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.
We’ve just opened up the 2010 Sarasota Film Festival’s Call For Entries on Withoutabox. If you’re interested in submitting a film to us, we’d be honored to take a look. I have compressed the submission timeline this year and all of the deadlines are set, so let’s get to it, shall we?
This year’s event is already coming together and I have a lot of interest for some exciting projects; I’m convinced this will be a special festival. Let’s be honest; at this point in the economic meltdown, that fact that so many regional festivals are still taking place, despite so many obstacles, it’s a minor miracle. All credit to the community of Sarasota for maintaining a passion for this festival after all of the ups and downs; I really want to deliver a great event for the community, for our friends and guests from the film industry and especially for our filmmakers. I hope that you’ll all consider joining us April 9-18, 2010. Fun will be had, films will be enjoyed, the sun will shine on the beaches. What could be better?
There are moments at the movies when, watching one film or another, for whatever reason, everything seems to come together. And then there is every other waking minute of my life. I have spent the better part of the last five years attempting to sift through piles and piles of the low-budget relationship drama with a comic touch or the low-budget relationship comedy with a dramatic hook, all of them made on the cheap and each of them featuring unique problems that, with a little more craft or artistic concern, might have been overcome. You know what I’m talking about; anonymous, black-walled bars with no ambient sound, no music and no patrons, lit with Christmas lights. Single camera shoots with single takes that offer none of the dramatic momentum that can be created in editing and post-production. No establishing shots, no wide shots, no reaction shots, no actors. Whip pans between faces in a conversation. Nothing contemplative, nothing that transcends the moment, no big ideas to tie moments together. No real recognition that cinema is a visual and auditory form, no real attempt to say much of anything with the form at all. The overwhelming majority of these films represent the absolute death of my hope for the “democratization of cinema” through more inexpensive technologies. So, it is hard for me to express the depth of the pleasure I took watching Maren Ade’s beautiful Everyone Else at the New York Film Festival this year; let’s just say Maren Ade has redeemed a thousand MiniDV sins with a film that is as cinematic as it is moving.
Everyone Else tracks the decline, death and possible resurrection of a romantic relationship between Gitte (the phenomenal Birgit Minichmayr, who first caught my eye with her performance in Barbara Albert’s 2006 filmFalling) and Chris (Lars Eidinger); she’s a free-spirited woman who can’t help but speak her mind and he is a sullen and sensitive architect waiting for his big break. Ade shows us the pair on vacation at Chris’ family home on Sardinia, and the languid pace of sunlit days is offset by the growing tension between the pair; Chris awaits word of the outcome of an architectural competition he entered while Gitte grows more and more restless with the pleasantries of bourgeois living. Slowly and surely, Chris’ sensitivity gives way under the strain of Gitte’s balls-out honesty, and Ade brings tension to each scene like a series of stones thrown into an otherwise tranquil pool of water; each word and emotion impacts the surface of Gitte and Chris’ relationship only to ripple out into bigger and stronger problems. By the time Chris humiliates Gitte in order to “fit in” with the boorish behavior of a friendly rival, everything in the film is up for grabs and Ade and her pair of excellent actors have somehow, slowly and surely, created a real sense of hurt and collapse that only an openhearted forgiveness might overcome.
Of course, the story of young lovers in crisis is the stuff of so many small and insignificant films, but what they lack in dramatic structure, pacing, tone and performance, Ade makes up for in spades. Even more impressively, the film feels natural without feeling improvised, which is an important distinction. It has become almost a cliché to forsake rehearsal and writing in the name of a story outline and improvisational performance; inspired by the temporally exotic naturalism of Cassavetes, maybe, or any number of independent films of the late 20th century, these films seem to confuse improvisation and realism. There is nothing more “actory” and alienating than watching unrehearsed actors improvising their parts in the hope of collectively finding a story; this technique usually carries all of the naturalism of watching a graduate (on a good day) acting class exercise which is, you know, the last thing on earth anyone should ever be doing in a cinema. There is nothing natural about self-aware performance, particularly performance that has to carry the weight of believability and the entire narrative on its usually inexperienced shoulders. Everyone Else absolutely crushes this idea by using the tools of cinema to create space for performance and by allowing the story, as intimate as it may be, to lay underneath the actors; Ade uses performance as a palimpsest instead of a showy pillar, allowing the actors to convey real feeling and move their way through believable, emotionally complex moments that have multiple beats, that develop, that breathe and feel very much alive.
