In December 2008, I attended the International Film Festival Summit in Las Vegas. I participated on a panel with the esteemed Richard Lorber who, after some back and forth on the panel about the economics of film distribution and film festival budgets, told me at dinner about Alive Mind, his company’s recent expansion into digital and documentary film, and their first foray into distribution under this label, Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles’ documentary The Gates. I was intrigued by the label and Richard’s plans and, very much a fan of Maysles’ films about the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, I discussed the possibility of a full retrospective of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude films. Richard was encouraging. Once I was back in New York, Richard put me in touch with Antonio Ferrera, who shared my excitement and who put me in touch with Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s office directly. I left them a voice mail and hoped for the best.
The next day, I found a message on my cell phone; “Hello Tom, this is Jeanne-Claude. We heard your proposal and are indeed very interested. Please fax a written proposal to our offices and we look forward to coming to Sarasota.”
That message set into motion a months-long conversation with Jeanne-Claude who, despite a reputation as a tenacious and meticulous advocate for framing the discussion around her art, was one of the kindest people with whom I have ever had the pleasure of working. It was her kindness that enabled the festival to approach the filmmakers and distributors required to assemble our retrospective of the twelves films in which she and her partner Christo participated, films that today seem that much more moving, profound and, most important of all, reflective of the temporary nature of life and art. This retrospective offered me a chance to dive into their work in depth and, having always been a little suspicious of their methods (but loving the dialogue the films and their works inspired), I came away from the experience with my opinion of their work entirely transformed by the beauty and meaning it brought to the time and place in which it existed.
One of the great challenges of presenting art in America is the general literalism of the American mind; everything must mean something and that meaning must be adjudged to be of relative value to the meaning of other things. It is an economic way of thinking, a religious way of thinking, a moralistic way of thinking but so very often it is not a creative way of thinking. Art and aesthetics are too often seen as elitist, a luxury and the territory of scoundrels instead of as democratic, moving and beautiful. The impact of our thinking about art has shaped the way in which we fund, experience and discuss art as a society and, most important to me personally as a lover of movies, has too often turned the meaning of art into a discussion of its monetary value; is that painting really worth that much money? What does it say about our country that that film made however many millions at the box office? We are not a society that loves art, but rather, a society that loves business. Watching and learning about the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, I found myself experiencing the welcome obliteration of these ideas, of this business worship. When you experience their work, the discussion of values shifts completely, from the issue of cost (the artists raise their own money) to the issue of scale, from the meaning of consumption to the dynamics of experience, from interpretation to feeling. I found myself constantly and irrevocably moved by them, their ideas, their work.
At the festival this year, one of the great highlights for me was to introduce Christo and Jeanne-Claude to a packed house after our screening of The Gates and to be rendered immediately irrelevant as Jeanne-Claude grabbed the microphone and engaged the audience directly; these are the moments you live for as a programmer, to see a full theater in dialogue, filled with laughter and joy. I got the feeling this was common for Jeanne-Claude and Christo; their defense of their art and their communion with people seems to me an essential part of the purpose of the work itself. The films work so well as a vehicle for that dialogue because they not only capture the works as they exist in time (although fractured, removed, incomplete), but the monumental administrative procedures required to undertake them; you feel an intimacy with the creative process that is so often absent from the public discussion of art. Jeanne-Claude and Christo seemed to inhabit that space with the same ease with which they remained true to their creative vision. Watching the pair of them in action, it was clear that all of it and everything is the work.
Last Thursday, my birthday, I heard the sad news that Jeanne-Claude had passed away. I was tremendously saddened to learn of her passing, but I was heartened to hear what I had always assumed to be true; that Christo would be carrying on their work, keeping their promise to make art, come what may and no matter what. The couple, and they will always remain a couple to me, have several projects that remain incomplete, and nothing will honor Jeanne-Claude’s memory more than to see each of them realized. I am personally most excited to see the Over The River project realized; if and when the project is approved and up, I have promised myself that I will be there to see it and, I hope, to paddle under a sky of fabric down the Arkansas River. But most of all, I am truly honored that we were able to assemble this retrospective, to host and celebrate Jeanne-Claude and Christo at our festival, and to have had our work live in their orbit for a few days. It was something I will never forget and, now that Jeanne-Claude has passed away, a moment that will remind me of the power and purpose of cinema in my own life. May she rest in peace and long may her work continue.
