Today is the day to celebrate the civil rights and think about the state of social injustice. As such, it is, for me, a day to think once again about legal equality for the LGBT community. While most American news outlets will draw the obvious distinctions between Dr. King’s “dream” and the ascendancy of Barack Obama as President of the United States, I can’t help but think of the irony as, now one year into the President’s first term, he continues to sit on his hands while our fellow citizens, neighbors, friends and family in the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered community have not been granted equal protection under the law in this country. It’s interesting to me to see so many movements attach themselves to King’s mission—environmentalism, animal rights—without speaking about the only direct correlation in modern American society between the legal conditions that created the Civil Rights movement and the bigotry of the majority in establishing those conditions. The denial of equal rights for the LGBT community is the only social condition where ballot initiatives and civic law is structured to deny basic civil rights to our citizens, and yet here we are again, another Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day and people still draw literal correlations between the color of King’s skin and his mission without thinking about the way in which Civil Rights and the denial of those rights operate today.
I wrote a long essay on this topic back in November of 2008, as voters in another american state lined yo to deny equal marriage rights to their fellow citizens, and since then, things have only gotten worse. My position at the time remains unchanged today; without either the Congress and President passing and signing an equivalent of the Civil Rights Act for LGBT Americans or the country having this case brought before the Supreme Court, where a precedent against legal discrimination can be won, the movement’s broken strategy of fighting for rights state-by-state remains doomed to fail under the weight of popular bigotry. This idea, one that has made sense to me for years, is the subject of a recent New Yorker article by Margaret Talbot, who worries it may be “too soon” to address the Supreme Court because of the conservative bent of so many of the justices. In that article, Ted Olson, the ultra conservative lawyer who is hoping to petition the court in favor of same-sex marriage, evokes Dr. King directly in his defense of his position:
“I have spent a fair amount of time reading Dr. King’s response to people who said, ‘People aren’t ready for this,’ ” he said. “His ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ one of the more moving documents in history, addresses this. If people are suffering and being hurt by discrimination, and their children and their families are . . . then who are we as lawyers to say, ‘Wait ten years’? ”—Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, January 16, 2010.
“On January 11th, a remarkable legal case opens in a San Francisco courtroom—on its way, it seems almost certain, to the Supreme Court. Perry v. Schwarzenegger challenges the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the California referendum that, in November, 2008, overturned a state Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex couples to marry. Its lead lawyers are unlikely allies: Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general under President George W. Bush, and a prominent conservative; and David Boies, the Democratic trial lawyer who was his opposing counsel in Bush v. Gore. The two are mounting an ambitious case that pointedly circumvents the incremental, narrowly crafted legal gambits and the careful state-by-state strategy that leading gay-rights organizations have championed in the fight for marriage equality. The Olson-Boies team hopes for a ruling that will transform the legal and social landscape nationwide, something on the order of Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, or Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage.”—Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, January 16, 2010.
For me, leaving social equality up to a popular vote has been a great mistake that has cost the LGBT community civil rights for years now. It is time for the nation to take a stand for equality and, if the Supreme Court cannot properly apply the Constitution to defend the civil rights of LGBT Americans, time for all of us to take to the streets and force the Federal government to do its job and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I hope you will join me in thinking of and acting for true civil rights in 21st century America. The parallels could not be more clear, and the need for change could not be more urgent.
On Friday night, I headed to the Times Center in, of all places, Times Square for the third annual Cinema Eye Honors, an evening celebrating the craft of non-fiction filmmaking. I have served on the Nominating Committee for the Cinema Eye Honors since its inception (a huge honor to be invited to participate) and these awards, along with my role as a nominator for the Gotham Awards, are among the two great professional pleasures of my year. I hadn’t been to the Gotham Awards in over a decade until this year (it was lovely) and now, since the Cinema Eye Honors moved to January, I was finally able to attend the ceremony itself. All I can say is, as long as AJ Schnack, Thom Powers, Esther Robinson, Andrea Meditch and the rest of the organizing committee will have me, I will do whatever I can to see this orgainzation survive and thrive. Despite the cynicism of some who see the move to January as a way to get the awards in front of the Oscar, on the night, the point was completely moot; The Cinema Eye Honors are all about community building and celebration. How to tell the difference? While most award events focus on red carpets and celebrity turnout, flashy PR events seeking to venerate the already venerated, the Cinema Eye Honors serve the singular purpose of casting a spotlight on the people who make the non-fiction filmmaking community tick, a noble mission if ever there was one.
