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June 30, 2004

Sympathy For David Harris

This news caught me completely off guard. I've been teaching Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line in my summer film class, and several of my students were curious about what happened to the film's main participants, and it turns out that David Harris, whose false testimony originally put Randall Dale Adams on death row for the murder of Officer Robert Wood, faces execution this week in Texas.

A federal judge blocked the lethal injection procedure Texas uses for executions, and Harris's lawyers have other appeals pending with the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, the lawyers have appealed due to the testimony by court psychologists that Harris would be likely continue to be a danger to society. In The Thin Blue Line, Morris and Adams work to discredit the testimony of one such court psychologist, James Grigson (about whom Morris originally planned to make the documentary before learning about the Adams case), whose testimony helped put the innocent Adams on death row in the first place. I'm not sure why this story has thrown me so much. I oppose the death penalty, no matter the victim, but because of Morris's film, I have a little more sympathy for David Harris.

Update: CNN is reporting that Harris was executed this morning.

Posted by chuck at 11:27 PM | Comments (45) | TrackBack

June 29, 2004

Atlanta Time Machine

Last summer, I wrote several blog entries about how Atlanta's past may be both remembered and forgotten in the rush of development and re-gentrification. I'm fascinated by the traces of Atlanta's (or any city's) past when I can find them, and the Atlanta Time Machine provides a wealth of access to these images. The site collects vintage photographs of Atlanta and compares them with contemporary photos taken from nearly the same location. Greg, the author of the site, has devoted a tremendous amount of energy to this project, and it works very well, the comparisons of past and present beautifully presented.

In case you're interested, I live within walking distance of this intersection, but if you want to see something really mind-blowing (or if you're nostalgic for Atlanta's pre-traffic-nightmare past), check out this before and after shot of downtown Atlanta from the 14th Street bridge. Most of the vintage photographs were provided by Special Collections at Georgia State University's Pullen Library. Cool stuff (via Metafilter).

Posted by chuck at 8:46 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The Whys of the Oubliette Film

An essay by Molly C. O’Donnell on Metaphilm about recent popular films about memory loss, including Memento, 50 First Dates, and Eternal Sunshine.

Posted by chuck at 12:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 27, 2004

Sunday Morning Film Reads

In an otherwise insightful review of F9/11, David Edelstein comments,

This is not quite a documentary—which I define, very loosely, as a work in which the director begins by turning on the camera and allowing the reality to speak for itself, aware of its complexities, contradictions, and multitudes. You are with Moore, or you are a war criminal.
To imply that documentaries only exist when the filmmaker allows "reality to speak for itself" is an incredibly rarefied concept of a documentary, verite to the highest possible degree. I realize that I'm overreading here, but Edelstein seems to ignore that every cut, every camera movement is a meaningful act, one that will shape the reality that we see. I do think that in spite of its clear thesis (which Edelstein overstates for emphasis), Moore's film shows some awareness of the complexities and contradictions of American life, particularly when it comes to social class, even if many of those complexities are subsumed within Moore's larger thesis.

One of the other Big Questions about the film has been how the film will play among swing voters. An LA Times article includes interviews with several swing voters and lifelong Republicans who now claim they will not vote for Bush. A similar AJC article notes, however, that ticket sales in suburban Atlanta have been "good, but not overwhelming." No word in the AJC article about how the suburban audience responded to the film.

Now for some non-F9/11 reading material (all via GreenCine): A Eugene Hernandez interview with Jim McKay, who recently directed the fantastic HBO film, Everyday People, and a second McKay interview by Craig Phillips. Finally, a Jennifer Ordoñez profile of Julie Delpy who stars in Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, a follow-up to Before Sunrise, which I re-watched last night, just to give myself a break from all of the documentary films I've been watching lately.

Posted by chuck at 12:04 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 26, 2004

R-Cards

Quick link and comment to this New York Times article about the R-Card, a card distributed by GKC Theaters that parents can purchase for their teenager children, which would give them permission to see R-rated movies without being accompanied by a parent or guardian.

I think it's a pretty good idea (of course I don't have a 15-year old child). It allows parents to skip obnoxious action movies their teen children might want to see, and in general, it simply assumes a level of trust between parents and children. And, of course, most video stores already have options that allow their children to check out R-rated films anyway. Naturally, MPAA captain Jack Valenti thinks it's a bad idea, that it somehow subverts the ratings system (of course, in my opinion, that's not a bad thing, either).

Posted by chuck at 1:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Fahrenheit 9/11

Here are some initial observations about Fahrenheit 9/11 (IMDB). This review will probably ramble quite a bit. It may seem a little impressionistic. I'm still recovering from the intensity of the sounds and images I've just witnessed ("spoilers" ahead).

First, the theater where I saw the film was sold out for every screening tonight (and also incredibly hot--couldn't they have cranked the A/C?), with most people arriving at least half an hour early to line up for seats. I saw at least two news trucks (did anyone happen to watch Atlanta's Channel 2 news tonight?). Lots of cheering and enthusiasm throughout the film (and, yes, a long ovation at the film's end). And while F9/11 had far fewer "gotcha" moments than most Michael Moore films, I'm not sure I'd call the film "restrained" as some critics have. It might be better described as far more somber than anything Moore has done.

The film employs a relatively straight chronological approach, starting with election night coverage (with Ben Affleck and Bobby D, of all people, standing behind Gore celebrating) and moves quickly through many of the election controversies, including an upsetting montage sequence in which several members of the Congressional Black Caucus (including Cynthia McKinney) try to contest the results (there's also one Asian woman), but because no Senator signed the petition, Gore (who was still President of the Senate) was forced to uphoild parliamentary procedure and decline their petition. We see the massive protests of Bush's inauguration (which I'd forgotten). What follows is a montage of Bush vacation sequences, with the Go-Go's "Vacation" playing on the soundtrack, and the news that Bush was on vacation approximately 40% of the time between inauguration and 9/11, a statistic that has been relatively widely reported. All of this happens before the opening credits (which show various Bushies preparing for photo-ops, including a slimy image of Paul Wolfowitz using spit to set his hair in place), when the film shifts in tone considerably.

Immediately after the opening credits, the film fades to black for nearly a minute while we hear the familiar sounds of the towers hit. Finally, after nearly a minute, the image fades in and we see the immediate aftermath of people running, people crying and hugging, and paper floating in the air. We see very little of the actual violence of 9/11, a decision I think could be read in various ways. It might be seen as an attempt to respect the memory of the dead. It might be an acknowledgement that this violence is unrepresentable, but given Moore's eventual treatment of the Bush-Bin Laden family connections, it does show some restraint.

This sequence is followed by the now-famous video of Bush reading the children's book for seven minutes after the second tower was hit. The voice-over felt a little pushy here as Moore attempted to introduce some of his theses about Bush's connections with the Bin Laden family and the negligent treatment of intelligence regarding terrorism. Instead of Moore trying to score cheap points here, I have to wonder how this sequence could have played without Moore's voice-over, just seven minutes of real-time footage of Bush sitting there during the terrorist attacks. I'm not sure that it would have played better, but it would have been devastating.

The section of the film that treats the Bush-Bin Laden connection is mercifully fairly brief, and I don't think Moore ever directly states that Bush is culpable for the 9/11 attacks as some critics have implied--the film is more subtle than that. That always struck me as being a fairly thin thread to support a 90-minute feature film, but the sequence does convey the extent to which the Bush family (and many of his cronies) stand to profit from war, an ongoing theme throughout the film. It also allows Moore to re-frame some of the allegations that have often been levied against the Bush administration about their failure to pursue Bin Laden. Nothing new here, really, but it's done in an entertaining way, and it helps to frame some of the arguments about social class that Moore makes later in the film.

