The Two Eyes Of Mark Wilson

If you didn't attend some wonderful repertory/revival film screenings in 2012, you missed out. As nobody could see them all, I've recruited Frisco Bay filmgoers to recall some of their own favorites of the year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Mark Wilson, an artist/filmmaker whose work will be included in Gallery Bergen's upcoming exhibition proto-cinematic investigations.

In 2012, it became positively clear that there are now suddenly far fewer opportunities to see 35mm prints, especially from the catalogs of major studios.  This impending scarcity of projected prints influenced many of my film going decisions this year, as one could no longer be assured that that certain films would come around again, to be presented in the medium they were made to be viewed.  I'm not anti-digital, but I feel that works made as film should be shown as film. Digital shouldn't try to imitate and look like film and to that end, it has a long way to go before growing into its own as a medium. I feel digital translations of films are a useful tool for preservation and study, but not a satisfactory cinema experience. There is another essential quality of cinema that needs to be preserved as well, since it's one we truly cannot afford to lose... the experience of community around cinema, going out to see films with friends, sitting among strangers, and often afterwards discussing the works face to face.  Many of the epiphanies that I've had around a film, how the medium makes its meaning, why a director has made an unusual decision, have often been sparked by an observational fragments spoken by others in conversation, which resonate alongside other fragments I've observed, leading to a fuller understanding of the work.  Many of the programs I've attended last year were presentations by organizations such as the Pacific Film Archives (PFA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco Film Society,  Artists' Television Access (ATA), and San Francisco Cinematheque.  These organizations often not only bring us together as a community to view works, but regularly put us in the same room and in dialogue with the artists who have created the films we view.  Artists' Television Access and San Francisco Cinematheque have been doing this as part of their  mission for decades. If you're unfamiliar with either, they have been around, waiting for you to discover the community they offer.  Both organizations are quite small and in need of the support of open-minded cinema enthusiasts, if they're to continue their mission and to grow in a rapidly-changing San Francisco.

Time:      

Everything you may have read or heard about the greatness of the Silent Film Festival's presentation of Napoleon, is to be believed.  I'm sorry if you missed it, because its way at the top of my list of Bay Area film experiences in 2012, and not exclusively for the film, and the accompanying live orchestral score, but also largely in part for way in which the event fully awakened the Paramount Theater itself... an art deco jewel of a film palace brought to life in the name of Cinema.  Napoleon was a complete experience, a film that took you back in time, to the French Revolution,  presented in a vessel powered by the anticipation, excitement, and energy of those in attendance, transporting us back to an age when Cinema was monumental.

Time, or the questioning of our perception of it anyway, was the theme of several films that make my list for 2012.  Chirs Marker's La Jetee at SFMOMA (as well as his Sans Soleil at PFA), prompted another sitting with Vertigo, when the Castro presented it in 70mm.  There was also a Sunday afternoon at ATA when the Right Window Gallery celebrated the 20th anniversary of Anne McGuire's video Strain Andromeda, The a shot-by-shot, end to beginning, re-sequencing of The Andromeda Strain.  This wasn't exactly a screening of the piece, rather a re-presentation of its themes through Ed Halter reading his new essay about the work, and an exhibition of recent watercolors by McGuire, the Square Spiral Series... applications of small squares of color arranged in patterning reminiscent of the spiral of time seen in Vertigo's opening credits.  The first fifteen minutes of the video was also shown (or the last fifteen minutes of the original, if you prefer...)

Restrospectives:  

In 2012, I had the opportunity to thoroughly immerse in retrospectives of filmmakers whose works I make it a point to see every single time they show (simply because it isn't often enough.) Robert Bresson, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Hayao Miyazaki.  Each of these directors create works one can see many times over and still make new, sometimes startling discoveries within.

The Bresson series ran at the PFA, I'd seen all of the works, even the rare prints, more than once, and most many times...  the surprise film for me this time around was the The Devil Probably, not one of my favorites of his prior, but with Bresson sometimes deeper understanding of the work registers more forcefully after a few viewings (later in the year i saw this film twice again in the final days of the San Francisco Film Society's operation of the New People Cinema in Japantown.)

The Pacific Film Archives also presented Afterimage: Three Nights with Nathaniel Dorsky... as three consecutive Sunday evening programs in June, a time of year when a 7:30 start time in Berkeley feels like the late afternoon, a perfect setting for the contemplation of ten films by Dorsky, all made in the past ten years, (programmed in reverse chronological order I should add.)  Compline is the title I'll single out here, Dorsky's last kodachrome film of several decades of work with the stock, in full command of the color palette, contrasts, density, and everything magical that Kodachrome had to offer.

The Studio Ghibli festival featuring most all of Miyazaki's feature length animation work was a summer event that sort of slipped under the radar, yet provided film goers opportunities to see all the works presented in 35mm.  Those screenings were my last visits to the now closed Bridge Theater in San Francisco.  The series repeated the following week at the California Theater in Berkeley.  Porco Rosso has been the favorite of all these works ever since I first saw it on 35mm.  Seeing this film projected on a big screen is essential to appreciating what Miyazaki is doing in animating the crimson red seaplane, its form rendered from all angles as it twists and turns, gliding to and fro against backgrounds of clouds and blue sky, shown from a vantage point which itself is continuously in motion to the degree to which it all nearly becomes abstraction.

 In-Person:

There were notable in-person visits to the San Francisco Bay Area by experimental filmmakers that were the subject of two- or three-program surveys of work.  David Gatten from Colorado/North Carolina accompanied a touring mid-career retrospective of his films curated by the Wexner Center for the Arts.  In person, Gatten is an excellent storyteller... in particular, a ghost story that he shared, served to illuminate his work, Secret History of the Dividing Line.   PFA and San Francisco Cinematheque at YBCA co-hosted surveys of works by Rose Lowder from France, and by Gunvor Nelson from Sweden.   After her screening at YBCA, Lowder shared images of hand drawn charts, which represented field notes of her intricate film making processes, providing insight to the single frame, multiple pass, in-camera, checkerboard technique used to create film images, such as those of sailboats weaving through a field of red poppies, seen in Voiliers et Coquelicots. Nelson's visit was a return, as she had taught influentially at the San Francisco Art Institute for several decades.  Her work is often built around dense layers of personal language, ensuring there'll always be new things to discover in subsequent viewings.  Nelson's clear, delicate, and mischievous sound work, exemplified in Red Shift, has few peers in the realm of independent filmmaking.  

