengthy conversations and edited to pull short clips which she then arranges in sections. One can imagine that these categories emerged from the interviews she filmed as well as from her questions, and the sections are simply titled with white text on black: “A look at the word.” “Where did the term nigger come from?” “Is there such a thing as a nigger?” (This section is particularly intriguing, as interviewees think through aloud about the distinctions involved between a word and what it represents.) “To be called a nigger.” “The cultural nuances of nigger.” “Is there a difference between nigger and nigga?” “Should we use the words nigger and nigga today?” and “Are you a nigger?”, which evokes perhaps deeper emotion than in any of the previous sections. It is my guess that none of the white interviewees asked this question will ever claim glibbly that they "know how you feel."

While we don’t hear her voice until a good ways into the film – she softly asks a young man how he reacted when someone called him a nigger (instead of answering directly, he says, “My Jewish friend Andy beat the crap out of the guy!”) – and only infrequently after that, it’s evident she’s an excellent interviewer. Her subjects are relaxed, expressive, thoughtful, sometimes witty and frequently eloquent. I said above that she “distilled” this film; that’s descriptive but also offers the temptation to draw that metaphor out, for what’s here is a kind of bootleg knowledge. Clearly these enormously quotable people feel safe with St. Omer getting them on record about, as the film’s tagline goes, “Arguably the most loaded word in our history.”

Actually, I suppose some would argue about that assertion, and several of St. Omer’s subjects do reference parallel struggles in passing. For example, one woman says that “for some people, the world is full of niggers and kikes and homosexuals.” Another woman responds to the issue of who may appropriately use the word “nigga,” either in solidarity or as a way of claiming affection, by noting that she understands the theory of “reclaiming” and thereby transforming negative language but she can’t imagine ever actually calling her women friends by the “C” word. It seems to me another of St. Omer’s quiet accomplishments in this film is that we understand she’s not adverse to including other oppressions, but this one is what we’re talking about right now and – like the good teacher that I imagine she is in a classroom – she deftly keeps us right on point.

******* This review appeared in the October 1, 2009 print issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Thea St. Omer hosted the premiere screening of her finished documentary, Nigger, on Wednesday, October 7 at 7:00 PM at ArtRage Gallery, 505 Hawley Avenue, Syracuse.

Film Review #211: The Passion of Joan of Arc
1928/DVD 1999
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Cast: Renee Maria Falconetti & others

The idea of what makes a woman hero dates back at least to female medieval mystics, among them Joan of Arc, the illiterate French peasant girl whose “divine voices” told her to unite France, assist in the crowning of the young Charles VII and expel the English invaders. For her trouble she was betrayed by French collaborators in 1431, turned over to a Church court, tried for heresy – there were 29 “examinations” combined with torture, during which she disavowed her voices but then recanted – and burned at the stake, all by the time she was 19 years old.

Every Catholic schoolgirl knows Joan’s story – as much frightening cautionary tale as feminist inspiration – though actually a number of cultures have legends or historical instances of young women who transgressed conventions of their time, dressed in men’s clothing and took up arms and leadership at moments of crisis, often to repel invaders. The Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film about Joan’s trial and execution is by no means the first cinematic treatment of "the maid of Orleans" – at least seven movies preceded his, the earliest in 1895 – though the Catholic Church did not declare Joan a saint until 1920. Ingrid Bergman played Joan twice – in Victor Fleming’s 1948 adaptation of Maxwell Anderson’s play and again in 1954 for Rossellini. Otto Preminger launched Jean Seberg’s career by casting her in his 1957 film based on George Bernard Shaw’s play (the screenplay by that great novelist of Catholic doubt, Graham Greene). Director Robert Bresson’s Joan film came out in 1962, and in 1997 Luc Besson cast Milla Jovovich in The Messenger, still-popular on DVD and featuring Joan in battle. The most recent effort seems to be the riveting 2003 Hungarian film Joan of Arc on the Night Bus, best described as a post-modern opera, which incidentally screened here in Syracuse several years ago courtesy of the Syracuse International Film Festival. This list is not exhaustive, but illustrates an enduring fascination with Joan.

But Dreyer’s film has a certain mystique attached, even in terms of the film’s survival in the world. Fire destroyed the original negative. Then his second version – reconstructed from outtakes – was lost to fire too; Dreyer died in 1968 believing this work was gone, though boot-legged, truncated versions survived. In 1981, a print of Dreyer's original was found intact under circumstances either bizarre or miraculous, depending on your point of view: locked in a janitor’s metal cabinet in an Oslo psychiatric hospital. Restored in 1985, this has been available since 1999 on an excellent Criterion Collection DVD, which contains more of this history as well as options to play the film in its original silent form, with commentary, or with composer Richard Einhorn’s majestic Voices of Light. Einhorn himself encountered Dreyer’s film by accident at the Museum of Modern Art while considering whether to compose something about Joan. He comments on the Criterion DVD that first watching the Dreyer film was like “walking down an ordinary street, turning a corner and without warning, you find yourself staring at the Taj Mahal.”

Dreyer stripped his story down to Joan’s trial, with no panoramic shots of battlefields or Charles’ court or the Rheims cathedral, no lush scenery, no mystical moments of Joan with her heavenly confidantes, no fabulous costumes for Joan in armor astride her white horse. His camera came in at odd angles on a stripped down set, creating disorienting, unsettling visuals, literally askew perspectives that match the sensory perception of someone exhausted and under stress, and evidence of a harsh daily existence in details like Joan's ragged, dirty fingernails.

The film is relatively short – just 82 minutes – and he strips the narrative down too. Dreyer relied on the actual ecclesiastical trial transcripts for Joan’s exchanges with her tormentors. Joan’s was a show trial, so when vain, hair-splitting judges nonsensically ask her how she knew it was Saint Michael who visited her, whether he was naked and whether his hair was cut, she is not outwitted. When they inquire in another trick question whether God hates the English, she answers that she doesn’t know about that but she does know he will drive most of them out of France, except for those who die there. You may not think about this as you watch the film, but afterward it occurs how like the scriptural Jesus she is in Dreyer’s portrayal – both the boy found holding his own with the scholars in the temple and the later, angrier Jesus who drives the money-lenders out. And it’s no coincidence Dreyer titles his film The Passion of…. For some, Gethsemane – where Jesus is perhaps most fully human, doubting his salvation, wondering if he can avoid his painful death, wondering if he can do more good alive, asking please to get out of this, agonizing – is what makes his story worth its salt. And in this portion of Joan’s story – when she allows herself to be convinced to save herself, only to draw back from that spiritual calamity as from a dizzying brink – Dreyer’s film is most unforgettable.

Dreyer found his lead in Renée Maria Falconetti, a stage actress of light comedies. She found his methods so aversive that – much like the singer Björk’s experience with another Danish director, Lars von Trier – she never made another movie. The critic Pauline Kael called Falconetti’s performance the finest ever filmed. A ways off the beaten track from the multiplex, this one’s worth the trip.

*******
This review is from the 9/24/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Find The Passion of Joan of Arc at Netflix.com.

Betty y Pancho
1998
Director: Juan Mora Catlett
Cast: Elizabeth Catlett, Francisco Mora

In 1998, Mexican filmmaker Juan Mora Catlett unveiled Betty y Pancho, a video portrait of his artistic family that centers on his parents’ half-century marriage and collaboration. His father, who died in 2002 at age 79, was the Mexican painter, print-maker and muralist Francisco Mora. His mother is Elizabeth Catlett, the Washington, DC-born, African American sculptor, print-maker and painter, who went to Mexico City in 1946 to study print-making at the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Arts Workshop), where she met Mora.

Their son the filmmaker will be in town Saturday afternoon for a single screening of Betty y Pancho at the Community Folk Art Center (CFAC) at 3:00 PM. This rare U.S. screening – though shown widely in Mexico including on television, the film has not been released in this country and is not commercially available on DVD – occurs in conjunction with the opening of Power and Pride: An Elizabeth Catlett Retrospective, which fills both the building’s main galleries and its hallway.

Catlett herself, now 94, travels from her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, for the opening reception Friday night from 6 – 8 PM. Central New Yorkers should take note that landing this show – and the artist with it – falls into the category of Genuine Major Coup for CFAC (though to tell the truth they have been making a habit of that lately). And although there exists fairly extensive other filmed interview material on Catlett, some of it readily available online, in just under an hour’s run-time Mora’s film provides an unusually accessible and close look at how two artists worked, supported one another and managed a bicultural marriage and family.

Betty y Pancho opens with a scene of gracious triumph: the sparkling opening reception in February 1998 at the Neuberger Museum of Art at State University of New York’s campus in Purchase of the fifty-year retrospective of Elizabeth Catlett’s sculpture, which went on to tour the U.S and Mexico. (You may spy, as I did, some work from that show which is now on view at CFAC, although the two shows are not the same group of work.) Soon afterward, we hear Catlett recalling, “My father’s mother was a slave in Virginia and when Emancipation came, her free uncle who lived in Washington, went to bring her back. He had to pay for all the seats on one car in order to bring her on the train.”

