From Word To Word

So, I have this theory that the reboot of the Star Trek franchise reflects a shift in the American self-imagination following the events of 9/11, a shift that disrupted the cultural logic of the original Star Trek timeline and that required the a creation of an alternative timeline to take its place.  Stay with me.  This may take some doing.

Okay, I start with the observation that the Star Trek franchise before 9/11 was the product and the reflection of a particular sort of  American utopian narrative, a narrative that understands the advance of science and technology and democracy and capitalism as a manifest destiny that will culminate in a world without poverty or hunger and where the threat of violence and disaster can always be met through technological intervention.   It is in this sense that Star Trek is a true science fiction.  The solutions to its problems are always technological and scientific in nature.  They are almost always a matter of reconfiguring the phaser banks, or modifying the warp core, or introducing a new modulation to the sensor array, or rerouting the signal through the secondary power relays.  These are the kinds of solutions to most problems in Star Trek, and these solutions produce a universe that is a coherent and continuing narrative, where the right people are always sitting in the Captain’s chair and making the decisions necessary to ensure the continuation of the Federation’s technological utopia, and it is this utopia that stands as the imagined future of the American way.

With the events of 9/11, however, America’s popular self-conceptions become questioned, and it ceases to be so self-evident that science, technology, democracy, capitalism, and the American way will achieve the future that this utopian narrative had imagined for itself.  The narrative of triumphal Americanism becomes seriously disrupted, and it now becomes necessary both to explain how this disruption could possibly occur and to determine how it might be overcome.

The newest Star Trek film, directed by , J. J. Abrams, responds directly to the challenges that 9/11 poses to the imagined future of technology, science, democracy, and capitalism.  Its story begins with a 9/11-like catastrophic event, a disruption to the very fabric of time and space that changes the course of history laid out in the original Star Trek timeline, replacing it with an alternative universe in which James T. Kirk does not in fact become captain of the Enterprise, but is replaced by the much more logical and analytical Spock.  The Star Trek universe, therefore, like the American nation, has suffered a tremendous shock that has disrupted its story as it was meant to be told.  The enemy has not just managed to threaten and to attack and to hurt.  It has managed to alter the course of events as they were supposed to have unfolded, an alteration that becomes symbolized by Spock’s replacement of Kirk in the captain’s chair.

The film positions the choice between Spock and Kirk as a choice between logical adherence to protocol and instinctual willingness to follow emotion.  A good leader, it suggests, is the one who knows when to throw aside the book, bend the rules, ignore protocol, and just get the bad guys, even when all logic and all odds would suggest another course of action.  As the story unfolds, Spock is represented to be a poor leader because he represses his grief and anger and desire for revenge beneath a logic and an adherence to protocol, whereas Kirk is represented to be a good leader because he embraces his emotions and decides to attack his enemies directly, even when it seems very likely that this course of action will lead everyone to their deaths.

If this is read as a response to the crisis of 9/11, the film affirms a need for leadership that values emotion and immediate revenge over logic and consultation.  It argues, essentially, that the disruption to the narrative of American technological utopia can be corrected as long as the right sorts of people find their way back into the captain’s chair, people who are willing to destroy their enemies at any cost.  Although the film purports to be a “reboot” of the franchise, therefore, I would suggest that its narrative is actually profoundly conservative in nature, advocating for a recovery, by any mean necessary, of the technological utopia that Star Trek has always represented in the popular American imagination.

I wrote briefly about Fernando Meirelles’ City of God several weeks ago, but the film has remained with me strongly since then, and I have found my thoughts returning to it again and again, particularly with respect to how the camera lens might represent a kind of critical distance that enables Rocket, the protagonist, to survive the Rio de Janeiro slum where he lives.

