Adam Hartzell: DocFest 2009

Adam Hartzell reports on three features in the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, a.k.a. DocFest, opening tonight at the Roxie. More coverage of the 14-day event is available at sf360, at the Evening Class, and at the SF Bay Guardian website and arts & culture blog. Adam:

I have ambivalent feelings about the use of ridicule in documentaries, such as those of Sascha Baren Cohen, Bill Maher or Michael Moore. As much as I might agree with the political views of these filmmakers, we know that the tactic of ridicule can impede efforts to bring people over to other views. Rather than convince people, ridicule can end up causing the other party to be defensive. And in the form of ridicule, any efforts to educate are received instead as condescension. Yet there are individuals and organizations that are not interested in actually furthering debate or illuminating discussion. They seek to obfuscate, to inject disinformation for the sole purpose of confusing people from knowing the factual information. (I’m looking at you FOX/GOP network!) When facing disinformation campaigns, I find ridicule useful to reduce the power that figure or the organization they speak for might illegitimately have. As much as I might feel Bill Maher often goes overboard, when he mocks Glenn Beck with a fake Beck book release entitled Painting with Poop, Maher is homing in perfectly on the insanity of Beck’s idiotic ideas.

Of the three DVDs I screened for the 8th edition of the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, none were out to ridicule their subjects. They treated each subject with dignity. But if there is any topic that deserves ridicule, it’s the nonsense of the Young Earth Creationists and their efforts to muddy up progress with false claims that the earth is only roughly 6,000 years old.

In this way, I find Todd Gitlin’s The Earth Is Young problematic since it is vulnerable to lending an unwarranted legitimacy to Young Earth Creationism’s fraudulent claims. Real world scientific evidence is stacked against the claims made by Young Earth Creationists in this reel world. They disregard science in order to advocate their pre-ordained beliefs. My concern is that without placing the proselytizing of Young Earth Creationists into context, we risk their views receiving unwarranted respectability. Call me a worrywart, but I’m concerned that by having such scientifically unfounded claims sit there in the democratic vat, the result would lead us towards dormancy on necessary public policy issues, such as our need to address climate change and our need to implement infrastructure changes to address the post-petroleum, post-car future that is soon upon us.

Yet, Gitlin’s documentary is intentionally off-putting, so the approach is not completely problematic since this creeping creepiness throughout the film is the indirect critique that I would rather be more direct. The drone we hear throughout the film, the voice-of-god-like blob cleverly placed amongst the microscopic world of microorganisms, the focus on the mute faces and gesticulating hands, these all add to the overall eerie feel of the documentary underscored by the bizarre claims made by the practitioners. It is this discomforting imprint that stays with me, leaving me not just unimpressed with the proselytizing trying to pass for scientific research, but a bit frightened as well.

For those who like their film-festival experience to overlap thematically, the Young Earth Creationists make an appearance in Joe Winston and Laura Cohen’s film adaptation of Thomas Frank's non-fiction book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? As much as I might disagree with the political views of the Christian Conservatives, I appreciate how the directors refuse to ridicule them here. This allows for a more accurate portrayal rather than the caricatures drawn in some liberal circles. For those who haven’t yet, I suggest reading the book rather than relying on this documentary to inform you. The arguments laid out by Frank regarding how working class conservatives vote against their own economic interests are made more compellingly in the book than the film. But then again, maybe I just have a book-bias when it comes to nonfiction, because there is some action at the end (which I can’t reveal here without spoiling) that underscores Frank’s thesis. What this documentary does do in some ways better than the book is humanize the citizens of an oft-ridiculed state of the union. Plus, since this documentary takes place during the federal midterm election after the publication of Frank’s book, it provides a snapshot of a political shift in Kansas. I don’t think we’re in What’s the Matter with Kansas?’s Kansas anymore, Toto. Kansan Politics have begun to matter a little differently.

The best of the films I caught for this year’s SF DocFest was Patrick Shen’s The Philosopher Kings. Shen focuses his camera on the lives and philosophies of those in what is considered by many as the lowliest of professions, the custodian. Several janitors at several academic institutions are interviewed on their thoughts about their jobs, their futures, life, death, and everything in between. Personal epistemologies are espoused by each of these custodians based on life experience. Shen demonstrates each unique perspective while also drawing life parallels, such as accidents and family histories, along with similar situations specific to janitorial work.