After this section recounting Catlett’s family history – both her parents were teachers and her father taught for a time at Tuskegee – and the roots of her art, the film turns to a similar background introduction of Francisco Mora in what will be the film’s pattern of essentially alternating chapters on Catlett and Mora. An exceptionally bright, eager and talented student from a family that was at least comfortable, Mora abruptly found his circumstances sharply reduced by his parents’ divorce. He credits his recollection of hunger so severe that he could no longer think in school with a life-long identification with the poor and the dedication of much of his art to their interests.

Of the indigenous Purepecha people, Mora also found American racism – and its antidote through art and cultural awareness – readily intelligible. (The filmmaker son also made a feature film depicting one of the tribe’s major legends, entirely in the indigenous language, three years ago - Erendira Ikikunari is available at Netflix.) The section of the film devoted, for example, to the early aims and practices of the Taller de Gráfica Popular with its credo of “prints for the people” (it was just a decade old when it brought Catlett and Mora together) are as fascinating at that about Catlett’s engineering a trip to a whites-only exhibit in New Orleans of a Picasso show for her students when she taught at Dillard University; clearly moved, she recounts how her students – not a one had ever entered a museum or gallery to see art “in person” before – ran about excitedly, exclaiming and calling to one another to come and see.

Catlett settled in Mexico and eventually became a Mexican citizen (after Mora’s death she reclaimed dual citizenship in the U.S.) following harassment and arrest due to her political organizing and associations, as government forces sympathetic to the McCarthyism rampant to the north attempted to pressure her into leaving. Although the film does not address that, it does spend time on the three sons Catlett and Mora raised, all artists. Besides Juan the filmmaker, composer and jazz musician Francisco Mora Jr. did the film’s score – a pair of string quartets celebrating Harriet Tubman and indigenous Mexican women – and the youngest, David, is a painter in his own right as well as Catlett’s studio assistant.

Besides making the celebration of African American women and mothers a major theme in her art, Catlett says at one point, “I was always doing things that Mexican women just didn’t do.” While she gives enormous credit to Mora for the union’s success, what’s also obvious as the film progresses is how well matched this pair is as artists – in temperament, sympathies, aims and capacity to nourish each other’s work. You see the results of that in CFAC’s galleries “in person” – and you might feel like it’s the first time you’ve been in a gallery too.

*******
This review is from the 9/17/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Betty y Pancho screened on Saturday, September 19 at 3:00 PM in the PRPAC Black Box Theatre at Community Folk Art Center, 805 E. Genesee St., with Juan Mora Catlett on hand for discussion afterward. Power and Pride: An Elizabeth Catlett Retrospective is on view at CFAC to December 12th; the opening artist’s reception was Friday, September 18, 6:00 – 8:00 PM. CFAC is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10 – 5, and Saturdays, 11 – 5. Also, through October 21st, in CFAC’s video alcove, two films by Carrie Mae Weems, Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment and Afro Chic, in conjunction with Light Work’s city-wide collaboration focusing on photo and video by Barry Anderson.

Film Review #209: District 9
2009
Director: Neill Blonkamp
Cast: Sharlto Copely, Vanessa Haywood, CGI

Midway through this story set in South Africa’s Johannesburg, the ingratiating corporate gopher charged with being the public face of a massive forced removal himself takes refuge within the sprawling, sordid shanty-town. Things have gone terribly wrong. Back at the shack of one Christopher Johnson, whom he’d tried to evict earlier, Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely) notices his host’s young son chattering and peering at him. Already distraught, Wikus demands, “What’s he doing?”

“He likes you,” says Christopher.

“We are alike,” says the little one, fascinated. “We’re the same.”

“We are not the same!” shrieks Wikus, leaping to his feet.

Wikus is still mostly right in this horrified declaration. Christopher and his son (who are CGI-conjured instead of played by actors) are aliens, two among the growing thousands who’ve been corralled for 28 years – since their apparently disabled mothership stalled above the city where it still hangs mid-sky – in an inner-city camp, ringed by East Berlin-like guard towers, gates, warning signs, razor wire and Multi National United’s prowling, brutal, trigger-happy private security forces. The South Africans call the aliens “prawns,” an epithet descriptive of their appearance, and their language is a series of clicks, which Wikus understands but are subtitled for the audience.

Tensions and incidents of violence have risen during human and alien encounters, and the TV live-eye reports and interviews that provide much of the narrative thread and documentary-like ambiance include a pointed, bizarre parade of black South Africans voicing fearful hostility toward the aliens, resentment over the resources they consume, and vigorous support of an even greater Apartheid toward them. In their very public display of removing the aliens to a remote site with even fewer amenities than District 9 offers, MNU has carefully kept out of view their interest in accessing the aliens’ weapons, which are coded to work only via contact with alien biology, and the Mengele-like medical experiments. So smarmy to start with that you want to slap him, Wikus actually seems to believe MNU’s public relations line and is crudely racist – if that would be the term – in his officious condescension toward the aliens. Imagine his surprise when a chance encounter with a canister of alien fluid – its versatile powers will also fuel that mother-ship if Christopher can get back up there – first makes Wikus violently ill and then causes an alien hand and arm to sprout, replacing his own, just the beginning of his transformation.

To what lengths must we go to feel another’s pain and know we are alike? Only when “infected” with an alien life-form does Wikus become, well, fully human. Enduringly, we all want to go home. Each stranded in the world of the other, Wikus and Christopher share this yearning and its dilemmas and, from across a great chasm, come to be allies and even brothers. Quickly arriving at Central New York multiplexes after wide release on August 14th, District 9 is an exhilarating action film whose shooting, editing and narrative are way better crafted and more thoughtful than you’d ever expect. As executive producer, hit mogul Peter Jackson “presents” this first-time feature from South African director Neill Blomkamp. In the largely South African cast, Copely delivers a stunning, high energy performance as the MNU bureaucrat who actually does love his wife Tania (Vanessa Haywood) and has more gumption than anybody previously imagined. One by one, his father-in-law (MNU’s CEO), the mercenary chief and the gangster running District 9’s black market all get more than they bargained for out of this frightened, unhip little guy they were planning to swat aside.

District 9 also owes a great deal to other sci-fi movies. Part of the pleasure of watching it involves realizing that a certain vocabulary has evolved at this point that comments on more than the action at hand (satisfying as that may be). From Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), for example, we see the blue holographic computer functions that hover in mid-air (predicting your own smart phone’s finger-operated apps screen). The Wachowski brothers’ Matrix trilogy (1999 – 2003) provided familiarity with the notion that new knowledge and abilities could be “plugged in” instead of acquired through laborious, old-fashioned step-by-step learning (see the part where Wikus, inside what we might best call an alien HumVee, finds himself understanding its operation and channeling Ellen Ripley).

In fact, District 9 especially owes a great deal to the Alien quartet (‘79, ‘86, ‘92 and ’97) – whether it’s memories of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) protecting the orphan Newt by using her space-age fork-lift to battle the alien mother in the second installment, Ripley’s chest bursting open as she dives into the flames in the third, or the cloned Ripley – now part-alien herself and discovering botched versions of earlier attempts to clone her stored in vats of formaldehyde – heading back to Earth, perhaps not with the same creature-loyalty. And whether it’s the many zombie films, New Line Cinema’s Blade trilogy with Wesley Snipes (variously directed, 1998, 2002 and 2004), or the progression of Ripley’s transformation over almost two decades and four directors, there also has emerged the idea that mixing species is at least tinged with infection. Setting District 9 specifically in South Africa, including “news clips” of vociferously anti-alien black South Africans and Wikus’ reaction to Christopher’s offspring thinking they’re “alike” makes explicit something of a trend in which mixing species frankly stands in for an old ideology that views race-mixing with horror and justifies treating those who are different as “non-human.”

Done with such seeming nonchalance that it takes you a while to realize it, District 9 actually offers an alternative history for South Africa: there is no government visible in this film, no Mandela, no end of Apartheid. Instead, "all that" is replaced by the 1981 arrival of the alien mothership which unites South African blacks and whites alike in repressing those yet lower on the food chain. (Given the parts assigned to Nigerians in this story, you have to wonder what the inside-Africa stereiotype is there.) In fact, I think surfacing this satirically is part of this film’s brilliance, though not everyone agrees; District 9 dwells in a queasy, ambiguous zone and some reviewers have found it literally, offensively racist.

Anyway, definitely don’t wait for the DVD.

*******
This review appears in the August 20, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular film column since 2006. “District 9” is playing in wide release.

Film Review #208: Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
2009
Director: Aviva Kempner
Documentary

The film opens just as the first episode of the television show did on January 10, 1949. Ample-bosomed Jewish mother Molly Goldberg (Gertrude Berg) leans out the kitchen window that faces the air shaft of a brick tenement building in the Bronx and greets her neighbors across the way – what NPR correspondent Susan Stamberg calls the urban equivalent of neighbors talking across back fences – “Hello! Such a little word for such a big feeling! I want to say hello to you in all the letters of the alphabet. That would be a hello!”

Washington, DC-based Aviva Kempner’s richly detailed film about the life of Gertrude Berg isn’t currently scheduled to screen in Central New York, but let us hope that changes. Opening on just two screens July 10th, it’s up to a dozen theaters this week and has bookings through the end of the year. Intriguing in several ways, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg also has enough Syracuse connections to make it a natural here.

