Don't miss my review of Spanish director Carlos Saura's latest film, Fados, about the genre of Portuguese music fado whose origins come from 19th century Lisbon's working class port-side neighborhoods. The music has undergone several adaptations over the 20th century, most notably the difficult assimilation of influences brought by immigrants from Portugal's American colonies, and occasional incorporation into the ghettoizing category of "World Music." Rather than smooth over these and other tensions, Saura presents the music in a very stripped studio landscape of strong warm colors and monumental mirrors. Rather than using interviews and archival footage, the story emerges from the music itself. Keep reading about Fados in my full review.
Showing posts with label Documentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Documentary. Show all posts
Fados
Don't miss my review of Spanish director Carlos Saura's latest film, Fados, about the genre of Portuguese music fado whose origins come from 19th century Lisbon's working class port-side neighborhoods. The music has undergone several adaptations over the 20th century, most notably the difficult assimilation of influences brought by immigrants from Portugal's American colonies, and occasional incorporation into the ghettoizing category of "World Music." Rather than smooth over these and other tensions, Saura presents the music in a very stripped studio landscape of strong warm colors and monumental mirrors. Rather than using interviews and archival footage, the story emerges from the music itself. Keep reading about Fados in my full review.
Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema
Directed by Todd McCarthy
A film lover's tribute to a film lover that will likely only keep the interest of film lovers, Variety critic Todd McCarthy's documentary Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema is particularly memorable for the amazing lineup of directors who weigh in on the titular movie buff's career. It's also a kind of wet dream for devout film fans everywhere: What movie buff wouldn't want to go from critic to art house programer to new director champion to Cannes emperor and Asian New Wave patron?
For all the stylish cinema its subject facilitated, there's not much style to recommend McCarthy's film, unless one counts the jumpy editing rhythms during its interviews as a nod to the French New Wave. After all, the first of Rissient's many contributions to film history was as assistant director on Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Rissient's subsequent achievements are related by beneficiaries of his eye for talent like Sydney Pollack, Jerry Schatzberg, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Jane Campion and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Meanwhile, McCarthy accompanies Rissient to his small hometown in the French countryside, where the globetrotting movie industry chameleon discusses regional history with picture-perfect little old French ladies.
Rissient's charm and passion for film are self-evident, particularly when he tells industry anecdotes. One story about trying to keep an aging, boozing John Ford dry during a visit to Paris is especially memorable. It speaks to his many close relationships with film legends and the friendly, personal way he could still interact with them, all the while stoking his fan-boy adoration.
Rissient emerges as a benevolent patron of cinema. First as a discoverer of overlooked classical Hollywood gems, then as a promoter of American independent cinema in the 60s and 70s, and thereafter dedicated to the development of Asian art cinema. At moments, the absence of counter-arguments looms large. Did Rissient ever pull strings against a director he didn't like? Also, fairly late in McCarthy's film several friends chuckle that film and women are Rissient's two great passions, "especially young Asian women." It's an uneasy, potentially creepy moment the film quickly speeds along from, on to the opening of a cinema named for the aging Frenchman.
Old but far from retired, Rissient tries to offer McCarthy some closing remarks, only to be interrupted by his interminably ringing cell phone. He takes the call, and we're left having discovered one of the most independent cogs in the international movie machine, one that's still turning out of sheer passion.
A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.
A film lover's tribute to a film lover that will likely only keep the interest of film lovers, Variety critic Todd McCarthy's documentary Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema is particularly memorable for the amazing lineup of directors who weigh in on the titular movie buff's career. It's also a kind of wet dream for devout film fans everywhere: What movie buff wouldn't want to go from critic to art house programer to new director champion to Cannes emperor and Asian New Wave patron?For all the stylish cinema its subject facilitated, there's not much style to recommend McCarthy's film, unless one counts the jumpy editing rhythms during its interviews as a nod to the French New Wave. After all, the first of Rissient's many contributions to film history was as assistant director on Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Rissient's subsequent achievements are related by beneficiaries of his eye for talent like Sydney Pollack, Jerry Schatzberg, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Jane Campion and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Meanwhile, McCarthy accompanies Rissient to his small hometown in the French countryside, where the globetrotting movie industry chameleon discusses regional history with picture-perfect little old French ladies.
Rissient's charm and passion for film are self-evident, particularly when he tells industry anecdotes. One story about trying to keep an aging, boozing John Ford dry during a visit to Paris is especially memorable. It speaks to his many close relationships with film legends and the friendly, personal way he could still interact with them, all the while stoking his fan-boy adoration.
Rissient emerges as a benevolent patron of cinema. First as a discoverer of overlooked classical Hollywood gems, then as a promoter of American independent cinema in the 60s and 70s, and thereafter dedicated to the development of Asian art cinema. At moments, the absence of counter-arguments looms large. Did Rissient ever pull strings against a director he didn't like? Also, fairly late in McCarthy's film several friends chuckle that film and women are Rissient's two great passions, "especially young Asian women." It's an uneasy, potentially creepy moment the film quickly speeds along from, on to the opening of a cinema named for the aging Frenchman.
Old but far from retired, Rissient tries to offer McCarthy some closing remarks, only to be interrupted by his interminably ringing cell phone. He takes the call, and we're left having discovered one of the most independent cogs in the international movie machine, one that's still turning out of sheer passion.
A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.
All of Us
Directed by Emily Abt
For a doc about a health crisis, All of Us ends up engaging some of our cultures gravest and most endemic ills. Investigating the disproportionate rise of HIV rates among black women (who make up 68% of new HIV cases in the US) leads Abt and her star, Dr. Mehret Mandefro, to grapple with unaddressed racial and gender inequality. What – according to conventional wisdom – is a simple question of sexual education, proves to be a symptom of America’s most enduring humanitarian shortcomings: engrained racism and sexism, and crippling Puritanism.
All of Us explores its Bronx locales like a case study, touching on national biases with terrific rhetorical efficiency. If not for its far-reaching implications for (yes) all of us, the film might be re-titled 3 Women (the Altman reference might not be entirely inappropriate, either). Abt’s camera is embedded with Ethiopian-American Mehret (whose drive and charisma keep All of Us interested even when the director seems stalled between two ideas) and makes its discoveries through her self-reflexive musings and the daily hardships of two patients, Tara and Chevelle.
Abt brushes aside the massive class differences between the three women to uncover their fundamental similarities through point-counterpoint editing and (sometimes uncomfortably) prying questions. Only Mehret is a college grad and HIV-negative, but all three suffer various repercussions of sexual, racial and economic inequity.
