Truth is Out There

“Artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up.”

watch the hand

Yes, another another. This one comes along on the heels of a mention by Eileen at the Theatre that they are considering the move to 3D projection. i would advise against it, but that’s just me. Call me a Luddite or a purist ( you would be close to correct on the latter), but in this so-called information age, we are being bombarded with stuff on the merits of its packaging, with less and less emphasis of the content therein. i suppose a good metaphor here would be the Playboy Bunny- lights are on (and would you check out those headlights) but nobody’s home. i could mention Avatar here, but i would be repeating myself.

one of the things i was reminded of last fall as i worked on my film class  projects was that the visual quality of film- even super8 film- is still powerful and stunning. While i do find the crispness and clarity of high definition to be truly amazing, i don’t really believe that it is necessarily a requirement for good story telling. A recent example i would insert here is a film i haven’t seen but, because of reviews and comments i’ve read about it, i plan to take it in. It is the documentary Sweetgrass, about sheep ranchers in Montana, and the reviews have been glowing, except for the mention that it should have been shot in high def to fully capture the beauty of the scenery. It is unfair to pass judgement without having seen it, but the fact is that beautiful scenery has been filmed and appreciated for over a hundred years without the “benefit” of digital technology, so either the cinematographer (or videographer in this case) is to blame, or the expectation is unfair- i will wait and see. 

So, what is too much information? Some people  thought that adding sound to films was, and it seems that one could go even further back to make the claim that adding motion to a still photograph was an overload. One of the things we learned in last night’s doc history class was that when the Brothers Lumiere first showed their 50 second films to the public, it was simply the movement of things that intrigued the viewers. Workers leaving a factory; a train coming into a station; a baby eating lunch- all became fascinating because they moved within the frame. There was no story in many cases,  just movement, but people watched just because of that.

One can think of  a few “new” tech ideas that we are better off without. What comes to mind first was the concept put forth in Alduous Huxley’s book Brave New World of  going to the Feelies- movies that give you the feeling (through knobs on your seat arms which you grasp while watching) of what is happening on the screen. One can see the problems here- would feeling Bruce Willis’ Die Hard pain bring box office or law suits?  i know, the premise Huxley was running on was more about pleasure than pain, but these things can and do get used for purposes other than their original intent.  More recently we have the virtual embedded war correspondent experience as portrayed in the great, but little known film, War, Inc. Here reporters are injected with a microchip and given virtual reality goggles and seated in a motion simulator so they can “go into battle” while not really going there. Some would argue that that’s where embedded reporters already go, but that’s another story. One can also not forget John Water’s trip to another dimension in his film Polyester, where audience members where given a numbered scratch and sniff  ‘Odorama’ card and prompted throughout the film to augment their olfactory experience with fragrances that ranged from roses to flatulence. While i think the concept was brilliant and funny, one could make the case that what Waters puts on the screen is already enough information to make his point.

We could, at this point, go into Ted Turner’s colossal misstep into colorizing  classic black and white films, but that is too much like fingernails on the blackboard. As it is, i already get engulfed in films without glasses and cine-wizard tech. In fact, the more i know of the wizard’s hand in the mix, the more i find myself rejecting the construct.

Perhaps, like the Lumieres showed in first opening the cinematic box of Pandora (not the Moon), we only need time before a 3D storytelling does become the accepted mode of operation. But in stepping back in time to the beginnings of the movie tale, it seems all one really needs is a good story and a flickering picture to tell it.

what has really been baking my noodle lately is the hooplah around james cameron’s latest ode to himself- that would be avatar. what has actually been stirring the juices here is a spin on the byrne quote above and something i’ve noticed as i’ve dug deeper into filmland, and that is the issue of already been there. i have been resurfacing memories of art school and the notion that it has all been done before. what i have found of late, having completed two short films for film school, is that in many ways it has all been done before. i was recently given copies of some old black and white classics- sunrise by murnau and chaplin’s modern times, and there i found some of the basics of what i had been filming about- a different context and situation of course- different, but somehow the same. as i watched and saw these parallels i was reminded of a time more than thirty years ago when i was slumping further and further into my seat as i realized that the scene i was watching from one of ingmar bergman’s classics was eerily the same as a dream i’d had the night before- there does seem to be evidence of some kind of universal, collective unconsciousness- i guess it will be amazing when it finally wakes up.

