Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Dangerous Camerawork

More reviews later…playing catchup.  One per day is probably all I will ever manage, given that I have seen three or four per day...Here are my first four reviews:

Farewell to Hollywood - Nov 22

Directed by Henry Corra and Regina Nicholson, but also starring them or, more accurately, lived and died by them, this documentary flirts with disaster like no other film I have ever seen.  At a film festival, Regina asked Henry to make a film about her fight with cancer and he agreed, but we know from the opening scene of the movie that Regina will die.  She does not make it past age 19 and when the movie begins she is 16 or 17--but amazingly, her slow death is not even the hardest part to watch, nor her multiple surgeries and chemotherapy.  The hardest part is watching her try to live, to be a teenager whose lifetime must be compressed into a few short years.

The normal conflicts teens have with parents are exacerbated by the cancer and seem even harder for her mother and father than they are for their daughter: a modern Job who, with a maturity beyond her years, endures her suffering and continues to speak clearly and cogently to the camera.  Among her torments are a mother threatening to shoot herself (which she doesn't) and a father threatening to disown on her 18th birthday (which he does!), so Regina must find her own medical insurance.  

At this point Henry asks Regina for permission to be her medical manager and moves her into her own home in South Pasadena, but even before she had turned 18, its clear from their frequent text messages that the middle aged filmmaker and his teen collaborator have fallen in love.  Henry Corra was in the movie theater, and although he insisted that he did not have sex with Regina, he does not dance around the fact of their intense relationship.  He includes in the film the texts where Regina's parents cut him off because they believed his attentions were inappropriate;  also, during the period when he can't see her, he admits that waiting for her to call or text recalls his own adolescence and that these feelings of anxiety are inappropriate for a man his age.  In one of her better periods, Regina is wearing a blonde wig (because "blondes have more fun") and its clear that she wishes she could be a normal teenager, who dated and had a boyfriend.  She even requests balloons folded into the shape of penises for her last birthday!  Part of the reason I believe Henry, when he says they did not have a sexual relationship, is that he includes so much of Regina's off color humor about her ill-fated virginity.  Henry reports that Regina anticipated the imputation of scandal and told him to say that she was his "dead virgin bride and our film is the love-child of an immaculate conception."

So what else is wrong with this picture: cancer, teen angst, abandonment by parents, Lolita-like love?  They also flirt with disaster with the cinematography, because much of the movie is just Henry holding up a 5D in Regina's face, and quite often while they are driving through rain, or committing misdemeanors: burying her ashes on Catalina island or tagging a sidewalk.  During the tagging incident, Regina hears a helicopter and flees back to Henry waiting in the car, and one is struck with the awkwardness of a middle aged man facilitating a teenager's classic coming-of-age experiences.  Before her last surgery he also takes her on a whirlwind weekend of amusement park rides, as a father might his own daughter. Regina cannot go out alone with other teenagers, so she must take what she can get: this awkward pretend teen-rebellion, accompanied by Canon 5Ds and a man with graying hair.

But in the end the wish they are able to fulfill for each other is real.  At one point, early in the movie, the "make a wish" foundation convinces Kevin Smith to let her play an extra in a funeral scene on the set of Red State.  Her wish was not so much to be an actress as to be a director, and no foundation could ever put in the years Henry Corra devoted to fulfilling this dream before she died.   Five days before she died she was reviewing their rough cut--and she co-directs in the credits.  Its not as clear what Corra's wish was--which is why lurid motives are too easy to imagine--but caring for anybody to the death is frankly more intimate than sex.  No one questions his devotion and generosity--and in Q&A Corra said he still hoped the movie might also be redemptive for the parents, though they have never seen it.  "I have a daughter myself" he tells us, and I wondered briefly if Corra had been estranged from her--because of the pressures of his work, or a divorce--and that Regina gave him the relationship he had not been able to have in his biological family.  This closeness--even if it is a cot next to the bed of a dying loved one--is precious rare in the 21st century and the movie portrays love in an original light I have never seen before.  Henry Corra and Regina Nicholson have created a new type of filmmaking--what he calls without irony "living cinema"--and while no one else may ever be able to pull off something like this again, "Farewell to Hollywood" succeeds.