If the scenario sounds nightmarish (and it is), Mehret’s trip to Ethiopia near the film’s end reveals how much worse things could be. What's often referred to as a health crisis here is a national crisis there, the unfortunate result of endless humanitarian mistakes and misplaced resources. Again, though, Abt and Mehret make clear how few dissimilarities actually exist between the Ethiopian and American AIDS crises. Sexual equality is still a long way off, resources for sex education are generally funneled towards abstinence programs, and public healthcare is forever underfunded.
With domestic measures consisting literally of ABCs (the Bush Administration’s AIDS prevention doctrine: Abstinence, Being faithful, using Condoms), the battle against HIV seems stalled on the home front. The home, in fact, is where All of Us locates the root of most of its problems. With histories of childhood and sexual abuse, most HIV-positive women find their health at the mercy of African American men’s fractured psyches (absent fathers, incarcerated relatives, abusive partners, etc.).
Mehret’s positing an alternative DEF (Demystifying, Empowerment/Equality, moving Forward) preventive shorthand offers inklings of a solution that should be applied more universally. If the HIV spread that All of Us addresses is being accelerated by culture-wide problems, its solutions for the one can certainly do wonders for the others.
A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.
For a doc about a health crisis, All of Us ends up engaging some of our cultures gravest and most endemic ills. Investigating the disproportionate rise of HIV rates among black women (who make up 68% of new HIV cases in the US) leads Abt and her star, Dr. Mehret Mandefro, to grapple with unaddressed racial and gender inequality. What – according to conventional wisdom – is a simple question of sexual education, proves to be a symptom of America’s most enduring humanitarian shortcomings: engrained racism and sexism, and crippling Puritanism.All of Us explores its Bronx locales like a case study, touching on national biases with terrific rhetorical efficiency. If not for its far-reaching implications for (yes) all of us, the film might be re-titled 3 Women (the Altman reference might not be entirely inappropriate, either). Abt’s camera is embedded with Ethiopian-American Mehret (whose drive and charisma keep All of Us interested even when the director seems stalled between two ideas) and makes its discoveries through her self-reflexive musings and the daily hardships of two patients, Tara and Chevelle.
Abt brushes aside the massive class differences between the three women to uncover their fundamental similarities through point-counterpoint editing and (sometimes uncomfortably) prying questions. Only Mehret is a college grad and HIV-negative, but all three suffer various repercussions of sexual, racial and economic inequity.
If the scenario sounds nightmarish (and it is), Mehret’s trip to Ethiopia near the film’s end reveals how much worse things could be. What's often referred to as a health crisis here is a national crisis there, the unfortunate result of endless humanitarian mistakes and misplaced resources. Again, though, Abt and Mehret make clear how few dissimilarities actually exist between the Ethiopian and American AIDS crises. Sexual equality is still a long way off, resources for sex education are generally funneled towards abstinence programs, and public healthcare is forever underfunded.With domestic measures consisting literally of ABCs (the Bush Administration’s AIDS prevention doctrine: Abstinence, Being faithful, using Condoms), the battle against HIV seems stalled on the home front. The home, in fact, is where All of Us locates the root of most of its problems. With histories of childhood and sexual abuse, most HIV-positive women find their health at the mercy of African American men’s fractured psyches (absent fathers, incarcerated relatives, abusive partners, etc.).
Mehret’s positing an alternative DEF (Demystifying, Empowerment/Equality, moving Forward) preventive shorthand offers inklings of a solution that should be applied more universally. If the HIV spread that All of Us addresses is being accelerated by culture-wide problems, its solutions for the one can certainly do wonders for the others.
A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.
FLOW
Directed by Irena Salina
“Big Oil” and “Big Tobacco” have shared the marquee as star corporate villains for some twenty years, but “Big Water” will upstage them any day now. We’ve been told for years that “sometime in the future wars will be fought over water,” but FLOW (For Love Of Water) suggests those days are already upon us. Technically unremarkable (even ugly in certain low-quality video sections), the immediacy of Irena Salina’s topic overwhelms her film’s aesthetic shortcomings. She intersperses footage of small-scale water fights throughout the world (in Bolivia and India, predictably, but also in South Africa and Michigan) and interviews with corporate interests, grass roots activists and environmental experts. No point in repeating the exhaustive stats and examples laid out throughout FLOW, let’s just say they're very convincing and depressing.
Salina reveals any number of entry points into this problem, water being the world's third largest industry (at $400 billion annually, behind oil and electricity). After mentioning early on that seventy percent of the world’s water is used for agriculture, Salina opts to focus on the ten percent implicated in the bottled and drinking water industries. The choice is justified, particularly as global drinking water shortages become linked to the IMF and global warming, but it’s a shame more time isn’t spent addressing the water war’s implications for the world’s food supply. Presumably this might have side-tracked FLOW into an update on the evil-doings of agri-business multinationals; interesting stuff, but slightly off topic. Plus, there are great docs like The Future of Food around, so that territory is being illuminated by others.
FLOW serves as a galvanizing introduction to a global crisis that will only move further into the media spotlight internationally and domestically. One of the doc’s recurring speakers, Blue Gold co-author Maude Barlow, points out that California’s water supply will run out in less than twenty years. The water wars haven’t begun yet (though isolated battles have), but they’re not far off. That’s terrifying knowledge, but (like water) crucial to our survival.
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
“Big Oil” and “Big Tobacco” have shared the marquee as star corporate villains for some twenty years, but “Big Water” will upstage them any day now. We’ve been told for years that “sometime in the future wars will be fought over water,” but FLOW (For Love Of Water) suggests those days are already upon us. Technically unremarkable (even ugly in certain low-quality video sections), the immediacy of Irena Salina’s topic overwhelms her film’s aesthetic shortcomings. She intersperses footage of small-scale water fights throughout the world (in Bolivia and India, predictably, but also in South Africa and Michigan) and interviews with corporate interests, grass roots activists and environmental experts. No point in repeating the exhaustive stats and examples laid out throughout FLOW, let’s just say they're very convincing and depressing.Salina reveals any number of entry points into this problem, water being the world's third largest industry (at $400 billion annually, behind oil and electricity). After mentioning early on that seventy percent of the world’s water is used for agriculture, Salina opts to focus on the ten percent implicated in the bottled and drinking water industries. The choice is justified, particularly as global drinking water shortages become linked to the IMF and global warming, but it’s a shame more time isn’t spent addressing the water war’s implications for the world’s food supply. Presumably this might have side-tracked FLOW into an update on the evil-doings of agri-business multinationals; interesting stuff, but slightly off topic. Plus, there are great docs like The Future of Food around, so that territory is being illuminated by others.