one might be wondering where this is meant to be going. what got me spinning in this groove was actually a viewing a few days ago of district 9, neill blomkamp’s avatar on earth. at this point i hadn’t seen cameron’s magnum opus- a situation i rectified last night at our own vashon theatre. what was bothering me previous to that was the notion that cameron had rewritten the book on computer generated effects and that this would change the face of cinema. what i saw in district 9, however, was that the cg book really didn’t need any revisons- blomkamp had aliens running around on his set, or at least it sure looked that way, and for an eighth of the cost of a trip to pandora.

as far as having been done before, as i recall it there was this small animated feature titled fern gully, which pitted the native inhabitants of an enchanted rain forests against the ravaging, land-raping avarice of the corporate state. on the other hand and in the land of the real, a small documentary with a big message by filmmakers george and beth gage tells the story of two native american sisters who were in a 30 year battle over the rights to their/shoshone land in nevada. it was our own government, nudged on by mining interests, who were the antagonists in this mini-epic. sound familiar? appropriately named american outrage, this doc brings the real message home about corporate greed, without indulging in massive consumption of production budgets. it tells essentially the same story without the idyllic floating mountains, beautiful blue people or the epic battle scenes. maybe more people would be concerened about the plight of the dann sisters (actually one has since departed) if  they rode pterodactyls and ran naked through the sagebrush, just like the na’avi.

i was asked how i liked avatar soon after watching it- my initial response was that it made me angry, for the above reasons and more. on the other side, perhaps my strongest memory of that nearly three hour excursion was that of the forest spirit represented by what could only be described as a milkweed seed gene-spliced with a jellyfish. i thought this was a bit of genius. the bioluminescent flora of the forests of pandora were amazing as well, but some of the late night e-wire extravaganzas i’ve seen at burning man, while not organic, as expansive or as  interactive, were nearly as awe inspiring. on the other hand, a late night paddle across tramp harbor in late summer with a glowing v being generated by the bow wave, and sparks igniting in the water to each side with each bioluminescent paddle stroke, will always out do any cinematic sleight of hand.

so, one might say- got any other movie buzzes that need a good killing? i think i’m done for now, but there’s plenty more where that came from.

While comedy is seen on the marquee as part of the offerings at the Vashon Theatre, there was nothing funny about what owner Eileen Wolcott found when she arrived Sunday to get the Theatre ready for the day’s screenings. Sometime during the night, someone broke in and made off with the flatscreen monitor in the lobby, 2 dvd players and the theater-quality digital projector which is an intergral part of  many special events that are hosted here. Wolcott called this a “pretty harsh blow”, following a month where even blockbusters like vampire flick New Moon have not done well on the Island. Given that there was minimal vandalism and mess, it appears that the break-in was targeting goods that could be fairly easily converted to cash. Saying that  they will “do what we can to take it in stride”, Wolcott wanted to emphasize that the 35mm projector was not affected by the projection room violation and that regular screenings will still go on. She said that they were “still standing”, but “really sad”.

While standing outside the theatre to turn away people arriving for the screening of Crude that i was involved with, i learned that local farmstands have also been targeted by thieves lately. Another local business owner who was passing by shook his head and said something about frontier justice and opening cans of whoopass in regard to the perps. Regardless of what happens, a special place in the hotter and more foul smelling areas of hell have been reserved for anyone stealing from those who are themselves struggling to make Vashon a better place.

Theatre owner Eileen Wolcott lists stolen items

During this suspended existence, there were a bunch of films i floated through, but probably the most important were the boxed set trio from Polish director Andrzej Wadja that i found on half price sale last Summer and haven’t had the nerve to get into until now. Part of my hesitation toward viewing these three was the old test of time thing. The third film in the box, Ashes and Diamonds, was actually my reason for getting the set- it was not available in any other form. It was also a film that i had seen more than thirty years ago as a part of my major introduction into ’something other than hollywood’  land. It was a film that blew me away at the time. Often times, one can go back to a book or an album or a film that  was a strong influence in those formative years, only to find that you have grown while the game-changer has become diminished in stature. We, or at least i, don’t like to see that.

As it turns out, this time i wasn’t disappointed. i would say though that the pedestal where Ashes and Diamonds (1958) had been residing is now more of an Olympic podium shared by the other two films, A Generation (1955) and Kanal (1957). All three deal with World War II, the oppression of Naziism, Communism and the Polish resistance, and having been made relatively soon after the conflict by people who had lived it, they all serve as time capsule windows into another culture and another time.