It is Rocket who narrates the film, so from the beginning the very structure of the story places him behind the camera as well as in front of it, allows him a vantage point from beyond the the events of the film, behind the lens of the film in a sense, from which to offer the order of a narrative.  This sense of distance is reinforced by his narrative style, which seems to deliberate between many narrative possibilities, telling the audience that he must tell the story of this person before the story of another can be told, or returning to tell the same story but from a different perspective, all of which makes Rocket appear to be the agent of the film, located somewhere behind or beyond it, guiding and directing its images.  Even the cinematography reinforces this effect, freezing into photograph-like still shots when Rocket introduces the characters, so that he seems not only to determine the images that will appear, but also to freeze them, like a photographer, forcing the audience to rest on a single frame rather than to continue uninterrupted through the imagined space of the film.

All of this cinematic apparatus reinforces the way that Rocket’s character interacts with the rest of the people who make up the slum where he lives, the City of God, a place ruled largely by gangsters and hoodlums and financed largely by drugs.  Rocket remains always at a distance from this life, even when attempts to join it, and this distance is symbolized by his desire to be a photographer.  Even before he actually has a camera, he still seems able to put his life at a critical distance in a way that the other characters are not.  He is able to see his world through a lens for which the camera can only become a physical extension.

Even the other characters recognize that Rocket is different in this respect.  When Little Ze, one of the gang leaders, is offered a camera in exchange for some drugs, he is about to refuse until he is reminded of Rocket’s love of photography, and he takes the camera as a gift for Rocket.  Though Little Ze has no use for the camera himself, he recognizes that Rocket is able to use it in a way that he himself is not. Similarly, in a later scene, another drug lord wants pictures taken of his gang, but no one is able to work the camera, so he has Rocket come and take the pictures.  Rocket has a knowledge of the camera that no one else has, just as he has a use for the camera that no one else has, the implication being, perhaps, that the others who live in the City of God do have some access to the critical distance represented by the camera but lack the ability or the knowledge to use it.

Eventually, it is Rocket’s camera that enables him to escape the City of God, as his pictures of the gang war are picked up accidentally by a newspaper, and he is then given the opportunity to be a photo-journalist, an opportunity on which he makes good.  There are obvious practical reasons for this, of course, since his skills with a camera give him an advantage over many of the other characters who are skilled and trained only in poverty and violence.  Even so, Rocket escapes the City of God as much because of what the camera represents as because of what it means as a practical skill.  He survives because he is able to maintain a critical distance, a critical lens, between his life and himself.  He is able to step back from the poverty and the violence enough to make meaning of it, to frame it in a picture, to narrate it in a story, and it is this ability that actually saves him.

It is my intuition that there is a real truth in this, a real truth in the idea that an ability to look at one’s own life with a certain critical distance, with a critical distance not separable from an artistic and narrative and meaning-making impulse, is crucial to surviving the evils of one’s world, whether that world be a Brazilian slum or a Canadian suburb.  This critical distance will not guarantee a more accurate perspective on one’s world, of course, because it is always an act of creation and narration.  Neither will it guarantee an easier or better life in one’s world, because it is always an act of resistance and critique.  It will, however, I believe, I hope, as such things can be judged, offer the possibility of surviving what is evil in one’s world, and such survival is worth whatever cost it might entail.

George Lucas’ THX 1138 – I will say in advance, by way of warding off abuse from those who are truly devoted, that I am actually a fan of the Star Wars franchise, even in its current bloated and unwieldy state.  However, I would also say, after watching THX 1138, that the staggering success of Star Wars has perhaps prevented Lucas from reaching his true potential.  THX 1138 has a much better sense of style and atmosphere than Star Wars does, and it creates a more emotionally and intellectually engaging world, a world that remains engaging despite, or precisely because, Lucas avoids the temptation to define it too far.   The world of THX 1138 remains unexplained in many respects, even at its conclusion, relying on its visual force and its characterization to make it compelling, so it escapes the long explanations and the grievous contradictions that distract from other science-fiction film worlds, many of which, like the later installments of Lucas’ own Star Wars franchise and like the Wachowskis’ Matrix films, could have been greatly improved by less explanation and more filmmaking.  THX 1138 reminds me strongly of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris in this respect: both allow the film world to remain mysterious to the characters and to the audience, so that there is a structural tension and suspense that informs each scene.  Lucas accomplishes this filmic tension well in THX 1138, which makes it all the more disappointing that his films since have mostly been content to follow the conventions of Hollywood storytelling, albeit with great success and with considerable technical innovation.  It is not that I dislike the Star Wars films or the Indiana Jones films.   I quite enjoy both.  I just feel like there might have been something more in Lucas, something more aesthetically original and interesting that never got a chance to be explored.