In this way, Shen demonstrates the interplay between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ put forth by Anthony Giddens. As Andrew Hickey notes of Giddens’ work in Hickey’s contribution to iPod and Philosophy: iCon of an ePoch, this is “An interplay that operates as a negotiation between the structural conditions of existence you find yourself in and the desires you have to express a certain identity” (p 124). The agency found within the structures of their profession is quite evident in The Philosopher Kings, from Melinda Augustus of the University of Florida who engages in self study of the butterflies in the building she cleans, to Corby Baker who finds inspiration for his own artwork in the student projects he dusts at Cornish College of Arts in Seattle.

Locals might recognize the UC Berkeley representative, Michael Seals. But many in the film argue that it is likely locals won’t recognize him, since we often make our janitors invisible. As someone who regularly greets and talks with the janitorial staff at my work, I am often disappointed at the levels others engage in to ignore the presence of those who assure our facilities are presentable and work smoothly. Others seem to walk around them as if they are a poorly placed pillar in the middle of the room by some absent-minded architect, looking away from them as if they are not worthy of everyday salutations. The Philosopher Kings gently addresses the injustices of such invisibility. It is an absolute gift of a film that will hopefully leave audiences with a change in perspective, which is the aim of every good philosopher, and of every good documentary.

Adam Hartzell: Mill Valley Film Festival

It's happening again. Like last October, when I noted the proliferation of film festivals descending on town, there are more than a dozen Frisco Bay festivals currently running or set to begin in the next month or so. And that's with the disappearance of two significant horror festivals that have bowed out of the pre-Halloween frenzy this year, Dead Channels and Shock It To Me! Check my top of my sidebar on the right side of this screen to see the list of this season's events.

I wish I could attend all of these and write about them, but it's simply impossible. I do regularly link to other online articles on the festivals on my twitter feed, so be sure to follow me (if you're on twitter) or to regularly check the feed if you're not. I try to keep my tweets useful; if you're finding I'm achieving otherwise or have other suggestions of any kind don't hesitate to send me feedback.

One festival already begun, and running for another week, is the 32nd Mill Valley Film Festival, which has been written about by Michael Hawley and by Susan Gerhard, among others. Sadly, this year I haven't been able to see many of the entries. In fact, I've only seen two features, both prior to the festval's lineup was announced. However, they're both masterpieces that deserve to be seen in 35mm prints on the big screen: Johnny To's buoyant Sparrow; whether you're a Johnnie To fan or virgin viewer, you have never seen anything quite like in his oeuvre. I wrote a bit about it in January, and it plays tomorrow (Monday) night at the Sequoia Theatre at 9:30 PM. The other is Pierrot le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard's whirlwind of primary color and revolution, which plays the Smith Rafael Film Center Tuesday at 6PM. Programmed as part of an in-person tribute to the legendary Anna Karina that unfortunately had to be postponed until spring due to "non-life-threatening" injuries recently sustained by the actress, the screenings of Pierrot le Fou and of the North American Premiere of her second film as a director, Victoria, this coming Friday, are noteworthy enough even without an international celebrity in attendance.

Though I really haven't explored the MVFF program for myself, Adam Hartzell has previewed five features from Southern Hemisphere nations, and I'm very thankful to him that he has offered up his thoughts on them. Adam:

The Mill Valley Film Festival is upon us again, providing a lovely excuse to venture out for a Punjabi burrito in the town centre of Mill Valley. As usual, the amount of film choices on offer can be a bit overwhelming, so to whittle it down to a manageable few, I decided to take the MVFF’s focus on Australian and New Zealand cinema as an opportunity to finally read the Australia/New Zealand edition from the 24 Frames series on world cinemas. And being that the Tri-Nations rugby series just finished with South Africa the winners, I decided to check out a few South African films, making up my own Tri-Nations film series

Let’s start off with the losers, Australia. Losers of this year’s Tri-Nations rugby, that is, not of the films I screened. Fiona Cochrane’s Four of a Kind was an intriguing film once I let the story ride. Four of a Kind was a reminder of how I expect a film to ‘look’, because, I had to filter out the low quality production values in order to appreciate what the film had to offer in interlocking storylines. The film follows a murder suspect, a detective, a therapist, and a therapist’s friend as they confront one another’s lies and past lives. The film presents dialogue intermixed with enactments of the dialogue, where the viewer is privileged to actions and words that are not mentioned in the dialogue, allowing for nice layering that peels away ever so slowly near the end. All this provides the viewer with the pleasure of trying to guess at how things will end based on the clues dropped throughout. However, utilizing Blues singer Joe Camilleri to chop up each chapter simply didn’t work for me. I understand his lyrics are meant to heighten the plot, but these recording session intermissions provided more of a disruption for me than an enhancement. Also, I must admit that I’m wondering if I’ve developed an a-musicality for certain musical genres. And I’ve never been a Blues man.

