THAI CINEMA—Bangkok Love Story Picked Up by TLA Releasing

When Todd Brown at Twitch first mentioned Pod Anon's Bangkok Love Story, offering up the trailer and a music video, I took note. Todd wrote: "[T]he roaming camera and gorgeous cinematography somehow bring Hou Hsiao-Hsien to mind."

TLA Releasing has acquired all theatrical, home video, television and VOD entertainment rights for Bangkok Love Story's North America and United Kingdom distribution. The film will be released in the summer of 2008 through the TLA Releasing label.

Bangkok Love Story tells the story of Maek (Rattanaballang Tohssawat), an assassin who is sent to kill Iht (Chaiwat Tongsaeng); but—when a twist of fate brings the men together—Maek refuses to kill Iht and takes a bullet in an ensuing gunfight. Iht helps Maek back to a safe house and nurses him back to health. A bond develops and the two men become emotionally attached. Confused—since Maek's life as an assassin doesn't allow him emotional attachments, especially with his assigned target—Maek attempts to leave but Iht will not give up on him. And when Maek goes back to his boss to rectify the situation and Iht suddenly appears, the end result is a bloody gunfight that will pit enemies, friends and lovers against each other. The film also stars Suchao Pongwilai of Ong-Bak Warrior fame.


Bangkok Love Story had a successful theatrical release in Thailand opening on September 13, 2007 and is in competition at the 34th Brussels International Film Festival along with being featured as the Opening Night selection for the 2007 Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Cross-published at Twitch.

THE WIZARD OF GORE—Herschell Gordon Lewis and Joshua Grannell On Stage

That's right, horror fans—the "godfather of gore" himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis, creator of Blood Feast, 2,000 Maniacs, She-Devils On Wheels, and more will be on-hand for both outstandingly rare screenings of The Wizard of Gore as part of the Landmark Theatres' Late Night Picture Shows. Peaches Christ's alter-ego and horror filmmaker Joshua Grannell will interview the genre idol at both shows on November 2 and November 3. Do not miss this remarkable chance to hear the master himself relate his filmmaking experiences—a career that many say constitutes the creation of the modern horror movie as we now know it! Clay Theatre, Fillmore at Clay, Show at Midnight, $9.75.

Also, H.G. Lewis will appear at Amoeba Music on Saturday, November 3rd for an in-store signing at 2PM.

For those who have been out of the loop, here is my Greencine interview with Herschell Gordon Lewis and my interview with Peaches Christ's fierce alter-ego Joshua Grannell, Parts One and Two.

IN ROTATION—Pacze Moj & Critical Culture

Okay. I will admit it. My blogroll has become completely unwieldly. There was a time—was it really that long ago?—when I was able to faithfully keep up with the entries on my friends' sites. Nowadays, I'm barely able to keep up with my own obsessive re-reading of my own posts, Dave Hudson's encyclopedic announcements at The Greencine Daily, Brian Darr's shuffling of a suspiciously stacked calendar deck, and wrestling elbows with the other kids at Professor Girish Shambu's eponymous classroom where I sit in the back with the dunce cap on, surly and withdrawn, prone to juvenile violence. Hand me that spray can!!

I feel so guilty. How can I ever expect anyone to comment at The Evening Class if I don't comment at their sites? It usually takes a bout of severe insomnia to get me to break the exponential agony of my blogroll and actually "catch up" as it were. So, I've decided to start a feature here on The Evening Class that I will call "In Rotation" where, on those nights of insomniatic reciprocity, I actually eschew all my regular obsessions to momentarily indulge a new one: to read what's up at one of the sites on my blogroll. Imagine!

First off, Critical Culture. Pacze Moj is one of my favorite writers on line. No one—other than maybe Darren Hughes at Long Pauses—informs his ruminations with such a poetic and philosophic sensibility. I love his multidisciplinary approach towards cinema, filtering a film through other mediums of art and other scientific disciplines to achieve fresh insights. He's also one of the best at screen capture analysis and I'm quite fond of his ability to unpack one scene in a movie to demonstrate his grasp of the whole.

In the last month Pacze has been on something of a historical binge. He has three stimulating posts in that regard. His most recent pretentious rambling is his consideration of history as the world's longest bad novel. Put on Joni Mitchell's latest Shine and you're right at home. This entry has some fascinating glimpses into legislative reactions at the time to the Mexican-American War gleaned from William Earl Weeks' Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War.

Prior to that, Pacze considered Marshall McLuhan's playful reflexivity with regard to revolutionary progress and compares it to an article he excavated from the April 1974 issue of The Journal of Contemporary History. Now, who else will conduct such archaeology on your behalf? Be grateful, children.