John Hillcoat’s The Road – I watched The Road on Father’s Day, and it was a powerful film experience for me.  I had already been thinking about what it means to be a father and to be a son, so perhaps this deepened the emotion that the film produced in me, but I think I would have found it impactful even apart from this added dimension. Though I do have some reservations about the plot, especially with the assumption that hunger and lack of social structure would suddenly cause mass numbers of people to overcome millennia of taboo and become ravening cannibals, the film is tightly structured and well acted, and it achieves a very satisfying and coherent aesthetic vision.  Rather than posing the question of how to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, it poses the much more considerable question of how to raise children to be moral human beings in a world that no longer has a standard of morality.  It is not so much about the survival of humanity as it is about the survival of what makes humanity human.  I recommend it very highly.

Mabrouk El Mechri’s JCVD – I confess that I am not really a fan of martial arts movies.  While I am not immune to the coolness factor in watching some of the stunts, I usually like a plot and some characters to go with this sort of thing, which means that my exposure to Jean-Claude Van Damme has been limited and mostly forgettable.  JCVD, however, is another sort of film altogether, and while I would stop well short of calling it great cinema, it explores in a thoughtful way the relation between the film star as person and as actor, and it does so with a nice balance between humour and poignancy.   The central scene in the film is indicative of the whole in this respect.  It begins with Van Damme being lifted mysteriously into the rafters of the building where he is a hostage.  He then addresses the camera and the viewer directly with a kind of confession, beginning with the claim that the movie is for him, and ending with him saying, “I truly believe it’s not a movie.  It’s real life.”  The moment is surreal.  No explanation is offered for it.  Yet it stands as a remarkably moving and original scene, and it alone is reason enough to see the film.

Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert – The wit and irony of this surrealist attack on the Catholic church in particular and on organized religion in general make it a most entertaining film, and it is well short of an hour in length, so it feels like the visual equivalent of a short-story: brief, structured, and pointed.  It is abruptly cut at times, but is otherwise a very nice bit of filmmaking and is sure to spark a conversation among those who see it with you.

Alex Proyas’ Dark City – There is much about this film that I liked very much.  I only wish that it had been able to avoid alien intervention in order to make its plot work.  It needed its villains to remain mysterious and unexplained.  It needed them to remain more metaphor than reality.  It needed there to be no way out of the city.  It needed there to be no Shell Beach.  It needed, in short, to have the intellectual courage really to explore the possibility that our lives are constructed more by external forces than by our own will and free choice.  It is an entertaining film in many respects, but it is much less than it could have been.

Fernando Meirelles’ City of God – This is a truly remarkable film.  Its subject is engaging.  Its acting is strong.  Its story is seamless.  Its cinematography is inventive.  To me eye at least, the film has no flaws.  It is what a film should be.

Rémy Belvaux’s Man Bites Dog -  I will need to direct my remarks about this film to two different sorts of viewers.  To most people I would suggest that the brutality and the grotesqueness and the purposeless of the violence of the film will make the it almost unwatchable, and recommend that they give it a very wide berth.  Even the cover picture will likely offend them.  On the other hand, to the sort of people who are willing to approach this violence with the irony and the detachment in which it is directed, there is no film quite like it.  If you think you are one of the second sort, do watch it, but you have been fairly warned.

Albert and Allen Hughes’  The Book of Eli -  I gave this film a chance, despite the trailer and despite the word of mouth reviews, but I should have known better.  The few action scenes do not distract sufficiently from the bland plot, the indifferent acting, and the unendurable dialogue.  The ending, which promised all along to be painfully sentimental, was made even worse by also falling into the kind of cloying, self-congratulatory, vaguely nationalistic religiosity of which only Americans seem to be capable.  There is very little about this film that justifies the time it takes to watch it.

