the chutry experiment

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March 31, 2006

Historic Film Criticism

Laura Miller's Salon review of American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, a new collection of film critcism edited by Philip Lopate, raises some interesting questions about the role of the film critic in the American public imagination (and also makes me want to read the collection ASAP).

Most notably, Miller points out that many of the critical debates that seem relatively recent actually have a much longer history, and I think that one of the major benefits of this book, for film scholars and cinephiles alike (not that the categories ar excusive), will be the historical materials Lopate has accumulated. The earliest anthologized criticism, dating from the 1910s and 1920s, can provide a window into the social role of these early films and illuminate the debates about film that persist to this day, including debates about whether film would corrupt its audience (in this sense, the book might prove to be an instructive companion to Gregory Waller's useful collection, Moviegoing in America) . Miller does point out the objection that the anthologized essays are not clearly dated and that their original sources are not clearly marked, but given that the information is available, this seems like a minor concern.

Like Lopate, Miller seems to celebrate most the free-wheeling, playful, and often highly subjective critcism of the "Golden Age" of film critcism, most associated with critics such as Pauline Kael, but Lopate and Miller show some awareness that even Kael's subjective style was not unprecedented. For example, Lopate includes modernist poet HD's review of Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, which HD reports, left her "cut into slices." Miller thus values Kael for her unqualified appreciation for cinematic "trash," not because of an elimination of critical standards, but because of her willingness to enjoy films and her ability to express that enjoyment so convincingly. But Miller also worries that Kael's influence as a critic may have led to "support for a cinematic culture in which 'trash' is all that anybody wants to make or see." I don't think that's a terribly fair argument in that it underplays the economic and institutional factors that have shaped cinema over the last few decades. While I don't want to deny that critics can shape how movie makers understand their craft, the decline in audiences for art house and foreign films (a decline I'm not sure exists) can hardly be ascribed to the embrace of so-called trash. Even if audiences aren't seeing these films in art house and repertory theaters in the same numbers as in the past, other audiences are finding many of these films on DVD and on cable TV (via channels such as Turner Classic Movies and AMC).

These comments are not meant to "bury the dead" of the earlier film culture, which thrived on the public screenings and local film cultures identified with rep houses, but to suggest that other film cultures may be forming. I know that I've already pointed to some of the film blogs that I enjoy, and that culture continues to flourish as the recent film blog forum on the films of Abel Ferrrara illustrates (Girish has many of the links). Evn with declining box office, I do think that movies continue to matter. The politically-oriented debates about Brokeback Mountain's Oscar-worthiness only underline the degree to which movies are still understood as functioning as a kind of cultural barometer. And I still believe that the blog format enables film critcism to do different things that writing articles for newpapers or magazines may not permit. Writing in the blog, I have few obligations to review films that don't excite me, allowing me to promote films that I believe desrve a wider audience. But the blog genre also allows me to constantly track back, to rethink and restate why I like or dislike a certain film or filmmaker. It allows me to think about how my tatses have changed and evolved as I've continued to write in the blog.

Again, I'm really curious to read Lopate's collection, but with the end-of-semester crunch quickly approaching, that may take a while.

Posted by chuck at 2:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 28, 2006

My March Madness

Somehow I've already managed to win this year's Bloggers' Mad Dance pool. Of the eleven participants in the pool, not a single one of us has a remaining Final Four team winning another game. Given that I watched maybe ten minutes of college basketball all season before the tournament, which I watched religiously, that's either a sign of incredibly good guessing or of a crazy tournament, maybe a little of both. I actually managed to have six of the elite eight before things came crashing back to earth for my bracket and pretty much everyone else's. I have two final four teams (Florida and UCLA), but I'm not picking either team to go any further. Now, like Michael, I can freely cheer for George Mason to win the whole thing.

Posted by chuck at 11:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

The Hole Story in Boston

I'm not sure how many of my readers live in the Boston area, but if you do, I highly recommend that you see Alex Karpovsky's The Hole Story at the Harvard Film Archive at 7pm this Friday, March 31. Like Matt Zoller Seitz I think that Karpovsky has crafted an outstanding film that deserves a much wider audience. Go to Matt's blog for all the details.

Posted by chuck at 5:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 27, 2006

Progressive Voices and the Media

FYI DC readers: Just received an email tip that Media Matters is sopnsoring a forum, "Media Matters: Progressive Voices and the Media," here in Washington, DC, onWednesday, April 5th, at 4 PM, at George Washington University 's Jack Morton Auditorium, 805 21st Street NW. According to the Media Matters website, Al Franken will be featured on the panel, and my email lists David Brock, Media Matters President and CEO, along with Eleanor Clift, Danny Goldberg, and Helen Thomas as participants. Reservations are required and available from the Media Matters website.

Posted by chuck at 4:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 26, 2006

Sunday Afternoon Film Reads

I'm still working on a couple of projects, but that doens't mean I can't do a little procrastination blogging. One of my current projects is a short essay on all of the claims about the "end of cinema" proclamations we've been hearing over the last few years, as digital production, distribution, and exhibition become more commonplace. There's no question that digital technologies have had a tremendous effect on moviemaking, but as I've suggested in the past, I think these claims about the end of cinema often try to identify a radical break when one doesn't exist, but I'm more interested in how this "break" is described. With that in mind, Matt Zoller Seitz's discussion of a recent Time Magazine article on "cinema's digital future," which Matt usefully contextualizes with Godfrey Cheshire's 1999 NYPress article, "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema."

Also, via some indieLoop surfing, I discovered Documentary Insider, a new-to-me blog about a favorite subject of mine. Since I have a number of readers in the Los Angeles area, I'll go ahead and mention an upcoming Academy Panel, "Documentries of Dissent, Part II," scheduled for April 7. Go to Documentary Insider for the details, but it looks like a really cool panel.

Posted by chuck at 3:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

The Inside Man

Bank heist films are often about narrative, about the ability of the authors of the heist, the bank robbers, telling one story while working to convince the detective, security guards, the police, and often the audience that they are telling another story. The best heists take place when the bank robbers use the conventions of past heists (or heist films) but depart from the normal script in one or two key ways. It's as if the author of the heist is directing his or her own heist film, complete with smoke and mirrors, just as a film director might use special effects. Spike Lee's latest film, the taut, witty thriller, The Inside Man (IMDB) gleefully plays with this notion of the heist as story while simultaneously telling a genuine New York story, something that Lee has done better than anyone in the years after September 11. What I also appreciated about Lee's film was its ability to encourage identification with both the perpetrators of the heist and with the detectives commissioned to bring the hostage situation to a safe and peaceful resolution, particualrly with Denzel Washington's Detective Keith Frazier.

The film opens with Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) directly addressing the camera, telling the audience, "I choose my words carefully," and then proceeding to give the audience (almost) everything they need to know to figure out the basics of Russell's plan, and while Stephanie Zacharek argues that "no matter how closely you watch, or how clever you think you're being, you'll never pick it up," I had a pretty good guess about where the heist and the story itself would go. But even with that knowledge--and perhaps because of it, in my case--I still very much enjoyed The Inside Man and Lee's playful tweaking of past heist films and the classic New York films, such as Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, to which his movie pays homage. We also know that most, if not all, of the hostages survive, as we watch Frazier and his partner, Det. Mitchell interrogate people in flash-forwards that anticpate what will happen.

The basics of the heist: four people, dressed as painters, come into the bank at the same time. They use the equipment they carry to barricade the doors while another uses spotlights to blind the security cameras making it all but impossible to see what is happening. The robbers then force their hostages to give up their cell phones and to strip down to their underwear. They make one other request, which like Zacharek, I won't reveal. At this point, the robbers and the police and detectives, led by Frazier, Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and Captain John Darius (Willem Dafoe), set up communications, with the robbers setting their plot in motion (and here, I think Roger Ebert's review seriously underestimates Lee's film, with Ebert asking at one point, "Did they want to be trapped inside the bank?" Yes, they did. The success of their heist depends on it. In fact, Dalton has accounted for every step the police will take. He knows that accepting the offer of food (pizza) from the police will come with a specific price and anticipates that well in advance. He knows that releasing a Sikh hostage with a message wrapped around his neck will provoke a specific, gut response from the police, one based on mistaking the hostage for an Arab and a potential terrorist. In fact, several sequences in the film--including a rash decision by Captain Darius--might be seen as an implicit critique of the increase in police surveillance in New York, discussed here by James Wolcott, with the heist itself relying on and therefore foiling the surveillance apparatus.

But Lee's film, based on a script by Russell Gewirtz, layers on a third plot, one that complicates Frazier's ability to capture the bank robbers. The owner of the bank, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), seems far more concerned about protecting certain valuable items in the bank than in the money in the bank's vaults. To that end, he hires the mysterious and aptly named Ms. White (played with relish by Jodie Foster), a "fixer" to the wealthy and influencial, to protect his interests, which may or may not correspond to those of the police. And as with most heist films, much of the suspense derives from the knowledge that each character has at a given point in the film. I won't reveal the specifics of what valuable objects Case wishes to protect, other than to say that the objects deeply indict his character and the means by which he is able to obtain his wealth. Case's bank itself--with its opulent, art deco interiors, and the majestic friezes and facades oustide--also seems to function as a character in the film, setting in contrast the street itself, often identified with rapid pans, crwods, and movement, with the vast interiors where we encounter Case and White.

While many observers have noted that The Inside Man appears to be the "least personal" film that Lee has made, I'm not sure that's the case. It's certainly a departure in that Lee seems to be working with a bigger budget, but the post 9/11 New York setting is crucial to the film's narrative and provides a basis for the interactions between characters, with Det. Frazier gently chiding a police officer for using racial epithets while the police themselves are on guard against another terrorist attack, as suggested when they mistake a Sikh man for a potential terrorist. Perhaps his most compelling critique, however, features Dalton, the author of the heist, registering horror at a nine-year-old boy playing a Grand Theft Auto style video game on a Gameboy featuring disturbing depictions of black-on-black violence. Ironically juxtaposed against the bank vault full of money--the two are even sitting on bales of cash--Dalton tells the boy, "I'll have to talk to your father about this."