Moore carefully avoids showing any footage of the war on terror as it has been pursued in Afghanistan, which allows the tragic footage from Iraq to have a more powerful effect on the film's viewers (but, as A.O. Scott observes, it also brings Moore's stance on Afghanistan into question). These images are almost impossible to watch, with some of them as visceral as any war footage I've ever seen. Shots of a wounded Iraqi child recalled the famous image from Vietnam of the naked girl running from her village after it has been attacked. Intercut with these images are soldiers playing the Bloodhound Gang song "Burn, Motherf*cker, Burn" on CD players as their tanks drive through Iraqi villages. I recognize that this sequence could be regarded as the most brazenly manipulative sequence in the film, but after watching Control Room, I share the sentiment that American TV viewers rarely get a sense of the human cost of the war.

Moore then focuses on other costs associated with the war, and I think this is one of the film's strengths. He builds a relatively strong case that the war in Iraq is unnecessary before moving on to a critique of the social class issues that have been swept aside in much of the coverage of the war. He uses a multi-ethnic working-class mother from Flint to stand in for many of these critiques. Before the war, Lila Lipscomb speaks proudly of her family's contribution to the US military, but later in the film, after her son has been killed, we see her grief and anger and frustration at her son's death in what she now sees as an unnecessary war. Intercut with these images, we see Moore attempting to goad Congressmen into getting their children to enlist for the war in Iraq. It's one of the few sequences where Moore deploys his usual shtick, but after the mounting tension, it's a welcome release, a break from the sobriety of what we've seen.

The film ends with a call to patriotism, noting that because many working class and poor people are willing to serve in the military, we should ask them to fight only when necessary. It's a fairly effective (and low-key) ending, and although the attempt to redefine patriotism and support of the military is far from subtle, it fairly effectively brings together all of the threads that Moore has been weaving throughout the film.

I'm not yet sure how I feel about the film. I don't think that the film changed my perception of the war or challenged me in any specific way. Like James Berardinelli, I was disappointed by the superficiality of some of the film's critiques of Bush, but I'm wondering if other viewers will feel the same way. I've developed strong opinions about Bush and Iraq, and Moore's film didn't shift those convictions in any specific way.

The film also felt a little scattershot, a little too short attention span, for my tastes (hence my suggestion about the "My Pet Goat" footage). Now, there is a generous reading here: there's so much to cover about the war that you can barely show everything in a two-hour film. In fact, the film (intentionally or not) conveys that effect, and in a sense F9/11 is about the impossibility of really sorting out all of our mixed emotions, our anger, frustration, our sadness, about the war, and I think that may be the strength of Moore's narrative in this film.

Posted by chuck at 2:32 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 25, 2004

Kerry's Coalition of the Wild-Eyed

Via Metafilter, I just came across one of the more bizarre and disturbing campaign ads (this link offers a partial script and another link to the ad) I've seen all season. The advertisement, "Kerry's Coalition of the Wild-eyed," is intended to depict the "pessimism and rage" of prominent "Kerry Democrats" such as Al Gore, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, and Kerry himself.

The most disturbing image in the ad shows Adolf Hitler giving a speech and implicitly claims that MoveOn compared Bush to Hitler (a false accusation in the first place). The advertisement itself is rather muddled and confusing, at least for me. Without the context of the Bush campaign homepage, it's not at all clear how these images are being used until the very end of the advertisement. In fact, on an initial, inattentive viewing of the ad, most of what we hear in the ad involves criticisms directed at the Bush presidency (Moore's "fictitious president" comment, etc). Although the ad concludes with a call for Bushian optimism, it's impossible to determine from the advertisement what to be optimistic about.

It would also be easy to think that the advertisement is comparing the Democrats themselves to Hitler, especially if you read the editing cues (which suggest an equivalence between each of the images). One commenter in the MeFi discussion did make the point that the ad is likely focused on "true believers" who would already know how to read these images (i.e. "look how scary these guys are"), but no matter the audience, the trivialization of these images of Hitler deserves to be heavily criticized.

Posted by chuck at 6:37 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Father Outsources Best

Possible article for my essay on teaching globalization. In the June 20 (Father's Day) issue of the New York Times, Bruce Stockler's "Father Outsources Best." The op-ed piece is written as a letter to his children imagining that his job as father has been outsourced to Bangalore, India.

As Anjali points out, the article unfairlydirects resentment towards Indian people who are ostensibly benefitting from globalization at the expense of American people. What I find interesting (and upsetting) about the essay is the extent to which the essay hinges on a crisis in masculinity through the concept of a father whose authority in the family has been displaced by globalization. In this sense, I think the essay will fit nicely with the "crisis in masculinity" narrative that contends with and underwrites Fight Club's "anti-corporate" narrative (I don't believe the film to be truly anti-corporate, but merely tapping into those tensions so they can be resolved later in the film).

I'm currently working through David Held and Anthony McGrew's Globalization/Anti-Globalization, which lays out many of the issues I'm planning to address quite nicely. More later as this essay continues to evolve.

Update: Corrected to clarify vague referent. I need to proofread my blog entries more carefully from now on.

Posted by chuck at 2:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 24, 2004

Unintended Consequences of McCain-Feingold

According to The Hill, Lion's Gate may not be able to advertise for or promote Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 after July 30 due to restrictions on corporate-funded advertisements that identify a candidate within 30 days of a primary. Because the Republican convention is technically considered a primary, that may limit future promotion of the film.

If the six members of the Federal Election Comission (FEC) board uphold the legal advice given by its general counsel, that would severely restrict advertising not only for Moore's film, but also quite possibly for the pro-Clinton doc, The Hunting of the President , the Candian documentary, The Corporation, and even John Sayles' recent anti-Bush feature film, Silver City. At the same time, David Bossie, the same guy who encouraged Republicans to compalin to theaters showing F9/11, plans to file a complaint with the FEC stating that it violates federal election law. I don't have the legal background or the knowledge of how the campaign finance laws work to specifically address the legal issues. If anyone understands these issues better than I do, I'd appreciate your take.

Posted by chuck at 9:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 23, 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11 House Parties

MoveOn.org is organizing house parties on Monday night to mark the release of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. It's similar to their house party screenings of Robert Greenwald's Uncovered, although Moore's film won't be screened at the party itself. I'll be attending one of the "house parties" (actually in a coffeehouse) here in Decatur.

The "Fahrenheit" house parties will feature an online, interactive chat with Michael Moore, and MoveOn is encoraging groups to discuss plans to defeat George Bush in the 2004 election. I'm still intrigued by the way in which these house parties can frame an interpretation of a film, in both cases by translating viewing and discussing the film into a certain type of action (voter registration drives, campaigning for Kerry, both things I like), but I'm a little suspicious about how these house parties might actually inhibit a critical engagement with Moore's film.

In my initial reading of this practice, I tended to read the "Uncovered" house parties realtively uncritically, perhaps in part because my appreciation of grassroots political movements and my opposition to George W. Bush prevented me from seeing how such an approach might actually limit the possibility of thinking critically about Uncovered itself as a film. As a result, I wasn't very satisfied with that paper. Now, I'm as critical of Dubya (and the war in Iraq) as anyone, but I'm not sure how beneficial it will be to attend the film with an interpretation (translating information into action) in mind.