Material:

Barbara Loden's Wanda, screened at SFMOMA as part of their Cindy Sherman Selects series, was shot on 16mm reversal, intended for 35mm release, giving the film a gritty, yet vibrant look, perfectly befitting the narrative.   The print was recently restored directly from the original 16mm reversal materials.  Ernie Gehr's Side/Walk/Shuttle is my favorite film of all time, and I got a good look at it again this past year at the PFA in a new 35mm preservation print (it was originally filmed and presented in 16mm.)  Nineteen-nineties San Francisco has never looked sharper... gravitationally, precariously, clinging to the earth.  Without the technologies of digital, we wouldn't have a hand-colored version of Georges Melies' Trip to the Moon, to look at, so it seems appropriate to cite the Silent Film Festival's digital presentation at the Castro Theatre.  The projection's sharpness of image and richness of coloring seemed perhaps hyper-accentuated, yet properly serving as a reminder of what material we were actually looking at. This translation took little away from Melies' masterpiece (sadly I missed a subsequent presentation of a 35mm print of the restoration at the same theater.)  This year, for the I Only Have Two Eyes project, Brian also invited us to write about one new film wherein some aspect around the presentation worked with the film to create an enhanced cinema experience.  For me it was Jerome Hiler's Words of Mercury, screened in the San Francisco International Film Festival's experimental shorts program Blink of an Eye.  At the PFA, the camera original reversal film was projected, meaning that the very same material that was exposed in the camera was projected to the screen.   From reflected light through camera lens to film crystals, then electric light through film and projector lens to screen...  immediate, and revealing of a stunning spectrum of colors that could be recorded through the layering of exposures on film emulsion.  Inconceivably, that very Ektachrome stock used to make this work, would be discontinued at the year's end.

Community:  

This year I get to write about one of the highlights of my Bay Area film-going experiences of 2011, Mission Eye & Ear.  A series that was organized by Lisa Mezzacappa with Fara Akrami and presented at Artists Television Access, three programs of newly commissioned works, pairing Bay Area composer/musicians with their experimental filmmaker counterparts.  The programs in 2011 were spread throughout the year and because the works were new then, I couldn't list them in last year's contribution to Two Eyes, however, for 2012 I can list this past November's all-day reprisal of the series at YBCA, part of Chamber Music Day events.  All the efforts were amazing, but I felt the highlights were Konrad Stiener's The Evening Red with music by Matt Ingalls, and Kathleen Quillian's Fin de Siècle scored by Ava Mendoza (who also deserves mention for her 2012 colloaboration with Merrill Garbus and tUnE-yArDs, in scoring a program of Buster Keaton shorts for SFIFF.)  I mentioned community at the beginning of this post, and for me this series exactly represents the best of what that means here in the Bay Area.  I've attended and followed performances and work by most of these composers and musicians of the local experimental improv scene for over a decade, and for more than two decades have attended experimental film programs in the Bay Area.  It was incredibly satisfying to experience these new works arising from a collaborative meeting of these two communities of artists.

Adam Hartzell: I Wish

Summer moviegoing in a city like San Francisco doesn't have to mean check-your-brain trips to the mall. Alternative screening venues abound in this town- their schedules linked on my sidebar a click away. I'll make special mention of the particularly strong programming at the Roxie, the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, and the SF Film Society Screen over the next month or two, before mentioning a pair of special events featuring local musicians picking favorite locally-made films (Foul Play and The Conversation) at the Vogue this weekend. Also opening this weekend? A return-to-form from one of Japan's most internationally-esteemed directors right now, Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Adam Hartzell reviews the new film. All photos courtesy Magnolia Pictures:

It speaks to the power of cinema, and Hirokazu Kore-Eda's story-telling in particular, that the director's latest film had my wife and I changing our minds so quickly with such strong re-commitment.  The morning before we sat down to watch I Wish at the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival, we had made the difficult decision that traveling to see our family in Japan this summer probably wasn't the best for us financial-wise.  But once the credits closed the film, my wife was first to exclaim, and I was quick to second, "I really want to go to Japan now!"


This is, of course, exactly what the folks of jeki want to hear. jeki, (I've only seen it officially referenced in lower-case), is the East Japan Marketing & Communications advertising group, which is a subsidiary of the East Japan Railway Company.  And jeki partially funded I Wish.  If an international audience wasn't the intent, at least it can be assumed that they hoped to inspire their fellow Japanese citizens to travel to the most southwesterly island of Japan's archipelago, Kyushu.    Although my wife and I won't be heading that far south this time, (we went to Oita during our past visit), we are definitely heading to other prefectures along other railway lines after witnessing this engaging story of kids rallying around something bigger than themselves.

What was it that so transfixed us?  First, a quick plot summary.  The film follows two brothers who are amicably apart after the separation between their mother and father.   The two brother characters, older Koichi and younger Ryonosuke, are played by two real life brothers, Koki and Oshiro Maeda.   Koichi feels stuck in the ash-y air of Kagoshima where an active volcano (Sakurajima) brews and occasionally spews ash, resulting in daily habits particular to Kagoshima residents such as vigorously brushing off the ash upon arrival at school or wetting ones finger to see if ash collects on the upright phalange.   (My wife was born there and these Kagoshima gestures resonated with her memories of visiting her grandmother.)