Before Oprah, Ellen, Martha, Rachel Ray, or I Love Lucy (which, incidentally, replaced “The Goldbergs” in 1956) there was Gertrude Berg’s creation, Molly Goldberg. Berg, a New Yorker who grew up at her father’s Catskills resort and married the Englishman who invented instant coffee, produced, wrote the scripts – in the end, some 12,000 – and played the starring role in both radio and TV versions. Before transitioning to television in 1949, Berg’s live 15-minute radio vignettes ran five days a week from 1929 – beginning three weeks after the Stock Market crash that launched the Great Depression – until 1945. The Yiddish-accented Goldberg family comprised Molly, her husband Jake, Molly’s Uncle David, and their first-generation American kids Sammy and Rosalie. Their stories provided solidarity and identification to Jewish listeners and to other Americans a window on how Jewish immigrants assimilated, found spots in US business and neighborhoods, navigated raising their kids in American culture while preserving their own, coped with a Depression economy laboring under 25% unemployment and lived through the rise of anti-Semitism both here and abroad and World War II.

Though often folksy and comedic, the show addressed political issues through the lens of a single family. During Hitler’s rise in 1933, radio audiences listened to the real rabbi that Berg invited onto her show as he performed a real Passover Seder. After the infamous Kristallnacht rampage in Germany in November 1938, during which wandering mobs killed Jews and burned their homes, shops and synagogues, Berg aired an episode for the next Passover in which a rock is thrown through the window during the Goldbergs’ Seder and Molly calms the family so the ceremony can proceed. Kempner includes archival footage and photos that recreate the social tensions on this side of the Atlantic during those years. The late 1930s saw Nazi clubs who marched on Long Island and in Detroit the popular radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin, whose broadcasts lionized Hitler and blamed the world’s problems on Jewish conspiracies.

Berg’s post-war transition to television was hugely successful and earned her the first Emmy Award given for Best Actress in 1950. Kempner includes interviews with many of the surviving actors from that cast as well as generous clips from episodes. But Molly’s husband Jake Goldberg was played initially by actor Phillip Loeb, who committed suicide in 1955 after he was forced off the show and black-listed as a Communist during the McCarthy era. This past spring, the Syracuse-based simply new theatre’s production of Trumbo, followed by ArtRage Gallery’s screening of Johnny Got His Gun, re-acquainted Syracuse audiences with black-listed Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, plus the unlikely part played by a Syracuse grocer named Laurence Johnson in strong-arming Madison Avenue ad agencies representing radio and TV sponsors to pull their support from shows who employed suspect cast and crew, or risk national product boycotts.

Kempner’s film (which also details the lengths Berg went to defend Loeb) features the Newhouse School’s television authority Robert Thompson, who relates how Johnson convinced General Mills that he and the American Legion could brand them as Communist sympathizers unless the show fired Loeb, a founder of Actors Equity and union activist.

As it happens in this city of sometimes surprising cultural extremes, Syracuse University Press also published Glen Smith’s 2007 biography of Berg, and SU Library’s Special Collections houses Berg’s papers. Kempner was here to research her film and she uses Smith as a major source as well. Now somebody needs to bring her movie here too.

*******
This review appeared in the August 13, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg” is screening in limited release. Thanks to mPRm Public Relations for providing a preview DVD screener.

Film Review #207: HBO's Grey Gardens
2009
Diector: Michael Sucsy
Cast; Drew Barrymore, Jessica Lange, Jean Tripplehorne

Beginning in the fall of 1971, reports – first in the National Enquirer – began appearing in the New York City press about a dilapidated mansion in an exclusive oceanfront section of East Hampton, the Long Island enclave some 114 miles from New York City. Grey Gardens was the Beale family’s 28-room estate, then inhabited by Edith Bouvier Beale, Sr. (“Big Edie”) and her 55-year-old daughter Edith, Jr. (“Little Edie”), plus a large number of cats and raccoons. Because Big Edie owned the property, her estranged husband had been powerless to sell it, as had her two sons, although they administered the small trust left to her after his death, which had by then run out. The media sensation – first the tabloids, then the mainstream dailies and Gail Sheehy’s article “Paradise Lost” in New York Magazine – stemmed partly from the estate’s extreme disrepair and its inhabitants’ bizarre theatricality.

Neighbors complaining of the stench had led the Suffolk County Health Department to threaten eviction. Without running water or heat, the house had many windows broken, was overgrown with vines and underbrush, filthy and trash-filled. Big Edie was John “Blackjack” Bouvier’s sister; his daughters, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill, were Little Edie’s first cousins. In the summer of 1972, Mrs. Onassis (Jean Trippelhorne in the HBO version) visited Grey Gardens, where she had spent much time as a child, while she was visiting her sister, who was visiting Andy Warhol in Montauk. When Big Edie insisted she would not leave, her two nieces arranged for a massive cleaning and refurbishing. During this project, Mrs. Radziwill brought the brothers Albert and David Maysles around. The Maysles, already acclaimed for their Rolling Stones cinema vérité documentary Gimme Shelter, hoped to film Lee and Jackie. A year later they showed up again – Mrs. Onassis had “lost interest” in their movie – asking to film Big and Little Edie.

Little Edie had discovered that first National Inquirer photographer shooting from the bushes and invited him in – she hoped publicity would revive her old dream of a dancing career – and she welcomed the Maysles and insisted her contract contain a clause that she could appear in other films. Big Edie had aspired to a singing career herself; she spends a fair amount of time on-screen in the ensuing film – when not bickering and making up with Little Edie – vamping and singing 30s and 40s pop tunes from beneath enormous old hats, ensconced in her bed with her cats, newspapers, hand mirror, empty pâté tins and ice cream cartons.

The Maysles’ 1975 film has been an enduring classic in its own right. Re-released in 2006 on a two-disc Criterion set, its copious extras contain an audio clip of Little Edie telephoning Albert Maysles after the Bush-Gore election. Big Edie had died in 1977; two years later Little Edie sold Grey Gardens, had a farewell two-night sold-out cabaret engagement in Greenwich Village, traveled and settled in Bal Harbour, Florida, where she died in 2002.

The Maysles’ riveting film is now also worth seeing along with Michael Sucsy’s new dramatized version. The HBO film premiered in April and came out on DVD several weeks ago; it has a whopping 17 Emmy nominations, including one each for Best Lead Actress in a Mini-series or Film for Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. For one thing, it makes clear (as the Maysles really didn’t) to what extent, in a single intervening year, most of Jackie and Lee’s improvements vanished.

The Maysles also hadn’t tried to account for Grey Gardens’ decline over the quarter century or so the two women lived there alone. Sucsy asked himself a dozen questions about what might have occurred and then attempted to fill in those gaps. So we see Little Edie at her New Year’s Eve 1936 debutante ball at the Pierre Hotel, see her mother’s narcissism and sabotage of her confidence, her brief Manhattan period when trying to break into dancing, her affair with Truman’s former Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug, her mother’s maneuvers to get her home after her own affair with a live-in “singing teacher” fell apart. Little Edie was witty, unstable, bright, surprisingly generous, gracious, blunt, ill-equipped to strike out on her own, stricken. Sucsy alternates these vignettes with often remarkable, verbatim recreations of scenes from the Maysles film. I watched these two films together last week. Like Helen Mirren reincarnating Queen Elizabeth, Barrymore and Lange astonish.

*******
This review appeared in the August 6, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. HBO’s Grey Gardens and Criterion’s 2006 DVD of the Maysles Brothers’ 1975 documentary are both available at Netflix. The Emmy Awards air 9/20 on CBS.

Film Review #206: The Hurt Locker
2009
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty

“I probably wasn’t injured because I was way in the back of the vehicle. I was on top of all the bottled water, because I was little,” my friend had explained, recounting how the troop convoy in Afghanistan encountered on IED on the road beyond the city. My friend paused a beat, then added before going on, “Well. I still am little.”

The capacity to compress yawning gaps between the before and after of life-shaking violence to a simple, quiet change of tense is similar to the kind of detail you’ll find in Kathryn Bigelow’s film, set in the pre-Surge days of 2004 Iraq, which opens this week at Manlius Art Cinema. That is what sets it apart from most action thrillers and what drives its surprising capacity to comment on war in intimate and domestic as well as surreal and dislocating ways.

