Upstream Color (2013)

WHO: Writer/director/etc. Shane Carruth's long-awaited follow-up to his 2004 time-travel movie Primer.

WHAT: It's rare for a truly independent film to arrive on a Frisco Bay screen so soon after make a splash at the Sundance Film Festival, which wrapped just a month ago. Anyone who loved the mind-boggling Primer (and there are many) is excited to see what Carruth has come up with nine years later, especially if they paid attention to the buzz accompanying its debut. Todd McCarthy called it "beautiful, mysterious, thematically suggestive but dramatically obscure, this is an experimental art film that appealed to exactly the same fan base as Primer and suggests a deeper burrowing" into Carruth's mind. My friend Jeremy Mathews said "the film continually finds new ways to evoke unexpected feelings". I'm cherry-picking vaguely effusive quotes on the advice of Sam Adams, who suggests viewers know as little as possible about the film, "since having the movie wash over me was one of the most transcendent experiences of my moviegoing life." 

WHERE/WHEN: Screening as a sneak preview at the Roxie tonight, and opening there for a regular run starting April 12th. 

WHY: Although tonight's San Francisco Film Society-presented screening with Carruth in person is sold-out, it may be worth camping out in front of the Roxie and hoping for a "mircale" ticket to come your way. Or you can wait until April. It's nice to see the Roxie get an advance sell-out show, especially considering last weekend's Joe Swanberg series wasn't exactly a blockbuster for the venue. The SFFS presents another public screening on Thursday of this week as well: Miss Lovely, the latest feature by Ashim Ahluwalia, the director of the disquieting John and Jane Toll-Free. This will be at the New People Cinema in Japantown.

HOW: Projected digitally, I'm 99.99% sure.

Jewish Film Festival lineup announced

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has announced the full program lineup and schedule for its 28th edition, running July 24th through August 11th at venues around Frisco Bay.

On an initial perusal of the offerings, three films jump out at me: my olympic summer is a terrific short that I saw and wrote about at Sundance earlier this year. Anvil! the Story of Anvil is another film that played Sundance. There was tinnitus-inducing word-of-mouth for this documentary about a persistent Canadian heavy metal band on the wintry streets of Park City. I figured that with that much positive buzz I'd surely have another shot at seeing it in Frisco, and here it is, to my mild surprise, at the SFJFF. None of the "you've gotta see this one" reviews I heard from festival volunteers and filmgoers mentioned that the band members are Jews.

Finally, Chris Marker's 1960 Description of a Struggle is the jumping-off point for Israeli filmmaker Dan Geva's new Description of a Memory. The Marker film won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961, and though it's little seen today, it still can stir up controversy on the occasions that it is. A program of both works plays one time only at the SFJFF, on the morning of August 9th at Roda in Berkeley.

What am I overlooking here?

Frameline schedule announced

Frameline, the world's largest film festival devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender filmmakers and images, announced its full program earlier today. The festival runs June 19-29 here in Frisco at the Castro, Roxie, Victoria, and in Berkeley, the Elmwood. I missed the press conference myself and haven't had time to peruse thoroughly, but two items stick out at first glance-over.

First, Derek, Isaac Julien's documentary on the life and art of Derek Jarman, will be playing at the Castro on Sunday, June 29th at 4:30 PM, just before the closing night film, Breakfast With Scot. Derek was my favorite documentary seen at this year's Sundance Film Festival, and I wrote about it here. I know I responded to it so well in part because I knew so little about the boundary-shredding British filmmaker beforehand. I'm curious to know how Frisco's true-blue Jarmaniacs will respond. Meanwhile, Jarman's Sebastiane and In The Shadow of the Sun (with soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle) are playing a screening totally unconnected to Frameline at A.T.A. Wednesday, May 21.

Second, this year's Frameline Award is going to its own outgoing festival director Michael Lumpkin, and a seven-film selection of past Frameline hits with real staying power will be included in the festival. I've seen four of them (Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche, the Wachowskis' Bound, Joseph Gaï Ramaka's Karmen Geï and my personal favorite of the quartet, Pedro Almodóvar's Law of Desire) on the big screen before, but never with Frameline audiences. I've never seen the other three (Big Eden, Lilies and Yes Nurse, No Nurse) at all.

See anything else in the guide that looks particularly good?

SFIFF: the Sundance connection

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 5/7/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION.