It appears the younger Ryonosuke got the better deal in the bargain.  He is having the childhood most can only dream of, running around the more bustling Fukuoka with his posse of mostly girls, all while helping sell the merch at concerts for his dad's rock band.  Ryonosuke is truly the hyper one that walks ever so closely towards that annoying line, but never fully crosses it.  The plot consists of the possibility of the family reuniting and Koichi's attempts to assist in this re-cleave post-cleave by conjuring up a story that if you make a wish when two bullet trains pass each other, your miracle (the literal Japanese title of the film) will come true. 

Simply watching the wonderfully expansive train system of Japan and the freedom it provides is advertising enough for someone like me who is stuck in the backward-thinking highway-bounds of a car-dependent nation. But the director's deft story-telling makes sure I Wish is so much more than an ad for the railroad industry.  Kore-eda shows us the joy of watching kids throughout their day, wandering around their respective cities unchaperoned, creating adventures for themselves, from as complicated as their journey to make a wish to as simple as rushing to a favorite food stall.  To me, this was precious without being sickeningly kawaii. 


In this way, I Wish further solidifies Kore-eda's reputation of being one of the best directors of young actors and actresses.  What particularly transfixed me was just the importance of that less self-conscious time of childhood when if you can dream it, you can do it, at least in your head.  For my wife, it was nostalgia for what her adult self is no longer permitted to enjoy.  She and I can enjoy it vicariously now by watching our nieces engage in these privileges of youth, and by watching I Wish again when it is released this weekend at the Lumiere in San Francisco, Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

I cannot recommend I Wish enough, but it is important to point out something missing from the narrative that comes off chasm-atic if you are aware of it, as Japanese citizens would be.  


The opening celebration for the northern section of Kyushu extension noted in the film takes place on the 12th of March, 2011.  This should have been a momentous event that further solidified Japan's forward-thinking in establishing a railway network envied by many.  But the celebration was canceled by an incident of world-wide proportion that happened one day before the opening - the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.   Neither the earthquake, nor the tsunami, nor the nuclear disaster enters into the plot of I Wish.  This can be argued as a major omission.  Even though kids can go about their days without knowing much of the wider world, this was an incident of such devastation to the country it ought to have been mentioned somewhere.


And, arguably, it is indirectly mentioned.  But to flesh this out, I have to ruin the plot.  So your time here is done if you hold onto the view that 'spoilers' spoil a film.  (Recent evidence suggests otherwise.)

But here's some non-plot spoilers regarding how the new northern Kyushu lines connect the dots of the plot.  Koichi is so bummed about living in Kagoshima, he takes one of the things that bothers him about it, the ash-spewing Sakarujima volcano, and melds a fantasy in his mind where an eruption of Sakarujima will force his family to leave Kagoshima.  The wish he plans to plead for once the bullet trains pass is that Kagoshima be destroyed.  Now, Koichi isn't evil in that he hopes people die.  It's just that he's a kid, living in his often selfish world.  If he really thought his wish through, he'd realize folks might die in the process of living his fantasy. 

And Koichi does seem to realize that his dream is selfish, because he lets go of it and doesn't wish for a disaster when the trains pass.  He resolves to accept his present plight and will make the most of life in Kagoshima.  If we read Koichi's disbanded disaster as the triple disaster that actually shook Japan the day before the launch of the new northern Kyushu line, even though neither the earthquake, the tsunami, nor the nuclear plant disaster are mentioned, perhaps that is partly an unspoken motivation for Koichi to relinquish the disaster in his mind.  (The reasons the film presents are more pedestrian, but still virtuous.) 

Unfortunately, this reason for exclusion is not an argument I find too convincing.  It makes me feel like I’m stretching it.  If you are going to place a fictional world within the borders of a real-life event, it's hard to justify silence on a national tragedy.  (By the way, I am not implying at all that jeki encouraged such silence.  And let’s also keep in mind that the funding and story line were probably well solidified prior to the horrible disaster that inflicted Japan.)  Still, I wish Kore-eda would have found a way to make note of what's excised from the narrative.  Such is the only flaw in an otherwise wonderful film.

No Neutrals

If you're in San Francisco, you surely already know from the public advertisements, the press coverage, and the convivial lines forming outside the Kabuki and other festival venues, that the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival is in full swing. Although I haven't written much about the festival here at Hell On Frisco Bay as of yet, I wrote a few quick capsule previews for 7x7 last week. I'm actually not in San Francisco right now, as I'm attending another festival in another town (Albuquerque), but I'll be back tomorrow and am excited to get into the swing of attending screenings at my hometown fest.

Although I'm having a great time in New Mexico, I'm disappointed I'll be missing the chance to see documentary filmmaking legend Barbara Kopple (director of American Dream, Wild Man Blues, etc.) receive the SFIFF's Persistence Of Vision Award at the Kabuki tomorrow afternoon, along with the screening of a 35mm print (that's according to the Film on Film Foundation) of her extraordinarily gripping, influential 1976 amalgam of ethnography, history and activism, Harlan County, U.S.A.. Shockingly, there are still tickets available for this event, where Kopple will surely share stories to inspire a new generation of Occupy-era filmmakers and media watchers. 

Following is a never-before-published article I wrote about Harlan County, U.S.A. All illustrating images are screen captures from the Criterion DVD edition of the film: 

The reigning in of documentarists takes many forms . . . They are enjoined to be "objective." This is, of course, a nonsensical injunction. Documentarists make endless choices: of topic, people, vistas, angles, lenses, juxtapositions, sounds, words. Each selection is an expression of a point of view, whether conscious or not, acknowledged or not. Any documentary group that claims to be objective is merely asserting a conviction that its choices have a special validity and deserve everyone's acceptance and admiration. Even behind the first step of selection, choice of topic, there is a motive or set of motives. 

-Erik Barnouw, in Documentary: a history of the non-fiction film

Barnouw suggests that true objectivity is a straw man; impossible when applied to a human-created art form. Each member of our species has developed a complex enough psychological and existential worldview that we approach every aspect of our life colored by conscious and unconscious biases. A decision to take an action, make a statement or ask a question will inevitably communicate these biases, intentionally or unintentionally.