The Hurt Locker is billed as an action thriller and it certainly has both parts of that phrase in spades. Its exhausting two hours and eleven minutes fly by, but its pedigree predicts an authenticity beyond Hollywood style and pyrotechnics. Mark Boal based his script on his experience as an embedded journalist with a US military specialist bomb squad in Iraq and in fact the film opens with words from another journalist, Central New York native Chris Hedges, asserting that “war is a drug.” This is from Hedges’ 2002 book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, one of the best of a rich crop of efforts by war reporters since, say, the break-up of Yugoslavia, in which Hedges writes about why he left combat and genocide coverage. As well, the actor Jeremy Renner – there is an excellent interview with him at NPR from earlier this week – spent time training with such a team to get ready to play Staff Sgt. Will James, the audacious leader of the film’s lead trio. Bigelow shot the film in the summer of 2007, just over the Iraqi border in Jordan and at the height of the Surge. Actual Iraqi refugees played most of the Iraqi roles and we may presume informed the film’s progress. Renner says further that the conditions of the “set” were sometimes so hostile that the cast and crew had shots fired at them during filming; there’s one passage in the film, apparently unscripted, when a gang of young boys pelt James’ vehicle with stones.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Bravo Company’s year-long active duty rotation has 38 days left and our bomb squad’s staff sergeant (Guy Pearce) dies during the opening scene when an insurgent in a nearby shop detonates an IED with a cell phone. In a prelude to his own development, although he’s visibly the most gripped in stomach-twisting panic of the three-man crew, Spc. Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is the first to glimpse that tell-tale cell phone. The third squad member is former intelligence officer Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie). By the next day they’re out again with their new Staff Sgt. James, who alarms them right away with his risk-taking. The film then ticks down Bravo’s remaining time – Day 23, 16, and 2 – followed by an epilogue in which one of the three re-ups, returning to Iraq to begin Delta Company’s rotation at Day 364.

These episodes – acts, if you will – are structured around variations on what such a squad might typically encounter – a cluster of bombs connected by a spider-web of buried wires, an unevenly sagging car with the detonator hidden in the windshield wipers, an ambush in the countryside in which the crew is pinned down all day, a dead child’s body rigged with explosives, a man in a suicide bomber’s vest begging for help. At Day 16, time – along with some other boundaries – starts to break down as days and nights flow together. James’ attachment to an Iraqi boy selling boot-legged DVDs takes him first outside Camp Victory alone at night and then finally to lead his team into danger that almost loses one member.

The Hurt Locker was filmed with four hand-held cameras going at once, so there’s an immediacy and sense of being inside the action. But over a whole film, you see that Bigelow also takes her time and is less concerned with the bang than what it surrounds. (The only thing recently on screen to rival The Hurt Locker in this regard would be Anthony Mann’s Public Enemies, especially that admirably-shot second prison break.) Bigelow has concerned herself with what the she calls “the seductiveness of violence in cinematic form” from the start. Regardless of who has served on any given film as her editor or cinematographer, her masterful pacing of extended action sequences and provocative use of point of view have been reliable over a career dating to The Loveless (Willem Dafoe’s feature debut as Vance), a 1982 biker film after which the terms “languid” and “explosive” no longer seem contradictory. Watching her other films, readily available at Netflix, repays the effort. The jolting zombie flick set in the Southwest, Near Dark (1987), has actually more stupendously fiery explosions than Hurt Locker. The 1990 cop drama Blue Steel wrings you out with that final chase up from the subway into the street (and makes me wonder if Michael Winterbottom had it in mind when he made The Brave One). Strange Days, made in 1995, looked forward to addictive, technologically-supported vicarious violence and a racist LAPD on the eve of the Millennium; it’s considerably smarter than similarly themed movies like Total Recall, and considerably more violent than almost anything in The Hurt Locker. A year later Bigelow made Point Break, ostensibly about an FBI agent infiltrating some surfer bank robbers but inserting some nifty chuteless sky-diving too. The Weight of Water (2000) didn’t do well, with its parallel stories set centuries apart, but Bigelow does a great shipwreck and she brilliantly directed Sarah Polley as a Lizzie Borden-style colonial wife. K-19: The Widowmaker of course put Harrison Ford aboard an endangered Russian nuclear submarine in 2002. Some of these films are arguably gory and spectacular enough to make The Hurt Locker seem positively contemplative by comparison, but Bigelow’s films also have human – often redemptive – dimensions beyond the regular wild ride.

The Hurt Locker, for example, uses the relationships among its trio of bomb specialists to explore what fatherhood means to these young men in rich but spare detail. James has an infant son, with whom the film briefly reunites him near its end. By then it’s no surprise that he is an affectionate and tender father, because we’ve watched him throughout the film look out for his men. Well, that’s what staff sergeants do, yes, but Bigelow focuses much attention on the depth of this care with details like the juice box he gets for Sanborn when they’re pinned down. Or the extended tutoring in the finer points of soldiering he gives the talented but frightened Eldridge, the times he talks him through dangerous moments and refocuses him exactly as a father might. Virtually the first personal conversation the three men have concerns fatherhood, in which Sanborn says his girlfriend is always pestering him about babies; his turning point occurs on nearly the last day when he sums up his desire to leave the war with, “I want a son. I want a son.”

Although nobody in the film literally calls James a “cowboy” – I listened carefully for this word – that’s what all of us, on screen and off, know he is as an American type. This unspoken common reaction drives several powerful cameo performances – implicitly the decidedly un-cowboy staff sergeant he replaces, then Ralph Fiennes as the private British contractor in the desert, and David Morse as a colonel whose congratulations after one close call might or might not be infuriated sarcasm – as well as Eldridge’s eventual (and very son-like) rebellion against James’ “adrenalin fix.” Curiously, so far only Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor calls this film a Western. Rainer cites the cowboy’s classic unease with the homestead. Then there’s the requisite pinned-down-by-savages-in-the wilderness scene. And James’ walks into the “kill-zone” are nothing if not high-noon showdowns on dusty frontier main drags. But I think Bigelow calls up something older too with her filmmaking too, like “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.”

*******
This review was announced in the July 30, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle. Opening on Friday at Manlius Art Cinema, “The Hurt Locker” screens daily at 7:30 PM with weekend matinees at 2:00 and 4:45 PM as well. Carousel Mall has also added some screenings. See other Kathryn Bigelow films listed in this review at Netflix.com.

Film Review #205: Chéri
2009
Director: Stephen Frears
Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathy Bates, Rupert Friend

Here is that unusual film that is worth seeing as much for its flaws as for its considerable accomplishments. In order to do that around here you’ll have to be quick, because it’s playing for one week only right now at Manlius Art Cinema.

Chéri reunites its star, Michelle Pfeiffer (as the aging Parisian courtesan Lea de Lonval on the eve of World War I), with director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, 21 years after their collaboration on Dangerous Liaisons. Based on Colette’s 1920 novel Chéri and its sequel, this film is the latest of a string of adaptations – a film in 1950, television plays in 1962 and 1973, and a stage musical in 1980 – which suggest the enduring tug of its story. On the verge of deciding she’ll “retire” and live on her investments after her last patron has departed for Russia, Lea impulsively enters what she assumes will be a two or three week dalliance with Chéri (English actor Rupert Friend), the spoiled and moody 19-year-old son of her colleague, Madame Charlotte Peloux (a boisterous Kathy Bates). Some years later, Charlotte intervenes and arranges a marriage for Chéri with young Edmee (Felicity Jones), daughter of another woman in their circle. (One of the best moments between these two occurs as they voice having grown up as feeling like “orphans” amidst the entrepreneurial excess of their mothers’ households.) Initially he assumes this marriage won’t upset his arrangement with Lea. Ever worldly-wise, she sends him packing after a last shopping trip, this time for his wedding present, a pearl stick pin. But neither does well with this separation, despite parallel lavish trips to the Italian lakes district and the French Riviera and the intended consolations of other partners. There are reversals, tearful declarations of love, more reversals and in a voice-over by Frears himself – old English majors take note – a kind of “Richard Corey” ending.

Michelle Pfeiffer is wonderful and quite moving as Lea and, in enough of the moments where it really counts – especially their last scene together when each is finally able to say what their love consists in and then live up to that – Rupert Friend matches her. Just after the film opened in late July, a still luminous Pfeiffer told Washington Post reporter Dan Zak that what she really fears is winding up like Norma Desmond (the character in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, a garish and deluded former star rattling around in a dilapidated mansion). Their interview as Zak reports it got off to a rocky start when he suggested that Pfeiffer’s own “golden age” had been the years 1987 to 1993. During that time she made the films Ladyhawke, The Witches of Eastwick, Dangerous Liaisons, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Batman Returns, Love Field and The Age of Innocence, a golden age by anybody’s standard. (Zak has since said admiringly of Pfeiffer’s Chéri performance, “Everybody’s got at least one golden age. I think she may be on the verge of another.”)

If Zak’s opening gambit left an overly long pause to get past, that Pfeiffer had Norma Desmond in the back of her mind explains a deeper bite to her performance and its commentary on aging and loss of youth. In fact, Lea and Charlotte stand out among some pretty Desmond-like contemporaries – one with raccoon eyes and horribly arthritic hands, another whose ropey throat and slack lips Chéri notices because she wears a string of pearls like Lea’s own (Harriet Walter and Anita Pallenberg, both unrecognizable) – who are really not simply comic relief figures.

