The Evening Class

SFIAF 2009—Peter Galvin Previews the Lineup

2009-11-11T21:43:00.000-08:00

By and large, animation gets a bum rap. The average filmgoer long ago decided that the medium catered either to kids or art house snobs, and Hollywood has spent the last few decades marketing accordingly. Luckily, it's a medium that also has some of the most fervent fans—ones who endlessly support the films and keep the animated flame burning—such as the San Francisco Film Society, which will host the San Francisco International Animation Festival (SFIAF) November 11-15, 2009 at the Landmark Embarcadero Center Cinema. SFIAF's fourth edition boasts four narrative features, a selection of shorts, and live events; a great way to become better acquainted with the overlooked genre if you're unfamiliar, and—if you're already on the hook—an opportune chance to see some of the best animated films of the year on a big screen.

The biggest draws will likely be SFIAF's features: First up, The Fantastic Mr Fox. Based on the eponymous novel by Roald Dahl, Wes Anderson's latest journeys away from live-action but retains all of the director's trademark eccentricities thanks to voice-acting from many of the actors who frequent his hit films. Shot entirely in stop-motion, Fox is the story of the titular Mr. Fox, a retired crook who risks his happy home life for one last hit on the three meanest farmers in town. Oceans 11 with George Clooney as a fox?! I can't confirm such a fantastic allegation, but I'll be attending this screening myself and my fingers are crossed. The film may open wide just a week or so later, but why not see it early and think up a swell question to ask Anderson (who is expected to attend)?

Next on the schedule is the irreverent Belgian import Panique au Village / A Town Called Panic. Twitch teammate Todd Brown writes: " 'Juvenile' and 'absurd' are perfectly good descriptors when talking about Panique, though only if they are accompanied by 'brilliant' and 'hysterical'." I've been anticipating Panique for quite some time since quickly discovering the English dub on Atom Films. Each episode follows the adventures of three toy figures—Cowboy, Indian and Horse—who share a house. Its simple setup has a big part in creating the sort of universal comedy that has crossed culture lines, the series having swiftly gained support in the UK from Aardman Animation (the studios behind Wallace and Gromit). Will the five-minute episodes translate well to feature length? Early word leans towards the positive.

A new Mamoru Oshii is always big news for animation fans, though you might be surprised to hear his latest is a samurai biopic. Stepping back from the usual action and sci-fi fare of previous efforts such as Storm Riders and Ghost in the Shell, Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai is more a detailed examination of the political climates that conspired to create the man who became the legendary samurai Musashi, rather than a straightforward story about his life. Using an anachronistic narrator to steer the film from sounding too much like an animated essay, Oshii's script explores both the myths and the facts but ultimately comes no closer to understanding the true identity of the mysterious samurai. Even when the film glorifies more than enlightens, Oshii's fascination with his subject shines, making Musashi an engrossing exercise in style and structure. At Twitch, Todd Brown stages his complaints while Simon Laperriere considers "ideal" the film's description as "an animated encyclopedia … since the film uses a structure similar to a book covering a wide variety of subjects all linked more or less with the same theme."

Closing the fest is Tarik Saleh's Metropia, a near-future mystery flick starring Vincent Gallo as a dissatisfied call-center employee who begins hearing voices after using a new brand of shampoo. As a slow-burn sci fi noir, Metropia is often cryptic and scattershot; but, anyone familiar with the genre knows better than to expect events to unfold in any other way. Saleh delivers enough intrigue and double-crosses, and such an interesting style of animation—big-eyed photorealistic characters that move almost like marionettes—that the plot's contrivances are negligible. At Twitch, Todd Brown writes: "Metropia fits beautifully into the canon of dystopic literature, a grim but thoroughly plausible vision of the future, a future in which progress leads to squalor rather than prosperity" whereas—though Simon Laperriere admires Metropia's "astounding" animation—he concludes the effort "disappoints."

If shorts are more your thing, Saturday brings a few compilations. The most eye-catching is The Best of Annecy (marking selections from The Annecy International Animated Film Festival), and Walt Disney's Alice Comedies, a selection gleaned from the 56 classic shorts made between 1923 and 1927 that helped launch the Disney Studios.

Of related interest: indieWIRE has published the 20 films submitted for consideration for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards®, including The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Panique au Village / A Town Called Panic.

Cross-published on Ornery-Crosby and Twitch.

PHILIPPINE / FILIPINO CINEMA—FACINE16

2009-11-10T18:11:00.000-08:00

Add one more to November's Filmfest Smackdown; but, with the coming year being an open window into Philippine and Filipino Cinema, I thought it would warrant to get a head start.

The Filipino American Center of the San Francisco Public Library in association with the Filipino Arts & Cinema International (FACINE) present the 16th Annual Filipino American Cine Festival on Friday, November 20, 1:00-5:00PM and Saturday, November 21, 10:00AM-5:00PM in the Main Library, Lower Level, Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin Street (at Grove), free to the public. The FACINE festival is the longest-running festival of its kind in North America that showcases independent short films produced by Filipino American artists and other films made in the Philippines. FACINE is a nonprofit media arts organization that aims to promote and develop Filipino American cinema.

FACINE's Artistic Director Mauro Feria Tumbocon, Jr. has programmed the following screenings:

Friday, November 20, 1:00-5:00PM

PROGRAM 1: Our stories from the 'hood
1:00-2:00PM

Legend (Mark Villegas, dir & prod; 5 min, 2009)

Got Book? Auntie Helen's Gift of Books (Florante Pete Ibanez, dir; UCLA Department of World Arts & Culture / Center for EthnoCommunications, prod; 8:45 min, 2005). This short documentary concerns Helen Brown, the founder of the Pilipino American Reading Room & Library.

Sounds of a New Hope (Eric Tandoc, dir; Mass Movement & Sine Patriotiko, prods; 41 min, 2009). Director Tandoc follows Filipino American rap artist, Kiwi, through his work with youth both in the US and the Philippines where he uses music to raise political consciousness.

PROGRAM 2: In a weird, crazy world of my neighbors
2:00-3:00PM

The Reunion (Pio Candelaria, dir/prod; 3 min, 2009).

The San Miguel Family Reunion (Theophilus Jamal & Joel Rosal, dirs; MojaStudio & PhlipFLIX Productions, prods; 14:23 min, 2008).

Alice, Interrupted (Theophilus Jamal, dir; MojaStudio LLC, prod; 10 min, 2009).

Bunot / Husk (Ivy Universe Baldoza, dir/prod; 7:08 min, 2008).

Nekro (Crisostomo Juan Andaluz, dir; Carl and Carl Productions, prod; 19:01 min, 2008).

PROGRAM 3: Special Premiere US screening
3:00-5:00PM

Handumanan / Remembrance (Seymour Barros-Sanchez, dir; Red Room Productions, prod; 85 min, 2009). Filipina model/actress ChinChin Gutierrez stars as romance novelist faces the difficult changes in her career and life.

Saturday, November 21, 10:00AM-5:00PM

PROGRAM 4: The Filipino, undaunted
10:00–11:30AM

Gami dad Lumfwig / We, the Oppressed (Nerve Macaspac, dir; 32 min, 2008)—The indigenous peoples of the Philippines are still a people suffering from neglect and discrimination.

Kinulayang Kitil / Hand-painted feathers (Richard Legaspi, dir; Red Room Productions, prod; 24 min, 2009)—A young boy yearns to have his own painted chick believing that it can bring back the life of his father shot in a picket line.

The Momentary Enemy (Angel Velasco-Shaw, dir/prod; 24:30 min, 2008)—An experimental documentary that explores a century's worth of war rhetoric and filmic representation from the dawn of last century's Philippine-American War to Vietnam and the Iraq War. Features interviews with Reynaldo Ileto, Howard Zinn and Ninotchka Rosca.

PROGRAM 5: What of woman, herself empowered
11:30AM–12:30PM

Life Begins at O'Farrell Street (Peggy Peralta, dir/prod; 3 min, 2005).

Hello, My Name is Clarisse (Peggy Peralta, dir/prod; 3 min, 2005).

Killeg / Long life (Golda Mae Bao-ag Pay-ong, dir; University of Makati Film Society, prod; 9:52 min, 2008).

Soledad is Gone Forever (Mabel Valdivieso, dir; Cesar Viana Teague/Haiku Films, prod; 14 min, 2006).

Always Faithful (Sam Wellington, dir/prod; in association with South of Ten, Abyssinian Moon Productions, Palindrome Pictures, prods; Esperanza Catubig, star; 13 min, 2008).

PROGRAM 6: Special US Premiere screening
1:00-3:00PM

Puntod /Baby's tomb (Cesar Apolinario, dir; Arlyn de la Cruz/ADC Productions, prod; 111 min, 2009)—A daughter of Manila's slums dreams of having a dignified burial space for her mother, forges deep friendships with an old blind man and other children.

PROGRAM 7: Special US Premiere screening
3:00-5:00PM

Anacbanua / The child of the sun (Christopher Gozum, dir; Sine Caboloan, prod; 105 min, 2009)—The filmmaker's love letter to his province, Pangasinan, in text and stunning visuals. At Lessons From the School of Inattention, Francis Cruz provides a full-on rave review.

All films are either in English or in different Filipino languages (Tagalog, Bisaya, Pangasinan, etc.) with English subtitles. A short Q&A with filmmakers in attendance follows after all screenings.

3RD I 2009: HOORAY! for Bollywood at the Castro

2009-11-08T01:10:00.000-08:00

THE FOURTH KIND—Peter Galvin's Review

2009-11-07T09:56:00.000-08:00

Another week, another "found footage" horror film.

The Fourth Kind claims only half of its run-time is found footage, the rest is introduced by actress Mila Jovovich as elaborate dramatizations of real events that occurred in Nome, Alaska. I am always a bit wary when a film's tagline is "Based on a true story", but setting aside questions of legitimacy, I recognize that it was a risky endeavor to construct a movie from equal parts VHS tape and America's Most Wanted re-enactment.

In the secluded town of Nome, Jovovich does indeed play a real person, Abigail Taylor, a small-time therapist who recently lost her husband in an unsolved murder. Her husband, who had also been a therapist, was investigating a pattern in his patients suffering from insomnia and bad dreams, and Abigail is convinced that—by finishing his work—she can somehow understand his death. She begins by videotaping the sessions with her patients as they are put under hypnosis, and discovers that they all remember the same thing—waking up in the middle of the night with a big white owl sitting outside their window.

What it all means I won't divulge here, but I think the trailers are keen on making it clear that this is a film about alien abduction.

While Abigail unravels the mystery of the owl, director Olatunde Osunsanmi constantly switches back and forth between dramatization and purportedly real recorded footage, each time including captions to delineate the real people from the actors. It's obviously a device that has greatly enamored the filmmaker, but what begins as a novelty quickly becomes a distraction—at times up to four different points-of-view crowd the screen at once. Towards the end, Osunsanmi manages to confine the moments of videotape to key "scare" moments, relying on the shoddiness of the footage to lend an eerie authenticity to otherwise familiar moments, but disassociating the audience with fuzzy VCR-roll isn't the same as actually developing suspense.

Even as I decry it as a distracting gimmick, the juxtaposition of fact and fabrication remains the most interesting aspect of the film. It's wildly apparent that the filmmakers have put all their faith in the movie's dual footage premise at the expense of a story, and The Fourth Kind delivers an alien abduction experience that is about as rip-roaring as a late era X-Files episode—you get the feeling everyone is just going through the motions.

Is it real, is it fake? I suppose I could add the absence of a satisfying conclusion to the film's narrative offenses, but you've probably already figured out that a supposedly true film about alien abduction isn't going to contain proof of extraterrestrial life or you'd have heard about it by now.

Cross-published on Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.

3RD I 2009—Michael Hawley Previews the Line-up

2009-11-05T13:54:00.000-08:00

How fortunate can a website be to have two of the Bay Area's best film writers offer previews of what I consider to be this weekend's winner of—as Michael Hawley aptly terms it—November's "filmfest smackdown." Film festivalism has never been more athletic or competitive!! Lay your bets, cinephiles!

The 3rd i San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival returns for its seventh edition November 5 to 8, with two nights apiece at the Roxie and Castro Theaters. Sure to be a highlight is Saturday's Castro revival of legendary producer/star Guru Dutt's 1960 Bollywood classic Full Moon (Chaudhvin Ka Chand). Set amongst the Muslim aristocracy of early 20th century Lucknow, this lushly photographed film follows a love triangle beset with comic misunderstanding, mistaken identity and ultimate tragedy. Any disappointment I had over the film's digital, rather the 35mm presentation, has been tempered with the announcement that Dutt's son Aran will be on hand to introduce the screening.

That night, 3rd i's Saturday at the Castro concludes with recent Bollywood hit My Heart Goes Hooray! (Kil Bole Hadippa!). Although this girls-just-wanna-play-cricket pic doesn't star Shahrukh Khan, I'm not exactly dreading 148 minutes of watching Shahid Kapoor (Rani Mukherjee in Drag King mode might be a different story).

And anyone with a taste for the wildly different won't want to miss Friday's late-night Roxie screening of Quick Gun Murugun. This ambitious masala mish-mash pits a gaily-garbed vegetarian caballero against a criminal carnivore—while spoofing vintage Bollywood, Spaghetti Westerns and a hundred other things. Expect a lot of cartoonish violence, special FX and in-jokes infinitum (plus a color-palate influenced by Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger).

There are several non-Bollywood narrative features in the line-up. Of the two I previewed I'm most enthusiastic about Bombay Summer. This moody, hang-loose Indian indie chronicles the evolving friendship between three Mumbai 20-somethings—Geeta, a graphic design company exec who still lives at home, Jaider, her coddled poet boyfriend, and Madan, a drug deliveryman and photographer who comes between them. In the dark, uneven British anti-family comedy Mad, Sad & Bad, three damaged adult siblings stumble through the weeks leading up to the death of their widowed, alcoholic mother. A 17-year-old Kashmiri boy's struggle to escape his fate is at the center of Bay Area director Tariq Tapa's neo-realist feature debut Zero Bridge. The film was just recently nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. The directors for all three of these films are expected to attend.

3rd i can be counted on to present some terrific documentaries, and this year is no exception. While I haven't previewed it, closing night film Yes Madam, Sir appears to be one not to miss. The film is about Kiran Bedi, India's first elite policewoman, and Variety's Richard Kuipers calls it "an enthralling chronicle of her brilliant, tempestuous career" in a full-on rave review. Both Kiran Bedi and the film's director, Megan Doneman, are scheduled to attend.

Of the three docs I've seen, I most strongly recommend Opening Night film Supermen of Malegaon, a charming story of cinema-obsessed textile mill workers making their own inspired version of Superman. Anyone who was blown away by Manufactured Landscapes' unearthly images of Bangladesh's "ship-breaking" industry will want to check out Iron Eaters, a sobering, multi-angled look at a back-breaking business that feeds an estimated three million Bangladeshis. The contradictory disconnect between "Kama Sutra India" and "no public kissing India" is the fascinating subject of Kaushik Mukherjee's brave documentary Love in India. Other docs in the fest include Warrior Boyz (South Asian gangs in Vancouver), Searching for Sandeep (Australian lesbian finds romance on-line) and Children of the Pyre (kids living off Varanasi's cremation industry).

Cross-published on Twitch.

3RD I 2009—Frako Loden Previews the Line-up

2009-11-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray. November is here, and so is the most excellent 3rd i, or the San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival. In its seventh year, 3rd i has become one of the must-go film festivals in the Bay Area, where you can catch up with outstanding selections from the "shorts, documentaries, and feature films from South Asia and the South Asian Diaspora, including India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, Australia, Canada, Germany, UK and the USA." The great strength of this festival is its generous attention to independent works, while including classics and crowd-pleasing Bollywood, in an era when only the latter will guarantee a full house at the Castro Theatre. The festival opens at the Roxie Theater Thursday and Friday, November 5-6, then moves to the Castro through the weekend of November 7-8.

This year in previewing the festival I suspect I missed out on the crowd pleasers, which at any rate I hope to see on a bigger screen. I did see a number of documentaries—which tend to be my favorite—that I would enthusiastically recommend. I wasn't able to screen Yes Madam, Sir, whose topic—India's first policewoman—fascinated me. And I'm saving the 1960 classic Full Moon (Chaudhvin ka Chand), starring the legendary Guru Dutt, for the Castro screening on Saturday noon.

Supermen of Malegaon (India: Faiza Ahmad Khan, 2007)—In the textile town of Malegaon northeast of Mumbai, when the power looms screech to a halt and the moviegoers mass around the iron gates of the movie theater, the theater staff unlock the gates and leap out of the way as a tsunami of spectators flood in for the first Friday screening. In this movie-mad town you can get a Shahrukh Khan haircut for 101 rupees, while a Sanjay Dutt cut costs 151 rupees because there's "more hair at the back." The Muslim majority of the town makes the films in this "Mollywood" of video parlors, homemade sequels and movie parodies. Shaikh Nasir, owner of a clothing store that used to be a video parlor, recalls his no-budget local-dialect parody of Sholay that was a huge success in Malegaon. This breezy, hilarious film documents the pre-production and shooting phases of his latest work, a localized parody of Superman. Two guys under the green-screen sheet hold up the super-skinny, horizontal Shafique in his baggy Superman costume as he mimes flying through the air, fists shooting out before him. Like any Bollywood star, he's got a busy personal life: he drops a bomb on his director by letting his wedding rituals interfere with the shooting schedule. The small-pond diva complains that Malegaon's bad water cakes up her makeup and keeps the crew waiting as she chats on her cell phone. The camera falls into the river and has to be repaired in Indore.

At the end a few clips from the finished product Superman of Malegaon leave you wishing for more from this homegrown film industry. Slake your parody-thirst with the late-night screening of Quick Gun Murugun: Misadventures of an Indian Cowboy (India: Shashank Ghosh, 2009), which promises a bigger-budget, time-traveling Tamil take on the "sambar Western" that has been necessitating extra screenings at film festivals around the world.

Warrior Boyz (Canada: Baljit Sangra, 2008)—In trying to account for the distressing one hundred-plus death toll among young Punjabi/Sikh men due to gang violence in the Vancouver area, the filmmaker talks to three survivors—15-year-old Tanvir, 18-year-old Vicky and ex-con Jagdeep. In a few minutes we become surrogate parents of the most vulnerable Tanvir, kicked out of school and his family for holding firearms and drugs, seeking role models in all the wrong places, forced to carry a bat that his father thinks is for baseball. Subtitles make intelligible his mumbling, but not his strained rationalizations for earning respect among thugs who use him to sell drugs. The seen-it-all, politically aware Jagdeep provides the ethnic subtext of the violence: the need to stand up against the systemic racism and xenophobia aimed at South Asians, and the young men's out-of-context perverting of their own origins as Sikh soldier-saints obliged to fight in the service of humanity. Director Baljit Sangra is scheduled to attend the screening and, it's hoped, update us on better news about Tanvir's prospects for a decent life.

Iron Eaters (Bangladesh/Germany: Shaheen Dill-Riaz, 2008)—A decent life is the least of a laborer's challenges in this amazing documentary, shot in the Bangladeshi seaport of Chittagong, where the coastline provides an ideal location for the grounding of huge ships destined to be painstakingly taken apart by manual laborers. These workers are men, some young teenagers, forced out of their rice-farmer occupations up north to engage in a job that is potentially lethal in literally every step they take (without shoes): pulling heavy cables to shore in foot-deep mud among rusting steel plates, breaking up metal with primitive tools, and exposing oneself to fire, flying debris and falls from great heights—and perhaps worst of all, not being paid for it. While the spectacular long shots of behemoth vessels dwarfing the ant-like laborers inspire awe, the day-to-day negotiations of work leaders with middlemen and company owners simply to get paid provoke outrage on behalf of these likable yet desperate working men.

Searching For Sandeep (Australia: Poppy Stockell, 2007)—The boyish Poppy, a white lesbian in Sydney, decides to find a girlfriend online. In short order she's chatting with, and falling for, Sandeep, an Anglo-Indian woman who is sure she's a lesbian but has had no experience, never had an orgasm and hasn't come out to anyone—not even her four sisters and certainly not her conservative parents. (A holy man bewilders Sandeep's deep-in-denial mother by saying that her daughter is "with someone.") Still, Poppy reasons, there must be something between two women who both want to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and love to eat saag paneer. Through the well-worn technique of closet (literal as well as figurative in Sandeep's case) video diaries, we ride along as the budding couple negotiate their first physical meeting on holiday in Thailand, the inevitable lonely return to their separate countries, and Poppy's risky decision to relocate to London to be closer to the woman she loves. In the meantime Sandeep's sisters peek at her text messages and confirm that she's gay. Anticipation, even dread, mount as the time comes for Poppy to meet Sandeep's reluctant parents, at which point we're thoroughly invested in the success of this romance. There's something deeply real about a mother who can't commit to visiting (and therefore acknowledging) the couple in their home, but who gives them plenty of mango pickle as a sour blessing.

Mad, Sad & Bad (UK: Avie Luthra, 2008)—I have to say this film was underwhelming despite my eager anticipation to see another Avie Luthra production. It's a "quirky" comedy about three Anglo-Indian siblings and their alcoholic drama queen of a mother, whose voiceover narration opens the film as she lies in her coffin ("definitely a low point"). We're sent back to a time before her death when her three grown children are struggling with problems in their relationships. Mum adores her elder son the psychiatrist despite his being a vicious, sex-addicted jerk. She disdains her younger son, a mediocre cable-TV "shitcom" writer who aspires to opera. And she torments her fortysomething single daughter, who yearns for a child without the necessary intermediate steps of moving out of the house and starting a relationship with a man. In the weeks before Mum's death the siblings experience rejection (even by a dating service), breakups, awkward meals, embarrassing interrogations and cheese epiphanies. I found the musical score too conspicuous and cheery, the characters too morose to warrant interest, and the storylines flat and straining for humor. In the role of the opportunistic wife of a rich undertaker, Ayesha Dharker, the eponymous heroine in Santosh Sivan's The Terrorist (1999), steals every scene she's in just by widening her eyes. I do like how Mum justifies throwing her daughter out of the house: "When I was your age I had a home of my own, three children and a husband who drank too much. You don't get that with spoonfeeding." But while that punchline instantly brings color to its character, other lines promise much and fail to deliver.

Children of the Pyre (India: Rajesh S. Jala, 2008)—Of the films I had a chance to sample, this one commanded the most fascination with its subject matter and manner of treatment. Winner of best documentary awards at Montreal and Sao Paulo 2008, Rajesh S. Jala's astonishingly beautiful film is set at the Manikarnika cremation ground in Varanasi, the oldest, busiest and most sacred cremation site in India. As many as 150 corpses are reduced to bones and ash here every day, in the Hindu belief that the departed soul achieves salvation, or moksha, as a result. The seven boys profiled in the film, ranging in age from 9 to 14, are of the Dom untouchable community whose full-time job—they don't attend school—is to stoke the fires, getting the bodies to burn as expeditiously as possible. Between pokes at the flaming logs, they snatch away the colorful burial shrouds to sell and pocket the proceeds. Despite their playful and callous demeanor, these kids are desperately trying to make a living in harrowing conditions: surrounded by charred corpses and accustomed to the stench and smoke of burning flesh and unending hours of 100-degree-plus temperatures. Unlike other kids, when they wake from a nightmare they're still surrounded by cadavers. The older workers yell at them and treat them no differently from the stray dogs that hang around the site. Some of their fathers are drunken abusers.

Don't let the disclaimer about "disturbing images" make you leave your seat or, God forbid, not show up at all. The burning bodies are insensate, and they're treated for the most part with respect. If you keep in mind that they're only shells being burned off for their souls to take flight, the horror abates. There are even moments of transcendence like those I've found in fictional films like The Harp of Burma and Why Has Bodhi Dharma Left For the East? The ethereally lovely song "Ud Jayega" that closes the film put me in a kind of tearful ecstasy that stayed with me for hours. But the horror that remains is the lives of these children, who endure with the help of thick skins, ganja, gutka (a chewing tobacco containing betelnut) and gallows humor. There happens to be a dance sequence near the end in which one of the boys shows surprising skill, but there's no Slumdog Millionaire-style happy ending in store for these kids.

Cross-published on Twitch. For more information and tickets, go to 3rd i's website.

HASHMATSA / DEFAMATION (2009)—The Evening Class Interview With Yoav Shamir

2009-11-03T11:08:00.000-08:00

Simone Bitton's Rachel took the bullet for Yoav Shamir's Hashmatsa / Defamation (2009), which I would have predicted to be the target of outrage at the 29th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF). By the time Defamation finally screened, voices were perhaps already hoarse from shouting? Fortunately, Shamir's latest has not had to go the torturous route suffered by Rachel and, hopefully, audiences during its theatrical run at San Francisco's Roxie Film Center (beginning November 20, 2009) will be allowed to independently decide where to situate themselves along the spectrum of conflicted opinion on the film's subject issue. Even at IMDb the film's synopsis has been written by someone unable to refrain from judgment—which I would have thought would be in clear violation of IMDb's policies—but, when I contacted IMDb about this, they recommended I debate it on the discussion board. The prospect of being accused of being anti-Semitic for defending IMDb's synopsis policy seems a thoroughly unattractive road to travel; but, perhaps it's a journey I will have to take?

As the film's website states, Defamation wryly explores what anti-Semitism means today, two generations after the Holocaust. In his continuing exploration of modern Israeli life, director Yoav Shamir (Checkpoint, 5 Days, Flipping Out) travels the world in search of the most modern manifestations of the "oldest hatred", and comes up with some startling answers.

In this irreverent quest, he follows American Jewish leaders to the capitals of Europe, as they warn government officials of the growing threat of anti-Semitism, and he tacks on to a class of Israeli high school students on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz. The film questions perceptions and terminology when an event proclaimed by some as anti-Semitic is described by others as legitimate criticism of Israel's government policies. The film walks along the boundary between anti-Zionism, rejecting the notion of a Jewish State, and anti-Semitism, rejecting Jews. Is the former being used to excuse the latter? And is there a difference between today's anti-Semitism and plain old racism that is affecting all minorities?