The Ghosts in Our Machine - Nov 23

If I had to find a common thread among the movies featured at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, it would be "dangerous camerawork."  The Ghosts in Our Machine is a film about radical empathy with animals, who photographer Jo-Anne McArthur documents in fur farms, slaughter houses, dairy farms, and kennels where dogs are bread for medical experimentation.  She takes gorgeous closeups of their fear, with creamy bokeh, and Liz Marshall manages to match this extraordinary technical bravado with her videography as well, exploiting the full dynamic range of newer cameras in low light (I was thinking C500, but there are slow-motion shots as well, so maybe a RED?)  This camerawork is dangerous, not only because the grim reality being documented puts us in an untenable position.  We all benefit from industries that require animals to suffer but we are also capable of an empathy, perhaps not so radical after all.  Empathy is perfectly normal with our pets, who (yes who, not which) we would not treat so badly--and when you put a camera's eye right up next to the eye of a beagle, fox, cow, horse, pig, goat, sheep, even a chicken, something truly dangerous happensYou care.

The filmmaker also takes monkey wrench gang risks, breaking into and entering a fox farm in the UK, with spotters on the road and walkie talkies to signal in time for them to escape.  And because Liz Marshall documents her photographer's attempts to publish, we see clearly the risk for her editors as well, particularly those that agree with her.  Caring might drive away advertising revenue, alienate political allies on other radical fronts, etc.  And then there is just the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Jo-Anne McArthur admits she herself suffers from.  I myself came out of the theater a little short of breath, and couldn't get out of my head the images of an old chimp, to whom her book "We Animals" is dedicated, and who has endured countless experiments in his life.  

If there is a second theme to this documentary festival, it is this darkness, but in Ghosts there is also an attempt to brighten the picture with visits to a farm sanctuary that takes animals who have been abandoned by industry.  One audience member even objected to this upbeat tendency in the second half of the film, because it reminded him of children's programming--but the director pointed out that they do hope to screen this film to young people, a naturally empathetic audience ripe for radicalizing.  In Canada, it received an over-14 rating (their PG-13), and we see the faces of many teenagers watching the documentary in the documentary itself.  Self-assured, relentless, convinced and convicted, Marshall and McArthur may be the world's best diplomats persuading us to recognize animal sentience, though they can't mitigate the horror of their subject matter enough by over-saturating the green lawns, where old cattle retire.

First to Fall - Nov 24

I have seen three or four films each day, and I might have also reviewed Dirty Wars (about how American power is projected overseas) or the Return to Hom (about rebels in Syria) also in the category of war documentary.  Instead I chose First to Fall because it was neither against nor for the warriors depicted in the film.  With a kind of adventurous glee, perhaps more appropriate to a summer tramping around Germany, we watch Hamid and Tarek join the resistance against Muammar Gaddafi, learn to fire rocket propelled grenades and 50mm mounted machine guns and, finally, become injured in the war.   

There is a lot of riding out in the back of light Toyota and Mazda trucks, and peering over walls full of bullet holes at dry scrubby smoking fields.  A band of young men with videocameras--one of whom is Hamid until he just sticks to his gun--shoot from the hip while the shrapnel flies, rifling corpses for munitions and joking with each other cheerfully.  This must be how it is--I can just feel it--a sort of make-believe soldiering becomes the real thing so smoothly that no one involved can mark the moment bravado is replaced with bombed-out eyes.  There is also a lot of sitting around in living rooms watching TV and youtube, and talking on cell phones, and weirdly, one senses the fear in these young men's eyes more during R&R than riding in those Japanese pickups.

After Tarek, who was never as gung ho as Hamid, is paralyzed by a gunshot wound to his lower spine, he is no longer having fun anymore--but its not clear he ever was.  Hamid maybe, but his is the despair of victory: after Gaddafi is dead, we see him seated in the former dictator's bombed out palace, wondering what he is to do next.  The rebel heroes have been rebranded dangerous militias, and the filmmaker told the audience after her film that just last week one of these militias shot dead 30 or so in Tripoli, after demonstrators demanded that they disarm and join the civilian political process.  

The director Rachel Beth Anderson was such a perky all-American young woman (in her early 20s?), with a warm tan and only a hint of hazel in her eyes suggesting she might have some North African muslim ancestry--the audience could not put her in her own picture.  "You are lucky not to have been hurt,"  an older woman next to me in the theater said, stammering to confirm that the young woman was literally out there with those guys--and it was all guys, except for one scene, where women with their heads covered and their children posed with AK-47s , pointing them at each other carelessly and wishing they could fight alongside the men.  "Were you holding the camera…at the front lines?"  Anderson evaded directly answering the question, by graciously thanking the many young Libyans with videocameras who helped document the battles, but she was there for 7 months straight during the revolution!  It was clear that the audience wanted to see the making-of this movie.  War photography is so dangerous many of us have simply been wondering how this film, and the others about violence in the festival, were ever made.  I suppose, you just go.

