This piece by filmmaker Barbara Schock appeared in our Summer, 2005 issue.

The phenomenal painter, teacher and film critic Manny Farber called his film class “A Hard Look at the Movies.” It was the first upper-division college class I took. I’d transferred from a small college in the Midwest to the University of California at San Diego, and I’d never seen a foreign film, unless you count the Sergio Leone westerns. We watched the following films in a 10-week period, and it turned the way I looked at movies upside down: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de…, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God, Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, Werner Schroeter’s The Death of Maria Malibran, Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou and Les Carabiniers, John Boorman’s Point Blank, Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, Joseph Losey’s Accident, Robert Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang, Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle, Nagisa Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Burglar, Jean Cocteau and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les Enfants terribles and several Buster Keaton films.

The first class I attended was packed and there was a circusy feeling in the air. It was rumored to be the last film class Manny would ever teach. People said he’d grown increasingly disillusioned with teaching film, that he preferred teaching his smaller painting classes. Manny was cranky — the story was he’d recently quit drinking. Supposedly in the old days he drank scotch up in the projection booth with the student projectionists.

Manny had a somewhat adversarial relationship with his film students. He didn’t want the class to be like basket weaving, something you took to satisfy your visual-arts requirement. Partly to thwart those looking for entertainment, he never showed a film straight through, a practice that annoyed many. Instead he’d screen one or two reels of the films in the weekly class, often out of order, sometimes stopping the film to replay a part. If you wanted to see the whole film you could watch it in the sections run by his teaching assistants, which was time-consuming if you had a full class load. Manny would get disgusted if anyone was talking in class, abruptly end his lecture and throw up a reel.

But most of us were enrapt because Manny’s lectures were mesmerizing. Considered by many to have reinvented film criticism with his brilliant, electric prose, Manny had a similarly inventive — and tremendously entertaining — manner of speaking. In vivid, staccato sentences (sounding like a cerebral Edward G. Robinson), he took a run at films. He was terse but rhapsodic; non-academic but deeply analytic. Drawing on a vast range of references to other art forms and with his keen grasp of the times, Manny always got at the guts of a film.

It was fundamentally the painter in Manny who urged us to “look hard at the frame.” He contended that a filmmaker, much like a painter, disclosed himself in a single frame. Manny had us focus on everything in the frame but the subject of the shot — what he termed the “negative space” — like the color and lighting, the scenery, the dialogue, the camera angles, where the character entered the frame, how the camera moved to pick up the smallest detail. Manny favored what he called “termite” artists, filmmakers who aimed not at product but who were interested in the activity of “burrowing into their media.” He wanted us to be termite critics, to burrow into the corners of the frame, where much would be revealed about the filmmaker’s intent.

Being a painter, he analyzed a film as though it were a moving collage of many elements, and those elements interested him more than the story the filmmaker was trying to tell. Sometimes he would run a scene backward and without sound so that we could discuss its visual components. But that surface examination was only part of his approach. While Manny wasn’t much interested in analyzing a film’s plot, he did want us to consider the cultural, historical and artistic impulses behind it. (Of course, it would have been pretty hard for us to analyze a film’s narrative without having seen the whole film.) Manny taught me more about film than anyone.

He called Double Indemnity a “low-down movie,” he talked about how singular and brilliant Wilder and Raymond Chandler’s dialogue was, how it kept cheapness and corruption in its focus at all times — he said the film had a “diseased attitude about disease.”

He described Out of the Past as a nasty middle-class tragedy with a melodramatic sense of light and dark: it was “chiaroscuro with a vengeance.” He explained that The Earrings of Madame de… was a social documentary about the bourgeois that caught its characters in a “dappling of life.” He said that Fassbinder had an eye for domesticity and that he used an “apartheid” effect in his interracial love story Ali: Fear Eats the Soul to “pin the characters with lighting.”

The severe up and down angles in Losey’s Accident made the scenes “prying and covert,” turning a story about social conscience into a thriller, a film whose characters chopped away at each other in fragmented sentences, in “mutilated, savage acrimony.” The characters in Boorman’s Point Blank were not people but puppets in a languid, sensual plastic world “engulfed by the decor.” Aldrich’s movies contained “marred” people, and Aldrich cluttered up his frames of The Grissom Gang with garbage so that the characters were forced to “knife through shit” and live life at a “cesspool level.” Losey, Boorman and Aldrich made “entertaining, degenerate” films about “self-serving, greedy people” who didn’t have much affection for one another “unless it was perverted.”

Manny’s language was hard-boiled — sometimes it felt as if he were going to get into a fistfight with the film he was critiquing. You never really knew where he came down on the films, it wasn’t a “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” kind of criticism, although there were directors he seemed to love, like Buñuel. He said that Buñuel’s films were haunting and forbidden, something inexpressible and private, like your favorite pornographic novel.