Yoav Shamir was born in Tel-Aviv in November 1970. He graduated high school at Vitzo France, an art school. He specialized in photography. He then went on to Tel-Aviv University where he earned a B.A. in History and Philosophy. He later received an MFA in cinema and graduated with honors. Defamation is Shamir's fourth feature length documentary. Arguably, his statement at the film's website states all that Shamir perhaps needs to say about his film; but, I nonetheless welcomed the chance to sit down and discuss it with him.

* * *

Michael Guillén: I don't know whether you're more brave for having tackled the issue of anti-Semitism in your documentary or for interacting with your audiences after they've seen the film.

Yoav Shamir: [Laughs.]

Guillén: Defamation has shown at several festivals, premiering at Berlin, going on to Tribeca, HotDocs, among others. Have you attended most of those festival screenings?

Shamir: Yes, quite a few.

Guillén: How do you prepare yourself for that confrontation with your festival audiences? You know the atmosphere will be contentious.

Shamir: I don't really think about that. I just put myself out there. Every question that is asked or every remark is legitimate because I allowed myself the same freedom in making the film. I don't get offended by any question, remark or statement. Sometimes people need to express their point of view and—because they've given me 90 minutes of their time to watch the film and have bothered to stay for the Q&A—if they feel a need to stand up to make a statement, even to say the film is rubbish, within the rules of the game I find it fair.

Guillén: This documentary tackles a difficult, sober and serious subject but counters the heaviness of the subject with light flourishes: irreverence, graphics, comic editing, subjectivity. At Screen Daily, Howard Feinstein described Defamation as "unapologetically subjective", whereas at The Auteurs Notebook Danny Kasman has noted that you've allowed the material to "overstate itself" such that it could be argued your subjectivity has, in fact, trumped (or become?) the film's content. I, however, much appreciated Defamation's sense of humor. I laughed a lot. I'm not Jewish so I'm not sure if that colors my appreciation of the humor. Can you speak to your decision to exercise this light touch and to enfold subjective humor into your voiceover and the film's editing?

Shamir: When I started to make this film, I realized it was going to be a very touchy subject. The more I filmed, the more I realized just how touchy a subject and how passionate people were about their points of view and the ways they see the world. I don't know how many films or documentaries there have been about anti-Semitism, but I suspect most of them have been basic archival black and white footage films that feature interviews with Holocaust survivors. If I tell you I'm going to make a film about anti-Semitism, this is automatically what will come to people's minds. Either it will be a film about the Holocaust with black and white archival footage and interviews with survivors—which most of the time serves as a type of catharsis for the viewers and, many times, for the people who have made the film—or audiences will come expecting a film that says how terrible the state of anti-Semitism is in the world today, complete with statistics and examples. In wanting to make my film, I came up against these expectations.

Personally, I would not come to a theater to watch a film about anti-Semitism because, up front, I would already be thinking that this is not the kind of film I want to watch. I've already seen hundreds of them and I don't feel like watching another one like that. I wanted my film to get close to people, to reach the audience, to shake up their paradigms and their convictions. By using a lighter tone, it helped the audience to maintain interest. It helped them get away from their expectations and their beliefs. It got their attention. Humor, for me, is a great tool to reach people.

Guillén: One of the ways the humor came across was that—rather than being a film specifically about the defamation of anti-Semitism or, as you say, a film that confirmed presumptions of how terrible the state of anti-Semitism is in the world today—instead, the film became an exposé of in-fighting among Jews. Defamation appears to focus more on the slander Jews perpetuate on one another. In fact, my understanding is that the genesis of this film was in response to your being called an anti-Semite by a Jewish American journalist because you expressed a critical view on Israel's policies toward the Palestinians in your previous film Checkpoint. For me it's an interesting perspective to realize that—even among Jewish people—there is not a clear idea of exactly what anti-Semitism is, which forced me to go to the dictionary. To my surprise, the dictionary definition revealed that Semites are members of "any of various ancient and modern people originating in southwestern Asia, including the Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs." At what point did the term anti-Semitism become appropriated by the Jewish community as a phenomenon exclusive to them?

Shamir: You know, in one of the interviews for the film conducted with a Jewish person, he told me that anti-Semitism means hating Jews more than you have to, which is a funny way of looking at the term. It's true that Semite refers to all the people who are living in the region of Israel—and, yes, Arabs are also Semites—but, eventually the term has been dominated by the Jews and has lost its 19th century definition, which related to the race of the Semites. The term has come to mean a phenomenon specifically targeted towards Jews.

Guillén: I'm interested in how you've structured the documentary to maximize the issue's polarizing potential; its main thrust being to situate the audience somewhere inbetween. As Ray Bennett wrote for The Hollywood Reporter: "The fiercest opponents turn out to be in the United States, where Prof. Norman Finkelstein, who has written about what he calls 'the Holocaust industry,' and Abraham Foxman, who is the very active National Director of the ADL [the Anti-Defamation League], are vocal enemies. Each was touched personally by the Holocaust but they hold opposing views on the nature of anti-Semitism and its impact on the world in general and Israel in particular. Their divide is profound and passionate, and Shamir takes time to allow both of them to make their case." As Ali Hazzah wrote for Eye For Film: "they come off as monomaniacal obssesionists, each obdurate in their point of view." Clearly it was your intent to stage polarity between these individuals? Can you speak to how you effected this but kept the balance?

Shamir: We chose Foxman for the film obviously for being a key player in the arena fighting anti-Semitism—perhaps the most important figure in that respect—and then we wanted someone who could be in opposition to him. It was difficult to find someone with enough credence to be accepted in that opposition. For example, here in the United States both the Republican and Democratic parties are accepted within the framework of their opposition. Whether you like McCain or you like Obama, most people consider them both legitimate players. Eventually, a voter decides which of the two they'll vote for. With anti-Semitism, however, the anti-Semitic discourse is ruled or owned by people like Abe Foxman. Anyone who says anything differently becomes marginalized and rendered illegitimate, as if there can be no opposition to the anti-Semitic discourse.

It's not like you have two forces who are equal. One of them is the establishment—which dominates the discourse with 80%-90% of the Jewish people siding with him—and then what's left is an individual like Norman Finkelstein who has been forced into an extremist characterization; but, what Finkelstein is saying, even in his book The Holocaust Industry, is not that extreme. Even Abba Eban, one of the best-known Israeli foreign ministers, famously stated: "There's no business like the Shoah business." That point of view came from Israel. The views which Finkelstein represents were already acceptable in recent Israeli history; but, for some reason, the point of view of the Anti-Defamation League has come to dominate the discourse.

With Defamation, I wanted audiences to think, "Yes, that makes sense and this makes sense. Oh, there is anti-Semitism; but, oh, it's not like that." I like that audiences move along this spectrum and re-think and adjust their positions and views.

Guillén: Critic Jason Bailey considered your final voiceover a "misfire" for not acknowledging that the film, and the issues it addresses, are too inscrutable. He felt that the efficacy of the final sequence didn't require a director to come in to tell the audience what to think and that the documentary had already effectively motivated people to situate themselves towards the issue according to their own convictions. Bailey charged that your final voiceover negated that some of your audience might have reached a different conclusion than you. How do you respond to that critique?

Shamir: I don't remember exactly who it was but someone once said that a poem is never finished until it is abandoned. It's the same thing with a film. Whether the final voiceover was the right statement or not, I'm not sure; but, I stand behind the statement. The fact remains that—while for many Jewish people the issues the film revolves around are the bottom-line issues of identity and self-definition and while the film is made from an Israeli point of view—this discourse on anti-Semitism, which has been held largely here in the United States, is an existential one for Israelis.

An Israeli kid who is conscripted into the army does not have the perspective that an American Jew has. When this kid reads the reports issued by the ADL about a steep rise in anti-Semitism in the United States, he wonders, "Wow. Is there going to be another Holocaust?" The past is important to remember. We need to know about it. But maybe we need to move on and envision a future we would like for ourselves? To imagine a definition of ourselves that we would like to have? Will it be a negative one or a positive one? That might seem like a simplistic statement in the end—perhaps I could phrase it differently—but, when you make a film, you can't be so careful about everything or you can't make the film.

Guillén: The sequence of the young Israeli students on the Holocaust tour was, for me, the film's most disturbing sequence. With all due respect to the young woman in your audience who criticized your selection of this group of kids for sending out what she believed to be the wrong message, I considered her critique manipulative. Clearly, she wanted you to choose a group of kids who represented the opposite viewpoint, her viewpoint; but, I don't imagine that you choose kids to represent any viewpoint?

Shamir: No, of course not.

Guillén: I imagine they simply reveal themselves in the filming? But I had a question about the tour itself. Is there a basic or established itinerary to the tour?

Shamir: Yes, there's an itinerary for sure. The tour runs seven days. It starts and ends up in Warsaw. The itinerary is arranged both substantively and geographically. For example, they keep Auschwitz for one of the last days after the students have already experienced certain … understandings.

Guillén: It seemed apparent that the structure of the itinerary was intended for maximum propagandic effect. The tour starts out with "lesser" camps, so to speak….

Shamir: They start with a ghetto and then move to a camp….

Guillén: Culminating in Auschwitz, perhaps the most infamous of the camps, and one to which everyone has an emotional reaction. Most people have a charged response at the mere mention of Auschwitz. Whereas Majdanek—one of the camps earlier in the itinerary—doesn't hold the same charge (not to say the atrocities committed there were any less important). It's in Auschwitz that the kids seem to finally break down and become indoctrinated through grief.

Prior to Defamation's premiere at the Berlinale, head of the Forum Christoph Terhechte defended inclusion of Defamation in the program, stating it was balanced against Petr Lom's Letters to the President, a film which likewise explores the "rehearsal of victimhood, [and] the definition and identification of an entire people and religious community with being the victim", albeit from the perspective of Iranian Muslims. Both Defamation and Letters to the President address "the delicate matter of confronting the aura of the perpetual victim." Have you seen Lom's film?

Shamir: I haven't seen his film.

Guillén: During the Q&A after Defamation's SFJFF screening, you mentioned that both Abe Foxman and Norman Finkelstein hated the film once they finally saw it. Can you elaborate on what their complaints were and what they felt was wrong about the film?

Shamir: I'm not sure that Finkelstein has seen the film. We've received negative comments from him but I'm not sure he's actually seen the film. Maybe he's responding from the trailer or from what he's heard from other people? Foxman issued a press release at the ADL website addressing his reaction to the film so, perhaps, I shouldn't speak for him?

Guillén: My reaction to Norman Finkelstein was conflicted. I take it you have read both his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploration of Jewish Suffering and the volume The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearsheimer?

Shamir: Yes.

Guillén: Can you recommend them?

Shamir: For sure, yeah.

Guillén: While watching the film there was a lot of tongue-clucking and exasperated sighs from the audience towards the end when you and Finkelstein argued about the Nazis. His anger intrigued me in the sense that it's apparent he's an individual who cannot be divorced from his anger. He had been denied tenure and placed on administrative leave at DePaul University, and then denied access into Israel, which struck me as profound. Has there been much discussion about his denial of access within Israel?

Shamir: In Israel? Not so much. Israel is a place where something major has to happen in order to make the news. Even a suicide bombing attack—if it's less than three casualties—won't make the news. So much has happened in Israel that the sensitivity level is low. Israelis need to be shaken strongly to elicit a reaction. I'm not sure how big a deal Israelis made of Finkelstein's denial of access.

Guillén: Equally disturbing to me was the comment made by the couple working for the ADL that Israel is the "insurance policy" for American Jews. You stated on stage at your Q&A that you did not want Israel to be an insurance policy for American Jews.

Shamir: Many American Jews have a multilayered perception of the world. While making the film, this emerged as one of the most fascinating themes. Seemingly, American Jews are happy as American citizens and their lives here; but, somewhere underneath…. It was interesting to note among the ADL circles that they play a little game where they ask: name five non-Jewish friends who will hide you if something terrible happens in the U.S. They can't come up with five names, so they're asked to name three. They can't come up with three, so they're asked to name one. One of the producers of Defamation is a Jewish American woman who told me that one of her best non-Jewish friends admitted she's had nightmares about whether she would hide her "should the Nazis come." Jewish Americans live seemingly happy lives in the American community but underneath there are many layers of insecurity that dominate their thinking. They think that Israel should be there as their insurance policy, which God forbid—and they always go back to history to confirm their fears; who would have thought that anything like the Holocaust could have happened in Germany in the '30s?—so many times they have a similar conception of America. "We're okay now, but it was also okay in Berlin. So in case something terrible should happen, we want to have a strong Israel we can go to." Many of them have houses in Israel. But as an Israeli living in Israel, we pay a heavy price for being this insurance policy.

If I was an insurance agent, and you asked me how to keep your house safe for insurance matters, I would advise you to surround your house with a wall, barbed wire, three alarms and guard dogs and that would pretty much insure that no one would come in and steal your belongings, right? That would be clever advice from an insurance agent. But if you live in the house, you don't want to be surrounded by walls, barbed wire, dogs and all of that stuff because you want to live a normal life. I live in Israel. I want to live a normal life. I don't want my life to be ruled by demons belonging to somebody else who is not living in Israel. If I have a problem with my neighbor, sometimes my neighbor might be right. If I'm occupying his land, anti-Semitism doesn't have anything to do with it. I recognize the fact that occupying his land is wrong. As far as I'm concerned, we should reach a point where we're more concerned about living in a liberal, democratic, tolerant and progressive Israel, which makes its decisions on moral and realistic perspectives. But what's happening in Israel now is mainly being influenced by demons chasing people who live outside of Israel. As an Israeli, this is not a great thing.

Guillén: I admire your concession that Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is wrong and works against achieving—as you say—a progressive and tolerant Israel. But this is a contentious perspective. Where does the strength come from for you to adhere to this perspective?

Shamir: As a filmmaker and as a person, I try to see things without being affiliated to any particular paradigm, especially in the face of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Most American Jews have never been to the occupied territories, not as civilians and certainly not as soldiers. I've worn both those hats. I've been there as a soldier and with my own eyes have seen the injustice. Later, while filming Checkpoint, I returned as a civilian with a little bit of perspective. In both instances, it seemed wrong to me that we should do such harm against the Palestinians. For me this is a natural response. I wouldn't like people to act that way towards me. Whereas we as Jews are very sensitive to any anti-Semitism levied at us now or in the past, we are not sensitive to the injustice and harm we are causing others. As a person, I find that unfair.

Guillén: Do you have a sense of how much your opinions on this matter are shared by other Israeli Jews?

Shamir: It's hard to quote numbers. Unfortunately, the last election reflects there is less and less tolerance. This is the most right-wing government we have ever had in the history of Israel. Obviously, according to the last election, the majority has proven that Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is not a huge concern for them. But there are still enough people in Israel who would like to see the occupation end. I think most Israelis even now know that we will eventually have to give back the territories; but, for right now, it's a strange relationship with the territories. Unfortunately, many crazy evangelist Americans donate to Israel, and Israel embraces their support without weighing that these people might be religious maniacs with disturbed views on the world. Israel is happy to receive the support from these individuals even if their final goal is that all Jews will become Christians and believe in Christ. Many strange things are happening in that arena.

Guillén: My final question: you've done such a fine job with documentaries, would you ever consider filming a narrative feature?

Shamir: It's my goal to make a feature fiction film. I'm hoping it will happen someday.

Cross-published on Twitch.

STREET ART SAN FRANCISCO: MISSION MURALISMO—The Evening Class Interview with Annice Jacoby

2009-11-02T14:05:00.000-08:00

"Like the Loisada of New York or the Left Bank of Paris," Annice Jacoby writes in the introduction to her visually stunning publication Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo (Abrams, 2009:29), "the Mission is a café society that scoffs at excess, complains about money, drinks the elixir of art and action, and provides its own poetry and mythmaking. Part of the spectacular appeal of this neighborhood is its outdoor gallery, which reveals a rich creative life, provocative attitudes, and multicultural influences."

As the book's website attests, Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo showcases the vibrant street art of San Francisco's Mission District through over 500 full-color photographs and 30 in-depth essays by either the artists who produced them or Mission-savvy writers, including a foreword by Grammy® Award Winner Carlos Santana. The volume includes profiles of such artists as R. Crumb, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Barry McGee (TWIST), Rigo, Las Mujeres Muralistas, the Billboard Liberation Front, Gronk, Sam Flores, Neckface, Juana Alicia, Os Gemeos, Reminesce, Andrew Schoultz and Spain Rodriguez, comprehensively exposing more than three decades of this expansive and vibrant public art movement.

Birthed in the early 1970s, a provocative new street art scene transformed San Francisco's legendary Mission District into an art epicenter that crosses popular culture, fine art and political audiences. "Mission Muralismo" is an ever-growing movement of accomplished street art combining elements of Mexican mural painting, surrealism, pop art, urban punk, eco-warrior, cartoon, and guerilla graffiti that has catapulted many San Francisco artists into the international spotlight.

The reviews have been rapturous, as indicated by the volume's Facebook page. In partnership with the Precita Eyes Mural Project, the M.H. deYoung Museum will be hosting a year-long series celebrating the Abrams publication and its vital subject. This series will be part of Cultural Encounters: Friday Nights at the de Young, offered free to the public in the museum's free zone, and will feature both cutting-edge and traditional street artists offering lectures and performances, sharing their art, insights, musings, experiences, and perspectives. The series kicks off this Friday, November 6, 5:30PM to 8:45PM, with a festive book launch, which will include many of the artists, photographers, and writers featured in Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo; live music by Dr. Loco's Rockin' Jalapeno Band; poetry and performances by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Stephen Cervantes, Francisco X, Lori B (Bloustein) and Andrew Voight; talks by the book's editor, Annice Jacoby, artist and writer Jaime Cortez; projections of thousands of archival and current Mission murals, including a ten-year span of the deAppropriation wall; art activities for people of all ages and MORE!

The volume's editor Annice Jacoby has directed innovative public art projects, incorporating visual arts, literature, theater, and media. She served as Director of Performing Arts Public Events at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Director of Public Relations at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her work includes City of Poets for the San Francisco Public Library and The Fort Point Project, the opening performance for the Hague Appeal for Peace. Annice and I circumvented the New York publicist's efforts to set us up for a mutually inconvenient telephone interview by acknowledging that we were neighbors on Bernal Heights and taking it from there. She accepted my invitation to come over for ricotta cheese pancakes smothered in gingered maple syrup and sweet friendberries.

* * *

Michael Guillén: As someone who collects Chicano/a art, I chafe against those who seek to exclude Chicano/a art from the category of "high art", relegating it to some lower realm of popular folk art. I'm sure you're aware of this tiresome debate?

Annice Jacoby: In Santa Cruz, I was the editor of a magazine in which I published a giant article about the work of Eduardo Carrillo in one of the early issues entitled "What's Chicano About Chicano Arts?" Carrillo had done a lot of work around Santa Cruz, some of which had been vandalized and whitewashed, which brought up the question: "What is the difference between the public eradication of identity and a community deciding what's right for its walls?" At the core of that argument was this condescension you're referencing of high art / low art, which I hope Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo will blow out of the water.

Guillén: I'm not so confident that condescension is going to be blown out of the water any time soon, though I do believe articulation against it is becoming more convincing, and Street Art San Francisco certainly champions the cause. Amalia Mesa-Bains is the cultural critic who most influenced me in realizing the importance of articulation and its role in convincing the critics and detractors of Chicano/a art that their dismissive definitions are misguided. Though it was something I knew in the back of my head, I hadn't quite formalized until reading Street Art San Francisco that the Mission's mural art has been—and is a continuing part of—a historical movement.

Jacoby: The book extends the invitation to view the whole impulse to work creatively in public and within the community as a movement that does not share the traditional hallmarks of how you define a movement—in the sense that you have an iterative style and an iterative theology of what art is—but, attacked it as outside of the sanctuary of the existing power structure. "Oh, the curator chose this." No, the community responds to it, in the sense that you have permission. In fact, the original title for the book was With and Without Permission. That is the organizing tension, the instrument, of how you decide what compels you to create something and share it with your community. It's also performative because a lot of this is done in public. Watching someone have the audacity to transform their community with a message towards beautification—or a tyrannizing message that has a lot of politics in it—that nerve is where the excitement is that's alive.

Guillén: I would argue that there is a longstanding heritage of that impulse, of that "organizing tension" as you say. Mayan public art—their architecture, their monumental sculpture, their murals, their portable objects—inscripted not only the political charter of an elite ruling class, but provided for the expressed concerns of the so-called masses. One can only theorize in looking back at what the Maya considered the essential purpose of their art.

I don't know if you keep up with the comments at the book's website, but some smart aleck on there said, "Murals belong inside." I found that a profoundly misinformed perception, evoking the standard thesis that art is something that is hung on a wall within a white cube, eliciting specifically-transcribed reactions. A comment like "murals belong inside" demarcates where art belongs and for what purpose. Clearly in this commenter's mind, public mural art defies and flies in the face of art's expected role and suggests a capacity delimited if not negated by the gallery space.

Which returns me to considerations of the Maya. When I was interacting with archaeologists working in the Maya field, it always amused me that the cave archaeologists were so cocky about how they came up with more stuff than the dirt archaeologists. This was almost entirely due to the Mayan belief that art's function was not primarily to be seen. They would craft beautiful things—carved lapidary art, metalwork objects, polychrome ceramics—which the moment they were crafted, were then placed into caves and cenotes as propitiatory offerings. In other words, Mayan art was not always to be seen and was often hidden, in the sense that—by being hidden—it belonged to an invisible world that energized the visible world.

Another example: the Maya are well-known for their onion-like architecture. Each pyramid provided the base for the next phase of construction. The core pyramid, the first pyramid, was lathered in stucco and brightly and beautifully painted and—as soon as it was constructed—was immediately built over. In other words, that core pyramid was not meant to be seen or admired as a piece of architecture; it was meant to be more like an invisible nuclear reactor core to the pyramid's subsequent constructions. It energized those subsequent constructions. Art was not for purposeful display but rather to energize. That's how I look at public mural art. This is art that is meant to energize. It's not invisible, but it does lack visibility in the standard gallery and museum settings, and is therefore—by contrast—a critique of that visibility.

Jacoby: I'm with you. That's a beautiful description. I love the way you're describing it. Obviously, this is an enormous topic that excites me and thrills me because Art (with the capital "A") in contrast to art (with a small "a")—art as taste or ambition or acquisition, all of those many many ways in which art is brokered in the world that we live in—are very confused. The art that functions like language, as something that belongs to all of us to apply, to enrich, to connect, to embroider, to exchange—all of that—that's what we want to keep alive; that impulse to make, to manifest something out of nothing, critical discernment, to make beauty.

For example, the Balinese see such creativity as an indistinguishable part of the spiritual obligation to create beauty that waters every day. It's not like you have to go every day and do penance for first confession or communion; whatever that rote tutelage is. Creativity is right there as a practice that embellishes every day and has this exquisite, self-replenishing principle that we wish were practiced all over, in terms of both consciousness as well as the terrible tension in the world we live in between construction and destruction, the violent mentality of the "them" and the "us", and the virtual experience in contrast to the actual sensory meaningful experience. I'm shorthanding all this but I'm sure you share my understanding?

What intrigued me to put this particular book together—rolling back a half a step into the why—was that I had been doing very large public artwork that dealt with the connection between the conscious and the unconscious life in media. Suzanne Lacy and I collaborated for over a decade on a series of works with the high schools in Oakland to advocate media literacy, with the principle that media had replaced religion as the source for behavior on how teens negotiate life. Whether it's good behavior or bad behavior, that modeling and information glut of instructions and confused messages are all coming from the media. Now, at that point, we did this project before the Internet and I was just thinking the other day that, interestingly, everything we did would be a different animal today, in contrast to 1999. You could look at this experience as the changes effected in the past decade. But we did things like set up staged dialogues between cops and kids who had only connected in negative, punitive contact. We set up a basketball game that was a parallel between the rules of the game and the rules of the street, with fouls and everything else. We had a performance event on top of a parking lot in downtown Oakland where each car was a chamber theater in which the kids could talk about the critical issues in their lives and the audience could eavesdrop on them. There's major documentaries about this work.

I did the opening performance for the Hague Appeal for Peace across from the War Crimes Tribunal with child-soldiers from Africa and people who had been dealing in the 37 wars that were going on all over the planet. I was looking at the Peter Brook principle of theater as an opportunity to surprise yourself. What's theater? Theater is obviously an old convention in the human play with both religious, political and social practice origins, in terms of gathering, staging, and all that, in every culture. The larger phenomenon of theater exists in the public sphere. My interest is in that communion between perception, social space, social sculpture, creative transformation and the really painful political reality of life in America.

I had done a lot of these things and then Susan Kelk Cervantes, the Founding Director of Precita Eyes Muralists, asked me to put a book together on the murals in the Mission. I told her that the only way I could do it was if it was balanced and not just about the community murals, but how the community murals live in this complicated, negotiated weather of mixed messaging, mixed intention, that is a reflection of the community. I wanted to look at the Mission as a laboratory of cultural activism cross-feeding itself through the many mediums within which it works: stenciling, printing, painting, tagging and spray. All of that is part of the counterpoint of this ongoing conversation that—both in terms of content and style, generational outlook, what you give a damn about—is one big, noisy opera and that the reason the Mission is so significant is that it has become an indicator that is exploring the global, using the imagery that gets recycled, tagged and changed.

The protests in Seattle against the first WTO were organized in the Mission. Burning Man was organized in the Mission. This is not an accident. The Mission possesses an instigational energy of access, inspiration and stimulation.

Guillén: Living in the Mission, walking around in my neighborhood, is a synergistic immersion in community expression and—I would argue—the alternative immersion to what you experience when you walk down into the BART stations, let's say, where the walls, the columns, the steps, the floors, have been sold to advertisers and where, in effect, you walk into and are absorbed by a commodified reality. That tension between these two different types of sensual immersion by two different types of reality fueled by completely opposite agendas is one of the wonders of living in San Francisco.