Second place at this year’s Tri-Nations was New Zealand. And both NZ films on offer for this year’s MVFF focus on the Antipodes are enjoyable pieces. Sima Urale’s Apron Strings follows two families. One family consists of two estranged Sikh-New Zealander sisters and the son of one who seeks to find his roots while reconciling his mother and his aunt. The second family are Pakeha (European) New Zealanders, a mother anxious about the changing demographics of her neighborhood and a thirty-something son whose gambling addiction forestalls any attempts to get a proper job and a home of his own. I had first heard about this film from an interview with Urale on Radio National New Zealand. That interview had intrigued me to see this film and I was happy MVFF provided such an opportunity. Although there are better immigration narratives, Apron Strings is still a delightful addition to the genre.

Armagen Ballantyne’s The Strength of Water is definitely the strongest of the five screeners I watched. Wonderfully paced, this film follows the tragedy that erupts when a familiar stranger enters this Maori seaside village and particularly how one young brother grieves through his personal loss. The desperation of a limited economy and limited options highlights what is often ignored in order to propel plots along. And in refusing to deny economic reality, the story becomes much more than just a psychological portrait of a grieving youngster. The Strength of Water is an example of a prime reason I am motivated to attend film festivals, to find out about a gem you had never heard of and are likely to never get a chance to see again.

Yet I get the feeling I’ll get a chance to see Anthony Fabian’s film Skin again. Representing the winners of this year’s Tri-Nations, South Africa, Skin seems made for Oscar bidding. (Most of it is in English, disqualifying it from the foreign-language film entry, so the Oscar efforts will need to be spent in other categories.) Actress Sophie Okonedo of Hotel Rwanda and The Secret Life of Bees plays Sandra Laing, a real-life individual of black phenotypes born of parents of white phenotypes.

For those who need a genetics refresher, phenotypes represent the physical expression of genes, such as red hair, black skin, etc. As for how a child that looks black could come from white parents, the film allows the audience to sit with this confusion initially to allow for suspicions of possible infidelity. However, the genetic reality is presented in a court case. If there are genes of black phenotypes in a family’s genetic tree, these phenotypes could express themselves later down the line of the family tree even if the black child is of parents who present white phenotypes.

Unwilling to accept their daughter looking black, and more so unwilling to confront the racism of South African apartheid and lose their white privilege, her father (played by Sam Neill) campaigns to have his daughter classified as white in South African courts. The disturbing absurdity of this all comes to the hilt in a brief scene at the beginning when we witness young Sandra and her father joyfully celebrate a court decision. However, regardless of Sandra’s legal claims to white privilege, her actual treatment by whites leaves her isolated. After returning home from high school, she finds herself curious about a black delivery man and drawn to the community out of which her father so desperately tried to keep her. Although an interesting story that needs to be told, Skin doesn’t seem like a film that will stay with me as long as The Strength of Water will. Skin wears thin on my eyes like a film vying for an Oscar that I’ve seen before, whereas The Strength of Water is confident in its own skin, impressing me at its own pace, in its own patient structure.

Yet Skin is better than the other South African film on option, Jann Turner’s White Wedding. And disappointingly, White Wedding is the film South Africa has actually submitted for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s not the kind of film that seems to win in that category. White Wedding is just a film that wants to have a little fun along the way to a too easily resolved ending. I don’t have a problem with such films at all. I like a little harmless fun too. But this isn’t the kind of grand film to which we often award prestigious prizes.

A South African road movie, the film follows the groom Elvis as he runs into trouble travelling from Johannesburg via Durban to his wedding in Cape Town. His bride, Ayanda, is tempted in his delay (and his often being out of cell phone range) by the return of a financially successful former beau. Along the way Elvis and his best man find an Irish woman who has stowed herself away in their truck. And later they find themselves stranded in a village full of Afrikaner redneck stereotypes to add further tensions. All these tensions need to be resolved by the end of this road trip. My interest in this film was to watch a film from elsewhere to see how that elsewhere is experienced (or better yet, dramatized) by those who live there. This experience is another reason why I attend film festivals. It allows me to watch another country’s successful mainstream films (White Wedding had a run of eleven consecutive weeks across South Africa), not just the art films.