Manny loved the actors too, especially the “bit” players, but he rarely talked about how well they played the role or how they sought an emotional truth. He focused on the actors’ gestures, how they occupied the frame, the “psychological space” the actors inhabited. In Les Enfants terribles, Melville and Cocteau’s story of a doomed brother-sister relationship, a high angle on the siblings in their “dyspeptic, gloomy, dun-colored” bedroom made them seem like “chess pieces in a hopeless drama viewed by God.” Manny was interested in the actor as a living piece of the whole production design.

In his insightful preface to Manny’s book of film criticism Negative Space, Robert Walsh writes that Manny was a “seer about the relations between film and its historical moment” — which is very true, and was part of his genius as a teacher of film.

In one of his most brilliant lectures, Manny described Walkabout as being “sinister and perverse” and emblematic of the films of the 1970s. He talked about the voluptuousness of the 1970s, about how one thing led to another and “things just happened, man.” Manny said that Roeg’s endless dreams, focus changes, off-angles, his going from macro to micro shots in Walkabout showed the multiplicity of choices for the human being in that decade.

Manny talked about the grand sense of terrain in Aguirre, the Wrath of God and said that even when a Herzog shot was standing still, it still had a “whoosh.” He mainly used Aguirre to talk about the director’s subversion of narrative form, as he did with Godard and Oshima. Manny explained that most films try to impersonate life but that Godard mocked and picked on life “like a sniper.” Oshima was a collage artist who “at all costs wants to deny you a plot.” While Herzog was a more compassionate filmmaker, he inhabited an “irrational movie area” where there was no space for human relationships. Herzog seemed to have a soft spot for “demented people,” but he treated actors as pictorial ideas rather than actual people who needed “feeding, or anything.” All three filmmakers rejected old-fashioned, “boxed-in” drama and relied instead on other art forms to create their films, challenging us to find their motivations, which were “well worth digging for.”

Manny said there was a certain sexual sadism to be found in the long takes in Gun Crazy (I understand that better now than I did at age 19). He helped us understand why we can frequently rewatch Eric Rohmer’s movies even though they appear to be simple. He said Rohmer has an ability to sustain natural talk and keep the viewer intensely involved in what’s said, because thoughts, not actions, are important in his films. That Rohmer’s naturalistic dialogue and lighting style (a feeling of “nature caving in from sunlight”) stemmed from Rohmer’s belief that any passage of time reveals a person — it doesn’t have to be a big moment. He also called Rohmer a voyeur and a “soft-porn artist.”

Manny’s final lecture that year was on Buster Keaton. He talked about Keaton’s subtle, quiet, profound grace, his feeling for other people and sense of environmental proportion. I think he taught Keaton as a kind of respite from the other filmmakers. Keaton’s camera wasn’t “parasitic” — it didn’t chase the characters when they exited the frame; it held on the lovely outdoor scenery until someone else came along, giving the films a “comfortable, luxurious” feeling.

Thankfully, my first class with Manny turned out not to be his last. He taught for another decade, continuing to expose his learners to the latest European filmmakers, such as Wim Wenders, Marco Bellocchio, Marguerite Duras and Jean-Marie Straub, and continuing his love affair with the American “B” directors he’d been an early champion of, like Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Raoul Walsh. Sometimes I think Manny read too much into avant-garde filmmakers like Straub and Duras, while giving short shrift to more established European filmmakers like Fellini. But he took risks in teaching and championing both emerging and forgotten filmmakers like Fassbinder, Borzage and Aldrich. As a result his students were steeped in dynamic European and classic underground American cinema.

With remarkable wit, feeling and insight, Manny introduced us neophyte film students to grown-up, sophisticated ideas about the artistic process, pop culture, the human psyche and even sex. To those of us fortunate enough to study with him — people like novelist Rex Pickett, critic Carrie Rickey and filmmaker Michael Almereyda — it is wonderful news that he is still around, painting beautifully and creating film series (for P.S.1/MoMA and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, which both also recently showed retrospectives of his paintings).

Most of my friends think I am too critical of films, and so I tell them about Manny. He didn’t merely give me the license to criticize but the means. As a filmmaker living in Hollywood, I find it easy to get distracted by the commerce, by what Manny called the “hard-sell”; Manny puts me back in the dark, watching the films unfold and learning from that human, pleasurable experience. In a time when what is hip is marketed to us in more sophisticated ways than ever, Manny points us to the real outsiders in the way they approach the film frame. Like Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, I feel I’ve got a little man inside me, with a voice a lot like Manny’s, who helps me identify a fake. While Manny can be a curmudgeon about films, he is also generous and inspiring, and he’s not a snob. He loves comedies, Laurel & Hardy, gangster films — all that’s unpretentious in the “movies.” I think about him at least once a week and about the great influence he’s had on how I view film art.

