From Word To Word

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 have not had the time to write about many of the films that I have been watching lately, and I will not try to write about each of them separately now, but a few do deserve mention for one reason or another, so I will just list them here and offer a paragraph or two about why they interested me.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, directed by Benton Bailey
I was either too young or too sheltered to remember the scandal around Jim and Tammy Baker, so Tammy Faye had never been more than a caricature for me. Her name evoked only hair and mascara, and I never had any reason to wonder if she was anything more than her cosmetics.  Bailey’s film is concerned to address precisely this stereotype, so it is unabashedly sympathetic to her, but Tammy Faye herself is such an immense personality that the viewer, even one as cynical as I am, discovers some sympathy for her as well.  To this degree, at least, the documentary accomplishes its aim.

O Brother, Where Art Thou, directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
This film may seem at first to contradict my tendency to watch mostly documentary on the one hand or fantasy on the other, but I would in fact include this film in the category of the fantastical and recommend it as an admittedly flawed attempt at the sort of film that I think should be made more often.  I am constantly frustrated by our culture’s relation to its mythological and literary past.  We either regard it as being irrelevant and ignore it, or we regard it as being sacred and idolize it.  O Brother, Where Art Thou, however, does neither, choosing instead to take the themes of Homer’s Odyssey and to reinterpret them.  The result is a very good film in many respects, and one that provides a commentary on American culture on several levels, even if it is also one that too often falls prey to the cliches of Hollywood.

Sita Sings the Blues, directed by Nina Paley
This animated film does what O Brother, Where Art Thou could have done if it had not been limited by the need to sell theatre tickets . Sita Sings the Blues mixes South Asian mythology with a contemporary love story and with classic blues and jazz music to create a whimsical but moving story.  The music is used superbly.  The art is wonderful.  I can hardly recommend this film highly enough, and it has even been released free through a Creative Commons license, so you have no excuse not to watch it tonight.

Ballet Russes, directed by Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine
I have seen only a single ballet in my life, and it was the ballet that everyone will have seen if they have seen only one: The Nutcracker.  I was young, and my only real memory of the performance is of my even younger brother asking my mother, “When are they were going to start talking in this movie.” Even so, I found Ballet Russes a very interesting documentary.  Though many of its interviews drag, and though the accounts of the interminable politics of the ballet become a little tedious, the story is remarkable, and it made the film well worth the evening I gave to it.

Outlander, directed by Howard McCain
I have an obsession with Beowulf. I confess it.  This means that I end up having to see every new adaptation of the story, even when it is horrible, and many of them are.  McCain’s version begins well, despite the obligatory Hollywoodisms, but the more that it tries to explain itself and the more that it tries to develop its characters, the worse it becomes.  The lengthy flashback sequence, which tries to explain and humanize the outlander, is a case in point.  It is mostly pointless and entirely tedious, and it destroys the pacing of the film besides.  The romantic element of the film is poorly acted and trite in the extreme.  The final action sequence is predictable and unconvincing.  In short, though it may not be the worst adaptation of Beowulf, I will stop well short of recommending it.

District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp
I was very pleasantly surprised by District 9.  When I heard that it was an alien film, my expectations were low.  When I heard that it was the director’s debut film, they sunk even lower.  When the reviews were mostly favourable, they sunk so low that I almost decided to see something else.  I was, however, as I said, very pleasantly surprised.  Now, make no mistake, it is a Hollywood action film produced by Peter Jackson, and it has all the violence and special effects that you would expect, but it also has a complexity of storyline and character that is entirely surprising in a film of this kind, particularly from a rookie writer and director.  It may even be worth your ten bucks to see it in the theatre.

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.

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.

This past Saturday was a busy one for our family.  We spent the morning at the Speed River Cleanup, an annual event where volunteers pull a year’s worth of garbage out of our local river.  We spent the afternoon with some friends who came to visit, the kids playing in the back yard while the parents were chatting over soup preparation.  We spent the evening watching The Boys of Baraka for this month’s Dinner and a Doc and eating the soup we had made that afternoon.

As I was going to sleep that night, I found myself reflecting on these neighbourhood activities and on how deeply they contrasted with those of the urban Baltimore neighbourhoods that were portrayed in Boys of Baraka, where life is dominated by poverty, crime, addiction, and violence.  Now, I recognize the complex of factors, both past and present, that have produced and perpetuated these urban neighbourhoods, and I recognize also that the question of how to renew these communities is difficult in the extreme, politically and economically and logistically.  It involves providing adequate learning, employment, and health to a massive number of people living in densely populated and poverty stricken areas.  It involves overcoming a long established culture of hopelessness, addiction, and violence.  It involves addressing the effects of the slavery, exploitation, racism, and classism that has been perpetrated over several hundred years.  It involves, in other words, alleviating the by-products of a capitalism, democracy, protestantism, industrialism, and nationalism gone horribly wrong.