 A Generation was Wadja’s first feature film, and is astounding in its all ’round mastery of the craft. It tells of the early days of the war and the organization of a faction of the Polish underground. Kanal takes place during the time of the Warsaw Uprising, and is shot in two parts- in the light of day in battle in the ruins of Old Town Warsaw, and in an incredibly lit system of sewers beneath the city. Ashes and Diamonds chronicles the last days of the War, when the Nazis are being driven from the country just as the Soviet occupying forces come in to “save ” the day. In all of these films, beyond the skill of their making and the intrigue of their tales, the extras sections provide a whole other level of insight into what they are about. While one might have thought (i certainly did) that this band of filmmakers in the Iron Curtained purgatory of post-War Poland would have been isolated from outside cinematic influences, i was surprised to find out that it was the style and presence of James Dean, in his performance in Rebel Without a Cause, that strongly influenced both the look and the concept for the main character, Maciek, in Ashes and Diamonds. Sometimes these extras things are a bit too much information packed for me, but in this case, the insights and backstories all made this revisitation of this past fascination a box load of  an education, in spite of the fog.

In gardens, the concept of having a focal point where one’s eye is drawn to is something that has always bothered me. To place a bench or a gold-leaved shrub or a  statue of a naked nymph holding a polished bronze apple so that eyes are drawn to that point in the garden has always seemed to me to be counter to the point of being in a garden. My interest in a bench might be to go there and sit so i could gaze back over the space i just passed through. The gold foliage of that mock orange over there might be interesting  because of its relation colorwise to the stand of bronze carex beneath it or the complementary nature of that purple smoke bush just behind it. And that nymph sculpture- don’t make me go there.

Photographing a garden is a whole, other matter. It has been said, i forget by whom, that the garden- or piece of a garden- that one sees in a photograph only exists for the fraction of a second that it took to capture that image as the shutter popens and closes. This particular picture frame had been selected to focus attention on foliage or flower or trick of the light or all the above, and once the shutter has been tripped and the camera moved on, that section of space mingles back with the rest of the garden. Having recently given a garden talk locally, i came home to the new garden that was the subject of my pontification, only to be fairly disappointed that pretty much none of the greatest hits of the past summer were in evidence in the October gloom- i had just run through over a hundred garden views that in reality had only been there for a few seconds in total exposure time, and were certainly long gone, except as saved in pixels logged in 0’s and 1’s, somewhere in the digital file marked summergarden09.

One might be asking what this has to do with film, to which i would say that we were talking about getting people’s attention in film class the other day. Much has been made of subliminal messaging in the media- you don’t know the half of it. It seems that there are things aimed at getting one’s attention going on all the time, frame by frame. From colors to light to objects and character placement in the frame, we are constantly being told to look over there. An example we were given was of a student play where the instructor in that class was a minor character. What our instructor noted was that, while this particular production was a bit scattered, the experience of the teacher on stage had him staring intently at the main character getting through his lines, drawing wavering attention back to the main focus of the scene. While it seemed something of a revelation at the time, in thinking it over on the way home it seemed more obvious in a real world sense. You can be walking down the street and see intensity of gazes on other people’s faces grow and wane, but if you notice a number of people focused in the same direction you are fairly likely to turn and see what’s going on. Add a look of concern or an emphatic,  pointing finger and you have even more reason to look. Like, well, over there- no behind you. Too late.

The two films here are V for Vendetta, from the prodigious Wachowski brothers, and For My Father- the film mentioned in the next box down- from Israeli director Dror Zahavi. Both films are about revenge, with main characters who wrap themselves in explosives for a cause. Both films have been criticized for oversimplifying the dilemmas they pose. Both films dig deeply into the psyche and expose the raw nerves that drive the need for revenge.

The main character- for those who aren’t familiar- in V for Vendetta is only identified as the letter V. He is the sole survivor of a government experiment in bio-warfare and, after twenty years, is out to get those who “done him wrong.” He wears a mask depicting the stylized face of Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the Parliament building in London a number of hundreds of years ago. He quotes Shakespeare, and has a few notable sayings of his own, a sampling of which are:

A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

There is no such thing as coincidence, only the illusion of coincidence.