Jacoby: Very interesting point. I'm totally with you. I like that observation. I made my book above ground but I never actually thought about the mood of the BART stations. I don't take the BART very often.

Guillén: My point being that—returning to the comment that was left at your site—why would a commuter accept this bombardment of commercial imagery every day of his working life but question the necessity for public art?

Jacoby: That is such a powerful necessity to say out loud. Others have made that comment and I hope it comes across clearly in the book in terms of who owns public space? Who owns our attention? The corporations are given license to buy our attention in gross, manipulative ways, both in scale and intention. The entire impulse to transform our environment is an unsubtle, anti-corporate, anti-control, anti-public mediocrity impulse to put color, irreverence and personality back into public space: style wars.

Guillén: Or as you described it so perfectly: to create without permission. As someone who arrived in San Francisco in the mid-'70s, I have watched the city change. Granted, its lineage of rebellious art remains consistent; but, with even more necessity in public space. In the mid-'70s public space was more common than it is now. The parks, the seaside, the streets, afforded liberty for self-expression. Since then there's been an alarming trend where much of that common public space has given way to privatization and censure. It underscores the rebellious critique against private property found in graffiti and tagging. I'm admittedly conflicted about the quality of this critique. I'm a tax payer whose money goes into cleaning up MUNI buses and I frequently become upset when kids tag a bus while I'm on board; but, I do understand—or appreciate to a limited extent—their impulse, however misdirected.

Jacoby: There is a big difference between blithe destruction, imposition and social protest. If I get on a bus and some kid pulls out a stash of stolen markers and starts scribbling them around and the bus suddenly stinks making me gag, I don't think he's made the world a better place. That's not taking something ugly and making it beautiful. In contrast, the daredevils in the New York scene who snuck into the train yards to paint grimy, grey train cars pink and orange so that they came out looking like circus cars; that's different; that's style wars. There is that place where the copycat art destroys the fun, which is not so healthy. I don't want to condone that straight out.

Guillén: Nor do I. I bring it up only to highlight that the impulse is valid albeit misdirected. These kids don't yet understand the necessary negotiation involved in the true social work of public art.

Jacoby: Right. They also haven't moved into the consciousness that—first of all—life is precious. Youth can squander a lot of its vital energies on meaningless stuff. That's part of the "get your ya-yas off because you did it" mentality. It's hard for someone who is not in "the moment" generation to advise: "Okay, now let's do something worth doing." Kids who are coming of age now think that they are the coolest in the world to grab a spray can and enter the night; but, that activity is over 30 years old. It wasn't just invented. The guys who did it then are now in their forties and fifties making a living. Defacing property exclusively as an act of rebellion hasn't been thought through.

At the same time, you take someone like Twist (Barry McGee), he started out that way—in fact many of them started out that way—but, a few of them started to actually use their instincts to say something or to move people. That's probably the same ratio in any art form. A few go beyond just doing it because they're thinking, "Oh, look at me! I'm cool! Hear my pistols!"

Guillén: Some street artists have become quite sophisticated in their negotiation; for example Shepard Fairey. Fairey fascinates me because he's a street artist, he's a gallery artist, he's a commercial artist. He doesn't limit himself.

Jacoby: But Shepard is an art school kid. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. He started doing street art as a young art student so he chose to go back to the movement part of it. It was a tactic. What appealed to Shepard was taking some cultural coin—in his case André the Giant—and blowing it out, putting it in your face, throwing it where you wouldn't expect to find it. As an artist, he exercises surprise. The artist as an acrobat-adventurer who hijinks your attention span is what Shepard Fairey is playing with. He loves this book, by the way. He's very excited about it.

Guillén: Clearly. He's written: "Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo captures the essence of San Francisco: community, diversity, color, expression. It's a city that belongs to its artists, and this book feels that way too." My favorite Shepard Fairey experience however—where I really "got" him and recognized the brilliance of his multiplicity—was one day on Valencia Street when I saw a young woman with long, flowing blonde hair carrying a large purse with the Obey Giant on it walking past posters of the Obey Giant plastered on a wall. She probably paid a fortune for that purse; but, the art was also free. It was a thrillingly dissonant moment that made me wonder how Fairey had convinced her to buy that purse when the art is free?

Jacoby: You are beautifully embracing all of the interesting tensions in street art. I would say that young woman was voting for him by buying the purse. She is actually saying, "I think this is so cool that I need to own my own version of it and it's my choice." You and I could argue that she's been as comparably manipulated as the young woman who buys the GAP bag; but, it's just a different notion of coolness. It's a different type of prestige tag. It's a different way of saying, "This is my brand." That argument would be a possible interpretation. The relationship between advertisers and artists—whether you look at Warhol or further back in terms of exploiting imagery, controlling responses and reducing things to a symbol (think Nike)—is that they have the same things available to them to play with.

Alan W. Barnett, an art historian who wrote a major volume in the '70s-'80s on the history of community murals [Community Murals: The People's Art] has provided exhaustive research and an overview of the history of art and politics—with a particular focus on Mexican poster and revolutionary art—that begins with the Paleolithic caves. His thesis is that all art is essentially mural art; that all art begins with the impulse to put things on our living spaces that enclose us and have meaning for us. His whole point, from the caves on, is that we assign meaning to—let's say—this circle, based on whether we're taking cues from politicians, the Church, the guy next door, or the advertisers. What does that circle mean? Is that a god or is it Texaco or listening to yourself? Everyone, each creature landing in this special milieu, in this global creative legacy to which we're gaining more and more access, has a choice in how they project significance in art, how they commune with it, resonate with it. Sometimes it's completely accidental. Yesterday in Santa Cruz I went into a friend's house who I hadn't seen in a long while and I might as well have been in ancient India with all the deities she had around her and she's a nice Jewish girl from New York! I'm just saying you make choices. However, the person who made those gorgeous deities many hundred of years ago had no idea that my friend would collect them and that they would land in some fancy house in Santa Cruz, y'know?

If you take that principle that Barnett proposes as a base line and apply it to mural cultures all over the world—whether Byzantine, Roman, inside, outside, mosaic, painted, whatever—it winds up being all of art. If you look at all of the street art in the Mission as being a singular art work, with an everchanging exhibition, with its residents constantly expressing themselves in some noisy, hard-to-catalog fashion, then it starts to be an individual's responsibility to have some consciousness about how you move through the street and where you actually focus. It becomes more and more interesting as you start to not think about them as individual works of art—"Oh, that's Juana Alicia, she's an accomplished artist"—but more that she is one of the many people dancing in this milieu.

Guillén: Of course Juana Alicia would be a first choice for a book like this, and I have a piece of her's in my collection as well, but what truly delighted me about Street Art San Francisco when I first leafed through it was your inclusion of the mural painted inside my local taqueria El Taco Loco of the jalapeño bandido chasing the bespectacled (and loco) taco. In some ways, your inclusion of that image best reflected the living texture of my community or—as has been said of film—"the frenzy on the wall."

There is an aesthetic arrest that happens in the orbit around any piece of art; but, I would argue that one of the most compelling aesthetics of street art is its ephemerality, which has a longstanding heritage in Chicano art all the way back to Mexican art—papel picado, alfombras, the seasonal and ceremonial altars of Muertos, pulqueria art, revolutionary poster art—these beautiful expressions of art which were never intended to last, but which gain beauty in being anchored to a specific moment and having that moment weather, fade and transform. I am always amazed when an author/editor such as yourself or cultural critic Amalia Mesa-Bains can, ironically, "capture" the ephemerality of popular art. Can you speak to the Chicano/Latino aesthetic of ephemeral art? The classic example being the Santana mural at 22nd and South Van Ness, which you've written "exemplifies the conflict between permanence and temporality in the ever-changing landscape of Mission murals." I was so pleased that you had a photograph of what the mural looked like in its prime since—in recent years—I've watched it literally fading away.

Jacoby: I call it a rag.

Guillén: Are there any plans to touch up that mural?

Jacoby: There's a lot of politics behind that. Will Shank—who wrote an essay "Whose Art Is This Anyway?" for the book—and Timothy Drescher have started this organization called Rescue Public Murals. That mural has been discussed several times now. My personal opinion is that its artistic merit is just okay; obviously, however, it's a cultural artifact. Particularly because Carlos Santana's blessing on this book is not arbitrary. [Santana has written in his foreword: "The whole Mission neighborhood is a massive public artwork, both sacred and profane, brimming with graff and goddesses."] In many ways his journey parallels the cultural trajectory of someone who—just like yourself—had a completely Chicano identity and took his roots into a position where he now represents a global world roots musical vocabulary with many of the same messages that are central to the operating principles of the transformation of the Mission activists. Therefore, seeing the young Carlos in rapture on the street three stories high was an inspiration to all the kids in his hood, to his whole community. He became—What is a god in our time? A rock star, right?—he became as close as we get to a hero. The fact that the mural has been neglected is a point of embarrassment.

Now, the politics behind it is that Michael Rios—who painted it in 1987—has zero interest in repainting it. Just the way that Juana Alicia—for creative reasons—had zero interest in repainting the lettuce pickers mural. Whatever it would cost to have the Santana mural be repainted by anybody, no one has ponyed up to do it and the people who own the building apparently are indifferent. It's unlikely it's going to be rescued.

Guillén: But my point being that: as unfortunate as that might be, isn't that true to the ephemeral aesthetic? Are these fading murals always meant to be rescued?

Jacoby: I think it's going to be okay. I think it's been rescued by being included in this book.

Guillén: I can't argue with you there. That is one of the presiding values of Street Art San Francisco: its chronicle of the movement's historicity. In effect, as editor you have played the same role I play at international film festivals, which is to create the written record of the negotiated tensions that make up an event; one of the elements essential to a film festival's identity. You have done this for Mission muralismo.

By discussing the aesthetics of ephemerality, it conjures the questions: who owns this art? Can it be owned? Who is responsible for it? When Shepard Fairey strategizes the commodification of his own art even as he lets it come and go on the streets, it causes me to wonder if it would be true to the mural art or the social activism to try to peg it? To fix it in place? To make it stay? It seems to me that the value of the ephemeral aesthetic is precisely the energy released in letting go. The Maya did this when they killed pots. And that release is necessary not only for creative artistic energy, but also for the social activism. The ephemeral value of social activism is not in its intended result but in the action itself. Yes, activism aims for results; but—as you and I both know—these struggles are in constant flux, it's a constant struggle, it's a constant resistance, and one might even say that the means not only justify the ends but, in essence, become the end. I would say that awareness is what allows us to own these images, even as they fade and change before our eyes. And your chronicle of that constant change is one of the driving values of this book, just as Craig Baldwin stated that this "voluptuous volume documents a thousand ways to reconcile Art and Life." The chronicle—memory—becomes a reconciliation of the hazards and values of the aesthetics of ephemerality.

Jacoby: I love this drift of the tension between what's for the record, what's indelible, where's the afterglow of any art? But it's not an accident that the very first image you see in the book asks the question: "How alive are you willing to be?" There is a deliberate, way in which the book is structured as a filmic narrative—it has an arc—but, it's also like a walk in the neighborhood, a self-discovery, that is very much rooted in the fact that—to be fully alive—you are living every day. You don't store up life. You might be ensconced in some cellular, residual behavior that gives you impulses to act; but, unless you are in the moment, you're not fully responsive to life. You're thinking ahead and you're thinking behind instead of being there in the moment. The book is structured like the art form itself, constantly coming and going, though the book in some way predicates itself on the notion that it writes its own criticism, like all great art. You can't take a particular single rubric and impose it. That's how we structured the book. The subject doesn't have a single personality, issue or methodology to focus on, which is why the "neighborhood" is really the container for it.

Guillén: Street Art San Francisco is the result of 10 years of work?

Jacoby: It wasn't the only thing I was doing; but, yeah, over 10 years I compiled it. But I want to be very grateful for the fact that we worked on it over a long period of time because that's what gave such range to the material, both in terms of its archival value and its diversity of styles, as well as the people who were players at different points.

Guillén: I love that Street Art San Francisco can be read in different ways, not only for its filmic continuity—as you've mentioned—but, also in this rich imagist immersion that is like taking a walk through the Mission, being sensually informed by the images, one after the other. Then, if you want to take a break, you can read a bit and angle in on the art in a different way.

Jacoby: You are making me so happy because—when you make something—you don't know what people will experience; but, what you've just said, was my hope for this book. It really makes me happy to know this is your experience.

Guillén: As it will be the experience of many people, I'm sure. Another understanding I have of the temporality of mural art comes from my training in the Maya field where from their own murals—at Bonampak, let's say—I learned that these painted images were not merely historical records; they were conceived as events ever unfolding. The Maya did not conceive of time simply in linear tense but also in aspect. Street Art of San Francisco is the chronicle of the unfolding of mural art; it's the witness to its living quality.

Jacoby: Beautifully said.

Guillén: So I can open this book and turn to the page where there's this fantastic photograph of the Santana mural at its prime, which is as clear as my memory of it, even though my memory also includes its faded aspect and negotiates with the truth that everything comes and goes, not only art but our biological lives. Perhaps why I trust the ephemerality of mural art is because it seems somehow truer to life. As much as I love art, I sometimes have issues with what its original impulse has been turned into.

Jacoby: What you're really talking about is the denial of death, which is exaggerated in our culture, but which is a reasonable part of the life cycle. You've been using the word energy throughout our entire conversation. Maybe that is what art has to do? Maybe it has to energize our imagination, our sense of destiny, our sense of belonging? All of it; the long list. Whatever makes you wake up in the morning and be grateful. I bet you know how to answer the question posed at the beginning of the book: "How alive are you willing to be?"

Cross-published on Twitch. Photo of Annice Jacoby courtesy of Paul Chinn, San Francisco Chronicle.

ARGENTINE CINEMA: LOS SANTOS SUCIOS / THE DIRTY SAINTS (2009)—Q&A With Luis Ortega

2009-10-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

Speaking with Diana Sanchez at the start of this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), she advised that one of her criteria for choosing Latino films for TIFF is to determine the films that most characterize the cinematic landscape of any given country's national cinema for the current calendar year. From Argentina she brought two widely divergent examples: a polished big budget police procedural love story El Secreto de Sus Ojos / Secret of the Eyes (Argentina's submission to the Academy Awards®) and a raw, independent film Los Santos Sucios / The Dirty Saints, indicative of the evolving vision of one of Argentina's young auteurs, Luis Ortega, of whom she's written: "With only two feature films under his belt, Luis Ortega is already considered one of Argentina's more impressive and original directorial voices. His first feature, Black Box, stood apart from the social critiques that characterized the films of his Argentine contemporaries."

Luis Ortega was born in Buenos Aires and attended film school at the Universidad del Cine. At the age of 19, he wrote the screenplay for his feature directorial debut, Caja Negra / Black Box (2002), which received several festival accolades: including the SIGNIS Award and Special Jury Prize at the Mar de Plata Film Festival; the Don Quixote Award along with two others at the Fribourg International Film Festival; and was nominated for the Argentine Film Critics Association's Silver Condor for Best First Film. His second feature, Monobloc (2005) won the Horizons Award at the San Sebastián Film Festival and a Special Mention at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema. His latest film Los Santos Sucios / The Dirty Saints (2009) boasted its World Premiere in the Vanguard Program at this year's TIFF.

I admired Ortega's wild and seemingly wounded persona as he addressed his audience, nervously combing an unruly mane with his hand while baring his soul to scrutiny; never a comfortable proposition. Equally, I was pleased when he and Rodrigo Vélez—the lead actor in Colombia's El vuelco del cangrejo / Crab Trap (2009)—embraced like brothers after the screening, proud of each others' accomplishments. Their mutual encouragement was palpable and fundamentally sweet to observe.

On Who Are the Dirty Saints?

This movie started out with these people I knew—these friends of mine—who were living on the street. I met them 10 years ago and I started writing the story for them. Eventually, when we began filming the movie last year, they all started passing away. The movie was supposed to be with non-actors but they just didn't make it. The final thing that happened was that the last one who was alive flipped out. He lived on the street and drank a lot and the week before shooting he went completely crazy. Thus, I had to act in the film myself and that wasn't part of the plan. None of the real people who the story was based on are alive anymore, except the one who went crazy. Now there are professional actors in the film, like Rey (Alejandro Urdapilleta), Monito (Martina Juncadella) and the kid, though he's more of a circus-kind of actor. The other guys are not actors at all.

Los Santos Sucios is inspired by the lives of these street people who were able to transcend the daily difficulties of life with a great sense of humor. I had my home and all the standard things and yet I couldn't enjoy life as much as them. That's why that place where they get to in the end, that's where they would really get: standing in a corner, maybe not even going to the bathroom, with their pants all dirty in a terrible terrible state; but, they would smile, more than normal people. I had to put that out there. So I imagined this place where there's nothing, which is definitely better than something when everything is already rotten and experience runs out. There's nothing left to do. You don't know where to run. It's a spiritual exile. It's like getting out of this world without having to die.

On What the Character of Monito Represents

Monito is love or the idea of love. As a word, love is trouble. We all know that. Love wouldn't have made the trip [across the Fijman River] possible. I did film her traveling with them and included her in the sequence where they are each facing the wind; but, the idea was always that she would stay behind. [Sanchez describes Monito as "a creature desperate for love and affection, not yet ready to leave humanity behind for an unknown future."]

Though I'm against reproduction, I don't expect audiences to think that way; but, by her staying behind, some new race could start over, some new people. She stays behind and finds the map and a book. The idea was to leave something pure, to leave a little bit of hope behind, even though this movie is not about hope; it's just about will—they just have to cross the river—they don't want to live and they don't want to die. They just want out.

On the Liebig Corned Beef Advertisement

That looks like a smart joke; but, that really exists. That's like a little monument in this little town where we shot this film. There's this big factory there where they used to make that corned beef. I got to that town and I saw that sign and it was like a Warhol thing. It was too pop for what should be in the film; but, I couldn't avoid it. It was there. I had to do it. It's still there.

On the Symbolic Significance of the Door Handle

Everything comes out of something that you're living and going through. I used to live in a house that had no light, no water. It was just a house. I used to live there with a guy that didn't speak. We didn't have a door with a key, we just had the doorknob. When we left the house, we would leave with the doorknob. That's how I started thinking about it. But then it's supposed to be the door or the key to somewhere; but—since they're going nowhere—it's okay that it gets dropped along the way. They don't need it. Los Santos Sucios is like Waiting for Godot, only more like Going Towards Godot. Even if we don't know who Godot is, where he is, if he is, if he's God, whatever. Eventually, the idea is that you don't need anything at all to reach that place. I'm not Zen-like. I'm just a really anxious person. I can't stand watching this movie; it's too slow. But it's still the movie that I wanted to do.

On Using Sound Design

to Represent Interior States

Film tries to copy reality; but, that's not how life sounds when you're alone. When you're alone, you hear all sorts of creepy things. If some of you are a little paranoid, maybe you know what I'm talking about. That sensibility where you're on the edge all the time because reality is so hallucinatory. The sky: I get up every day and I just can't get used to it. I get up and I go, "Whoa, shit." I have to assimilate what things are every day. That's why I wanted this world to look as strange as I see it. Not as we've all agreed it is so that we understand left is left and right is right. That's just an agreement not to bump into each other. But there are different laws of nature and it's really much more crazy than what civilization is holding down.

On Tarkovsky As Influence and Inspiration

For those who know Andrei Tarkovsky, he's like Jesus for me. I was influenced by his idea of putting your soul in the scenery. This was a low budget film. Thank God we had these smoke machines and all we needed was the wind to blow the smoke the right way. And it happened. Sometimes it doesn't happen. I'm influenced by the idea that the space and light have to tell you how you're feeling, not just the actors. Tarkovsky is the main influence on this movie. [Diana Sanchez referenced the same in her program capsule wherein she wrote: "Ortega's approach is anarchic and unexpected. Incorporating influences from Tarkovsky's Stalker, the film likewise transcends science fiction, working as a commentary on humankind's deepest anxieties and questions about our very existence. Ultimately, though, The Dirty Saints is a film about spiritual and physical exodus. Our five travelers decide to cross to the other side of the river, preferring to discover the unknown rather than wait on Earth, in a Godot-like stasis, for nothing to happen and no one to arrive."]

At first I wanted to do a remake of Stalker. But I didn't have the talent or the money or the time, even though that was what I wanted to talk about. No one watches Tarkovsky's movies anymore. They just go onto YouTube to watch the scene where the guy puts himself on fire. But when you see that scene in Tarkovsky's movie, by the time the character gets to that point, it's just a big trip. I'm talking about nostalgia. The difference is that Tarkovsky was a person with a lot of faith and I'm not. I share the feelings with him but I just don't have the hope. I'm pretty much hopeless; but, I'm full of joy.

When we were walking in that final scene over the desert, we were really hot, and we were joking, "What do you think's on the other side? A shopping mall? A golf course?" The movie's a little romantic in topic—and that's how I loved it to be—but, unfortunately, we can't travel together. It's a lonely journey. This is as close as we can get. We have someone to love, to make love to, and that's the end of the solitude for a while. Eventually, the trip is so lonely that it's better to start enjoying it somehow. That's what this film is about.

These people are completely exhausted. But at the end those birds appear like a little celebration. That wasn't planned. We just walked into the bird zone. Most times films just end how they're supposed to end. I was bitching at the birds because I didn't want anything to appear in the final frame. I was bitching at them, thinking I would have to go and digitally erase them. But so many flew in that I finally just had to give in to it. That's the third element that we don't control. That's the wonderful thing about making films. That's why I wanted to leave everything. Like just walking down the street and accepting everything.

On Whether Film Is An Alienating Medium

Film is like a virus. If a virus kills you, it's tragic; but, if you kill the virus, it's tragic for the virus. It could be alienating. It's hard for me to talk about that. I can talk about it now because you've seen the movie and something is broken. Alienation is just a way of protection. Society is alienating because—if it weren't—there would be more people that would be free and celebrating a different sky every day. But it's Monday and we each have to go to work.

I'd rather have a poetic alienation than a civilized one, which is like a militarized scene, a box for the soul with not much chance for surprise. So even if it's scary, I'd rather just see everything, forget what the name is, just see it, and let that happen to me. You could go crazy. That's why my friends didn't make it into the film. They eventually went crazy. That's a consequence of repression. When we actually find freedom, it creates a kind of madness.

Maybe poetry is the end of alienation, even if it's the beginning of silence. Maybe the beginning of silence is the way to stop feeling lonely. Maybe it's the opposite. I wanted to create a unique, alienating world and share the voyage. This is all I can do for people. I love people. And I try to do it the best I can. It's my tribute to humanity. Even if it seems tragic for me, really it's just a celebration. We don't have to have a reason.

Cross-published on Twitch.

WINGED DISTANCE / SIGHTLESS MEASURE: A Conversation With Robert Beavers, Pt. Two

2009-10-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

[This entry is dedicated to Jonathan Marlow who has turned my eyes upside down. Part One of my conversation with Robert Beavers can be found here. Cross-published on the San Francisco Cinematheque website: here (Interview, Pts. One & Two), and here (Endnotes).

Guillén: Admittedly, my appreciation of your films is definitely colored by the Jungian perspective. There is in fact a term—which has fallen somewhat out of use; but, one which I still find useful—of a “psychoid” consciousness, and it’s possible that it’s not used too much because it has a negative connotation, sounding similar to “psychotic”, which is something altogether different. As I understand it, a “psychoid” consciousness is very much what a poet possesses, or any creative visionary actually. It’s the psyche’s ability to utilize the world, to claim it and transform it into living ideas. It’s the consciousness by which analogies are made and understood.(12) Let me give you a specific, personal example that happened just the other day.

I was walking to my bus stop and there was a pigeon on the sidewalk and—as I drew near—the pigeon startled and took flight and there was that sound of the flapping wings which runs throughout your films. I immediately saw a flash of images from your films. I saw the image of your film layered upon the surface of the world. That association and layering of meaning onto the physical world is a quality of psychoid consciousness. It’s a way of living in the world where everything means something of personal value. I have to thank you for adding onto that natural phenomenon a cerebral overlay.

Beavers: Cerebral?

Guillén: Cerebral and emotional, as in emotional intelligence.

Beavers: And sensuous?

Guillén: And sensuous, right. It’s very difficult to talk about great ideas without their being tainted by cerebrality, as if thought can only be intellectual. Your films are intelligent on a much more visceral, emotional and sensual level. In fact, despite Tony Pipolo noting what he perceived to be a “tutorial” quality in your second cycle of films, I had to disagree with Jeffrey Skoller the other night when he described From the Notebook Of… as pedagogical….(13)

Beavers: [Firmly, gesturing to my recorder] We will only discuss what we agree with.

Guillén: I respect that; but, I think it’s important for me to say that I do not find your films pedagogical in the least. I agree with you that you weren’t trying to pedantically teach through your films, you were trying to learn and express yourself. Another psychological process that could be applied here is what I would call psychic inflation, which is when an individual incorporates influence and becomes enthused, in the true sense of the word. The god within the influence becomes overpowering and overtakes the individual. Again, in Jungian parlance this would be when the ego-self becomes inflated with the truths of the larger Self. Usually the inflation is perceived as problematic. However, I felt From the Notebook Of… to be the most creative and appropriate demonstration of psychic inflation that I’ve ever seen in film. You can feel the pleasure of those Florentine influences entering your young psyche and its creative efforts to do something with it, to express it, to turn it into art. That pleasure has nothing to do with pedagogy and—attempts to reduce the creative impulse or to try to fit an individual experience into a cultural collective—robs it of its essential value, even though I understand it is the role of cultural historians and critics to do, unfortunately, just that.(14)

Beavers: I told the audience, and I think it’s important, to know that From the Notebook Of… would not have been made without the commitment of both Gregory and my painter friend in Florence who gave me the means to make the film, because I didn’t have the means to make the film. Everything that is possible for an artist—if they are not born with the financial means to simply establish their own work—has to involve the coming together of these different elements. Perhaps the vision of the Temenos is sustained by this also: to try to bring it into a form that has some more permanence to it.