Zak’s “golden age” reference originates in the fact that Chéri is set in the period known in Europe as the Belle Époque, covering roughly the last couple decades of the 19th century up until World War I. This corresponded with the “Gilded Age” in the US - a time of massive colonialism globally, robber barons, new fortunes by scandalous means, wild extravagance and the shifting social classes and gaps that led to the collapses of World War I and beyond. It was also a time of massive shifts in gender roles. It’s no coincidence that Charlotte and Lea, a couple of wily operators, talk over how their investments in oil futures are doing late in a film whose major male character favors pearls and white satin pajamas and complains he’s been kept as helpless as a 12-year-old. “Leave all the arrangements to me,” soothes Lea as readily as any sugar daddy. Colette’s novel opens with the scene where Chéri teases Lea to give him her string of pearls, immediately framing the story as one of skewed relations between the genders as a lens to comprehend broader shifts. Frears and Hampton put that scene further in, framing the story instead – at least in tone – as escapist fare, a kind of light farce about harmless May-December seduction among the rich and famous.

Or at least marketing it that way. The film’s trailer uses clips from the film that create the impression this is a comedy; these moments often stick out like sore thumbs in the course of the film itself. It’s hard to tell how much this is a marketing strategy for a summer release and how much it reflects the continued ambivalence among filmmakers and audiences alike with the film’s more serious themes. Chéri opened in limited release in 80 theaters to start here in the US. Despite a decent enough box office (up to 170 screens this week) and a cascade of initial coverage heralding the come-back of Michelle Pfeiffer, there was no advance press screening for the Manlius run (hence this review getting posted late and on-line only). Distributors pull press screenings when they don’t want to risk soft ticket sales. Critics have been lukewarm to this film – it’s gotten only a 50% favorable rating at the Rotten Tomatoes site – I suspect because it can’t quite own up to its own serious intent, and if there’s one thing we expect in our summer movies it’s clear, unambiguous intent. This movie more than repays the extra effort.

*******
This review was announced in the July 16, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Chéri plays at Manlius through this Thursday, with two matinees daily this weekend and a regular 7:30 PM showing weeknights. In a wry bit of serial scheduling, Manlius Cinema’s Nat Tobin will follow Cheri with Woody Allen’s Whatever Works (also for one week) which several critics have suggested would make an intriguing double feature if paired with Chéri. On July 31st, Manlius opens Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker – so far, an exclusive CNY engagement.

Film Review #204: The Beaches of Agnès/Les Plages d’Agnès
2008
Director: Agnès Varda
Cast: Agnès Varda, Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, Jacques Demy; Anne-Laure Manceau as young Agnès
A Cinema Guild release. France/French with English subtitles, 108 minutes.

Of all the ways that French filmmaker Agnès Varda, just turned 81, might frame discussion of the French New Wave in this self-portrait documentary, she mirthfully chooses a giant orange-tiger cartoon cat with a droll, mechanically filtered voice to introduce the subject for posterity. The cat is actually long-time friend and fellow filmmaker Chris Marker, bobbing along disguised in cardboard cutout as his own character Guillaume-in-Egypt, inquiring “What about...?” off-handedly during a stroll through a crowded Paris street.

Well, she recounts just as casually, after Godard had gotten Georges de Beauregard to make Breathless in 1960, that the producer asked Godard if he had “any more pals who could make the same kind of cheap black and white films.” She tells Marker that Beauregard “wanted a stable” of filmmakers. Beauregard made other Godard films, some of Jean-Pierre Melville’s and in 1961 he produced Jacques Demy’s Lola. Getting the same recruitment query, Demy suggested his lover, Varda, whom he would marry the next year. Varda had made one feature in 1954 set in a coastal fishing village, La Pointe Courte, followed by a handful of shorts, and also worked as a photographer. So in this way Beauregard, with Carlo Ponti, came to produce Varda’s acclaimed Cléo from 5 to 7.

Since this occurs well into the film, we already know Marker’s been coming around Varda’s rue Daguerre compound in Paris since the days Varda convinced Alain Resnais to edit La Point Courte. So they have clearly colluded in staging this exchange as a kind of advisement against hoping for portentous announcements at the last minute. Instead, Varda now inserts a short clip from Cléo (Corinne Marchand as a glamorous singer trying to fill time before she learns whether she has cancer). She then comments on filming a story in real time and the inspiration of medieval painter Baldung Grein’s images of voluptuous women embraced by boney death figures, then briskly moves on to her 1962 trip to Cuba to photograph Fidel’s “revolution cha cha cha.”

Varda shot The Beaches of Agnès over two- and three-week stints between August 2006 and June 2008 with six camera people in all. Half, including Varda herself, used a Sony V1, the small high definition video camera that she began using a decade ago for The Gleaners and I; the others used a larger video camera. She takes as her major connecting image the series of beaches she’s known since childhood: La Panne beach in Belgium (her family lived in Brussels until they fled the Nazis to France in 1940), the Mediterranean port of Sète (where the family spent summers on a docked boat and the site of her first film), Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach in California (she followed Demy to Hollywood, a town she says “immediately seduced me,” where both made films before she returned to France without him during a separation), La Guérnière Beach on Noirmoutier Island (she and Demy made a retreat of an old mill), as well as along the banks of the Seine in Paris. For one sequence Varda has six truckloads of sand dumped in the street outside her Paris house and sets up her office there “to justify the film’s title.”

Additionally the film has two other powerful threads. One is the omnipresence of Demy, whose post-Hollywood reunion with Varda – they reconciled with the idea of growing old together – was cruelly interrupted by his AIDS diagnosis and his death in 1990 just ten days after Varda completed shooting her first of three films about him, Jacquot de Nantes. In Beaches, when it is clear that Demy will die, the screen fills wordlessly for a moment with what looks like a profusion of deep green palm fronds barely swaying in a soft wind. It’s an effective, surprisingly moving image on its own, whether or not you happen to even know or recall – Homer’s Odyssey is a touchstone for Varda – the moment that Ulysses’ heart is first pierced with an apprehension of beauty at the sight of a young palm tree.

Secondly, flowing out of just such rich moments as this and their power to summarize and connect to other such images, the notion of puzzles structures the film as much as the beach episodes. Years ago, Varda’s first “official self-portrait” was a tile mosaic; now Beaches works by juxtaposing excerpts from her films with her on-screen appearances, re-enactments, photos and the more recent installations (including Varda in the belly of a whale/boudoir among the dunes, specially for this film). Conventional film clips of well-known scenes as well as clips of music from the film-scores are excised from their context and used both to reference past work and anew as free-standing images. For Varda, memory works in this way rather than by historical time-line. This elaborates Varda’s entertaining opening piece with the mirrors on the beach set up by a troop of young assistants; yes, obviously the conceit of mirrors for a self-portrait, but also that life’s fragments reflect one another and so do efforts in one art form resonate in another. Thus what Varda calls “my musings, pretty close to the truth, are punctuated by sketches where I put on a bit of a show. Clowning around allowed me to take a step back.”

This also means that Beaches works for those at all degrees of familiarity with Varda’s work. It’s deeply satisfying when a fragment of a film you’ve seen before triggers your own memory of the whole, but it’s also credible that an entirely new and young audience – who seem to be showing up – may need no familiarity at all with her films to take in her approach to experience.

Varda’s exchange with Marker over the New Wave may even be redundant, except as a kind of footnote. I’m thinking of the spot early on where she recounts that she was conceived in Arles and named for that city, but changed her name at age 18, all the while writing her given name – Arlette – in the sand with a stick, only to have an incoming wave sweep over the letters and recede, leaving again a virgin field of sand washed clean.

Varda held her own with New Wave theorists, mostly men and many of them ex-film critics. Whether from her other films or this one alone, it’s plain she was extraordinarily literate, capable and at ease across art forms and social classes. From Beaches one does learn some particulars, that she was educated in art history at Ecole de Louvre, was a photojournalist and official photographer of Paris’ Théatre National Populaire, was intrigued by the narrative structure and experiments of novelists like Faulkner and Natalie Sarraute, is now still running the “family business” production company Ciné-Tamaris out of her Paris house and, starting with 2003’s Venice Biennale, has embarked upon multimedia art installations, some of which show are documented in this film or were created for it. She also logged three months of working on small fishing boats in Corsica and “unambiguous cohabitation” with their owners, a privately executed walk-about that bridged her student days and her decision to take up photojournalism. But Varda came to cinema unburdened by film theory (or even much viewing at age 25), at first simply wanting to try out words with images to extend her photographic practice.

Thirty-three films later – roughly half of them fiction, the rest documentary – she remains serenely centered in her clarity that “films always originate in emotions” and that technical and intellectual prowess should serve rather than drive the enterprise. For example, in Beaches Varda recalls her involvement with feminist organizing, especially in the period she and Demy were apart. “I tried to be a joyful feminist but I was very angry,” she says, listing of horrific abuses and offering archival footage of protests. But more persuasive – and in this context generating new flashes of revelation about why she created this character as apolitical – are the quick clips from 1985’s Vagabond that punctuate this section: Sandrine Bonnaire as the increasingly desperate drifter Mona, kicking a metal keg in a field, punching metal garage doors, furiously patching a boot with a ripped sole.

And Varda’s keen interest for reunions with old friends, casts and subjects alike from earlier films stretches back years, flowering in Beaches. To describe her satisfaction with her documentary about the time-honored French practice of scavenging harvest left-overs and city garbage, The Gleaners and I (2000), which she extended with follow-up visits to as many of the same people as she could find in The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002), Varda says, “I was able to approach them, to bring them out of their anonymity. I discovered their generosity.”