Sarasota Film Festival Board President Mark Famiglio, Jeanne-Claude, Christo and The Gates Director Antonio Ferrera at the 2009 Sarasota Film Festival
(Photo: Heather Dunhill for The Sarasota Herald Tribune)
In the interest of full disclosure, I need to get a few things out of the way; Oren Moverman’s The Messenger has been a very important film for me this past year. I am unable to assemble my thoughts about the film itself; I have no critical distance when it comes to this movie. Let me just say I think it is one of the finest movies of the year and an instant classic. I saw the movie at Sundance and fell in love with it. With a little help and some true generosity, we were able to showcase The Messenger as the Opening Night Film at the Sarasota Film Festival back in March. Coming to us right after a triumphant trip to the Berlin Film Festival, we worked with the team from the film to bring in several soldiers and veterans for the screening and party; everyone had a great time. During the festival’s opening weekend, I got to know Oren and the cast a little bit and I was as shocked by their kindness as I was by their talent. I am indebted to all of them for taking a chance on our idea and bringing the film to Sarasota so early in the process.
I have been waiting for this weekend for months now; the film is opening in NYC and DC and rolling out wide next week. All I can hope for in the coming weeks and months is that the film is as warmly received by the national audience as it was by our festival’s. Not only will your support offer tremendous help to a very talented group of artists, but it will also signal an investment in the type of serious, American cinema that desperately needs a boost. My fingers are crossed for the good people at Oscilloscope and for my Messenger friends; here’s to engaging hearts and minds.
Don’t trust them? Trust me; just go see it. Go. Go go go.
* A special mention for film critic movie-loathing-contrarian-for-the-sake-of-it Armond White, whose review, a complete misreading of the film that underlines his own condescension and deep insecurity, opens with the following sentence: “Despite the many things wrong with Brian De Palma’s Redacted, the acting was superbly on-point.” Why read on from there? Say hello, wave goodbye. Seriously?!
In reading the reaction to today’s announcement that Newsweek film critic David Ansen has joined the Los Angeles Film Festival as its Artistic Director (congrats to David, and to my friend and colleague Doug Jones, who received a much-deserved promotion, and to the LAFF for finding their man), a number of lights switched on for me, most of which have been flickering for weeks now. It’s been a tough couple of years for print critics and film criticism in general, and with Ansen’s appointment and the recent wrap of the AFI Fest (programmed by film critic Robert Koehler), it seems like critics are finding refuge among the ranks of professional film programmers like, well, me. Anne Thompson makes a case for the change in her analysis of Ansen’s move when she writes:
“Who better than a critic to make the final picks on the LAFF?...As journalism becomes more and more inhospitable to film critics, film festivals become a viable alternative. Ansen landed at LAFF. And there’s still a position open at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which mounts the New York Film Festival and books the Walter Reade Theatre, for a full-time programmer to replace Kent Jones, who left to work with Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation. Several critics are in contention for that slot, including LA Weekly survivor Scott Foundas. I’d argue for Foundas to keep doing what he does so well. But what future can he reasonably count on…?”
Which, you know, makes the idea of film programming sound a little bit, well, like a bomb shelter; a place to hide out while the world collapses around you and hopefully you can get back to normal once all of the madness dies away. What it doesn’t do, really, is advocate for the reality of film programming, the meaning and importance of the job to a festival, an audience, a community and, probably most importantly, festival colleagues who will be called upon to execute the million details involved in putting on a large event. Which is not to say that David Ansen or Robert Koehler aren’t great programmers, but I think the perception and the reality of the press in addressing this new wave of critics-turned-programmers misses one of the great chasms between the two jobs: No one has begun to describe the dissonance between thinking and acting like a film critic, which entails giving an honest, personal assessment of a film (good or bad), and the constant compromises required by festival programming. In one job, you serve an audience of anonymous readers who seek out your opinion (which you give in a relatively unfettered form, if you’re any good) and in the other, you’re serving both your audience and the industry, the very same filmmakers, actors and distributors you may have taken to task as a critic.
It is interesting that Anne mentions Scott Foundas, an excellent film writer who serves on the NYFF selection committee, as Scott recently talked with Robert Koehler as part of his coverage of the AFI Fest;
“Our first conversations about this [job] really began almost at this time last year,” Koehler adds. “From my end, I just wanted to get much more involved with programming. Not programming film series, which I’ve been doing, or coming up with a juicy little wish list and then phoning it off to the folks who really do the spade work in terms of getting the films. What I wanted to do was blend the conceptual side of it with the spade work.”