I have been watching far too many films lately, and I have far too much that I want to write about them, so I have not been able to write anything at all, and my list only gets longer.  This post is a an attempt to catch myself up, though at the expense of doing some of these films justice.  I have written similar posts before about my reading, and I may just make a habit of posting something like this every few months, just to keep myself on top of things.

Avatar by James Cameron (2009) – The best thing that I can say about this script is that it remains mostly inconspicuous.  If I was to say more, I would be forced to call the plot cliche and the story racially stereotypical and the character development both shallow and predictable.  The acting is generally of a similar caliber:  good enough not to distract but otherwise uninspired and uninspiring, even from some of the more established names from whom something more might have been expected.

Even so,  despite all of these criticisms, I would not hesitate to list Avatar among the most impressive film experiences of my life.  Too much has been written already about the 3D and the special effects and the visual scope of the film, so I will not go over these things again, but the greatest testament to the power of these elements is probably the fact that they are able to make a mediocre script and barely passable acting into the highest grossing film of all time.

Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (1954) – This was my second Kurosawa film, but it may as well have been my first, since I saw Yojimbo so long ago that it is only a very hazy memory for me now.  I will not make the vain attempt to describe the film or the director for those who are unfamiliar with them, but I do want to discuss two scenes that I liked particularly.  They both centre around a peasant girl and the youngest of the seven samurai who have have been hired by her village to protect it from bandits.  The two fall in love, as might be expected, but they are separated both by class and by the ambiguous relationship that the peasants have with the samurai, both relying on their strength to maintain the social order and also fearing that their strength might be used to undermined that social order, to take the peasants’ food and daughters by force.

In one scene, the two lovers are sitting in a meadow of flowers, a place that has already been visually associated with the young samurai.  The peasant girl basically offers herself to the samurai, but he hesitates, and she becomes angry, questioning his manhood and his status as a samurai.  During this scene, there is a shot of the two lovers sitting, turned toward each other, face to face, and the camera pans behind the samurai, so that the girl’s face is increasingly occluded and eventually eclipsed by his head. It is as if the girl’s beauty is being obscured by the many questions that the samurai has to consider or as if the girl herself is being eclipsed by her lover.

In a later scene, the two face each other once again, but now across a huge bonfire in the village square.  The girl is  at the door of a hut, and her invitation is clear to the samurai, but he hesitates again, and the camera alternates between their two gazes as they look at each other across the fire, the symbol both of their passion but also of the considerations that separate them.  The scene culminates with the samurai crossing to the other side of the fire to consummate their perhaps ill considered love.

These two sequences are fabulous.  They are so tightly blocked and filmed, so symbolically suggestive on various levels, that they almost stand as stories unto themselves.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Werner Herzog  (2009) – If I was forced to describe this film in a single sentence, I would say that it is a colossal practical joke being played by the director and the principal actor on the audience and the rest of the cast.  It is as though Herzog took the script of a completely conventional cop film and told most of the cast to take it ever so seriously.  Then, letting only Nicholas Cage and maybe Val Kilmer in on his intentions, he set about shooting the film as a systematic mockery of both the Hollywood cop flick and the culture that produces it.  There are three highlights for me.

First, there is the scene where Nicholas Cage, high on cocaine, enters the apartment where his team is staking out a suspect.  He sees two lizards on the table and asks why they are there.  Of course, nobody else sees the lizards, so Cage turns and looks out the window for what seems like two minutes, all the while, in the foreground, the two lizards are climbing over each other.  The scene closes with Cage, at long last, turning back to glance at the lizards once again.

Second, there is the scene where a car has crashed after hitting an alligator.  The shot that closes the scene is filmed from the perspective of another alligator and looks very much like handicam footage.  The shot lasts for perhaps a minute, and there are some indications that the alligator is being prodded with a stick so that it will move.