A successful filmmaker understands this, and will not expend energy on a fruitless quest to make her films purely objective. She may make an effort to present a diversity of voices and opinions. She will try to avoid presenting untruthful material unchallenged in some way (unless her objective is to mislead). But to attempt to give voice to every possible perspective on an issue, or to give precisely equal weight to two opposing positions, is an impossibly impractical goal. Wiser to follow one's own instincts and predilections, biased as they may be. Often it is the filmmakers courageous enough to follow them as far as they may lead, that make the most effective and watchable films. For instance, the Academy-Award-winning documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. by Barbara Kopple.

According to cinematographer Kevin Keating, interviewed on the Criterion DVD supplemental documentary The Making of Harlan County, U.S.A., Kopple and her crew were covering miner and black-lung advocate Arnold Miller's campaign for the presidency of the United Mine Workers of America at the time that a strike in Harlan County, Kentucky was initiated. Workers at the county's Brookside Mine had voted to join the UMW, but the company, controlled by the North Carolina-based corporation Duke Power, had refused to give them a contract accepting that vote. In response, the workers struck and picketed the mine, drawing the company into a showdown in which the latter employed scabs, strikebreakers and so-called "gun thugs" to try to put an end to the protest. Kopple's team took what they thought would be a "side trip, almost a tangent" as Keating puts it, to the Brookside picket line.

The picket line, as one can see in scenes from the film, had an inherent drama and danger to it. Confrontations occurred, and the presence of weapons on both sides of the conflict made for a potentially lethal situation. Any filmmaker trying to photograph the day-to-day life on the line would be putting her life at risk. Even an attempt for a filmmaker to try to remain "objective" in the face of this situation could have led to a disastrous result. By picking one side off the conflict to focus on and ally with, Kopple and her crew did not avoid exposure to danger, but solidarity between strikers and camera crew created diffused some of the danger for both of these parties.

Kopple's background as a filmmaker gave her credentials in two of the categories of documentarian that Barnouw uses as chapter headings for his Documentary book: observer and guerilla. She had worked as an assistant to David and Albert Maysles, whose 1969 film Salesman is considered a landmark in the "Direct Cinema" movement emphasizing the camera as observer. This North American-centered movement was connected in spirit to the British Free Cinema movement of the 1960s which, as Barnouw describes, "often poked into places society was inclined to ignore or keep hidden." The Maysles had followed a number of door-to-door Bible peddlers in Florida, most certainly a milieu that had been ignored in mass-media portrayals up to that point. But it was also the methodology of the Maysles that had made Salesman remarkable: the intimacy of a very small crew of image and sound recorders (just the Maysles brothers themselves), a lack of extra-diegetic material such as voiceovers and graphics, and an emphasis on the synchronization of sound with picture, giving the voices of the salesmen and their customers a real-time authenticity that had been all but technologically impossible a decade or so before. Kopple worked for the Maysles on the promotion end of Salesman, and then assisted in the filming of Gimme Shelter, which showed a Rolling Stones concert's turn to tragedy.

Her credentials as a guerilla filmmaker were established through her participation as an uncredited co-director in the collective that made Winter Soldier, about the Vietnam War veterans who returned to the United States to testify about the war crimes that they witnessed and participated in. Virtually every aspect of this film was conceived and executed in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxies of documentary filmmaking and distribution, from its subject matter and unapologetically anti-war stance, to its collaborative and anonymous authorship.

But Kopple's resume meant little to the strikers of Harlan County. It was dedication that would earn her 3-person film crew their trust. A turning point in her relationship with her film subjects came after a car accident delayed her crew's presence at the early morning picketing. Undeterred, the team walked over a mile to to protest site with cumbersome film equipment in hand. Their commitment to documenting the workers' cause was no longer called into question. Strikers offered up their homes for the filmmakers to stay in during the shoot. They became increasingly accustomed to Kopple's camera presence at protests, meetings and even down in the mines, where the opening sequence of the film was shot. One vivid scene in the documentary depicts a meeting at the local Multi- Purpose Center, in which internal grievances are aired heatedly. It's unlikely that strategy disagreements within the union movement would have been expressed in front of a crew that the participants felt uncomfortable with.

Kopple's camera became, with her full complicity, a tool of the strike. The rolling camera caught a great deal of violent and threatening behavior, mostly from the strikebreakers, at least according to what footage was ultimately used in the finished film. But it also may have prevented a certain amount of violence. As Kopple puts it in the Making of Harlan County, U.S.A., "no one wants to commit murder in living color." The protection the camera afforded felt powerful enough to the participants that Kopple's crew would come to the picket line and pretend to shoot footage even at times when, due to the financial or logistical problems that plagued the independent production, there was no film left to expose. This might be seen as a filmmaker's ultimate show of solidarity with a political movement- even without the chance to obtain footage Kopple and her crew were willing to risk being in harm's way.

One might wonder if, thanks to this close alliance between filmmaker and subject, Harlan County U.S.A. might be left open to criticism that it presents an unfairly one-sided distortion of the strike situation. But any such criticism, in order to be effective, must be accompanied by evidence of some sort: accounts of important events that might have been left out of the record, or specific information that might put the material seen on screen in another context. I am not aware of any such rebuttal.

Kopple did include a great deal of information to contextualize the strikers' situation, in the form of historical footage recovered from the collections of local filmmakers and news outlets, as well as from the National Archives and elsewhere. This material includes 16mm footage shot of violent miner protests in the 1930s, and more recent footage concerning the activism and subsequent murder of UMW presidential candidate Joseph Yabloski in 1969. Seeing these clips edited into the film roughly chronologically, interspersed with footage from the strike, informs us of the blood-soaked history of the labor movement in coal country in general, and Harlan County in particular. She also interviews old-timers who remember the battles of the thirties and can put their direct experience into words on the soundtrack. The historical context is vitally important to the success of certain sections of the film, as when the April, 1974 conviction of Yablonski's murderer seems to increase the morale of the strikers, who by then had been picketing for months on end. Without an understanding of the basic structure of events, this moment would have far less impact.