Guillén: May I offer you my—once again, idiosyncratic—fantasy of experiencing Temenos? I’ve studied a lot of mythology and there have been many things I’ve concluded. One of the most important involves creation myths, which are so pertinent to artists and the artistic process. What I’ve observed in comparing creation myths from around the world is that they usually fall within two main categories. Creation is either manifested by sound, as in “God spoke and there was…”, or scientifically in how iron particles on a drum skin will vibrate themselves into mandalic shapes if a tuning fork is struck near them. Sound creates. Alternately, when I was doing my research of Mayan culture in Central America, there creation was envisaged. In other words, it was seen first and the creator gods of the Maya, the first artists, painted their visions onto the night sky. Scientifically, these would be the asterisms—the constellations—to which a culture’s stories are attached. For the Maya, these painted stories in the sky, which revolved across the sky, were thought to be pages in a book and the passage of the stars across the night sky was comparable to the turning of pages in a book. In other words, the night sky was read.

I fantasize, or have this sense, that when I’m at Temenos in 2012, the turning momentum inherent within the films will be corresponding to the turning of the night sky. For me this is an appropriate relationship between art form and space.

Beavers: To a cosmic space?

Guillén: Yes.

Beavers: It’s the only place that I’ve experienced this; but, I think other people can find it closer. The night sky over Berkeley is also very beautiful; but, the interesting thing with the Temenos projections is that—because of the geographical context—you are isolated within this vision. That is a sustaining element.

Guillén: Which I comprehend. When I was leading tours down the Usumacinta River in Central America—the border between Mexico and Guatemala—on whose banks the Maya built several of their Classic period sites, which were—at that time—only accessible by the river, I would guide participants into a removed and—as you say—isolated experience. I used to tell them at the outset, “I am a psychopomp. We are starting here and I’m going to take you through this and when you come out on the other side, you will not be the same person.” That always proved to be the case because they had a depth of experience. That’s how I understand Temenos and why I am excited by experiencing it.

Another aspect of that rotating sky that I feel applies to your films, is a concept you expressed in your interview with Tony Pipolo of “the double movement of sight”(15) and your fascination with the reverse side of things. You’ve talked about two things going on at one time or moving in two directions at once. For me this is analogous to the two circles which comprise the truth of the sky: the phenomenal cycle of appearances vs. the Earth’s axial precession of the equinoxes.

Beavers: Yes.

Guillén: Your cinematic device of masking and filters—which one might characterize as your signature—intrigues me in its Dionysian impulse, in the sense that a mask reveals as much as it conceals. You seem to be playing with a fascinating equivalency between geometric masking (oval, rectangular, triangular), silhouettes of people architecturally framed within windows and doorways, and cast figural shadows. Can you speak to that equivalency?

Beavers: Of course I was searching. While I was in Zurich, one of my interests was in psychiatry. Both Count of Days and Palinode dialogue with points of modern psychology. They try to find visual equivalents for this. I didn’t really understand German at this time, but I tried to read a case study in German by Sigmund Freud.(16) Even in New York I was attracted to certain writers associated with Carl Gustav Jung, though I never read Jung. I read people like Károly Kerényi and Mircea Eliade. That interest also comes from my relationship to Gregory Markopoulos because he’d made—just before I met him—an elaborate film based on mythical archetypes called The Illiac Passion (1964-67).

While I was in Zurich I tried to meet some people connected to Jung and did succeed in meeting a couple of them. When you mention shadow, of course, this is a key element in this whole area of interest. Just a few days ago, for instance, I saw a painting by Georges Braque in which a figure and its shadow is split and I thought, “Oh yes, this has the same quality of something I was interested in.” I’m still absolutely fascinated by it and hope to go back to it. In film, what’s extraordinary is that everything is light. You have the possibility to create and to see the light in shadows—also, to think about color in shadow—and to bring this into relation to express the human being. All the filmmakers of my kind of filmmaking are using our elements to express what we either cannot or do not want to express in words; we want to give you another experience.

Guillén: I’m intrigued by the hand work in your films and the resemblances struck between film editing and sewing, the making of blood pancakes, and so forth. Can you speak to the value of the hand work and its association to your editing?

Beavers: The films speak to the value of the hand work and the value of the hand and what the hand communicates. For instance, in AMOR—where you have the tailor and the tailor in relation to architecture—you also have the hand and both sides of the hand within the space of the image and sound. I was interested between the subjective sense of uniting certain sounds with the inside of the hand and others with the back of the hand. For myself, I feel an extraordinary power that goes through the hand: this relation between hand work and objects. A favorite writer of mine Francis Ponge speaks to the mute expressive power of objects. I am someone who very much communicates through these means. Of course indirectly I am showing the presence of the human being through this hand work. What I am articulating is not done dramatically; it’s done in a more lyric way using the elements of film. Rhythm is much more important than breadth and the clarity of rhythm can carry and communicate with the image and with the sound a narrative that is there; but, it is not a dramatic narrative. It is suggested in other ways.

Guillén: Susan Oxtoby has emphasized that your films “occupy a noble place within the history of avant-garde film, positioned at the intersection of structural and lyrical filmmaking traditions.” In terms of the lyricism—which is what speaks to me emotionally—have particular poets inspired your filmmaking?

Beavers: P. Adams Sitney visited me in Switzerland and looked through my books and—in his text for the monograph—he lists all of the poets.(17) But their influence upon me was over a long period of time. When I was in school, I was interested in French poetry. I read Paul Valéry and was interested in his writings. Then Constantine Cavafy, the Greek poet. Then much later some Italian poets, particularly a Jewish-Italian poet Umberto Saba. Then German poets Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke. And lots of Americans; before Valéry, Ezra Pound. Much later, Wallace Stevens and—for the past decade—two American women: Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop.

Guillén: Ah, Wallace Stevens! His poem—“Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird”—seems so in alliance with your films. I watch one of your films and I feel I am being offered thirteen ways to look at something.

Beavers: But, Michael, you have to be in the mood to want that. [Laughter.] There is one side of America that says, “One’s enough! We don’t have time for the other ones.”

Guillén: I was struck by Nigel Gosling’s comment: “The eye wanders around and picks up images.” I appreciate that comment within the context of seeing being directing, or seeing being the narrative impulse, in contrast to more standard Hollywood narratives. Can you speak to that?(18)

Beavers: You mean the eye, how it moves?

Guillén: Yes.

Beavers: That’s very complex. First of all, Gosling is a critic in two fields; under one name he wrote art criticism and under another name he wrote dance criticism, both for The Observer, one of the leading London newspapers. His wife was a ballerina so she must have helped him with the dance criticism. He was probably the first specimen of a critic that I encountered. He’s a very kind man and I was probably unkind to him. We actually rented rooms from him. That’s his house in the film. Anyway, that comment was his idea. He was saying that when you watch a film, your eye is not permitted to wander around. What he liked about still images—paintings and other things—is that he was in control. All of his other comments had to do with bringing a film image into—as he says at one point—being like a telephone just sitting there that becomes part of a room. I have to say that’s his comment; but, what you’re asking is maybe more about: do I do something like this?

Guillén: Exactly. To create your films does your eye wander around and pick up images?

Beavers: Every film has a different development. I am very interested, for instance, and have structured some of my films on thoughts about how the eye moves. In other words, when I am turning the lens in—for instance—AMOR, I am moving the lens itself in the camera while it is running. Many of my movements that you’re seeing in the films are not movements of the camera but movements of the lens. I was coming closer to what the eye is doing. I was fascinated by the fact that—every time we change focus—we close our eyes. I think it’s physiological. The human eye does not allow itself to stay open and focus. All of my interruptions of closing the image and opening the image again and incorporating the movement in opening and closing have to do with this thinking about vision; but, it is orchestrated in a way. There’s freedom in what part of the image a spectator takes; but, there’s a very strong element of measure in my work. I’m not alone in that. Every filmmaker who is not relying on a dramatic structure is relying on measure, some through improvisation, some through other more decided forms.

Guillén: When you say “measure”—as you often use the term “phrase”—do you mean them to be the same?

Beavers: No.

Guillén: Is a phrase more of a durational aesthetic?

Beavers: They’re connected. Measure and phrase are connected. In the little text that I wrote for the monograph, I said that I wanted to go away from the measure that is controlled by the cut of the image. One way I did that was to go to the phrase, to create phrases, in which the rhythm is not established by the cut. There’s a larger phrase of many images in a particular film and the point of emphasis is not always coming from where the images cut; it’s coming through other means, through a number of different means. Color and sound are two of these means, which interact sometimes or establish a definite point of purposes. How much I let the viewer wander or decide: this is always the question between filmmakers who use measure and filmmakers who use static compositions, such as Fritz Lang. There are filmmakers who go away from editing and want the spectator to become aware through duration. I’m very interested in that way; but, I have not done it. I might. I’m still filming.

Guillén: In Ruskin, you say you were following John Ruskin’s movements around Venice?

Beavers: Not his movements; but, the locations that he is writing about in the development of his book.

Guillén: When I first saw Ruskin, I was struck by the architectural detail of Noah and his creation of wine sculpted on the Ducal Palace. Did Ruskin reference that sculpture as well? Is that what drew you to that sculpture?

Beavers: Yes. But I don’t remember what he said; but, it’s very important. Ruskin is actually a political writer in some ways. That’s what the Moderns hold against him. He has an ethical and moral viewpoint that he thinks he is seeing in all of this architecture.

Guillén: With regard to attaching the Monthly Segments to the larger films, you mentioned that you added the sound segue of the flapping wings. I’m interested to know if you can recall what you were thinking by doing that? What does the sound of the wings signify for you or what do you hope the sound will signify for us?

Beavers: This sound of the wings grows out of From the Notebook Of….(19) The central place for this sound is in that film. In relation to the Segments, From the Notebook Of… ended my filming of the monthly episodes of the Segments. When I went to edit them in relation to the longer films, they are of course related to my travel and to filmmakers. Usually it’s only one flight of wings; but, at certain moments I used two. So you hear it twice. That’s a muted development of this thought because this sound of the wings has so many different levels in my filmmaking. From the Notebook Of… opens with the point of inspiration of Leonardo releasing the birds.

Guillén: Let’s talk about narrative construction. You’ve said that your films are in opposition to or the opposite of the dramatic model coming from the Hollywood studios and one could say that your films are almost non-narrative; however, as I’ve watched some of them repeatedly, I see a lot of analogy of form that causes my eye and my sensibility to follow the sequences and rhythms. I see in a lot of the contrasts of color against black and white, or certain vibrant colors against others, again a kind of leading of the eye or what could be interpreted as a narrative impulse. Further, I understand that you have said you seek to elicit from your audiences a narrative impulse. Can you speak to that?

Beavers: Yes, but what I am interested in is the narrative within the image. The image itself can create narrative.(20) For instance, From the Notebook Of…, The Painting, Work Done and Ruskin—which were done within the context of Florence—to look at, perhaps, those images which are within that extraordinary culture, those paintings, those are all narrative. You look at the figures. You look at the entire composition. It’s not an abstract painting. It has a narrative element. And so when I am using the images in my films, I am asking you to see them and to have a dialogue with them that—in a way—is in this direction of approaching them narratively. It’s not exactly a narrative in a sequential narrative; but, it is still a narrative.

The juxtapositions, the fact that I am using physical elements and transforming them; for instance, this narrative of transformation in Work Done where you begin with the ice and go to the river, or you have the book and you go to the trees, and the relation of the stones to the mountain. Bringing these elements together within the making of the blood pancakes with the blood balancing where the film begins with the ice: this going back to a solid. It’s a kind of progression and structure, which can be read completely with the elements of film; but, in the conscious seeing of it, not in the narrative which is the actor following this trance state, which is the usual dramatic narrative. My personal development involves a balance between abstraction and representation and bringing these two—very often reflecting—and bringing them together.

Guillén: You’ve spoken now and then about movement within an image. This intrigues me. I see it as a vibrancy to the image, or a literal vibration of the image, as registered in a suite of images I’ve detected throughout your films: a palm frond that’s quivering, the flanks of a horse that’s flinching, human skin that’s flinching, or a seed pod shivering in the wind. Can you speak to what that is? It seems to be a common movement that your eye, as a filmmaker, has been drawn to.

Beavers: Actually, the one that comes to mind—which is perhaps not so obvious—is from Ruskin where there’s a black and white image of an alp and there is this tree there with only one leaf that’s dropping. I’m not sure. You have strung together an interesting series that are obviously related; but, I have to think about what it is. I suppose it has something to do with the almost biological sense that one wants to create that something is alive. Also, the last sound of Wozzeck is a quavering sound that is pulsing, as if returning to its beginning.

Guillén: You also shake or vibrate some of your masks, I seem to recall. I bring this up in the context of statements you’ve also made about the influence of Florentine paintings. Poet Mark Doty has written a lovely essay concerning the influence of paintings, how if a painting speaks to you, you are caught in its orbit. The painting that spoke to me when I was visiting the Ufizzi Gallery in Florence was Caravaggio’s portrait of the reclining Dionysos. He’s holding a goblet of wine and on the surface of the wine you can see concentric rings that register the vibratory energy of his presence. This was tremendous for me when I first saw it and I agree with you that this has to do with “the almost biological sense that one wants to create that something is alive.” Your films exhibit a sensual attention to the basic vibration of life. This is not conscious on your part?

Beavers: Partly. It’s what one is attracted to. There are these two elements, these two facets, together: the stillness and the vibration. It’s important that it should be both. It is both.

Guillén: As someone who vainly fancies himself a poet admiring the poetry in your films, I love this pulse of energy between two points that you express so exquisitely.

Speaking of moving between points, you mentioned in one of your Q&A sessions that you’re not necessarily a peripatetic type of person, that you actually don’t travel that much, though it appears you do because of your background of returning to various locations: Greece, Belgium, Switzerland. That got me thinking about the situational notion of triangulation. I too have my geographic points of reference by which I situate myself and understand myself: Idaho, San Francisco, Central America, Paris. I sought out San Francisco to escape Idaho. I sought out Central America and Paris to escape America. But in the process especially of triangulating between San Francisco, Central America and Paris, I discovered myself to be undeniably American. And that’s somewhat the gist of what I’m suggesting in my question to you. My desire to want to live among and somehow be indigenous to Central America was a fantasy wholly privileged by my being American. As Sitney quipped, there is something completely American about the need to travel elsewhere in order to recognize one’s roots.

How’s your lamb, by the way?

Beavers: It’s delicious!

Guillén: I hope I haven’t let it get cold on you. That’s the true hazard of an interview.

Beavers: [Laughs.]

Guillén: Now here’s another somewhat tough question for you. You have talked about “the rhetoric of the personal.” I notice you tend to resist an audience impulse to focus on what is biographical in your films.

Beavers: Michael, can you really call it resistance? Some, perhaps, but not completely.

Guillén: Okay. I’ll concede resistance is probably not the right word. You’re focused in a certain way. Careful about the work. Serious about the work. And, as you mentioned earlier, you don’t want the biographical to distract from what is essential about the work. My question, however, concerns a statement you made about films like From A Notebook Of… and Ruskin,(21) where you sought—not so much to place the historical personages in your films—as much as to suggest them.

Beavers: And to show my enthusiasm for them. This is the point. Somehow my connection to these figures allowed me to make the films.

Guillén: That I understand. But what I thought of when you made that comment was the contrast between Winged Dialogue—the start of the cycle where you and Gregory are so much the visible subjects of the film—to The Ground, the cycle’s completion, where you and Gregory are not in the film….

Beavers: But I am in the film.

Guillén: Yes, but not with the intense specificity of Winged Dialogue. Your presence is implied, not directly represented. That arc in your work, that movement, that shift from being markedly present as a subject to being absent as a subject is fascinating to me, and I wonder if you can speak to that?

Beavers: Well, first maybe I should say something about Winged Dialogue and the early films. Much of my work has been done in a state of alertness to what I’m doing, but also allowing important elements to remain somehow free from scrutiny. At the time of making Winged Dialogue, I didn’t even know that I was doing something so intimate—I just did it!—but, that’s why it could be deeply intimate. There was no hurdle for me. I was simply open to doing it without worry and that had to do with the context of my life. It could only be done then.

Guillén: I liked how you expressed that you were a titan at that time and could do anything.

Beavers: You know, you misunderstood what I said. That night there were students in the audience and what I was saying was that at that time in one’s life, youth, you feel like a titan or you feel like you have a clock within you….

Guillén: Oh, a clock!!

Beavers: You have a clock within you that is very dynamic, you understand? That’s when I used the word presto because you have this completely different possibility and this strength.

Guillén: Oh dear, I apologize, even though I loved what I thought you said.(22) [Laughter.] I was all excited. I thought, “He’s right!”

Beavers: Maybe you were closer to the truth?

Guillén: Okay, but now that I understand: there is this clock, this immediacy to everything….

Beavers: And you just get so much done.

Guillén: But returning to what I was asking about the shift from being present as a subject to being absent as a subject, P. Adams Sitney has written about a certain hermetic quality to some of your films and the astounding way in which something that is so intimate and personal and subjective bridges over to become universal. Were you aware of that?

Beavers: I was just being myself. Although, when I use the word “subjective”, Michael, I have a definite direction. I can appreciate the important filmmakers who create a film form that is an abstracted subjective; but, I do not want the further development of my own work to be that. I have gone in a different direction. The articulation of the subjective in my films is still connected to the world as we know it and as we experience it. I am not like an abstract painter. This recognizable voice is what interests me. It is an exterior, spoken voice in a sense. Not that the film speaks or that the filmmaker is speaking, but it is not free-floating.

Guillén: I find your films most subjective in their sound design. This is why I wish I had the chance to see the cycle one more time so that I could focus less on the accomplishment of your visuals and more on the accomplishment of your sound. My initial impulse with your films was to concern myself with the imagery, to understand the connections and compositions, to recognize the analogies being made, but now I wish I could focus on the sound: why is that drone of the bees being associated with that particular piece of architecture?(23)

Let’s talk about color and the interestingly different ways you use color. A Pitcher Of Colored Light was vibrant with the colors within the objects themselves, in contrast to the filters you used in earlier works. You’ve also struck rhythms, especially in Ruskin I would say, between color footage and black and white footage. Can you speak about that rhythm? Is it safe to say that—at least in that film—black and white references the past and the color the present? Or is that too literal?

Beavers: In that film, yes. Also in Diminished Frame. Yes, you can say this. Also, the strange color qualities in Ruskin are partly caused by the unadvised hours of the day in which I used the color stock: before the hour when you’re supposed to use it, after the hour, and so forth. I did sometimes film in the same location at different hours of the day. Michael, you know, color, shadow, sound: these are all messengers from the subjective. But they are not being left to float. For instance, in Pitcher of Colored Light they are connected to a particular person and in Ruskin also qualities of the black and white are connected to the period in which Ruskin lived and to the position of the beginning of photography in his life and the kinds of illustrations that he had in his own books. If you look at his books, for instance, you see immediate connections to my film.

Guillén: A lithographic impulse?

Beavers: It’s not lithograph, it’s more photogravure, even earlier, like cyanotype—I can’t quite remember the name—but it’s a process that doesn’t have Ben-Day dots.

Guillén: How about, then, in Work Done where the colors are so intensified? I recall J. Hoberman’s review of that film where he said the pig blood was “impossibly red.”

Beavers: No, it’s exactly as it was.

Guillén: It was really that red? That’s astounding!

Beavers: Of course, you could say it’s Kodak red also. But, no, the color of the pig blood was in no way adjusted or changed; it was just extremely fresh. The man uses only blood from that day. Of course other scenes are filtered by me, like the green pasture and the blue mountain. In The Painting also, my filming of the figures and using filters to bring out a dominant color that was already there, but to make it even more dominant; changing the dominance.

Guillén: My final question: Now that you say you are finished with the Cycle and it is done….

Beavers: Oh yes.

Guillén: But is it done? Can it ever really be done? Isn’t one of the cycle’s enduring qualities that it is somehow open-ended and ready for its audiences? In the spectatorial interaction with the living film, isn’t there always a constant negotiation? Just as you have been more than patient with the expression of my individual idiosyncratic experience of Wingless Flight / Sightless Measure, I have no doubt that each individual in your audiences has, hopefully, had their own experience.

Beavers: There is also—and I could even call this an esoteric thought—which is, that as long as I am living, whatever actions I take, can possibly influence this cycle because the worth of a work may not be a physical thing. It may not be in the “real” realm. It might be a combination of the real and some other force.

Guillén: The force that comes across to me from the cycle—at least one aspect of it—is that of a creative life well-lived. I feel that the truth of that is being imparted through the screening of the cycle to young people.

Beavers: But, Michael, why only young people? Because they will continue and might carry it further? I disagree that the cycle is something imparted just to young people.

Guillén: You’re right. The cycle is not just for young people; but, perhaps what I meant to say, is that it is for what is young in all people. It gives license to what is the creative impulse in all people—which, I guess, I associate with a youthful beginning—even though it doesn’t matter when in the biological timeline the impulse arrives. Quite simply, Wingless Flight / Sightless Measure is inspirational. Thank you for putting up with my intrusive and sometimes indelicate questions and for responding with such generosity of spirit.

Endnotes

(12) The concept is perhaps better enunciated through Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Sitney (2008:146): “The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts.” Psychoid consciousness moves in both directions.

(13) Hazarding indelicacy, and framing the following within a fecund and democratic exchange of ideas, during the Q&A after the screening of From the Notebook Of… and The Painting, the following exchange took place:

Jeffrey Skoller: I found these last two works to be deeply pedagogical. They seem very much like works of contemporary artists of their time. What works were you in dialogue with through making these works? In what ways were you engaging with certain kinds of approaches and ways of thinking about art and cinema that this work seems to reaching out to touch or engage? It may help to enlarge the sense of where this work stands.

Robert Beavers: Even before I left New York I had read a text by Paul Valéry on Leonardo da Vinci. This was an inspiring prose text. That would be one source for From the Notebook Of… though it was not contemporary; it was from the turn of the 20th Century. In the period that I was living in New York, or even as a very young student in Boston, I was looking at American-colored paintings and fascinated by some of those painters. Because the filmmakers whom I admired in New York had so highly developed film editing—it is still in my mind a great period of film editing and the mysteries of this condensed form of editing—this became an important, basic impulse in my work. But in order to take a step myself, I transferred this unlocking of the editing of the film frame to the space within the frame. My use of the mattes is, in some way, an alternative to that highly-developed articulation based on the single frame. Though my films are still highly elaborate in their editing, the points in which I feel I am moving forward have to do with the space that I am developing as a correspondent to the unit of editing in time.

The very few filmmakers whom I found had become masters of their filmmaking—and they were not so many, even in the New York school—but, those filmmakers had begun actually much earlier in the ‘40s and ‘50s and had taken time and been forced through a difficult challenge in those years when they were totally neglected. It was their accomplishment plus silent film that inspired me to become a filmmaker. The classic Hollywood film—even though I absorbed it much more than many other people through television and the local cinemas—would never have brought me to film a single frame. Everything I do is in opposition to that work. Maybe not; but, at least at this time.

Skoller: I wasn’t asking about what work influenced you and what your influences were; but, there’s a sense—at least in those two films—of you reaching out to teach something.

Beavers: Jeffrey, I was reaching out to learn something. Really. And maybe to teach, but in which way do you mean?

Skoller: Well, that there’s a sense that you’ve been doing something now very intensely for a few years. Also in this period of art there’s this desire….

Beavers: What do you mean by “period of art”?

Skoller: I’d say the early ‘70s where there’s a way in which some contemporary artists….

Beavers: Who are you thinking of?

Skoller: Well, within film I’m thinking of the materialist filmmakers, the radical filmmakers—whether Godard or Straub—and within conceptual art there were artists who were dealing with image and language and trying to find a way to talk about what they were doing; all of which were not only trying to make demystifying statements about art, but they were also trying to find language to talk about the things that they were learning about the medium or forms they were either working with or inventing, y’know? So this directness that I see in From the Notebook Of… where you’re actually writing down in words certain kinds of directives and certain kinds of observations or directions for yourself or maybe for others who are watching this, that some of these seem like aphorisms that somebody might actually follow, then their relationship to the images that follow. There’s a sort of demonstrative quality.

Beavers: In many of the films that I made at this time—and perhaps in all of them—the movement is not the usual kind of movement in film. In From the Notebook Of… I sometimes use the word “locomotion”: it’s a movement in place. The movement is a dual movement of reading and seeing. The spectator is constantly being guided from one to the other and back. It’s a constant flux between these two different ways of using the eyes. They also allow a different use of sound so that—because you are reading—you already have a sound. When I am reading, I already have a voice inside me that is the voice of reading. Because it is a film also with sound, it’s possible to bring together such a constellation of elements—color, shadows and light. I did go back and read the Notebooks of Leonardo and there was one quote about the pyramids of sight which I used in my film. I think you’re off on a false track, basically, because the real sources were the sources that I felt by being in Florence. I may have put it into an idiom, which is of that moment; but, the sources of inspiration were those other sources. At least that’s my feeling about it.

As for the English filmmakers that I think you’re thinking of, I find they lack…. There are dangers in working with this form. I have tried to avoid being too ideological and too flat. These different elements have to create a certain life. I don’t want to be pedagogic in that way. Valéry said a poem is like a piece of fruit; it nourishes you and it’s pleasurable. I don’t want to eliminate the pleasure. I want it to be there. Valéry also said about Nietszche: “It’s more stimulus than nourishment.” There are all these possibilities. But, of course, I am of a period.

(14) Sitney turns to Marcel Proust to make the same observation: “It is the power of genius to make us love a beauty more real than ourselves in those things which in the eyes of others are as particular and perishable as ourselves…. [¶] There is no better way of becoming aware of one’s feelings than to try to recreate in oneself what a master has felt. In this profound effort it is our thought, together with his, that we bring to light…. Actually the only times when we truly have all our powers of mind are those when we do not believe ourselves to be acting with independence, when we do not arbitrarily choose the goal of our efforts. The subject of the novelist, the vision of the poet, the truth of the philosopher are imposed on them in a manner almost inevitable, exterior, so to speak, to their thought. And it is by subjecting his mind to the expression of this vision and to the approach of this truth that the artist becomes truly himself.” (Quoted in Sitney, 2008:168)

(15) Tony Pipolo, “Interview with Robert Beavers,” Millenium Film Journal no. 32/33 (Fall 1998), p. 15.