Everyone Else
Ade has a beautiful way with the camera; very still, medium shots of the couple or a single actor with very few close ups at all, always with a sense that the frame is patiently mediating the distance between her characters. In most films, a break-up scene would alternate between a close-up of someone confessing their true feelings, and a reverse shot of, say, a confused partner, not understanding how he arrived at this moment of truth, trying to hold things together. Big feelings, writ large on the screen. Ade understands that to give primacy to any one of the emotions on the screen would be to undermine the truth of every other moment in the movie, and so she keeps the close up out of it, underscoring her evenhanded approach to all of the feelings her actors give her. Which is not to say the film seems “one note” or flat in visual terms; Ade uses the rooms of the home, the contrast between blazing sunlight and the dark of night, and exotic exterior locations to reframe her actors. This lends the film a gentle pace (again, room to breathe) and instead of visual, “directory” tricks or cinematic bells and whistles that would draw lines under and around the film’s moments, Ade uses a delicate touch that allows the performances to fill up the film with meaning. Sure, the film has a few flaws; I think that the movie is relatively uneven in its attempts to balance our sympathies for both characters and I couldn’t help but favor one of them over the other. But that is a minor complaint, if only because I was so compelled by the character that I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. I was heartened to read that younger film lovers were flocking to The New York Film Festival for screenings of Antichrist and Trash Humpers last week, but I never heard tell of what became of Everyone Else. In a perfect world, cinephiles would embrace something this lovely with the same interest and curiosity they bring to controversy, but I clearly don’t live in a perfect world. Here’s hoping that Everyone Else finds a home anyway.
A brief warning: some of the links below point to images and articles of a graphic and or controversial nature. Be advised.
Is there role for white people in post-colonial Africa? If you ask some African leaders, they’ll tell you that the legacy of white colonial power on the continent has established an oppositional, almost dialectical relationship between white (read: Western) opinion and action; nations pay lip service to the civil wars, famine, poverty and diseases that have plagued the continent while continuing to exploit Africa’s resources, political corruption, tribal rivalries and large scale suffering for their own gain. The reality of post-colonial exploitation has fostered a rather brilliant form of populist demagoguery that foments anti-Western, anti-white sentiment and points the finger at the impact of so-called economic development (The World Bank and IMF) while simultaneously allowing a class of elites to profit wildly from private corporate investment and charitable largesse. In a few rare instances, residential white populations living in nations like Zimbabwe have come into direct conflict with the government for maintaining economic control of resources even after the colonial dominance of their families has ended. Earlier in the decade, in an attempt to repatriate the farms of Zimbabwe into the hands of black citizens, President Robert Mugabe sparked outrage among many Westerners for inspiring violent clashes between his supporters and the wealthy whites who, despite making up only 2% of the population, controlled over 60% of the arable land. As these difficult, graphic images will verify, this story does not end well for anyone involved. But many would argue it did not end well for Zimbabwe either; deprived of the white farmers’ generations worth of expertise in large scale farm management, the use of the land was handled poorly, resulting in famine which persists to this day and, ironically, has ended up destabilizing the Mugabe regime. Meanwhile, the violence and intimidation continue, seemingly unabated. All of these years later, race and the colonial experience are twinned, intertwined in new, complicated knots.
In White Material, Claire Denis takes inspiration from the continent’s hot spots of social upheaval and violence to explore the dissolution of a way of life. Maria (Isabelle Huppert) is the matriarch of a family of white French farmers whose African coffee plantation comes under threat during an unnamed civil war. Desperate to maintain order in the face of a seemingly abstract enemy, Maria’s mission is the engine that drives the film forward; despite the impending arrival of rebel forces to the family plantation, Maria will seemingly do anything to maintain the life she’s built on the farm. Maria hires a band of day laborers to work the land when her employees abandon the cause in the name of safety and ignores her family’s repeated pleas to get the hell out of there. But there is more to Maria’s need than just the quixotic quest for normalcy; blind to the racial tension at play, Maria is shocked when her long-term relationships with black friends and neighbors start to come unravelled, only to realize that her own family (and her own mind) are almost certain to follow suit. At that moment, it is already too late; a small, renegade band of child soldiers arrives, murdering and pillaging, wiping away the old order before running into big problems of their own.