* * * * *
The 51st SF International Film Festival began last night, with a screening of Catherine Breillat's the Last Mistress at the Castro Theatre. Earlier tonight the festival expanded to its other venues, the PFA and the Kabuki, where it will stay for the next two weeks, drawing hardcore cinephiles and curious culture-watchers alike (the Clay and a few other venues broaden the festival's reach in the days to come.) The festival, more than any other film event of the Frisco Bay calendar year, feels like a party that the anyone in the city can join in, as long as they're willing to pay a $12.50 single-ticket admission price.

That price is a tad higher than most moviegoing around here will cost you, and with the elimination of matinee pricing this year there's all the more incentive for particularly active attendees to become a film society member (or, like me, a PFA member) to get a couple bucks lopped off each ticket price. However, all but a few specially-priced gala events will cost a non-member less than a ticket to, say, last year's Silent Film Festival, or an advance-sales ticket to a Sundance screening should you be in Utah when that festival rolls around. And, in fact, regular tickets cost less than certain screenings of non-festival fare at the Kabuki do, now that the theatre's been bought and made-over by the new Sundance Cinemas venture, with its amenities fees charged for assigning seats. While the SFIFF makes its home at the Kabuki, seats will not be assigned in advance and amenities fees will not be charged on top of the festival ticket price.

I've attended the Sundance Film Festival twice now; once as a member of the ticket-buying public, and once with a press pass that saved me a few hundred dollars in ticket costs. I have a press pass for the SFIFF too, but as usual I've purchased tickets to a certain few shows that I Absolutely Do Not Want To Miss (like Aditya Assarat's Wonderful Town), knowing that there is often greater demand for press tickets than there is supply. Though I honestly can only remember being shut out of a film once, for the Iranian film Iron Island, in the past five years that I've had a pass for the SFIFF, I don't like to take chances. Sundance is run differently; there's less incentive for press to buy advance tickets because their pass can be used to acquire a comp. ticket in any wait-list line.

Sundance is different from the SFIFF in many, many other ways, of course. For example, the programming at Sundance is far more AmerIndie-centric, leaving foreign films on the sidelines. Here's a good quote on the matter I recently found via the cinetrix, from former SFIFF director Peter Scarlet:

If you’re the maker of a foreign film and you accept an invitation to go to Sundance, it’s a little like getting a last-minute reservation at a trendy restaurant. You get a nice dish for you and your companion, you wear something sexy, but it turns out you’re seated at the tiny table right next to the restroom. I won’t even get into the aromas and whatnot.

It's a harsh statement, but there's certainly truth in it, as the lion's share of the attention at the Utah fest gets lavished upon homegrown productions. By contrast, the SFIFF and a good portion of its audience see foreign films, especially those directed by the world's master filmmakers, as a central piece of the festival mission. If not the core.

On my own trips to Sundance, I've attempted to swim against the tide and cover its foreign films with at least as much care and enthusiasm as the American offerings. One film I never quite got around to in my Sundance reports was the Jordanian documentary Recycle, which is also set to play at the SFIFF; an image from the film is featured on the cover of the festival's program guide. Recycle follows the routines of Abu Ammar, a resident of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's hometown of Zarqa. He drives his young son around the city, an industrial center in Jordan, picking up unused cardboard that he knows he can sell at a recycling center. It's a reminder that while recycling may still be seen as optional or even a luxury in opulent communities, the act becomes a necessity when poverty strikes. But Recycle's subject is not just recycling cardboard; he also saves notes to use in a book on religion he plans to write. He keeps sacks full of these paper scraps, and they're not the only evidence director Mahmoud al Massad presents that seems intended to make us wonder if Abu Ammar has been radicalized into a potentially dangerous fundamentalist along the lines of Zarqawi. Sometimes Al Massad's frustrating metaphor of a "recycled terrorist" seems at times heavy-handed and at other times vague, but the film is filled with enough sarcastic characters and absurd images, like a camel stand on the edge of town, or a cardboard eye becoming swallowed up by churning liquid at the recycling center, to make it much more than just a metaphor.