I think Zacharek is right to fault critics who will fail to regard The Inside Man as one of Lee's "great" films. In part because of herreview, I couldn't help but think about the vastly overrated Crash, with its muddled message about racial tolerance, and while Lee's most recent film takes a much lighter, less preachy touch, it offers a far more observant portrait of New York's melting pot of ethnicities and cultures and the conflicts they face in a post-9/11, post-Giuliani New York City.

Posted by chuck at 9:20 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

March 25, 2006

Eyes Back on the Prize

Apparently I'm late to the party, but while taking a PBS survey this morning--yes, I know that procrastination is bad, but was for a good cause--I learned that they will be broadcasting the acclaimed Civil Rights documentary, Eyes on the Prize, which had been blocked from TV broadcast or DVD release due to expired copyright licenses. Most famously, the documentary featured a scene in which supporters and friends sing the copyrighted song, "Happy Birthday," to Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. According to a Wired article from August 2005, the Ford Foundation and another philanthropist stepped forward with $850,000 to work towards clearing the copyrighted material. That clearances for this documentary would cost this much money, of course, is another issue altogether, but if this news is true, I'm pleased to know that Eyes will have the opportunity reach an entirely new audience.

Update: I did some more digging and found this press release indicating that Eyes on the Prize will air in Fall 2006, as a part of PBS's ongong American Experience series.

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

Booked Solid

I'm not sure I've mentioned it, but this semester, I've been attending the Wednesday night DC Drinking Liberally at Mark & Orlando's in Dupont Circle. It's a nice way to unwind after a long day of teaching on Wednesdays, and here in DC, we've been able to bring in some cool speakers, including some of the folks from MoveOn.org (among others). The free appetizers and drink discounts at Mark & Orlando's aren't bad either.

I mention this because the folks at DC Drinking Liberally have been promoting a book signing for Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics at the ultra-cool Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse, here in Washington, DC. Crashing the Gate is authored by Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of Daily Kos, and Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD. Because I teach on Mondays, I won't be able to attend, but if you're in the neighborhood, drop by the Politics and Prose event if you can (there's an evening event at George Washington University at 6 PM, and I may try to swing by that if I can, but this week will be incredibly busy for me).

I'm still working through the book in my (somewhat minimal) spare time and haven't been able to develop a full response to their arguments, but Thomas F. Schaller's review in The American Prospect conveys the book's general argument. As Schaller implies, Zuniga and Armstrong reserve most of their criticism for the consultants, whom they regard as out of touch with the voters (their dressing down of focus groups, in fact, reminded me of the depiction of focus groups in Rachel Boynton's documentary, Our Brand is Crisis). And, like Schiller, I haven't been able to resolve the tension between their desire for "organic netroots" practices on the one hand and the highly-effecient Republican election machine, which they clearly admire, on the other. As I've mentioned, I'm still working through the book, so hopefully when I finish it, I'll have an opportunity to review it in greater detail. It's certainly an engaging read, and if you're in the DC area, I know the DC Drinking Liberally folks would appreciate a high turnout at the Politics and Prose event on Monday.

Posted by chuck at 11:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 24, 2006

Friday Afternoon Film Links

Just a few links I don't want to lose:

First, Sujewa tipped me off to The War Tapes, which looks like it should be a fascinating documentary:

In March 2004, just as the insurgent movement strengthened, several members of one National Guard unit arrived in Iraq, carrying digital video cameras.

THE WAR TAPES is the movie they made with Director Deborah Scranton and a team of award-winning filmmakers. It’s the first war movie filmed by soldiers themselves on the front lines in Iraq.

The documentary follows the soldiers throughout their tour and has been endorsed by Chris Hedges, author of War is the Force that Gives us Meaning, who comments that The War Tapes is "a film of rare honesty and power that exposes, from the eyes of those who fight the war, the revolting and soul-numbing world of combat." It's worth noting that Scranton has emphasized that she worked closely with the soldiers in editing the film and sought to earn their trust in representing their experiences of the war. Regular readers may know that I've done some writing on documentaries about the war in Iraq, and so I'm very curious to see this film.

I also want to point to a Washington Times article from a few weeks ago about the use of digital projection at some local movie theaters. According to the article, it sounds as if audiences are responding positively to digital projection, but given the money involved, I have to wonder whose financial interests are being served by here (the article reads a bit like a promotional piece).

Finally, both Sujewa and David have reminders calling for donations to help keep AIVF afloat during its current financial difficulties.

Posted by chuck at 5:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Democracy on Deadline: The Global Struggle for an Independent Press

As part of American University's "Reel Journalism: Screenings and Symposia," I had the chance to see Cal Skaggs' fascinating and ambitious documentary, Democracy on Deadline: The Global Struggle for an Independent Press, which is due to air on PBS later this summer. The documentary traces the battles that news reporters face in the United States, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Mexico, Russia, and Israel, as they seek to fulfill the media's role in guarding against government abuses. During a Q&A after the screening, Skaggs commented that the documentary was intended as a series that would focus on news reporting in various countries, and that ambitious aim is reflected in the final product, a 2-hour documentary that addresses various complications news reporters face, whether Putin's crackdown on the media or the Bush administration's misnformation on WMD, as they seek to keep their readers informed.

While I think audiences could have easily benefited from an entire series on the topic, I found Skaggs' method of juxtaposing these countries to be highly effective. Most notably, Deadline depicts the ongoing attempts at democratization in Sierra Leone and their relationship to the radio broadcasters who attempt to keep voters informed about the candidates' policies, as well as information on polling places and other important information, while in Afghanistan, another reporter investigates the steep rise in cases of Afghani women committing suicide through self-immolation (this article is not by the reprorter featured in the film, but provides an overview of the issue). Skaggs builds from these stories to a discussion of the reporting on WMD during the build-up to the war in Iraq, and while he acknowledges the faulty reporting that failed to question the Bush administration's threats of WMD, he instead interviews Knight-Ridder reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, who were among the few major reporters to challenge the WMD claims. The film culminates with an extended segment on Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper that has been criticized by both Palestinians and Israelis for its depiction of the conflict between those two groups. Reportes from that newspaper discuss the challenges they face in reporting on the consequences of violence committed by both groups.

But while all of these segments offer valuable insight into the need for effective news reporting, I felt that the film was a bit inconclusive in explaining how to preserve a truly independent press, an issue that came up during the Q&A session. These questions have been at the forefront of the recent conflicts in the US over news reporting. As one observer pointed out, Haaretz benefits from an owner who is committed to more objective reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict. But having privately-owned news media, rather than corporation-managed media, is clearly no guarantee of effectivel media coverage, as the Judith Miller fiasco illustrates. In that sense, I think it's worth making the case, as Molly Ivins does, for non-profit newspapers. As Ivins points out, newspapers showed operating profit margins of 19.2 percent in 2005, which isn't too shabby, even if it is down from the 21% from 2004. But her column more readily points to the problems that emerge when profit is placed ahead of the service that newspapers provide, and as Skaggs' film beautifully illustrates, that service is a vital one if we want democracy to thrive both in the United States and abroad.

Posted by chuck at 1:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Unfinished Business

Still having some problems with publishing the blog, but Jason speculated that my last entry may have timed out because it had too many links, so I'll try publishing one with fewer links. I'd almost said that I would try publishing something "a bit more modest," but then I realized that I was going to express my wonder that I'm currently in second place in my March Madness pool and my even greater surprise that I'm in the top 3% overall on Yahoo. It probably won't last, but given that I watched maybe ten minutes of college basketball all season, I think I'm doing okay.

Update: Still timing out, but comments appear to be working.

Posted by chuck at 10:19 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 23, 2006

The End of Suburbia

Gregory Greene's important and timely documentary, The End of Suburbia (IMDB), which played last night at the DC Environmental Film Festival, opens with an epigraph from James Howard Kuntsler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere: "We're literally stuck up a cul-de-sac in a cement SUV without a fill-up." Kuntsler has been documenting for some time the long-term effects of suburbanization in contributing to what President Bush has belatedly described as our "addiction to oil." Greene's documentary compiles the research of Kunstler and other researchers, many of whom participated in a "Peak Oil" conference in 2003, where these researchers began discussing strategies for dealing with the imminent crisis in oil production. While Greene's documentary is unsettling, it also offers strategies for alleviating the worst consequences of the end of an economy and culture based on oil, one best represented by the uniquely American version of suburbia.

To Greene's credit, The End of Suburbia, if anything, underplays the stereotypical loathing of suburbia, noting instead the degree to which suburbia has been entangled with contemporary versions of the American Dream. Instead, Greene uses clips from In the Suburbs, a 1957 promotional piece commissioned by Redbook and available from the Prelinger Archives to gently mock suburbia while showing the link between suburbia and the American Dream to be an ideological one (the clips from In the Suburbs in fact provide some much needed kitschy humor). In the Q&A afterwards, Greene cautioned the audience against seeing "suburbia" as a universal concept, noting that in Canada, and more particularly in France, the suburbs have a much different cultural resonance than they do in the United States, where they are associated primarily with white flight and white picket fences.

More crucially, The End of Suburbia offers a wealth of evidence that the we are nearing the World Oil Peak, the moment when global demand for oil begins to outstrip supply, which will happen in the very near future, if it hasn't already happened (especially given increased demand in India and China). As Suburbia painstakingly illustrates, the consequences of inaction--or worse, deepening our dependency--are tremendous. Consumers have already faced significant increases in energy prices and, in Maryland at least, a gallon of unleaded gasoline continues to hover around $2.60, which may soon seem like a bargain, and from there, the film asks some pointed questions. Notably, how will the end of oil affect our ability to ship products inexpensively from overseas (or even across the US, for that matter)? To what extent will the end of reliance on fossil fuels demand that we forsake McMansions for a return to city centers? One policy maker even speculates that multiple families may be forced to share these mansions in the distant future, while others predict that American subdivisions may become the slums of the future. It's a relatively bleak portrait, and Greene wisely accompanies these dour predictions with a touch of humor that prevents things from seeming entirely too bleak.