Kopple's use of music in Harlan County, U.S.A. serves a similar function. She captures with her camera performances of songs, some in front of audiences and others more informally intimate, that have been rallying cries or elegies for Appalachian laborers over the decades. One particularly effective moment is when Nimrod Workman sings the mournful ballad "O Death" to bring us out of the historical footage of Yablonski's funeral and into the present. Kopple also enlisted Hazel Dickens, a miner's daughter and well-known bluegrass musician, to perform songs to be used in portions of the film in which recorded dialogue doesn't need to be foregrounded. This music is an oral history tradition in its own right, and its incorporation into the film is, along with the historical visuals, a reminder that 1973's fight is merely another chapter in a generations-long struggle. That Dickens wrote and sang a new song, "They Can Never Keep Us Down", for use in the film's closing credits, brings the historical back to the present; there is no aspect of the miners' struggle that becomes frozen in the past, as all members of the movement, from organizers to picketers to musicians and filmmakers, are all part of a tradition that will continue into the future as long as there is a need to fight for safe and decent working conditions.

While making Harlan County, U.S.A. Kopple surely must have felt a stronger connection to this tradition shared by the people she was standing beside every day, than to the documentary filmmaker traditions. In fact, she says outright on the Criterion commentary track, "I wasn't thinking about the tradition of documentary." Perhaps this is why, despite her experience with the Maysles from a few years earlier, Harlan County U.S.A. is not an example of Direct Cinema. It's true that certain techniques were shared, such as the size of the crew and the importance of capturing the authentic speech of the people seen on camera (in this case often using less-cumbersome wireless microphones). But the incorporation of archival footage, camera- address interviews, and non-diegetic music on the soundtrack, all ensure that the film is of a more hybridized form.

Kopple's close allegiance with the strikers' cause helped push her in film in the direction of cinema verite in certain moments as well. This is the documentary movement that Barnouw assigns with the label of catalyst, and indeed Kopple was a catalyst on more than one occasion. Two remarkable scenes involve the most feared of the "gun thug" strikebreakers, Basil Collins. In the first scene, we witness an exchange between Collins and Kopple herself. Collins threateningly asks to see the director's press badge, and in response she asks him if he has any identification himself. When he answers that he doesn't have it with him, Kopple sarcastically retorts that "I guess I must have forgotten mine too". After this she's warned by one of the picketers that she's just made herself an enemy. A Direct Cinema purist would avoid stepping into her subject matter so directly, or if she did, would make sure the final film contained no visible trace of the interference. But by this time Kopple was deeply enough intertwined with a particular side of the strike that she was almost forced to bring herself into the drama in this way. Her decision to keep the scene in the film was both truthful to events as they occurred, and to the ultimate goal of providing an exciting film for the viewer to watch.

In the second scene, the Harlan County U.S.A. crew plays an even more directly catalytic role. Camera assistant Ann Lewis delivers to the ineffectual sheriff a warrant for the arrest of Collins for flourishing a deadly weapon. The warrant was obtained from a judge, presumably at least in part on the basis of evidence collected by the film crew itself. There is no shortage of footage of Basil and his fellow "gun thugs" holding to that nickname by bearing their arms in front of the camera. The production of the warrant is a victory for the striking miners and their supporters, at least for that day. And no other moment in the film better illustrates the bond between the crew and the picketers than this one.

"They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there," is a line of music sung at least twice in Harlan County, U.S.A. Barbara Kopple and her crew were not neutrals but increasingly involved players in the drama they were capturing on film. As a miner named Jerry Johnson says in the Making of Harlan County, U.S.A., "I don't think we'd have won without the camera crew." And it's almost certain that neither would have Kopple's film been the success it was if she had taken any other approach. Her film shows "objectivity" to be a unicorn foolishly chased by the documentarian.

Adam Hartzell on Two Architecture Films

The San Francisco International Film Festival begins Friday, and post-festival screenings at festival venues SF Film Society screen, SFMOMA, the Castro and the Pacific Film Archive have recently been announced. We also now know what will be playing at the Stanford and the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts through mid-June. Both of these latter venues have interesting programs happening during SFIFF, and I'm lucky enough to have articles from guest contributors relevant to each. Sterling Hedgpeth wrote here on Howard Hawks before his nearly-finished PFA retrospective began; it reprises with more titles at the Stanford starting Friday. And Adam Hartzell has previewed two films coming to YBCA this week and next. He compares them in the following article:

The Love Song of R. Buckmister Fuller (USA: Sam Green, 2012) photo courtesy of San Francisco Film Society

With the recent release of the Foster + Partners design of the future new Apple headquarters in Cupertino, it’s the perfect time to bring a documentary on architect Norman Foster to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Spain-based co-directors Carlos Carcas & Norberto López Amado's How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? plays twice on April 22nd, at 2 & 4 pm as part of a two-film series of new films on architecture at YBCA. (The other film screening is Chad Freidrichs’ The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, but more on that later in the post.) Doubly perfect planning, the film on Foster also provides a nice lead-in to those who were able to snag tickets to the world premiere of documentarian Sam Green’s The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at SFMOMA, part of the San Francisco International Film Festival playing on May 1st at 7pm and 9pm, since the title, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?, is a question Fuller asked of Foster. This friendly and eccentric interrogation by Fuller of Foster pushed the latter to realize that in the case of his Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, a disproportionate amount of this building’s weight went unseen. It was an architectural Zen koan to excavate what was hidden beneath the facade.