Perhaps this is my real problem with the house party concept. It seems that MoveOn is treating the documentary film (whether Moore's or Greenwald's) as mere information. As many great critical essays on documentary filmmaking suggest, documentaries are much more than mere information; they are narratives that organize "information" in highly specific, ideological ways. Again, I know that my politics roughly coincide with Moore's, but I think that watching the film with a specific interpretation in mind (how can I use this information to convince people that Bush should not be re-elected?) seems like it might actually prevent genuine conversation about the film rather than provoking it.

Update 6/30: Here's a New York Times article covering several of the New York house parties. It also mentions the release of a Disney documentary called America's Heart and Soul, which purports to describe the American Dream through (very carefully selected) interviews with a diverse group of Americans. At some point, I'd be curious to see the film simply as a cultural artifact (it sounds a lot like the Frank Capra and John Ford WWII-era films), but for now, I'd rather enjoy this review in The Onion.

Posted by chuck at 6:44 PM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

A Milestone of Sorts

It just dawned on me that I've officially been a Wordherder for one year now. I had my one year blogaversary a few months ago, so it feels a little cheap to describe this as another milestone, but I still felt I should mark the occasion somehow. Maybe the best way of doing that is to thank Jason for getting the whole thing rolling.

Posted by chuck at 1:39 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

The Weather Underground

Because I was born in 1970, images from the 1960s have the aura of history for me. I don’t remember the Civil Rights Movement or Vietnam, so I find representations of that era to be fascinating. When I taught freshman composition at the University of Illinois, I often showed Mark Kitchell’s 1990 documentary, Berkeley in the ‘60s, in order to introduce the research project, in which the class would write research papers on specific historical events from a specific decade. When I watched this film, I found myself unself-consciously drawn to charismatic leaders of the Free Speech Movement, such as Mario Savio, who spoke so passionately about his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

With that in mind, I watched Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary, The Weather Underground (IMDB), tonight. The film focuses on the radical left-wing political group that bombed several government buildings, including the US Capital, in the late 1960s and ‘70s. It’s a film that is impossible to watch without acknowledging one’s political investments, and in fact Roger Ebert’s review of the film verges on being only a reflection on his politics (he mentions that he still has his SDS card signed by Tom Hayden).

I knew a little about the Weathermen, but I didn’t have a clear sense of their long history. The documentary certainly provides that, although I’d imagine that one aspect of their experience is probably unrepresentable: after watching this film, I’m not sure that I have any sense of what it must have been like to be separated from family and friends for years, unable to communicate except perhaps in elliptical ways. One member of the group comments that after the early 70s they became “invisible,” unrecognized by old friends, and unable for the most part to return to familiar haunts. I’m not sure how anyone represents that, though.

The documentary uses interviews with former members of the Weather Underground, undercover FBI officers, and former SDS president and Weathermen opponent, Todd Gitlin, to trace the history of the Weathermen, from their formation at the 1969 Students for a Democratic Society conference through the late seventies when the group essentially disbanded (after Jimmy Carter’s amnesty for draft dodgers), with many members turning themselves in. Like the leaders of the Free Speech Movement (such as Savio), many of the Weathermen were incredibly charismatic, their press appearances carefully constructed to convey their passionate beliefs, and archived footage of Bernadette Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Naomi Jaffe and Mr. Flanagan effectively conveys the idea that they were “sexy criminals” as Elvis Mitchell puts it (by the way, what must it be like to be surfing the Internet and find yourself described as a sexy criminal?). Several times during the course of the documentary, Dohrn and Ayers (who are still a couple), particularly, are described as a real-life Bonnie and Clyde, and the footage certainly captures that spirit of rebellion that I find so enticing, and the film shows to some extent how carefully the group managed their image.

The interview format, mixed with news footage and home movie footage (often in Super-8), allows for a reflective format, in which many of the Weather Underground find themselves looking back at their actions with mixed emotions. In one of the more compelling interview sequences, Brian Flanagan, who now owns a bar, reflects that “When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrific things.” Others, including Mark Rudd, now a community college teacher, also express mixed emotions about their actions, but some members of the group show less remorse. Still, there’s a great deal of nostalgia among many of the group’s members, a nostalgia for the moment of possibility represented by the volatility of the late 1960s.

As the indieWIRE reviewer suggests, the film’s format, at least on a formal level, is relatively orthodox. However, this approach masks the extent to which members of the Weather Underground are presented sympathetically. I would have liked to see interviews with other liberal or left opponents of the Weathermen besides Todd Gitlin. It’s not that I’m necessarily suspicious of Gitlin, but because of his involvement in SDS, it’s hard to shake his personal investment in that history (and I’m not suggesting that anyone could be objective, but another point-of-view from the outside could have been helpful). The roughness of the footage does add to the intensity of the film as well.

Of course the film cannot be separated from its contemporary context, and I think that’s what makes this documentary so successful. Brian Flanagan, in particular, clearly feels some degree of remorse for his actions, comparing them to the Oklahoma City bombing. And, implicitly at least, the film raises questions about the current opposition to the war in Iraq and (to some extent) the resistance to globalization, about what can be said, about what form that opposition takes.

Posted by chuck at 1:05 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

June 20, 2004

Recent Documentary Articles

I've pretty much put the finishing touches on my horror film article, just missing my June 15 goal. Should hit the mail tomorrow. Now I'm starting to think about my conference paper on Capturing the Friedmans, a paper that I'm hoping will allow me to reflect on some key debates in documentary filmmaking. I'm way too exhausted to write anything terribly coherent about the questions I'd like to address right now.

With that in mind, I've linked to a few recent articles on doucmentary films. David Sterritt, writing for The Christian Science Monitor, has recently written an article discussing the recent trend of political documentaries. Sterritt attributes the rise in political documentaries to the polarized political atmosphere, and to some extent, I agree. Joel Bakan, co-writer of the Canadian documentary, The Corporation, echoes many of these claims:

Bakan started writing "The Corporation" in the mid '90s, when he decided that "globalization, deregulation, privatization, [and] relaxation of merger and acquisition laws" were leading to "our democratic institutions being subsumed to the corporate agenda."

The movie is catching on, he says, because people increasingly sense that the the world is facing real problems. Yet when they watch the news and read the paper, they don't have a sense of why it's happening the way it is happening. Documentaries try to make sense of the big picture, he says, and viewers welcome the engagement such films provide even if they don't always agree with a film's conclusions.

To some extent, I agree, documentaries allow for greater reflection than either news broadcasts or radio talk shows. I'd also agree that Bush's policies have led to widespread opposition and energized people on the left. But, as Bakan's experience suggests (he began writing the film in the good old mid '90s), this opposition has been building for some time, and Michael Moore has been producing significant anti-corporate documentary work since 1989. I don't know that I have any complete answers here. Certainly having access to cheap equipment has been critical, but again, that's only part of it.

This emphasis on politcal documentaries also appears in Stephen Holden's New York Times review of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival (HRWIFF). Like Sterritt, he mentions The Corporation. The connection Holden makes between the HRWIFF and the photos and videos from Abu Ghraib also seems very much relevant.

Finally, Matt at Rashomon also has a recent blog entry on political documentaries helpfully collecting some links and listing some of the key films in this cycle.

Now, I'm off to watch one of the classics, Primary, Robert Drew's documentary about the 1960 Democratic primary race between John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.

