From Word To Word

Next Saturday, March 13th, our Dinner and a Doc film will be Arnold Shapiro’s Scared Straight, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1978.  The film follows seventeen young offenders as they are taken to Rahway maximum Security prison in New Jersey where some of the inmates give them a raw introduction to what prison life actually entails.  The experiment so effectively shocked the offenders that the film spawned many similar programs, though there is some controversy as to whether they actually reduce repeat offenses.

Further information can be found in an interview with Karl Shapiro by Kristen Kidder, in this clip from the original film, and in this school version of the twenty year follow up film.

The soup that night will be Cauliflower and Sorrel Soup, a Gordon Ramsay recipe, though I will be omitting the optional caviar as it is a bit beyond my budget.

The event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though the film contains a good deal of profanity, so this may not be a great night to bring your kids.  We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.  As usual, I would appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming.

Also, here are some of the upcoming films we will be showing:

April 10th – Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov
May 8th – The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris
June 12th – Kordavision by Hector Cruz Sandoval

For Dinner and a Doc next Saturday, which is February 13th, we will be screening Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, a film that follows Terry Gilliam during his first attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  It provides interesting insight into Gilliam as a director, and it also draws some nice parallels between the story of Don Quxote and the film making process.

For those who are interested in a little more information, there is the official trailer, an interview with the directors by Rebecca Murray, and a review of the film by Stephanie Zacharek at Salon.com.

The soup that night will be Butternut Squash Soup with Brown Butter, which is a Thomas Keller creation with a few modifications.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though please email or leave a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

Also, here are some of the upcoming films we will be showing:

March 13th - Scared Straight by Arnold Shapiro
April 10th – Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov
May 8th – The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris

On January 2nd, I wrote my usual preliminary post for the Dinner and a Doc that was upcoming on the 9th of the month.  I indicated that we would be watching The Price of Sugar by Bill Haney, a film that explores the working conditions of Haitians who have illegally immigrated to cut sugar cane on plantations in the Dominican Republic.  It focuses specifically on the work of Father Christopher Hartley to improve the conditions on the plantations in what is now his former parish, plantations that are largely owned by the Vicini family.

On January 4th, several days before the screening, I received an email from the Washington legal firm of Patton Boggs, which is representing the Vicini family.  The email expressed dismay at my decision to show the film and included a forty-five page copy of the legal injunction that the firm has submitted to the courts, outlining the various respects in which the Vicini family feels that the film has misrepresented them and their interests.

On January 9th, I showed the film anyway.

Today, on January 14th, I am now posting the email that was sent to me by Patton Boggs along with the message that I do not intend to be bullied, now or ever, about the films that I decide to screen in the privacy of my own home, and let us be clear: the act of sending forty-odd pages of legal injunction is nothing more than mere bullying.

It has no legal function, since a defamation suit against the filmmaker has no bearing whatsoever on my right to watch the film in my own home.

Neither does it serve to correct misinformation.  Forty-odd pages of legal injunction will never be read by anyone, and any real intent to be corrective would have been much better served by a two or three page summary of the Vicinis’ objections.

It certainly does not provide proof of anything.  That the Vicinis object to their portrayal in the film and have filed a defamation suit proves absolutely nothing, in either direction, and even should the judge rule in their favour, I would still have some reservations about the ability of The District Court of Massachusetts to arrive at an informed judgment on a case whose material evidence lies mostly in a foreign state under the control of one of the interested parties.

The only thing that sending this legal document does  is attempt to intimidate people out of watching and showing and addressing the film for themselves.  The only thing it does is try to convince people that they should censure themselves at the discretion of those with the money to retain large legal firms that will send impressive looking swathes of legal material to anyone who shows up on a google alert.

I will not be so intimidated, and neither should you.  Inform yourself of both perspectives on the question, by all means.  Just do not let yourself be intimidated into letting the question drop.  In fact, I suggest that you go and rent the film this weekend, or even better, you can always borrow it from me.

For those who are interested in further persepctives on this dispute, there have been some interesting articles posted by  The World Socialist Web Site, by The Boston Globe, and by the National Catholic Reporter.

This Saturday, January the 9th, our Dinner and a Doc screening will be of Bill Haney’s The Price of Sugar.  The film explores the ways that sugar production effects the people who grow it in the Domincan Republic, following the work of a priest who is trying to organize the workers to achieve some basic human rights.

More information can be found at the film’s official website, in the official trailer, and in this interview with the director.

The soup that night will be this Roasted Sweet Garlic, Bread, and Almond Soup.  I am looking forward to giving it a try.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though please email or leave a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

Also, here are some of the upcoming films we will be showing:
February 13th – Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
March 13th – Man or Aran by Robert Flaherty
April 10th – Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov

So, as I mentioned last month, there will be no Dinner and a Doc this Saturday.  Instead, it had been my plan to send my children off with one relative or another so that I could have my traditional Christmas baking day with my wife.  I was also going to set up the projector this year, so that we could watch movies together as we worked.  I initially proposed an Alfred Hitchcock marathon.  My wife demurred.  She counter-proposed a foodie-movie marathon.  I accepted, and I was intending to post a request for people to recommend their favourite foodie-movies.  Everything was planned.