# @ 8/19/2008 02:18:00 PM Comments (0)

This article, written by Bergen Swanson, originally appeared in our Winter, 2002 issue

YOU'VE DONE IT! The screenplay you've been slaving over for months has finally been optioned by an edgy production company noted for offbeat films. Or, the movie that has consumed your life for the past two years has been picked up by a noted distributor. Emptying out your savings, selling your comic book collection, sleeping on friends' couches - it's all been worth it. But then the unthinkable happens. The company that bought your film or script files for bankruptcy, and your project gets thrown into legal limbo, possibly never to see the light of day.

A far-fetched scenario? The sudden demise of companies like The Shooting Gallery and, most recently Propaganda Films, the noted commercial and film production house and home for filmmakers like Spike Jonze, reminds us all of the financial instability of independent film. And although ex-executives and lawyers are reluctant to comment on record, these companies -- and the scores of lesser known ones that have been cratered during this entertainment industry recession -- controlled dozens of projects, whether they be acquired books, optioned screenplays or produced or acquired films. The acquisitions or production executives, the "friends of the filmmaker," who brought those projects into their companies and have been pink-slipped away, and anxious independents have now been left to bargain with bankers and court appointed trustees in order to regain the rights to their material.

Although it can be difficult to disentangle one's work once a company has entered bankruptcy, by understanding bankruptcy and its legal workings when first negotiating his or her deal, a filmmaker can obtain some degree or protection should a production or distribution company go belly up.

There are two types of bankruptcy that affect a filmmaker: chapter 11 and chapter 7. In chapter 11 bankruptcy, a company is reorganized so that it will continue to operate. In this scenario, those that are owed financial compensation "line up" with everyone else in that same situation. As profits are generated from the company's operations, then the creditors, which may include you if your project previously generated revenue which you have yet not received, are paid off.

In chapter 7 bankruptcy the company ceases to operate and its assets - not only its real estate, computers and copy machine but also your screenplay or movie - are liquidated to pay off debts, which may include everything from bank loans to distribution overages. A recent example of this situation concerns Julie Johnson, a film starring Lili Taylor, Courtney Love and Spalding Gray. The Shooting Gallery financed the project from a Wendy Hammond play for Bob Gosse to direct. It has played in several key festivals, including Sundance and Berlin, and picked up some awards. But as an arrangement with Universal Focus, part of The Shooting Gallery's overall output deal, for an October release was being worked out, things went sour. Serious financial issues caught up to The Shooting Gallery, and the company was forced to file bankruptcy.

Amy Nickin, a lawyer currently of Barnes, Morris, Klein, Mark & Yorn who formerly ran business affairs for the entertainment division of The Shooting Gallery, explains: " Julie Johnson was never actually released. What will happen [to that film] is that people in the film community will go to the bank, or in this case the [court-appointed] receiver, and the receiver will determine what a fair market value is for that project, and people will negotiate. Basically, they'll get a deal on buying that film" "But in practice that's not what is going on," Gosse claims. "I don't know if [the receiver] just hasn't gotten to it yet, which is entirely possible. I'm sure it's a tiny piece of paper on a desk. We've had bids on Julie Johnson from Strand (Releasing), Home Box Office and Showtime. Why wouldn't they want to liquidate the [companies] assets, even if it's just pennies on the dollar?"

Although Gosse was paid his director's salary, he still isn't comfortable with the situation. "it's horrible. It's very disappointing because it's a good film. I'm very proud of it." Yet, the hope is still there, when he adds, "Maybe it'll still come out."

But Gosse also understand the nature of the business. "I have no claim to [the film], because who am I?" he says. "I just wrote it and directed it. They paid me and [said], "'Thank you and goodbye.'"

Philosophically, he adds, "The business has changed so much since The Shooting Gallery started. These kind of events, these consolidations and bankruptcies, are an inevitable part of the shifts in the business."

To anticipate the risks, and to prevent one's material from being tied up in a bankruptcy court, there are precautions a film maker can take. "Obviously, investigate and research the reputation of the company," advises Nickin. "Determine how the companies finances their development, how they generally finance production. Is it through private investors or bank investors? What you're tying to do is determine who is going to own these rights at the end of the day. If everything fails in the company, where are the right going to end up? Indeed, filmmakers who have signed a deal with a Vans-wearing CEO may really discover that their rights are really controlled by a bunch of investment bankers in the midwest. (Something similar happened to Propaganda Films when the Pennsylvania investment group that bought the company abruptly decided to pull the plug.)

Another strategy would be to include a "key man" clause in an option or purchase agreement. This basically states that a particular project or element is tied to a particular person remaining at that company. If that person is no longer at the company then the owner of the company has a contractual right to terminate the agreement. But this negotiation point is usually very difficult to earn because it goes against the broader corporate interests of the studio or production company the contract is with.