Koehler’s appointment was not without its share of raised eyebrows. Writing about the hire last April, Cinematical blogger Peter Martin (himself a former AFI Fest employee) deemed it an “odd move” while quoting at length from a Koehler essay in the Canadian film quarterly Cinema Scope that chided North American festival programmers for their laziness and herd mentality: “The essence of interesting, vital festival programming is an intelligent argument for a certain kind of cinema — this kind, not that kind.” With his new job, Martin surmised, Koehler would get a chance “to put his money where his mouth is.”
Implicit in Martin’s provocation was the bane of every film programmer’s existence: how to challenge an audience without alienating them? How, in Koehler’s case, for a passionate champion of radical and avant-garde filmmaking (his “certain kind of cinema” in a nutshell) to program a festival with movies that Joe the Plumber might also want to see? As Koehler himself puts it, it all comes down to “finding a balance of tendencies, of kinds of films. You certainly want to avoid both a vanilla drift toward the middle on the one hand, and you also want to avoid an ideological purity that veers on the obnoxious on the other.”
First of all, I love Koehler for understanding and articulating the idea of “spade work”, because for me, that’s right on. But maybe it is the privilege of criticism, the ability to look at work from an idealistic distance, that makes the second part of his statement ring as, let’s just say, diplomatic. I’ll say what he can’t say; When you’re dealing with a sponsor driven, non-profit event, you can’t show all the movies you love and you have to show a few you don’t like. Unlike the process of developing a critical corpus and a theoretical vision for “a certain type of film”, the job of festival programming is not about having great taste (which, by the way, everyone thinks they have). It is about, as Koehler rightly states, “finding a balance” between a complex set of interests that do not exist in the critical world.*
For most of us in the world of film programming, life is a series of qualifiers; we like to think that by assembling a program from the available, relevant films in our festival window that will agree to play the festival, we’ve worked hard to bring the very best that we can to our audiences, given the unique circumstances of each event. There are a few out there who, because of their size and status in the festival marketplace, have the unique privilege of saying no far more often than they hear it from others. Depending on the demands of the festival mission (i.e. whether or not you’re going to play the “premieres” game—it is duly noted that AFI dumped their premiere status requirements this year, as I did too in my first year in charge of a film program), most of us in the film festival world are, let’s be honest, not in a position where high profile, high quality projects are beating down the door to be a part of our event. So, when your festival is looking to hire someone to take over the film program, finding a professional with name recognition and a long history of quality relationships in the world of film PR makes a LOT of sense. I totally get it.
But, in welcoming my critic friends into the community of programmers, I offer a little bit of hard-won wisdom; film programming is a harbor for constant disappointment. We’re told “no” constantly, we have to tell other people “no” all the time, we do our best in negotiating all sorts of tricky problems between a multitude of interests. Now, obviously, people as gifted as David Ansen and Robert Koehler are amazing film scholars and have proven through their criticism and programming work, time and again, that they are excellent at what they do. I have no doubts that their work will be superior to my own in every way. But I do find it curious that so many festival directors seem to be looking to the world of criticism to find their programmers, and more importantly, that an honest discussion about what that means for programmers and critics alike hasn’t really started. So, maybe we can start now? Honest opinions welcome.
* By the way, Robert Koehler also has a huge advantage that most programmers can only dream about; he’s going to pack the house every time because his festival gives away all of their tickets for free. Which begets a note on the recent press regarding AFI’s free film tickets: They were paid for. By Audi. Who then gave them away. Putting that model out there as the next big idea in film festival management is a little bit like hitting the Mega Millions and then advocating that the lottery is the best new model for obtaining personal wealth. AFI was great in their acknowledgement of this incredibly special, generous sponsorship, but the press needs a reminder; let’s not trend “insanely good fortune” as being a reasonable approach to the business.