The main character in For My Father is named Tarek and played by Shredi Jabarin. As we quickly learn, Tarek has been tapped to be the next human explosive delivery system as a Palestinian response to the ongoing occupation of lands by Israel. Tarek seems to get little comfort from the men accompanying him to his “operation”, especially when one says, “we do not have an air force- you are our airforce.” I found it interesting that it was noted in an AP story i clicked on before coming here to write, that the name of the aledged terrorist in the latest “discovered” U.S. plot was also named Tarek- makes one wonder what that illusion of coincidence means.

i wonder a lot about these coincidences- so-called or not. The day Diane’s review appeared in this blog zone was the same day i received a copy of For My Father in the mail, from a film club of which i’m a member. In noting the Israeli- Palestinian conflict theme on the dvd cover, i immediately thought of the three documentaries we recently screened at Lunavision about this very subject, and wondered how a fiction could shed any more light on this basin of troubles. As it turns out, simplification and coincidence are powerful tools that have allowed Zahavi to construct an indictment of this border struggle that causes even the documentaries to pale in comparison.

What we are offered in For My Father is a play on a street corner. There are disputes and resolution among people in a block in Tel Aviv. There is a love story of sorts. And we have a stranger who arrives among them with a pack of trouble from a much larger picture. What we slowly learn here is that there is no good reason to burden these neighbors with more and greater troubles, and that the frame of Tarek’s large and dangerous picture has no purpose or place here.

Katz (Shlomo Vishinsky) is one of the shopkeepers at the center of this drama. He had a son who died in service with the Israeli army. To this end, Katz makes the following statement: “He died because everyone here is stupid.” As a coincidence, this could be just as easily applied to the deadly results of most  armed conflicts. If you have to see one film about the Middle East problem, or if you’re looking for a drama that will spark discussion, open mental pathways, and shake you to the core, i would suggest For My Father.

That was simple.

I was spurred into thinking about what might ruin a film by something said at my first filmmaking class at the Seattle Film Institute last week. In discussing our first assigment for next week, one of our two instructors mentioned how paying strict attention to the position and power of the edit in film composition might, for a time, ruin how one perceives any given movie. This brought to mind the words of one Marvin Saltzman, a printmaking instructor i had in the exploratory days of art school. He spoke of a certain German print making school where the students would gather around new work that arrived from various places, and cast intense and probing glances through handheld magnifiers at these objects of art, hoping to undertstand and perhaps adopt any new technique that their close inspection should reveal. The takeaway here was that these students were at least partly missing the point by ignoring the merits of the entire work by digging for only how it had been put on the page. The other side of that is,  if one fully understands the use and purpose of  the depth of an etch on a zinc plate or the wavering vibrato of a finger at the fret on the neck of a guitar or the subtle combination of two images in a movie timeline, then the technique disappears into what one hopes will be a more mature work of art.

That said, I thought a bit more about the trouble with edit point awareness and how it might skew a view of a film, and went a bit beyond that to a problem i sometimes have with objects inside the frame that shouldn’t be there. Probably the most notable time/ space disturbance i ever experienced from the big screen was when Peter Seller’s Chance was swept off the streets of the other Washington, as portrayed in Being There, and was taken to the fat cat’s mansion just outside of downtown D.C. I knew, however, that as soon as the limo turned down that tree-lined lane that we were not in, or closely outside, the beltway anymore, and in fact were paying a visit to the Biltmore Estate just outside of Asheville, N.C. At the time i wondered if a piece of the film had been lost somewhere on the projection room floor, since that particular overland journey was not just a jump cut away. Once the whole suspension of disbelief thing kicked in i was able to accept the fiction that this journey had indeed been brief in the context of the story. I’m now a little bit better at making these kinds of reality/film reality events go away. One that comes up with a bit more regularity is the misplaced plant syndrome. This occurs when one is just traveling along with characters and story and all of a sudden there is a shimmer off a mass of foliage on a tree of a certain shape and silhouette that really should not be growing there, if we are really in that assumed region or country. Before i shout and scream that hey, we are not in Korea, we’re in southern California, i catch myself, make a smug note of quiet recognition and then get back to the story at hand. It didn’t spoil a thing.

Off to draw stick figures in a storyboard and try to make the edits disappear.