Cinematic technology’s service of the human reaches a most magic moment in Beaches when Varda returns to the village of Sète, site of La Pointe Courte, resurrecting test footage she’d shot of a local couple, Pierrot and Suzou, old friends of hers, long ago. The husband had died soon after, leaving two young sons, now middle-aged men. Mounting a projector on a hand-cart and rolling it through the old town, Varda ran the test footage for the sons, who had seen their father in photos “but never in motion.” Watching Blaise and Vincent’s faces as they watch their long-passed father’s image on that very thoroughfare and you’re reminded that in some places photo – still and motion alike – inspires fear of soul-stealing. Work like Varda’s may give souls back.

*******
Fanzine published this review on July 8, 2009 at www.thefanzine.com. The Beaches of Agnès won France’s Cesar Award for best documentary in February and had its official US theatrical opening on July 1 in New York City at Film Forum and in Los Angeles on the 3rd. But actually a number of screenings in North America already have prepared the ground – at Toronto’s film festival last fall right after its Venice IFF premiere, since February at film festivals in Portland (OR), Wisconsin and Seattle, and as sneak peeks in several Varda retrospectives: in Chicago and then at Harvard in March and, just winding up now, American Cinematheque’s week-long retrospective in Santa Monica. Varda has traveled to some of these to give talk-backs after screenings and in March visited New York for a number of interviews at Film Forum that are just hitting print now. The Criterion Collection’s January 2008 release of a new four-disc DVD set – her first three features (La Pointe Courte, Cléo from 5 to 7, and in 1964 Le Bonheur/Happiness) plus Vagabond (1985) – is available along with several other Varda titles at Netflix.

Film Review #203: The Last Ridge
2007
Director: Abbie Kealy
Cast: 10th Mountain Division, Scott Simon

In 1946 Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini made a film called Paisá – criminally hard to find here – whose six episodes depict the Allied liberation of Fascist Italy between 1943-45 through the eyes of ordinary people interacting with, primarily, U.S. GIs. These vignettes often turn on misunderstandings due to language and O’Henry-like twists, but Paisá features pretty keenly observed portrayals by a non-American filmmaker – and it brims with a deeper, more serious appreciation for the Yanks that we are no longer so sure greets our troops abroad.

Certainly not in 1993 Somalia, when a one-hour helicopter mission to capture two aides to warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Mogadishu’s Bakaara Market neighborhood turned into 15 hours, with 19 US troops and 1,000 Somalis killed. A convoy of the 10th Mountain Division rescued survivors. Ridley Scott put that onscreen in late 2001 in the utterly riveting Black Hawk Down, which you can see, along with Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr. Strangelove (1964), in 35 mm as part of Fort Drum Night at the Palace Theater on the 17th.

Fort Drum is home now to the 10th Mountain Division and there’s another movie screening to get the evening underway. Abbie Kealy’s documentary The Last Ridge (2007) harks back to World War II’s Italian campaign, the founding of the 10th Mountain Division and its current generation. Kealy, who lives outside Baltimore and often makes documentaries for PBS, inherited the letters and diaries of her uncle, Pfc. Stuart Abbott, a 10th Mountain soldier from Chicago who died at 18 on Italy’s Mt. Belvedere the day after writing a last letter to his mother in which he looked forward to “curling up with a good book and an entire pan of hot buttered popcorn.”

Kealy says she’s known about her uncle’s service in the 10th “since I could lace up my ski boots,” but it was a request for photos from historian McKay Jenkins for his own book that prompted Kealy to plan her film (and adopt his title).

Kealy is reticent about her connection to Abbott in the film itself but talks about him elsewhere. Just so, The Last Ridge includes footage of the 10th’s World War II vets revisiting Italy and being feted by their hosts – NBC noted the 61st anniversary of the taking of Riva Ridge during coverage of the Turin Winter Olympics – but it’s a quieter stray detail about the film’s making that illuminates the depth of gratitude similar to that found in Rossellini’s Paisá: before Kealy and her tiny crew could film the Riva Ridge wintertime re-enactment in the Apennines, miles of snow-choked paths were cleared by four Alpini (traditional mountain guides), three of them in their 70s - who would’ve been little boys when the Allies drove the Fascists north out of their country.

Narrated by NPR’s Scott Simon, The Last Ridge spends considerable time on the founding of the 10th. Charles Minot Dole of the National Ski Patrol proposed and recruited this elite division, inspired by the devastation the Germans suffered in Hitler’s first winter Russian campaign and by the Finnish “ski troops” who then repulsed the Soviets invading them. It appears that this civilian bright idea was initially “laughed out of Washington,” but Dole’s persistence and the huge response of volunteers – including many Ivy League graduates and champion sportsmen, even Norway’s world champion Olympic ski jumper Torger Tokle – won out. The 10th got underway two weeks before Pearl Harbor.

Trained under truly grueling conditions for almost four years on Washington’s Fort Lewis and Mt. Rainier, Colorado’s Camp Hale and briefly in Texas at Camp Swift, the 10th first saw action after Japan’s short-lived invasion of two Alaskan islands – landing in heavy fog, 18 were killed by friendly fire after the Japanese had already evacuated.

But in late 1944, the Allies had bogged down after 16 months of fighting, trying to take the northern Apennine Mountains near Bologna. The Allies needed to take Mt. Belvedere and the key to that was Riva Ridge, a series of peaks held as observation points that protected Belvedere and in turn kept a crucial highway out of play for the Allies. Previous frontal assaults on Riva Ridge had cost the Allies 15,000 casualties. When the Allied command turned to the 10th Mountain Division, they expected up to 90 per cent casualties. Instead some 700 men from the 10th went up the back way at night, scaling a sheer 2,000 foot cliff that the Nazis left unguarded. The 10th went on to capture Belvedere in the following days, Mt. Della Torraccia and the village of Torre Iussi, and helped chase the Nazis to the Po River and the mountain tunnels at Lake Garda. On May 7th, the European war ended.

Besides pioneering mountain and winter warfare techniques and gear – Kealy says they “invented extreme sports” – the 10th, which initially disbanded after World War II, seeded a generation of sports and environmental leaders. Besides founding some 60 ski resorts – including Vail and Aspen in Colorado and Vermont’s Sugarbush – 10th vets shaped Outward Bound, Nike, the Sierra Club, and the National Outdoor Leadership School. The Last Ridge DVD contains another 45 minutes worth of extras including more interviews with a number of these vets – especially catch the vivid Tap Tapley - plus current 10th members and author McKay Jenkins, and additional training and making-of footage about the re-enactments shot in Colorado, Italy and Slovenia.

Some of those re-enactments were carried out by current 10th members. The 10th was reactivated in its present form in 1985 and now – 20, 000 strong – makes its home at Fort Drum in northern New York.

Kealy shot her film over three winters, conducted 100 interviews with World War II vets and some two dozen with current 10th members serving in Afghanistan (where she embedded with the 10th), and at Walter Reed Hospital, where older 10th vets are active in visiting the wounded. The Last Ridge also contains captured German military film plus US archival footage. There have been at least seven other books about the 10th – Flint Whitlock’s Soldiers on Skies came out in 1992 but most since 2003 – and two other films, but Kealy enjoyed the input of most of those authors as consultants on her film. The Last Ridge premiered in April 2007 in Vail, Colorado; the next month it screened at Fort Drum and on TV in Watertown and Rochester PBS stations.

The most deployed division in the US armed services, the 10th has served in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa, Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, the Persian Gulf and here at home in Hurricane Andrew Support.

And they’re right in our own back yard.

*******
This review appears in the July 9, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. See The Last Ridge, Black Hawk Down and Dr. Strangelove at Eastwood’s Palace Theater, 2384 James St. on Friday, July 17, part of Fort Drum Night, a Wounded Warriors benefit by Operation Homefront. Doors open at 1730 hours (5:30 PM). Under 17 must be accompanied by an adult. Copies of The Last Ridge DVD will be available at the event. Also check out lastridge.com and 10thmtndivassoc.org. Fort Drum Night is part of Jeff Meyer’s “Brew & View 35 mm Film Series” at the Palace.

Film Review #202: Away We Go
2009
Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Maya Rudolph, John Krasinski, Maggie Gyllenhaal

Still peeved at Sam Mendes for last year’s disappointing and leaden Revolutionary Road and the waste of its two fine leads, many film critics have gone right on being cranky at him for his latest movie. Billed somewhat vaguely as a road-trip comedy about pregnancy – certainly a change of pace from his previous efforts – Away We Go opened in theaters on June 11 and comes to Central New York this weekend, trailing sour grapes.

In order to keep you reading, let me say I liked this little film a lot. It has some disadvantages, so let’s get them out of the way. The wrong poster can ruin a movie before you know what hit you. The ads for Away We Go feature Peter Max-style cartoons with wobbly sun rays, portentous arrows and log cabins drawn in cramped, faux-child perspective. These seem from an earlier era and suggest the movie might be about aging hippies. Then, the soundtrack comprises lyrics and guitar-strumming by Scottish musician Alexi Murdoch of the kind usually described as “evocative” and “folky.” It may be me, but increasingly I find such soundtracks grating and misguided. I think these two factors may be largely to blame for some usually better-tempered reviewers crossly calling this film “smug.”