(16) “Notes Upon A Case Of Obsessional Neurosis” (1909), commonly referred to as the Rat Man case.

(17) “He disciplined his sensibility with an intense reading of modern European poets: Valéry, George, Saba, Cavafy, Rilke, and perhaps Hofmannstahl. Their aesthetic nostalgias, negating arrests, and epistemological ironies—which portray poetic craft as an inspired construct to transform things and events into acts of the mind—inform his poetics of the cinematic image as the fusion of observation and action, seeing and directing….” (Sitney, 2008:128)

Elsewhere, Sitney has finessed Beavers’s engagement with Saba: “More relevant might be the concatenation of self-reflection, lost love, and sacred affection Saba associated with certain Trieste streets and shops and the objects he chanced upon in them, although the explicitly autobiographical aspect of Saba’s poetry is foreign to Beavers’s work.” (Sitney, 2008:361)

(18) I realized after the fact, once I got my hands on a copy of Sitney’s Eyes Upside Down, that Beavers had already addressed this, again in his essay “Em.blem”: “I am aware of the way in which ‘observing’ becomes ‘directing,’ aware of the power that exists in Seeing. The making of a film allows one to move back and forth, observing-directing.” (Quoted in Sitney, 2008:128.)

(19) “The opening scene, with the doves being released in the square, came from a biographical anecdote: Da Vinci would buy caged doves to set them free. The scene led me to compare this movement of the doves' wings to the opening of the window shutters in my room and to the turning of the pages in my notebook because all can be compared to the movement of the camera's shutter.”

This biographical anecdote comes from Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists, wherein Vasari wrote: “[H]e took special pleasure in horses as he did in all other animals, which he treated with the greatest love and patience. For example, when passing by places where birds were being sold, he would often take them out of their cages with his own hands, and after paying the seller the price that was asked of him, he would set them free in the air, restoring to them the liberty they had lost.” (Quoted in Sitney, 2008:151-152)

(20) Beavers has written in his essay “The Senses”, published in The Searching Measure: “The image nourishes how we see it. It enlivens all our senses by concentration and praises the instant.” (Quoted in Sitney, 2008:162.) Sitney has expanded upon that statement: “What may appear as mere elements of image and sound in projection can speak to us in the shape of the interval as the pattern of the film rests upon the screen. The spectator builds the narrative like a bridge in the vibrant lightness of attention. The coherence is not imposed nor does it exist as literature to be discarded by a discursive understanding.” (Ibid.)

(21) In his interview with Tony Pipolo (1998:12-14), Beavers stated: “Whenever I have used a biographical source for a film, whether it was Leonardo or Ruskin, I have always refrained from any attempt to present the person directly and have tried to find other ways to establish their presence.”

(22) I misunderstood Beavers and thought he said “you have a cock that goes presto.” My deepest apologies to him. That text has been corrected.

(23) Sitney’s interpretation is that “the swarming sounds of bees naturalize the intimations of regimentation and collective behavior of [Berlin’s] citizens….” (2008:140)

WINGED DISTANCE / SIGHTLESS MEASURE: A Conversation With Robert Beavers, Pt. One

2009-10-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

[This entry is dedicated to Jonathan Marlow who has turned my eyes upside down.]

It’s important to stress—and I offer this as advice to any journalist wishing to interview Robert Beavers in the future—that it’s much richer to simply converse with him and not to have too programmatic an agenda. Our particular conversation spanned a period of two weeks (October 8-20, 2009) in which his film cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (“Winged Distance / Sightless Measure”) was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Pacific Film Archive (“PFA”), in partnership with the San Francisco Cinematheque, and was consummated by a lovely, leisurely dinner at Adagia in Berkeley.

My thanks to Susan Oxtoby and Jonathan Knapp at Pacific Film Archive, and Jonathan Marlow and Vanessa O’Neill at the San Francisco Cinematheque for their ample assistance in facilitating access to the films and the filmmaker; but, especially to Robert Beavers himself who put up with my sometimes indelicate questions with polite grace and profound humor; it has been a complete honor to befriend him. Further, I must acknowledge the considerable insights gained from reading P. Adams Sitney’s Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford University Press, 2008), from whom I have borrowed liberally to confirm understandings.

Robert Beavers is cloaked in a mysterious and fascinating persona; a cloak, which—much like the iconic garment painted in portraits of St. Martin of Tours—Beavers is willing to tear in two in charitable generosity. Not only did he offer invaluable information in his conversation with P. Adams Sitney, but he entertained a wide variety of questions from his audiences.

In our conversation, I sought to build upon Tony Pipolo’s foundational interview for the commemorative issue of Millenium Film Journal in which Robert Beavers and his lifetime partner Gregory Markopoulos were both profiled; but also his subsequent interviews with Artforum’s Henriette Huldisch for the Whitney retrospective; and Nicolas Niarchos for Yale Daily News—all of which skillfully explored Beavers’s techniques and practices, both in filmmaking, editing and film preservation/ exhibition. Those territories having been competently covered, my hope was to enrichen the record with anecdotal amendation; to honor not only the artist’s persona intimately bound to the beautiful film work Beavers has meticulously crafted for over 40 years, but also the intriguingly protean personality behind the persona. I leave it to the reader to decide how much of Beavers’s truth-illuminated soulfulness I was able to capture as we wrestled with words, such necessary but untrustworthy agents of communication.

Note: Because of the complexity of my experience with Beavers’s film cycle, this transcription differs from previous efforts on The Evening Class in that it includes Endnotes. Unfortunately, the blogspot software does not allow such references to work with the usual ease of Microsoft Word and I beg the reader’s indulgence in having to hop back and forth between text and notes; but, I nonetheless felt it important to include this amended parallel commentary to appreciate Beavers’s work and our conversation more fully.

* * *

Michael Guillén: First of all, Robert, I want to simply thank you for your generosity of spirit. These last two weeks have been wonderful for me in the sense that you’ve allowed me an experience with Winged Distance / Sightless Measure in which I could be “awake” and “attentive” and I’m aware that these are qualities you wish from your audiences. You have spoken of film as being an opportunity for the “awakening of sight” rather than a passive reliance on actors and the shadow of performance more customary to studio narratives.(1) Can you speak further on that?

Robert Beavers: My first response would be rhythm. Or perhaps the very first word should be resistance. For the spectator who is not aware of my particular kind of filmmaking, a comparison might be made to hearing a composer’s music that you don’t know and having some resistance to it; but, at the same time, attraction. This combination of resistance and attraction does create a state of wakefulness and questioning; but, one does have to be careful in the experience of seeing a film like my kind of filmmaking to—perhaps, at a first encounter—have the sense (perhaps after it) not to question it in a way that will stop your experience. This is an important danger to be aware of.

Guillén: Susan Oxtoby made me laugh when—after seeing your films for the first time at an advance press screening—she noted that she’d never seen me look so startled. And quite frankly, I was completely startled; or more accurately, aesthetically arrested. I didn’t completely understand what I had just experienced; but, I was having a strong emotional reaction, especially to The Ground. I had the sense that there was so much life experience enfolded within that film—personal, philosophical, psychological—and, of course, now that I’m aware that it closes your 18-film cycle, it only seems appropriate that I should have felt that. But what I was specifically feeling was the sensation of being pulled into the gravitational field of the death horizon.

Beavers: The what?

Guillén: What I call the death horizon, which is a resonant space or field of energy where the experience of the death of a loved one or the death of an ideal or the death of a way of life has deepened and spiritualized an individual through crisis and grief. I didn’t yet know about your lifelong partnership with Gregory Markopoulis and his eventual death; but, I was sensing the depth of your loss in The Ground. The other day you mentioned that you began that film with an aesthetic of death….

Beavers: Oh! But, I didn’t finish what I was going to say about that, Michael. It began with this theme and this interest and then—when I began to film—it changed to the opposite.

Guillén: To become life-affirming?

Beavers: Yes! I could not focus on death—it just was not me—but, I couldn’t know that until I went through the process of making the film.

Guillén: My point being that—even though one is caught in a death horizon….

Beavers: It’s a horizon.

Guillén: Yes. A horizon resonant with life. I was taught at an early age by my mentor Joseph Campbell that, without death or the awareness of death, life has no resonance. It was that life-affirming resonance in The Ground which triggered my emotional reaction. It spoke to my own experience of losing my partner of 12 years and how that crisis, that rupture, created (and continues to create) the remaining shape of my life. The Ground is what hooked me into your film cycle and—in retrospect—it seems fitting that I would want to journey through all the films that led to The Ground.

Beavers: Michael, do you have a connection to Latin America yourself?

Guillén: I’m Chicano and my family is from Michoacan in Southern Mexico.

Beavers: Because what you’re saying to me maybe also comes from your own tradition?

Guillén: I did learn and absorb the Mexican cultural inflection of this theme—their local dance with Death, if you will—but, I maintain the wisdom of this theme is universal. Also, with regard to the gestural significations in The Ground, it reminded me of a popular lyric: “Now my hand is open and now my hand is ready for my heart.”(2) Can you speak—if there is a way to speak—about your frequent usage of gesture to emote?(3)

Beavers: I am alone when I’m filming usually, almost always. I’m also not planning. I have my notes and I’m thinking about what I’m doing so I’m not in a trance; but, there is a level in which it is not thought out and I think my usage of gesture is happening on that level. It is an intuitive searching and the central part of the filming as it develops. In a number of films—I know which ones—I can feel that I did not really know what I was doing. This must be true of many people. There are probably artists and composers and others who do know what they’re doing; but, I’m one of those mixtures: I know what I’m doing, I’m thinking certain things, and then I also don’t know what I’m doing.

I feel I have to always be very careful about the production and how I am making a film. I don’t think I could ever make a commission—at least, I can’t imagine it—because I feel so many unpredictable elements in how I am working. Sometimes I have to stop. And that’s the tradition that I come from: this independent tradition of people who are very close to what they are doing. All of that enters into it. But it’s a rather narrow range. There’s a thematic range, etc.; but, my concerns and my interests, they’re constant. They don’t change very much. They take different forms. There’s a great difference between a film like AMOR and The Ground, even though there are some elements that are similar.

Guillén: In your interview with Tony Pipolo, you stated: “There is always a spiritual force which renews itself in cycles, but the individual filmmaker's life has a certain trajectory and he or she hopes that certain helpful occasions may allow the work to develop. It is not possible to predict what form these occasions will take. It is important to continue to work and it is wonderful when this can be nourished by response; every filmmaker wants to be accepted, yet certain gifts come simply from putting the work first. That is basic.”

Having given you my personal, idiosyncratic reaction to one particular film of yours and my entrance into your cycle, I’m curious about your own response to the cycle’s multi-institutional presentation in the Bay Area? You strike me as an artist who is keenly invested in the intention of your films, and the value of their exhibition and reception, so I’m curious about your personal reaction to the cycle’s third go-round?(4) Has it proven to be a “helpful occasion”? What worked for you? What didn’t work for you? Was the third time the charm, as they say? Is there anything you might have done differently?

Beavers: I would have spaced the screenings over a longer period of time, perhaps. It’s not absolutely necessary; but, strategically—this is on a different, maybe ideal level—sometimes when work is completely unknown, it’s important to give the space so that people can somehow fit it in.

Guillén: And situate themselves?

Beavers: Yes. That might be the difference between the earlier two screenings of the cycle: this time it was in a more condensed period of time.

Guillén: You would have preferred screening only two or three films at a time?

Beavers: No, I mean over a calendar period. Maybe three weeks or even a month? Perhaps the cycle could even be shown twice? Such a period of time might make the continuities less obvious—here it was condensed so you had the flow—but, strategically with our public, which is so dispersed and tends to not be fully committed, over a longer period the cycle somehow can sometimes build up a greater presence.

Guillén: I would have to agree. I didn’t mind how it was done. I liked being introduced to your practices and techniques through your stronger, more mature films first, so that—by the time the cycle came around—I was ready to enjoy it as you intended it to be appreciated. But I truly regret that I don’t have one more round, now that I’m just starting to gain a clear sense of your aesthetics. I’ve been astounded by the depth of the full cycle. I feel, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to be gone just when I’m starting to get it and when will I ever have this opportunity again?” So I would have to agree. The next time an institution solicits the cycle, demand that it be played in its official order twice.

Beavers: And maybe over a month, Michael? But you know there are pressures right now, which are not allowing that. We even had at least one important day removed here in the Bay Area. But what I liked was—I’ll say it very simply—because it was an intimate-sized audience, I liked this kindness of the spectators, their true involvement. I felt this even the first time I came to PFA with my work in 2004. California spectators … it’s a different culture here.

Guillén: I know you’ve differentiated before between cinematheque and festival audiences; did you feel any distinction this go-round?

Beavers: No. This is a cinematheque audience, of course. There is, perhaps, a difference between a museum audience—even though there is a museum here on the campus that PFA is connected to—but, it’s just two different kinds of audience. It’s not that one is better than the other. I found it pleasant to know there were some filmmakers in the audience. This I rather liked. But there is the advantage from the side of the museum presentation that tends to bring in a wider public; but, that’s only when the museum is in an urban area.

Guillén: But all in all you were pleased with the cycle’s presentation in the Bay Area?

Beavers: Yes, I am pleased and I am extremely appreciative of PFA. I have followed the archive for a number of years now. I had no contact with them before the late ‘90s; but, I think of them as perhaps the most clearly dedicated archive for this kind of film in North America. The challenge of cinematheque archives is how to bring young people in and also what kinds of new events can be created. It needs to be said that not all the work has been done. There’s still a lot to do.

Guillén: As someone who is still relatively new to the avant-garde tradition of cinema, particularly the New American Cinema of the 1960s which you’ve referenced a few times, I’m trying to imagine what it was like for you at that time. I’m fascinated not only in your work, but also in the persona you have consciously constructed over the decades. As P. Adams Sitney indicated the other evening, it’s remarkable and extraordinary that you started creating films at such a young age.(5) I’m trying to get a sense of you at 16 in 1965 experiencing New York. Sitney, I know, was trying to elicit this from you as well. At 16 you visited New York City, researching films to develop a film club at Deerfield Academy, but you were clearly too advanced for them and they took the film club away from you. Your response was to drop out of high school and move to New York City where you were accepted into this circle of creative, imaginative individuals.

How did you meet Gregory Markopoulos? Was it at screenings at the cinematheque? And, if it’s not too personal to discuss, I’m intrigued by what it was about Markopoulos that led you to trust his guidance, his mentorship? What was it about him that allowed you to feel that, alongside him, you could develop as your own person, as an artist and that led—as you have described it—to “a continuity in the way that we lived with filmmaking at the center.” We talked a bit about this the other day when I expressed my fascination with intergenerational eroticized mentorships: a style of relationship which you don’t often see these days, what with modern gay subculture’s nearly narcissistic obsession with youth.

Beavers: I don’t know. [A long pause.] Perhaps Gregory was drawing on all the resources of his own search and of his own background? [Another long pause.]

Guillén: Who was zooming who?

Beavers: What is “zooming”?

Guillén: Wooing would be the other way to put it. Did you woo him? Or did he come after you? I realize this is personal; but, I’m intrigued because of the way P. Adams Sitney has described you in Eyes Upside Down as an “ephebe”, which implies a classic interactional dynamic. It’s an almost quaint way of describing a certain part of your life.

Beavers: A certain stage, right. Although, that word comes from a different culture, which—in general, Michael—is not uncommon. An innovator uses a cloak for what he is doing.

Guillén: To grant credence?

Beavers: Yes.

Guillén: But I believe what he was trying to finesse was the nature of this mentorship.

Beavers: Yes, but as I also mentioned at the screenings in San Francisco, the importance of life scenarios in the figures who Gregory chose for his films and this idea of casting someone in a film—and having the person enact a myth which is directly perceived as connected to this person—was connected to a wider area of activity, such as Mircea Eliade and Jung and the uses of myth, and also Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide, all of this background.

Guillén: It’s like the mythic investment in personal biography or—as I prefer to look at it—the intrapsychic dimension of interpersonal relationships.

Beavers: Yes!

Guillén: People get involved in these interpersonal relationships when they’re young, which later in life they recognize as having been truly intrapsychic the whole time. The people you meet and become involved with further the process that is evolving within your own mind. That’s what I’m trying to get at.

Beavers: But with some discipline.

Guillén: If you’re lucky, there’s discipline and awareness. Otherwise, you’re just acting out.

Beavers: Right. With Gregory and I, there was generosity on both sides. That’s how I like to say it. A different kind of generosity needs it from both sides.(6)

Guillén: Which, as someone steeped in Jungian parlance….

Beavers: But I am not.

Guillén: Please bear with me. There are these axial dyads between archetypal constellations and one of the most famous ones is that between the senex and the puer; i.e., the mentor and his protégé. My critical observation, however, is that in our contemporary culture this axial dyad is very much discouraged. That is perhaps why—though it is unfair of me to range into such personal territory—I remain fascinated by the dynamic of your relationship with Gregory. The only other intergenerational relationship I know that achieved a comparable measure of creative success was between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, where a similar generosity, as you say, was expressed. So Gregory, you say, being the man he was, the artist he was, had this impulse to mythologize personalities and create films out of them?

Beavers: Or to search for someone who would fulfill a certain myth.

Guillén: Notably, he cast you as Eros in his film Eros O Basileus?

Beavers: Right. But there had been another Eros in a previous film of his. Even further, a very basic statement that he made was that Eros is color.

Guillén: Which implies spectrum, variety?

Beavers: Yes. Passion has various forms and various ways of leading the creative person.

Guillén: The way that I have come to understand Eros—that is, the erotic impulse—is that it is what holds the world together. It’s almost molecular or even atomic; an attractive impulse that draws things to each other into form, let’s say relationships.

Beavers: Which is almost how I was describing the force in AMOR.

Guillén: I have another delicate question with which I’m intrigued. As I’ve been learning about the New American Cinema these last few years, I’ve been struck by the fact that so many of these innovative filmmakers were brethren. Kenneth Anger was perhaps the first of this group who I became familiar with, first through the diaries of Anaïs Nin and her accounts of filming Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and then when—by accident—I found myself sitting next to him at a tribute at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. We talked a little bit then. Kenneth Anger. Jack Smith. Gregory Markopoulos. Tom Chomont. Warren Sonbert. As a queer-identified male, I have found it so intriguing that these vibrant personalities were so brave at a time when homosexuality was much maligned.

You’ve explained that your filmmaking did not come from the plastic shell of Hollywood studio filmmaking with its dramatic narratives and the shadow of performance. Like these other individuals, you sought a different way of filmmaking. It makes me wonder if—at a time when a queer narrative was simply not feasible in a mainstream film—if queer sensibility then shifted away from narrative to perspective? If the independent films of that period expressed homosexuality through perspective and not narrative?

Beavers: What do you mean by “perspective”?

Guillén: Those films are infused with a sensibility that I would characterize as a queer sensibility. In your instance, when I first saw Winged Dialogue, I was—quite frankly—provoked. I couldn’t believe how provocatively homoerotic that film was, and I’m a fairly seasoned old goat. Winged Dialogue is thoroughly suggestive and thrillingly explicit. I was speaking to a friend about this after the screening who asked me what I thought was so suggestive and I said, “Didn’t you notice?! The way Beavers uses the shadow of a hand to caress a butt or how—through superimpositions—hands reach for and touch genitals”; what Sitney described as “the phallic oath.”(7) In your conversation with Sitney you said that at that time you were “unlocking the psychological and erotic energies” and “working through a confusion between eroticism and psyche.” That’s what I mean by perspective.

Beavers: Perspective, right.

Guillén: Your generation, and the generation before you, have done more—in my estimation—for queer representation than the contemporary parade of silly queer narratives, which seem to have totally lost perspective.

Beavers: I hope there has been a positive quality to what has been created. Michael, it simply is a certain wonderful moment in each of those individual’s lives, and it changes. It is an important development.(8)

It’s difficult for me to speak about Kenneth Anger. I don’t feel competent. I only feel that he was an important filmmaker for me when I was young and the person who I recognize in the letters that have been published in the Cinema 16 history is brilliant and vital. I think each of these filmmakers have lived in extreme ways, also very different ways, all of them valid.

Guillén: As we were saying earlier, if Eros is color as Gregory suggested, the spectrum of queer desire would have to be expressed in many different ways. Do you have any thoughts or remembrances of Harry Smith? What you felt when you first saw his films? Did you meet him?

Beavers: I met him very briefly. Twice, I think. On both occasions, it was not pleasant. But he was one of the filmmakers whose work I enjoyed the most. When I arrived in New York, I was very interested in animation, which is visible in From the Notebook Of… What I don’t like about that period, there is a side to some of this work that I find too negative. The last time I looked at Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, I couldn’t connect to it. But when I was very young, I didn’t see that side. To speak about the psyche, and then to read about it, yes, this is not the direction that I personally am so interested. And I’m not so interested in some of Kenneth’s areas; but, both have been wonderful sources for me as filmmakers.

When you speak about filmmakers I have been personally involved with, Gregory and Tom Chomont also, there I feel more trusted to speak about a special experience of qualities in them as persons.

Guillén: There is a sweetness I can detect in the films of not only you as a young man but Tom Chomont as well. I love the scene in one of your films where Gregory is talking to Tom and Tom is paying attention with a smiling twinkle in his eye. It’s lovely. So I do understand what you’re saying; that despite the seeming illusion of a presiding queer perspective, there’s a variety of temperament.

Which leads me to ask about an Amerindian concept I’m fond of: the longbody, which states that only now—in our middle years—can we look back and see the shape of our lives, its contours, its arc, and reflect upon our youth in a way we could not self-reflect at the time. If anything, within the concept of the longbody, we could only project ourselves towards an imagined elder self. So my question is: you were in New York, you met Markopoulos, you both felt a generosity for each other—I love how you say that!—but you elected to leave New York. Even though New York appeared to have a vital avant-garde scene, it possessed qualities that the two of you didn’t care to participate in? So the two of you relocated to Europe, where you traveled among various European cities and countries.

I mention this only because a few times you have expressed to me that you want to be acknowledged and recognized as an American filmmaker. P. Adams Sitney has commented—quite wryly—that nothing is more American than an expatriate’s infatuation with European art and architecture. Yet you chafe against the term “expatriate” because it implies fleeing from something, when in fact your movements were towards filmmaking. What is it in your filmmaking—that came into its own on the Continent—which these days you consider distinctly American?

Beavers: The problem with interviews is that there’s always a temptation to bring up details, to bring up cultural history, and other points that disguise the essential matters and that don’t let you get to them. It’s difficult to have a conversation that goes beyond that.(9)

Guillén: I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.

Beavers: It doesn’t make me uncomfortable. I’m thinking back; but, I’m speaking as a 60-year-old filmmaker. So it’s been a very definite moment, perspective as you said, and I’m thinking more of the experience, for instance, in my childhood where it was explained to me by a neighbor that certain artists were able to paint and write poetry and write music and be architects, and I was shown images: a box of black and white prints that were made at the end of the 19th century. This fascinated me. The elderly woman who showed me these images was extremely important in my boyhood. She was also an artist herself.(10) But her entire perspective and her ethic was deeply New England and so it’s really that ethic and belief in a different set of measures than the predominant contemporary measures in America. I don’t think I’m alone. I think there’s a substantial part of the American population that is still vitally connected to the serious spirituality of the country—which also has its playful side—but, it’s strong. All of our boats are anchored to that.

Guillén: Are you going in the direction of the thesis proposed in P. Adams Sitney’s Eyes Upside Down that there is a distinctly Emersonian or Whitmanesque heritage to the American avant-garde tradition? American transcendentalism?(11)

Beavers: I really don’t know if that’s what it is. There’s a man named Lewis Hyde who wrote a book called The Gift. I think this idea of “the gift” is somehow very American.

Endnotes

(1) In his essay “Editing and the Unseen” published in the UC Berkeley monograph The Searching Measure (2004), Robert Beavers explained: “I reach beyond the life-likeness of the actor and the shadow of performance to the figure gathering the life that is in the light of the image.” Quoted in P. Adams Sitney’s Eyes Upside Down (2008:127).

(2) Laura Nyro, “Timer”: “Holding to my cradle at the start / but now my hand is open / and now my hand is ready for my heart. / Let the wind blow, Timer, / and if the song goes minor, I won’t mind.”

When Sitney asked Beavers about the significance of the hand gestures in The Ground, Beavers responded in an email letter dated April 29, 2008: “In re-reading my notes … recently, I found that the literal meaning of doron, the Greek word for gift, is ‘hollow of the hand.’ …I am filming myself, and the gesture is equivalent to ‘opening the heart.’ ” (Quoted in Sitney, 2008:368)

(3) Sitney has written at length on the tactility of Robert Beavers’s films and the multiple registers of meaning encoded into his hand gestures, whether the desirous energy to touch, or a reference to handiwork and craftsmanship. In ancient understandings, the human soul was thought to whorl out of the human body through the conduit of the fingerprints into a crafted object, which is how one would distinguish the soulfulness (i.e., the beauty) of one crafted object over another. I was reminded of this in the scene where Beavers filmed a strip of film on which his fingerprints were left as a filmic imprint; as a film on the film. Beavers explained in one of his Q&A sessions: “I feel an extraordinary power that goes through the hand: this relation between hand work and objects. A favorite writer of mine Francis Ponge speaks to the mute expressive power of objects.” I would equate that “mute expressive power of objects” with the invested soulfulness of craftsmanship. Incidentally, Sitney reports that Beavers once showed his films to Ponge. (Sitney, 2008:361)

(4) Winged Distance / Sightless Measure first screened in its entirety at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the Fall of 2005. Its second presentation was at the Tate Modern in 2007.