White Material
Denis, working here with cinematographer Yves Cape (who also shot Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, also playing at the New York Film Festival) in the absence of longtime collaborator Agnes Godard, manages to create images that reduce the expansive forests and hills of the Cameroonian countryside into a claustrophobic geometry of impending doom; roads that seem to go on forever suddenly segmented, fraught with enough danger from former friends and new foes to render them useless, the rows of trees and open fields offer just enough privacy to harbor violence and humiliation. Cape’s images operate very much in Denis’ tradition; close-ups and pans that keep important information outside of the frame, only to return later in the story, finally pulled back to reveal the full horror on display. For Denis, the repetition of images is crucial to her elliptical brand of storytelling, providing keys to her narrative and allowing the viewer to establish a chronology while fostering reconsideration, the constant need to re-examine the meaning of the image in light of subsequent revelations. As such, Denis’ films often get misunderstood as “narrative puzzles” that require the viewer to put them together, but that metaphor seems wrong to me. Instead, I think of her films in the way I think of looking at a painting or a mural, only, instead of starting from across the room and slowly making my way up close to see the detail, Denis reverses the process and places the close-up details first, slowly guiding the eye across the frame and story, each image building upon the others until the full film is assembled in the mind and the viewer is able to step back at last and contemplate the whole.
In order for that strategy to work, Denis must do more than simply play games with the structure of her storytelling; she is required to create beautiful, dramatically compelling moments that keep the eye and mind eager to know what might come next. Thankfully, no one understands these requirements better than Denis herself. She is an absolute master of balancing narrative tone with cinematographic beauty to produce revelation and, in the case of White Material, she can’t lose; she has Isabelle Huppert at her disposal, after all. Huppert seems to me the perfect embodiment of Denis’ vision of a stubborn colonial tradition; she is an actress that can drive you away with the upward tilt of her head and the subtle twist of her jaw, only to draw you back in the moment her eyes flash an ounce of the pain that seems to flow like mercury beneath her skin. Huppert uses her diminutive stature like no other performer; her fragility, those tiny arms and legs, only deepen the confusion over the fact that she dominates every frame she occupies. There is no performer more brave than she (I truly believe she would do anything at all in service of the truth in a character) and Denis uses Huppert’s innate tension, this frail threat, to great effect. Huppert’s Maria longs for a normalcy that evaporates before her very eyes, a normalcy that also includes nonchalant exploitation; terrible living conditions for her workers, a flippant disregard for the safety of her friends, workers and family, all of which comes back to bite her in the ass and then some. And yet, despite the knowledge that you’re watching a pushy rich French woman act incredulous that black African workers don’t appreciate an unlit hovel to shelter themselves for the night, you know that Maria is suffering, too; Huppert moves you to tears and scares the absolute shit out of you all at once. For all of the politics and pain on display, Denis’ White Material is ultimately reduced to the slow fracture behind Huppert’s defiant eyes. The film couldn’t be in better hands.
One of the worst and most tedious arguments in American film culture is the debate over the responsibility of so-called “non-fiction” filmmaking to act as reportage, a perception among some that documentaries should present facts, be balanced and tell the story in an even-handed way so that the audience can make up their mind about the complexities of the issues raised. Too often, this argument (which is being generous) focuses on the intersection of political, bureaucratic minutia and the necessary individual perspective of the filmmaker; while it is okay for, say, Chris Marker to make cultural juxtapositions in a film like Sans Soleil or for Werner Herzog to lay an ironic, skeptical narration over the top of found footage in Grizzly Man, the instant that an otherwise acceptable subjectivity meets an out of sequence fact or a passionate opinion, the shit starts hitting the fan. You can’t tell a good story without a strong point of view, without a sense of doing advocacy for both your subject and your own perspective, and so, when I am not throwing up in my mouth as people criticize documentaries for “playing with the facts”, I usually end up shaking my head in disbelief that anyone could possibly want what they’re asking for. You want to know what happened on 9/11? Read The 9/11 Report. You want to know what it felt like for individuals to be alive to the experience of being an American or an Afghani or an Iraqi on and in the wake of 9/11? I can suggest a documentary or two. May the twain never meet.