The other foreign films I saw at Sundance that also are set to play the SFIFF were all animated shorts that did not require subtitles: Madame Tutli-Putli from Canada and the Pearce Sisters and Yours Truly from the UK, which along with American Carson Mell's Chonto played a terrific Sundance shorts program that I reviewed here. As it features these four entires plus films by Kelly Sears, Stefan Mueller, Max Hattler and Aardman's Richard Goleszowski, I feel confident recommending the SFIFF shorts program the Human Kingdom. It plays tomorrow evening and Wednesday April 30th. I also enjoyed the Sundance screenings of a few short films playing on two other SFIFF shorts programs, for example the deservedly Oscar-nominated short documentary La Corona which plays the SFIFF as part of a program called the Feminine Mystique on April 28 and 29. Kelly Sears' the Drift and Leighton Pierce's Number One both play on Alternate Geographies; I intend to attend the program tomorrow, and I'll be glad to see them again, along with Bruce Conner's Cannes-bound Easter Morning, the highly-praised, much anticipated Observando El Cielo and more. That program plays again May 2nd.

Finally, a pair of American features I saw at Sundance will play SFIFF on the way to a wider release planned for this summer. Both films seem to brush up against the imaginary line between fiction and documentary, from either side of that electric fence. The fiction film, Ballast, uses non-professional actors all from the same Mississippi Delta region in which the film was shot, improvising dialogue to a predetermined scenario. The result is remarkably affecting and almost completely free from familiar character cliches. I spoke a bit more about the film with Robert Davis on his podcast here. The documentary, American Teen, in chronicling a year in the life of an Indiana high school, hand-picks four archetypal teenagers and follows them through their daily adventures, some of which seem quite possibly concocted by the teens just to add drama to their on-camera presence. I wrote a bit more about the film here.

Ballast and American Teen also provide an interesting case study for another issue that's been recently raised regarding the SF International Film Festival this year. The issue is that of digital projection vs. film projection, and has been extensively covered by Michael Guillen, who has provided a list of festival films expected to be screened using digital projection, gleaned from the Film On Film Foundation calendar; Guillen also interviewed Carl Martin from that group. The crux of the issue is that, for those of us who find something pleasurable, if perhaps somewhat ineffable, about the act of viewing a 35mm or 16mm film print, it's nice to know before we purchase a ticket to a screening and sit down to watch a film, whether the film we're about to watch is going to really be a physical film running though a mechanical projector, or else a digital projection. Likewise, those of us who are curious about the new frontiers of film distribution technology, and production technology with which it often though not always goes hand-in-hand, might like to know in advance what digital format a festival selection is being shown through as well.

Sundance, at least for the past two years, consistently marks the projection method, whether film or video, and what kind, in its program guide, but SFIFF does not. Thankfully, the Film On Film Foundation had the initiative to request that information from the festival, which was very helpful in agreeing to the request. The resulting list is pretty free of surprises; 1920's The Golem screened in a very nice-looking (if untinted) 35mm print for example, while Craig Baldwin's found-footage mash-up Mock Up On Mu will be shown digitally, as expected. It seems that most if not all of the films being projected digitally are the ones that were shot with digital cameras. I wrote about the way digital production and projection can open up a wider range of options for filmmakers and festival programmers in my SFIFF festival report three years ago (already a bit late to the issue). This year I feel confident saying that Ballast's pictoral virtues would be severely lessened if it were screened digitally instead of in 35mm, as is planned. Likewise, I can't imagine that American Teen could have been made as intimate as it is without the relatively unobtrusive presence of digital cameras. Everything has its place.

SFIAAFF So Far

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS SITE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 6/18/2010. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

* * * * *
When writing up my preview piece for the SF International Asian American Film Festival, or SFIAAFF, which opened on Thursday and runs through March 23rd, I focused on the directors in the International Showcase section of the festival whose films I'd personally been exposed to at prior editions of the festival. I neglected to mention two repeat-SFIAAFF directors in the section because I hadn't seen their films at this particular festival. India's Buddageb Dasgupta, whose the Voyeurs plays Monday, Wednesday and next Sunday, has had his prior films Memories in the Mist and the Wrestlers at the festival in previous years, but I've always missed them. I was first exposed to Korea's Hur Jin-ho when another local festival played One Fine Spring Day, and caught up with Christmas in August on DVD. I didn't realize that it had played the SFIAAFF in 1999. I believe that his last film, April Snow, has still never graced a Frisco Bay screen, but his newest, Happiness, is here to make up for that fact and then some.