(5) Sitney: “Beavers, an unusually determined, reserved, meticulous young man, was far from the typical dropout of the 1960s.” (2008:124)

(6) I must concede that Beavers was being most patient with this line of inquiry. I should have, perhaps, taken heed of Sitney’s suggestion that Beavers as filmmaker “casts a cold eye on the nature of his desire and, by implication, his own youth.” (Sitney, 2008:362) Perhaps a more positive assessment would be Sitney’s supposition of Beavers’s “priority of desire over satisfaction, as if the poetic purpose of desire was to inspire and encourage the crafted artifact.” (Sitney, 2008:363) In other words, instead of being concerned with “who was zooming who”, I should have chastened my curiosity, which might have turned “the power of erotic observation and direction into an examination of the inspired continuities of filmmaking and filmmakers” (ibid.); my focus should have remained on the beautiful films inspired by the mutual generosity between Beavers and Markopoulis; but, it’s difficult to resist the anecdotal in such fascinating lives.

(7) More accurately, Sitney has borrowed the term from Beavers himself who referenced it in his notebooks. When Sitney asked him about it, Beavers responded in an email letter dated March 2, 2005: “I had purchased a book … about certain phallic objects and rites in ancient time … like oil lamps, etc. …. I found this tradition of swearing an oath by the phallus mentioned in it. In my note I was intending to show the power of the phallus through the entire body, perhaps by showing the arms raised or in some other way.” (Quoted in Sitney, 2008:155)

Never one to skimp on his research, Sitney discovered: “In biblical literature (Gen. 24:2, 47:29-31; Deut. 67:29) the phallic oath is sworn by placing a hand under the genitals of an authority. It is a token of fidelity, duty, and submission.” (2008:156)

(8) Beavers somewhat touched upon the enthusiasm of my reaction and inquiry: “When I showed Markopoulos' trilogy—Psyche, Lysis, and Charmides—at Berkeley, it was interesting to see the students' reactions. Some were offended—or, more correctly, threatened and afraid, while others, perhaps a smaller number, were enthusiastic. In both cases, the response was immediate and strong, and I was particularly interested to see their reaction to this film, since it had been made in the late 1940s when the filmmaker was the same age as these young people.”

(9) Sitney (2008:126) has quoted Beavers from an early version of his essay “Em.blem”, wherein he opined, “It is not the film maker’s work to tell you: his work is to make the film and to protect what he does, in the serenity of a thought without words, without the quality in words which would destroy what it intends to represent.” In this, Beavers aligns with Paul Valéry who was—as Sitney synopsizes (2008:147)—“brutally critical of observers who name everything they see or those who trust in the stability of words to convey fixed meanings.” Valéry preferred modes of abstract construction and visual analogy (what he called “notions of differentiation”) over the arguably false confidence of words. This disposition creates a unique challenge with regard to Beavers because his artistry is intimately fused to his persona as an artist whose protective reticence disfavors written descriptions of his artistry, perhaps “because the filmmaker has subtly comprehended the structural impossibility of arriving at definitions or ends.” (Sitney, 2008:360-361) As a writer, however, I felt compelled by the creative challenge to assess his work, however inexactly, however distractedly, and perhaps even despite his wishes. Words must have their way. Mine, certainly, because words are my own artistry.

(10) In one of the Q&A sessions Beavers referenced her again and specified that she carved wood. If I’m not mistaken, she’s also the individual who gave Beavers a copy of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice.

(11) In retrospect, I feel I was not mistaken. I later read Sitney’s synopsis: “Yet the very notion of the weight of European culture is an American idea—no European filmmaker I know shows the range of Beavers’s cultural enthusiasms—linking the filmmaker to Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. If the details and references of its films largely evade the Emersonian models, the overall aspiration and achievements of My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure are fundamentally a consequence of the poetics of Emerson and Whitman.” (2008:371)

[Part Two of my conversation with Robert Beavers can be found here. Cross-published on the San Francisco Cinematheque website; here (Interview, Pts. One & Two), and here (Endnotes).]

WINGED DISTANCE / SIGHTLESS MEASURE: ROBERT BEAVERS ON….

2009-10-25T13:58:00.000-07:00

It's difficult not to associate Robert Beavers's creative sensibility with Greece, not only the ochre-toned landscapes of the films he constructed on his rocky and beloved island Hydra, but the pantheonic influence of its ancient capricious gods. Apollo is there, of course, soteriologically dispensing and relieving disease and angling in on rays of light to focus affection or affliction on the skin of men. Eros is there holding the world’s molecular manifestation together through the binding gravity of desire and tactility. And Narcissus in a glade of echoes and shadows indulges his penchant for self-reflexivity. Yet, somehow the mythic personage I most associate with Beavers—especially with regard to his public presentations—is that of the purposely elusive Proteus.

When P. Adams Sitney writes in Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Oxford University Press, 2008:351) that "the filmmaker has taken pains to avoid so literal an interpretation", I smile to myself not so much for the comment's specificity, as for its conjuration of the essential mytheme of Proteus: that he can foretell the future, but will change his shape to avoid having to do so; answering only to someone who is capable of capturing him.

Faced with the broken statue of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke concluded: "You must change your life." Commensurately, to grasp Robert Beavers' answers, you must be awake and attentive and prepared to change your life.

Anaïs Nin once wrote that writing allows an individual to savor life twice. This is undoubtedly the manic impulse behind my compulsive transcriptions of film events. Especially with regard to Robert Beavers, transcribing the many Q&A sessions conducted during his two-week residency in the San Francisco Bay Area has afforded the opportunity to track how frequently (if not skillfully) Beavers slips away from the grasp of a spectator's literal question by responding indirectly, often elliptically. Direct answers would nowhere near the mutable, flexible, adaptable and versatile truths offered by his indirect responses that feel to be just beyond your grasp. There is a profound and—referencing yet one more Greek—tantalizing wisdom to his indirection.

Like the strong-shouldered stonemason with his red chisel shaping the stones to build a wall, this entry has been cobbled together from Robert Beavers's generous encounters with his audiences during the two-week period (October 8-20, 2009) in which his films were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Pacific Film Archive, in partnership with the San Francisco Cinematheque. I’ve tried to somewhat follow the intended chronology of the films. Where similar questions elicited slightly dissimilar responses, I have conflated same for clarity. Mine is not a construction fixed with mortar but more of a xerolithye in the Greek countryside: a wall constructed from piling stones upon each other. Feel free to carry a stone away for your own construction.

On the Films That Influenced Him
To Become A Filmmaker

[San Francisco Cinematheque Executive Director Jonathan Marlow mentioned that it had been somewhat disorienting to see Robert Beavers in one of Tom Chomont’s early films, to which Beavers wryly quipped that it would have been disorienting for him as well. He confirmed that Chomont’s film, along with Gregory Markopoulos’s Eros O Basileus—another film in which he was the featured subject—were both made during his late teens in New York.]

It was these New York filmmakers who made me a filmmaker. I grew up watching films on television and—because of my generation—in the small town south of Boston where I lived, we still had five cinemas when I was a child. I went to the cinema two or three times a week and saw first runs of Douglas Sirk’s films; they impressed me. But those classic American films would never have made me a filmmaker. It was Markopoulos and silent films that made me a filmmaker.

During that period in New York when I had the opportunity to see films at the Museum of Modern Art and the Cinematheque, they were showing a lot of silent films. For instance, I saw—almost immediately after my arrival in New York—a retrospective of Fritz Lang's silent films at the Filmmaker's Cinematheque. That impressed me greatly because I had never seen what appeared to be such a slow film as Die Nibelungen: Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge. It awakened me. It's a kind of threshold. You wonder, "What is it?" It gives you time to think. Those films were really important, as were Abel Gance, and of course Dreyer and Stroheim. That experience of silent film has stayed with me. I am a filmmaker because of the so-called New American Cinema and silent film.

Also, there were the repertory houses that existed in New York at that time, such as the Bleecker Street Cinema, which I went to most frequently and which was owned by the documentary filmmaker Lionel Rogosin; he kept it going. I looked carefully and was going to cinematheques often for a certain number of years then somehow I reached a point where—because I was moving so much—it wasn't possible. But in Brussels they had great films and I had the opportunity during one month to see all the films of Mizoguchi.

On First Encountering Greece

So many responses and developments are unconscious. Basically, there was a euphoria in encountering Greece. I still think of Greece as the country with the nature most suitable for youth. It was, of course, a wonderful piece of good luck.

On the European Avant-Garde Scene

There was a lot of 16mm work in England, Germany, even Italy and Austria, and France also (though I was not as aware of it). I remember in 1968 I went to a European meeting of about 300 filmmakers in Munich.

[P. Adams Sitney recalled that 1968 was, in fact, the high point of the European avant-garde film movement: "It was enthusiastic and at its most optimistic. There was a sense that something enormous was about to happen. Historically, this happens every now and then; but, it takes the very persistent, those willing to starve, to keep it going after a couple of years. There were filmmaker cooperatives in virtually every capital of Europe but they collapsed after a couple of years."]

On Using Framing Masks As a Focusing Device

All of my early films use a series of different spaces, which are created by the camera. For color, I am using the space between the film and the lens. In other words, I am actually placing color inside the camera and this has a particular organic quality. It breathes in a special way because it is not in front of the lens. It is behind the lens and in front of the aperture. I use this very narrow space and place a compendium in front of the camera. A compendium is a small box, almost like a theater space, a mini-theater in front of the lens. The compendium is where these masking shapes are being placed. I use two parts of the compendium, the front and the back. So within this space you have the camera, the filter slot for some colors, in front of the camera the compendium box, and both the mattes and other filters in this box. As a young filmmaker, I was crazy for all these different spaces between the filmmaker and the figures who were in the films or the locations. The movement of the focus back and forth with a voice, for instance, suggests something of the breathing of focus, and the breathing of the voice.

This could all be sustained only as long as I felt connected to it; but, there is a danger in this playfulness. As I watch the films now, I think, "What are the qualities?" The qualities are a young filmmaker's fascination with technique, his intellect, and the confusion of psyche and eroticism, all of these together as a unity. Then there's the searching for order through the filmmaking. All of that has a strength as long as it does not become a manner. That's why From the Notebook Of… is almost the last time, for instance, that I use filters. I am returning to filters a little bit in my present filmmaking; but, I found at a certain point you have to stop some things; you can’t continue with everything. It’s important to know what still has a life.

On the Rectangular Mask in Still Light

This is balanced between formal and psychological concerns. Of course, in Diminished Frame it has a different meaning than it does in relation to the face in Still Light. If the rectangular mask is in front of a view of a city, it has a more architectural connection in some ways. It's always playing with the film frame itself and in certain moments, minimally, just beginning to think about a placement of sound. Often in this period—which may be a little overdone—I was interested in a sense of breath in focus. In this square in the middle of the frame, this is more active perhaps.

On Finding the Rhythm to Editing

When I think of rhythm, I think that the rhythm is already germinating in the filming. Or rather, that there is one part of the rhythm that is created in the filming—whether it’s the turning of the lens or the camera movements or whatever elements are done during the filming—these create a rhythm, which is then defined more carefully when it’s combined with other elements. Finding the rhythm is a process that begins at the onset of filming and—because in recent years I'm filming over longer periods—it means I'm also considering making decisions during the filming and seeing parts of the filming as I continue, then reaching a certain point when I know that the film that I have is completed. Then I either decide to edit or to leave the material until I know how to edit it. But when I'm editing, I’m already usually thinking about sound or have already recorded sound. I do tend to edit the image first. Except there is one film where the sound came first; a film in two parts in which the sounds I created for the first part then generated the images of the second part. But in most instances I edit the image first. On some occasions I have re-edited the sound and then re-edit the image after I've approached the sound. It's back and forth.

On Improvised Composition

[A young woman commented that Beavers’ films felt like improvised music; even as she was aware that his films were tightly structured and measured.]

It's both. First of all, I have been editing since I was 16 years old. It's something that gives me a lot of pleasure, even when it's difficult. Someone asked me the other night about the rhythm in my editing and I said the rhythm begins in the filming. And I am quite improvisational in my filming. Really. You would be surprised. Compared to what you are seeing. My editing creates certain qualities which do not suggest that. The rhythm is already evolving in the filming. When I am looking at my rushes—so-called rushes—I'm looking at my footage and I am editing by remembering the image and looking at one frame of it; but, I'm not using an editing table where I would be seeing the moving image. I am editing by hand with rewinds and I am checking sometimes. I will put what I have taped together through a projector but I am also editing by my developed physical sense of the length, which is not the same thing as the time of seeing the image. That's a kind of speculative element, a chance element also, or I’m relying on what I know.

On Where Chance Enters His Edited Constructions

There is a great deal of chance to what I'm doing. I can try to sum it up by saying that I leave almost everything open until the film is completed. Somehow, From the Notebook Of… shows you how I make films. For instance, there is a notebook for every film that I have made. It begins with some notes that are made before I begin filming and it continues until the film is finished. Then there happens to also be a notebook when I re-edit it. These notes serve a number of purposes. They allow me to think through, to speculate, and they allow me to hold the continuity of what I am doing. Those are the two purposes. Because I am leaving the final form of the film until it is finished and allow myself to develop any possible new element while I am in the process of making the film, that is the chance. You don't see that in the surface of the film because that's my choice; that's the kind of filmmaker I am. It's my background that I want to create a form that I think will go into the future. This is the way I do it. Other filmmakers, other artists, would have other means to think about this; but, this is how I have done it.

While I am looking at my films—because this is an occasion for me to reflect and, at this particular moment, to bring the films into connection with what I am holding up—for me, that is interesting; but, I see in almost each film (or I hope I'm seeing this) that I am taking a step forward and taking a step backward at the same time in different ways and on different levels. Sometimes it is a formal step forward whereas the step backward is in content. I’ve known this for a long time. It used to be that in these years I would often make two films in a year. In each of those films there was a repetition in the first one and something new in the second, but still using something from the earlier one.

There is a constellation of concerns that have fed me almost since the beginning of my filmmaking to the present. For instance, there were a couple of notes in From the Notebook Of… where I thought, "My goodness. That's what I've written in the notebook that I'm writing right now" and one of those is shadows. I have always been fascinated by the richness of light and shadow and the idea of moving between constant points. In one way, I'm not a great traveler; I am circling between a certain number of fixed points. Of course, the relation to Greece is constant and other points are coming out and become more at certain points and certain times. But it's all being seen with the same eye.

You've probably had this experience yourself if you've gone to a museum and suddenly a painter allows you to see something that you've never seen and then you walk out of the museum and suddenly you're seeing everything with that eye that he or she has given you. That's a wonderful thing.

On How He Felt Returning To the Films
To Edit Them For the Cycle

It varied. It was interesting on a number of levels. I felt that with this kind of filmmaking—filmmakers whose work is being self-produced—they have this possibility to go back to a film that they've made and decide, perhaps, something could be done better. I was urged by what I had seen in my early work that it could not be seen the way it was. The films were too long. The sound was very much that of a younger filmmaker, an aggressive sound. I had the possibility to go back to my earlier films and work on them, which film directors in other areas of film wouldn't be able to do. I took the time. I took 10 years to work on the sound of these feature films. During that period, I didn't film much because I was so involved with re-editing the earlier films. This re-editing also freed me from all the lengths. Some of the early films I reduced to one third of their original length.

On the other side, an early work has an energy from the filmmaker at a certain age and I hope that in most cases I didn't damage that. In some cases, I looked at the early version, then looked at the late version, and—even though it was one third the length—it was somehow the same! All of those things I learned in the process of this re-edit. I drifted into it actually. I began by doing one or two films and that led to my having to work on the third. But now it's done. Now I'm finished. All of the early versions, however, are in certain archives where they are protected.

[P. Adams Sitney has suggested we might "read 'chance', as so many American artists have, as a near synonym for its apparent opposite, Necessity." (2008:360)]

On the Unity of Human Beings

I had read a short text by poet William Butler Yeats and he was describing how he was in the audience at a political gathering. He listened to the people who were speaking and he wrote that they said everything that he would have said. This idea of the basic unity of human beings, that we experience—I don't know, what should I say?—98%, or at least 90% somehow the same; this was a diametrical change in my filmmaking because all of my earlier work was based on the opposite. There is a central figure in many of my early films which is an isolated figure.

Having looked very carefully at paintings in Florence, somehow there's a connection between the seriousness of what the image can represent, and what it can contain at this level, within this idea of the unity of human beings. That's the basis. And the object. I had edited all of the early films by measuring numbers. It was like composing a musical score in which I balanced the numbers. Superimposed images and phrases were all measured very carefully, very quickly. With this reverse thought, I tried to film each object thinking through the editing while I was filming, choosing the image and thinking of the image from one to the next.

On The Count of Days and Palinode

The context is different because it is Zurich for both films and I am encountering a different social and psychological geography than in Greece or Brussels. Again, the abstraction is developing in relation to isolated individuals so there are these two levels: an isolated individual at the center of the film—in one case a writer, in the other an elderly singer. There is this curious relation between the way I try to represent the psyche of these individuals and the abstraction of color and other elements in the film.

On the Critic in Still Light

Filming Nigel Gosling in Still Light is probably one of the few times I’ve filmed someone who represents the critical archetype. However, my filming of the singer also has some of this to a smaller degree. I did film Gosling in opposition, but only on one level. I was probably more engaged with the idea of placing my images in the corners of his room. This was also the only time I expressed my fascination with re-filming projection, up until the film that I'm working on right now. But it really was a youthful reaction to a different environment. I was fascinated in my first visit to London by such a person and he really was good-humored, actually making fun of himself in a way. All he said at the time was, "I should have brushed my hair differently." His inclusion in Still Light is really a youthful response to such a personality. Still, there are points he is making that have an interest.

Also, to create a different perspective. I have always been so frontal, in Diminished Frame, in Palinode, and in Still Light, very central and frontal in composition and suddenly I thought, "Yes, but for the critic I will go into the corners as opposed to frontal and use this perspective with the corner that has fascinated me also. This corner idea and the critic has some interest to it."

On From the Notebook Of…, Ruskin,
and The Hedge Theater

All three films have a source of inspiration which involves three individuals who are, for me, very important sources. That would be the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci for the first film; [John Ruskin's] The Stones of Venice and a second book Unto This Last for Ruskin's thoughts; and then the architect [Francesco] Borromini for the third film.

The Stones of Venice was given to me as a very young student by an elderly woman who was important in my life. She must have given me an edition that was given to her, perhaps, by her parents. I had this book from her and, at a certain point, I read it. It's curious because—in that particular case—I followed very carefully locations that he mentions in the book. I even followed drawings that he did; the watercolors that he did to illustrate it. The edition that was given to me was illustrated by his own illustrations. The black and white in the film comes from seeing these illustrations. Ruskin was an early photographer also so I thought I would try to relate the quality of the filming to the period in which he was in Venice and to that period of photography.

Then I chose something which is a little more difficult. I filmed in color at times of the day that you're not supposed to film in color: very early in the morning and towards dusk. Then the processes of film added something also, meaning that film ages and so forth. Developing also. You're always at the mercy of the laboratory that develops your material. With film, everything is so precarious. Ruskin was restored by a film lab in New York. They helped to make it possible. I paid for half and they covered the other half.

On Meeting Ernie Gehr

After I made From the Notebook Of… and The Painting, I went to New York in 1972 and I met Ernie Gehr. We walked around New York for hours and hours after I had shown him Notebook and he had shown me Reverberation (1969). Coming from these different directions—he from the non-editing school at that time, and I from the editing—we still became friends.

On Perceptions of Violence in Work Done

There are two groups of people in how they react to Work Done. One is the spectator who finds that it is violent and the others are the ones who don't and who find it more about the processes of making. There is a quality of what I'm doing—also maybe even in the way the book is moved from vertical to horizontal—that's a certain psychic element of violence and strength that I am dealing with within myself. When I am making the film, however, I am not thinking of violence.

On How Ruskin Moves Away From
From the Notebook Of….

To move away from, yes. And of course I didn't use filters in Ruskin and I'm showing much more of the text that I'm actually following and reading, of the book that I'm not showing. In From the Notebook Of… I'm involved much more with my own notes. In both films these are individual artists: one a very great artist and one a kind of prophetic critic and social reformer. I always had the idea that I would not make a film by trying to show these individuals directly, but to show my involvement with them. My films are a kind of homage to these people; but, I'm not trying to usurp what their body of work presents in its finest form. I'm simply trying to make use of what inspires me.

On The Role of the London Intersection in Ruskin

It's just one location in London. The film is built out of these three locations: the Venetian locations, the Alpine location, and this place in London. The text that is the foundation under the film is constantly making a parallel between what was modern London then and Venice. For me, I am using it as a point of chance. The movement of the traffic and the rhythm that I am creating by the movement of the lens is constantly a matter of chance and how much I am measuring these lengths of the traffic.

In The Painting, the original editing of that film was modular in the sense that I would choose a length for the image that came from the painting, and then I would make double the length of the traffic location. It's an exact measure. The painting is in the middle and the pieces of broken glass are the shortest units. It was one, two, three. Each time I chose a length for the painting, the glass was half of that and the traffic site was twice as long. When I re-edited, those measures are still there but they are not as strict. I added other elements. I added the footage from the room and I did not keep this order so strictly.

On Knowing When to End A Film

That's a challenge. For instance, in Pitcher of Colored Light I edited the image and then I showed it to someone and decided some points were not right so I eliminated five minutes after I thought the film was finished. I even took off the first image and then—when I was editing the sound—I had to stop the mixing of the sound with the editing because I realized that I needed one more sound before the next to last image. I stopped, went to where I was living, and recorded that sound. The patience that is necessary is a key element to know that—until the very last moment—one doesn’t know when one has to decide. One has to be capable of stopping until one knows. The general point of how long something should be is something I think about all the time and my way of thinking about that changes because that's one of the key questions for any filmmaker.

On Variations of Pattern

This is central. It has to do with music, but not modern music so much. When I think of the central question of pattern, repetition, and so forth, I think of Scarlatti and Handel or Mozart and how diametrically opposite results can be created. This is also true of film. It's such a subtle thing but film can very suddenly slide into its opposite. That answers the greater question I tried to answer of how to know the length of a film—this point of how much and when to stop?—in relation to these questions. In The Ground, for instance, the elements are limited. How do you express difference with the same elements? I'm thinking more in poetic terms than musical terms. Quite frankly, I'm thinking in cinematic terms, which have their own ways of developing because it has so much to do with light.

When I use the idea of the phrase, one very important element is color. There are moments in my films where the entire edited phrase is developed out of variations on the color. That is sometimes a key to the emotional value.

On Texture

I am constantly gaining nourishment from textures; but, not textures simply shown in themselves. I'm using textures to create rhymes and as one element that I'm bringing into relation with other elements; but, strong on sensuous qualities of the film image and sound, trying to keep these elements alive and inspired on that level, and then in relation to certain emotions. These emotions are kept close to the sensuous qualities. They are not being brought to the spectator in a dramatic way. I'm trying to stay as close as I can to these sensuous qualities in the medium.

On Inferred Autobiography In Sotiros

First of all, of course I am drawing from my own experience; but, I've always felt that I built the films from my own experience but didn't want to limit the emotions that I wanted to express through the images to biographical facts. That is why I tried to create a special voice in Sotiros, which is both an "I" and a "he" within—you could say—the same pronoun. The "he"—whether it's one or two—and this dialogue that I am creating, which is an unspoken dialogue, is both personal and impersonal. For myself, I have always been able to reach something that is more personal by keeping it impersonal.

Sotiros is one of a number of films that is dealing with a kind of secret language, which is also open. It's open but still there's a secret to it. That's what I wanted to touch in the film. I am still interested in and still searching for what the connections are between all the elements of the human psyche and not wanting to limit them. Even other points of what might have been called—and which is a very old-fashioned word—"fate"; an intuitive touching of this. That's what connects me to the Greek also; but, not only.

The entire development of the film and of my own life at that moment was touched upon hearing those fragments from Alban Berg's Wozzeck on the radio while I was editing. At all of those different levels I have tried to bring them into a form. When I watched the film again in San Francisco, I thought how the film elements that I'm trying to use to express and to hold the film together are so at an angle. Also the editing form: the curious movements where you have these static images and suddenly they move at the edges. This is all related. The power that is then given to this single image. At the same time, for instance, the blind man who is standing and begging or the fellow in the village who is perhaps drunk and dancing around: these are elements within this voice for the whole film.

On the Importance of Location for The Ground

It became important. Because it is the same location that you see in the very first short film Winged Dialogue. I began with a relation to death and asceticism. There were a number of sources for The Ground. When I am making a film, I take some notes. Sometimes I see something that interests me. For instance, there was an exhibition in Switzerland about asceticism and there was something about St. Jerome. I had always been fascinated by Da Vinci's one painting he did in the Vatican that's unfinished—it's a drawing—of St. Jerome. I must have seen that at a very early age. But in this exhibition there was also an unusual lithograph or drawing by the artist Redon of a centaur. The centaur is lying against some rocks looking at a cloud. It was so extraordinary to see this very large horse-man looking at a cloud. That's why I included the close-up of the cloud in my film and, perhaps also, the hooves.

There are two films I've made on that island Hydra. Also Still Light. When I was watching them, I was thinking this is still one of the places that I hold most dear.

On Working With His Mother For Pitcher of Colored Light

The film was made over a number of visits [to my mother's home]. Even though I edited the film as if you are seeing one cycle of the year, it was actually filmed over a number of years. The only time I was able to film was when I was in the States. I am very attached to the region that I grew up in. Of course, filming one's parent is a challenge. It's a very difficult thing to do. During the period when I was filming, I had burning questions about how to do it, what was appropriate, what was not. I must say my mother helped me simply by ignoring me, in the sense of finding it completely natural that I was there and not worrying about what I was doing. She pushed aside the fact that the film might be a public film. She actually has allergies so there are no animals living in the house; but, she is still living in the house. She's not seen the film because at this period she was actually losing her eyesight.