The End of Suburbia also offers some alternatives that might not prevent what Kunstler has called "the long emergency," but might make it a bit more manageable. Among other alternatives, the film espouses "the new urbanism," which focuses on producing more sustainable communities and a greater emphasis on localism, the subject of Greene's follow-up documentary. I had a chance to chat for a few minutes with Greene after the screening about the upcoming film, and it sounds as if the new documentary will complement The End of Suburbia quite nicely.

Update: I had problems publishing this entry earlier. Checking to see if those problems have been resolved. If you feel compelled to comment on this review, just leave the comments in another entry until I figure out what's happening.

Posted by chuck at 2:26 PM

Don't Forget Me When I'm Gone

I've been getting a surprising number of hits from people searching for more information on Doug Bruce, subject of the documentary, Unknown White Male (my review). A Washington Post story yesterday explored the possibility that Bruce's story may actually be an elaborate hoax, although little substantial evidence is given that he might be faking.

The film's director, Rupert Murray, adamantly insists that that he would not participate in this type of hoax, pointing out that it would severely undermine his credibility as a filmmaker. Skeptics include Hans Markowitsch, a neural psychologist, who points to the film's conspicuous lack of a medical or psychological explnation for Bruce's condition, and several acquaintances of Bruce's, who point to his dexterity in conversations about certain topics (Middle Eastern politics), while claiming no memory of George Bush, Bono, or (to name one example from the film) the Rolling Stones.

I'm certainly in no position to judge whether Bruce's story is a hoax or not. As my original review of the film suggests, it's a fascinating story, one that genuinely tackles important questions about what constitutes identity and what relationship memory has to identity. As the Post story points out, it will be difficult to establish conclusively whether or not the story is a hoax, and I'm not sure that it matters that much. Perhaps I'm being a bit too glib, but I think the skepticism about Bruce's story--expressed almost exclusively in press materials and not in the film itself--makes these questions about memory and idntity all the more compelling.

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

March 22, 2006

Revisiting Crisis

David at GreenCine pointed me to Sudhir Muralidhar's review of Our Brand is Crisis in The American Prospect. Like Muralidhar, I found that Boynton's documentary "riveting" in part because of the unusual access to Goni's campaign and to the American political insiders, such as James Carville and Jeremy Rosner, who orchestrated it. As I discussed in my review, Goni "wins" the 2002 election, but he is unprepared to handle the widespread opposition to his presidency and the onging economic uncertainty that haunts Bolivia, which the film illustrates through the stark contrast between the "focus groups" orchestrated by US political consultants and the protests taking place outside of Goni's campaign headquarters. Muralidhar similarly notes that "What is particularly troubling about this story is the degree to which the political process, and all the character attacks and propaganda that process now entails, is so detached from the social and economic reality."

In other doc news, David mentions Eugene Hernandez's report that Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo will be released this summer by Roadside Pictures, and Doug Cummings reviews The Future of Food.

I'll be attending tonight's screening of The End of Suburbia at the DC Environmental Film Festival and will hopefully have a review up later tonight or tomorrow.

Posted by chuck at 10:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 21, 2006

CIDI Student Film Contest

Molly Williams passed along information about a student film/media production contest sponsored by The Center for International Disaster Information (CIDI), and I thought that if any of my students (or other student filmmakers) happen to read my blog, they might be interested in participating, I've included the text of the CIDI press release below the fold.

It looks like an interesting opportunity to find an audience while promoting the need for adequate disatser relief.

“Lights, Camera, Action: Future Filmmakers for International Aid”

Public Service Announcement Contest

U.S. University Students Have Chance to Win More Than $10,000 in Cash Prizes

Following a year of international disasters and urgent calls for help from the victims, the Center for International Disaster Information (CIDI) today launched its first-ever public service announcement (PSA) contest targeting U.S.-based university students, seeking their help in creating an educational 30-second television PSA that will raise the level of awareness of and rally support for international disaster relief efforts.

“I am very excited to announce this contest. I encourage all university students to enter and take advantage of this unique opportunity to showcase their creative abilities,” said Suzanne Brooks, director of CIDI, who with more than 20 years experience in disaster assistance founded the organization in 1988. “This is an excellent way for students to encourage appropriate international disaster relief while educating Americans about why cash is the best form of donation to help the victims of international disasters.”

Chris Palmer, an award-winning environmental film producer, is the official spokesperson for the contest. He will spearhead a team of judges from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and CIDI who will choose the five PSAs that will be posted on CIDI’s Web site for public voting and selection of official contest winners. Throughout his 20 years in the film industry, Palmer has produced films for prime time television that were aired on Disney Channel, Animal Planet, TBS Superstation and The Travel Channel. He has also produced six IMAX® films and received an Academy Award nomination for his work on the IMAX® film Dolphins. Currently, Palmer is a professor at the School of Communications at American University and is the director and founder of the Center of Environmental Filmmaking also at American University.

“When CIDI asked me to be the contest spokesperson, I eagerly accepted because it involved three things that are very important to me – students, filmmaking and international donor giving,” said Chris Palmer. “Following a year marked by devastating international disasters, I think this contest is a great way to remind everyone about the importance of giving and that we all play a vital role in making a difference in the lives of international disaster victims.”

The theme of the contest is “Lights, Camera, Action: Future Filmmakers for International Aid,” and videos can be about anything related to international aid and international disaster relief.

The first-place winner will receive $7,500 in cash and the chance for the winning PSA to be seen nationally. The second- and third-place winners will receive $2,500 and $500 in cash, respectively.

A complete set of contest rules and regulations, as well as additional contest information, is available at www.cidi.org

Posted by chuck at 2:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Our Brand is Crisis

I caught Rachel Boynton's Our Brand is Crisis (IMDB), a fascinating and frustrating documentary about US political consultants hired to assist Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo "Goni" Sanchez de Lozada in his bid to return the office during the 2002 election (Goni previously had been president from 1993-1997). Boynton's documentary takes on added interest with the election of one of Goni's political rivals, Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, who campaigned as a socialist on the MAS (Movement to Socialism) platform, but the film itself is an incredibly rich portrait of what it means to export US election strategies to other countries. This portait becomes even richer and more fascinating given that the consulting film hired by Goni is none other than James Carville's GCS, with Carville's down-home screen style prominently featured. While other viewers might reach different conclusions, I was left feeling somewhat troubled by these consulting strategies, and I'm not quite sure Crisis pushes this critique far enough.

In one of the film's opening scenes, Jeremy Rosner describes the role of GCS in somewhat startling terms: "We listen very aggressively." While Rosner seems to intend to say that GCS works hard to listen to and understand the opinions of the voters, "listening aggressively" took on a different connotation for me. Instead of properly hearing the discontent of the Bolivian people, "listening aggressively" became an aggressive act, in which an image of Goni was foisted upon the various focus groups assembled to watch the latest advertisements about Goni or news reports about his rival candidates. Given that Goni himself is often dismissive of the various voters that GCS is trying to court, their task becomes a rather difficult one. The title itself also has an interesting resonance as Carville and other GCS staffers author a narrative for the election, in which they point to Bolivia's unemployment and economic insecurity and conclude that "our brand is crisis" and that Goni will be the solution to that crisis, the means by which that crisis narrative is resolved.

Boynton's greatest strength as a filmmaker was her attention to the ways in which Goni's candidacy--and I would argue GCS itself--seemed out of touch with the rising tide of opposition to Goni's neoliberal economic policies and support for the socialist policies of Morales, who is constantly marginalzied as a candidate during the 2002 election. This disconnect is conveyed strkly through visuals of "focus groups" in which Bolivian voters are shown advertismenets for Goni while GCS consultants, especially Rosner and Carville, watch from behind a two-way mirror while a Goni employee translates. The two-way mirror visually suggested a divide between the Goni campaign and the voters. But more starkly, Goni's sterile campaign office stood in stark contrast to the protests that took place outside, in the city streets. Such distinctions are also highlighted by the fact that in Goni's office, English is the primary language (Goni studied at US universities and spent much of his life in the US), while in the streets, Spanish dominates.

There were several aspects of Bolivian politics that went unexplored. We rarely hear from Bolivians "on the street" about their perceptions of the political situation there, other than through the highly mediated context of focus groups, in which many of the questions already come "pre-answered," packaged by Goni's advertisements and by the framing of the question itself. While Boynton suggests that she found it difficult to include such interviews "organically" with relationship to the narrative, the absence of such interviews only served to reinforce the looking-glass effect with which Goni's campaign seemed to view the Bolivians, especially the indiginous people. I also would have liked a slightly more explicit meditation on what it means to brand "crisis" as Goni's campaign did. There is little question that Bolivia was in economic turmoil, but the film didn't fully explore the intersections between campaign narratives and other attempts to understand Bolivia's economic situation.

Crisis culminates with the 2002 election and its aftermath. While Goni won the election, the vote was deeply divided, with the top three candidates (Goni, Morales, and Manfred Reyes Villa) each receiving between 20-22% of the vote. As these numbers suggest, Goni's position as president was weakened by the lack of popular support (that a president can get elected to office with such a small percentage of the vote is, of course, surprising), and because he offered no quick fix for the Bolivian crisis, what little support he had quickly dissipated, leading to the massive riots that eventually led to Morales being elected with 54% of the popular vote, an incredibly high percentage by Bolivian standards (and, as Boynton herself noted in a Q&A, Morales' support came from across the political spectrum), but through the course of the film, we are offered little to explain Morales' appeal other than soundbites from several of his speeches, though significantly Morales is almost always seen among the people, rather than above them in the glass-and-steel skyscrapers or expensive mansions where we see Goni.

As Stuart Klawans points out, Carville's presence in the film will recall Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker's documentary The War Room, and like the earlier documentary, I found myself troubled by the image of deomcracy that I was witnessing, one that, as Klawans notes, "ought to be about something more than steaming up people's emotions, venting the pressure and then hoping the populace will simmer down again, so the work of capital markets may go on undisturbed." As always, though, Carville is a bluntly honest and darkly funny screen presence. Rosner, who has the most screen time, is also quite engaging, though his dismissal of Morales as an "irresponsible populist" only reinforced, for me, his distance from the situation on the ground in Bolivia.