Happiness is my favorite Hur film yet. It's remarkable how similar the film is to another SFIAAFF film, Japanese filmmaker Nobuhiro Yamishita's follow-up to the wonderful Linda Linda Linda, at least in certain respects. Both Happiness and Yamashita's a Gentle Breeze in the Village adopt the "city mouse /country mouse" trope, their bucolic settings assisting the emphasis of character moods as reflected in the changes in weather and light accompanying seasons (this is something that runs through each of the Hur films I've watched). Both films track a developing romance between an urban male and a female more settled in her rural community. And both films are exquisitely crafted. But in other ways the two films are like yin and yang. Happiness is an adult melodrama showing the co-dependent romance of a couple who meet at a curative retreat; he's there to heal his pickled liver, she for her weak lungs. It doesn't work out so well for them (yin?). A Gentle Breeze in the Village is a far lighter piece illuminating the joys and anxieties of teenage youth (yang?).

Speaking of Yang (bu-dum-pum), I have now seen more than one Edward Yang film. I just got home from watching his 1986 award-winner the Terrorizer. It's the kind of rich, crescendo-ing film that I want to see again as soon as I've finished watching it. Which makes it all the more discouraging that the film has never been released on video or DVD with English subtitles. I'll hazard a guess why this may be so: the complications of rights clearance for the American pop music that appears on the soundtrack, not only the iconic "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" usage that Hou Hsiao-hsien surely was tributing in his Three Times, but also songs by the likes of Kool & the Gang and (correct me if I'm wrong on this identification) Grandmaster Flash. If the Terrorizer were playing the festival again I'd see it again, but since it's not, I'll have to content myself with the other two Yang screenings in the festival's tribute: a Brighter Summer Day on Wednesday, and a revisitation to his swan song Yi Yi: a One and a Two on Thursday.

I can recommend Rithy Panh's documentary on Phnom Penh prostitutes Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers, (which I watched on a festival screener DVD at home) but only if you can brace yourself for something extremely heavy. It's hard to imagine that a director who has made a film about the Tuol Sleng prison might make a film that matches it in "downer" qualities. But Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers may even be more emotionally devastating than S21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, if only because it illustrates a current devastation, not one cordoned off by history books. In fact, while S21 felt almost cathartic in the way it allowed former prisoners an opportunity to confront their tormentors, and allowed the latter a chance to harmlessly re-enact the crimes they committed in the name of the genocidal Pol Pot regime decades ago, the unsmiling women in Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers display often harmful re-enactments that seem habitual rather than cathartic. Caught in an utterly tragic loop of shame and desperation, they are shown grinding up methamphetamine pills known as "ma" to smoke through a makeshift plastic pipe, displaying their razor scars, and conversing with each other about their abusive johns, abortions, and contemplations of suicide. The final thought of the film comes from a young woman who reveals a disturbingly irrefutable perspective on her plight when she matter-of-factly states: "Poor people can only expect to be guilty."

There are a few schedule changes and added screenings to the festival, so make sure to check the website for details. One added screening I can recommend is tonight's free outdoor showing of Hayao Miyazaki's first feature film as a director, the Castle of Cagliostro at 8PM on JapanTown's Peace Plaza. The animation master hadn't yet let his fanciful style fully flower when making this 1979 release, but it's terrifically designed and drawn, and a very entertaining adventure story with a European setting reminiscent of Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik. And it's free!

Finally, I saw Never Forever and Yasukuni at last year's and this year's Sundance Film Festival, respectively, and wrote a few words on them here and here. Though as you'll see if you click the links, I had serious problems with each film, I think they're both good choices for this festival, as they both represent a breath of fresh air on the conceptual level, and deserve the kind of dialogue SFIAAFF audiences can help provide. It's the muddled execution that troubled me in each case, and I'd love to hear a convincing argument that I'm missing something. Any takers? Or other tales from the SFIAAFF so far?

Power Of The Image: talking with Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky

NOTE: THIS ENTRY HAS BEEN SALVAGED FROM THIS PAGE AND REPOSTED UNEDITED ON 11/14/2008. SOME INFORMATION MAY BE OUTDATED, AND OUTGOING LINKS HAVE NOT BEEN INSPECTED FOR REPUBLICATION. COMMENTS CAN BE FOUND HERE.

* * * * *
I've been focusing the majority of my filmgoing activity over the past few months to revivals and retrospectives, but I can say without question that there is at least one new film in Frisco Bay theatres absolutely worth the attention of moviegoers who prefer visionary cinematic achievements to would-be rollercoasters determined to be forgotten five minutes after exiting the mall: Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary on the work of "subliminal environmentalist" photographer Edward Burtynsky, and on the context he's found himself working in for the past several years: the factories, the energy extraction centers, and the rapidly transforming cities, villages, and post-industrial wastelands of modern China.