On Self-Distribution

"Self-distributing" is the reality of the present situation. It's complicated. It's the history of my involvement with Gregory Markopoulos, the removal of the films from distribution, and the vision of a place in which the films would be shown; that people should come to this place to see this work. Self-distributing is also a reaction or response to the position of the kind of filmmaker that I am and how to present the work in the way that I want it presented and how to develop the public for this work. It is the position of a filmmaker who is neither taking a direction that is developing now in an art context nor within a normal theatrical context. I am interested in developing the film-event as the best event for the moving image. What context or what form it will take, I am involved with. That's why—when it's described as self-distribution—it has a vision behind it and it also has to do with the fact that I've built up a small archive from which this work is being distributed. My vision towards the future is to see how this body of work will find its final home, where it will be, and how to bring it to a future generation. All of that is mixed together. It's a wonderful fact that the work is all together, complete with the documentation and papers for the work, and that it hasn't been crushed by commercial pressures. My vision is how to give this and that's what I'm still working on. The question also for me is technological support and how to create a balance between what can be done with other technology without harming my objective, which is the film-event.

On Presentation

For my kind of filmmaking and for the filmmakers who tend to work the way I do, we are not part of the more recent development in the art galleries and, of course, we are not part of the cinemas. That's quite clear. That has a possibility—if one has the strength to realize it—to create film-events that are as much in harmony with the film as possible; either the individual film or the body of work. This can be done in various ways; but, one existential choice by Markopoulos and myself was to create the site of Temenos in the Peloponnese. I must say this was Gregory's choice. It was combined with the idea to remove his work from everywhere else and to show it only at that site. That's a strong and decisive choice. It had to do also with his not printing the films he was making in the last 15 years of his life.

This location, and the screenings that have already taken place there—and which I hope will continue—I believe have a nourishing value in the sense that they can strengthen other individuals, perhaps not even just filmmakers but other creative individuals to be in such a location and to feel both the extraordinary nature and the clarity and serenity of the work, to draw from that possibilities for their own processes. This freedom that can exist also has to do with the fact that this location is cut off from the normal economic advanced world. In some way we are taking advantage of what still exists from an archaic society.

As I have continued and as I have tried to learn from my own existence and Markopoulos's very special personality and struggle, I saw that for this type of filmmaking there probably had to develop a unity between the filming, the preservation and restoration, the printing, and the event. This unity is what—within the concept of Temenos—has personal worth. When you believe in someone else's work and you want it to not be lost but to be realized, this is an added incentive. But of course that's only one side. There's also the other side of how complex everything is, how one moves into the future, and how so much is unpredictable, and how no one is here to fulfill the objectives that should be fulfilled by the individual himself. This extraordinary speculative development for film is a treasure for all of us. I hope to bring it to a point where it can be given into the future to the next generation.

Another point in this is how to not make it too exclusive? You could say this is an egotistical development and I don't want to stand there alone. We had 250 guests in 2008. There is the incredible obstacle that you have to pay for your travel; but, once you are there, once you reach the airport in Athens, there is practically no expense. In both events I organized, the governor of the region provided buses that transported participants from the airport to the host village, the village gave a wonderful banquet, and bed and board each day cost about 20 Euros.

On Temenos

The intention of Temenos was to create a place where the films in the archive Markopoulos was creating that had been intended at a certain point only to be shown at one site would be shown at that site and that people should travel to that site to see the work. It actually makes most sense for his final work, which was so long. The idea was linked to Greece because of the background of the films; but, also, my own idea was to build upon that intention. It's part of the same intention but my perspective on it is that such a location—and there are places in the United States that could be put to the same purpose—which is to remove people from the pressures they are under and to put them in a context which gives them strength through the film viewing. It could be specifically for young filmmakers or young artists but really it's for everyone. But in the case of young filmmakers or young artists, I was thinking—because I had visited some art schools—I know the kind of pressure they're under, partly from the family where the parents have a responsibility to think of how their child who wants to be an artist will live. By this, there is a pressure put on the young person.

I have thought that these kinds of projections in such a location, if you have this experience at a certain age, it has a great worth. I'm thinking of this in connection to my own experience, which was not to have this viewing experience but to live in a certain way and to have someone who said to me: "Just do the work and don't worry about the costs. They will be somehow finagled." It's important to have this kind of fanatic development or support. Obviously the San Francisco Cinematheque and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts are committed to this work and—without these very small groups—there would be no possibility because of the larger context and the larger institutions which do not have the commitment. We can find a place in larger institutions, but it is always somehow compromised. This is the balance that always has to be struck; but, it’s possible. So that's something about how the films were intended to be shown.

Even the event that I do in Greece, I have created an event which takes place once every four years and it is for three days, perhaps a little longer, and people come from great distances. In recent years they have seen the films I am printing of Markoupolos that were never printed in his lifetime. It's a wonderful occasion that brings a very special group of people together. They, of course, have a tremendous cost to travel but this location in the Peloponnese has extraordinary qualities and is still very poor. It's in the mountains. A room costs, maximum, $20; a meal, perhaps, $6. The projections are given free and the publication that we do is also given free.

CIRQUE DU FREAK: THE VAMPIRE’S ASSISTANT—Peter Galvin’s Review

2009-10-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

Releasing in what has become the year of the vampire, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009) is another film aimed squarely at the teen crowd, but it's one that takes itself far less seriously than some of its peers. Cirque du Freak, the first novel in The Saga of Darren Shan (by Darren Shan)—succeeded in turn by Takahiro Arai’s eponymous manga—seeks continued life in its filmic adaptation Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, which follows high-schooler Darren (Chris Massoglia) as he fakes his own death and joins a freak show as a vampire’s apprentice. Despite Darren’s good intentions, his friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson) views this act as a betrayal, angry that Darren would leave him behind to an ordinary life. Neither of them realize that they are merely pawns in the burgeoning war between the vampires and the vampanese (what?). Well, as Steve notes later in the film, it's their "destiny or whatever."

It's sometimes hard to tell how much of this campy set-up is supposed to be tongue in cheek, but John C. Reilly as Crepsley the vampire is a real asset in this regard. His delivery brightens much of the picture's wooden dialogue and I wonder how much of a comedy it would be without his characterization, as scenes with the younger actors aren't nearly as fortunate in their charm. The freaks that make up the cast of the Cirque are largely recognizable actors—Patrick Fugit, Jane Krakowski and Salma Hayek, to name a few—but not many are given enough screen time to develop their performances. I will say that Hayek is eye-rollingly overplayed as a bearded clairvoyant, and similarly hammy is Willem Dafoe as Crepsley's vampire confidant, but I found his smarmy smile and pencil-thin moustache to be a relative joy in the two short moments he appears.

Brimming with prophecy and exposition, The Vampire's Assistant often manages to feel simultaneously bloated and empty. Most of the screenplay falls victim to the curse of countless past book-to-movie adaptations: too much story to cover in a reasonable running time. Moving from one necessary plot-point to the next lengthy expository speech, it's a story that promises more than it delivers, winking the whole while that everything will be subsequently revealed. When director Paul Weitz manages to reel back the pace and allows us to bask in the simple wackiness of the characters, the film fleetingly taps into the uncanny sensation of a magical world colliding with the real, but the illusion doesn't last long under a rigid breakneck pace.

If the planned sequels are allowed some breathing room—now that the set-up is out of the way—the Cirque du Freak series might yet have a chance of finding an audience. Amidst the crowded line-up of blood-suckers coming to theaters, this particular entry feels scattered and incomplete; but, I do appreciate the change of pace from the more customary pattern of children's films that insist on being nauseatingly wholesome. Though practically bloodless, The Vampire's Assistant still resides in a world that feels agreeably sinister. When Darren asks if his new vampire powers will allow him to turn into a bat, Crepsley sneers "No, that’s bull."

Now, there's an attitude I can get behind.

Cross-published on Ornery-Crosby and Twitch.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE—Peter Galvin’s Review

2009-10-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

I was afraid that I had forgotten what it was like to be a child, my own memories having faded and mixed with the archetypes of youth that pop-culture has drilled into me, but the opening scenes of Where the Wild Things Are feel more authentic than any muddled memory I can muster. Before ever visiting the land of wild things, the young boy named Max spends an afternoon building an extravagant igloo, only to have his sister's friends—in a moment of recklessness—cave it in. His anger and rejection are wordlessly apparent as he destroys his sister’s room in a fit of rage. Later that night, as Max relaxes beneath a table while his mother is on the telephone, he studies her face. Her conversation sounds like white noise but her expressions reveal emotions without drawing attention to them.

Moments like these bubble to the surface and endear themselves throughout Where the Wild Things Are, but when given the chance to let his imagination truly run free, why does Max, by proxy director Spike Jonze, invent such dreary friends for himself?

You might already know the story of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book, but as a recap—Max gets in an argument with his mother and retreats to an imagined world of strange creatures, where he rules as king. Sendak’s story is not the most substantial piece of writing, totaling a mere nine sentences in all, and Spike Jonze has approached writer Dave Eggars to fashion a new story for the film that draws upon the themes and emotions from the acclaimed book. Eggars' take on the story trades the visual-reliant style for a lot more talkiness, giving human voices and personalities to his wild things, but it's a mystery why he chose to have the otherworldly characters spend most of their screen-time sulking and discussing the futility of life.

Here's an example: upon arriving in the magical forest of the wild things, Max announces himself as their leader and their first question is whether he will take away all the sadness. Such oppressive melancholy colors much of the second half of the film, and Eggars' attempts to riff on Max's loneliness and fears by having them physically invade his dream world never reach any narrative finality, making the thinness of the original conceit all the more apparent.

Yet, there’s no denying the impressive look and feel of the film. Jonze's decision to use a hand-held camera affords a lot of maneuverability, allowing us to experience the world from the viewpoint of a child. Likewise, his determination to forgo the popular CGI route for the wild things, instead adorning the actors in rubber suits and digitally manipulating their expressions, is in keeping with the organic DIY feel of the film. Both Max Records as Max and Catherine Keener as his mother are perfectly cast, and even the actors playing the wild things turn in wonderfully-nuanced performances despite the cheerless subject matter.

As a children's story, I can't see many kids latching onto the heady themes of Jonze's film—their attention is more likely to focus on the impressive visuals and wonderful look of the wild things themselves—but, even eye-popping visuals can only compensate for so much gloom. Putting aside the question of its appeal to youngsters, I think adults too will tire of the exhaustive in-fighting and passive-aggressive nature of the creatures which mirror real-life people a bit too closely. The lack of a narrative that properly reflects the source material's simple exhilaration ultimately hurts a film with a lot of visual richness, leaving Where the Wild Things Are a terribly bittersweet experience.

Cross-published on Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.

AFF09—Michael Hawley Previews the Line-up

2009-10-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

The 13th Arab Film Festival (AFF) kicks off tonight, October 15 and continues through Sunday, October 25 in San Francisco (Castro, Opera Plaza), San Jose (Camera 12 Cinemas) and Berkeley (Shattuck Cinemas). This year's line-up of films from the Arabic-speaking world seems typically strong, with an emphasis on gritty street tales from Cairo, films relating to the Palestinian issue and women's rights—and surprisingly (or perhaps not), four narrative features and docs of LGBT interest.

It's unfortunate that AFF has to compete against the Mill Valley Film Festival and SF Docfest in what's become an overstuffed fall festival jam-up—there looks to be some promising films here. AFF outreach to on-line press didn't appear to happen this year, so unlike years past, I wasn't able to preview anything. In the informational capsules below, I apologize in advance for errors, and for a heavy reliance on Variety. As often as not, it's the only available English language resource for news and opinion on these films.

Pomegranates and Myrrh (Palestine, dir. Najwa Najjar)—This year's Opening Night film is a Ramallah-set drama about a Palestinian-Christian folk dancer who marries an olive farmer. When the Israeli government confiscates his land and he goes to jail on trumped-up charges, his new bride is left to deal with the olives, a prickly mother-in-law and a tempting Lebanese choreographer (Ali Suliman, who starred in Paradise Now and was Hiam Abbas' seductive lawyer in The Lemon Tree). And speaking of Abbas (The Visitor), she's said to have a movie-stealing supporting role here as a no-nonsense café owner. Check out John Anderson's rave review in Variety.

Help (Lebanon, dir. Marc Abi Rached)—Also on board for Opening Night at the Castro is a late night (10:30PM) screening of this controversial film about a homeless teenage boy who befriends a prostitute—one who's being threatened by mobsters and lives with a gay man. In an unprecedented move, the film was banned in Lebanon after initially being approved by censors. The official reason was nudity and tough subject matter, but more plausibly it's because the film's star, Joanna Andraos, is the daughter of a prominent Lebanese parliament member who is up for re-election. Lebanese films have been among the most vital and challenging works at recent AFFs. Perhaps this is another one.

Basra (Egypt, dir. Ahmed Rashwan)—In Yousry Nasrallah's astounding 1999 film The City (AFF01), actor Bassem Samra (The Yacoubian Building's straight trade) played a Cairo accountant who moved to France to become an actor. Ten years later in Basra, Samra stars as a photojournalist departing France for Egypt at the start of the Iraq War, going through an existential life crisis that intensifies as Baghdad is captured and an Al Jazeera reporter is killed by US bombs. In addition to being the name of Iraq's second largest city, basra means "snap" in Egyptian Arabic; employed in card games when two players have the same card, or when two people think the same thing or say the same word.

Demons of Cairo (Egypt, dir. Ahmed Atef)—Bassem Samra also stars in this grim Cairo tale in which a gang of street urchins are overlorded by a pregnant drug dealer. Samra plays a former kingpin whose release from jail sets off a turf war. In his very mixed Variety review, Jay Weissberg criticizes the film's "over-the-top gore" and "over ambitious narrative." The film's Arabic title, Al Ghaba translates as The Jungle.

Casanegra (Morocco, dir. Nour-Eddine Lakhmari)—Casanegra is the pejorative nickname given to Casablanca by its underclasses. It's also the name of this neo-film noir that's become a smash hit on home turf and has been selected as Morocco's submission for this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Fed up with their dead-end lives, two smalltime crooks/childhood friends take on the classic "one last job" for a big gangster in order to earn money to immigrate to Sweden. According the Jay Weissberg's rave review in Variety, the film is brimming with social critique and its dialogue has become the country's latest street lingo. He goes on to make comparisons with Martin Scorcese and Anthony Mann, and calls the performances by its two non-professional lead actors, "career-making." I'll be disappointed to miss this at the AFF, but will keep my fingers crossed it shows up at Palm Springs in January.

Laila's Birthday (Palestine, dir. Rachid Mashrawi)—This wry satire about the daily frustrations of life in Ramallah is the one AFF film I've already seen, having caught a screening at this year's SF International Film Festival. It's one I recommend, particularly for the lead performance of veteran actor Mohammed Bakri as a former judge turned taxi driver who's just trying to get through the day (and make it home with a cake and present for his daughter Laila). The film is structured as a series of vignettes, each involving a different taxi passenger with their own particular issue. At the SFIFF, Laila's Birthday was shown as a digital projection, which did the film no favors. I'd be curious to learn if AFF screens a 35mm print. Alissa Simon's positive Variety review is worth a read.

The Beirut Apartment (Lebanon/Italy, dir. Daniele Salaris) / Not Quite the Taliban (Belgium/Jordan, dir. Fadi Hindash)—In the first part of this LGBT-themed docu-double bill, Italian filmmaker Salaris rents a tucked away Beirut apartment in which to film. Lebanese Queers from all walks of life come there to safely and confidently share their stories and feelings on subjects like sexuality, religion, endless war and politics. The second film takes a look at the hypocritical, hidden nature of contemporary homosexuality in the Arab world, with the director promising to "explode some of our own myths from the inside."

Garbage Dreams (Egypt, dir. Mai Iskandar)—Zaballeens (Arabic for "garbage people") are a 60,000 strong Coptic Christian community which collects and recycles 80 percent of Cairo's garbage—13,000 tons a day in a city of 18 million people with no municipal garbage collection system. Now Cairo is starting to hire foreign multi-national waste-hauling firms to handle the problem, and the Zaballeen's means of existence is threatened. This documentary was shot over four years and follows three Zaballeen boys as they come to terms with the transition. World-premiering at this year's SXSW, Garbage Dreams drew acclaim for its cinematography and even-handed portrait of a complicated issue.

Heat Harara (Morocco/Netherlands, dir. Lodewijk Crijns)—Two 20-year-old women, one Dutch and one Dutch/Moroccan, take their car to Morocco to buy furnishings for their new henna/nail salon. After a suspiciously calculated car crash, a series of events will lead them to consider smuggling a gay Moroccan back to Holland to rejoin his boyfriend. I couldn't find any English language reviews of this made-for-Dutch TV movie, but it sounds intriguing.

Fawzeya's Secret Recipe (Egypt, dir. Magdy Ahmed Ali)—Egyptian star Ilham Shaheen won a Best Actress prize at last year's Abu Dhabi Film Festival for this populist melodrama set in the slums of Cairo. Her titular character is bawdy, self-reliant, optimistic, on her fifth husband and a rock of tenacity for her family and neighbors. In his generally favorable Variety review, Jay Weissberg praises Ali as a director who "embraces sensitive pro-feminist topics in a mainstream way" and "celebrates female independence while slyly condemning government corruption." On the award-winning lead performance he states that Shaheen "gives Fawzeya her all in a grandstanding perf that's in keeping with the pic's generally high-pitched style."

Salt of This Sea (Palestine, dir. Annemarie Jacir)—The AFF sponsored a sold-out benefit screening of this in Berkeley last spring, which is probably why it's only being shown in San Jose during the festival. In this feature directorial debut, a young Brooklyn-born Palestinian woman (spoken word artist Suheir Hammad) travels to Israel to reclaim an uncle's money left in a frozen bank account since the 1948 Nakba. After being rebuffed by the bank, she hooks up with a waiter (Saleh Bakri, the handsome lothario from The Band's Visit), with whom she stages a bank robbery. They hit the road, stopping along the way to visit her uncle's now Israeli-occupied home in Jaffa, and the ruins of his ancestral village (the best part of the film, according to all the reviews I've read). Unfortunately, those same reviews described the movie with words like reductive, didactic, agenda-driven, un-nuanced and full of credibility-straining plot turns. Bakri, however, is repeatedly singled out for his fine performance.

Henna (UAE, dir. Saleh Karama)—In this rare narrative feature from the United Arab Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, the theme of rapidly encroaching development is explored through the eyes of an eight-year-old fishing village girl whose parents have divorced. In his decidedly mixed review in Variety, Jay Weissberg says that while the film "just about works as a glimpse into an unfamiliar culture … the execution lacks any vitality, subsuming the message under stolid filmmaking," and the "mediocre digital quality and flat lighting, coupled with uninspired dialogue, hinder involvement."

Niloofar (France/Iran/Lebanon, dir. Sabine El Gemayel)—The AFF traditionally does not show films from Iran. This year, however, there's one set in an Iranian community within the borders of Iraq (although it was filmed in Iran in the Persian language). In this first feature from film editor El Gemayel (The Olive Harvest, SFIFF 2003), a 13-year-old girl is promised in marriage the day she becomes a woman. Managing to hide her menstruations for two years while being clandestinely home-schooled, she executes an escape with the help of an uncle. A step-brother is sent to track her down and save the family's honor. In his mixed Variety review, Robert Koehler finds the material "intrinsically fascinating," but "the determinedly paint-by-numbers filmmaking style and dramatization make for dull stuff on screen."

Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.

WINGED DISTANCE / SIGHTLESS MEASURE: PROGRAM ONE—A Conversation Between Robert Beavers and P. Adams Sitney

2009-10-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

In his review of AMOR for the PFA monograph The Films of Robert Beavers, Richard Suchenski writes (2009:12): "More than most works of their kind, the films of Robert Beavers are hard to describe in words without eliminating everything about them that is rich and poetic." Though I respect Suchenski's modesty, I don't necessarily agree. Just as one can read poetry and be inspired to write a poem, and just as Robert Beavers himself has traced literary influences in his own filmmaking, the critical response to his films is—one might argue—an essential accent to the poetic vision of Beavers's oeuvre; a critical response whose acumen is precisely negotiated through poetic language. Certainly, no one has done more to elucidate Beavers's poetic strengths than cultural historian P. Adams Sitney, whose articulations frequently achieve a poetic force all their own. Sitney has extolled Beavers's specific genius in various publications—including his essential surveys Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (now in its third edition) and Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson—and not once in his descriptions has all that is rich and poetic within Beavers's films been eliminated. On the contrary, the poetry of Beavers's films has been enhanced by Sitney’s erudition.

Sitney's contribution to the PFA monograph was originally written for the 2007 Tate Modern exhibition of Beavers’s 18-film cycle My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure ("Winged Distance / Sightless Measure"), which had been shown in its entirety only once before in 2005 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The third time, as they say, is the charm as Winged Distance / Sightless Measure now visits Berkeley's Pacific Film Archives October 13-20, affording Bay Area audiences the rare opportunity to watch the cycle in the official order Beavers intended. Along with Sitney's contribution to the PFA monograph, and the multiple chapters on the various stages of Beavers's career in his books, I heartily recommend Sitney's 2001 Film Comment essay "Majestic Images", his 2007 Artforum International appreciation of Beavers’s most recent film Pitcher of Colored Light (outside of the Winged Distance / Sightless Measure cycle, made available through the Highbeam Research Library), and his recent impressions on experiencing the 2008 Temenos exhibition of the films of Gregory Markopoulos, organized by Robert Beavers (likewise available at Highbeam Research).

To launch the PFA exhibition of Winged Distance / Sightless Measure, P. Adams Sitney introduced the first program (Early Monthly Segments, Winged Dialogue, Plan of Brussels, The Count of Days and Palinode) and engaged Robert Beavers in conversation.

* * *

P. Adams Sitney: It is with a certain impish pleasure tonight that I as a university professor—I believe a caricature of a university professor—am speaking here in this great institution within one of the greatest universities in the world. As I said, it is an impish pleasure to point out that many of the greatest filmmakers I teach, I study, I love, I write about, never went to a college or university, or went for a very brief time and dropped out in order to make films: for instance, Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, George Landow, Nathaniel Dorsky, Gregory Markopoulos made it, at most, through one year of university; but, Marie Menken, Kenneth Anger, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, didn't go at all.

The most radical instance of that is Robert Beavers who left high school, the Deerfield Academy, because he knew the nature of his calling to become a filmmaker. Extraordinarily, astonishingly, the films you're going to see tonight were made between the time he was 18-21 years old. He wasn't the only teenage artist to make an indelible imprint on the tradition of the American avant-garde film, but he was—to the best of my knowledge—the last, and the most prolific and the most intense in that very early period. To think that he made the entire first cycle of his series My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure before he was 22 years old—all the films we will see tonight and the first two of the films we will see in the next program—is quite amazing.

I should point out that he made those films and released them; but, many years later, he went back and revised all the films you'll see tonight. They are all most—if not universally—shorter than in their original form and one of the major transformations occurred because of the technological facility that came with digital sound. So the soundtracks have been largely changed. The films are shown in chronological order with the codicil—I should indicate—that the very first film you'll see, Early Monthly Segments, is a film composed of a discipline the young filmmaker gave to himself of shooting something once a month during that early period. That film was made as all of the other films that you'll see tonight were being made.

Beavers left Deerfield Academy and went to New York where he was mentored by Gregory Markopoulos, with whom he lived for almost 30 years in Europe, traveling in Europe and living in Europe until Markopoulos's death in the early 1990s. One of the inadvertent pleasures that we get from looking at Early Monthly Segments—these fabulous fragments of cinematic genius—is that they document the life of Gregory Markopoulos and Robert Beavers during those early years and we see some of the filmmaker's creative processes in that work.

I ought to mention that these self-taught filmmakers are a most erudite and intellectually adventurous group. I'd like to ask Robert Beavers to tell us a little bit about his background as he was taking that plunge into filmmaking.

Robert Beavers: I would like to qualify that a little bit, P. Adams, and say we were precocious and immature. Also, we were unlocking the psychologic and erotic energies. All of that was possible because of the generation just before me—meaning the filmmaking I encountered in New York when I went to New York at a very young age, 16, which would be the films of Markopoulos, Brakhage and Anger, and silent films—and the wonderful dream-like qualities of using 16mm at relatively little expense. Plus the addition of the New American Cinema and the Film-Makers Cooperative and the miniscule amounts of money that people lived on back then. There was a group called Friends of New Cinema, which gave to these filmmakers small stipends. When I arrived in 1965 they were being given $45 a month. It went up to $75 when I received it three years later.

Sitney: With $40 a month in 1964, one could either pay the rent on a New York apartment and eat a little or—as was more often the case—buy four or five reels of color film and have them developed.

Beavers: At that time the development was actually included in the price of the film.

Sitney: You couldn't apply for these grants. No one knew where they were coming from. Usually Jonas Mekas, consulting with a couple of other people, made up a list every year and that list was submitted to Jerome Hill who was himself a filmmaker and a very affluent man who didn't want anyone to know where the money was coming from. These checks would arrive once a month in the hands of 12, at the most 15, filmmakers. Aside from the economics, what was the intellectual firmament as you were perceiving it? How were you developing intellectually as a filmmaker? It's an extraordinarily daring thing to drop out of high school and start making amazing films.

Beavers: But, as I said, it had to do with the entire context of these other filmmakers. Some of them were very generous. It only takes one person to say, "You can make films" to counteract—as I've said on some occasions—the family, which basically has very legitimate concerns for how you will exist. I remember asking Markopoulis when I first came to New York, "But how will I survive? How will I eat?" He said, "We will never let you starve."

Sitney: Which was not quite the case later. [Laughter.]

Beavers: Recollecting now that brief period between the winter of 1965 to 1967 when I was in New York, I absorbed so much. At that age you're a titan and your clock is so presto. You're able to do so much. This is a wonderful thing. That was the first time I had the occasion to see many different kinds of films. The Museum of Modern Art and the Filmmakers Cinematheque had their daily screenings. For me it was a wonderful adventure. But standing behind this psychological awakening was Markopoulos balancing and commenting upon what I was doing. It didn't remove the freedom but there was a Presbyterian side to it: meaning, no drugs and alcohol.

Sitney: The audience will note that once the title appears for the cycle—My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure—what follows are two films. The transition from Winged Dialogue, which was shot on the island of Hydra in Greece with Markopoulos, to Plan of Brussels occurs without a title change. In fact, it occurs at that moment when we see the façade of houses in Brussels and hear knocking on a door. Why did you decide to not mark the difference?