Thanks to The Washington Note for sponsoring the screening.

Posted by chuck at 10:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 20, 2006

Spike Lee in the Observer

Too lazy to come up with a better title, but this Spike Lee interview in the NY Observer is pretty interesting. In the interview Lee talks about his Katrina doc for HBO, set to debut in August, and Inside Man a New York cops and robbers thriller that apparently taps into a similar post-9/11sensibility that made 25th Hour one of the most underrated films of the last few years.

But the article also introduces other interesting tidbits about the director, including this cool bit of trivia: the first assistant director on his student academy award-winning film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads? Classmate Ang Lee, who's done okay for himself. And Lee just moved into a place on the Upper East Side, which once belonged to famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. And Spike's family purchased the place from painter Jasper Johns who left behind a videotape of Gypsy Rose's appearance on This Is Your Life filmed in the house.

Thanks to RiskyBiz for the link.

Posted by chuck at 10:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 19, 2006

Against All Enemies, The Movie

Keith Demko initially tipped me off to the fact that Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies is on its way to the big screen. The latest news from Cinematical is that the screenplay offers a taut thriller comparable to All the President's Men. The bad news is that Crash-man Paul Haggis is currently planning to direct.

As both Keith and Martha of Cinematical suggest, the big question is casting. Jeffery Wells, who has read the screenplay, reports that George W. Bush only appears off-screen, while President Clinton actually has a substantial suporting role in the film. Wells' suggestion? Cast the ex-Prez as himself. I still think that Brian Cox would make an amazing Richard Clarke. Larry Hagman might be able to pull off Dick Cheney (although Paul Sorvino might work, too). Sam Waterson would make a great Paul Bremer. But who would play Condi Rice? Paul Wolfowitz? Karl Rove (maybe Bob Balaban)? The mind reels. Make your suggestions, serious and otherwise, in the comments below.

Posted by chuck at 9:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

IndieLoop and Other Connections

I've really enjoyed watching the apparently tireless Sujewa's Indie Features 06 blog grow over the last few weeks, and I hope the blog loses the "06" and continues to grow over the long haul. I discovered the blog through Sujewa, of course, but several filmmakers I know, whether through blogging, IRL, or through their films, are contributing, and it's nice to see that film community evolve (and it even makes me wish I had a movie to promote).

I've also enjoyed discovering new films and filmmakers through the blog, including Joe Swanberg's LOL-The Movie, which looks like a fun movie (and in classic indie form, LOL not only has a blog but a MySpace page, too (and Karina's review of the film also sounds promising). I'm also curious to see Kat Candler and Stacie Storie's Jumping Off Bridges, which has been getting some good buzz recently after a SXSW screening.

I mention Indie Features 06 in part because I'm intrigued by indieWIRE's recent introduction of indieLOOP a social networking space for filmmakers and other members of the independent film and media community. I'm still exploring the place (you can check out my profile if you're really curious), but once again Karina scooped me on this news.

Update: By the way, I got an incomplete invite from indieLOOP the other day, so if you sent me an invite and I'm not reciprocating, that's probably why. If you'd like to join indieLOOP and haven't been invited email or leave a comment, and I'll be happy to invite you.

Posted by chuck at 8:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

They Shoot Movies, Don't They

They Shoot Movies, Don't They (IMDB) relates the story of Tom Paulson, a former hotshot baseball player who decided to make movies when his baseball career was derailed by a knee injury. Paulson scrapes together his savings for a relatively low budget feature (around $200,000), Mirage, but finds himself just a few thousand dollars short of completing the film and getting it distributed. Because we've never heard of Mirage or Tom Paulson, it's clear from the beginning of the film that Paulson's, we know that Paulson's film never succeeded, making They Shoot Movies a kind of cautionary VH1 "Behind the Music" episode ("Behind the Movies" maybe?) about the wanna-be star director who never managed to overcome the "second-act" complications thrown at him over the course of his brief career in entertainment. But like a "Behind the Music" episode, I felt They Shoot Movies never went deep enough in its exploration of the star system, choosing instead to stay on the unreflective surface without unpacking how stardom or indie, to name two examples, get constructed in our media-saturated society.

Like a "Behind the Music" episode, we see interviews with Tom, along with his friends and colleagues that describe his ongoing struggles to finance and finish Mirage, and a documentary crew follows Tom as he seeks to finance his film, including a scene in which Tom screens a rough cut in the hopes of building interest in the film. While Tom is hardly the most adept negotiator of the Hollywood scene, his attempts to seek financing for his film, whcih is clearly a labor of love for him, may be familiar to other indie filmmakers. The style of the film, with its heavy emphasis on talking-heads interviews and scenes in which the crew follows Tom to various meetings, allows us a glimpse of Tom's struggles to jumpstart his career. The film is an interesting, if somewhat cynical, glimpse inside a low-budget film production, and in that regard it fits in with other "inside Hollywood" films such as The Player, Sweet Liberty, and State and Main.

Mild spoliers follow: If you've seen They Shoot Movies, you will likely know that the film is, in fact, a mockumentary, with Tom Paul Wilson playing the role of "Tom Paulson," and other actors playing the role of Tom's friends and colleagues. In a sense, I felt that They Shoot Movies tries too hard to play with this boundary between reality and fiction without really capturing a full understanding of independent film production. This may be due to some weaker performances or the limited focus of the film on the several weeks in which Tom seeks the money to finish his film (we never actually see a single frame of Mirage, which is ostensibly nearly complete). I think They Shot Movies is of some interest for fans of mockumentaries, but the film itself seemed too cautious to achive a full critique of the studio mode of production, and the parody of the incompetent filmmaker also fell a little flat.

Posted by chuck at 2:44 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Unknown White Male

On July 2, 2003, at around 8 PM, Doug Bruce left his Manhattan apartment. Severeal hours later, Bruce found himself exiting the New York subway at the Coney Island station wearing shorts, a t-shirt a flip flops. He had no idea who he was and had no memory of his past. He wasn't carrying ID but happened to have a backpack with a book inside, where he found a woman's phone number stuffed inside. Turning himself in to the police, Doug spent several days in a Brooklyn mental hospital while he waited to contact the woman. While the set-up of Unknown White Male (IMDB) sounds like something straight out of film noir, Doug Bruce's story is actually true, and Unknown White Male documents Bruce's experiences as he comes to terms with his amnesia and tries to make a new life for himself.

The phone number in Doug's backpack belongs to a friend, and she is the first person to reintroduce Doug to his old life--he was a stockbroker who "retired" at age 30--and his luxurious Manhattan apartment, and from there, Doug begins meeting old friends and family, including Rupert Murray, a drinking buddy from Doug's days in London who decides that Doug's story would make an interesting documentary. Several critics have speculated that Doug's amnesia may be faked or that the documentary itself is an elaborate hoax (if it is a hoax, Doug is a fantastic actor), in part because very little medical evidence is offered on-screen to explain Doug's condition (director Rupert Murray seeks to defuse the "controversy" in this City Paper interview). But no matter what, Doug's story offers a profound meditation on what counts as human, what constitutes as identity, and even on the capactity of personal reinvention embedded in the American dream (Hoberman's good on many of these issues), and to Murray's credit, he features interviews with psychiatrists and philosophers who recognize the complications Doug's experiences raise.

Many of the film's early scenes feature Doug in a mental hospital The scenes featuring Doug's encounters with his family and friends are as unsettling as they are fascinating. While Doug's father and sister have decades of memories of him, he is, in some sense, meeting them for the first time. Because Doug has lost memory of his mother's death, he re-experiences that loss a second time. At the same time, Doug develops a fascinating sense of wonder about the world around him. When he swims in the ocean for the first time, he describes a child's sense of amazement mixed with an adult sensibility that allows him to process what he is experiencing. Memories of place also shift dramatically. When driving through London for the first time since his amnesia began, Doug seeing Westminster Abbey comments, "This is like that movie, 28 Days Later."

But for me, the most compelling scenes involved Doug watching old home movies of himself hanging out with his friends at the pub or goofing for the camera just a few years earlier. As he watches the films, Doug notes that not only does he have no memory of these events, but he also barely recognizes himself. Towards the end of the film, Doug makes an anlogy between watching these films and time travel, noting the degree to which they take him back to past he doesn't remember. This lost past does allow Doug to "reinvent" himself, or perhaps to "invent" himself, since he has no memory of who he was before the amnesia took hold. Doug's sister describes him as more gentle, while Doug's photography teacher believes that Doug's amnesia may have provided him with new insight into the human psyche, admiring portraits that seem to offer a deeper and unexpected understanding of the people he photographs.

Murray identifies Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (my article) and Andrei Tarkovsky as major influences, and that seems like a pretty good read to me. Doug's story offers a profound meditation on cinema, memory, and identity, even as Doug himself searches for--and seems to find--a new identity for himself.

Posted by chuck at 10:53 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

March 18, 2006

From Cinema to Cineplex

While doing some research the other day, I came across an interesting little resource on the history of movie theaters after World War II. Steve Schoenherr's "From Cinema to Cineplex" starts with the building of the "last of the movie palaces," the Loma Theater on Rosecrans in San Diego, and offers a timeline of various multiplexes and megaplexes built over the last half century. It's pretty amazing to note that the first megaplex (defined as a theater with sixteen or more screens) wasn't built until 1995.

The "Cineplex" page also offers some useful links to pages on drive-in movies and American Picture Palaces, as well as Jim Ridley's "Attack of the Megaplexes," a relatively early account of the megaplex phenomenon.

Posted by chuck at 9:52 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Melodious Cacophony

We've just completed an upgrade of Moveable Type, so I'm still learning how things work. For now, I'll mention that I caught the "performance" of George Antheil's 1924 "Ballet Mecanique," featuring three xylophones, four bass drums, sixteen player pianos, seven electric bells, three airplane propellors, and other instruments as part of the National Gallery of Art's Dada exhibit.