Although the ethereal floating views of the voluptuous and domineering buildings throughout Foster’s career are wonderful eye candy, (Foster worked in San Francisco very early in his career, but the only buildings completed by his firm in the Bay Area, as far as I know, can be found on Stanford’s campus), what’s more compelling to me about the documentary is what, like Fuller’s question, is left hidden beneath the edits of the documentary. Such documentaries about ‘great’ artists can border on hagiography, partly due to the need to maintain the willing participation of the film’s human subject. The documentary does mention that Foster has his critics, but the criticism is limited to aesthetics rather than practice. Plus, those critics are not permitted to speak for themselves. We are left to hear solely from Foster’s firm, friends, and fans.

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? (SPAIN: Norberto  Lopez Arndao & Carlos Carcas, 2011) photo courtesy First Run Features 

As a result, the practice of architecture portrayed in this documentary is limited to the ‘genius’ approach to history, the ‘starchitect’ as city savior, rather than a social history of a larger system. The discussion of the Fred Olson project, which the narrator hangs up on an aural pushpin as "a social utopian project", is the closest it comes to really looking at how buildings demarcate people of all classes. But this focus is flown over like so many of the scenes where Foster pilots around his buildings. This 'genius' approach is problematic when Foster + Partners’ CEO praises Hong Kong for their speed and efficiency at completing projects when compared to Europe. Knowing the concerns many human rights groups have about China’s labor practices, concerns highlighted by the recent auditing of Foxconn Technology Group that was contracted to manufacture Apple’s iPads, this ‘speed’ isn’t necessarily a good thing. When the film's narrator, this time discussing the Beijing airport project, tells us the Chinese laborers worked 'three non-stop shifts around the clock’, we should ask for more evidence that the workers of those shifts were treated and compensated fairly than just Foster's use of the neoliberal buzzwords 'thinking strategically' and 'bold initiatives'. In this case, I don’t see modern Europe’s slower pace when compared to China as something to criticize because it’s more likely that necessary regulations are in place to lessen the occurrence of injuries and deaths along with securing a more sustainable wage (and necessary health benefits) for the folks who actually make the buildings starchitects design.

This section of the documentary is soon followed by a discussion of the Masdar City zero-carbon footprint project in the UAE. (Ironically, a city designed in the exact opposite direction of sustainability as the proposed new Apple headquarters that looks like a UFO from the past isolated from major public transit and demanding further car-dependency.) Along with mentioning nothing about the labor conditions in the UAE that arouse as much concern by human rights groups as in China, this project's green intent contradicts the previously mentioned preference for speed, since our need for speed and convenience is fueled by cheap oil and leads to unsustainable cities and living arrangements. With all that’s missing from this documentary’s lessons in hagiography, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? practically requires companion reading material for all the context the film doesn’t provide. Might I suggest the wonderful book Dubai: The City as Corporation by Ahmed Kanna, which I first saw at the University Press Bookstore on Bancroft in Berkeley and later picked up at The Green Arcade bookstore on Market Street. (This is the book from which I pulled evidence of the worker violations in the UAE noted above.) Providing examples from the wider UAE, and briefly mentioning Foster’s Masdar City project, the second chapter of the book, “’Going South’ with the Starchitects” is an insightful examination of how, in spite of all the progressive rhetoric spoken by starchitect firms, the firms end up buttressing repressive regimes. Kanna is not indicting specific architects, (nor do I intend to do that here), but his insightful analysis brings to light the hidden foundations of the rise of the starchitect phenomenon.

How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? (SPAIN: Norberto  Lopez Arndao & Carlos Carcas, 2011) photo courtesy First Run Features

In the end, all that is unspoken in this question-titled documentary How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? results in a structure that fails to stand up. As you step away from the floating frame and begin to ask the questions title-as-question doesn’t, the buildings seem less impressive. Perhaps if the film’s title tilted the question slightly to say ‘How Much Is Your Building’s Weight, Mr. Foster?’ the directors may have focused more on the cultural, economic, and environmental impact of the building process rather than simply leaving us to admire the superficial beauty of the buildings.

Thankfully, the second film in the series at YBCA, Chad Freidrichs’ The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, puts much more weight on these social aspects of architecture. (It will screen twice on Sunday, April 29th, at 2 and 4pm.) In fact, everything that is wrong in the structure of How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? is set right in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.

For those who haven’t heard of Pruitt-Igoe, it was a large housing project in St. Louis, Missouri completed in 1954. Considered revolutionary for its time, it gave low-income residents infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, etc.) and amenities well beyond what they previously lived with. It quickly fell in to disrepair and became a scary place to live due to high-levels of crime. Twenty decades after it was raised, Pruitt-Igoe was razed.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (USA: Chad Friedrichs, 2011) photo courtesy First Run Features

What is so valuable about Freidrichs’s documentary is that it places the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in the proper complicated historical, political, and social perspective. The stock answers explaining Pruitt-Igoe’s demise have always been a combination of three choices: the un-livability of modernist architecture, the failure of government welfare, and the behaviors of the residents themselves. (As the film demonstrates from archival footage, the racism of the latter ‘answer’ was often explicit in the words of many of the suburban whites towards the primarily black residents.) Through interviews with former residents of Pruitt-Igoe, a sociologists who worked with the residents, and urban historians who have studied Pruitt-Igoe within a broader context, we learn how limiting those stock answers are. Ironically, part of Pruitt-Igoe’s demise was foretold in the law that enabled its creation, the 1949 Housing Act. Although the act provided funding for the creation of Pruitt-Igoe, it relied on the rent paid by residents, all low-income, for upkeep. At the same time, the 1949 Housing Act subsidized the creation of suburbia through roads and other infrastructure. Add to this the redlining housing practices of developers and lenders keeping non-whites out of the suburbs and the suburbs became a publicly subsidized space only accessible for the white middle and upper-middle class. As a result of this white-flight-to-suburbia, (an American creation that represents what urbanist James Howard Kunstler calls “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world” since it solidified our car/oil dependency that will obstruct our growth in the near future), the jobs followed white middle-class folk to the suburbs. As a result, few jobs were left for the primarily black residents of Pruitt-Igoe, making the upkeep of Pruitt-Igoe nearly impossible to maintain.