Of course, this can lead to a little bit of inside baseball at the event itself: witness AJ Schnack, who hosted the event, playing a game of MAD LIBS by calling on a random selection of members of the audience. The reason the gag worked? Because AJ could simply look around the auditorium and call on familiar faces. Why? Because everyone in the audience was a familiar face. Literally.
For me, this is one of the most important aspects of the event. Without the support of the documentary community, the whole evening might seem a bit odd. Instead, because of that support, it feels nothing but special, which is nearly an impossible feat for an event in an industry hell-bent on awarding itself into oblivion. This is primarily driven by two factors; the Cinema Eye Honors deciding to award trophies in the areas of editing, cinematography, score, graphics and animation, all of which are crucial to the sucess of a given film and none of which get attention in the mainstream film industry (due to the complete exclusion of these artists from “fiction only” craft categories at other awards programs), and the unique position of non-fiction filmmaking to have a few of its pioneering artists still with us, many of whom attend the Cinema Eye Honors year after year. It was most heartening to see Barbara Kopple, Albert Maysles, Peter Davis and Ross McElwee, each with her or his own contribution to the art of documentary, surrounded by hundreds of people who have contributed to the blossoming of what once must have been very lonely work. I can only imagine how they felt, looking out over a big, full room inside the Times Center (a lovely theater by the way), and thinking about the form they helped create, now thriving in numbers and quality (and box office in some cases). It was Peter Davis who was most eloquent in discussing this growth, directly addressing the community and reminding everyone to keep working toward depicting an emotional reality without relying too much on the Hollywood tricks of the trade that can blur the lines between truth and entertainment.
As the award winners came forward, men and women from all over the world, representing a wildly diverse set of nominees, it was incredibly heartening to watch documentary celebrate itself, on its own terms and in its own unique way. More than the thrill of victory, it was the reality of the show itself that was the most profound. Congratulations to all and I look forward to another rousing success in 2011.
Hello filmmakers… If you are interested in having your work considered for the 2010 Sarasota Film Festival (April 9-18, 2010), today is our regular deadline. We hope you’ll consider allowing us to review your film. Our late deadline is January 30, 2010, but if you’re interested in submitting now, we’re eager to take a look.
You can submit via our Withoutabox application here.
As we prepare for Sundance and continue to work on plans for the 2010 Sarasota Film Festival, I wanted to take a moment to point you toward the ballot I put in with indieWIRE for the Annual Critics Survey 2009. As I always say, this blog is about championing films I love, not about any pretense to formal criticism (you can rest easy, blog haters, I have no intentions of “rating” in your world…), but it is always an honor to be asked to particpate in the indieWIRE Poll. Here is my list of favorites, each item linked to my own memory of each film, be it writing, a preview, a photo, whatever.
I am planning on writing from Sundance if I can get WiFi in the freezing cold tent in the parking lot at the Holiday Village (which will replace the comfort of the Yarrow Hotel Lobby as the Press and Industry waiting area); I’ll do my best to get capsules written every day. In the meantime, a last look back at 2009. My ballot below:
I love Eric Rohmer’s films. Yes, even The Lady and The Duke and its aristocratic distrust of the common man. Rohmer always stood apart from the Nouvelle Vague for me, more of a problematic cousin to the emotional honesty of Truffaut or the intellectual cool of Godard than a part of their fraternity. His movies are, for me, one of the only exceptions to the old rule of “show don’t tell”, primarily because of the dissonance between what his characters say and what is really going on in their hearts. Rohmer’s films are the literal definition of irony without ever feeling ironic, and it was his gift to understand what people mean when they say what they say. Veiled intentions, hurt feelings; Rohmer is always aware of his character’s true emotions, even when they aren’t. It is this awareness, always passed along to the audience through beautiful, long takes that allow his actors to undermine the text of the dialogue and create the text of the film, that define Rohmer’s cinema.
In recent years, primarily thanks to Criterion’s re-relelase of Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales in a beautiful deluxe edition DVD boxset, Rohmer’s early films, lovely movies all, have been rediscovered and much was made of his important role in shaping the current state of international cinema. I’m happy he lived to read those notices and, knowing what words meant to him as an artist, I hope he enjoyed the praise. Now that he is gone, I do feel that a certain type of filmmaking may have gone with him; a cinema that eschews the gadgetry and technical tricks of the trade in favor of people, their behaviors and their struggle with their feelings. Like I said, I love his movies. I will miss his work and was hoping for another film from him soon. Alas.
The Opening Sequence of Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse
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