Third, there is the scene where one set of gangsters is gunned down by another.  Cage, high once again, tells a gunman to shoot one of the corpses again.  “Why?” the gunman asks.  “Because his soul’s still dancing,” Cage replies, and the camera shows the corpse’s doppelganger breakdancing in the middle of the floor until the body is indeed shot again and the soul drops awkwardly to the floor.

This film is a must see, I think, but only if you are prepared to watch it from the same ironic perspective that it was directed.

Watchmen by Zack Snyder (2009) – I did not love this film.  I did not even like it as much as the graphic novel, which I liked less than many others told me I would.  The narrative of the pirates, which is my favourite part of the book, is cut entirely from the film, though there are for obvious filmic reasons for this.  The music, which seems appropriate where it is mentioned in the book, seems often jarring and awkward when it is actually played in the film.  The narrative, which is pleasantly complex in the book, appears only hurried and shallow in the film.  I am thankful, in short, that I paid nothing to see it.

Sanjuro by Akira Kurosawa (1962) – This film is a sequel of sorts to Yojimbo, and it might be summarized by the phrase, repeated several times in the course of the story, that the best sword remains sheathed.  The hero, a grizzled samurai, is told this first by the noblewoman whom he rescues near the beginning of the film, and he repeats the phrase to himself in the final scene, but much of the film reinforces this idea less obviously, showing how most violence is unnecessary, and how it is the stupidity of some that makes violence necessary for others.

The final scene recapitulates this theme succinctly.  Sanjuro is confronted by a samurai whom he has tricked and defeated throughout the course of the film.  Sanjuru has removed his hands from his sleaves and has tucked them against his body under his kimono, and though I am not certain whether there are the cultural connotations for this stance, it is certainly a passive one, with his hands far from his sword and encumbered by his clothing.  He remains in this position even once confronted, telling his opponent that he does not want to fight, that enough blood has been spilled already.  He is, visually and symbolically, sheathed, but his opponent is persistent, as movie villains so often are, and he is forced to unsheathe himself and slay his enemy.  He is, as he says himself a moment later, a sword that cannot remain sheathed.

This blend of symbolism and reflection with what remains essentially an action film, all very beautifully shot, is what makes Kurosawa’s films so appealing.

49th Parallel by Michael Powell (1941) – As a Canadian, I find 49th Parallel often amusing, since it portrays Canada as a nation of trappers and natives and Hutterites and dillettant democrats, which most Canadians would have recognized only as a stereotype even at the time the film was made.  The propgandist elements of the film are also enetrtaining at a remove of some seventy years, sounding mostly forced and mostly unnatural.  The story, however, still remains compelling, and the pacing is superb, creating a thriller that builds in intensity without having to resort to cliche plot techniques.  The score, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, is also very good.  I would recommned it very highly for a February evening with a glass of scotch.

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.

Having spent the better part of four years now immersing myself in documentary film, I am starting to find a kind of comfort with the medium, a familiarity with its tendencies and its habits, with its movements and its processes.  I am discovering by contrast, however, how little familiarity I still have with the feature film, and I am realizing also that the process of making myself familiar with feature films will need to be much different than the process I used to familiarize myself with documentaries.  The difference is primarily this: I had almost no experience with documentary prior to approaching the medium seriously, so I had few preconceptions that needed to be overturned, while I have had a fairly extensive experience of the feature film, just by existing in my culture, but most of this experience has been with the lowest common denominator of Hollywood film.  So, while my approach to documentary film was to watch everything I could find, regardless of its quality, my approach to feature film, begun only a few weeks ago, has been to watch what are generally considered to be the best films.  So, I have been going into the public library, which is just down the street, and I have been browsing the shelves until I come to a Criterion Collection film, any Criterion Collection film, and I have been letting it be my film for the week.

For those who are unfamiliar with The Criterion Collection, it is, according to its own mission statement, “a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films” that is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements.”  It is, in other words, the creator and defender of a certain filmic canonicity that I hope will be the counterbalance to the popular film that has largely formed my experience to date.  Thus far, I have seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972); Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1952).  During this time I have also seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood (2007), which will likely be a Criterion Collection film itself at some point or another.