FLOW serves as a galvanizing introduction to a global crisis that will only move further into the media spotlight internationally and domestically. One of the doc’s recurring speakers, Blue Gold co-author Maude Barlow, points out that California’s water supply will run out in less than twenty years. The water wars haven’t begun yet (though isolated battles have), but they’re not far off. That’s terrifying knowledge, but (like water) crucial to our survival.
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Secrecy
Directed by Peter Galison and Robb Moss
Amidst swirling discontent and suspicions regarding our government's wartime activities (torture, unlawful imprisonment, needless civilian casualties, misinformation, etc.) Peter Galison and Robb Moss could easily have presented a much less even-handed – and thereby less effective – account of the U.S. military and intelligence industries' concealment of information. Secrecy mixes point-counterpoints from government big wigs and various watchdogs (think tanks, journalists, lawyers) and an historical inquiry into the 1952 plane crash that set a false precedent for unilateral government immunity in cases involving sensitive secret information.
Being a film essentially on government and media policy, there's little pertinent archival footage or room for stylish digressions. Accordingly, a series of black-and-white animated interjections by Ruth Lingford add pleasant flurries of dark expressionism to a film so rooted in the dry reality of courtrooms and classified documents. Galison and Moss make great use of these animations – welcome breaks in a film that consists of ninety-nine percent talking heads – and also maximize the rhetorical power of complete silence.
Blank pauses after certain sections let the weight of a statement develop or allow back-logged streams of facts through our overwhelmed brains. As one interviewee notes, for instance, the U.S. government recently spent over $7 billion dollars in one year on matters of secrecy, a budget comparable to an entire cabinet department. We, in essence, have a department of government secrets that – fittingly – we don't know about. Cut to black, pause, contemplate... How Cold War!
Indeed, throughout Secrecy the current degree of information control around terrorism and Gulf War II is repeatedly compared to similar activities during the Cold War. The parallel is drawn for contrast not similarity though, as former head of the Information Security Oversight Office Steve Garfinkel remembers, "We have lost that... the comfort zone of the Cold War." In a time when there's endless information to process and innumerable parties to track, easily drawn lines between us and them seem so deceptively simple.
This is not a simple issue, however, and Secrecy's strength is in laying out opinions from all over the political spectrum and not positing a clear solution. That said, Tom Blanton of George Washington University's National Security Archive does come off better than others, musing in his cheerful drawl that "in the dark, you can get as lost as the people you're trying to hide things from."
Disastrous instances of leaked information make clear that total transparency is not the answer, while unchecked concealment of information is, as one interviewee notes, "profoundly un-American.” Rhetorically sound and powerful, Secrecy makes clear that a secretive government (as ours is, more than ever) needs to be held responsible by someone. As another interviewee concludes grimly, “when things are secret, we don’t have to be responsible.”
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Amidst swirling discontent and suspicions regarding our government's wartime activities (torture, unlawful imprisonment, needless civilian casualties, misinformation, etc.) Peter Galison and Robb Moss could easily have presented a much less even-handed – and thereby less effective – account of the U.S. military and intelligence industries' concealment of information. Secrecy mixes point-counterpoints from government big wigs and various watchdogs (think tanks, journalists, lawyers) and an historical inquiry into the 1952 plane crash that set a false precedent for unilateral government immunity in cases involving sensitive secret information.Being a film essentially on government and media policy, there's little pertinent archival footage or room for stylish digressions. Accordingly, a series of black-and-white animated interjections by Ruth Lingford add pleasant flurries of dark expressionism to a film so rooted in the dry reality of courtrooms and classified documents. Galison and Moss make great use of these animations – welcome breaks in a film that consists of ninety-nine percent talking heads – and also maximize the rhetorical power of complete silence.
Blank pauses after certain sections let the weight of a statement develop or allow back-logged streams of facts through our overwhelmed brains. As one interviewee notes, for instance, the U.S. government recently spent over $7 billion dollars in one year on matters of secrecy, a budget comparable to an entire cabinet department. We, in essence, have a department of government secrets that – fittingly – we don't know about. Cut to black, pause, contemplate... How Cold War!
Indeed, throughout Secrecy the current degree of information control around terrorism and Gulf War II is repeatedly compared to similar activities during the Cold War. The parallel is drawn for contrast not similarity though, as former head of the Information Security Oversight Office Steve Garfinkel remembers, "We have lost that... the comfort zone of the Cold War." In a time when there's endless information to process and innumerable parties to track, easily drawn lines between us and them seem so deceptively simple.This is not a simple issue, however, and Secrecy's strength is in laying out opinions from all over the political spectrum and not positing a clear solution. That said, Tom Blanton of George Washington University's National Security Archive does come off better than others, musing in his cheerful drawl that "in the dark, you can get as lost as the people you're trying to hide things from."
Disastrous instances of leaked information make clear that total transparency is not the answer, while unchecked concealment of information is, as one interviewee notes, "profoundly un-American.” Rhetorically sound and powerful, Secrecy makes clear that a secretive government (as ours is, more than ever) needs to be held responsible by someone. As another interviewee concludes grimly, “when things are secret, we don’t have to be responsible.”
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Trouble the Water
Directed by Tia Lessin, Carl Deal
Trouble the Water re-energizes the DIY aesthetic adopted in the name of "realism" for big-budget escapism like Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead, with two important exceptions. Firstly it's non-fiction, a view of an impossibly immense disaster from the perspective of those whose lives Hurricane Katrina most radically affected. Secondly (more importantly?) its main characters are antitheses to the depthless, target market-researched twenty-somethings of those supernatural disaster films.
Introduced as the filmmakers met them while attempting an entirely different Katrina doc, Kim and Scott Roberts command Trouble the Water's narrative long after the waters recede from their Ninth Ward neighborhood – unlike those blockbuster protags, their lives extend beyond their films' first and last monster attacks. Kim is particularly charismatic, musing in her enchanting New Orleans accent, "maybe I'm gon’ sell it to some white people" while knowingly collecting footage of her block before the storm. Trees swaying in the gathering winds haven't spelled doom so plainly since Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.
Beyond the opener's shocking storm footage, Trouble the Water keeps its disaster voyeurism minimal (national news footage serves mostly as depressing propagandistic counterpoint to lived reality) focusing instead on its main characters' relentless optimism. Kim, Scott and another Katrina refugee Brian pack enough charm and personal redemption to make the shift in scope entirely successful. Brian, a recovering addict, is strikingly forthcoming with forgiveness, thanking indifferent and ineffectual would-be re-builders stationed in and around the Ninth Ward.