Also important is the length of the option or license period. For the filmmaker in all cases, shorter is better. Nickin cites a recent example. "Everyone knew [a certain company] was in trouble because they weren't paying writers. So, now would not be the time to enter into a deal with them. But if you were going to enter into one, then you would do a short option period. You could be assured if something were to happen [with your project] it would happen sooner rather than later when the entire company fell apart.

"Really pay attention to the reversion and turnaround," Nickin continues. Applying to mostly screenplay deals, "reversion" means that if, after a certain period of time, the company does nothing with the project, the rights to it revert back to the whomever originally controlled it. Or, filmmakers can ask for a "progress to production" clause, which obligates the company to steadily to move the project along (by hiring casting directors, making offers to actors, etc.) or else have the project revert back to its original rights holder. A "turnaround" clause ensures that, if the project is "abandoned" by the acquiring company, the filmmaker or the original rights holder is able to shop it around to other companies who can then acquire it by reimbursing, in some form, development costs. "Turnaround should always be negotiated for if you have the ability," Nickin advises.

Andrew Hurwitz, an entertainment attorney with Epstein, Levinsohn, Bodine, Hurwitz & Weinstein, adds that there is one key concept filmmakers should keep in mind when trying to protect themselves from a future bankruptcy. " A lot of filmmakers are advised to add language to the contract saying that in the event of bankruptcy it's terminable," he notes. "And that's basically unenforceable because the courts will not allow you to terminate contracts because of financial condition of the debtor. For example , add the language that says, ' In the event you cease to distribute the film or you don't distribute the film in 25 markets or you don't pay x amount of P&A....' If they don't meet those things you can go to the bankruptcy court and ask to have license terminated by arguing that they breached contract, and not because their financial condition is such that you need relief. That's very important distinction for people to be aware of."

# @ 8/15/2008 12:10:00 AM Comments (0)

The 54th edition of the notorious Flaherty Film Seminar (June 21-27) kicked off with some steamy words from president Patti Bruck. “We’re not here to discuss film,” she insinuated; “we’re here to argue about film.” Begun in 1955 when Robert Flaherty’s widow Frances gathered filmmakers, critics, and musicians to discuss the potential of the moving image, the Seminar has evolved into one of the more idiosyncratic and invigorating stops in the film world, with an almost Nietzschean will for conflict. No titles or filmmakers are announced beforehand; all screenings, meals, and discussions are mandatory; filmmaker/audience hierarchies are abandoned in favor of a vast (and at times unwieldy) meritocracy, and argument is treasured as much as agreement. A dream scenario to some (and a nightmare to others), the result is an immersive group-think experience unlike any other, where ideas and debates about film’s past, present, and potential take precedent over usual festival conversations like “Why can’t my badge get me into this party?”

This year’s model, located on a leafy, suitably impossible-to-escape Colgate University campus, gathered approximately 150 filmmakers, academics, curators, and students for a week already pressed free of outside diversions: three screenings, three two-hour discussions, three communal meals, and one communal “happy hour” a day, all mandatory and enjoyed from the institutional comforts of “home,” a communal dormitory (of course). A group experience this intense can only lead to either total immersion or reverse alienation, but either way it’s memorable, if only to prove that even if you watched the same things with 150 people, at exactly the same time, then ate the same food, slept in the same dorms, drank the same beer, had the same discussions, etc, you’d still have little in common with about 140 of them.

At times unwieldy and unfocused (unavoidable in such a large seminar), the large-group discussions were divided between meandering and insightful, but at least served as seeds for more focused, intense conversations among smaller groups afterwards. “Somehow I was expecting the discussions to be more rigorous and critical in general,” filmmaker and attendee Sylvia Schedelbauer told Filmmaker. “Most of the time, there was too little dialectical discourse, but rather a display and collection of perceptions, ideas, associations and questions, or even parallel monologues.”

While it took awhile for the attendees to get going, the festival’s rowdy paramilitary wing soon got their wish for argument, with early discussions more befitting sleepy undergraduate seminars giving way to those dreams of conflict. Even with calls for “a new paradigm” to capture just how supposedly unique and epoch-changing our particular era is (a refrain undoubtedly repeated every seminar since 1954), this year’s most spirited discussions showed how little times had changed, with debates over such eternal questions of “intellectual” and “popular” aesthetics, art versus journalism, the human story versus a systemic approach, and issues of representation all at the forefront.