Though these films are all very different from each other, they are similar in possessing what I will call a patient camera, one of the characteristics that I am coming to see as a distinction between strong films from weak ones.  A patient camera takes its time with its subjects.  It is not afraid of being still, of holding a shot, of showing silence and inaction, of including repetition.  It is interested in images of slowness and silence and stillness and duration as much as it is interested in images of speed and loudness and movement and transition.  Let me give several examples.

The  opening section of Solaris is a series of very long shots, either entirely still or moving slowly, of nature and of the protagonist, who remains mostly still and entirely speechless. There is only a very small amount of ambient sound, and the images are mostly of still objects, though some of them do move organically, slowly, almost hypnotically.  These images serve to parallel the movement of the great alien sea that the protagonist will later encounter, but they also create a tone of silence and stillness and aloneness and reflection that will be paralleled by the protagonists’ journey into space.

There Will Be Blood opens with another such speechless scene, though one that contains much more activity, and this forms a pattern for many of the film’s dialogue scenes, which are static or broken or inclusive of long silences but interrupted or ended by bursts of anger and action and violence and even murder.  Each of these scenes seems to underwrite how difficult it is for the protagonist to interact with the rest of humanity that he finds so repulsive.

Two-Lane Backtop has so little dialogue in it that the voices seem like intrusions when the characters finally do speak, and the film is full of long steady shots of the occupants of the vehicles as they drive through the landscape.  The dialogue is most often represented with a medium-range shot that does not require cutting from face to face to get the reactions of the characters, so the conversations are largely uncut, even when the lapse into silence, as the film itself finally does also, as the last scene eschews any audio at all.

In The Wages of Fear, the scenes of the nitroglycerin-loaded truck are shot in this patient way also.  There are stationary shots of the truck moving slowly across the screen.  There are fixed shots that track with the truck along its slow journey.  There are seemingly endless shots of the truck’s wheels moving inch by inch through potholes and ruts in the road.  These shots are intercut with one another, and no single shot is terribly long, but the sense is of slowness and tension and apprehension.

In all of these ways, and in many others also, the cameras of these films are patient.  They do not cut or shoot for speed simply because speed is possible.  They take their time in order to create a filmic time and space in which the images and the characters and the dialogue can find a pace and a movement that is proper and that is visually effective.  They are not tempted into the illusion that only speed and activity are able to create interest.  They recognize that interest can also be found in stillness and silence, and that even greater interest can be created in the contrast between the two.  I am discovering, I think, that this kind of patience is the mark of a film worth seeing.

I read an interview with Werner Herzog in the Globe and Mail this morning.  I love Herzog, not just his films, of which I have seen too few, but his persona as a director, and the interview provides some fabulous examples of this persona at work.  For example, how many Hollywood directors are capable of an observation this articulate and this profound:  “I see a rigorous correlation between the explosion of instruments of communication, cellphones, the Internet, virtual reality, and the amount of human solitude, existential solitude. I can’t fully explain it, I can only observe it. More people are withdrawn, and they are incapable of real dialogue. The 21st-century will be the century of solitude.”  If more of our directors were capable of this kind of thoughtful reflection, if more of them were capable of articulating themselves half so well, perhaps we would have more films worth watching.

The Guelph Festival of Moving Media is upcoming on the first weekend of November, from Thursday the 5th to Sunday the 8th.  The festival focuses on cinema and social justice and usually includes an eclectic mixture of documentaries, and this year’s program includes several that interest me very much.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto by Brett Gaylor, is a film that Dave Humphrey brought to my attention a while ago, but I have not yet had a chance to see it.  It focuses on the music of Girl Talk, which is created using samples and mash-ups, and which therefore raises some questions about copyright and free culture.  I will try to make this screening if at all possible.