Narco Cultura - Nov 26

This film documents the drug war in Juarez, where over 3000 murders (or is it 10K?) occurred last year, by riding shotgun with a crime scene investigator named Richard Soto, who finds mutilated bodies abandoned here and there across the city.  This was the only movie I have seen where we were not able to ask questions of the filmmaker.  Director Shaul Schwartz was not killed in the making of the doc, though I am not sure why not because he interviews mexican police, a gang member in prison, and border patrol chiefs on both sides of the border. He even attends a party hosted by the drug lords themselves, though there faces were shadowed, and its not a pretty picture.  

We already knew that the entire criminal justice system is complicit in the drug war, but getting the authorities and gang members themselves to say this on camera is unprecedented, according to a dutch anthropologist, who spoke to the audience after the film.  This man has written a book on Juarez, visiting it 15 times over the past decade, but said he was never allowed to directly quote with attribution any police or gang members, much less record their faces and frank testimony or visit their homes.  Perhaps Schwartz gained access because his unusual angle is to document the culture surrounding the drug war: the song lyrics, TV soaps, teen idolatry, and even children's toys that celebrate the violence so sensationally.

If the investigator is the main character in Juarez, it is the lead singer of a narco-worshiping band named Edgar Quintero who is the main character on the El Paso side of the border.  The singer anxiously begs his wife and manager to let him cross the border for a couple months, so he can meet the narcos and get the slang right.  Eventually he gets his wish, traveling as far south as a meth lab outside of Mexico city, where the son of the cook is wearing one of his band's T-shirts, and it is here, after a show, that a drug lord invites him to sing at his private Quinta, with babes lying around the black bottom pool and piles of weapons on the kitchen table.  I am wondering what the lord said, when he answered the door and found Schwartz, an Israeli previously honored for his war journalism in the Middle East, pointing his camera at him.  Was the sound man asked to wait outside in the open grave? Did he ask them to sign releases?

Alongside the anthropologist, there was also a Dutch music critic who tried to do damage control on gangster rap after the film.  His angle was that this music doesn't incite violence but merely reflects the reality on the street, but at the same time he pointed out that no one minded when they found out the American rapper Rick Ross was actually a prison guard with no street cred at all.  No doubt the drug lords like the music of this singer who flatters the Narco lifestyle, even though they know he is just a kid fromTexas.  But if the reality justifies the rap, how couldn't it matter when the rapper is a phony? I wanted to ask why Dutch people would like Gangster rap, given the absurdly low crime rate (at least compared to the US?) Even in Amsterdam--where drugs, prostitution, and millions of tourists co-mingle--women walk around until late at night, and elderly hobble along from the train station through the red light district on their way home.  In this virtual utopia of civil society, there must be something other than a "reflection of reality" inspiring the fans.

Perhaps the more pointed question would be about the Nacthwacht: Rembrandt's famous painting of the floppy-hatted nightwatch guards who are sculpted in life-sized metal outside my hotel on the Rembrandtplein.  These home boyz are brandishing blunderbusses and swords--all men with the right to bear arms used to go about their daily life prepared for a fight--and they must have also been feared.  They had blood on their hands (and those floppy high-heeled boots too) yet not just the Dutch, all tourists fantasize that the Nachtwacht were simply protecting us with their power to do violence.  Is it so different from the mexican youth of Juarez, who fantasize about the powerful men who run the protection racket in Narco culture?  

Dutch and European history more generally is rife with historical periods much more bloody than the drug war in Juarez Mexico.  In the Golden Age the Dutch invented central banking, the stock market and the first multinational corporation, with their East India Corporation--and it was no walk in the park to be pressed into service on a vessel, or colonized in Indonesia, to say nothing of the religious wars, rebellion against Spain, naval wars with the Portuguese, etc..  How did Holland ever turn itself into such a peace-loving, coalition-building, well-regulated society?  Couldn't Mexico?

Right now the options are bad.  Better to live two years as a man, than twenty years as a donkey…this was the translation of a mexican saying the dutch anthropologist quoted to explain why they would rather do coke, fuck bitches and kill with impunity than work for almost nothing in the NAFTA sweatshops down there. Who wouldn't?

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