The performance was incredibly fun. Loud, cacophonous, and yet somehow melodic. The Dada exhibit itself ws pretty impressive, a nice collection of materials, which was organized by the cities that were Dada's biggest hotspots: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, and Paris, and the exhibits were also contextualized within the Dadaist's opposition to and horror at the events of the First World War. While the Dada exhibit runs longer, the daily performances of Antheil's composition only run through March 29.

Posted by chuck at 7:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 17, 2006

Wordherders' Wild Ride

The Wordherders are still dealing with comment and trackback spam, so the next day or two may be rough riding in Herd country. Jason is working hard on getting things up and running again, so here's hoping things return to normal soon.

Among other changes, we're moving up to MT 3.2, which may mean a slightly different look for the chutry experiment in the near future. Also, I'd like to apologize to the distributors who've sent me DVDs to review. I'm a little behind because of work and blog issues, but reviews are on the way.

Posted by chuck at 4:14 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Marketing Crisis

There will be a special screening of Rachel Boynton's critically acclaimed documentary, Our Brand is Crisis on Monday night, March 20, at the E Street Cinema (right down the street from the Metro Center station). Crisis documents the practice of U.S. strategists-for-hire quietly influencing the opinions of voters and the messages of political campaigns in international campaigns. Interestingly, the film focuses on the role of campaign strategists James Carville, Tad Devine and Jeremy Rosner in the recent Bolivian presidential election.

The screening starts at 7 PM, but guests are encouraged to arrive at 6:30 PM. For more information on the screening, including RSVP information, check out The Washington Note.

Posted by chuck at 10:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Moviegoing Memories

I'm still working through Charles Acland's incredibly rich and deeply researched Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture, published originally in 2003. For my own purposes, I've found most productive Acland's discussion of the cinema as "an assemblage of practices, people, technologies, times, locations, and ideas" (43). Such an approach allows Acland to explore the specificity of film exhibition in a variety of forms. Interestingly, Acland is writing after the movie theater has lost its centrality as the primary site for encountering motion pictures, but the book itself bears traces of the moment when it was written in that most of the information tracking movie attendance was gleaned before the most recent decline in moviegoing. Still the book illustrates the degree to which screen cultures are determined by far more than the technologies by which they are distributed and more resiliant than the home theater systems that ostensibly threaten to keep everyone at home.

The book offers a number of important observations about moviegoing and the movie theater, including the reminder that movie theaters are not only places of leisure but they are also workplaces and the reminder that no two screenings are absolutely identical (a point that is implicit in much of what follows).

But what has surprised me about the book has been the degree to which it has sparked me to think about my own moviegoing experiences and my participation in a certain kind of screen culture both online and beyond. In particular, his discussion of the relationship between time and moviegoing reminds of my own aversion to matinees and my strong preference for late night films, a predilection that sometimes conflicts with the subway schedule. Acland also offers useful data on frequency of moviegoing, and I think it's no surprise that I qualify as a frequent moviegoer (the US average frequency is five movies per year) or that movie attendance is significantly higher in urban areas, which is probably true for me (it's certainly the case that I see different kinds of movies when living in cities).

This discussion of Acland is perhaps an excuse to point to someone else's cinematic narrative. As I was doing my evening blog surfing, I came across Flickhead's compelling narrative about a triple feature he watched back in 1974 at the Uniondale Mini Cinema. Flickhead's description of walking out into a cold windter's night after watching a midnight screening of Magical Mystery Tour under the influence evokes layers of nostalgia for a form of moviegoing that is all but lost.

I'm still working through many of Acland's arguments and had planned to write a much different blog entry, one focusing on some of my own screen experiences, but a long day of reading and writing is catching up with me.

Posted by chuck at 12:03 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 16, 2006

Screen Overkill

Just wanted to highlight a few upcoming screenings and symposia I learned about via the Women in Film and Video website.

First, American University's School of Communication is sponsoring "Reel Journalism: Screenings & Symposia," including screenings of Democracy on Deadline, Dateline Afghanistan, and War Photographer. The "Reel journalism" series looks absolutely amazing, both the screenings themselves and the panels as well.

Also just a quick note that the early registration deadline for Silverdocs is fast approaching (March 20) and that DC Environmental Film Festival is starting tonight. I think it's quite possible that even I can't hanlde seeing this many films over the next two or three weeks. Pretty amazing.

WIFV, by the way, is a more than 1,300 professionals in the DC film, television, video and related screen-based media industries.

Posted by chuck at 4:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

American Messiah Revisited

I've enjoyed reading Lance Mannion's review of The Proper Care and Feeding of an American Messiah and his interview with director Chris Hansen (btw, Chris also has a blog that describes his experiences as an independent fimmaker). Because I watched the film without an audience, I couldn't get a sense of how the film would play for other viewers, and Lance's comments on the film and his interview with Chris helped to clarify much of what I liked about the film.

Like Lance, I was struck by the narcissism of the central character Brian B, whose "miracles" never seem to serve anyone other than himself. Although Brian believes himself to be called by God, displays little generosity towards others, including a homeless man who asks for Brian's help. In his interview with Lance, Chris comments on his impatience with big-name Christians, such as Pat Robertson, who "don't represent Christianity very well," while adding that he has become more interested in the historic role of Christianity in issues of social justice. And here I think Lance's read is right on:

But Brian B., as a satirical target, isn't meant to be a stand-in for those big-name Christians, except to the degree that they preach a religion of complaceny and self-aggrandizement instead of one of charity, mercy, humility, and love.

The object of satire in Brian's story is also its point of sympathy. Brian's "folly" is his desire to feel special and important in a vast and unfriendly universe, and his quest for proof that God is out there and that he cares, while played for laughs, is still treated with compassion.

I believe that Lance is planning a third blog entry on Messiah, and when it's available, I'll post the link, but it's nice to be able to communicate with others about the film, even through the mediated world of blogging.

Posted by chuck at 1:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Bubble Wrap

I came across this MIT Convergence Culture Consortium blog entry on Bubble this morning, and because of my own interest in the film and its "day and date" release, wanted to hang on to the link. It's clear from Alec Austin's entry and the subsequent comments that I liked the film quite a bit more than they did. Alec is responding to a blog entry from The Artful Writer.

I'm still not sure that I can predict whether releasing a film to theaters and on DVD will prove to be a useful long-term strategy given the continued decline in box office. I do know that the expense of attending movies, the improvement in home theater systems, and perhaps even the development of quality TV programming have made theaters less attractive options, but I don't think the trends away from moviegoing are inevitable. At the same time, I think it's probably a mistake to judge day and date release from a single movie.

Posted by chuck at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Kieslowski and the Metroplex

Conitinued problems with th Wordherder servers, which have been slammed with trackback and comment spam. Right now, we've decided to shut down trackbacks temporarily at least, but hopefully Technorati or Site Meter will catch most links (or just leave a comment!). The server shut down while I was writing this blog entry the other day, but luckily I was able to save it:

Just a couple of links I don't want to lose: First, via GreenCine, a Guradian article on a Krzysztof Kieslowski retrospective in London. Kieslowski's Three Colors:
Red is probably the film most responsible for my deciding to do my graduate school research on film rather than literature (even though I've only written in passing about Red or any other Kieslowski film for that matter). What's interesting about Richard Williams' article is that it's also an "end of cinema" essay, too. In commenting on Quentin Tarantino winning the Palme d'or over Kielowski at Cannes in 1994, Williams writes:

In its recognition of the potential influence and commercial significance of Tarantino's film, the jury's decision could not be faulted; nevertheless the choice appeared to close the curtain on the European cinema of ideas, a tradition of films based on character-driven narratives and an unhurried approach to pacing.

Williams does provide a great overview of Kieslowski's career, especially his late-career "French" films.

Unrelated link: Edward Jay Epstein's discussion of movie piracy in China, where he notes that very few Chinese people attend the cinema while billions of pirated DVDs have been sold. Implicitly, it seems to be an argument for collapsing the window between theatrical and DVD release dates, but again, it seems to reinforce the "end of cinema" argument. I've been thinking about these changing movie-watching practices a lot lately (as you might have noticed), particularly
in the context of Charles Acland's fascinating book on 1980s-1990s moviegoing practices, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture. Perhaps most significantly for my research, Acland's book is a reminder that the multiplex is actually a relatively recent phenomenon even within the very short history of cinema itself.

Posted by chuck at 10:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2006

The Anywhere Effect

Via Sujewa: Lisa Selin Davis's "The Anywhere Effect," an article-essay on Jem Cohen's Chain, my favorite film of 2005. Davis's article addresses one of the film's major concerns: the eclipse of regionalism with the advance of strip malls and chain restaurants. She also makes a valuable connection between Chain and the role of Hurricane Katrina in prompting us to rethink concepts of place and community.

Sujewa also points to the news that the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers is facing a financial crisis. If you can send them a little financial support, I know that it would be much appreciated. Because AIVF supports independent voices and perspectives, their value to the film community should not be undersetimated.

Posted by chuck at 6:51 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

State of the News Media

For now just a quick pointer to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's "State of the News Media," an analysis of the state of journalism in the United States in a variety of media (network news, cable, newspapers, blogs, alternative media, etc), which I came across most recently via Lost Remote. The Project for Excelelnce in Journalism took what they call a look at "a Day in the Life of the News," in which they examined how audiences might get news over the course of a single day. It's an interesting approach, although I'd argue that it might have some limitations, especially for alternative media where articles or research might be part of a much larger context.

In the Lost Remote entry, Steve Safran records many of the more interesting results. They note that network news audiences continue to decline in numbers, even as their audience gets slightly older. At the same time, NBC abd CBS were praised for efforts in making news reporting more transparent through such online tools as CBS's "Public Eye" and NBC's "Daily Nightly."