The five screeners I watched represent the various motivations audiences might have fulfilled by a film festival such as MVFF. Whether you’re looking for the film that slowly grows on you (The Strength of Water), the plot-weaving tapestry (Four of a Kind), the film that doesn’t require all the characters to be white (Apron Strings, The Strength of Water, Skin, and White Wedding), or the Oscar contender (Skin and White Wedding), the Mill Valley Film Festival’s got your preference.

Adam Hartzell: SF Shorts Festival

After an August with comparatively few film festivals here on Frisco Bay, September is bringing the beginnings of an Autumn onslaught of them. Though the September staple Madcat Women's Film Festival is transitioning from a Frisco Bay-based event to a national touring program this year, a screening on Sept. 16 of festival favorite filmmakers including Kerry Laitala, Samara Halperin & others carries the tradition of El Rio outdoor music & film forward in 2009. The 2nd Annual Iranian Film Festival runs September 19-20 at the SF Art Institute. In San Rafael, the Global Lens Film Series runs September 25th through October 7th, after which the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center becomes one of the venues for the Mill Valley Film Festival. The 32nd annual program for the latter festival will not be fully revealed for another week, but in the meantime the festival has begun teasing us with announced special guest appearances: Clive Owen will be in Marin for the opening night screening of the Boys are Back, and French New Wave icon Anna Karina will be on hand to present her scarcely-seen recent directorial effort, Victoria on October 16th. Jean-Luc Godard's muse will also be represented at the festival by an October 13th showing of one of their most well-known collaborations, Pierrot Le Fou.

But before all this, the Red Vic is just about to play host to the 4th Annual SF Shorts festival, featuring six programs of short films over the next four days. Arya Ponto has a written brief write-up on the program. Here at Hell On Frisco Bay, Adam Hartzell has also previewed a few of the offerings and provides his take:

There’s a wonderful moment of Deaf storytelling that takes place in Cynthia Mitchell and Robert Arnold’s short All Animals. It goes on at length sans subtitles and is mesmerizing. Just a young Deaf woman (actress Sheena McFeely) sitting on the back of a pick-up truck signing with her whole upper body and the space that surrounds it, including the facial expressions so important to all Sign Languages, and the authentic Deaf voice John S. Schuchman has noted is so important to (Hearing) Children of Deaf Adults (aka CoDAs). It truly takes over the film, levitating the viewer trance-like into a completely different film from the larger short film that surrounds it. All Animals involved one of the California Schools for the Deaf. Perhaps the focus on Deaf storytelling germinated from this collaboration or was the very reason for this collaboration.

This subtitle-less scene reminded me of the screening of Deaf director Peter Wolf’s I Love You But... (1994) at the Deaf Film Festival in February of 2003 at the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley, where it was explained that no subtitling or translation via headphones would be provided for Hearing viewers, in order to give Hearing viewers an idea of what it’s like for the Deaf to attend the cinema. Outside of the beauty of signed languages in general, the moment of expressive Deaf storytelling in All Animals is inaccessible to non-ASL fluent viewers just as the dialogue of English-language cinema is inaccessible to Deaf Americans. Rarely are subtitled or close-captioned prints of English-language films available for U.S. theatres and this limits the experience Deaf viewers can have in the cinema. And based on the screener I watched, I’m assuming the spoken dialogue will not be close-captioned at the Red Vic screening, making this film only partially accessible for the Deaf community. Whether or not that’s an oversight or due to limited funding options, I don’t know. But since the Deaf storytelling is so prominent, it appears its inaccessibility to me and other non-ASL fluent viewers is intentional. Yet in spite of that ‘inaccessibility’, I am still deeply affected by it.

Unfortunately All Animals also utilizes what Gallaudet University professor Jane Norman refers to as a ‘gimmick’ of Hearing-centric films where the sound is cut off as a false attempt to lead us into the Deaf character’s experience of the world. As the Hearing character notes when discussing the Opera, Deaf people do not experience the world in total silence, for vibrations are felt through other parts of the body. Such sensation of sound through the vibrations of the body is not the same as through the ear, but such is not total silence either. The sappy (but I love it nonetheless) Japanese Deaf film I Love You (Osawa Yutaka and Yonaiyama Akihiro, 2000) demonstrates this beautifully, but to write how it represents sound as ‘heard’ by Deaf people would be to ruin the tear-jerking moment up to which the film builds, so I’ll leave you to the difficult search to find that film to see how such clichés can be avoided.