Unfortunately, life, or the Christmas season rather, has intervened.  It seems that we will be hosting an annual gathering of friends this year, and this Saturday is really the only day that will work for it, and there are no other open Saturdays between now and when the Christmas baking will be needed, so the annual Christmas baking day has become something like an extended Christmas baking week, where we are making this and that whenever we find a few minutes.  It is not exactly what I had planned, or not at all in fact, but it has been something good even so.  It has allowed us to enjoy the baking at a slower pace and over a longer time, and it has also opened opportunities for friends to do some of the baking with us.  I was not tradition perhaps, but it did what the tradition was intended nevertheless.

Of course, this does not mean that those foodie-movies will not get watched someday, so feel free to recommend them anyway.

Also, for those who are wondering, here is the upcoming schedule for Dinner and a Doc:

January 9th – The Price of Sugar by Bill Haney
February 13th – Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
Match 13th – Man or Aran by Robert Flaherty

I have always regarded it as positive that the internet as a medium permits its users a greater degree of active participation than most other media, but during the discussion at this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, I found myself questioning this assumption.  We had just finished watching The U.S. vs. John Lennon, and we were asking why the war in Vietnam had produced such a strong and sustained opposition while the war in Iraq has not generated a similar level of response.  After all, the activists of today have technological advantages that those opposing the Vietnam War did not, and these technologies should theoretically enable them to network and to share information far more easily and far more effectively.  Perhaps, I suggested to the group, the more active experience of using a computer actually dissuades people from becoming active in more practical ways, so that they respond to an issue by signing an online petition, or by writing a blog post, or by sending a mass email, or by contributing to some relief fund, but they never make the transition from internet activism to physical activism.  Their drive to engage in issues becomes satisfied through the monitor and never finds expression beyond it.

To be clear, I am not at all arguing that real activism cannot be accomplished online.  I am merely suggesting that the internet often allows people to engage with issues in ways that provide only the illusion of activism and that it frequently functions to satisfy the need for active involvement in political issues without really addressing these issues beyond the level of the monitor.  Rather than enabling activism, the internet comes to replace it, limiting the ways in which people are willing to be politically active.

The answer to this problem is obviously not to abandon the internet as a tool for activism, because it is simply too effective a means for communicating and networking and organizing and raising awareness.  The answer may, however, involve reimagining how we use the internet and how we promote activism through it, so that we do not content ourselves with online petitions that nobody sees at the expense of actually feeding the hungry, defending the oppressed, and protesting injustice.  I am not sure that I have any specific suggestions as to how this might be accomplished, but I would encourage you, the next time you are confronted by a cause in your online wanderings, to see what it is exactly that you are being asked to do.  Is it the kind of activism that stops at the monitor, or is it the kind that only begins there in order to go much further?

My housemate Katerina Strohschein asked to assist me in selecting the film for the next Dinner and a Doc, which is coming up this Saturday, November 14th, and we eventually settled on The U. S. vs. John Lennon by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld.  The film focuses on the political elements of Lennon’s life and music, following his development from pop star to celebrity activist.  It also highlights the response of the United States government to Lennon’s politics, relating the ongoing struggles that Lennon had as an outspoken public figure.

Those who are interested in more information can have a look at the official trailer and a video review by A. O. Scott of The New York Times.   A complete version of the film is also available.

Our soup for the night will be a broccoli bisque, both because the recipe looks fabulous and also because, well, I just like saying “broccoli bisque”.  There will also be homemade pumpkin pie.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though please email or leave a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

Lastly, some people have requested that I give them earlier notice of which films I will be showing on which dates, so, despite the fact that this will require me to know what I am doing more than a week in advance, here is the upcoming schedule for Dinner and a Doc.

December 12th – We will be taking December off, though I may do something a little different instead, so stay tuned.
January 9th – The Price of Sugar by Bill Haney
February 13th – Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
Match 13th – Man or Aran by Robert Flaherty

We will still be holding our Dinner and a Doc screening this Saturday, October the 10th, despite the fact that it falls on Thanksgiving weekend, and we will be showing something a little different this month. We will begin with Syrinx, an Oscar nominated short animated film by Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animation pioneer. We will follow it with Ryan, an Oscar winning short animated film by Chris Landreth about the life of Ryan Larkin. We will then finish with Alter Egos, a documentary by Laurence Green about the lives of Ryan Larken and Chris Landreth and about the making of Ryan.

If you are interested in more information, you can preview the whole of Walking, or watch some of Ryan Larkins other films, Syrinx and Street Musique. You can also preview the whole of Ryan on the National Film Board of Canada’s site, as a part of its new and very welcome decision to make all of its films available to the public online.  Lastly, you can also watch a preview of Alter Egos, which begins with Syrinx and includes clips of Larkin’s other films.