Meanwhile, Kim's discovery of her old rap EP and impromptu performance is an incredibly eloquent scene, proving the survival of New Orleans' rich vernacular culture despite the indifferent city government's blind promotion of postcard-ready tourism as a means to top-down reconstruction. If T.I. and Lil Wayne hadn't already convinced you that Southern rap is an art form, Kim's music (recorded under the name Black Kold Madina) certainly will. The notion of music and hardship providing a motor and fuel for personal re-making (Kim and Scott were both drug dealers before Katrina) recalls Hustle and Flow with more empowering sexual politics.
Kim's impassioned rap also serves as a shorthand articulation of Trouble the Water's complete immersion in America's frequently ignored class issues. As Scott states casually while walking in his mud-caked neighborhood, "the hood's always last to be fixed." Following the film's bottom-up aesthetics though, it makes sense that Kim and Scott will have to do the fixing themselves. At film's end their journey is just beginning, with Kim pouring herself completely into her rap career, while Scott works at rebuilding homes in New Orleans. It's not the cathartic finale of your average monster movie, but it's about the happiest conclusion to be extracted from this never-ending disaster scenario.
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Trouble the Water re-energizes the DIY aesthetic adopted in the name of "realism" for big-budget escapism like Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead, with two important exceptions. Firstly it's non-fiction, a view of an impossibly immense disaster from the perspective of those whose lives Hurricane Katrina most radically affected. Secondly (more importantly?) its main characters are antitheses to the depthless, target market-researched twenty-somethings of those supernatural disaster films.Introduced as the filmmakers met them while attempting an entirely different Katrina doc, Kim and Scott Roberts command Trouble the Water's narrative long after the waters recede from their Ninth Ward neighborhood – unlike those blockbuster protags, their lives extend beyond their films' first and last monster attacks. Kim is particularly charismatic, musing in her enchanting New Orleans accent, "maybe I'm gon’ sell it to some white people" while knowingly collecting footage of her block before the storm. Trees swaying in the gathering winds haven't spelled doom so plainly since Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.
Beyond the opener's shocking storm footage, Trouble the Water keeps its disaster voyeurism minimal (national news footage serves mostly as depressing propagandistic counterpoint to lived reality) focusing instead on its main characters' relentless optimism. Kim, Scott and another Katrina refugee Brian pack enough charm and personal redemption to make the shift in scope entirely successful. Brian, a recovering addict, is strikingly forthcoming with forgiveness, thanking indifferent and ineffectual would-be re-builders stationed in and around the Ninth Ward.
Meanwhile, Kim's discovery of her old rap EP and impromptu performance is an incredibly eloquent scene, proving the survival of New Orleans' rich vernacular culture despite the indifferent city government's blind promotion of postcard-ready tourism as a means to top-down reconstruction. If T.I. and Lil Wayne hadn't already convinced you that Southern rap is an art form, Kim's music (recorded under the name Black Kold Madina) certainly will. The notion of music and hardship providing a motor and fuel for personal re-making (Kim and Scott were both drug dealers before Katrina) recalls Hustle and Flow with more empowering sexual politics.Kim's impassioned rap also serves as a shorthand articulation of Trouble the Water's complete immersion in America's frequently ignored class issues. As Scott states casually while walking in his mud-caked neighborhood, "the hood's always last to be fixed." Following the film's bottom-up aesthetics though, it makes sense that Kim and Scott will have to do the fixing themselves. At film's end their journey is just beginning, with Kim pouring herself completely into her rap career, while Scott works at rebuilding homes in New Orleans. It's not the cathartic finale of your average monster movie, but it's about the happiest conclusion to be extracted from this never-ending disaster scenario.
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Richard Serra: Thinking on Your Feet
Directed by Maria Anna Tappeiner
For those who've experienced Serra's environmental iron sculptures this doc is fascinating, with the sculptor (and college buddy Philip Glass) offering very intelligent commentary on his career and process-driven method. In the absence of the twisting, tapering rust-colored structures Tappeiner's gliding, panning camera provides a good experiential substitute for works that really need to be seen and walked through in person to be understood. For those less familiar with Serra's work, this might be a dull artist doc – not to be confused with an artist biopic, since very little (well, basically nothing) of Serra's personal life ends up onscreen. Does this verbose San Franciscan have a partner or a family (or friends, for that matter), or does he just fly into museums and steel mills like that other man of steel, Superman, then disappear until the next time a foreman needs to consult one of his graphite sketches to figure out where to put a 7-ton metal slab?
In sharp distinction from Louise Bourgeois, whose recent biopic at Film Forum was considerably more interesting than this film, Serra's art contains little of his own experience and therefore the omission of his personal life is somewhat justified. That said, it's this lack of a more candid connection in favor of modernist artspeak that keeps Thinking on Your Feet from transcending the category of DVD-bound artist documentaries into something more engaging. Visually, meanwhile, the crisp imagery of Serra's installations looks terrific on the big screen, and repeated visits to the German steel mill where his massive sheets are formed are the stuff of sci-fi space docks and alien torture chambers. You practically expect to see Han Solo, cast in metal, propped up against a wall somewhere. Glowing, molten metal, steamy cooling contraptions and hulking steel-bending mechanisms prove nearly as poetic as the minimalist installations they churn out for Serra. Strange industrial spaces and modernist musings aside, those not already interested in Serra's work might have a hard time getting into this exploration of his artistic process.
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
For those who've experienced Serra's environmental iron sculptures this doc is fascinating, with the sculptor (and college buddy Philip Glass) offering very intelligent commentary on his career and process-driven method. In the absence of the twisting, tapering rust-colored structures Tappeiner's gliding, panning camera provides a good experiential substitute for works that really need to be seen and walked through in person to be understood. For those less familiar with Serra's work, this might be a dull artist doc – not to be confused with an artist biopic, since very little (well, basically nothing) of Serra's personal life ends up onscreen. Does this verbose San Franciscan have a partner or a family (or friends, for that matter), or does he just fly into museums and steel mills like that other man of steel, Superman, then disappear until the next time a foreman needs to consult one of his graphite sketches to figure out where to put a 7-ton metal slab?
In sharp distinction from Louise Bourgeois, whose recent biopic at Film Forum was considerably more interesting than this film, Serra's art contains little of his own experience and therefore the omission of his personal life is somewhat justified. That said, it's this lack of a more candid connection in favor of modernist artspeak that keeps Thinking on Your Feet from transcending the category of DVD-bound artist documentaries into something more engaging. Visually, meanwhile, the crisp imagery of Serra's installations looks terrific on the big screen, and repeated visits to the German steel mill where his massive sheets are formed are the stuff of sci-fi space docks and alien torture chambers. You practically expect to see Han Solo, cast in metal, propped up against a wall somewhere. Glowing, molten metal, steamy cooling contraptions and hulking steel-bending mechanisms prove nearly as poetic as the minimalist installations they churn out for Serra. Strange industrial spaces and modernist musings aside, those not already interested in Serra's work might have a hard time getting into this exploration of his artistic process.