Along with being a calling card for directors, actors, and others film industry folk to garner future projects, short films can also be a space for experimentation, which makes All Animals both compelling in its highlighting of Deaf storytelling, and disappointing in its reliance on an overused Hearing trope of Deaf characters. Of the few films I was able to see for the festival, nothing else jumped out at me as ‘experimental’, but the animated films The Mouse That Soared by Kyle T. Bell and Prayers for Peace by Dustin Grella both kept me transfixed by their drawings, Bell’s through digital rendering and Grella’s through the washing on and off of dreamy charcoal images.

Another film I was able to watch was Molly Snyder-Fink and Kiran Goldman’s Fast As She Can. With Usain Bolt dashing through the headlines as of late for his World Record 100 meter time of 9.58 seconds at the recent World Championships in Berlin, it’s nice to see a short film focusing on the amazing female athletes of Jamaica. Although there is some repetitive narration early on, the short serves its subjects and the topic well by showing the constant training in which these women engage and the encouragement and support many provide for these endeavors. The details of their training regimen offer a counterpoint to the speculative ‘reasons’ that are often given to Jamaican track and field success. In this way, we can see the self-serving claims of the yam seller in the film who claims ‘it’s the yams’ just as we doubted Mars Blackmon when he proclaimed ‘It’s gotta be the shoes!’ More disturbingly, but not mentioned in the film, sometimes the hard work that propels the success of black athletes is downplayed by the Pat Buchanan-esque racist assumptions about their bodies. And now these athletes must also confront the constant suspicion of doping, based, as a San Jose Mercury News reporter admits in the documentary, on little evidence outside of the record-breaking record-breaking. Everyone is looking for the secret to their success as if it were one simple thing proving their prejudices, rather than a complex network of things.

And like that journalist, I will proclaim on the little evidence of these four shorts that it looks as if the Red Vic will have much on offer for those with the heavily-concentrated attention spans and precise mental-compartmentalizing that short film watching requires.

Miyazaki Midnights & Matinees (and more)

One of my favorite films of the year so far is the latest animated feature from Hayao Miyazaki, Ponyo on the Cliff By the Sea, also know as just Ponyo. Made by a near-septuagenarian, and perhaps aimed primarily for children just barely old enough to sit still for a movie, this Japanese re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen holds the power to captivate a childless 30-something willing to be awash in Miyazaki's visuals, whether depicting the crashing of furious waves as a Hokusai woodcut come to life, or the simple process of serving a bowl of ramen to a little girl who has never eaten noodles before. Miyazaki's inked lines are more robust than ever, and his gentle-handed ecological message perfectly apropos for his pre-school protagonist Sosuke, who understands the import of the chain of events he has set off less completely than audiences of any age will, yet it better able to make a crucial narrative leap of faith than a more world-weary individual might. He provides an inspirational model for us all.

Some Miyazaki fans seem to be, at least mildly, disappointed in Ponyo in comparison to the master's other animated films. I can't understand almost any of their arguments, and I can't help but wonder if some are registering disagreement less with the film itself than with the Disney Corporation's decision to release the film only in a dubbed version, in contrast to their making Howl's Moving Castle available to theatres both an English-dubbed and a Japanese-language version with English subtitles. Sprited Away, too, was sent on the festival circuit in a Japanese version before its theatrical release with American voice artists providing the soundtrack.

I've watched both versions of Ponyo. First I saw a 35mm print of the Disney-dubbed version; though I was mildly bothered by Liam Neeson's distinctive tones, and Cate Blanchett's essential reprisal of her Galadriel role, their Ponyo characters are relatively minor and I was so overwhelmed by Miyazaki's fluid animation and florid imagination that they couldn't mar the experience in any meaningful way. The other voice actors submerged their star personae and were unrecognizable to me until the end credits. In sum it was a terrific dub job; nothing like the distracting celebrity voice-fest of the Miramax Princess Mononke dub. Watching a friend's Japanese Ponyo DVD import with English subtitles shortly afterward was nearly as wonderful, but I'm glad it was not my first experience with the film. In fact the dub translation was slightly superior in a few instances, as I confirmed with a native Japanese speaker. The only major improvement was the end-title song, which Disney turned from a sweet farewell to the film into a groan-worthy techno remix involving its stable of pop singers.