“The Age of Migration” was the seminar’s theme, thoughtfully curated and graciously hosted by Chi-hui Yang of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and within “the relationship between conflict, movement and transmission” lurked all manner of approaches and forms. Migration was tackled in ways both poetic (the impressionist videos of Laura Waddington) and highly personal (Thavi Phrasavath and Ellen Kuras’ portrait of Thavi’s Burmese family in the U.S., The Betrayal (pictured above); Renee Tajima-Pena’s roadtrip through her husband’s family history, Calavera Highway). Forms included the straight-forward, hard-hitting journalism of New Yorker Lee Wang (her provocative documentary on Filipino contract workers in Iraq, God Is My Safest Bunker), the multi-channel video-art chronicles of Austrian artist Ursula Biemann (Contained Mobility, The Black Sea Chronicles, and Trans-Sahara Diaries), photographer-turned-filmmaker Allan Sekula’s intellectual cine-essays (the sprawling The Lottery and the Sea), and epic documentary/narrative hybrids from Pedro Costa and Bahman Ghobadi. Young filmmakers seized the stage alongside such established artists, with the emotionally charged found-footage essays of Sylvia Schedelbauer, the bemused identity-satires of Alison Kobayashi, Lonnie Van Brummelen’s rigorous 35mm border-landscapes and James T. Hong’s kino-fist provocations all pointing a way forward both aesthetically and ideologically from the rut several of the works appeared stuck in.

To merely list films and filmmakers gives readers some idea of who and what was there, but Flaherty’s unique charm and devilish charge comes from the more undefinable, random dynamic between artist and audience, artist and artist, and even among the audience. Attacks and retreats, engagements and withdrawals ebbed and flowed through the seminar, mirroring the waves of Sekula’s seabound works. Early sessions involved a feeling-out process, where those who spoke tended to be veterans comfortable in the environment, but by the third or fourth day a (dis)comfort zone was reached and a peak was hit, thanks in particular to the challenging work of Biemann and Sekula. The critiques then ebbed, either from exhaustion or propriety or from the becalmed, impassioned presence of Phrasavath, who spoke from the heart about his relationship with Kuras and the filmmaking process after his screening.

This year’s attendees were indeed surprisingly accepting of the more populist, accessible styles of Calavera Highway or The Betrayal, with little questions asked about such traditional, P.O.V.-type modes of filmmaking. Meanwhile, Biemann and Sekula garnered the most critique and discussion. Was it indicative of a certain anti-intellectualism in the air (as the latter insinuated), with audiences merely not familiar with the kind of “artschool” European film aesthetics that fostered more difficult work? (Certainly, Sekula was more than happy to reel off his influences.) Possibly, but critiques can arise from individuals well-versed in such genres and aesthetics; they can arise not because the films are too challenging or “too rigorous,” but because they are not challenging enough, and not rigorous enough. Indeed, several of the so-called “challenging” works on display were in fact safely ensconced in the kind of museum-installation or cine-essay traditions that have existed just as long as first-person television-ready documentaries, and are just as refreshing as the wilted iceberg salads the campus cafeteria served each day.

By the final day all decorum vanished, with a previous discussion on the issue of representation (in particular, whether Laura Waddington’s impressionist and impassioned portrait of refugees in Border, complete with the director’s voice-over intoning “It was all so sad and lonely,” was truly capturing the lives of these refugees) boiling over into a filmmaker-on-filmmaker match that caught even the moderator (the same person who insisted we were all here to argue, ironically) a bit off guard. Some filmmakers took a defensive approach (“Who are you to tell us what we can and cannot film?,” etc), while others lept to defend the integrity of the original question. One artist began a more antagonistic, prickly monologue (“You say we’re all artschool zombies here! Well, I’d like to know, who’s the artschool zombie here?!?”), while others looked on bemused (“I like zombies,” Pedro Costa chimed in). The original question, the responsibility of the filmer to the filmed (especially when one is from a more priviliged background), seemed strangely, almost willfully disregarded. “That discussion has happened for two decades now,” noted one attendee dismissively, which may be true, but what’s depressing is that it still evidently needs to be discussed.

Artschool zombies and television rubes apart, it was emerging filmmakers like Hong, Kobayashi, Schedelbauer and van Brummelen that gave the seminar energy and hope. Refusing boundaries like intellectual and populist and the staid traditions and genres of prior generations, their works pointed towards a new kind of filmmaking. van Brummelen’s landscape film Grossraum, which slowly pans over four different borders in four serenely long takes, may owe a debt to James Benning, but her 16mm silent film essay Monument of Sugar is all her own, part investigative report into European sugar tariffs and trade laws, satire on artistic commodification, revisitation of colonialism, and philosophical comedy of human and social errors all wrapped into an experimental silent film. Mixing family photos with found-footage and even found-sound, Schedelbauer’s films turn historical documents into private poems, and public images into personal worlds. Mining her own remarkable family trove of images (jackbooted National Socialist pictures from her German grandfather; some lurid Tokyo nightclub scenes from her German father and Japanese mother), she turns the found-footage traditions of Bruce Conner and Craig Baldwin into something far more private, with secretly whispered narratives that feel as alive as any newly filmed image.