Don Argott’s The Art Of The Steal, one of an excellent crop of documentaries at this year’s New York Film Festival, does justice to the incredible story it has to tell by taking a point of view and pushing it hard. Steal is the tale of Dr. Albert Barnes, a American physician who invented a once-massively popular drug called Argyrol (used as an antiseptic in the eyes of newborns) and used his newfound fortune to buy an overwhelming number of modern paintings by the greatest artists of his age. The names and numbers are staggering; in his lifetime, Barnes acquired 181 paintings by Renoir, 69 by Cézanne, 59 by Matisse as well as numerous paintings by Gauguin, Goya, Manet, Modigliani, Monet, Picasso and Van Gogh. Barnes lived in Philadelphia and, as a New Deal democrat, spent many years of his life in opposition to the city’s conservative elites, including the Annenbergs (Moses and his son Walter) who owned and ran the Philadelphia Inquirer. Barnes’ personal distaste for Philadelphia society was served by his unique ideas about how to show and present his collection; housed in an intimate building on a quiet suburban street outside of the city limits, Barnes established The Barnes Foundation to maintain his principles and the integrity of his collection by following a very specific set of rules; the collection would never travel or be loaned to any museum, the collection would exist to serve the serious study of art by students (and as such, The Foundation would be an educational institution), the collection would be made available for public viewing on a limited basis. By establishing these and other strict ground rules, Barnes sought to ensure that his ideas about the study and appreciation of his collection would be maintained in perpetuity and that, even decades after his own death, the elites of Philadelphia (including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Inquirer, etc) would be forced to engage The Barnes Foundation on Barnes’ own terms.
The Art Of The Steal
Of course, a funny thing happened on the way to perpetuity; Barnes inevitably passed away, as did his most dedicated disciples and soon, his will was put to the test when the collection and Foundation were placed in the hands of Lincoln University, a small, historically black university to which Barnes, childless, bequeathed the stewardship of his life’s passion and work. It is this moment, when institutions with competing interests intersect, that started the process whereby, over the course of several years, Barnes’ original vision, principles and, well, codified demands began to be tossed aside in the name of political and financial expediency. And suddenly, through a series of seemingly small actions, the Barnes Foundation made it way rapidly down a slippery slope; the expansion of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, the proposed raising of money for the purpose of providing capital improvements to the buildings in which the collection and school are housed, and most shockingly, the investment of other, larger non-profit organizations who claim to be able to help raise money for the Foundation’s mission. After suffering these slights of hand, Barnes’ collection has been transformed into the polar opposite of its founder’s intent; the collection is getting a new home, in Philadelphia, open to the public and ready to generate piles of cash. In the end, Philadelphia, including the Inquirer and its constant championing of the Foundation’s transformation, seem poised to stick it to the old man in the end.
The Art Of The Steal takes this tale and sculpts it into the stuff of great tragedy, meticulously and passionately outlining each and every transgression against Barnes’ principles with a surgical precision. Even better than the details, Argott and his team use the primarily chronological narrative to mark the change in democratic ideals over the years and to ruminate on the greater issues of the competing values of art (the film states that Barnes’ collection is today worth tens of billions—with a “b”— of dollars), public interest (represented here by the City of Philadelphia’s desire to bring the collection to town and get that tourism money flowing) and the legal value of writing a will in the first place. Should a man’s private art collection be the subject of actions that feel like a collaborative claim of eminent domain? Does the interest of the collector become irrelevant when the value of his collection is judged by the city and state to exceed his private claim to do with it what he pleases?
There may be nothing more infuriating than a parade of politicians and non-profiteers parading around as if they cared about public access to art, and Argott presents a copious number of rubes (and many more who declined to appear in the film), each of them with all of the answers, self-certain and without an ounce of conscience about what their actions might mean to poor old Dr. Barnes. But if the film were only dealing with the unconscionable crimes against art committed by public figures, it would be a lot less engaging than what it truly represents, which is an elegy for the role of the individual thinker in public life. For all of his wealth and the monetary value of his collection (and it’s those numbers, those billions, and little else that attract ambitious know-nothings like bees to honey), the most dangerous and useful thing about Barnes was his belief that the economic value of his collection was subservient to his greater ideas about education and fostering the growth of new, young artists who might take spiritual inspiration from the works he amassed. Argott’s film honors Barnes’ big idea, that billions of dollars of masterpieces are better served in his unique setting than they could ever be in the sterile institutional environment of so many museums, and gives voice to the ideas that Dr. Barnes himself is no longer around to articulate and defend. The great tragedy is that, despite his deep desire to foster change in the way Americans and cities think about art, what was once deemed a controversial, even profane collection of paintings grew into something that was truly the envy of his enemies; a collection of great financial worth. Things do change, but this is America, after all; what great idea stands the chance of triumph over the dollar?
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