But what if you happen to lose something a little more tangible than money.  What if you are out for a walk or are digging in the soil and for no real good reason you are missing arms and legs and you can’t get up. This is something we don’t have to think about too much in these United States, but in many parts of the world, the land mine is an all too real surprize. From Bosnia to Burma to the current conflict in Afghanistan, anti-personnel devices are a reality that takes things away that aren’t coming back, no matter how much one skews the data. In Disarm, director Mary Wareham takes us around the globe to see the effects  of landmines on the human condition. We are also introduced to Jody Williams, who had by the late nineties done the work to earn her Nobel peace prize as a leader in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. From Colombia to Iraq, landmines continue to wreak havoc on the human body, and in Afghanistan, the prosthetics industry is one of the largest in that third poorest country in the world. Things could be different- Ms. Williams and others are working on getting these devices out of international arsenals so that the act of walking won’t lead to the reality of not being able to walk again.

We screen Disarm tonight at Cafe Luna at 7pm. I’d better get up there.

What is it about film that engages us? Some observers are eloquent — actress Ingrid Bergman said “No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does,” while some in the business cut to the chase — studio boss Samuel Goldwyn proclaimed “Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.”  Critic Pauline Kael,  known for her many years of New York Times film reviews, wrote “The words “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies.”  And writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry included filmmaking on a short list of great recent human achievements, famously saying that, “The transport of flickering pictures … still has the single aim of bringing men together.”

Art, entertainment, commerce, blood, guts, gore, musical, romantic comedy, truth and illusion, philosophy and psychoanalysis — all co-existing on the big screen and coming every week to a movie theatre very near you!  Vashon Film Society welcomes the exchange of ideas that we hope will be generated with this web log, and as Film Society president, I am pleased to introduce two island film folks who will be contributing to our blog:  PETER RAY and DIANE BRADFORD.

Leslie McMichael, president
Vashon Film Society

_____________________________________________

Peter Ray and Film

My first film experience was Bambi. I don’t remember much about it other than my Dad drove us to the theater- I couldn’t quite reach the pedals yet at four. Oh yes, there was something else- it was a dark and stormy night- at least that’s how I remember it. Some other early memories revolve around the station wagon at the drive in- King Kong vs. Godzilla, Dr. No, Vertigo, and those crazy speaker boxes that hung on the window. “Turn it up Dad, we can’t hear it back here.”

There was other stuff in between, but the most important immersion I had into the world of film was at the Dryden Theatre, which is a part of the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. While working there as a gardener I had free access to all the film screenings they ran, which at times meant that I was watching classic European film all week and some commercial films of interest on the weekend. As the likes of Bergman, De Sica, Antonioni, Fellini and Bunuel were paraded across the screen, I sat with the giant word bubble over my head with the simple OH! inside- I always sat at the back so it didn’t block anyone’s view.

As of late, I’m finding that the film stories that grab most firmly on to my interest are those that are true, not simply based on the events they sometimes resemble. Documentaries are the new tales and the people who make them are the new story tellers. The bumpersticker-” Film is Truth” comes to mind here. I am planning on joining the ranks of the new story tellers in the coming months, and I hope to document that transition, along with some commentary about other things film related as I pass through.  Welcome to my rabbit hole.

________________________________________

Diane Bradford and Film

Diane Bradford served on the first board of the Aspen Film Festival from 1995-96 and continued to work as a volunteer with the film group until 1998.  She participated on the screening committee and saw many, many, many hours of films submitted to the annual festival which identified itself as “Independent by nature.”  Translate that as: Diane saw a lot of films which never got distribution, never made it big, but all of which got her time and feedback and perhaps honed her opinions and taste in what she liked, valued and enjoyed in film. She says she always “loved finding that diamond in the rough,” the chance to discover a good film before anyone else. Her time on the screening committee focused on short films and documentaries, and she felt her role was as a “regular person” seeing movies and emphasized that shenever wanted to be perceived as posing as a pro.

Recent favorite films include THE KITE RUNNER and  THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. Diane loves both documentaries and features, she appreciates the Vashon Theatre and how the Vashon Film Society works to sustain the island’s only movie theatre, and she welcomes the chance to have an exchange with other movie lovers via this blog.  In fact, the invitation to participate in the new VFS blog motivated her to volunteer for this fall’s Aspen Film Fest so perhaps Vashon will get some breaking news from the film festival circuit as Diane drives filmmakers between hotel and screening!

Sunday-Oct. 11- Vashon Theatre- 7pm- admission by donation- $5 suggested- brought to you by For Word Films and the Vashon Film Society- proceeds to go to Greenwald’s  Brave New Foundation. More info at the Brave New Theaters website:

http://rethink.bravenewtheaters.com/screening/show/13229-vashon-island