Our soup for the night will be a curried squash soup, based loosely on a recipe graciously provided to me by my friend Lauren Anderson.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

At this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, we watched Voices of Iraq, which is comprised mostly of footage shot by Iraqis using the 150 digital cameras provided to them by the producers of the film, and which describes itself as, “Filmed and directed by the people of Iraq”.  This description was one of the reasons that I chose to screen the film, because it seemed to imply that the film was providing a more truthful and accurate account of the situation in Iraq simply because the footage was actually made by Iraqis, ignoring the enormous role that the producers had in shaping the film, both through the process of editing 500 hours of raw footage into 80 minutes of finished film, and also through the choices of which people were to be given the cameras. Though I expected to see evidence of this editorial influence, I was startled to see just how much editorial intervention there really is in the film.  Not only are there the unavoidable and mostly invisible choices of what footage to include and exclude, but there are also frequent and highly visible elements that are very clearly not shot and directed by the people of Iraq.

There are the written titles for the sections of the film , for example, which are usually just dates, relatively innocuous, but that sometimes include strangely selective references to the political situation in Iraq.  One such title informs the audience that the month in question  saw the return of Iraqi sovereignty, though the highly ambiguous and contested nature of this sovereignty is never mentioned.  Another claims that there had been a rise in bombings and beheadings in that month, attributing these things exclusively to Al Queda, ignoring the considerable role that local Iraqi militia groups were having in the escalation of violence in Iraqi cities.  These sorts of titles, though not necessarily false, are certainly partial, and they are almost certainly not the kinds of titles that everyday Iraqis would use to describe the events that were taking place at that time.

There are also several sections of film that, while perhaps technically filmed by Iraqis, are certainly not filmed and directed by the common Iraqi people to whom the film claims to be permitting freedom of expression after more than two decades of silence.  There are several lengthy clips from terrorist propaganda videos, for example, and there are also several clips of the torture and killings conducted under Saddam’s regime.  There are no similar clips from Iraqi cameras that have captured abuses by the occupying American and British forces, though these videos are freely available all over the internet, so the editorial choice to insert certain kinds of found footage and not others becomes an increasingly unavoidable question as the film progresses.

Perhaps the oddest editorial intervention, however, is the inclusion of western newspaper headlines.  These headlines almost exclusively imply positions that are opposed to the American intervention in Iraq, and they are consistently followed by footage that contests their claims.  Not only are these interventions highly biased, never including examples of conservative headlines being similarly contested, and not only are they manipulative, making the footage take a position on a Western media debate about which the Iraqi filmmakers themselves would not even be aware, but they are also entirely opposed to the film’s self-description.  Western newspaper headlines are in no way written and directed by the people of Iraq.  Nor are they related to the ability of the Iraqi people to express themselves freely for the first time in decades.  They are imposed entirely by a Western editorial perspective.

These kinds of interventions are a problem because documentary film already creates an illusory sense of verisimilitude, of reality, of accuracy, of truthfulness, and Voices of Iraq, far from signaling this problem as good documentaries should, presents itself as being even more reliable and truthful than other documentaries because it is filmed by everyday Iraqi people, and yet its editorial influences constantly undermine the Iraqi voices that the film claims to represent.  The film is a problem, not because it is biased, as all documentaries are, but because it makes special claim to being  less biased, to being more accurately reflective of the situation in Iraq, to being a way for Iraqis to express themselves freely.  It is a problem because it attempts to conceal rather than to confront the impossibility of its own claims to facticity and truth.

This does not mean, however, that Voices of Iraq is entirely without merit, because it does include some lovely moments of intimacy with the Iraqi people.  There is an older man who describes how he coped with the bombing of his city by waiting up, night after night, playing the piano.  There is a young man who performs a solo dance in a small courtyard.  There is the mother who is interviewed by her daughter about the torture that she has endured.  These kinds of moments are where the film seems, even if only momentarily, to exceed its own intentions.  Such scenes may not be more true than the rest of the film, but they are more surprising, more intimate, more human, and they are where the film finds its worth.

This coming Saturday, December the 12th will be the next Dinner and a Doc, and we will be screening Voices of Iraq, which describes itself as being filmed and directed by the people of Iraq.  The film was shot in 2004 by people throughout Iraq who were given 150 digital cameras in order to document their everyday lives, producing over 400 hours of footage.  The purpose of this approach was to let the people of Iraq speak for themselves, a purpose that I would like to spend some time discussing, either at Saturday’s event or in a later post.

For further information about the film, you can read an interview with producers Eric Manes, Martin Kunert, and Archie Drury, or you can watch the trailer.  By way of preparing for a discussion of the film, you may also want to watch this video review, which raises some interesting questions about how the film tries to locate itself politically.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.