I would also like to see Alanis Obomsawin’s Professor Norman Cornett, which explores the pedagogy of the former McGill University Professor.  Not only is his story an interesting one, but the issues that it raises about teaching and education are ones that concern me particularly.

I will also make a point of seeing Anders Ostergaard’s Burma VJ, because of how closely it relates to the themes of the documentary course that I will be teaching in January.  The film looks at high risk journalism, focusing on citizen journalists in Burma, and I am hopeful that it might be a film that I can use in my course in order to explore just this subject of journalism in areas of social upheaval.

Taking up a slightly lighter topic, Nollywood Babylon by Ben Addelman and Samir Malla also piques my curiosity.   It looks at the rapidly growing film industry in Nigeria, where the making of the films seems to be every bit as entertaining as the films themselves.  I have the premonition that I will like this one very much.

My biggest disappointment will be having to miss Murray Siple’s Carts of Darkness, which happens to be playing at the same time as Professor Norman Corbett.  It explores the lives of people who survive by collecting bottles in Vancouver, and is just the sort of quirky documentary that appeals to me.  If only it were playing at another time.

The whole of the lineup actually looks quite good, and the tickets are cheap, so do check the GFOMM website, and make some time in your calendar this first weekend in November.  Better yet, email me, and we can go see something together.

It was my wife who introduced me to the genre of the food movie.  We were still in highschool, and the film she showed me was Babette’s Feast by Gabriel Axel.  I have now seen this film seven or eight times, and I am always moved by the final scene where the people of the village begin to recognize each other again as they eat the food Babette is serving them.  Before I had even begun to articulate the philosophical and theological importance of the table to me, I intuitively recognized something significant in this scene, and I would recommend the film without reservation to anyone who loves food and to anyone who loves a good and simple story.

Last night, my wife and I discovered a similar film in Ali Raffi’s The Fish Fall in Love.  It is set in Iran, and it relates the story of a woman who runs a restaurant in the house of her former fiance, who had disappeared many years earlier but has now returned.  Frightened that he will evict her from the house and from her means of providing for herself, she and the other women who work with her decide to cook for him as a way of convincing him to allow them to stay.  The film is beautifully simple.  The story does not try to say too much.  The acting is understated and intimate.  The music does not overwhelm, as it too often does now in Hollywood films.   The film is content, and rightly so, to be what it is.

The scenes that take place in the kitchen and around the table are accomplished beautifully.  There is a real sense of the unique combination of labour and community that characterizes the kitchen, and an attention to the interactions that take place around the table.  There are also several places where food is offered from one person to another, and these scenes are marked with a similar degree of significance.  In every case, the food takes on a symbolic role, a ritual role, becomes a carrier of meaning and value.  Because of this role, the food itself is also the subject of the film’s gaze on many occasions, as the camera follows the food from the market and the garden, to the cutting board and the simmering pot, and finally to the plate.  These images produce an almost physical pleasure in me.  They are beautiful aesthetically, and even more so, because they are also beautiful symbolically.

I am not sure how readily available the film is wherever you might happen to be, but it is well worth the effort to go and find it.

Let me say, right from the beginning, that I have never been one of Quentin Tarantino’s biggest fans.  I enjoy his films, mostly.  I think his dialogue is often very good.  I love the way that he frames and moves through his shots.  I am not, however, able to respond to his films in the ways that other people do.  On the one hand, I cannot wallow in the popular culture references, in the violence, in the genre mashing that attracts the greater part of his audience.  On the other hand, neither can I find much profundity in the irony and social commentary that attracts his more intellectual admirers.  I find his work far more interesting than the generic Hollywood films that are generally found in theatres, of course, but this is not exactly a grand achievement.

On Tuesday night, however, I went with Don Moore and John Jantunen to see Inglourious Basterds, and I think my opinion of the film might very well be summed up in the words that close it.  They are spoken by Aldo, an American officer in charge of a Jewish special forces unit that has been dropped into Nazi France to wreak havoc on the occupying forces.  Throughout the film, he has allowed only a very few of his Nazi prisoners to survive, and he has carved a swastika into the foreheads of each of these men as a way of marking them as Nazis even after they have removed their uniforms.  He takes a certain pride in this operation, remarking at one point that he is getting quite good at it, and suggests that you only get to be the best with practice.