In any language, Ponyo is absolutely something to see on the big screen if you can, and if you live in Frisco that's still possible, at least for another week, as it continues to play at the Balboa Theatre until Thursday. Miyazaki fans holding out for the subtitled DVD, you'll thank yourself for taking the opportunity to see it in a cinema. If you want to display your original-version-purist credentials, take the rare opportunity to watch the Japanese-language version of Miyazaki's Spirited Away this November when it plays four midnight shows and a matinee in Frisco Bay theatres. Both the Clay here in Frisco and the Piedmont in Oakland have included the 45th San Francisco International Film Festival's audience award-winning film in their autumn lineup of cult favorite screenings. The Clay shows it November 6th & 7th, and the Piedmont on November 13th & 14th, with an additional 10 AM screening on the 15th.

Other midnight movies coming to Landmark theatres this season include This is Spinal Tap, the Wiz (featuring Michael Jackson as the scarecrow, of course) the original release cut of Donnie Darko, the Graduate, the Shining, and more. Check the Landmark After Dark website. And though the Bridge will no longer be the site for full summer seasons of Peaches Christ's Midnight Mass series, the horror hostess will present a one-off screening of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 there on October 24th.

Meanwhile, the Red Vic on Haight Street has a midnight hit on its hands as well these days. The Room, Tommy Wiseau's enigmatically awful, but clearly rather expensive passion project, has been packing in viewers and solidifying screen-talkback rituals the last Saturday of every month all summer. The tradition, as revealed in the latest Red Vic calendar, is planned to continue this fall with shows on September 26th and October 31st (come in costume as one of the characters for additional fun.)

Finally, my friend Jesse Ficks has been hard at work putting together his season of MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS shows at the Castro. Tonight he's playing Risky Business, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the Last American Virgin in a set entitled "Cocky White Guys". October 2 is "Bite Nite", pairing the Santa Cruz-set the Lost Boys with Katheryn Bigelow's Near Dark, which I've never seen (for shame!) And November 6th is called "Love Kills", with True Romance, Natural Born Killers and a midnight MiDNiTE screening to be determined. Looking at the thematic pattern, I bet it'll be something written by Quentin Tarantino. Though Jesse has been known to have unexpected surprises up his sleeve.

Adam Hartzell: Say My Name

Fall is almost upon us. We movie-lovers know it because Johnny Ray Huston's rep film roundup for the SF Bay Guardian's Fall arts Preview is out, with tons of clickable links to most of the major and minor film festivals, repertory series, and special events of the season. But August isn't quite over yet, and this weekend has at least a few Frisco film events worth coming in from out of the heat. Huston's own Beyond ESPN series at the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts wraps up tomorrow with Football as Never Before, a proto-Zidane film featuring the Manchester United legend George Best. The other night I saw there Visions of Eight, a lovely documentary of the 1972 Munich Olympics directed by Kon Ichikawa, Arthur Penn, Milos Forman, and five others. The series was written up by Adam Hartzell for sf360.

More recently, Hartzell wrote up a preview of the focus on Kim Longinotto at this weekend's Women Make Movies Film Festival for that site; he'd also written on the documentary filmmaker here a few years back. And now, I'm very pleased to present his write-up on another documentary playing tomorrow at the Women Make Movies festival:

Sadly, for those outside of the Hip Hop Nation, juxtapositions of women and Hip Hop are more likely to lead towards thoughts of booty-shaking than rhyme-making. Nirit Peled’s documentary Say My Name, (screening at the Roxie Theatre on Sunday August 30th as part of the Women Make Movies Film Festival) should correct that viewpoint for the casual viewer. But it provides an equal service for those heads with full Hip Hop cred. With so many female MCs dropping knowledge and dope lyrics one after the other, even the most diehard fan’s understanding of Hip Hop can’t help but be changed. Hip Hop is not just a man’s world. Like so much else in this world, men just dominate it. Say My Name is a call for recalibration of the control masculine rhetoric has within and around Hip Hop.