Meanwhile, as Burt and Verona, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are anything but wasted. Together they manage the rather underrated feat of portraying an unmarried, earnest, genuinely loving though not particularly stylish couple in their early 30s who are expecting a child and aren’t sure where they fit, all the while without falling into parody, revealing themselves to be fools or revealing us to be rightfully cynical. These are roles that are deeply embarrassing when an actor falls short. But Burt and Verona are, as Roger Ebert says, nice people, and watching them figure out their next moves through a series of trials and toxic encounters provokes laughter that’s unexpectedly affectionate and expansive. Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, writers who happen to be married, wrote the script while they too were expecting, which may explain a lot.

As you know if you’ve heard anything about Away We Go, the story opens with Burt and Verona six months pregnant, living near Denver because that’s where his folks are. Massively narcissistic, Jerry and Gloria (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara) suddenly decide they’ll move to Antwerp, Belgium for a couple years, just before Burt and Verona’s daughter arrives. There is the suggestion that Gloria might be overly focused on whether her granddaughter will be “dark” like Verona, the first of several seemingly off-hand zinger references to Verona’s mixed race. There is sometimes that rare movie in which you see a character transported to another age before your eyes. Stunned at his parents’ dinner table over their decision to leave him at his finest hour, Burt is suddenly that decent 14-year-old, a little gawky and serious, who can’t quite believe how the adults behave, caught in the act of deciding how he never wants to be. Later, watching Verona sing his brother’s daughter Camilla to sleep through a cracked doorway, you see Verona will be the mother Burt hopes for their daughter too, and that he knows that. A little while before this, when Burt erupts in madcap mayhem over a stroller, you see why Verona loves Burt steadily and doesn’t mind stapling their trip itinerary to the inside of his jacket.

Anyway, Burt and Verona embark on a sampler tour of cities where they might live. Although Mendes has shown himself prodigiously able to create distinctive American milieus before, there’s not much specific in any of these places except for some patched-on aerial footage – Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal and Miami. But Burt and Verona aren’t looking yet for a sense of place. This waits till the end, in her old family home. Instead these two, rather forlorn at their loss of parents, have to work through hitching their wagons to other stars for a while. Having sound instincts and clean hearts, work through this they do.

We should understand these encounters as set pieces – the brash alcoholic former boss and mother of two sullen kids who hits on Burt(Alison Janney), the wise sister-confidante, the insufferable PC cousin (a delicious Maggie Gyllenhaal), the unhappily diligent college buddies, the brother whose wife has left him with a young daughter to raise – as conventions in an Odyssey-like tale of young heroes who will be tested, tempted, distracted and finally reminded of finding their way home. Burt and Verona may never marry – she adamantly refuses, doubting the institution – but they do understand how to make and speak their commitments, even if it is on a backyard trampoline.

*******

This review is from the June 25, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Away We Go opens June 26 at Manlius Art Cinema with screenings on Friday at 7:30 and on Saturday and Sunday at 2, 5 and 7:30.

Film Review #201: Vagabond

1985/2008

Director: Agnes Varda

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Yolande Moreau, Macha Meril

From the start she has liked these tracking shots that seem to go rogue. Agnès Varda had no formal training in cinema when she made her first feature in 1954, but in the opening moments of La Point Courte she turns a seaside village’s sleepy summer ambiance to sudden visual exhilaration with one such shot. We are all settled on the figure of a man standing at a corner when another emerges casually from the background, walks up an alley and enters a house. Varda’s camera swerves to follow the second man, flying along outside in the street as he walks from room to room within, catching him briefly through successive windows before finally we’re allowed inside at the noon meal too.

In Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Varda tracks a glamorous singer awaiting a cancer diagnosis in real time through a series of encounters – sometimes following a little girl up the street and sometimes coming to rest on a bickering couple at the café table – as she circumnavigates the city of Paris (wonderfully re-created with a map and a motorcycle in the 2007 Criterion Collection DVD’s extras), much as Joyce’s Leopold Bloom circles the city of Dublin in Ulysses.

Before turning to film, Varda had worked as a photojournalist, a fact often remarked upon to explain her gorgeous framing. But surely these tracking shots are a further masterful adaptation of the demands of still, two-dimensional composition to the moving image’s additional realms of space and passing time. When Varda made Vagabond in 1985, she used a series of twelve linked tracking shots – each begins with an image that echoes how the previous one ended – combined with variations on the theme of Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz’s La Vita quartet, as a quiet scaffold for her story, the rapid disintegration of a young vagrant named Mona (17-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire) who freezes to death in the vineyards of southern France during one of the coldest winters on record.

Emerging from the near-freezing sea after an impromptu bath in the film’s first flashback after the discovery of her body – and even here she is spied upon by two guys on scooters who idly consider whether raping her in worth their trouble – Mona encounters a number of people in her last weeks, losing the accoutrements of hippie wandering as she goes. Some offer assistance and care, some have other ideas bordering on depraved indifference and worse. Their impressions of her – much as in Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane – piece together a sort of portrait, which Varda inserts documentary-like, with some individuals facing the camera, after a narrator (Varda herself) explains early in the film that she sought out their remarks upon the discovery of Mona’s body in a ditch, much as the police search Mona’s pockets.

Vagabond will screen to great fanfare this Saturday in Santa Monica, California, part of American Cinematheque’s major retrospective of Varda’s half-century-plus career (June 24 – July 1). Now 80, Varda has a heavy post-screening talk-back schedule and will also introduce a sneak preview on the retrospective’s last day of her new film. The Beaches of Agnès, which won France’s Cesar award for best documentary, then opens theatrically in Los Angeles on July 3rd (and in New York City on the 1st at Film Forum).

A look-back at her life and work with the through-line of beaches that have been important to her personally and figured in some of her films, The Beaches of Agnès is replete with clips from Varda’s many earlier films. Those from Vagabond are especially telling by their very judicious brevity – a series of moments when Mona kicks a metal door, punches a building and vigorously gives a lecherous truck-driver the universal sign for “Up yours!” as she departs his cab when he throws her out in the middle of nowhere. Sandrine Bonnaire’s Mona – a bravura performance that won awards then and remains fresh and gripping – was neither sentimentalized nor softened, even in her best moments. But the clips from Beaches suggest we should take another look at how deeply angry and alienated such a woman might actually be – whether a female drifter, apparently few in number in mid-80s France (though Varda did research their existence), or those for whom such a figure might stand even now – whether she has a thought-through philosophy to go with his destitution or not.

While containing some of Varda’s most masterful filmmaking innovations, Vagabond also has some of the heftiest performances she’s directed. Besides Bonnaire, there’s a very young Yolande Moreau as a gullible maid (the Belgian comedienne currently stars in the well-received drama Séraphine, just opened here in the US) and Macha Méril as the fastidiously manicured ecologist Mme. Landier, who befriends Mona during a field trip, recounts by phone from her own luxurious bathtub how much the girl stunk, and wakes in the night from tearful guilt at having left her alone in the woods.

Vagabond also displays Varda’s signature use of local non-actors in pivotal supporting roles, often essentially playing themselves. These include the rollicking elderly brandy-drinker Aunt Lydie (Marthe Jarnais), the soulful-eyed Tunisian farm worker Assoun (Assouna Yahiaoui), a drop-out scholar-turned-goat-herder and his wife (Sylvaine and Sabine Berger), a pair of father and son garage mechanics (Pierre and Richard Imbert), and Setina herself, the young drifter upon whom Mona was modeled.

It would be a good idea to get ready for Beaches, and Vagabond is not a bad place to start.

*******
This review is from the June 25, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Find Vagabond at Netflix in the 2008 Criterion DVD release, along with several other Varda titles. “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column reviewing DVDs both new and enduring as well as theatrical releases.

Film Review #200: Our City Dreams

2009

Director: Chiara Clemente

Cast: Swoon, Ghada Amer, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero

“I needed to be in New York because it’s, like, the biggest, loudest, dirtiest, most intense city we had,” recalls the young Brooklyn-based printmaker and installation artist Swoon, “so that’s where I needed to be.”

Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1977, Swoon “landed” in New York two decades later for art school, and it’s been her home base ever since. In Chiara Clemente’s City of Dreams, we encounter Swoon as she’s transitioning from her “street pieces” – large-scale wood-block prints made as she crouches on the floor of her apartment, put up with wheat paste on the sides of gritty buildings next to graffiti – to preparing her first solo gallery exhibition at Deitch Projects in 2005. There is also footage of cross-country travels and, in the summer of 2006, collaboration on the construction a connected fleet of river boats in Minneapolis called the Miss Rockaway Armada. Appealingly down to earth, Swoon is just verging on serious success. She’s exhibited at PS1 and the Tate; MoMA has just bought six of her prints. And, while she’s wary of what might come with such attention and keen to keep some open space about herself, she also feels that “we’re actually in a moment when it’s actually encouraged to be a woman artist.”