Beavers: I marked it by a length of black between the two films. I decided to remove all titles quite early on, maybe in the '70s. I wanted the titles to be in the printed text of the program but I didn't want them to be a part of the visual image. I would like to mention that the structure of the program this evening and of the first films of the second program is that you will have seen all of the monthly filmings that I did silently—I don't know how many there are, maybe 20?—that were done between 1968 and 1970, with Winged Dialogue actually being filmed in 1967. You've seen them silently as a prologue but—beginning with this evening's program and the next—these segments are dispersed between the longer films I made in the same years. You see them again. There is only one sound that continues through all of them: the sound of wings. These segments have a very different meaning when you see them again within the context of the longer films. It's a rather unusual structure of the early part of my work.

Sitney: I'd like to address the sound design of Plan of Brussels, in which you have a French text from Michel de Ghelderode’s 1925 play for marionettes: Duvelor ou la Farce du diable vieux. Plan of Brussels is much more complex than Winged Dialogue in its introduction of any number of figures. Can you speak to your choice of sound and the density of Plan of Brussels?

Beavers: The image had also been more dense than it is now. There were a lot more superimpositions, all of which were done in camera. The film's rhythm is one of measured numbers. There are rhythmic phrases of numbers carefully measured. The sound is an interweaving of many sounds taken from locations where I filmed but at a later date. At the center of the film is this puppet play Duvelor, who is a small devil waiting to give up his human existence—with which he's bored—to return to Hell. But around that are all these acoustics suggested in relation to the room. The music conservatory was next door so you have someone singing and practicing a song from Carmen. There are many rhythmic elements but they are all taken from on location and drawn into relation to the abstract because—in all of the films that you will see—I realize now that I was constantly involved with abstraction. The sounds float upon the abstract shapes, which are the skeleton for the whole film. Because the sounds are brought into relation to the shapes, they should have—I hope they do have—a strong subjective value and emphasis to them.

Also, one of the inspirations for Plan of Brussels were the paintings of James Ensor, who I still think is a great painter from Belgium. He dealt very much with masks. One of his great inventions and gifts to painting were these masks, which he used socially, politically and religiously. This carnivalesque element entered the film. There were lots of people from the other part of Flanders, from the Dutch side, who had come to Brussels to celebrate their winning a football game. All this is woven together for atmosphere, to create a parade sense, but the center of the film is my isolation in this small room.

Sitney: It continually strikes me that—just as Winged Dialogue and Plan of Brussels are something of a pair, easily matched because of your presence in both of those films—the erotic exuberance of Winged Dialogue is somehow matched by the erotic despair of Plan of Brussels. Count of Days and Palinode are, in a sense, your most difficult films because of the compacted drama that is never fully elucidated. They, too, seem to be matched together. When I think that a palinode is always a poem in which you take something back, I wonder if Palinode is perhaps a palinode to Count of Days? Or a palinode to something else? Can you address any of these observations of mine?

Beavers: No, I don't think Palinode is a taking back from Count of Days; but, I think you're correct about the pairing. The two films are paired because they both somehow deal with the same themes. I find them more similar than one retracting from the other. What is similar is that both of them are films in which I'm dealing with negativities within myself and with what I believe I encountered with this location, this place, of Zurich, which is: qualities of life unlived. There's a frustration in the figures I'm presenting; but, of course, they are figures of fictional types.

The problem here is that neither the abstraction nor the narrative are free. This is somehow an awkward development; but—just as with so many other creative individuals—you have to take so many steps; you have to try so many things. Something which is not fully successful at one point is still adding to your development. One of the positive results in seeing a filmmaker's work in the form in which I am presenting it—which is this series in chronological order—is that you have the possibility to see within a very short period of time the development over decades.

Sitney: Beavers makes a very good point about the crucial nature of place. This will appear all through the entire cycle. I would urge you very much to try to see as many of the films as possible. What you'll see in the next program is a further purification of the elements we see in the films in today's program. Then—in what to my mind is an utterly astounding breakthrough film made in Florence called From the Notebook Of…—the beginning of Beavers's maturity and from From the Notebook Of… on, a strength of pellucid masterpieces. What is also interesting to me is that the filmmaker seems to be turning perhaps towards some kind of narrative, which he turns away from.

What you're seeing in tonight's program is the amazingly impressive work of a very young filmmaker; but, if you really want the exalted and the ecstatic, come see the mature films.

Early Monthly Segments (1968-70/2002)

Early Monthly Segments, filmed when Beavers was 18 and 19 years old, now forms the opening to his film cycle, My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure. It is a highly stylized work of self-portraiture, depicting filmmaker and companion Gregory J. Markopoulos in their Swiss apartment. The film functions as a diary, capturing aspects of home life with precise attention to detail, documenting the familiar with great love and transforming objects and ordinary personal effects into a highly charged work of homoeroticism.—Susan Oxtoby, Toronto International Film Festival.

Early Monthly Segments collects studies shot between 1968 and 1970 and was completed in 2002 (this unhurried artist finishes pieces over a span of decades). In it, he begins to articulate his distinct cinematic lexicon: close examinations of Mediterranean light, the elaborate use of mattes and color filters as cinematic punctuation, associative editing and visual rhymes, and a variety of in-camera effects. Segments also includes diaristic episodes of the couple's life together. In one shot, Markopoulos sits in a room, wearing a stiff, high-necked collar, holding over his heart a pocket mirror that flashes light into Beaver's camera, an image that reappears in The Count of Days.—Ed Halter for The Village Voice; 10/12/05.

Early Monthly Segments (1968–70/2002) provides a notional prologue to the entire cycle, encompassing the entire range of [Beavers’s] visual leitmotifs and containing sequences of film that are reused in several later works. In this, the earliest of the films shown here, images of the filmmaker dominate. As if watching the uncertain moments in which the artist holds a camera for the first time, Beavers tentatively establishes his relationship with the device, exploring its ability to capture the world around him and what it may reveal about his own image. The autobiographical tenor of the film is heightened by scenes depicting interactions between Beavers and Markopoulos as well as recurrent shots of Beavers in his studio—in this instance a simple table in a sun-dappled room—cutting and editing carefully arranged fragments of film. Beavers, like many filmmakers who began working in the 1960s, uses reversal film stock, allowing him to view the positive images on the film strip by holding it up to the light. Because he cuts his films manually and edits the sequences through visual memory alone (only in the making of his most recent works has he projected the images during the editing process), the final compositions preserve a patina of this intricate handcrafted process.—Andrew Bonacina for Frieze; June-August, 2007.

Winged Dialogue and Plan of Brussels (1967-68/2000)

Winged Dialogue details with growing clarity the desperate beauty and sexuality of the body animated by its soul, essence blindly reaching out, touching, in brilliant patterns through and beyond those of the vanishing images, expressed vividly in the after-image on the mind, on the soul’s eye.—Tom Chomont, a note on Winged Dialogue.

One of his earliest films, Plan of Brussels (68), made when he was 19, has structures reminiscent of Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poete, the fountainhead of lyric visions of the narcissistic imagination for Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage as well as for Markopoulos. Shedding all traces of the narratives constructed by his predecessors, Beavers filmed himself in a hotel room, both at his work desk and lying naked on the bed, while in rapid rhythmic cutting, and sometimes in superimposition, the phantasmagoria of people he met in Brussels and images from the streets flood his mind. Fragments of Michel de Ghelderode's play Duvelor can be heard on the soundtrack, cuing the viewer to the Faustian theme of this 28-minute film inspired by James Ensor's paintings. [¶] Beavers included geometrical shapes in iridescent colors among the fast alternation of images. As punctuation, lubrication, and percussion, these abstract elements shape and formalize the film.—P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment.

The Count of Days (1969/2001)

The film is seen as though upon and through the structure of its spiritual partitions. One might say that there are three elements or levels to the images: narrative, descriptive or analytic, and abstract. The Count of Days is not an account so much as an accounting of the essence of the days in which three separate persons are related at points … a penetration through the masks and habits of these days to reveal the nature of the charade and the arena in which it is enacted.—Tom Chomont, Film Culture.

Palinode (1970/2001)

Beavers included geometrical shapes in iridescent colors among the fast alternation of images. As punctuation, lubrication, and percussion, these abstract elements shape and formalize the film. In his subsequent work similar structuring elements grow in importance. In Palinode (69) a disk-shaped matte continually shifting in and out of focus alternately blocks part of the image or contains it. Its respiratory rhythm matches operatic fragments of Wladimir Vogel's Wagadu, as the camera studies a middle-aged male singer in Zurich, singing, eating, window shopping, meeting a young girl. The filmmaker told himself, "Don't let yourself know what that film is about while you are making it." Thirty years later it still remains astonishingly original and mysterious; elements suggestive of Fritz Lang's M seem translated from criminal psychopathology to aestheticism. [¶] At the climax of Palinode Beavers shows his work space, his notes, and the apparatus he used to film the mattes.—P. Adams Sitney, Film Comment.

Cross-published on Twitch.

DOCFEST 2009—Peter Galvin’s Review of The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia

2009-10-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia chronicles a year in the life of a family of self-proclaimed hillbillies. One member of the White family, Jesco, has already achieved cult status, after being featured in a 1991 PBS special called Dancing Outlaw, which spawned a sequel in 1994 and a narrative feature earlier this year. Jesco is an Appalacian "mountain dancer" whose many run-ins with the law have delayed his dream of being hailed as a worthy successor to his late father, the famous mountain dancer D. Ray White. Director Julien Nitzberg now offers us a chance to meet the rest of the White family, which is extensive, but even with so many lives to explore he fails to discover anyone with the same level of natural charisma as Jesco White.

Scrutinizing the White family tree is enough to give one a headache. We are introduced to enough aunts, uncles, mothers and grandchildren that the filmmakers are forced to caption each family member's name even after featuring them on-screen several times. At the top of the tree is the matriarch of the family, Bertie Mae, who with her daughter Mamie attempts to establish some sort of order within the group while their children become involved in increasingly-dangerous circumstances. From prescription pills to attempted murder, the exploits of the Whites are often lessons in fatalism, a fact of which the family is disturbingly proud.

Amidst the head counting, a few stories do rise and take focus, such as a trip to pick up Mousie White from jail and Kirk White’s battle with Child Protective Services to see her newborn daughter, but by and large the film is representative of the Dickhouse production logo—a company run by a crew from MTV’s Jackass. Like its TV ancestor, the footage is more focused on chronicling day-to-day drug use and exploiting violent antics for shock value than exploring anything below the surface. The most interesting moments are probably accidental, when the Whites stop mugging for the camera and let their guard down—Jesco’s reflections on fame and fan expectations are particularly memorable—but then it’s off to another night at the bar to watch the Whites get drunk. Occasionally, local police and government officials are interviewed in an effort to situate the family’s poor behavior within the community, but for the most part Nitzberg seems hell-bent on remaining impartial towards his subjects. Perhaps I would be too, after getting an earful of the multiple stabbings and shootings of which the Whites freely boast.

The Wild and Wonderful Whites is a film about an unattractive and offensive group of people. It’s not my place to make judgment on their character, but it is my duty to tell you if the film about them is any good, and frankly it’s not. Forgoing the fact that the film says nothing insightful about its characters, its meandering structure forces even the exploitative elements to grow tiresome well before its 85 minutes are up. Worse still, it’s a film that encourages its subjects to continue their damaging lifestyle in the pursuit of some sort of fame, never realizing they’re being laughed at, not with.

Cross-published on Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.

MEXICAN CINEMA—Alamar (To the Sea, 2009)

2009-10-11T21:39:00.000-07:00

Straight off, Adam Nayman deserves some kind of commission for convincing a small squadron of film journalists to catch Pedro González-Rubio's sophomore feature Alamar (To the Sea, 2009) at its last public screening at the Isabel Bader. Boasting its world premiere in TIFF’s Visions sidebar, Alamar was already part of my scheduled coverage of this year’s Latin American fare, but it’s always heartening to share a viewing experience with such accomplished journalists as Andrew Tracy, Danny Kasman, Fernando Croce, Darren Hughes, Girish Shambu, Richard Porton and Dan Sallitt. Talk about fraternity! Though I didn’t quite agree with Nayman (or Danny Kasman at The Auteurs) that Alamar was the "find of the festival"—for me that honor fell to Oscar Ruiz Navia's El Vuelco del Cangrejo (Crab Trap, 2009)—I could certainly understand their shared enthusiasm for Alamar's pellucid simplicity. "Pedro González-Rubio," Kasman writes, "has found a documentary subject and turned it into a lovely, modest, and sweet fiction of the real world." In a word, the film is beautiful, with stunning aquamarine cinematography contributed by Alexis Zabé (Silent Light, Lake Tahoe).

Mexican Jorge (Jorge Machado) and Italian Roberta (Roberta Palombini) have fallen in love and given birth to Natan (Natan Machado Palombini), now five years old; but, their relationship can’t endure their contrasting temperaments so Roberta has decided to return to Italy with the boy, but not before allowing him the chance to spend quality time with his father and grandfather Matraca (Nestor Marin). Jorge seizes the opportunity to take Natan to Chinchorro, Quintana Roo, home to the second-largest coral reef on the planet and one of the few places in the Mexican Caribbean with an intact ecosystem. Living simply in a wooden palafite (a shack constructed on stakes) in front of the quay, little Natan eases into a fisherman’s life, acclimating to the natural world alongside his father and worldly-wise grandfather. Linaje (lineage) and a sense of knowing one's origins becomes a father’s parting (and lasting) gift to his son.

So what is it that makes this spare tale so resoundingly resonant? Is it that Alamar achieves fiction without narrative intervention? During the Q&A following the screening, González-Rubio was asked the inevitable question: is Alamar a feature film or a documentary film? He responded quite honestly, "I think of it as just a film." Circumventing strict categories, and suffering no delimitations, Alamar forges its own waters. As filmmaking, it recalls Antonio Machado's poetic assertion that there are no paths at sea, only wakes.

In a serendipitous bit of elucidation, Mark Peranson provided advance copies of the Fall 2009 issue of Cinema Scope to press attending TIFF and—perusing same on the flight home to San Francisco—I was quite delighted with Robert Koehler’s essay "Agrarian Utopias/Dystopias", which more than aptly captures the spirit of Alamar in its exploration of "the new nonfiction" or "the cinema of in-between-ness." Koehler writes of a "zone of a cinema free of, or perhaps more precisely in between hardened fact and invented fiction" that "permits all manners of wild possibilities", especially with regard to nuanced observations "specifically applied to subjects about humans working on the surface of the earth." Koehler's essay addresses the suspicion posed during the Q&A that Alamar was neither fact nor fiction: "This deliberately contradictory nature is a fundamental part of these films' essence. If any finding is made at all, it is that the categories are finally quite pointless."

Indeed. How could it be otherwise? How else could the poignancy of a film like Alamar be so evocatively articulated? The profound sadness at the heart of the separation between father and son, between a boy and his native country, echoes the "overwhelming sadness at the process of collapse and the end of things, alongside the unspoken drama of human beings stuck in a cycle with no escape." Marriages collapse, families fall apart, lineages are disrupted, and only memory can soothe distance and rupture; the memory, perhaps, of a befriended cattle egret who flies into the film—and into the lives of its "characters"—as if to remind that one need go no further than an observation of the natural world to find a story that will last a lifetime; a story whose heart is perhaps not fiction but unadorned observed truth.

10/25/09 UPDATE: Alamar swept the audience and jury prizes at the recent Morelia Film Festival. Produced by Mexico’s Mantarraya Productions and Xcalakarma Films, Mantarraya will handle Mexican distribution for Alamar, with France’s MK2 as the film’s international sales agent.

Cross-published on Twitch.

MVFF32—Michael Hawley’s Capsule Reviews

2009-10-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

Hipsters (Russia, dir. Valery Todorovsky)—I never expected that my favorite film of the fest would be a splashy, wide-screen Russian musical set in 1955 Moscow, but there you go. Hipsters recounts the phenomenon of stilyagi, the name given to Russian youth who rebelled against gray Soviet monoculture by emulating jazz music and fashion from the west. The film follows the transformation of Mels, a stodgy young communist whom love converts into a pompadoured, sax-playing free spirit. Full of romance, comedy, bright costumes and cleverly choreographed production numbers—each done in a different musical style with engaging lyrics—Hipsters is clearly an exaggerated, romanticized version of post-Stalinist Russia. But it's a version that doesn't totally whitewash reality. The scorned stilyagi are subject to mob attacks, and one character speaks of an aunt who was arrested because her Stalin portrait hung opposite the bathroom. I'll rarely watch a DVD screener twice, but couldn't resist with Hipsters. This should be a blast to see on the big screen with an audience.

Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire (US, dir. Lee Daniels)—Hallelujah, the hype turns out to be justified for this alternately horrifying and humorous hardknock fairytale that won audience awards at both Sundance and Toronto. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe is unforgettable as Clarice "Precious" Jones, an illiterate, ridiculed, morbidly obese teen with a hyperactive fantasy life and the most horrible mother in the history of cinema (an unforgettable turn by comedienne Mo'Nique). About to be thrown out of school for being pregnant—for the second time, by her own father—salvation comes in the form of a caring lesbian alternative school teacher (Paula Patton). Daniels directs with compassion and freewheeling imagination, from a first-time screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher. Opens in Bay Area Theaters on November 13.

An Education (UK, dir. Lone Scherfig)—In 1961 London, a bright schoolgirl falls under the sway of a smooth talking playboy, receiving a deliciously poignant education in life whilst jeopardizing her academic future. Scherfig's evocation of pre-Swinging Sixties UK highlife—its nightclubs, racetracks, and weekend jaunts to Paris—is terrific fun, while the performances all resonate, especially Carey Mulligan and a Brit-accented Peter Sarsgaard as the inter-generational couple. Based on a Nick Hornby script, this is by far my favorite film of Scherfig's (Italian For Beginners) and her personal appearance at the festival is reason enough to catch it there before the October 16 theatrical release.

The Maid (Chile, dir. Sebastian Silva)—In this heartbreaking and hilarious social satire, Raquel is a housekeeper who's taken care of the same upper class family for 23 years. After a thwarted sense of self causes her to start acting out resentments, the confused family responds by hiring on additional help. The first two maids flee after being terrorized by Raquel. Finally, a woman with a taste for jogging and irreverence joins the household staff—and she's got Raquel's number good. Filmed almost entirely indoors with a handheld camera that reflects our heroine's entrapment, The Maid explores thorny master/servant issues without demonizing the former or martyring the latter. This Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner for World Cinema will open in Bay Area theaters on November 13.

Soundtrack For a Revolution (US, dir. Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman)—This exceptional documentary traces the history of the American Civil Rights Movement via the protest songs which inspired its leaders and participants. As one interviewee states, "They could take away everything else, except our songs—which meant we kept our souls." From "We Shall Overcome" to "Wade in the Water," the film recounts how these songs came to be written and then incorporated into the movement. The directors seamlessly blend moving first-person accounts (Julian Bond, Coretta Scott King, songwriter Guy Carawan), contemporary performances of the songs (The Roots, Ritchie Havens, Wyclef Jean) and a lot of archival material I know I haven't seen elsewhere. Apart from its focus on the music, this is perhaps the most concise and affecting film I've seen on the African American struggle for civil rights, period. Co-director Guttenberg is expected to attend the festival, and a special Concert for a Revolution featuring The Blind Boys of Alabama (who perform in the film) will take place after the Oct. 16 screening.

Dark and Stormy Night (US, dir. Larry Blamire)—I approached this one with trepidation, not having liked Blamire's vintage sci-fi parodies (The Lost Skelton of Cadavra, Trail of the Screaming Forehead). Here he takes on the Haunted House genre, and comes up with a spoof that's ambitious, reverent and often enough, completely nuts. All the tropes show up—the reading of a will, secret panels, an escaped maniac from the local asylum, ancestral portraits with roving eyeballs, expository monologues—everything but the sour-faced female caretaker. Blamire expertly lifts all this from such films as The Cat and the Canary, The Dark Old House and the spooky comedies of The Bowery Boys, Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges. Not all of the two dozen stock characters work equally well, but I happily found my least favorites getting bumped off early in the proceedings. Among the ones who fortunately live through the night are a pair of bickering guy/gal reporters straight out of His Girl Friday, and a turbaned, Andrea Martin-channeling medium.

Shameless (Czech Republic, dir. Jan Hrebejk)—In this droll, melancholic little film about the foibles of adult relationships, TV weatherman Oskar gets the heave-ho when his wife discovers he's screwing their Hungarian au pair. After losing his job, he begins a new career driving drunks home from bars, which is how he meets his new love, an older celebrated Czech songstress. Meanwhile, his ex-wife meets a blue collar single dad who loves her big nose, and the two have sex for the first time in her ex-husband's childhood bedroom. Slight, piquant, and oddly satisfying, Shameless has a low key charm that could use some of the edginess that underscored Hrebejk's earlier works like Up and Down and Beauty in Trouble.

Hellsinki (Finland, dir. Aleksi Mäkelä)—Booze was illegal in 1960s Finland, giving rise to a bootlegger underground in the depressed Helsinki neighborhood of Rööperi. This solid, but unremarkable genre yarn follows the fates of three small time gangsters through a decade and a half's worth of up-and-downward mobility. When alcohol starts being sold legally in 1969, more nefarious career options arise for the trio. Krisu (Peter Franzen) takes his thuggery to Sweden and returns home a junkie, while momma's boy Kari intentionally screws up a bank robbery to regain the sanctuary of prison life. Meanwhile, troubled hothead Tom gets married and makes a fortune in the burgeoning mail-order porn biz. The film has been tagged a Finnish Goodfellas, which is in many ways an apt comparison. Actor Peter Franzen is expected to attend the festival.

Superstar (Iran, dir. Tamineh Milani)—An insufferably arrogant and bellyaching movie star has his life changed when an impudent, self-righteous—oops, I mean spunky—precocious young girl shows up and claims to be his long lost daughter from a forgotten affair. This is so not my thing. I'd had all I could stand 20 minutes before reaching the end, which I understand contains some sort of twist. Milani is said to be one of Iran's top directors and this sentimental melodrama made gobs of rials for the country's cinemas. Recommended for those with a curiosity about mainstream Iranian crowd pleasers.

Cross-published on film-415 and Twitch.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY—Peter Galvin’s Review

2009-10-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

When DreamWorks picked up Israeli émigré Oren Peli's effectively creepy lo-fi supernatural thriller Paranormal Activity at Slamdance 2008, it withdrew the film from its scheduled festival appearances in the Bay Area. As reported at the time on The Evening Class, SF IndieFEST resisted DreamWorks’ position and went ahead with its scheduled screening. Since then—as Dennis Harvey has detailed at Variety—"Paranormal's path to commercial release has been a laborious one: Initially, DreamWorks intended to simply use it as a DVD extra for a bigger-budgeted remake it signed Peli to create. When that fell through, the pic shifted to Paramount's shelf."

Nearly two years later, as Harvey enumerates, Paramount has taken an unusual approach in its distribution of the film, scheduling it at midnight screenings in various metropolitan and college markets, and encouraging viewers to urge wider bookings via online service Demand. The strategy appears to have paid off. The midnight screenings have been nationwide sellouts, demand for the film has increased, and sightings of Paranormal Activity can now be expected in a more conventional theatrical rollout. Our thanks to Peter Galvin for his review.

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Micah and Katie have got it all worked out. He's a day trader and his job pays well enough to support them both while Katie goes to school. Early on in Paranormal Activity Micha explains that they're "engaged to be engaged" and they've finally decided to move in together. The only thing gumming up the works is that Katie is being plagued by nightmares and strange voices while she sleeps. Concerned, Micah hatches a plan to film these mysterious phenomena with a camera set up in the corner of their bedroom in order to better understand the unwanted presence plaguing his and Katie's lives.

Shot entirely through a diegetic camera and posited as "found footage", Paranormal Activity probably shouldn't work. The weathered movie-goer in me immediately figured the set-up for a cash-in on an increasingly tired gimmick: "Those aren't scary noises, that's the director behind the scenes jiggling the lights and stomping his feet. No way will I be amused for an entire 90 minutes of light-jiggling." But let me tell you, when I walked out of that theatre, I was white-knuckled and grinning. Not only does this gimmick still have some legs, but this may be one of the best examples of it I've seen.

Largely, the film's success is due to the performances. Set entirely in one location, where the two main actors are on-screen for every frame, the film lives or dies on how willing the audience is to care about its characters. Katie (Featherston) is so steadfast in her belief that the anomalies that torment her are ghostly that dialogue which could have elicited laughs comes across instead as serious and sinister. Micah (Sloat) matches Katie's earnestness with a thick sense of humor, but his main function is ultimately as aggressor. His preoccupation with filming the house's curious displays and his stubborn unwillingness to stop and listen to what his girlfriend actually needs drive the film toward an uncertain conclusion. Neither give particularly showy portrayals, but the pair have a natural chemistry and authenticity, without which my belief would certainly have crumbled.

Another asset is writer/director Oren Peli's knack for subtlety containing the film from being an overblown shockfest. Sure, some of his willingness to downplay the scares can be chalked up to a meager budget, but Peli has an unwavering dedication to the illusion he has formed and understands when less is more. Many of the scarier sequences are spent merely watching the couple sleep, but our perspective from the tripod facing their bed—a spinning timecode on the screen counting down the hours 'til morning—creates an undeniable apprehension for what might happen before they wake. As the film continues, and the attacks become increasingly brazen, the static point-of-view also helps to transform the otherwise modest effects into impressive displays of movie magic.

Completed in 2007, Paranormal Activity has been withheld for three years while Peli figured out how to approach a proposed big budget remake. Whatever forces conspired to help that project dissolve, I'm glad, as the low-budget no-name feel of the film is one of its strongest distinctions. We've had more than enough verité horror in recent years, but if the execution continues to prove as effective as Paranormal Activity, I don't see that trend dying out anytime soon.

Cross-published at Ornery-Cosby and Twitch.