Similarly constructing new meanings from found items, Alison Kobayashi gave the seminar a different concept of migration, in terms of how stories and narratives can migrate from one person to another, from the teller to the told. Reimagining herself as every person who left messages on an answering machine in the remarkable Dan Carter, or as the teenagers from a love letter she found on a suburban bridge (From Alex to Alex), Kobayashi brings someone else’s personal world into her own. Through empathy (or narcissism), we all imagine ourselves in every story we hear or read, so it makes perfect sense that Kobayashi literally sees herself as every character. Satiric, comedic, and utterly bizarre, her films are created in a private interior world as rich and strange as the original found items that she works from, and form some of the most idiosyncratic, individualistic works in recent memory.

Smart enough to question the very idea of “intellectual” cinema, James T. Hong pulls the cinematic form through the wringer, and not a moment too soon. Hong knows the power of cinema to sway and convince, and he’s out to expose it, and you for ever believing it. His films question not just how cinema approaches truth (through manipulation, he argues), but the very concept of truth itself. “Why do we feel the need to prove what we already believe,” he wonders in his This Shall Be A Sign.” It’s an appropriate musing for not only that film (an interpretation of the Israel/Palestine conflict), but for all filmmaking, and indeed for life outside of it.

“I doubt many minds were changed,” he notes about the seminar, “and I think many world views, predilections, prejudices, and biases were reinforced rather than changed for the better or for the worse.” “Why make movies that just support the status quo, progressive or otherwise?” he continues. “Is it enough to say that at least some people care about documentary and experimental film? I don't know.” There are no answers to this, of course, but the glory of the Flaherty Seminar is that it calls up such discourse, and forces attendees to address it.

# @ 7/16/2008 01:28:00 PM Comments (0)

Canada’s Patricia Rozema has had an eclectic career, spanning films as diverse as her 1987 debut Cannes feature, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing to her Yo Yo Ma feature, Six Gestures: Suite No. 6 for Unaccompanied Cello to her 1999 Jane Austen adaptation, Mansfield Park. The themes and approaches of these films — Rozema’s concentration on adult eroticism, feminism, religious skepticism, and social revolution — would not seem to be the kind of interests which would speak to the upright members of the American Girl enterprise, protectorate of the indomitable Kit Kittredge and her wholesome doll sisters. Yet, the sweetly toned Kit Kittredge: An Amerian Girl — which is about the value of love and loyalty, is set in the Great Depression, and stars the wonderful Abigail Breslin in the title role — has proven to be a bright, happy coupling, especially for the director.


TOP OF PAGE: ABIGAIL BRESLIN IN KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL. PHOTO BY: CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN. ABOVE: KIT KITTREDGE: AN AMERICAN GIRL DIRECTOR PATRICIA ROZEMA. PHOTO BY: CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN.


FILMMAKER: Given your arthouse reputation, you’d seem an unlikely prospect to direct a project as mainstream as this.

ROZEMA: I had shot [the relationship drama] Tell Me That You Love Me for HBO, which I think convinced everyone I was not crazy and could do all the things a “mainstream” director could do. [laughs] At any rate, previously I had called Julie Goldstein at HBO, who I had known and loved since my days with Miramax and Mansfield Park, to let her know I was open for business. I was stuck on my own script, called How To Be Unbearably Happy — it’s this mock self-help program love story — and she contacted me not long after with Kit Kittredge. It really hit a chord in me.

FILMMAKER: You must have appreciated the story’s political and social awareness.

ROZEMA: They are close to my heart. After all my work in news, I still have a great hankering for fact-based work. And the script has children banding together, working hard and taking care of the weak during the Great Depression. They are told that poverty is nothing of which to be ashamed, and the only thing that can take you away from the “good” is not getting out there and trying to do your best.

FILMMAKER: Given the popularity of the franchise, were you pressured to conform to the company’s idea of the characters?

ROZEMA: I do prefer to be the Queen of the Castle in all situations, but we were all unified in being accurate, and the story is so rich with history and detail that there wasn’t much issue there. What bonded us was Kit. She is a leader, a smart girl and I am known for having a facility towards strong female characters. So, I think they knew I could handle drama and comedy, that I could talk to kids... and that the film wouldn’t end of being an air bubbled-head thing, which was important to everyone. And that this project would be additionally affirming if a woman would be chosen to direct it is a mild [rebuke] of sexism. And at the core of the film, tonally, there is my own personality, in that it is infused with a real tenderness, a sense of humor, and I hope a bit of wisdom.

FILMMAKER: Even so, were you surprised to be directing a children’s movie?

ROZEMA: It would be more unexpected of me to do an action film. First off, I cannot do a film if I cannot love it, or else the audience will not feel the story. And then there are my own children. I have two girls, four and twelve years old who have changed my life. They have no idea how deeply they have nourished me. Through them, I’d become very open to doing a children's movie. I wanted to show them what skills I had picked up, to involve them in what it takes to make a film and I wanted them to be a part of the process. And this is where I have gotten my chance.

FILMMAKER: You have said you feel somewhat “out of step” with a normal filmmaking career. What do you mean by that?