Swoon is the first of five women artists that Clemente profiles in Our City Dreams. All are transplanted New Yorkers by choice, all captured at a recognizable juncture in quite accomplished – even rarified - careers, and all working representationally with the human form, crossing media when it suits them, and in various ways entirely willing to discard restraints imposed by traditional framing. We see just enough of the work of each to want to see more, and the subtle ways in which their work echoes each other’s ties their stories together as much as their choice of home base. This deceptively unassuming film enjoyed only a modest theatrical run earlier this year, but has an afterglow born in the web of associations among its subjects. Clemente clearly knows her terrain and has won an extraordinary degree of confidence from her subjects; my guess is this film will enjoy a steadily rising reputation as times goes on.

Clemente, whose father is the Italian painter Francesco Clemente, grew up in New York and left at 18, certain she’d never return. After eight years – divided largely between Rome and Los Angeles – Clemente returned in late 2005. She had already made short documentary films in Italy about a number of artists, among them Jim Dine and Frank Gehry. She decided, after a three-hour studio visit with the Cairo-born fabric-artist/painter Ghada Amer, that she could best return to her city by following other women artists who also chosen this spot as their anchor.

They range in age from Swoon, who is likely to remain elfin at 80, to Nancy Spero, who actually does celebrate her 80th birthday uproariously during the film, a witty, curious, sharp-as-a-whip, still-working artist despite quite advanced crippling arthritis in her hands. Each woman recounts how she decided to be in New York, though part of what emerges is the city’s cosmopolitanism and the ease with which its residents come and go. Perhaps it could be said of no other city that making a film about its artists provides the opportunity for trips as far-flung as Venice, Cairo, Serbia and Paris (well, via footage of early careers) and Thailand, not to mention heartland America (Minneapolis figures in more than one story).

Over roughly two years shooting, Clemente follows them, apparently crossing paths fairly often (besides Minneapolis, the Venice Biennale, the Deitch and Gagosian galleries appear with some regularity). After Swoon, there’s Ghada Amer (“born 1963, Cairo; landed in New York City, 1996”), who combines tapestry and paint with sewn drawings of women, often with their limbs entwined. Amer travels back to Cairo for a project born of rug-making and visits her parents, a diplomat father who encouraged her and a hesitant mother who likes to look at the work only “from a distance.” This furnishes one of several rich portraits about the complexity of parental support for artist off-spring.

Kiki Smith, daughter of painter Tony Smith (born 1963, Nuremburg, landed in New York City 1975 – by way of New Jersey and San Francisco), works in drawing, clay sculpture, print-making and painting. Besides filming Smith as she peddles around New York on her bike, gray hair streaming, Clemente follows her preparing for her retrospective, 1980-2005: A Gathering, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, musing on work some of which she herself has not seen in a quarter century, considering whether she’d have been an artist at all if her father had lived longer.

Marina Abramovic (born 1946, Belgrade, landed in New York, 2003) is a pioneering performance artist. All these artists do work that is representational and involves the female body, though Abramovic most directly makes her own body the medium. Abramovic, who cut her stomach with razors in 1975 (Clemente includes footage of this piece, Thomas Lips), is now 60, and has scarcely let up. Likening performance to ballet in the physical rigor, training and sensitivity required, Abramovic also coaches younger performance artists, and speaks about this as a medium with particular clarity. She also travels to Thailand after the Tsunami for God Punishing, a piece involving dozens of Thais who join her in wielding whips in the ocean surf.

Nancy Spero (born 1926, Cleveland, landed in New York, 1964) met her husband, the painter Leon Golub, at the Chicago Art Institute. They went first to Paris in the 50s, but in the midst of the Vietnam War, she recounts, “We finally decided that we had to face the music, that we were American painters.” Like all the artists here, she encounters Clemente at a certain turning point that summarizes her journey thus far and makes clear why she remains important.

Compact at 85 minutes, Our City Dreams is absorbing and satisfying. Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini provides an understated, effective score that serves the film especially well, right down to use of an older ballad of affectionate whimsy about “old Amsterdam” over the closing credits matches the film’s large spirit.

*******
Our City Dreams releases on DVD next Tuesday, June 23rd. It’s already listed at Netflix & is available at Firstrunfeatures.com. “Make it Snappy” is a regular column in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, reviewing both DVDs and films in theatrical release, new and enduring. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle.

Film Review #199: Throw Down Your Heart

2009

Director: Saschia Paladino

Cast: Béla Fleck, Oumou Sangare, Anania Ngoliga

When violinist Itzhak Perlman decided to explore the roots of Eastern European Jewish music – that amalgam of dance, folk song and liturgy that we know broadly as klezmer, traced from Yiddish-speaking enclaves among the Rumanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Greek, Turkish and Rom communities between the Baltic and Black Seas, violently scattered by World War II, transplanted to the Lower East Side where it met swing, flowering in popularity well beyond the Catskills since the 70s – he took a camera crew. The resulting documentary was In the Fiddler’s House (1995). Along the way, Perlman learned from masters of this vernacular – at a festival in Poland, the Klezmatics advised him to play more “slinky” – and the classical concert virtuoso memorably came to realize that conventional Western notation could not begin to capture and convey the tonal richness and rhythmic nuances of that music.

In 2005 the banjo player Béla Fleck took a year off from his group The Flecktones and embarked on a similar journey to the African nations of Uganda, Tanzania, the Gambia and through Senegal to Mali with his half-brother, filmmaker Saschia Paladino, and a small crew in a frequently over-heating van. Paladino had already made a short film in 2004 with Fleck and bassist Edgar Meyer (Obstinato: Making Music for Two), Fleck had done extensive international touring and just since 2002 has appeared in at least half a dozen concert DVDs.

But Fleck has long believed the banjo was originally a West African instrument that slaves brought to the US, developed because drumming was forbidden on plantations and then appropriated by white musicians. The film’s title comes from the exclamation – “Bwada moyo!” – that translator John Kitime tells Fleck captured Africans made when they saw the ships in slave ports and understood they would never go home.

Fleck wanted also to reintroduce the modern banjo to African musicians and he wanted, mightily, to make music with them. Many of this film’s most memorable moments concern these sessions. Whether in remote villages with musicians whom Paladino only allowed Fleck to meet when the camera was rolling, or with cosmopolitan recording artists, we watch patient and accomplished musicians instruct the diffident 11-time Grammy winner. In Tanzania he plays with Anania Ngoliga, a blind thumb pianist. In Mali, there’s kora master Toumani Diabate, and Lexus SUV-driving diva Oumou Sangare, with whom Fleck records a haunting track called “The Worried Songbird.” He jams with Madagascar's guitarist D’Gary. He encounters families of musicians like the Jattas – “I smell banjo,” he says before meeting this clan – and what seem like clear banjo forerunners. This sparingly subtitled film has six languages – besides English, there's Lusogan, Swahili, Jola, Bambarra and French – or perhaps, if you go by the moments most moving for audience and musicians alike, just the one.

Central New Yorkers know Fleck well. Besides the air time he gets on Eric Cohen’s WAER jazz show (88.3 FM), he’s performed at Syracuse Jazz Fest three times. With the Flecktones, he capped off the first night of the 25th anniversary fest in 2007. In 2005 he played with jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. And Russ Tarby, now the City Eagle’s music columnist, remembers introducing Fleck in 1996 when Jazz Fest was still held downtown in Clinton Square. With this year’s Jazz Fest just two weeks off, it’s a good time to see this film.

Next week you can do that in Ithaca, where the film screens three evenings at Cornell Cinema. Better yet, Laura Austin says Redhouse Arts Center might include the film in a series of music documentaries they will put together from a grant that’s just come through.

Throw Down Tour Heart, which first screened at San Francisco’s Roxy in March and has won a number of festival awards, had a conventional theatrical release on April 24th at IFC in New York City and last week in Los Angeles. But it’s also done a steady, under-the-radar business well outside the multiplexes, with almost 30 more short runs now booked across the country. Fleck and/or Paladino show up for talk-backs after some of these, and Fleck continues U.S. concerts all summer with combinations of half a dozen musicians from the film. (He’ll also be nearby in Utica on September 30th playing with Edgar Meyer and classical Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain).

Last weekend in Brooklyn, Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, about whom another documentary is forthcoming for US theatrical release this month (Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love), opened the ten-day Muslim Voices Festival with a sold-out concert. And in DC, Mali’s guitarist Amadou Bagayoko and singer Mariam Doumbia – they are married and perform together – this week told interviewers they are quite comfortable that New York’s white indie bands like Vampire Weekend, Yeasayers, Harlem Shakes and Dirty Projectors are influenced by African music because their own show, “Welcome to Mali,” is after all “globalist.” So Fleck is right on time.

*******

A version of this review appears in the June 11, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in the regular film column "Make it Snappy." Syracuse Jazz Fest runs June 26-27 at Onondaga Community College. Throw Down Your Heart screens next week at Cornell Cinema, Willard Straight Hall in Ithaca (8:00 PM on Monday & Wednesday, June 15 & 17, 7:30 PM on Friday, June 19.) Rounder released the soundtrack CD in March; audio samples and MP3 downloads of all 18 tracks at amazon.com. The movie DVD releases next fall. Keep track of screenings for the movie at www.throwdownyourheart.com. Find In the Fiddler’s House on-line in VHS and since 2006 on DVD.