The award-winning film was directed by Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, whose often poetic approach to the material inspired me to track down her other films available on DVD: Let it Come Down: the Life of Paul Bowles and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia. They're both excellent and the latter is a particularly compelling counterpart to Manufactured Landscapes. They're similar in that each film follows a photographer whose stunning compositions inspire drastically conflicting emotional reactions in viewers, and indeed sometimes within an individual viewer, but very different in approach to presenting these conflicts. Burtynsky's work has hung in the boardrooms of corporations that profit from the industry his images depict, as well as of activist organizations working to minimize the physical impact of human industry and globalization on our planet. In Manufactured Landscapes Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler have created an often horrifying, often beautiful, largely pictorial investigation of the apparent contradictions in Burtynsky's work.

When presented with an opportunity to speak with Baichwal and Burtynsky in late May, while they were in town together "doing press" on the film, I leapt despite my rather paltry experience with interviewing. I was nervous, and they were probably exhausted from being asked about the film all day, but if perhaps I didn't establish the rapport that other, more experienced interviewers like Glen Helfland and Michael Guillen seemed to, at least Baichwal and Burtynsky were comfortable with following up on each others' answers, and I felt lucky just to get to be in the room getting it all down thanks to my handheld digital recorder. The recorder was one of the first things mentioned when I sat down with them at a table in a room adjoining a publicist's office. Before I even had a chance to turn it on, I noted that it bore a label "Made in China." This launched Burtynsky into a story about his daughter...

Edward Burtynsky: It was three Christmases ago. We have the tradition of Christmas stockings that "Santa" brought. The youngest had just started to learned how to read. She pulled out a plush toy, and she looked at it. She read "Made in China" and she turned and looked up and said, "Hey Dad, even Santa shops in China!" [The room fills with laughter.] Out of the mouths of babes.

Hell on Frisco Bay: There was even a Santa Claus in the film.

Jennifer Baichwal: There were two Chris Marker moments in the film for me. One was the stills, at the coal distribution center, and the other was the hydrofoil. The whole scene on the hydrofoil reminded me of Sans Soleil, which is one of my very favorite films.

HoFB: I loved it when I saw it at the Castro several years ago.

JB: It's extraordinary, just the most incredible film, but [the hydrofoil scene in Manufactured Landscapes] reminded me of the people asleep on the ferry. This was only after, when I looked at the footage; I wasn't thinking about it when we were shooting it. [to Burtynsky, who nods:] Do you remember that scene with the Santa? With the guy on the boat just standing, looking at the Santa Claus sign. You ask "what is this thing doing here?"

HoFB: I saw Manufactured Landscapes at Sundance, and of all the films I saw there it's the one that has haunted me the most since January.

JB: It is pretty haunting. It was haunting being there. I'm still reminded of those locations where we were. I mean I think about that kind of thing every day now. And I'm beginning to look at how I'm engaging in this process that is directly related to what's happening over there. And trying not to.

HoFB: One of the workers, who is demolishing his own city to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, looks at a test photograph you've handed him, and he says "it's a very broad view; it's hard to see the details."

EB: Right.

HoFB: I was able to view your photographs in a gallery setting. There were I believe six of them on display in Park City during the festival. Looking at them in this setting, I definitely felt like it was easier to hone in on the details than when looking at a reproduction in a book, but I wonder if you also see the film as a presentation of some of the details that might get lost otherwise?

EB: I think the film successfully moves from a broader view, to look at some of the more nuanced, human scale moments that are within the subject. Jennifer was able to go into some of my photographs from the macro, and then follow some of the paths through the images, traversing some of these paths. It was used quite sparingly, but when it was, it was used very effectively. I think the film was in keeping with how one is confronted by the work itself. You start out seeing and trying to absorb the overall, and then you enter it, and because it's a large format, you're able to investigate the smaller things that often belie the scale. Often the scale isn't immediately present in the picture. It's only when you go in further that you start to find things you can understand the size of, like a ladder, or a 45-gallon drum, or a person, that it reveals itself in a way that would be difficult on a first view.