ROZEMA: I try not to think of what I am doing as a career. It feels like a reduction to view it that way. I have had no strategy at all. I just respond to what has come before me, create what comes from within, and work with people who let me explore in that way. I am of my time though. But on the other hand there are whole [other] streaks of my artistic personality that I can’t seem to get funding for!

FILMMAKER: Back in the ‘80s you worked as an a.d. for David Cronenberg on The Fly. What did you learn from him?

ROZEMA: Most importantly I learned how to control a set without being a jerk, and that by using civility and graciousness you can still explore strange corners of your mind. Also, he says he does not have a precise plan shooting plan, and in the beginning I used to have a document with a rigid shot list. Taking in his approach loosened up my work, helped me be alive to the moment. My work became more fluid, not so obsessive about “here is where we move towards the window for the three-shot.” It was also when I learned I didn’t want to do horror!

FILMMAKER: Do you think the success of this film will lead you to more Hollywood ventures?

ROZEMA: Probably not. I just finished a script for the [dramatic version of the Maysles’ documentary] Grey Gardens. And most of projects I want to make, are… well, let us say no one will give me money to make those things. Which is part of the reason I continue to make short films for 10 cents. I shot one a short while ago, cut it on iMovie — it’s going out to festivals. It’s called Suspect, and it’s about life, the ordered structures of mystery stories, and how that relates to our own unordered world. Purposely, it has a very, very unsatisfying ending.

# @ 7/07/2008 11:05:00 AM Comments (0)

Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven is a fierce, generous melodrama of boundaries and passions, of blood and yearning, the second of a trilogy about émigré culture patterned after Fassbinder's "BRD Trilogy" (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lola, Veronika Voss) of post World War II German history. His fiery prior feature, Head-On, is the "love" component, with Edge comprising "death" (with "evil" on the way). Comparisons can be drawn to other work by the late German director, especially with his inclusion of Fassbinder stalwart Hanna Schygulla in a major, moving role. Akin seems to have found his métier after working in several styles, from the Scorseseian buddy film A Short, Sharp Shock(1998) to the giddy, sweethearted road romance Im Juli (2000) to his documentary on Turkish music, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005). Crossing the Bridge came after Head-On (2004), Akin's best-known film, a devastating, sexually perfervid cross-cultural romance.

The dovetailing storylines begin with a retired widower who meets Yeter (Nursel Kose) a prostitute whom he offers to pay to live with him. His son Nejat (Baki Davrak), a college professor, disapproves, but becomes close to her until her accidental death, which leads him to Istanbul in search of Yeter's missing daughter, Ayten (Nurgul Yesilçay). While taking over a German bookstore as its owner returns to Germany, Nejat is unaware Ayten, a political activist, is in Germany where she meets a university student (Patrycia Ziolkowska), who admires her politics and brings her to bed in the house of her mother (Schygulla). The journeys between Germany and Turkey are marked by more than just the crossing of borders. Unexpected intersections lead to tragic, but ultimately hopeful results,

Scholar of German film, Thomas Elsaesser's valuable essay in the May Film Comment holds this trenchant observation: "Not for Akin the Romeo and Juliet melodramas of multicultural star-crossed lovers or the comedies of mistaken ethnic or national stereotypes found in the ‘Greek wedding’ genre. In both cases, the hyphenation of ethnic or religious identities joins too comfortably or separates too neatly what in reality remain messy sets of generational tensions, universal moral dilemmas, emotional ambivalences, and divided loyalties. Instead, Akin prefers, like Fassbinder, perversely improbable love stories, sadistic scapegoating, and suicidal sacrifices."

The Edge of Heaven won best screenplay at Cannes 2007, as well as at the European Film Awards. It didn't make the cut for Foreign Language Oscar consideration, but in March, won five Lolas from the German Film Awards.

The Edge of Heaven is unabashedly emotional and patterned around recurring structures and recurring themes and its deep well of sorrow as well as Akin's superbly expressive filmmaking—framing and cutting and a generous eye for the features of city streets and besorrowed faces—demonstrates bold use of craft. The Edge of Heaven is currently playing in Manhattan and Strand Releasing will release wider in coming months.


TOP OF PAGE: NURGUL YESILÇAY AND PATRYCIA ZIOLKOWSKA IN THE EDGE OF HEAVEN. PHOTO COURTESY OF STRAND RELEASING. ABOVE: THE EDGE OF HEAVEN WRITER-DIRECTOR FATIH AKIN. PHOTO COURTESY OF STRAND RELEASING


FILMMAKER: While you were making Crossing the Bridge, did any of the musicians you met in Istanbul influence this film?

