From Word To Word

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.

I experimented with plantain in the soup for this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, not the plantain that looks like a banana, the one that is almost certainly growing as a weed somewhere in your backyard.  It was not the greatest soup that I have ever made, though this was not entirely the fault of the plantain.  I was working from a recipe that actually calls for spinach, and this recipe turned out to be far too bland.  It needed roasted onions and garlic.  It needed bay leaves.  It needed lemon juice.  It needed salt.  None of this was the fault of the plantain.

The plaintain actually tasted quite good, something like spinach only a little more bitter, but its texture was far too tough.  This was partly due, I think, to the lateness of the year, when the plantain has already flowered and toughened.  It was also partly due to my substituting it directly for spinach, assuming that it would wilt in a similar way.  Had I picked the leaves younger, or had I boiled the older leaves separately before adding them to the soup, I think the texture would have been much better.  I will need to experiment further, though not at the next Dinner and a Doc, where I should probably offer something a little more traditional once or twice before I make people into test subjects again.

Where I had reservations about the soup, however, I had none about the film.  The Agronomist was the first documentary that I had seen by Jonathon Demme, though I have seen several of his feature films, and I found it very effective.  The subject itself, the life and death of Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti’s first independent radio station, is powerful, and Demme’s portrait of the man is beautifully rendered.  The film expresses an obvious affection and admiration for Dominique and allows his personality, his gestures and idiom, his passion and emotion, to dominate the screen.

Demme’s editing and cinematography are mostly unobtrusive, so there is little to detract from Dominique himself, and the few obvious editorial interventions are clearly meant to emphasise the person of Domique even further.  At certain points, for example, Demme replays a clip several times in succession, and these clips almost always include something that is characteristic of Dominique: the way that he sniffs the air, or the way that he imitates gunfire, things that recur in other places throughout the film as well, and help give a sense of Dominique’s personality and idiosyncrasies.

This repetition also occurs once on a much larger scale.  The film includes a long segment that record’s Dominique’s first return from exile, where he alights from his airplane to the adulation of a Haitian people who are experiencing their first taste of political freedom.  Dominique is cheered like a pop star, embraced by everyone who can reach him, and carried on the shoulders of the crowd, his hand raised, first in a fist, but only for a moment, and then in the peace symbol.

This whole segment, with much additional footage, is then replayed at the end of the film, after Dominque has been assassinated.  It follows immediately after a segment in which Dominique’s wife and fellow reporter, Michele Montas, returns to the air to proclaim, with a determined irony, that Dominique has not actually died, but lives on to help his people and his country.

The relation of these two scenes is significant, I think.  Dominique was twice forced into exile, and just before his death, he threatened to go into exile again.  Demme’s repetition of Dominique’s first triumphant return to his country, therefore, serves to reinterpret his death as merely another exile, a temporary leavetaking, from which he will return again, just as his wife declared.

The man may have been killed, certainly.  The film shows his body being loaded into an ambulance, shows his face in the casket at his funeral, shows his ashes being spread in the river.  Even so, Demme implies, the man cannot be wholly killed.  He, and the freedom that he sought, can only ever be exiled.  They will return again, triumphantly, even if they must return again and again, endlessly.  This kind of man will always return, to be taken into the arms of his people, whenever they are able to find freedom, even if it is only for a time.

The August edition of Dinner and a Doc is upcoming on the 8th, and we will be watching Jonathan Demme’s The Agronomist.  Most people will probably be familiar with Demme’s feature films, which include The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but he has also directed several very good documentaries, like Haiti: Dreams of Democracy and Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains.  The Agronomist explores the life of Jean Dominique, who ran Haiti’s first independent radio station through several of the country’s regime’s, and who was eventually assassinated.

For further information, see the official trailer, an interview with Demme about the film, and a recording of Dominique speaking about his Haitian nationalism.

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.

Many documentaries, because of the subjects that they address, are faced with the question of how to represent the image of death in film, of how to do justice to the image of death without reducing it to an object of mere voyeurism.

I first encountered this problem in Seeing is Believing, by Peter Wintonick and Katerina Cizek, where the filmmakers were faced with the question of how to include images of a man who had been shot in the thigh and who was rapidly bleeding to death. If they showed him actually expiring in the film, how would they avoid turning the scene into a snuff video, into an exercise of fetishism and voyeurism? Their solution was to fade away from the wounded man just before the moment of his death and then to fade back to him afterward, but I am not certain that this approach is all that effective, since it still makes a fetish of the moment and the image of death, only in reverse. It refuses to show the moment of death, but only in such a way that draws attention precisely to this absence. It occludes the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer, but only in order to arrest and fix this gaze on what has been occluded.

There is a similar moment in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. The film’s protagonist and a friend have gone into the wilderness to live among the grizzlies, and they have been attacked and killed by one of the bears. Their video camera happens to be running at the time, and though it is thrown aside so that there are no images of their deaths, the camera still captures an audio record of the attack. When Herzog is presented with this audio, he appears on camera and explicitly raises the question of whether to play it for his viewers. The film then shows him listening to the audio through earphones, so that the viewers cannot listen themselves but can only watch Herzog listening to it, and then the filmmaker declares that he will not include it in the film, having piqued and then disappointed his viewers’ interest. Here, again, the moment of death is omitted, but only in such a way as to fetishise it more entirely.

Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls, which I screened at this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, faces a similar problem, but its solution is different and, in my estimation, more proper. The majority of the film is composed of interviews with the family members of the four young girls who were killed in a church bombing during the civil rights movement, with prominent civil rights activists who were operating in the area at the time, and with other celebrities. Lee inserts into these interviews the period footage that is relevant to them, and there comes a time when the interviews begin to discuss the physical condition of the girls when they were found dead, the wounds that they had sustained, and the process of preparing them for their funerals. The period footage that would be relevant to this discussion, however, raises once again the question of how to employ images of death. Would it be right to avoid these images entirely? Would this be a failure to confront the horror of the acts that were perpetrated? On the other hand, would it be any more right to put the images of these broken bodies on the screen as objects for the fetishising gaze of strangers?

Lee addresses this problem by including photos of the dead girls, but only very briefly. The images are introduced hardly long enough for the viewers to register what they are before the film returns to the person being interviewed. Rather than showing everything but death, and thereby fetishising death all the more, Lee shows death in a way that refuses to make it into an object of voyeurism. His approach does not shy away from the fact that these girls were broken and killed, but it refuses to dwell on this, refuses to let its viewers dwell on this, and chooses instead to emphasize how the girls are remembered by their families and friends and how they influenced the growing civil rights movement.

This, to me, is a more profound understanding of death, one that refuses either to avoid or to fetishize it, but that chooses instead to put death in its proper place in relation to the life that it follows and the memories that it precedes.

This coming Saturday, July 11th will be our next Dinner and a Doc, and we will be watching Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls, which explores the bombing deaths of four young girls in 1963 and the effects of this event on the civil rights movement in the United States.  Though it played in only four theatres and never achieved any financial success, it is widely acclaimed as one of Lee’s best films and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary.

A complete version of the film is available, and further information can be found in this interview with the director and this interview with the parents of one of the victims.

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.