That’s just the beginning of what is a dense, insightful documentary on a missed opportunity of good intentions not fully-funded or followed-through. Much of the documentary’s impact comes from the reminiscences of former residents of Pruitt-Igoe who talk of the joy of the early years and the fears of later years. How they speak of the violence of the later years in the projects is particular poignant when some of the young men express how surprised they were by the advice the environment encouraged from their mothers. I’ll leave that aspect in cryptic form since those particular recollections hit you in the solar plexus in that uniquely haptic way that the light and audio from the cinema screen does.

I first heard about this Pruitt-Igoe documentary through the local architecture and design podcast 99% Invisible. Produced by Roman Mars, 99% Invisible quickly made my must-listen list after the best podcast in the world, Radiolab, gave the show props. Along with recommending you peep a listen to Mars before the screening of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, in spite of how my criticism of How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? might discourage a viewing, I still recommend watching it before The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. It is the juxtaposing of these two films, one full of pretty pictures and failed analysis, another a well-researched re-rendering of a failed historical moment, that shows you how much more worthwhile and fulfilling a film like The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is compared to the unsatisfying ‘genius’ hagiographic view of history that is How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?

Sorrow's Springs

The San Francisco Film Society has been rocked by tragedy twice now in the past half-year. When its dynamic and beloved execute director Graham Leggatt died of cancer last August, the city's film community grieved mightily. How cruel, then, that Leggatt's successor Bingham Ray fatally succumbed to a series of strokes while at the Sundance Film Festival, less than five months later. He'd been at the Film Society for only ten weeks. This time around, the mournful tributes came equally from voices outside the Bay Area, as as locals had barely a chance to get to know Ray, other than through his heroic efforts as a distributor of independent films nationally, as described in this New York Times article, prior to his post in San Francisco.

The Film Society soldiers on, now with Melanie Blum as Interim Executive Director. The team has already begun the first wave of announcements for their biggest event of the year, running April 19 through May 3rd: the 55th San Francisco International Film Festival. In the festival's tradition of pairing contemporary musicians and silent film classics, on April 23rd at the Castro Merrill Garbus and Ava Mendoza will accompany four Buster Keaton two-reel comedies: One Week, The Haunted House, and, co-starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Good Night, Nurse! and The Cook. SFMOMA has announced two May 1st SFIFF screenings of Sam Green's new film The Love Song Of R. Buckminster Fuller featuring a live collaboration with indie band Yo La Tengo, returning to the festival for the first time since 2001. Tickets go on sale Friday, and seem certain to sell out long before the festival begins. Meanwhile, the organization continues to show films daily on its dedicated New People screen. Future bookings include Terence Davies (who will also receive an award from Cinequest in San Jose) introducing his stunning 1992 film The Long Day Closes March 8th. This special screening is sandwiched by screen-sharing with the SF Green Film Festival (March 1-7) and the SF International Asian American Film Festival (March 9-15). Then a series of week-long bookings include Kill List opening March 16 (it also plays IndieFest this month), Sound of Noise March 23, House of Pleasures March 30, and Béla Tarr's haunting final film The Turin Horse April 13.

This week audiences at New People can see two films selected for that screen prior to Bingham Ray's strokes. Both are among the richest, most important films of 2011. Both films, quite coincidentally, begin as explorations of the ramifications of an untimely death, and fan out to cover far more thematic territory. Currently playing until Thursday February 16, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is an epic, ironic example of the police procedural subgenre: a team of cops and bureaucrats spend a sleepless night and morning hunting for the buried body of the victim of an admitted killer. Although I was impressed by the film, I don't feel I have much to say about it that hasn't been better said by Bilge Ebiri, Ali Arikan or, in his final article for the Village Voice before his abrupt firing, J. Hoberman. With its long takes and detailed attention to both image and sound design (the act of hearing with ones own ears?) the film exemplifies the international art house style that we've come to rely on the SFFS to bring to Frisco screens, whether during the festival or year-round, as few other venues are willing to touch such films.

Margaret, on the other hand, played the Landmark Embarcadero for a low-attended week last October. It was the best new release I saw all year, so I'm thrilled that the SFFS is bringing it back February 17-23 and I can encourage friends and readers who missed it to catch up. I hope to see it again myself. A second viewing at a recent press screening confirmed that what on first look seemed like a messy, sprawling masterpiece is in fact a carefully-designed sprawling masterpiece. See Once Upon A Time In Anatolia if you can, but make sure you don't miss Margaret.

In Margaret, Anna Paquin gives a career-high performance as Lisa Cohen, a Manhattan teenager trying to glide through the challenges normal for a girl of her age and station: maintaining her scholarship at an upper-crust-liberal private high school, experimenting with drugs and boys, navigating fraught relations with her divorced parents and their new romantic partners. Early in the film, her actions contribute to a horrific bus accident; trying to catch the attention of the driver (Mark Ruffalo), he plows through a red traffic light and over a pedestrian named Monica Patterson (Allison Janney in a brief-but-unforgettable role), who dies in her arms. This fatality is perhaps the first thing Lisa has ever felt personally responsible for, including her own behavior and relationships. It doesn't feel good at all. She tries to shunt aside her guilty conscience, living her life as if nothing had happened, but it simply doesn't work. Her every interaction is now colored by her unprocessed emotions. Eventually it's too much for her to take, and (more than halfway into the film) Lisa finally attempts to contact Monica's surviving family members. She helps put in motion a lawsuit against the bus company; perhaps if the driver is fired he'll demonstrate a glimmer of the remorse Lisa feels so deeply but is rarely able to vocalize.