Posted by chuck at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 19, 2004

[AFF] This Land is Your Land

I attended my last Atlanta Film Festival screening yesterday evening, watching Lori Cheatle and Daisy Wright's This Land is Your Land (IMDB), a film that sought to document the powerful impact of corporations on everyday life, using both humorous images of corporate branding, and later, interviews from Natchez, Mississippi, a town that has been devastated by factory closings. The film draws from the stories of many other people as well. Cheatle and Wright generally take a talking-heads approach, focusing primarily on interviews, and allowing people time to tell their own stories, an approach that I think works well with the material they're addressing in the film.

The opening segment of This Land focuses primarily on the ubiquity of advertising and features interviews with Naomi Klein of No Logo fame. Most of the material here will be relatively familiar to the people who watch this film, but it's still rather humorous to watch one woman, who is wearing Adidas products from head-to-toe, comment on how "tacky" it would be to mix-and-match corporate brands. More crucially, we are introduced to two running subplots in the film: a small independent coffee company sued by Starbucks for using its trademarked name "Christmas Blend" and a lawsuit against Nike for using misleading advertising. The latter case allows Cheatle and Wright to introduce one of the film's more powerful arguments and consistent themes. In short, they are challenging the interpretation of the 14th Amendment that allows corporations to be treated as people.

Also enjoyable: an interview with Granny D, the 89-year-old New Hampshire woman who decided in 1998 to walk across America to raise awareness for campaign finance reform and is currently running for the US Senate in New Hampshire.

The film builds nicely towards a concluding section in which we see the different ways in which people have responded to the negative effects of these corporations. In general, the film does a great job of landing many of its critiques with a relatively soft touch (that is, without appearing mean-spirited), which I think is a useful approach. In its spirit and politics, the film seems to take its cues from Jim Hightower (blog), who is prominently featured in the film. In general, it's both a fun and thoughtful film, and even with the critique of corporate power, This Land is Your Land never leaves the viewer feeling powerless.

Update 7/5: Here's a quick link to the Austin Chronicle review of Land. I've been thinking about this film a lot over the last few days because of my "teaching globalization" paper. Also, because of the July 4 holiday, I've been thinking about definitions of citizenship, and this film addresses that question in a very effective way.

Posted by chuck at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Saturday Morning Coffee Reads

The Juneteenth Film Festival started this week in Dallas, TX, and runs through June 20. The website has interesting historical information about the history of the Juneteenth holiday.

Meanwhile, the New York Times continues its round-the-clock coverage of the publicity for Michael Moore's new film (maybe you've heard about it?). A Philip Shenon article, echoing similar claims by Roger Ebert, notes that Moore will be under tremendous pressure to ensure that factual information in the film is accurate. To that end, Moore has put together a "war room" of sorts to rigorously fact-check everything in the film. I'm very much in suspense about how this film will be received.

Posted by chuck at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2004

Metroblogging

Via Boing Boing: Metroblogging is "a hyper-local look at what's going on in the city. a group of regional bloggers give each site a new perspective on daily life. less calendar listing, more friendly advice." Metblogs have alreay been established in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, among other cities, and they're currently planning to expand to several other cities including Atlanta and Washington, DC.

Posted by chuck at 4:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

[AFF] Control Room

Jehane Noujaim's Control Room (IMDB) continues the trend of excellent documentary filmmaking that we've been witnessing over the last few years. I had a chance to watch the film last night at its Atlanta Film Festival screening with a packed and enthusiastic audience (for those Atlantans who missed it, Control Room will be opening Friday at the Midtown Art Theater). Noujaim's film is very compelling, and I've been struggling the last few days to find a way to review it, so I'll admit that this review is probably more impressionistic than most.

The film, which deploys a classic cinema verite style, opens with several Arabs watching one of Bush's pre-war speeches on Al Jazeera and essentially introduces one of the basic, but significant, arguments made by the film, which is to illustrate how the US and Arab narratives of the war lead to vastly different perspectives on it. In his Village Voice review, J. Hoberman notes that "every conflict is a contest of competing narratives." In a later sequence, one of the Al Jazeera employees echoes Walter Benjamin when he observes that "history is written by the victors."

The scenes in CentCom are also fascinating, specifically the interactions between Lietenant John Rushing, a young American information officer, and Sudanese journalist Hassan Ibrahim, whom Hoberman describes as "a former bin Laden classmate, onetime Deadhead, and ex-BBC man." Initially, Rushing maintains the classic justification for the war in Iraq based on humanitarian grounds. Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator, and the US has an opportunity to bring democracy to Iraq. Gradually, Rushing begins to question some of these beliefs, or at the very least, he's willing to discuss them, and one of the film's most powerful scenes shows Rushing and Ibrahim planning to get together for dinner to further discuss their perceptions of the war.

One aspect of the film that I found fascinating was the clear efforts that Al Jazeera confronted simply to define itself. It's interesting to watch the debates in teh newsroom about what news should be covered, and from what perspective. Other scenes portray the absurdity of the military efforts to manage the media in the war. One sequence that got a lot of laughs involved the infamous deck of cards, which the military revealed at a CentCom press conference. The army announced the existence of the deck, but then failed to provide the press with any copies of the deck or even to display the deck in a public space. Throughout the film we witness the ways in which information is managed, and in a sense, it may not be a terribly new story, but with violence in Iraq continuing, it's a story that needs to be told with great urgency.

There are several humorous moments in the film in which Donald Rumsfeld is accusing Al Jazeera faking evidence in order to drum up opposition to the war. In fact, Rumsfeld's comment, "the truth will come out" probably got the biggest laugh of the night. I'm still thinking about this movie, two days after seeing it initially, and I think it may be the kind of film that I'll want to write about in an exteneded essay.

Update: Check out Amardeep Singh's review of the film.

Update 2: I'd planned to mention the cinetrix's review of Control Room before, but other things intervened. She also links to this Village Voice article on the film (which includes an extended interview with Lt. John Rushing). Kelly at Shiny Blue Grasshopper also has a good review of the film.

Posted by chuck at 12:56 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Letters From an Unknown Filmmaker

My article, "Letters from an Unknown Filmmaker: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and the Politics of Memory" is now available online. This issue of Rhizomes looks particularly good--lots of interesting stuff on time and memory. Kudos to Davin Heckman for putting the issue together.

It's a strange sensation looking back at my article, which bears the traces of its unpacking over the course of several years. The article originally grew out of a conferene paper I delivered at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature conference in Hartford in 1999. The original paper was an attempt to read Sans Soleil via Derrida's Post-Card, a reading I found produtive at the time because of Marker's experimentation with disjunctions between sound and image. I could go back a step further and observe that my interest in Marker grew out of some connections between cinema and time travel I made in a visual theory course I took at Purdue.

I'm rarely satisfied with my own work, so I'll never really be able to judge what I've written, but it's interesting to see the essay in published form and to see how it evokes certain aspects of my past.

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June 16, 2004

Dare We Call It Genocide?

Recently, some people in the national media have begun to pay attention to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has been following the story pretty closely lately. He notes that the Bush administration is still trying to determine whether or not to call the mass murder and rape committed by the Sudanese government "genocide." According to the US Agency for International Development at least 320,000 people have died will die this year alone if no action is taken. Ted Koppel also covered this story last night on an episode of Nightline, which aired after the basketball game (when probably six people were watching). I certainly applaud Kristof and Koppel for finally bringing some attention to this story, but the international community's lack of response to this crisis is really inexcusable.

Update: Entry edited 6/19/04 due to my misreading of Kristof's editorial.