JB: It really is what we were wrestling with; how to translate these photographs intelligently into film. Peter and I talked about how we would move back and forth between the wide view and the detailed, which is how you look at those photographs. Because the detail is so extraordinary and the resolution is so extraordinary, you can see, when you look in close, all of these things happening. Then when you pull back, it's just about the scale. And often you're confused by the scale. At one point there's this truck and then you pull back and it looks like a little toy truck. You wouldn't have any idea how big that was unless you started there. There are tricks of scale where you really have to look to see. "Okay, that dot, that is a human. That's how big this place is." So we follow these inherent narratives that are there in the photographs. Teasing them out was a strategy that was something I really wanted to use; to keep moving back and forth in a rhythm, macro to micro.

HoFB: I remember one shot in particular, where the camera is traveling over some high-rises. We can't tell if the camera is flying over Shanghai, or one of Ed's photographs. And then it pulls back and we see we're looking over someone's shoulder, looking at the photograph.

JB: And you know what, that was important to me because issues of representation are. Every time you engage in the language of documentary or photography, you have to talk about that. On the other hand, you can't only talk about that. You can't be constantly self-referential, and just reflect on what it means to be representing just this person's view of a real place, and are we filming all those layers? But I really felt it was important to make reference to it, and include those deliberately confusing moments, where you're not sure where you are, or what vision you're looking at, what frame you're looking at. Is this reality? Is this the photograph, the image? Is it the photograph in another context? And that's sort of where we begin and end also: in the museum, making reference to the fact that in some ways that is the end point of this vision.

EB: One of the things that was consistent with what I'm doing, where Jennifer's coming from and where the cinematographer Peter is coming from, is that I think all of us are believers and proponents of very strong visual language. We're all interested in the Power Of The Image at a time when there's the Power Of Theory and the Power Of Concept. Not to say that the work is devoid of any of these things, but as visual people, we invest enormous amounts of energy to get the visuals right. That's something that I fight for in my work all the time, and I know that Peter does, and I know that Jennifer is just absolutely fastidious about getting what's possible out of the scene and out of the materials afterwards. So there is a visual determination of trying to translate all that through truly powerful visual narratives, and I think that probably has helped the film become a piece, and in a way a work of art in itself. It isn't a documentary on me; it's a parallel piece that exists in its own right.

JB: Art is really one arena of inquiry that allows you to engage intellectually and emotionally with issues. Take something like the Al Gore film which I felt was very powerful because of him, because of his commitment to what he was doing. It's a completely didactic film. It is an archive of a slide show. There is nothing artful about that film. Yet it... persuades you. Because of his passion. And in some ways, we end up at the same place through an entirely different route. A route of witnessing, of being in these places we are responsible for but don't normally see. I think the arena of art is a very powerful arena because of the possibility of melding the intellectual and the emotional.

EB: It leaves enough openness of meaning. The viewer has to conclude or put closure to it themselves. We're not saying, "this is how you have to think about it." Coming to those conclusions and arriving on them yourself is a much more powerful and lasting way to leave somebody with something than to say "you need to think about this this way". And most people coming out of the film, I would be willing to gamble, arrive at the same conclusion: "Uh, oh!"

JB: It is open-ended. It has to be. It can't be fixed. In the film there's enough to help you contextualize information without fixing the meaning, ever. Because for me, past films have been very dense; the last film with Shelby Lee Adams [the True Meaning of Pictures] was very dense with argument, you know. We were cutting between people literally having arguments on screen. For me, this film was really an exercise in restraint in allowing the images to lead and the pictures to tell the story, and to then pull back. Somebody asked me, "What are you most proud of?", and I'm proud that I was able to do that. To pull back and let it be as sparse as it was, as it needed to be.

HoFB: One word I used in writing on the film for GreenCine was "neutrality"...

EB: I don't know if that actually describes the film at all. If it were truly neutral, then there would be no problem for us screening the film in China, and that's a big question for us right now. What is neutral? Is it culturally, is it globally, or in China, where they see their neutrality differently than the free market democratic system we see as neutral? So I think it's almost like "what is normal?" How do we place it, when every culture has a different definition of what is normal. I think "what is neutral" is an equally slippery kind of idea to pin down. "Neutral" is almost paralleling "objective". We're forever wondering if we could ever achieve objectivity. Media are not objective, whether we use stills or film, or whatever.