I can hear you, can you hear me?—R.E.M., Sitting Still
R.E.M. is the absolute seminal band for me; their albums are the soundtrack of my life. I was a thriteen year-old heavy metal-loving dork living in working class Michigan in 1984 when, on Easter vacation in Toronto, I stumbled upon Chronic Town in a cutout bin at Sam The Record Man on Yonge St. From the moment the needle hit the vinyl on my shitty, department store turntable, I was literally tranformed into another person. It is hard to remember the fabric of a pre-internet, pre-iPod, pre-video on demand world, but I clearly had a sentimental attachment to the sensation of having a secret, of loving something and finding almost no connection among members of my community, my friends, my peers; is that even possible anymore? I have a very young son, and I often wonder if he will ever feel what it is like to not know a single person who shares his passion for an artist, an idea, a song. Today, we connect online, we find a universe of articles and fans sites and links and history and community among like-minded people around the world. For me, cracking open Chronic Town in Flint, Michigan as a thirteen year-old kid felt like a secret, private revolt. I would literally spend days listening to R.E.M. records, singing along in jibberish, blissfully alone, disconnected, changing into what I now consider “me.” Is that possible anymore?
Smitten with Chronic Town, I immediately dove into the R.E.M. catalogue, picking up Murmur, already a year old, and Reckoning, which had just come out. I was inseparable from those records during Middle School, literally wearing out my vinyl copy of Murmur within a few months. The following spring, 1985, I picked up Fables of The Reconstruction and my step-dad took me to see the band in concert at the Fox Theater in Detroit, which blew my 14 year old mind. I can remember almost every detail of that show to this day, from the expressionistic lighting to the huge sound to the cover of Aerosmith’s Toys In The Attic that came out of nowhere. The band was always mysterious; who wrote which song? What was Michael Stipe hiding from behind his curly hair? What was he singing about? Every once in a while, an interview would appear in a magazine, a clip on MTV, and I would gobble all of it up, trying to understand the band and the reasons I felt so connected to their music. It was and is a mystery to me; Stipe’s voice is in my own vocal range, so I could sing along, the abstract imagery of the songs hit me, the jangly guitar connected to classic songs that I loved, there was an outsider’s perspective that the band conveyed that felt true, a million reasons.
But most of all, they were singing songs that felt like being young and feeling eternal, about the impossibile reality of death and growing old, mixed with a deeply curious attachment to passing ways of life, regional, local experience, to just living and not giving a fuck. I felt like I could live a million years, secluded and all along the ruins and on and on.
Most of all, though, R.E.M. felt like something in stark opposition to the conservative literalism of Regan’s America, something much smarter and bigger than Middle and High School, connected to an almost impossibly vibrant scene (Athens GA, a place I dreamt of for years), an ideal of creative work, of personal possibility for me. There are infinite numbers of stories of kids claiming that bands saved their lives; my life didn’t need saving, I was a happy, confident kid. R.E.M. didn’t save my life or give it purpose, they simply offered me a portal into the possibilities of living, of a larger world. I listen to those records today and more than the music and the words, they convey the texture of memory and experience for me; they make me feel the same feelings, but through a new, changing perspective about who I am.
For no reason other than my own inability to appreciate the grand scale of the stadium concert, I stopped going to R.E.M. shows after the Green tour. And in truth, after Bill Berry left in 1997 to recover from a brain aneurysm, I felt like the band and I both had changed, which, fucking right and fair play. There was nothing revoked between the music and me, but all of doors that R.E.M. had opened for me had been populated by a million other moments, experiences, songs, shows, loves. I grew up, got older, and they did the same. I haven’t felt a deep connection to the band’s new work in the same way I did their 1980’s work, but who feels the same deep connection as a thirty something that they did as a teenager?
I am going to die someday. I have a son to whom I want to give the entirety of the world and all of myself. I have a wife that I love in ways I thought impossible. So many things I dreamed of doing will never get done. And I feel completely content.
That said, whatever connected inside of me, it is still very much alive. Today, I picked up a copy of R.E.M.‘s new album, Live At The Olympia which has essentailly forced me curl up in a ball in my bedroom with my headphones on, a irrevocable grin plastered on my face, emotions and feelings I haven’t had in years flooding through me. It is an absolutely amazing retrospective of everything that made the band vital, crucial, meaningful to me. The song selection is unreal (they play so many of my favorites) but it is the muscular, urgent sound of the performances on this record that prove just how important and powerful a band R.E.M. are. All of that is well and good and yes yes yes, but the real gift here is the way Michael Stipe just CRUSHES these songs—I just can’t believe how good and clear he sounds on this record; the performances of Sitting Still, Carnival Of Sorts and especially 1,000,000 as they are performed here are achingly, jawdroppingly great. I had forgotten what they mean to me and this album feels like a reclamation of everything I loved about discovering their music, everything I was and wanted to be. I can’t believe it. It’s still there and I forgot how much I missed it.
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