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June 14, 2004

Summer Solos

I just learned that a colleague of mine here at Georgia Tech has an exhibition at Atlanta's Contemporary Art Center. The exhibit, Summer Solos, pairs the work of Michael Oliveri, Chair of the Digital Media program at the University of Georgia, and Prema Murthy, a Fellow at the Wesley Center for New Media at Georgia Tech.

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June 13, 2004

Four Word Film Review

The Four Word Film Review provides you with a much shorter synopsis of today's films than I ever could. You want a quick review of Brad Pitt's Troy? Try these:

Or, you could check out reviews on an older film such as The Big Lebowski:Thanks to pullquote for the link.

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[AFF] Reconstruction

Reconstruction is a meticulously directed film by young Danish filmmaker, Christoffer Boe, who won the 2003 Camera d'or at the Cannes Film Festival for this film. The film's plot defies description. The film opens with Fred Astaire's version of "Night and Day" playing non-diegetically while grainy shots of Copenhagen at night, some in time-lapse, establish the film's meditation on uncertainty. We cut to a magician who defies gravity by seeming to suspend a lit cigarette in midair while a voice-over reminds us that, even though we may respond emotionally to the stories of the characters, the film is merely a "construction." The film itself reflects philosophically on the nature of identity and memory, reminding me of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and to a different extent, Kieslowski's Blind Chance.

I'm going to explain the plot in some detail here, in part to simply better sort through my interpretation of the film. After the opening sequence, we are then introduced to the film's four central characters, Alex (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a young man in his early thirties; his girlfriend, Simone (Maria Bonnevie); an older novelist, August (Krister Henriksson); and his wife, Aimee (also played by Bonnevie). Alex, in one of teh film's first scenes, approaches Aimee in a bar, immediately striking up a conversation, immediately asking her to go to Rome with him. She smiles and says she can't; she doesn't know him, it's too soon. Alex insists that there is a spark of recognition, that they do know each other, and the familiarity between them is emphasized by close-ups that include both of them in a single shot.

Later, Alex goes to meet Simone; they've clearly been together a long time, but the relationship seems to be lacking intensity. He only tells Simone he loves her when prodded, and the camera seems more distant here, reducing the intimacy between them. Later, the two of them catch a train when Alex spots Aimee from a distance. He ditches Simone and eventually has a one-night stand with Aimee and makes plans to meet her the following day. The next day, however, something has changed. When he returns to the apartment he shares with Aimee, the entrance to the apartment is gone, and his landlady doesn't recognize him. Later in the park, his father says he doesn't know him. Finally, Simone herself fails to recognize Alex, though she does seem drawn to him. The decision to cast the same actress for both roles becomes significant here, as it adds to the films meditation on identity. In part, the film seems to suggest that falling in love changes one's world completely, but I think the film complicates that notion considerably.

In addition to Alex's story, we also learn a little about August, the famous novelist. He is writing a novel that seems remarkably similar to some of teh events taking place in the film. In addition, it is his voice-over that introduced the film's constructedness. Are these characters simply ideas from his novel, with August experimenting with the emotional effect of certain events? The film never answers this question, but it certainly raises the possibility. I won't reveal how the film concludes the plot, but the final shot of Reconstruction reprises the image of the magician, still in black-and-white, the cigarette still floating in air, when the cigarette suddenly flashes creating a giant puff of smoke, the magician disappearing behind it. In this closing sequence, Boe also reprises Astaire's "Night and Day," completing the circle of this fascinating film.

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Critical Art Ensemble Petition

Via GreenCine:

Steve Kurtz [...] teaches art at the State University of NYU in Buffalo and is also a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, a group that has been exploring the politics of biotechnology for some time now. When he woke up on May 11, Steve Kurtz discovered that his wife Hope had suffered a cardiac arrest and died in her sleep. He called 911. Long story short, the police suspected that the material and equipment they found in his apartment was being used for some sort of bioterrorist plot. Kurtz was held briefly, then allowed to return home, but the investigation is still in full force - in fact, instead of being called off once the obvious misunderstanding came to light, it has expanded to include other CAE members.
Here's a link to the CAE Defense Fund overview and a petition you can sign supporting CAE.

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June 12, 2004

The Film Experience Website

Bedford-St. Martins has launched a website designed to complement Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White's The Film Experience: An Introduction. I haven't dug around too much, but the links section looks very useful and informative. If anyone is planning an introduction to film course, this might be a helpful resource.

Cross-posted at Palimpsest.

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Melon Farmer!

This made me laugh out loud. Jim, at Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey, reports the anecdote of watching part of Die Hard 3: Bruce and Samuel Get Paid Lots of Money to Blow Stuff Up, when he noticed that Samuel Jackson called Bruce Willis a "melon-farming cracker." Jim explains that he eventually noticed that "melon farmer" stood in for another MF expletive. It turns out that Alex Cox, of Repo Man fame, coined the phrase when re-dubbing that film for television. By the way, Melon Farmers is a cool site focusing on media censorship.

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Yet Another Blogging Panel I Wish I'd Attended

Collin reports on a panel on blogging chaired by Liz Lawley and featuring Alex Halavais, Jill Walker, Sébastien Paquet, and Clay Shirky. Sounds like a great discussion. Should be useful for my paper on using blogs in the classroom.

Posted by chuck at 12:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

[AFF] Everyday People

I attended last night's screening of Jim McKay's latest film, Everyday People, at the opening night of the Atlanta Film Festival. The film itself focuses on a Brooklyn family restaurant, Raskin's, that will soon be closing after being sold to developers who plan to replace it with condos and chain stores, and the action basically takes place over the course of a single day, primarily within the walls of the diner itself.

We learned after the film (during a Q&A session) that executive producer Nelson George originally developed the idea for the film by soliciting stories about racial tension on the web. George commented that they received hundreds of stories and found that most of them (around 70%) dealt with racial tensions in the workplace. George then recruited McKay, and they began the process of building a set of stories around the larger narrative of the restaurant. Many of these stories actually grew out of the workshops with the actors before the script had been written. Sydnee Stewart, for example, is a Brooklyn poet and spoken word artist, and the filmmakers were able to incorporate her story into the film's script, with her character Erin determined to become a professional poet while her mom, a beleaguered employee of the company that plans to buy Raskin's, is desperate for her to go to college.

The film itself was pretty compelling. McKay deftly weaves between several plotlines, effectively using an ensemble cast of primarily unknown actors (McKay himself commented on this decision, noting that he felt using familiar actors would disrupt the world he was trying to create), allowing the different plotlines to comment on each other without being too obvious. The dialogue-heavy film allows McKay to introduce several of the major debates around the "gentrification" process that many neighborhoods face, and while the film deosn't resolve these questions (the lack of narrative closure is almost overdone), it's pretty effective in raising them. In this sense, I think Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times gets it right: "Mr. McKay's integrity is sometimes a weakness; he's determined to maintain a balance, strike a theatrical democracy." Like Mitchell, I would have liked to see more of the street vendor, Akbar, who tended to challenge some of the easier narratives about race and social class, but despite these absences, Everyday People is a worthy film, one that could only be made with the indie sensibility that McKay brings to it.

Update: Eugene Hernandez of indieWIRE, previews the AFF and includes a link to Bob Longino's AJC article, where Longino ranks the top 25 films of the festival.