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Patti Smith: Dream of Life
Directed by Steven Sebring
Listening to Patti Smith’s music or watching footage of her raw, explosive performances (most of which is withheld until the second half of this documentary), you’d doubt her likeliness to be quoting William Blake backstage or musing on the differences between Picasso and Pollock while painting in her studio. Best known for her music and its part in developing American punk rock, poetry comes off as Smith’s motivating passion (Sebring accompanies her to the gravesites of Blake, Shelley and Ginsberg).
Outside performances and painting, Smith’s verbose honesty, warmth and shyness come in surprising contrast to her raging stage persona. Sebring quietly crafts his very effective portrait with this psychological profile taking precedence over stargazing. Smith’s only voice-over is a deadpan timeline of her life recited during the opening minutes that comes off as practically sarcastic, a parody of the obligatory conventions of the artist biopic. In the end, we don’t learn the exhaustive details of Smith’s career or even her personal biography, but anybody seeing this film will know exactly how to speak to her should they meet her one day at a poetry reading.
In fact, for making his feature-length debut Sebring seems very confident, foregoing any thesis-pushing structure and opting for an expressively edited, casually beautiful portrait excised from footage shot following Smith for over a decade (lots of crispy black and white scenes, and fuzzy, meditative cut-aways of landscapes gliding past in a colorful blur). The result is not the crash course – detailing Smith’s musical career and its significance – some unfamiliar viewers might be hoping for. As the title indicates, this is a film about the entire life of an enigmatic woman who writes music and poetry, sings, paints, raises children, has living parents and a deceased husband, and is close friends with some of the most significant members of America’s recent modernisms.
A slightly awkward living room acoustic jam session with Sam Sheppard is more interesting and revealing than any of Smith’s concert footage. Elsewhere, surprising screentime is devoted to poring over the items strewn about Smith’s home, slow pans fetishizing her various possessions as if searching for some hidden clue to her psyche hidden among browned pages and rumpled baby clothes. In such scenes she also becomes a kind of time capsule for a recent moment of bustling cultural vitality and possibility, the magically remembered 70s and 80s whose arts were exciting and whose New York was gritty (scenes at the Chelsea Hotel or CBGB stroke a kind of collective nostalgia).
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Listening to Patti Smith’s music or watching footage of her raw, explosive performances (most of which is withheld until the second half of this documentary), you’d doubt her likeliness to be quoting William Blake backstage or musing on the differences between Picasso and Pollock while painting in her studio. Best known for her music and its part in developing American punk rock, poetry comes off as Smith’s motivating passion (Sebring accompanies her to the gravesites of Blake, Shelley and Ginsberg).
Outside performances and painting, Smith’s verbose honesty, warmth and shyness come in surprising contrast to her raging stage persona. Sebring quietly crafts his very effective portrait with this psychological profile taking precedence over stargazing. Smith’s only voice-over is a deadpan timeline of her life recited during the opening minutes that comes off as practically sarcastic, a parody of the obligatory conventions of the artist biopic. In the end, we don’t learn the exhaustive details of Smith’s career or even her personal biography, but anybody seeing this film will know exactly how to speak to her should they meet her one day at a poetry reading.
In fact, for making his feature-length debut Sebring seems very confident, foregoing any thesis-pushing structure and opting for an expressively edited, casually beautiful portrait excised from footage shot following Smith for over a decade (lots of crispy black and white scenes, and fuzzy, meditative cut-aways of landscapes gliding past in a colorful blur). The result is not the crash course – detailing Smith’s musical career and its significance – some unfamiliar viewers might be hoping for. As the title indicates, this is a film about the entire life of an enigmatic woman who writes music and poetry, sings, paints, raises children, has living parents and a deceased husband, and is close friends with some of the most significant members of America’s recent modernisms.
A slightly awkward living room acoustic jam session with Sam Sheppard is more interesting and revealing than any of Smith’s concert footage. Elsewhere, surprising screentime is devoted to poring over the items strewn about Smith’s home, slow pans fetishizing her various possessions as if searching for some hidden clue to her psyche hidden among browned pages and rumpled baby clothes. In such scenes she also becomes a kind of time capsule for a recent moment of bustling cultural vitality and possibility, the magically remembered 70s and 80s whose arts were exciting and whose New York was gritty (scenes at the Chelsea Hotel or CBGB stroke a kind of collective nostalgia).
A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Man On Wire
Directed by James Marsh
Thankfully – conspicuously – 9/11 is never mentioned in this fanciful recounting of French tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s daring and illegal skywalk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. Rather, well-crafted assemblages of interviews, archival materials and whimsically stylized re-enactments restore a much-needed dash of naiveté and magic to a dreamy, ugly building whose mythology is otherwise shrouded in darkness.
Man on Wire follows a quirky, fated logic of poetic collision, wherein Petit and the World Trade Center start off at a vast distance – briefly acquainted through a photo spread in Paris Match – and grow gradually closer and more familiar in the build-up to the big day. Indeed, there’s a sort of first date anticipatory tension not unlike the planning phases of your average heist movie (say, Ocean’s 11 or even Entrapment). The pieces come together, Petit trains, crewmembers on both sides of the Atlantic join and disband, there are arguments and moments of realization, and all the while the towers grow into their hideous, clunky frames.
The narrative is a wonderfully edited and engaging mix of loquacious French aesthetes rhapsodizing over the poetic beauty and daring of the act, more monosyllabic Americans justifying their participation, and hilariously wacky re-enactments. “The coup” (as the group called the event during planning) happens in a cheesy 70s crime-saga aesthetic, with hideous broad-collared shirts, massively ugly suits and simply massive sideburns. Scenes of Petit’s early acrobatics development, meanwhile, are rendered in the wacky silent film style of Buster Keaton movies. The influence of Guy Maddin’s period-popping style is in there somewhere.
Coordinating the coup is so chaotic and grueling for perpetrators and spectators alike that when Petit finally steps onto the wire everything stops and the next few minutes are pure bliss. In the same moment, all of Man on Wire’s potent analogies come to fruition. Walking weightlessly, defiantly between the two-pronged epitome of mindless profit-driven innovation, Petit and his team of dreamers and dropouts perform the beautiful triumph of the imaginative underdog over rigid bureaucracy, the artist over the office worker, maybe even of the Frenchman over Americans.
Images courtesy Jean-Louis Blondeau/Polaris Images, ©2008.
This review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.