AKIN: Yes, some of them did. If you remember in Crossing the Bridge, there was this Kurdish performer in the film, Aynur. The year we shot the film, 2004, Turkey had never been so liberated. I met all these beautiful musicians and a year later, in 2005, I spoke to Aynur and she said they had forbidden her album -- it could not get through the censorship anymore. I was really shocked, and so I had a desire to have a hero who has certain issues to face, who has a political background, a political resistance background. And then were some stories the street musicians from Crossing the Bridge had told me. Some of the members told me about their ethnic background and about experiences they had. I had a feeling to use this in Edge of Heaven.

FILMMAKER: Exchanges of populations and culture between cities in that region, such as between Thessaloniki and Istanbul, have occurred so often. Do have a sense of Istanbul's past as this major cosmopolitan crossroads at the turn of the twentieth century?

AKIN: You still feel the sort of facts of that beautiful past but it's not a multicultural presence anymore. It has this multicultural past and you see this past through the buildings and through the architecture and you hear it in the music and [see it in] some faces. But now it has this, I dunno, this present where this multicultural past has disappeared. The more time spans, the more it disappears. That's a pity, a shame. That's something that's missing. I don't want to come to the town and have this multicultural nostalgia; I want to have it presently. I have this in Germany these days, more. Because Germany is a bit like the U.S. I was in a kindergarten with Yugoslavian kids, with Greek kids, with German, with Turkish, with English. You see very much more multicultural and I always remember this as a gift. In Istanbul, it's just the past.

FILMMAKER: Has The Edge of Heaven been released there? How was it received?

AKIN: Yes. It made box-office, which means people liked the film, whoever saw the film sent other people to the film. The reviews were kind of mixed. They weren't enthusiastic like in Europe or for my film before, Head On. The critics were more enthusiastic. I expected that because the film is not taking any party, the film is kind of very neutral. I made the film that I hoped no political extreme can instrumentalize the film for itself. It's a cold portrayal of the left movement and a cold portrayal of the right movement. I think that's the secret of why the response of the critics was kind of cold. But at the domestic film festival of Antalya [the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival], the film won five awards, including best director and second best film. So, in a way it was warmly received. I'm satisfied with it.

FILMMAKER: There are critics who seem to need to be reassured, they don't seem happy with a movie unless it endorses or underlines their perspective on politics or the world, something they already believe. We call it "preaching to the choir" -- reinforcing what they already know. Ambiguity and ambivalence are discouraged. You do attempt this larger complexity with all these issues about identity and borders and desire.

AKIN: Since I am also a documentary filmmaker I recognize the idea of observing. You see? To not push or force my audience to think in a certain direction. When I see films where the film is really trying to teach me something in a didactic way, trying to force me to think in a certain direction, I don't feel so comfortable. I think I've read enough books and I had a good education, y'know? I don’t need that, that's not what I want to see. When I made this film, every film I do, I am the first audience, you know? I try to make it like I wouldn’t feel; I don’t want to have propaganda. I don’t want to see that. It's a non-political film. My definition of a political film is when you force an audience to accept certain [things]. What you describe is the same in Turkey. If I get criticism in Turkey, it's why don't I take a clear position? For this film, the issues are too complex. I want to show that in a way everything has two sides. It's a very philosophical film, in a way, and it [demands an] interactivity [with] the audience. The critics you mention, I think this is for people who are lazy to think by their own.

FILMMAKER: The man who made The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, told me about how much he admires the director Robert Zemeckis, whose movies' politics often elude reviewers. His films become mirrors for their own politics. An entertainment with moral concerns but you couldn’t decipher what he believes.

AKIN: Yeah. Somehow I share that. I get a lot of inspiration through the cinema, the New Hollywood Cinema, the cinema of the late ’60s 'til the end of the ’70s. I think that period was the best American cinema. And you have heritages of that today in American movies like Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck. These were political films, in a way, they deal with political issues but especially Syriana, I like the observing of things and not commenting. The filmmaker gives the audience a kind of space to think. This is what I wish of cinema. I don't like films that answer every question. With apolitical statement—I don't know if you know the cinema of Yilmaz Guney, a very popular Turkish director? After a while, he was forcing the audience to be left, and you don't feel very comfortable [watching his films]. First a film has to entertain. First rank, a film must be storytelling. Whatever your message is, whatever your ideas are, whatever your thoughts as an artist are, you can smuggle them or put them into the film so that the audience can understand them on their own.

FILMMAKER: You saw from Guney's a contrary example how to avoid didacticism?

AKIN: Yes. I like the cinema of Guney because it's so strong, it has a strong identity, and he really believed in what he did, and he found some great images, but I am adult enough to decide. If a film forces you, sooner or later, it reminds me of Goebbels, of how Goebbels treated cinema. You have films like Top Gun or Black Hawk Down, which are forcing to audience in another direction, to being Right. I don’t think this is very healthy for an audience. I think film is an artwork, and art is something you have to interact with your audience. This I really believe.

# @ 5/21/2008 05:08:00 PM Comments (0)