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June 11, 2004

Explode Your Television

Via Cinema Minima: Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine is prediciting that TV is about to explode. He notes that the major barriers to producing and distributing television broadcasts are now being lowered. Jarvis comments:

Citizens TV will not look like the early efforts at TV online. It won't be all edgy Atom films (nobody watches them). Neither will it exactly mimic broadcast and cable (why bother?). But you can, today, turn out useful TV with little effort and expense.

For example, you could with one camera person and one host and a little editing create a house remake show like the ones my wife and I now love to watch. You could create local shows about sports or politics. You could review movies. You could test drive cars or gadgets. You could teach people how to use, oh, PowerPoint. Or you could create source material: Tape the board of ed meeting and put it online. And then you can distribute it. And then you can get people to watch it.

Now, I actually did watch Atom Films back in the day, but Jarvis makes a good case here. One of the major benefits I've encountered while blogging is the opportunity to network with people who had similar interests in local politics (I could also list dozens of academic bloggers, but that would take a while), and if Jarvis is correct, this would be another cheap way of providing access to this type of information. Jarvis has lots of links to articles that imply that TV is "exploding before our eyes." I do wonder how much the residue of current TV content, with the current heavy emphasis on "reality TV," will limit people's imaginations when it comes to content for these shows, but "Citizens TV" still sounds promising to me.

Update: Jarvis follows up on the "Explode your TV" post with a link to SpecSpot, a site where filmmakers can display commercials they've made on their own. Of course I'd like to see these technologies put to use for less explicitly commercial purposes. Why use the cheap production and distribution technologies to expand further the complete branding of everything that moves? But some of the spots are pretty cool.

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June 10, 2004

Exhuming McCarthy

Via Kevin Drum, this LA Times (subscription required) op-ed by Thomas Doherty marking the 50th anniversary of one of the most famous soundbites in the history of televised political spectacle. On June 9, 1954, Army attorney Joseph N. Welch, responding to Senator McCarthy's increasingly vitriolic attacks against Fred Fisher, a young lawyer at Hale and Dorr, eloquently asked,

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Doherty goes on to note that Welch's defense of Fisher marked a turning point in the McCarthy hearings. But, as Doherty (a film scholar whose books I like) points out, they are equally interesting in terms of the effect these words have today:
The words still echo loudly in the fantasies of anyone near a microphone at a televised congressional hearing — grandstanding politicians, ambitious lawyers and subpoenaed witnesses, all straining to summon a golden sound bite for a media moment of ad-libbed eloquence and historic weight.
Some local rock band even sampled the line in one of their songs (BTW, Doherty's wrong about the date of "Exhuming McCarthy," which was actually released in 1987). It is a pretty powerful moment in American history (Welch's speech, not the song), with the spectacle of politics finding its greatest expression in the emergent medium of television, an image that informs all of the scandals and Congressional hearings we've had since.

Doherty also addresses the debate about whether or not Welch's famous line was rehearsed or not. Welch, of course, insists it was not planned while McCarthy lawyer, Roy Cohn argued otherwise. The transcript and audio are available here.

Posted by chuck at 11:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 9, 2004

Mo[u]rning and Memory

Because I'm in the habit of not watching TV (a bad habit--I must break it), I've managed to avoid most of the Reagan nostalgia for the last few days, but I have been fascinated by the number of interesting blog entries that attempt to come to grips with Reagan's legacy. I share in this attempt to set the record straight regarding Reagan's presidency, espeically regarding AIDS, Nicaragua, taxes, and so on. But I'm more intrigued by two other interrelated aspects of the Reagan story, both of which have more to do with representations of Reagan, or more broadly representations of Reagan's America.

In "Mo[u]rning in America," The Cinetrix describes the experience of re-watching Reagan's famous 1984 campaign video, "Morning in America." I vaguely remember watching this video during the Republican convention when I was a teenager. I didn't have the critical thinking skills back then to really understand politcal rhetoric, but I remember the images having a powerful effect on me as a viewer. As the cinetrix points out, Reagan still stands as our "most cinematic" president, with his carefully scripted performances and his perfectly framed photo ops (Reagan as cowboy, Reagan as farmer, Reagan as jokester).

More recently, we have another version of Reagan. As Ryan asks, "What, for example, does it mean to remember a president whose death was cause by a disease whose primary feature is a loss of memory?" Ryan's suggestion, linking the cultural memory of Reagan to a tendency towards nostalgia (itself a major element of the Reagan image), makes some sense to me. Reagan has been virtually invisibe for the last ten years, making almost no public appearances over the last ten years, and I think that adds to the outpouring of nostalgia that has become attached to his image.

I'm not sure I can quite synthesize these two related ideas into anything particularly new, but they struck me as closely related points that belong side by side. Reagan's cinematic presidency seems to fit readily onto the attempts to remember Reagan.

Posted by chuck at 6:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 8, 2004

My MeetUp Adventures Continue

Attended another MeetUp tonight at Ashtons, a coffeehouse just south of downtown Decatur. I've now attended three MeetUp events, and they've been progressively better every time. This particular event featured several candidates for the upcoming Democratic primaries for US Senate and for the 4th District Congressional race here in Georgia.

I had the chance to meet several candidates in both races (including Liane Levetan and Leigh Baier), and I realized just how valuable it is to meet the candidates in person. I'm not quite sure how to describe the experience, but meeting a candidate makes the concept of representation far less abstract, much more concrete. Obviously, there's a level of performance there, even in conversations before a stump speech. I know very well that I'm meeting someone who is playing a role or whatever, but the candidates who have attended the MeetUps have made it much more likely that they'll get my vote. I'd imagine that translates into action, as well. The people who attend these MeetUps usually want to get involved, and tapping that resource can be very valuable in a close race. I realize, of course, that many of the candidates involved in the race had prior commitments and couldn't attend, but if I were running a campaign, I would not take these groups for granted.

Update: I'd planned to make some more specific observations about each of the candidates, but it has been a long, long day. Completing sentences seems difficult at this point, and I don't want to be unfair to any of the candidates by tossing off an offhand comment about them.

Posted by chuck at 11:37 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 7, 2004

Atlanta Film Festival Itinerary

The Atlanta Film Festival starts on Friday (here's a screening schedule). Here are some of the films I'll be seeing:

I'm hoping to catch at least one or two other films, if my time and budget permit, but I'm very excited about seeing Control Room.

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Cinema Blogs of Note

At the risk of never leaving my computer again, I'm linking to Filmbrain's post, "Keeping Up With the Blogses," which lists several (dozen) film review blogs. Filmbrain comments:

The state of film blogs at the moment is excellent, in Filmbrain's opinion. Not only are people posting links and writing reviews, but there seems to be an equally strong critical eye turned on the critics themselves. Filmbrain says bravo to this. Many critics have become incredibly lazy, and more than a few write as if there were being paid handsomely to say wonderful things about utter dreck. Film bloggers answer to nobody, and as a result are honest (often brutally so) in their reactions to a film. Sacred cows, political correctness, going with the flow -- none of these matter. Film bloggers do one thing that critics rarely do -- let us know in no mixed terms how a film made them feel. Sure, we all like to get up our own asses from time to time and revel in how brilliant we are, but then we wouldn't have started blogging if that weren't the case.
I think he's right that film bloggers have more room to be critical of films that just plain suck. Many of my reviews are somewhat positive, in part because I've been trying to concentrate only on independent and low-budget films, and I feel like I have an interest in seeing more of those kinds of films get made. There are lots of outstanding film blogs here, and I'll be very interested in watching this community grow.