Thankfully – conspicuously – 9/11 is never mentioned in this fanciful recounting of French tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s daring and illegal skywalk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. Rather, well-crafted assemblages of interviews, archival materials and whimsically stylized re-enactments restore a much-needed dash of naiveté and magic to a dreamy, ugly building whose mythology is otherwise shrouded in darkness.Man on Wire follows a quirky, fated logic of poetic collision, wherein Petit and the World Trade Center start off at a vast distance – briefly acquainted through a photo spread in Paris Match – and grow gradually closer and more familiar in the build-up to the big day. Indeed, there’s a sort of first date anticipatory tension not unlike the planning phases of your average heist movie (say, Ocean’s 11 or even Entrapment). The pieces come together, Petit trains, crewmembers on both sides of the Atlantic join and disband, there are arguments and moments of realization, and all the while the towers grow into their hideous, clunky frames.
The narrative is a wonderfully edited and engaging mix of loquacious French aesthetes rhapsodizing over the poetic beauty and daring of the act, more monosyllabic Americans justifying their participation, and hilariously wacky re-enactments. “The coup” (as the group called the event during planning) happens in a cheesy 70s crime-saga aesthetic, with hideous broad-collared shirts, massively ugly suits and simply massive sideburns. Scenes of Petit’s early acrobatics development, meanwhile, are rendered in the wacky silent film style of Buster Keaton movies. The influence of Guy Maddin’s period-popping style is in there somewhere.Coordinating the coup is so chaotic and grueling for perpetrators and spectators alike that when Petit finally steps onto the wire everything stops and the next few minutes are pure bliss. In the same moment, all of Man on Wire’s potent analogies come to fruition. Walking weightlessly, defiantly between the two-pronged epitome of mindless profit-driven innovation, Petit and his team of dreamers and dropouts perform the beautiful triumph of the imaginative underdog over rigid bureaucracy, the artist over the office worker, maybe even of the Frenchman over Americans.
Images courtesy Jean-Louis Blondeau/Polaris Images, ©2008.
This review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.
Very Young Girls
Directed by David Schisgall
This horrifying portrait of a late capitalist society trafficking its citizens’ flesh like drugs (an analogy developed throughout the film) is a hard-line Marxist’s wet dream. And like anyone else seeing Very Young Girls, the Marxist would do well to come equipped with a box of tissues. The first half of this New York City sex trade expose spirals like one of those humanitarian documentaries where things just keep getting worse. Arrogant pimps film their conquests, dreaming of a reality TV series; indifferent cops keep their distance – behind bullet-proof glass – from a desperate mother hoping to rescue her daughter; courts contemplate sending underage sex workers to jail; and the spirited young women at the center juggle extremely adult situations while still in their early teens (the average age of entry into the U.S. sex trade, we’re told, is 13).
Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom (just mostly). GEMS (Girls Education and Mentoring Services), a perpetually under-funded organization that helps redirect young women in the sex trade towards safer, long-term careers and stable lives, dominates the film’s second half. Therein, things resemble a kind of terrifying blend of rehab and Survivor-style reality TV. Some women flourish, get jobs, reconnect with their families, start their own, and resist the destructive if comforting allure of returning to their pimps. Others, like Ebony and Carolina (as misfortune would have it, this doc’s most charismatic and endearing subjects), waver on the line between the frugal GEMS safe house, and the relative luxuries of “the life” and its sweet-talking father-lover-employer figures.
Certainly, Very Young Girls will speak to film-going Marxists’ desire for stories about how the selling of lives and bodies has become part of normal life. Underneath its broad ideological implications though, this film is intensely humanist, concerned less with commodified bodies than with people for whom “normal life” is a beautiful if distant dream.
This horrifying portrait of a late capitalist society trafficking its citizens’ flesh like drugs (an analogy developed throughout the film) is a hard-line Marxist’s wet dream. And like anyone else seeing Very Young Girls, the Marxist would do well to come equipped with a box of tissues. The first half of this New York City sex trade expose spirals like one of those humanitarian documentaries where things just keep getting worse. Arrogant pimps film their conquests, dreaming of a reality TV series; indifferent cops keep their distance – behind bullet-proof glass – from a desperate mother hoping to rescue her daughter; courts contemplate sending underage sex workers to jail; and the spirited young women at the center juggle extremely adult situations while still in their early teens (the average age of entry into the U.S. sex trade, we’re told, is 13).
Thankfully, it’s not all doom and gloom (just mostly). GEMS (Girls Education and Mentoring Services), a perpetually under-funded organization that helps redirect young women in the sex trade towards safer, long-term careers and stable lives, dominates the film’s second half. Therein, things resemble a kind of terrifying blend of rehab and Survivor-style reality TV. Some women flourish, get jobs, reconnect with their families, start their own, and resist the destructive if comforting allure of returning to their pimps. Others, like Ebony and Carolina (as misfortune would have it, this doc’s most charismatic and endearing subjects), waver on the line between the frugal GEMS safe house, and the relative luxuries of “the life” and its sweet-talking father-lover-employer figures.
Certainly, Very Young Girls will speak to film-going Marxists’ desire for stories about how the selling of lives and bodies has become part of normal life. Underneath its broad ideological implications though, this film is intensely humanist, concerned less with commodified bodies than with people for whom “normal life” is a beautiful if distant dream.
A similar review appears in The L Magazine.
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine
Directed by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach
A fiery, well-read mind in a small, wrinkly vessel – and, occasionally, a hot pink fake fur coat – Louise Bourgeois muses knowingly: “My emotions are completely inappropriate to my size.” Appropriately then, her most famous artworks are monumental symbols of melancholy, nostalgia and trauma, a kind of therapy worked through on a massive scale. The stroke of genius in Marion Cajori (who died in 2006 while the film was still being edited) and Amei Wallach’s documentary is filming Bourgeois’ artworks in a way that conveys their imposing emotive presence. In the opening scene their camera approaches a circular room-sized installation in a series of curving, see-sawing dolly shots that echo the outer walls of the piece. Later, a dizzying spinning shot taken from beneath one of Bourgeois’ iconic works – a giant spider sculpture named after her mother – captures the dark, primal fascination these creepy and calming creatures evoke. In such moments, Cajori and Wallach’s long-titled film extends the effects of Bourgeois’ artworks as much as it prods their sources.