In the final scene, Aldo is taking charge of a German SS officer who has made a deal with the Allies.  He knows that he cannot kill his prisoner, but he is also unwilling to let the man escape his crimes, so he resorts again to carving a swastika on his prisoner’s forehead.  The closing shot is of Aldo’s face from below, from the perspective of the newly branded officer, as Aldo says, “I think this may be my masterpiece.”

All of which is to say that Tarantino, at least in my opinion, could have put these same words in his own mouth, and perhaps, in a way, he even does, since there are more than a few similarities between how Aldo and Tarantino use violence as a medium.  In any case, whether or nor he had the audacity to say so himself, I think Inglourious Basterds is indeed Tarantino’s masterpiece, at least to date.  What distinguishes it from his previous films, at least in my opinion, is the structural complexity of the story, the many layers of parallelism that engage the audience itself in the film’s social and ethical critique.  I could give many examples of this, but one will have to suffice.

In the climactic sequence, a Jewish theatre owner is hosting the première of a Goebbles film.  The entirety of the Nazi high command is in attendance, so the owner and her black lover have decided to lock the doors and burn the theatre down around the audience.  The film being premièred is about a young German soldier who single-handedly defends a tower against 300 Allied soldiers, and the footage is mostly of these Allied soldiers being gunned down in various ways.  Hitler and the other Nazi luminaries are shown laughing at this carnage, and Hitler even mentions to Goebbles that the film is his best work.

This moment produces an interesting irony, however, considering that the audience of Tarantino’s film has been similarly laughing at depictions of German soldiers being shot, scalped, smothered, strangled, and beaten with baseball bats.  Suddenly, the audience of Tarantino’s film is being paralleled with the audience of Goebbles’ film,  and our laughter begins to appear disturbingly akin to Hitler’s laughter, a laughter that comes from seeing the death of those we have always assumed to be deserving of nothing other than death.

Film logic has always told us that Nazis are the one unambiguous evil.  Nazis appear on screen only to be killed.  They can be killed without conscience.  In fact, they can even be killed with a certain humour, and we will laugh along.  Yet, this laughter, Tarantino implies, is very much Hitler’s laughter also.  The only difference is in the kinds of people that we are amused to see dying.

This is not say that Tarantino is in any way excusing the Nazis.  Quite the opposite: without offering them any excuse whatsoever, he is implicating his own audience in their behaviour and implying that we are also guilty of the same unambiguous evil that the Nazis have come to represent, and when the theatre burns down around Hitler and his staff, there is the uncomfortable implication that we, as an audience of Tarantino’s film, might expect a similar fate.

We are left to wonder whether there might not be those who would indeed happily burn us in our seats because we have been all too content to watch them dying, because we have always assumed that they exist only to die.  There may not be an orphaned Jewish girl behind the projector or her persecuted black lover behind the screen, but there are any number of candidates to take their places, some who have already taken their places, the oppressed and forgotten people of the world for whom violence and torture and terrorism appear to be the only choices available.

Which brings me back to that final scene, where Aldo is etching a Swastika in his prisoner’s forehead.  Perhaps Tarantino’s film puts us in the place of that prisoner.  After all, it is in that moment, for the first time, that the camera takes the point of view of one of its characters, and we are made to look, through the SS officer’s eyes, at the face of the one who has just marked us forever.  Perhaps we are meant to recognize that we too have committed the same kinds atrocities through the very ways that we live, that we too have cut a deal that lets us escape responsibility for the violence that our lives inflict on others, and that we too, through the film, are now being marked as a permanent reminder of our culpability, though we have no uniform that others might recognize.  Perhaps, Tarantino’s film is his way of sitting on our chests, taking a knife in his hand, and marking us as those who are content to have certain kinds of people die so that we can live the way we do.  Perhaps this is his masterpiece.  Perhaps.