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The Top Sample List

Via Bitter Cinema, a list of 1219 sample sources from movies, television, politics, and other diverse sources. Not surprisingly, the most-frequently sampled source appears to be Blade Runner, with 215 samples in over 100 songs (all of which are doucmented here). Other frequently sampled sources include Apocalypse Now, Videodrome, Aliens, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among films, and political leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Current President Bush ranks 114th (but I know I've heard at least two other Bush samples).

The project grew out of one film and music fan's observation that he recognized several samples while watching Videodrome one night in 1993.

Posted by chuck at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Belated Cannes News

Via David Lowery (no permalinks, go to the May 26 entry), a brief mention of David Gordon Green's latest film, Undertow from indieWIRE's Cannes wrap-up. George's review of All the Real Girls conveys much of what I like about Green as a filmmaker, so even with the slightly critical review, I'm looking forward to his new film.

Lowery himself is currently completing work on his feature film, Deadroom with an upcoming screening at a Dallas Museum. Sounds like an interesting project, and the Francis Bacon-inspired poster art looks great.

Posted by chuck at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 6, 2004

Searching for the Great Brain

When I was a kid, I loved John D. Fitzgerald's Great Brain books (this one was my favorite). I read all of the books in the series several times. Fitzgerald's stories were based on the adventures of his older brother, Tom, and were set in the fictional community of Adenville, Utah, at the end of the 19th century. The books were beautifully illustrated by Mercer Mayer, who went on to author several books himself.

As a kid, I wanted to go out and learn more about the characters from these stories, and now someone else has gone searching. Via Metafilter, I came across "Searching for the Great Brain," a site designed by Robert A. Reiser and Learning Family, in which they travel to what they believe to be some of the novels' prominent locations. Of course, they're guessing about many of these locations, but it's still an interesting site, perhaps even more interesting because of the speculative tone (it turns out that someone from the Utah State Historical Society was able to piece together some more factual information).

The site brings back a lot of memories of my early reading experiences. I still remember my excitement when I'd find a new-to-me book from the series at a bookstore, and looking back, I'm pretty convinced these books contributed to my desire to become a writer, simply because they had such a powerul effect on me as a reader. My parents have been cleaning their basement lately, and now I'm really glad my mom made such an effort to look for my copies and to make sure they don't get thrown away.

Posted by chuck at 5:42 PM | Comments (16) | TrackBack

The Tumultuous Fifties

Emory University's Michael C. Carlos Museum will be hosting a special exhibition, "The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from The New York Times Photo Archives." The exhibition features nearly 200 photographs from the Times. Because this link isn't permanent here's the overview of the exhibit:

The exhibition documents a decade notorious for its conformity and complacency but also distinguished for significant transformations in the cultural landscape, from McCarthyism, space travel, and civil rights to post-Bebop, Abstract Expressionism, and Beat poetry. Visually compelling as works of art, the photrographs demonstrate the power images have in shaping our understanding of post-war America.
The exhibit also includes 1950s photographs of Atlanta borrowed from Georgia State University and a display of the manuscript for Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I'll be interested to see how the exhibit organizes these images of the fifties, to see to what extent it challenges traditional narratives of that decade. The exhibit opens June 12 and runs through August 8.

Posted by chuck at 4:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 5, 2004

Bloggers at the Democratic Convention

The Democratic Party has decided to issue press credentials (requires registration) to a few carefully selected bloggers for this year's Democratic Convention in Boston. My first thought? Ooh, pick me, I'm ever so smart! Of course, my humble blog doesn't attract nearly enough traffic to warrant an invitation, but it's a really cool concept.

It's a fairly generous article, especially given the mainstream news media's suspicions about blogging (it's not real journalism, it's too partisan, yadda yadda). The article, echoing a comment by Eric Schnure, compares bloggers to the pamhpleteers during the American Revolution:

In colonial America, the politically active spread their ideas in pamphlets still fresh from the printing press. Today's pamphleteers — the "bloggers" who can put every idle thought on the Web — are being invited to the Democratic National Convention.

"You've been doing it ever since the Revolutionary War," Eric Schnure, a former speech writer for Vice President Al Gore and the official 2004 DNC blogger, wrote in a pitch for the party's Web log, or blog. "Dumping tea and deleting spam. They're kind of the same, don't you think?"

This comparison has been coming up a lot lately. During a recent Democratic MeetUp, one of the participants compared our email lists to "Committees of Correspondence," the politically engaged colonists who copied letters to several friends who would then copy and send the letter to several others.

It's also a recognition that Howard Dean's Internet campaign was very successful in getting people, especially disaffected voters, involved in the political process again, a point raised by Alex Halavais:

"They're just trying to pick up on what they seemed to have lost with Dean," said Alex Halavais, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo's School of Informatics. "There was a luster associated with the Dean campaign — the luster of the grass roots — that Kerry hasn't quite managed to pick up on."
Even though I won't get picked, I'm enthusiastic about this decision and what it communicates about the role of blogging in the political world.

In other news, in a shameless attempt at self-promotion, I submitted my blog to the AJC, which has now linked to me on their opinion page. For whatever reason, the AJC has really embraced the whole blogging phenomenon lately, and that includes highlighting a few community bloggers. Here's the strange par. Even though I haven't seen a major bump in readership, I think having that link has changed how I've written over the last few days, making me a little more self-conscious about what and how I write. It's also made me feel obligated to write something every day. I'm not quite sure what that says about my relationship to old media.

Posted by chuck at 11:37 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

June 4, 2004

Scenes on the Verge of a Story

Thanks (yet again) to GreenCine, I just caught a webcast discussion of Edward Hopper featuring filmmaker Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine) and film theorist Richard Dyer. The discussion was sponsoed by the Tate Museum in London, where Haynes is screening a series of films in conjunction with Tate Modern's Hopper Exhibition. This is one of the coolest things about the Internet; I really like Haynes' work, but would never had had the chance to know about, much less see, this event. Here are a few notes, which are pretty sketchy, but hopefully will provide some sense of Haynes and Dyer's observations.

Because I learned about it a little late, I missed the first few minutes of the live webcast, but Haynes and Dyer seemed to take for granted the fact that Hopper's paintings have influenced many filmmakers. Among the more intriguing comments: Haynes noted that he finds the connection between Hopper and noir superficial and based primarily in the popularity of one of Hopper's most famous paintings, Nighthawks. His argument was that noir tends to be male-driven, with female characters serving merely as the subject of erotic intrigue, while in Hopper, he argues that women are not viewed voyeuristically or erotically. He essentially reworked Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure" thesis to suggest the ways in which Hopper disrupts visual pleasure.

He later added that many of Hopper's paintings do resemble film stills, a condition that one (unidentifed) woman in the audience described as "scenes on the verge of a story." I'm struggling through this idea/concept right now, but it strikes me as just about right (and reminded me fleetingly of Cindy Sherman's amazing series, "Untitled Film Stills," at least in terms of the engagement with narrative and banality).

He then connected this concept to the minimalist filmmaking style of Chantal Akerman, specifically her 3.5 hour film, Jeanne Dielman, which Haynes described as "a film about what every other film cuts out." In the film (which I have seen), we see a housewife engaging in all of the daily chores, such as cleaning, cooking, or taking a bath, all in real time, all with an essentially static camera (as I recall). The film is strangely compelling, and when it was released, it was seen as an alternative to the narrative-driven male gaze films criticized by Mulvey. Given their reading of Hopper, the connection makes a lot of sense. Sirk and Dyer also read Malick's Badlands and Sirk's Tarnished Angel through Hopper's lens, but my details are sketchier here. Certainly Badlands (in part through Sissy Spacek's amazing voice-over narration) evokes the loneliness and open space associated with Hopper, and which Dyer identified as a specifically American sensibility.