In wordy yet accessible interviews – delivered in verbose English that still bares the charming edge of a French accent and, occasionally, lapses into more flowing digressions spoken in her native language – Bourgeois discusses formative factors like her childhood in war-scarred France, her father’s affair with her governess and her experiences as a female artist, but refuses to endorse strict historical, psychoanalytic or gendered interpretations. She concedes that her work is about pleasure and pain – or, more precisely, the pleasure of overcoming her pain – but why pain? “Why pain? Because it’s obvious,” she tells an interviewer matter-of-factly. “Okay, that’s it. Sorry to say it’s obvious, but you have to work a little yourself.” This funny moment encapsulates why Bourgeois is a terrific artist and thrilling documentary subject. She’s tiny, and yet behind her small, coiling frame lurks the immense form of her experiences and achievements, a life that has seen most of our modern era from the fairly fascinating vantage point of an outsider at the highest reaches of the art world. It also speaks to a balance of intellect, fame and modesty, a charming smile that deflects the flattery of being addressed as a know-it-all, then volleys a pandering question with a quizzical deadpan.
Cajori and Wallach’s film, here, gets at the heart of what makes Bourgeois a great artist (indeed, what makes anyone a great artist): her work reveals as much about her as our reactions to it reveal about us. This point is exemplified later, when art activists The Guerilla Girls claim Bourgeois (against her stated non-affiliation with feminism) as one of their great successes in the crusade to forge a more inclusive art community in New York. In the early 90s, her work was added to an otherwise all-male exhibition at the Guggenheim after sustained protests organized by the Guerilla Girls. How poetically just, then, that this film should be released over a decade later in conjunction with a major retrospective of Bourgeois’ work at the very same museum (opening June 27).
Perhaps most striking, in the end, is this divergence between Bourgeois’ diminutive stature and the thematic and material size of her oeuvre. The inklings of her artistic and personal sensitivity are scrawled in the wrinkles around her eyes, her grateful smiles and disappointed grimaces, but they take on so many rich forms in her works – a veritable alphabet of spiders, cells, mirrors, dolls, sculptures, stones and homes. Bourgeois’ lasting strength is her ability to make this alphabet legible to her audience, something personal but – with a little work – functional for her public. With a lot of work (they began shooting in 1993), Cajori and Wallach’s film documents and extends the reach of Bourgeois’ art.
A similar version of this review appears in the June 18 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.
A fiery, well-read mind in a small, wrinkly vessel – and, occasionally, a hot pink fake fur coat – Louise Bourgeois muses knowingly: “My emotions are completely inappropriate to my size.” Appropriately then, her most famous artworks are monumental symbols of melancholy, nostalgia and trauma, a kind of therapy worked through on a massive scale. The stroke of genius in Marion Cajori (who died in 2006 while the film was still being edited) and Amei Wallach’s documentary is filming Bourgeois’ artworks in a way that conveys their imposing emotive presence. In the opening scene their camera approaches a circular room-sized installation in a series of curving, see-sawing dolly shots that echo the outer walls of the piece. Later, a dizzying spinning shot taken from beneath one of Bourgeois’ iconic works – a giant spider sculpture named after her mother – captures the dark, primal fascination these creepy and calming creatures evoke. In such moments, Cajori and Wallach’s long-titled film extends the effects of Bourgeois’ artworks as much as it prods their sources.In wordy yet accessible interviews – delivered in verbose English that still bares the charming edge of a French accent and, occasionally, lapses into more flowing digressions spoken in her native language – Bourgeois discusses formative factors like her childhood in war-scarred France, her father’s affair with her governess and her experiences as a female artist, but refuses to endorse strict historical, psychoanalytic or gendered interpretations. She concedes that her work is about pleasure and pain – or, more precisely, the pleasure of overcoming her pain – but why pain? “Why pain? Because it’s obvious,” she tells an interviewer matter-of-factly. “Okay, that’s it. Sorry to say it’s obvious, but you have to work a little yourself.” This funny moment encapsulates why Bourgeois is a terrific artist and thrilling documentary subject. She’s tiny, and yet behind her small, coiling frame lurks the immense form of her experiences and achievements, a life that has seen most of our modern era from the fairly fascinating vantage point of an outsider at the highest reaches of the art world. It also speaks to a balance of intellect, fame and modesty, a charming smile that deflects the flattery of being addressed as a know-it-all, then volleys a pandering question with a quizzical deadpan.
Cajori and Wallach’s film, here, gets at the heart of what makes Bourgeois a great artist (indeed, what makes anyone a great artist): her work reveals as much about her as our reactions to it reveal about us. This point is exemplified later, when art activists The Guerilla Girls claim Bourgeois (against her stated non-affiliation with feminism) as one of their great successes in the crusade to forge a more inclusive art community in New York. In the early 90s, her work was added to an otherwise all-male exhibition at the Guggenheim after sustained protests organized by the Guerilla Girls. How poetically just, then, that this film should be released over a decade later in conjunction with a major retrospective of Bourgeois’ work at the very same museum (opening June 27).
Perhaps most striking, in the end, is this divergence between Bourgeois’ diminutive stature and the thematic and material size of her oeuvre. The inklings of her artistic and personal sensitivity are scrawled in the wrinkles around her eyes, her grateful smiles and disappointed grimaces, but they take on so many rich forms in her works – a veritable alphabet of spiders, cells, mirrors, dolls, sculptures, stones and homes. Bourgeois’ lasting strength is her ability to make this alphabet legible to her audience, something personal but – with a little work – functional for her public. With a lot of work (they began shooting in 1993), Cajori and Wallach’s film documents and extends the reach of Bourgeois’ art.
A similar version of this review appears in the June 18 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.
Dreams With Sharp Teeth
Directed by Erik Nelson
After writers (the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd) retrieved genre filmmakers (Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock, etc) from the dust heap of cinema, how fitting that movies should reciprocate by rescuing genre writers from literature’s recycling bin. With Philip K. Dick now firmly canonized (thanks in no small part to Blade Runner), long-time Werner Herzog-collaborator Nelson turns our attentions to the somewhat-obscure yet searing bright Harlan Ellison. An incredibly intelligent, opinionated, and funny graying man with a scrappy work ethic, Ellison (and longtime friend Robin Williams) electrifies this otherwise utilitarian documentary – bizarre green screen-backed excerpt-readings notwithstanding. Intentionally or not, you’re likely to leave with an intense desire to read a collection of Ellison’s short stories, but only vague recollections of the movie that sparked your interest.
Constantine’s Sword
Directed by Oren Jacoby
This review appears in the April 16 issue of The L Magazine.
Based on James Carroll’s book of the same title, he and Jacoby scour Europe and North America detailing the 1700-year old tradition (begun by Constantine) of bending Christian myths to justify killing. The materials cohere very persuasively (and prettily), creating a strong argument from testimony by religious scholars, local historians, military officials, politicians, and, most creepily, evangelists. The film hits hardest when Carroll reveals the fictions behind so many Christian ‘truths,’ and exposes the evangelizing of today’s U.S. military. (NR, 1:36)
This review appears in the April 16 issue of The L Magazine.