Not only does the partial plot summary I've just attempted leave out major characters and incidents, but the very form of a summary may be wholly inadequate to the task of conveying just what is so special about Margaret. This is why we get more pleasure out of watching great movies than reading reviews of them, or worse, of their screenplays. Filmmaking is like a form of alchemy, mysterious and unscientific in the way it can combine elements it's almost impossible to evaluate in isolation, or even to describe with mere words, into a time-based talisman with the power to transmute a viewer's emotional state. Some of the elements in Margaret that I've yet to see adequately described include: the cinematography by Polish DP Ryszard Lenczewski, far more cinematic than that for director Kenneth Lonergan's prior film You Can Count On Me. The plaintively arpeggiated music by composer Nico Muhly. Or the line-readings; there is something perfectly teenage about the way Paquin, who was 23 at the time of filming, says things like "I think I'll stop generalizing now."

Perhaps the most powerful element of the filmmaking alchemy is editing. Margaret's editing has been much commented on, but most commentators fixate on the fact that it took half a decade for the current cut to be arrived at by Lonergan and his editors (Anne McCabe is credited as editor, but apparently Dylan Tichenor, Thelma Schoonmaker and even Martin Scorsese had their hands in cutting at various points in the process.) Many of the film's reviews take for granted that Margaret's editing was never satisfactorily completed. Even certain positive notices start from this assumption, and make claims for the film's successful aspects as achieved in spite of flawed editing choices. If this seemed a justifiable reading after a single viewing of the film, a second made it seem ludicrous unless coming from the perspective of a supporter of the continued homogenizing of American narrative filmmaking.

Gripes about Margaret's editing generally focus on three aspects of the film, each of which I find integral in context: subplots, transition shots, and "choppiness". Let me take a brief look at each of these three, starting with subplots. Yes, Margaret contains a great number of characters, subplots and scenes which do not seem to support the main thread of the film: how Lisa deals with her role in Monica's death. There are long conversations with parents, teachers, police officers, and others, which do not necessarily advance this storyline, or could do so far more briefly. But the film is as much about how Lisa does not deal with her shared responsibility for the bus accident as it is how she does deal with it. In order for the intensity of her interest in the lawsuit to make sense, we need to see her attempt to live life for a while --for a good chunk of the film, really-- by ignoring it. It's a sad but human truth that sometimes the most effective way to cope with a tragedy is to move on with our lives as if it never happened. It doesn't always work, as when Lisa goes on a date the night of the accident. But this instinct cannot be summed up in a single scene; we have to feel a sense of the duration of her trying to live life without dealing, before it makes sense to see her deal.

Lonergan and Lenczewski's transition shots are almost uniformly masterful. This is where much of the film's real alchemy lies, I suspect. A shot of high school boys ogling a female gym teacher cuts to a scene between Lisa and her own teacher-crush, Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon). A late-night mother-daughter conversation is preceded by an exterior view of the family apartment, where it's possible to see through a nearby frosted window that the Cohens' neighbors are up and active at the witching hour too. Typing out descriptions seems to rob these transitions of their power; they seem more banal or heavy-handed than they appear when occurring on screen. But I think they're one of Lonergan's key techniques in constructing a world and our sense of Lisa's place in it. Movies usually show us how an individual might react to love, lust, fear, pain, death, etc. Margaret shows us that, and also gives us glimpses of evidence that everyone in the world is reacting to the same forces all the time. I can't take seriously the critiques of the film which consider unnecessary the Manhattan cityscapes Lonergan and his editors frequently use as transitions between scenes with dialogue.

As for accusations of "choppiness" in Margaret's editing, I'm not quite sure what is meant by the accusers although I have a few guesses. There is an elision lying beneath a cut in another, later scene between Lisa and Mr. Aaron at the latter's home, perhaps made more pronounced because it occurs at a reel change. It's a perfectly appropriate elision in my opinion. Another kind of cutting occurs in this scene, introduced in a previous one depicting an intense confrontation between Lisa and Monica's friend Emily. Juxtapositions of two shots taken from similar camera angles, with the characters in frame in approximately similar positions in each framing, seem to tread that borderland between a continuity cut and a classically-defined jump cut, without announcing itself as "technique" as loudly as the latter type of cut tends to do. These cuts don't signify that time has passed, or give us a significantly new angle through which to view the characters, but provide a loss of balance for both the viewer and for the characters. After reaching a level of comfort and/or courage to open up and share a memory of Monica's last minutes with her prickly friend, Lisa upsets Emily, who finds her interpretation of those minutes presumptuous and self-centered. She responds with a blunt but justifiable reprimand to Lisa: "we are not supporting characters in the fascinating story of your life!"

Emily's exclamation brings me to one last aspect of Margaret I'd like to touch on before on before concluding this piece. The film is not just a rare modern Hollywood example of art worth engaging with. It's also a container for for an argument that art is indeed worth engaging with, and for artists, worth continuing to create. Though many films center on artists and their worlds, very few films so truthfully capture how central art can be for the ordinary consumer. or how artists can be ordinary consumers of art themselves.

I'll end with a few details to support the above claims, though there's so much more packed along these lines packed into the film that it could (and probably will) provide material for a fair number of academic dissertations. The title Margaret comes from a line in a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem read to Lisa's class by a literature teacher (Matthew Broderick) who, like a police detective in the film, eats his lunch at his desk. Lisa's mother (J. Smith Cameron) is a stage actress by profession, and we're privy to a realistic look at how tumult in her personal life informs her performances, and vice versa. Her new suitor (Jean Reno) is an opera lover, and the film's final scenes takes place at a performance of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman. It masterfully demonstrates that sometimes sharing an experience in a theatre can be the best way to honor the loved ones we have lost, and strengthen our bond with a loved one sitting in the seat next to ours.

This post is dedicated to the memory of writer and cinephile Damien Bona, who died far too young on January 29, 2012. He was one of the first and most influential influences in my approach to understanding the cinema, and how its study might weave into my own life. Though he lived in New York and thus I only had the opportunity to meet with him face-to-face once, I always cherished his generosity and his strongly held opinions on movies, politics, cats, the San Francisco Giants (his favorite sports team), or anything else he might have mentioned on a discussion board, in an e-mail, or in one of his books or articles. He was no fan of You Can Count On Me, but I wonder what he might have had to say about Margaret He will be missed by many many more; here are a few lovely tributes.