The program concluded with a Q&A that focused primarily on Haynes' own films. I appreciated Haynes' observation that as a filmmaker, he is "always interpreting, not creating." He discussed his awareness of the "culture of channel changing" in the US that allows a viewer to quickly interpret where she is in a story based on just a few narrative and visual cues, explaining that he worked in his films to respect that knowledge and then sometimes to subvert that, as he does with Sirk films in Far From Heaven.

He then discussed his current project, which he's currently writing, a film about Bob Dylan, a project that seems especially relevant in response to the radical conservatism that engulfs much of today's political outlook in the US. I'm glad I stumbled into it, and if you did miss it, apparently there will eventually be a transcript of the show at the Tate webpage.

Posted by chuck at 4:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Friday Morning Film Reads

GreenCine has a link to a fantastic LA Weekly article on Control Room, Jehane Noujaim's documentary about Al-Jazeera's coverage of the war in Iraq. The article features an interview with Samir Khader, one of the two "stars" of the documentary. The film itself investigates the ways in which "Arabs and Americans can look at the same events and see two entirely different things, sometimes in unpredictable ways."

Also from GreenCine, a link to Anthony Kaufman's post mortem on the "death of the independent film" from 2002. Kaufman explains the effects of the changing economic situation in the film industry pretty efectively. In general, I'd agree with GreenCine blogger dwhudson's implication that the best "indie" work is currently being done in the documentary field, with powerful new docus, including Control Room, Jonathan Demme's The Agronomist, and Canada's The Corporation currently receiving major buzz. And, oh yeah, there's that Michael Moore film I've heard something about.

Posted by chuck at 10:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 3, 2004

Bonnie "Prince" Billy Coming to Atlanta

Bonnie "Prince" Billy, one of the artists whose music got me through my dissertation, is playing at Atlanta's Echo Lounge on Thursday, June 10. I saw BPB perform at the High Dive in Champaign, IL, a few years ago, and it was one of the better concerts I've attended. Should be a good show.

I should be grading midterms right now, but reading Creative Loafing is much more fun. If you like BPB, check out his tour diary from last year's tour.

Posted by chuck at 4:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Madstone Closes

This is a real bummer. One of my favorite movie theaters in Atlanta, the Madstone (note the lack of an Atlanta link on the home page), is closing. It was quite a trek for me to go all the way OTP (outside the perimeter for non-locals), but the theater itself was great, especially in its methods for creating a nice atmosphere for viewing good movies. The wine and beer selections helped to create a wonderful leisure experience. I'll definitely miss it.

Equally distressing, according to the Creative Loafing article (which I can't seem to find online), Landmark Theaters, which owns the Midtown 8 Art Theater, is also undergoing a shake-up. I'd really hate to see any changes there. They've had an incredible run of good movies lately.

Posted by chuck at 4:30 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Counter Cultural Programming

Just a link for now, but I didn't want to forget to link to (and re-read) Michael Atkinson's list of fifty films, "the best left movies ever made [to] keep the flags of discontent flying," starting with Zero de Conduite, running through It's a Wonderful Life (which I would argue used to be a left film, but is no longer), finally to Errol Morris' amazing documentary, The Fog of War. On a quick glance, I'm surprised there was no mention of any Spike Lee films (particulalry Do the Right Thing), but in general, it looks like a nice break from summer blockbusters, a good mix of popular and more obscure films. Link via GreenCine Daily.

Posted by chuck at 10:07 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 2, 2004

Meet Up at Manuel's

Just returned from a Democratic MeetUp at Manuel's Tavern. After a slow start, the meeting ended up being very productive, and I appreciated the opportunity to meet some of the local Democratic candidates. Most pundits have already written off Georgia, with this New York Times calling the state "virtually hopeless." But even if we can't win Georgia, sentiment around the room was that if we are active in getting out the vote, we can at least make Bush work harder (and hopefully spend more money) in Georgia.

We also discussed ways of focusing on several local races where we can make a difference by supporting progressive candidates, something in the spirit of the Dean Dozen, but on a local, state-wide level. It's hard to avoid sounding like a cheerleader, but I was encouraged by the energy and the attempts to put it to productive use.

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Burnt Orange Productions

Byron reminded me about this New York Times article, which reports that the film program at the University of Texas has begun producing films, allowing film students to gain hand-on experience in the world of film production. The article reports that the university plans to produce eight feature films, with budgets of up to $3 million, over the next three years. Prominent Austin filmmakers, including Richard Linklater, Matthew McConaughey, and even Terrence Malick, have joined the advisory board. It's a fascinating move, one that could provide a solid film program with even greater credibility, and I have to admit, I'm kind of jealous of the whole deal. Thomas Schatz, film historian and theorist, developed the idea in the mid-1990s, but because of economic factors, it has taken some time to get off the ground.

The article acknowledges what I regard to be the biggest potential problems with this kind of studio, specifically concerns about this kind of studio subverting union labor. The students who work on the films will also be unable to profit off of their work. Like scientific research that is often owned by a scholar's university, a hit film would see its profits go back into the university (and to the private investors who help finance the films). No matter what, it's very cool to see a major university get into the DIY spirit within the humanities.

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The Last Broadcast

Last night I watched The Last Broadcast (IMDB), the 1998 film that many people have identified as an inspiration for The Blair Witch Project. There are some startling similarites, especially the use of the mock-documentary style to track a ghost figure (in this case, the "Jersey Devil," suggesting that the filmmakers must have been watching hockey when they came up with idea for this film). In both films, camera crews go into the woods and never return, leaving behind film and/or video footage as one of the few clues to their deaths. Both films also were made with incredibly low budgets (The Last Broadcast for around $900), but with "Broadcast," it's interesting to note that it has been called "the first 'desktop feature film'" because it was filmed, edited, and screened entirely digitally.

There are some other important differences between the two films. Unlike Blair Witch, which exploits video and 16mm to create a cinema (or video) verite style, Broadcast uses more of a talking-heads approach, with interviews, archival footage, and voice-over narration supporting the director's investigation of the story after the fact. As many critics, including James Berardinelli, point out, the film's final act ultimately undermines the faux-documentary style that the film had been carefully building.

For now, I'll likely mention Broadcast briefly in my media horror film paper. It doesn't play like a typical horror film (by the way, I'm getting sick of horror films, can'ty wait to finish this article), but instead seems closer to a satire of investigative documentary (with some element of mystery).

Posted by chuck at 2:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 1, 2004

You Went From Totally Geek...

..to totally chic. According to this opinion piece in the Georgia Tech newspaper, weblogs aren't so geeky anymore. It's actually a pretty amusing little editorial about the rising popularity of blogs, and the author mentions the fact that the paper is considering setting up blogs for the newspaper's writers. My class even warranted a brief, albeit anonymous, mention. Money quote:

For example, a couple months ago, the Technique ran an article about how LCC professors were using weblogging in freshman English classes. Having to keep a weblog for a grade might take away from the fun of it, but I for one would definitely rather have kept a blog for English than write a 10-page paper on, say, Frankenstein and the human condition.
Now, of course I do require students to write papers, although I probably wouldn't accept a ten-page paper on Frankenstein and the human conidition, unless it was this Frankenstein.

Posted by chuck at 10:46 PM | Comments (17) | TrackBack