But their "day in the life" approach to blogs misunderstands how blogs fit within news media culture. First, they report that they "examined seven blogs, selected to offer a range of types, so as to closely examine the subject matter discussed, the places bloggers get their news, the level of reporting that exists, and the relationship with readers and with the mainstream media." While the blogs they chose are among the most widely read--and therefore potentially more influencial--I have to wonder if this approach actually corresponds to how blog readers and writers actually read blogs. The seven blogs they chose--Daily Kos, Eschaton, Little Green Footballs, Instapundit, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, and Power Line--also offer very little diversity (do I really need to link to them?). Far from a range of types, these blogs seem remarkably similar in their focus on national politics from a partisan perspective (even if those political perspectives are all over the map).

They note that these blogs tended to focus on the same issues as the mainstream press, which is generally true, but again, such a focus closes off other forms of "news" blogs that might focus on specific issues (one quick example: Lost Remote's reporting on media and technology). They do read each blog closely and make some good points about the "triggers" for each post, including Instapundit's tendency to link pointers to other blog posts. And they are right that many blogs do not offer what might be regarded as "original reporting," but I'm not sure that's the point of all of the blogs they analyze. I don't intend these comments as a defense of blogs but instead want to suggest that blogs and their role in the public sphere have not been fully defined and that to read them in terms of newspaper and TV journalism doesn't quite work.

Update: Susie at Suburban Guerilla also addresses this analysis of blogging. Again, I think that focusing on the Seven Big Blogs skews the survey considerably and doesn't take into account the practices of news consumption and production associated with blogging.

Posted by chuck at 11:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Monday Film Notes

I had a few minutes between classes and have been meaning to mention the good news about the screening of Tara Wray's Manhattan, Kansas at SXSW last week. David Hudson has a review of the film and a link to Wray's short story, which describes the film's main subject: Wray's complicated relationship with her mother. I've been following the progress of Wray's film for about a year now, so it's nice to see her film receiving an audience (and I can't wait to see the film myself).

I also wanted to complain about a dissapointingly bad review of Alex Karpovsky's The Hole Story by Stephen Hunter in The Washington Post. I'm finding that Karpovsky's film is rather infectious and that I'll fondly remember it for some time. While Hunter catches Karpovsky's cinematic influences, especially McElwee and Brooks (other than Karpovsky appearing onscreen, I don't see the Michael Moore connection at all), he misses the director's matter-of-fact humor and the film's playful existential touches. I often complain about the reviews in the Post, but Karpovsky is an impressive talent, and I'd hate for this excellent film not to find an audience.

Posted by chuck at 10:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 12, 2006

[DCIFF] The Hole Story

I caught Alex Karpovsky's The Hole Story (IMDB) at the DC Independent Film Festival on Friday night, and like Matt, I deeply enjoyed the film. The Hole Story has been on the festival circuit for a few months now, and like Matt, I believe the film deserves a much wider audience, and after seeing this film, I can't help but anticiapte what Karpovsky will be doing in the future.

The Hole Story playfully mixes reality and fiction, using documentary and mockumentary tropes that recall the best work of Albert Brooks (Matt mentions the underrated Real Life) and Ross McElwee (I was especially reminded of Sherman's March), with the Boston Globe coining the term ficumentary to describe what Karpovsky is doing. The film opens with Karpovsky traveling up to Brainerd, Minnesota, with a small film crew to explore the mysterious "Black Hole" in the middle of North Long Lake for a pilot episode of a planned reality TV show on small-town mysteries. When Karpovsky arrives in Brainerd, however, he discovers that the mysterious hole has closed for equally mysterious reasons (explanations for the hole range from thermal vents to aliens).

So Karpovsky does what every enterprising filmmaker would do: he improvises. He interviews locals, including the mayor and a local hair stylist among others, to see if they can explain the black hole, reminding them to speak about it in the present tense, as if it hasn't closed. He investigates Brainerd's other local legends, Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox, even breaking into a local amusement park at night with the hopes of filming a 40-foot statue of the legendary figure. But each attempt only serves to remind Karpovsky and the audience of the "hole" in the documentary, the absence of any footage of the (un)natural phenomenon he has come to film.

Eventually the pressure of making the film takes its toll on Alex. His long-distance fights, via cell phone, with his girlfriend intensify. Most of his film crew abandons him. Alex worries that his investors will be disappointed in the documentary he has made. And he fears that he will be forced to return to his day job, editing karaoke videos. These problems produce an existential crisis that leads Karpovsky to check into a pyschiatric clinic. The result of all this is an intriguing film that playfully mixes documentary and fiction while managing to take Alex's existential questions seriously.

As Matt points out, Alex has been somewhat coy about the boundaries between truth and fiction in the film, and that's fitting for this kind of project. But the most enjoyable aspect of the film is watching Alex evolve over the course of the film and to watch a filmmaker create something fresh and exciting, even with odds stacked against him.

Posted by chuck at 7:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bet On It

Interesting Boston Globe article by Laura Pappano on the relationship between coverage of women's collegiate basketball and restrictions on gambling of women's games. To be clear about these things, Pappano interviewed me for the article because of a comment I made in the blog two tournaments ago, and although I wasn't quoted, our discussion was an interesting one. Pappano observes that unlike men's regular season b-ball, "you can't put a dime on the Lady Vols until the post season." She adds that while the connections between sports and gambling may be troubling, sports betting is often accomanied by increased media hype or coverage, with the rise of fantasy sports in the last decade as one significant example.

I'll admit that I'm ambivalent about gambling, not because it affects the "purity" of sports in any way, but because gambling losses often (though not always) affect people who can least afford to incur additional debts. But I think she's absolutely right to note that interest in the NCAA tournament cannot be separated from all of the office and online pools that accompany the tournament. In fact, it was only due to my participation in the pool that I would have known anything about Nevada's backcourt or Gonzaga's bench players (or whatever).

I share Pappano's conviction that the women's tournament can be as exciting as the men's tournament (just ask any Purdue fan in the mid-1990s), so I find her case for encouraging gambling on women's sports an interesting one. Still, I wonder what kind of relationship gambling creates between player and fan. To what extent would gambling encourage the objectification of players or teams? And how might that objectification reinforce the sexism that Pappano seeks to challenge?

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Cinematic Dreaming

In The Nation, Gilberto Perez reviews Colin McGinn's book, The Power of Movies, in which McGinn argues that "by the intrinsic character of their medium, films are like dreams." Like Perez, whose The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium I've been meaning to read for some time, I'm suspicious of many of McGinn's claims (at least as Perez represents them). According to Perez's read, McGinn pushes the dream/movie metaphor to the point that "the images on the screen lose all bodily mooring and become sheer figments of our imagination, indistinguishable from the images we dream."

As Perez implies, such an approach ignores the materiality of the cinematic image and the dynamics of the movie-watching experience in general. This is perhaps most in evidence in McGinn's discussion of the "dematerialized body" of on-screen actors, suggesting that figures on-screen appear as "ghosts" or "angels," using Fred Astaire's gravity-defying dance performances as his ultimate example. Like Perez, I see Astaire's performance (and dance in general) as an "art of the body." One might add the comic performances of Chaplin, Keaton, or Lloyd to the mix. Their performances depend on the materiality of their bodies and the props with which they interact.

But McGinn's argument also relies on a very limited notion of cinema, one that limits itself to a fairly restricted range of Hollywood films (and one that McGinn himself admits that he doesn't readily remember). While Perez speculates that McGinn may be unfamiliar with Surrealist films such as Un chien andalou that work through dream concepts, I think there are other reasons to suggest that movies and perhaps dreams, but I'm less certain here, "remove us from the physical world." It might come as no surprise to my regular readers that I will offer documentary as a counter-example to McGinn's thesis, but to regard the documentary images of war and violence as removed from the physical world seems rather dubious.

Concluding his review, Perez explains that McGinn imagines some ultimate form of cinema in which movies will be "downloaded directly into the brain. You rent a cassette, plug it into your cortex, and enjoy the experience. There is no screen, no light projection--just mental images floating through your consciousness." Perez is quick to note that what McGinn imagines is not "the movies," and I'm inclined to agree, in large part because I think we do need to reserve some distinction between different media. This disagreement does point back to a question I find intriguing, specifically the degree to which digital media continue to upset some of the long-held assumptions about the materiality of cinema, and as Perez's comments imply, the various technologies, such as the VCR, DVD, and cable TV, that multiply the sites where we encounter movies chnage the ways in which movies are enjoyed and studied and are a testament to the fact that movies are more than dreams.

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March 11, 2006

Three

This week marks three years of blogging for me. In past years, I've used the occasion to reflect on my blogging practices in the past and present, and I have two somewhat distinct observations about mycurrent blogging practices. I've been planning a State of the Blog entry ever since Jeff's Inside Higher Ed article a few weeks ago but decided to wait until now to put these ideas together in a blog entry.

First, I've been somewhat surprised by the direction my blogging has taken. When I first started blogging, I intended to use my blog as a way of exploring the intersections between my personal, professional, and political selves. While these categories cannot be seprataed easily, I've found myself increasingly focused on the latter two categories, and in fact, most of my entries have elaborated "professional" investments rather than "perosnal" or "political" ones. Or, at least, that's how it feels. I'll admit that I might not be the best reader of my blog and what it seems to be doing, but in some ways the blog has felt a bit more like work lately. What that means for the future direction of the blog, I don't know. It might actually mean that I should invest more "professional" attention into the blog and to see how this work can inform other kinds of public writing.

Unrelated thing number two: For several reasons, I've been thinking about blogging and place this year. By place, I'm thinking in part about how place affects how and what I write about in the blog. Living in Washington and Atlanta and working in the university cultures where I teach have no doubt affected what I write. To name one example, being here in DC has allowed me much greater access to independent cinema through film festivals and museums, as well as art house theaters.

I've also moved in the last few months and may be moving again soon (I'll just say I'm exploring a number of job opportunities right now), and this sense of rootlessness has been defining or shaping my sense of self quite a bit recently. This kind of rootlessness is certainly not unusual, and for the most part, I've had some choice in when and where I've moved, which is not always the case. As James M. Jasper points out in Restless Nation: Starting Over in America (a book I'm now curious to read when I find some of that mythical spare time), "with advanced technological means at our disposal, we change our residence, on average, once every five years—more often than any other culture except nomadic tribes, although in line with our ancestors. In an average year, almost one out of five Americans moves. More than a third of these move to a different county. Roughly 3 percent of Americans move to a new state." Jasper's argument seems to identify an almost fundamental rootlessness or geographic mobility that is deeply connected with American identity, and this sense of reinvention is an enticing one to me in some ways.