JB: I don't think any sane person could argue for objectivity, which in some ways is the same thing as neutrality. It's impossible. Neutrality almost feels like nothing, like you're in a place that is not advocating anything. The difference here is that the complexity of what you're seeing in the film does not allow you to have a simple response. There are so many layers. You know, the idea that somebody thousands of miles away is making the spray mechanism for your iron that you use every day, that is shipped here, and when you throw it away, goes back there. The complexity of this, and the fact that there are no easy answers to this predicament that we find ourselves in, that's what I mean by being "open-ended."

HoFB: Are the photographs shown in China?

EB: The book is for sale in China. It sold well there.

JB: Wow.

EB: The book is in China, and with no adverse effects. If they had a problem, they would approach Noah [Weinzweig, producer and translater], I think. Because Noah is the one who made it all happen. But nobody's ever talked to him. No-one's ever given him any grief. I think that they're so very busy there, with too many bigger fish to fry, in terms of issues. And I think that they also recognize that they have to open up. They are opening up. With the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World's Fair, they're inviting the world and it's press into what's normally a fairly closed, controlled society. You can't control 8,000 reporters walking around the streets of Beijing, and not have them interact with your people, and hear stories from their mouths. That's what they really don't like. I mean, where they get upset is where we're at Three Gorges Dam, or we're talking to a factory worker or we're talking to a ship worker and it's not the worker that they want, and their story isn't "I'm a happy worker here in China, happily making more money than I was as an unhappy farmer". That's the story they want you to tell. "We're moving ahead, modernizing, and we're bringing our people out of poverty. And yes we know we've got some problems. We're working on that. But don't just focus on the problems. Please, take a look at the fact that we have lots of positive stories." And you know what? It's true. It's not all bad, and it's not all simple. Also, I bet you we can go into North America with a film camera and we can find the some of the same waste and the same dreck work happening here. It's still happening here. I did that kind of dreck work when I was going through school.

JB: And you photographed it.

EB: Yeah. It's not that we've left that chapter completely, but it is true that the chapter's shifting. It is moving over there, and though it still exists here, it's still an industrial process and an issue.

JB: It's just that it's so much bigger over there, and it's so dirty. We find it pretty easy to send the things away that we now know to be dirty, and move them to a another place.

EB: Right, and it's so much bigger because in the last fifteen years we added 4 point something billion people to the planet.

HoFB: You tell the story in the film about your oil epiphany, and I found that was really interesting, where at one point you were driving in your car, and you were realizing...

EB: That all roads led back to oil.

HoFB: Right. And you also talk a bit about shooting film stock with silver in it at a silver mine, and I've been recently reading about nitrate stock, and how in 1926 up to one-thirtieth of all the world's silver supply was tied up in the motion picture industry. It's been making me think about how the appeal of art for humans might, consciously or not, be in the stain that it leaves on the planet.

EB: The appeal of art is that people have found meaning in the marks that they leave behind, from the first cave paintings in Lascaux. From the earliest mark-making, I think it's still the same impulse. We find meaning in trying to tell stories about our passing, and our perceptions of what we see. For most artists who devote their lives to it, it's something you really can't control. The need to leave those marks is the reason you get up. Because you're interested in that process, and being able to translate your world through another channel, or create some new form or new way of expressing yourself.

JB: One of the things that drew me to the photographs in the beginning was that Ed acknowledges his own implication, and we all have to acknowledge our own implication. Existing environmental discourses, early environmental discourses were very polarizing. Very much a kind of us-and-them situation advocating radical solutions while most people just could not imagine living that way. So not a lot happened. I think there's something about the acknowledgment: "I'm steeped in this." Ed went [to China] first to find out where his computer went when it died. I've probably filled the tank in my car with oil from one of these tankers. We're all joined to these processes and it's not easy. How are we going to get out of it? We all have to get out of it together, and that acknowledgment of complexity is very powerful to me, in him as a person saying that, and also in his work. In these processes that he's photographing instead of just having this, "I'm good and you're bad, and if you were like me you'd stop what you're doing."

EB: The first of the twelve steps of AA is to acknowledge the problem.

JB: [laughing] Acknowledge the addiction.

HoFB: Well, it looks like I have to acknowledge that my time is up, so thank you both for your insights into this marvelous, important film.

And in came the next interviewer...

Manufactured Landscapes is currently playing at the single-screen Lark Theatre in Marin County, the Shattuck in Berkeley and the Lumiere Theatre here in Frisco.