As Tricia Rose has noted in her latest book The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop ...And Why It Matters, Hip Hop does need to reroute where it has been headed. The misogyny (which walks intimately hand-in-hand with homophobia) is one of the areas on which Hip Hop needs to come correct. The most infamous incident of this is the image of the credit card being swiped through a dancer’s thronged buttocks in the video for “Tip Drill” by Nelly. (A clip of which makes a brief appearance in Peled’s documentary.) This video sparked a protest at the historically black Spelman College where Nelly was coming to support a bone marrow registry drive as part of his charity work to help leukemia patients. Nelly cancelled his appearance rather than accept a meeting with campus leaders to face the music of the critiques of his music. Beyond such visuals as in “Tip Drill”, there are lyrics of equal disrespect. Rose advocates for a redirection away from the nihilistic lyrics while also asking us to keep in mind that Hip Hop is not alone in purveying such societal ills. As Michael Jeffries notes in his contribution to Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology (HHFA), the mainstream shorthand of Hip Hop as “...the prime criminal in the business of pop cultural female misogyny, all but excus[es] other musical genres and cultural products.” And in spite of the misogyny easily found in the videos late at night on BET, there are women MCs trying to reframe the game so that women have entry points into Hip Hop other than ass first. Through the likes of female MCs speaking for themselves in Peled’s documentary, “ ...Young women fans”, according to Eric Darnell Pritchard and Maria L. Bibbs in HHFA, “are finding that there is a place for them in Hip Hop culture, and they do not have to settle for the role of a male rapper’s sex object or helpmate in order to have a presence.” We need to be “turning up the noise”, as Jeffries says, on the women Hip Hop artists being dampened by the nihilistic, which is exactly what is accomplished in the documentary Say My Name.

The reach in this documentary is impressive considering Peled is from Holland. Although interviews with certain luminaries are missing, (Queen Latifah and Missy Elliot being the major lacunae), Peled was able to provide ample time for elder stateswomen such as MC Lyte and Monie Love. These are women whose lyrical skill was matched with a tonal texture that made an imprint on this writer’s young mind growing up. Particularly intriguing is the section on Roxanne Shanté, the rapper brought in to recite the lyrics to the infamous response record to UTFO’s single “Roxanne, Roxanne” entitled “Roxanne’s Revenge”. (This was the ‘unofficial’ response record. UTFO produced their own response called ‘The Real Roxanne’.) The ethical disagreements over reciting lyrics written by others, the place of verbal battling in Hip Hop, and the disposability of some players in the industry all are underscored by the saga of this Roxanne. Erykah Badu is one of the more recent Hip Hop luminaries whose commentary serves the documentary very well. She has some poignant things to say about motherhood and the female beauty ideal. As if hearing Marlo David Asikwe (in HHFA) when she laments that black women Hip Hop artists do not attend to “the mothering body” with the same level of attention as the sexual body, Peled brings attention to the mothering Hip Hop body. This segment is quite significant regarding how motherhood can inspire (as well as disrupt) the careers of these female MCs.

Regional Hip Hop genres are also represented, from the rapid fire lyrics of British Grime to the socially conscious creed of Detroit’s Invincible. (The presence of Invincible also allows for a lesbian voice, although whispered at those familiar with Invincible rather than shouted out explicitly in the documentary.) When Peled represents the ‘Dirty South’ with the Georgia Girls, her footage of them performing in a high school gymnasium touches on the significance of high schools to the Atlanta variant Hip Hop. “...The high school”, notes Jocyelyn A. Wilson in HHFA, “works as a key environment for developing relationships that contribute to the strong network ties of the southern hip-hop community of practice.”

So much is touched on in a short 73 minutes. Aspects I haven’t mentioned include how the ghetto environment is a point of inspiration, but also something that can hold some artists back. And being held back is part of the overarching theme of Rose’s powerful critique The Hip Hop Wars. The harmful trends in Hip Hop, the misogyny and other forms of violence and nihilism, are holding back those who most need to be propelled forward. One way to propel forward is through documentaries such as Peled’s where women are launched into the discourses of Hip Hop rhetoric, negotiating their own terms. As Pritchard and Dibbs explain, “...As for many youth hip-hop is a clear way of making meaning and receiving/imparting knowledge in a way that is relevant to their cultural, economic, social and political realities.” To turn away from the enticing beat is to also turn away from the most vital means youth have presently to express themselves. Say My Name is a desperately needed call and response to reclaim a female space for Hip Hop. Bring the noise, indeed.