But now that I've lived in four different states since starting my PhD, I'm acutely aware of both the pleasures and difficulties of this type of mobility. While I have enjoyed the opportunity to experiment with slightly different identities when I move to new locations, I do find it frustrating that I haven't been able to establish "permanent" roots in a specific community. And it leaves me to wonder if this rootlessness hasn't shaped what or how I blog in some way. For example, to what extent does this rootlessness shape my investment in local politics? How does it shape my ability to find the stability to conduct the kinds of long-form academic research seen in scholarly essays and monographs? Or, how might this mobility allow me to work through ideas in new ways, to make connections that I might not have otherwise made because of being rooted in a specific discourse community?

I'm not sure I have answers to these questions, but I've been thinking about the concepts of blogging and mobility together quite a bit lately, and I think the concepts can be brought together in some interesting ways.

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Still Testing

Just checking to see if the server problems have been resolved. My server is allowing entries to post, but instead of pinging Technorati, Blogrolling, etc, it simply goes to a blank screen after I post an entry. Not a big deal, but I think it's causing a number of readers to miss my newest entries.

So in the name of adding some kind of new content, I'll just mention that I caught a solid show by Weird War at the Black Cat last night (more info on Weird War, including an interview with lead singer Ian Svenonius).

Update: Checking one more time to see if the server is working again. For now, I'll link to this Alternet article, so that I remember to read it later. I'll also mention that when things re running better, you can expect reviews of several films, including one or two from the DC Indeopendent Film Festival, as well some interesting Chilean films that have just been released on DVD.

Update 2: Continuing to test things out. I missed this film at the DCIFF this morning (who goes to a movie at 11 AM!?), but Beyond Babylon looks really interesting. The DVD's on the way, so hopefully I'll have a review up soon.

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March 10, 2006

Server Problems

This is just a test entry to see if the server problems that have been an issue all day have been resolved. And I'll use this entry as yet another excuse to mention tonight's films at the DC Independent Film Festival and also to plug the DC Environmental Film Fest, which has a nice collection of old and new films about environmental issues, including documentary nominees Darwin's Nightmare and March of the Penguins.

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You're on the List....

Via Kathleen: a report that Miguel Tinker Salas, Arango Professor of Latin American History and Chicano Studies at Pomona College, received a visit from the Los Angeles County Sheriff/FBI Joint Task Force on Terrorism. The visit appears to have been due to the fact that Tinker Salas, who is from Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, gave a talk in Washington, DC, on US policy toward Venezuela. The men who visited Tinker Salas may have "only affiliated with the Sheriff’s department," but it's still a troubling story.

Here are the details of an email sent to the Pomona College community:

On Tuesday, March 7, Miguel Tinker Salas, Arango Professor of Latin American History and Chicano Studies, was visited in his Pearsons Hall office by two men from the Los Angeles County Sheriff/FBI Joint Task Force on Terrorism. To avoid rumors, I wanted the Pomona College community to be aware of the facts.

The agents asked Professor Tinker Salas a number of personal questions as well as questions about the Venezuelan government and the Venezuelan community in the U.S. During the meeting, they told him that he was not a subject of investigation. The tone and content of the questioning, however, troubled him deeply. He was also troubled by the fact that the agents reportedly questioned some of the students outside his office while waiting to see him.

Miguel, as all of you know, is a superb Wig Award winning teacher and a fine scholar on Latin American history, politics, and culture who is sometimes asked by the news media to comment on topics related to his research, including Venezuelan politics. The College supports him and his scholarly work without reservation.

I am extremely concerned about the chilling effect this kind of intrusive government interest could have on free scholarly and political discourse. I am also concerned about the negative message it sends to students who are considering the pursuit of important areas of international study, in which they may now feel exposed to unwarranted official scrutiny.

The College is currently consulting with legal advisors about the most effective way to register a strong official protest about this intrusion into our scholarly and educational activities, and we will take appropriate action as soon as their advice is received. We are also asking for their help in assuring that all members of the College community are fully informed about their rights and their options in such situations.

David Oxtoby

And an email sent by Tinker Salas to his colleagues:

Estimado/as Colegas,

I write to inform you that yesterday during my office hours (Tuesday 2:30-4:30) I was visited by two agents of the LA County Sherrifs/FBI Joint Task Force on Terrorism (JTFT).

The arrived at about 2:40-2:45 pm sat out side my office while attended to a students, and then asked to see me.

They had with them a copy of my profile from the Pomona Web page, and other materials I could not see.

After identifying themselves, they proceeded to ask about my relation to Venezuela, the government, the community, my scholarship, my politics. They were especially interested in whether or not I had been approached by anyone in the Venezuelan government or embassy to speak up on Venezuelan related matters. In addition, they raised a whole host of other troubling questions, too long to summarize here.

After they departed, the three or four students who were outside my office informed me that these individuals had asked them about my background, my classes, what I taught, my politics and they even wrote down the cartoons that are on my door.

I consider this to be an attempt at intimidation and cast on matters of academic freedom.

I am planning a response, and I am open to your comments.

saludos

Miguel

While the story is still developing, the "visit" raises all sorts of troubling questions, many of which have already been asked by Kathleen. Is Venezuela now no longer to be trusted? Why is Venezuela seen as a threat and does it have something to do with socialism (and will Bolivia be added to the blacklist)? What do these events say about academic freedom, especially given the work of folks like David Horowitz? And, as Kathleen pints out, Tinker Salas, who is a full professor, is relatively protected. What if he had been an assistant professor, an adjunct, or a graduate student?

Update: I'm getting a number of Google searches for more information on Tinker Salas. Kathleen has the most complete version of what has happened in the last few days. Short version: the FBI apologized, sort of, for putting Tinker Salas and the Pomona College community in an "uncomfortable situation."

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[DCIFF] Desire

Nearly a decade in the making, Julie Gustafson's Desire follows the experiences of five women over the course of five years from their late high school years to their early twenties. Although the film was completed well before Hurricane Katrina destroyed many of the communities depicted in the film, Desire is impossible to watch without thinking about what has been lost due to the hurricane. But while New Orleans, and the class and race distinctions that shape the city, is certainly present in the film, it's the stories of the five women's lives that remain central.

Gustafson opens the film by introducing us to each of the five women, most of whome were 16 years old when filming began. Cassandra, who lives in the Desire projects, which were actually demolished before Katrina hit, promises that she will avoid her mother's mistake of becoming pregnant as a teenager and dreams of joining the military--this was well before the war in Iraq--to finance her college degree. Tracy is seen fighting with her mother about breaking curfew and expresses discomfort with her parents' pressures to go to college for a professional career. Other young women have stories, too, and while Gustafson wants to explore the girls' decisions about sex and dating, and how those decisions are shaped by race and class, Gustfson avoids exploiting the women's choices and behaviors for prurient purposes.

The film then follows the choices the women make over the course of these five years. Cassandra does become pregnant and decides, seemingly with good reason, that the father is unfit to raise their child. Tracy feels enough college pressure from her parents that she actually decides not to go to college straight out of high school. Another woman acknowledges halfway through the film that she is bisexual and discusses the difficulties of coming to term with that realization. Finally, in a scene that now has significant political resonance, Gustafson accompanies Peggy, who is not actually pregnant, to an abortion clinic where she counsels with doctors and confronts anti-abortion protestors outside the clinic.

One of the strengths of the film is that Gustafson generously and wisely steps back, allowing her subjects to contribute to the making of the film. Each woman contributes a video journal every year over the course of five years of filming, and in at least one key instance, Cassandra, an African-American woman from New Orleans' Desire community, turns the camera on Gustafson, confronting her to articulate her psychic and personal investments in the film. I won't explain Gustafson's story in detail, but she frankly discusses some of the decisions she made as a young adult, and those issues clearly shape her approach to the women's stories.

Gustafson also includes several scenes in which she shows willingness to criticize the potential problems with a project like hers. She meets with a group of concerned women from Desire who want to ensure that Gustafson's film will not send the wrong messages about teen pregnancy, and to the film's and the group's credit, there is some debate about what that message might be. There were also some scenes where all five of the film's subjects meet together with Gustafson and discuss their perceptions of the project (more of this material also would have been welcome).

Gustafson's film is surprisingly compact, given that it seeks to cover five years of the women's lives, and I felt the film could have actually benefitted from being longer and humanizing the women even further. Many of the women involved with the project ended up puruing careers in media arts, and I would have enjoyed seeing the young women in their "work" lives, whether at school or at work, more often. i would have also enjoyed having answers to other questions. Why these women and not others? How were their lives and decisions affected by the presence of the documentary camera (a similar question might be asked of the subjects of Hoop Dreams)? While these questions might be difficult, if not impossible, to answer, I did find myself contemplating the making of the film throughout. That being said, Gustafson has crafted a compelling and thoughtful film about the lives of these young women and the difficult questions they face on a daily basis.

Update: Here's some more information about Desire from the Women Make Movies website.

Update 2: Here's a review of Desire by the cinetrix.

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[DCIFF] Three Short Films

Last night at the DC Independent Film Festival, I had the chance to catch three short films, all of which deserve a much wider audience. I can't write full reviews for all of these films (I also want to write a longer review of last night's documentary feature, Desire), but all three are worth checking out.

Escape Velocity
Escape Velocity, made by visual artist and musician Scott Ligon,* was a subtly humorous animated autobiographical film about Ligon's experiences with ADD. The film's narrative and animation reproduce the stream-of-consciousness associative experience of having ADD, with Ligon postulating that ADD thinking may enable new connections to be made when ideas or thoughts collide in unexpected ways. Ligon's film is visually compelling, and while it is an autobiographical film, it is also quite modest about Ligon's accomplishements as an artist and musician. The film also features Ligon singing "Jackson Pollock was an Alcoholic" over the closing credits, which was pretty cool, too.