Traditional approaches to this problem are often of the institutional and programmatic sort: a restructuring of the grossly inequitable education funding formula, a publicly funded and easily accessible health system, a massive rebuilding of infrastructure, widereaching retraining initiatives, consistent support of local businesses, a landscaping program to replace concrete with parks and gardens, free and accessible addiction counselling and rehabilitation centers, free and accessible family conflict counselling.  Though many of these initiatives would be beneficial, I think, and though some of them are absolutely necessary for a viable future in urban neighbourhoods, all of them would require a staggering level of financial, political, and logistical commitment.

The very limited attempts that have been already made to revitalize urban neighbourhoods, such as those in New York, have shown some success, but only at tremendous cost to governments and to charitable organizations.  The resources simply do not exist to implement these kinds of initiatives on the scale that is required.  It may possible to send twenty boys to a school in Kenya or to make other limited interventions, and these things are valuable in their way, but it is not possible, not through traditional institutional and programmatical means at least, to fund or support these kinds of programs on a scale that have any realistic hope of changing urban communities.

The real problem, therefore, is not how to change the culture of urban neighbourhoods, or of any other neighbourhood for that matter.  The problem is how to change these neighbourhoods without the resources to make large scale institutional interventions, even if everyone could agree on what these interventions should be.  The problem is how to change these neighbourhoods through other means, and I confess that I am not sure what these means would be.

I can only suggest, from the perspective of someone obviously unqualified to make any suggestion at all, that we need to imagine a renewal of community that proceeds, not from institution or from government, even if these things are involved to a certain extent, but from human relation.  What if people formed sharing and bartering cooperatives to help alleviate their low incomes?  What if they provided homeschooling or afterschool learning groups to help supplement the poorly funded schools?  What if they developed community gardens on balconies and on rooftops to help provide food?  What if they organized community programs to get people safely out of their homes and away from their televisions?

I know that none of this would be easy, and I know that none of this would be without risk, but it seems to me that these are the only forms of renewal that have a hope, because they proceed from the community itself and from the relationships within it rather than from the kinds of programs that governments do not have the resources to run.  Yet, the question remains, who will begin these relational approaches to neighbourhood renewal within communities that are so oppressed by poverty and violence and fear?  Who will continue them through the many difficult years that will be required to renew a whole culture and a whole community?

This is where I truly have no answers?  Perhaps it is too much to expect from these broken neighbourhoods themselves.  Perhaps it can only be expected from those of us who have been fortunate enough to experience what a neighbourhood and a community and a family can be.  Perhaps it requires you or I or both of us to go and begin to live in these neighbourhoods as best we can in order to support and encourage those who are already living there as best they can.  If so, I am at fault.  Though I am moved to pity, I am not willing to stop by the side of this road.

Next Saturday, June 13th, at our next Dinner and a Doc, we will be screening The Boys of Baraka, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.  The film follows a group of boys from the ghettos of Baltimore as they travel to a boarding school in Kenya, and it explores the effects that such a change in environment and education might have in the lives of urban youth struggling with poverty and crime in American cities.

If you would like more information, here are some links to the trailer and to an interview with the filmmakers.

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.

It has been some time now since we screened Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze at the last Dinner and a Doc.  I had a fair amount that I wanted to write about the film, but I never seemed to find enough consecutive minutes to do this writing.  So, rather than leave it waiting any longer, I will just share a single image from the film and leave the rest for another occasion.

The image that I found most intriguing was a shot of a sandal floating upside down on the river.  In the dry centre of the sandal’s sole is a piece of food, a vegetable of some sort, and it is surrounded by ants, which are running back and forth between the food and the wet edges of the shoe.  They are surrounded on every side by water.  They must choose whether to float on the river until they are baked by the sun or to risk the water and drown.

This shot means on multiple levels, of course.  It allegorizes our limited planet with its limited resources and our seemingly unlimited demands.  It represents the way that the rising river has carried people away from their homes, has forced them to move or to drown.  It parallels the earlier shot where the female protagonist’s home is gradually surrounded and then engulfed by the river.   It symbolizes the tour boats on which this young girl is trying to make her living, where she serves rich tourists as they sail over the fields that her parents had once farmed.

I also wonder, however, whether this last level of meaning might be doubling as a commentary on the tourists themselves.  Perhaps, in one sense at least, the ants  represent, not the Chinese workers trapped by the repercussions of the flood, but the foreign tourists trapped by the assumptions of their wealth and culture and privilege.  Perhaps they are ones who are floating on the river, eating blithely from the buffet, unaware of the predicament that their consumption is creating.  I am both amused and disconcerted by this possibility.