Oh Danny Boy
Factory and family search for forgotten filmmaker
Fortunately the very mature Esther B. Robinson, Danny’s niece, has put his story on the screen in A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory. The film is unexpectedly restrained, shedding light on the legacy of Warhol’s Factory through interviews with surviving members including Brigid Berlin, John Cale of the Velvet Underground, Danny Fields, Paul Morrisey and Chuck Wein among others. These run alongside interviews with Williams and Robinson’s relatives, providing the personal family narrative that accompanies the much-researched Factory stories. Though several interviewees expose themselves to easy punches – particularly Morrisey – Robinson holds back, leaving the inconsistent stories and self-interested credit-snatching uninvestigated. In doing so, ex-Factory members keep more dignity than the would-be director of A Flight towards the Sun might have left them with. Their scars and insecurities, still visible forty years on, come off as humanizing foibles rather than demonizing vices. That said, we simultaneously envy the hell out of them for having been there then, while we’re stuck experiencing the Factory life vicariously now.
The film’s most exciting glimpses into that lifestyle come with A Walk into the Sea’s major payoff, Danny’s recently-recovered films, which convey some of the period’s exuberance that surviving members have difficulty articulating. These clips from Danny’s films give a sense of who the young man was more effectively than any Factory- or family-member’s testimony, a fact of which Robinson seems well aware.
NYPress: Seeing the quality of Danny’s work, was it tempting to make a film that built him up into a tragic genius type of figure?
Robinson: That was obviously a lure. Danny’s a talented filmmaker, but I didn’t want to push Danny as a genius. I think he’s a really talented kid who made movies for five months when he was 26 years old. And he made really beautiful movies, but history will tell us where they fit, and that won’t be my job.
With the heavy-handedness of many contemporary documentaries, why did you choose to tell Danny’s story with so much restraint?
There are people who object to that in my film, saying “it should be meaner,” or “we need to know this…” and often my question to these people is: “Do you understand these different things?” And they understand all of it. I believe that there is a joy in knowing something and allowing the person that you know it about to both keep their dignity and reveal it to you, like a present. You are given a gift as a filmmaker and how you choose to treat that power exchange is an individual choice.
Given the enormous body of work on the Warhol Fatory that this film adds to, how did you want to set yourself apart?
It’s like there’s two giant tributaries like rushing rivers, and it’s either “Andy Warhol was a genius,” or “Andy Warhol is the man who killed Edie Segwick,” and all the little rivers end up getting sucked in. I needed the movie to be intimate and on a human scale, and I feel like a lot of artifacts, or the books or the movies [on the Factory], almost operate on a mythic or iconic scale. I was really cognizant about not wanting that. What you end up seeing then is this kind of intimacy that allows you to really understand what happened in this way that’s really different from a lot of the other work.
How did you try to approach those familiar issues surrounding Warhol and the Factory differently in light of all that other material?
I feel that by not making a movie about Andy Warhol, I made a really good movie about Andy Warhol. Because it’s intimate, and you may not know what happened in the fact by fact way, but when you hear everyone talk and you see how the pressures of that experience has formed each of them in a similar way, you know what happened. I came to love the idea of all these kids coming together, and again not as icons, but as kids, as being twenty in New York City in 1965: you’re so hot, you’re never gonna be so hot again, you’re getting laid whenever you want, you’re taking drugs, you don’t even understand that drugs are bad yet because it’s the sixties and people are really naïve and doctors are giving them to you. That joyfulness, I wanted some of that to be in my movie. Because Danny’s films have that joy, they’re this window in into this thing, and most of the people I interviewed don’t remember being happy, just because there was so much unhappiness that followed.
Why is your film, with regards to Danny’s disappearance, more contemplative than investigative?
I never needed to know what happened to Danny. I wanted the audience to see each of the possibilities, so my goal was less to excise than to make sure that all the component parts that I felt came into play were clear. The beauty for me was always that at the end of the day we have [Danny’s] movies. I don’t have to make a case. And that’s why there’s so much of Danny’s films in the film. When you see Danny’s eye and you see how he makes films, he’s most articulate when he’s working in his world, and he speaks for himself.
A similar version of this review and interview appears in the December 12 issue of the New York Press, which can be seen here.Manufacturing China: new views of new landscapes
The film Manufactured Landscapes follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynksy around
The film’s montage focuses on manufactured goods, connecting the products’ sites of creation and destruction. The film begins, therefore, with a hypnotizing five minute-long tracking shot through an assembly plant for household electrical goods. The last work station we see is the final step in the production of electronic irons. Director Jennifer Baichwal then transplants us to a metal scrap yard where people gather recyclable metals. Our first image of this metallic moonscape is the bottom of an electronic iron. Baichwal immediately places Western viewers in the film because we are the connection linking the Chinese manufactories and landfills. Between the symbolic births and deaths of these household goods, both located in
The following segment of the film, similarly, follows Burtynsky to a shoot in an eWaste dump. As he states that “fifty percent of the world’s computers end up in
After seeing the toxic eWaste fields, therefore, we are quickly whisked back to a manufactory where we witness a dexterous young employee assemble a breaker switch in about twenty seconds, one of 400 she assembles in a work day. How many of her breaker switches will end up in another eWaste field we can only guess. Before they end up in the trash however, Baichwal and Burtynsky take us to shipbuilding yards and shipping docks, the means by which the breaker switches will be connected to the Western consumer. As Burtynsky puts it, while we watch the futuristic container cranes and shipbuilding landscapes glimmering with activity, “this is the reason globalization has been able to take the proportions it has.”
The following segment, however, proves that even the mammoth shipping vessels are subject to the pattern of creation, consumption, and destruction. The next connection in Manufactured Landscapes takes Burtynsky to a ship-breaking beach in
Burtynsky is from Saint Catherine, Ont., and first began photographing post-industrial landscapes when he stumbled on an abandoned mining town after getting lost driving in rural
The film is as sumptuous visually as it is shocking politically and environmentally, and director of photography Peter Mettler, makes great use of the contrast between his moving images and Burtynsky’s still photographs. On several occasions Mettler presents us with what appears at first to be one of Burtynsky’s haunting stills. But when one small element in the image begins to flutter in the wind, we realize how completely static the bleak landscape is. Baichwal is also very clever in the way she presents Burtynsky’s still photographs. By beginning focused on a small detail and slowly zooming out to reveal the vast magnitude of the photographed landscapes, she emphasizes the material density and human isolation of Burtynsky’s images. Finally, composer Dan Driscoll provides an eccentric but very fitting soundtrack which echoes the human alterations to a natural state which feature throughout the film.
Manufactured Landscape’s final segment connects the cities being submerged by the Three-Gorges Dam project to the incessant and destructive build-up of modern
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