Somebody Loves Me
Stephen Valentine's Somebody Loves Me follows the story of an itinerant DC blues musician, Prentis Richardson. The DV short follows Richardson to guitar shops, choir practices, tiny apartments, and lonely bars, where Richardson relates stories about playing with Barry White and James Brown. Whether the stories are true isn't clear and doesn't really matter, but the film offers a picture of a talented, self-taught musician who manages to charm and connect with others, while also charming the camera itself. Richardson, who ofetn played at Adam's Morgan bar, Madam's Organ, was recognizable enough in DC to even appear as a cover story for DC's City Paper (presumably well before I moved to DC).

Smitten
Nancy Kelly's Smitten relates the story of Rene di Rosa, an independent art collector living in northern California's wine country. Di Rosa is an intriguing figure, in that he once operated a winery but sold it to support his art collection habit, which grows out of the pure enjoyment of collecting and finding the new and undknown artist, and less out of a desire for status. But what I found fascinating was di Rosa's aversion to using the labels that typically frame musuem pieces, and in his personal collection, which is open to the public, he tends to shun labels so that people will focus on the "art itself." The film culminates in the curation of a national tour featuring some of di Rosa's art.

* Corrected to remove link to photograph of a different Scott Ligon.

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March 9, 2006

DCIFF Screenings

Finally have some time tonight to trek down to the DC Independent Film Festival, and it looks like several good films will be playing tonight. My choices: Julie Gustafson's Desire, in which the director gave video cameras to young women from three New Orleans neighborhoods and allowed them to chronicle their lives over the course of several years, looks really interesting. Desire is playing at 7 PM at DC's Goethe-Institut.

The series of short films starting at 8:50, including Escape Velocity and Smitten, also looks good.

Update: Just noticed that on Friday The Objective (website), which was filmed in EA-Games Battlefield 2 Engine, will be playing at the Jewish Cultural Center at 6:30 PM.

And while I'm linking, Saturday's Band of Sisters and Beyond Babylon, playing at 11 AM Saturday (so early!) also look interesting.

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March 8, 2006

Movies Big and Small

Just noticed that Caveh Zahedi, director of the highly recommended new film, I Am A Sex Addict (my review), has a blog. Interesting to follow Zahedi's experiences in dealing with IFC's promotion and marketing of the film (thanks to Sujewa).

On the other side of the spectrum, The Smoking Gun somehow managed to acquire the budget documents for M. Night Shyamalan's $71 million film, The Village. Here's the full story (thanks to Filmmaker Magazine).

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Garrett Scott

I just learned the sad news that documentary filmmaker Garrett Scott died on Thursday, March 2. Because I've been out of town, I guess I missed this terrible news, but Eugene Hernandez has written an obituary for Scott, while Scott Macauley posts an article he wrote about Scott back in 2002, which is also a fitting tribute to an important voice in the independent film community.

While I didn't know Scott personally, the film he made with co-director Ian Olds, Occupation: Dreamland (my review), is one of the most important documents of the war I have seen, and I can think of no better tribute to Scott's work than to encourage others to watch this film, which is available for rental from Green Cine, Netflix, and other video rental sites.

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March 7, 2006

Hammering it Home

Via Talking Points Memo, news of a new documentary by Robert Greenwald's production company, The Big Buy: How Tom DeLay Stole Congress. Grassroots srceenings are scheduled for June, but the DVD should be available in May.

Some interesting discussion on the interviews conducted (or not conducted) for the film.

Update: The New York Times has an interesting article about the history of the DeLay film, which grew out of the Texas Congressman's efforts to reshape legislative districts, creating the partisan stand-off that led to several Democratic legislators holing up across state lines.

I'll be interested to see how the documentary fits within the narrative of the trial. There is some speculation that outtakes from the documentary might be subpoenaed or that it might be a "factor" in the trial. That doesn't seem likely, but I imagine that The Big Buy will be used to shape opinion of DeLay or the trial.

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March 6, 2006

Oscar the Grouch

I have been intrigued by the competing and sometimes contradictory narratives that have been used to frame this year's Oscars ceremony (I referred to these issues earlier today). In Seattle Weekly, Tim and Brian introduce many of these narratives as they "bitch about the Oscars." They note that box office fell by 5% in 2005 (which doesn't account for how many people actually watched Hollywood or Indiewood films in other formats) and attribute this decline to the much larger video game market, concluding that "kids have better things to do than see movies." They add that adults are bored by movies made to appeal to teens and then add that "everybody" is sick of ringing cell phones, crying babies, and other audience distractions. Others, such as Peter Suderman and Jason Apuzzo imply that the Oscars are simply "out of touch" with mainstream America, with Apuzzo arguing that the poor box office can be attributed to the Oscar films' lefty politics. Finally, people have pointed to lower ratings for this year's Oscar ceremony as another sign that interest in Oscars is on decline.

It seems clear to me that the number of articles debating the relevance of Oscar illustrate that the ceremony's role as a tastemaker still carries a lot of weight. In short, despite the denials, Oscar still matters, even if the show itself is less than exciting (see Veronica, Lori, or Dylan's liveblogging of the ceremony to make that call).

The "lefty" politics argument doesn't seem to hold a lot of water, at least from my perspective. I find it incredibly difficult to read Crash as clearly a left or liberal film, and I'm not convinced that the film's politics mattered as much as the clumsiness of the film itself (of course, Apuzzo's snarky dismissal of the film's $55 million box office take ignores the film's $6.5 million budget, an impressive profit by any strecth). It's also worth noting that four of the five nominees had an R rating, which always limits box office, so suggesting that the nominated films were ignored or irrelevant because of their politics doesn't seem like a primary deterrent to movie attendance.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that people are less likely to attend movies because of the behavior of other patrons, who are described as talking loudly on cell phones and disrupting the moviegoing experience (not that there is an ideal moviegoing experience in the first place), but the idea of blaming the customer doesn't seem quite right, either. Of these narratives, the most convincing one, in my reading, is the one that attributes box office decline to the increasing affordability of home theater systems and the availability of other forms of entertainment, many of which--such as games--offer more possibilities for interactivity, and movies, especially on the big screen, where you can't stop, rewind or fast forward, begin to appear remarkably clunky and slow by comparison.

While I didn't watch the Oscars this year, I likely would have if I hadn't been 30,000 feet over middle America for most of the night (all distances are approximate and could be dead wrong), but as a film scholar interested in these issues of spectacle and marketing, I'm curious about whether these explanations for declining box office make sense to you or whether they are capturing the reasons that people are going to fewer movies than in the past. I'd also be curious to know whether you watched the Oscars and why you watched (or chose not to watch).

Update: James Wolcott has a wonderful rant about the claims that Hollywood is out of touch with Heartland America. As he points out, attempts to clean up Hollywood (or, in fact, the pre-Hollywood movie industry) have been around for some time and are not at all a recent phenomenon. In fact, the Fatty Arbuckle case, in which the talented comic performer was implicated in the death of a wannabe starlet, actually dates back to the 1910s. Wolcott's read on this topic is a really good one that I missed because of my recent travels.

Update 2: Anyone know where I might be able to find a transcript or a videotaped copy of the Oscars? I'm working on some ideas for a paper I'm writing and having precise quottaions from Dan Glickman and others concerning the issues of piracy and Hollywood's relationship to America's cultural heritage would help considerably.

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The "M" Question

I'm still recovering from the long trip to Vancouver and still processing all of the panels I attended at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, but like Kathleen, I was intrigued by the prominence of television and new media panels at this year's conference. For readers who are unfamiliar with SCMS, non-film, non-television media often figured less prominently at the annual conferences. Like Kathleen, I've spent some time thinking about my disciplinary home recently, and while this year's conference may not have fully answered my questions (more on that some other time), I appreciated the inclusion of a number of panels and papers on new media, including Kathleen's paper, which focused on blogging and documenting the self.

I'm tempted to map Kathleen's observations about the conference to her brief mention of an ongoing motif at this year's Oscars. In a quick Oscar entry, she remarks on the number of comments that "there’s no place else to really see a movie other than the big screen," adding that such comments indicate "just a teeny bit of desperation." I missed the Oscars because I was flying, but such comments seem to have intensified over the last few years as movie theaters continue to see declining box office. This is not to dismiss the influence of Hollywood but to point out that digital media multiply the screens and sites worth thinking about.

More later, but the conference and travel has put me a few days behind.

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March 1, 2006

Vancouver Bound

Leaving for Vancouver early tomorrow morning for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. Looking forward to checking out Vancouver and attending lots of panels. Will try to post from the conference if I get a chance.

Posted by chuck at 10:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Hip Hop at the Smithsonian

No time to comment, but I happened to notice the very cool news that the Smithsonian Museum of American History will be sponsoring an effort to create an ongoing collection of hip hop memorabilia. Their collection efforts sound rather promising, as they seek to compile artifacts from the earliest days of hop hop in the Bronx in the 1970s, including relics such as turntables, microphones, and old vinyl records belonging to hip hop pioneers Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and Fab 5 Freddy. Looks like a promising way to document this important and ongoing part of our cultural history.

Posted by chuck at 1:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Cell Phone Cinema

This story is a few days old, but given my upcoming talk, it's still worth mentioning. South African filmmaker Aryan Kaganof has just completed the first cell phone feature film, SMS Sugar Man, which focuses on a pimp and two high-class prostitutes. The film, which was shot using available light, was completed for about $164,000US according to the article, and according Kaganof, using cell phones allowed actors greater improvisation with multiple cameras recording at the same time.

There's a clear marketing angle with Sony Ericcson providing the W900i cell phones Kaganof used to record his feature. Also interesting: there are plans to blow the film up to 35mm and to have a "collapsed" release with DVD, theatrical, and Internet versions launching at around the same time.

More discussion at Metafilter and JD Lasica's blog where I found the story. Kaganof has a blog, and it seems like he updates fairly consistently.

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