Thirdly, Pacze shockingly reveals the horrid ineptitude of McGraw Hill's textbook A History of the Modern World, popularly used in North American high school and lower-level undergraduate history classes; a text which is embarrassingly inaccurate. I now feel fully justified blaming my middle school education as the reason that I don't know diddlely squat about geography, like a few other Americans I know. Looking at the maps that Pacze provides—having just come off of my Lebanese cinema tirade—I wonder if we shouldn't just resolve this confusion about what is the capital of what and just rename all these cities "Ruins"? It's a suggestion. It would certainly make it easier for me and a couple of other Americans I know.

But before he began waxing historic, Pacze—partly in response to a cue at Scribble and Ramblings (yet another neglected site on my blogroll)—has endeavored a most remarkable venture called The Mule Train ("TMT"). Get on board. He has three entries in this series. The first, a rich sampling of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, links and all; the second, a wealth of Ali Farke Touré; and the third, more Jacques Becker than you can shake a stick at.

So, if I can ever catch up with my blogroll, I can get my hands on TMT's loot. Thanks for all your continuing hard work, Pacze. I want to make sure you know it does not go unappreciated or unread.

2007 AFF: LEBANESE CINEMA—A Perfect Day, Falafel and The Last Man

Launched in 2006 and supported by the European Union, the Caravan of Euro-Arab Cinema sponsored a series of cinematic events (aptly named "Caravan Nights") in various European and Mediterranean cities earlier this year. Focusing on Lebanese cinema, Caravan Nights presented 11 films produced between 2000 and 2006, representing established directors with unique approaches and up-and-coming directors making their feature-film debut. The screened films reflected the uniqueness of Lebanese film production less concerned with traditional issues and heavily influenced by the diaspora from Lebanon. During May and June, the Caravan traveled through the Netherlands where it attracted 4,500 filmgoers and screened Arab films in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and other Dutch cities. It also participated with 11 films in all four competitive categories of June's 7th Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam. In July the Caravan was represented at the 5th Paris Cinema Festival at the Arab World Institute, where it then moved on to the Toulouse Cinématheque.

San Francisco's Arab Film Festival brought three of these Lebanese features—Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige's A Perfect Day (2005), Michel Kammoun's Falafel (2006), and Ghassan Salhab's The Last Man (2006)—to the Bay Area. Each employed Beirut at night as their mise-en-scène and shared common themes, albeit by individual stylistic flourishes. Kammoun, the youngest of the directors, explored a magical realism unique to the Mideast through Falafel; Salhab enunciated Beirut's death wish through The Last Man; and Hadjithomas and Joreige used A Perfect Day to profile the foolish hope of a Lebanese youth who decides to live life his way.

Throughout the festival, Peter Limbrick's introductory remarks provided working commentary to deepen my appreciation of these three films, specifically his references to "latency" in Lebanese cinema, which he described as "a sense that something is underneath and bubbling up even if it's not directly addressed"; that "something" being Lebanon's past, specifically its recent civil war. Limbrick asked us to give thought to how all three films are trying to deal in many ways with Lebanon's civil war but not by approaching it head-on.

In his Fall 2001 Middle East Quarterly article "Après la guerre", Martin Kramer specified: "Of the many questions haunting the Middle East, two concern the legacies of recent conflicts when Arab fought Arab with fanatic gusto. Iraq and Lebanon are now both [over] a decade after their wars, but question-marks still hover over the aftermath. …Has Lebanon moved beyond the trauma of war, far enough to reclaim its suspended independence? Filmmakers have attempted to answer [this] question[], with widely different degrees of art and integrity."

Kramer states Lebanon "remains a place of striking contradictions that few directors can resist" but qualifies that it "is a demographically young country, so memory of the war has very quickly grown foggy—perhaps too quickly, for the war's lessons were never clearly learned by Lebanon's leaders." He notes "the civil war has receded, and been made to recede, from the conscience of Lebanon" and "[t]hose who lived through the war prefer to forget it." The cost of such enforced forgetfulness, however, breeds irresolution of conflicts in the Middle East. "They enter latency," Kramer cautions.

Picking at Beirut's scars produces amazingly consistent complexes of images, which I seek to explore and elucidate through these three films. "Beirut, of course," Kramer writes, "is strewn with silent ruins." It's perhaps worthwhile to note that The Last Man's Arabic title is literally translated "Ruins." Kramer analyzes that "these terrible places where bloody massacres took place are attested to by no more than pockmarked walls, which will no doubt be bulldozed into the ground; they are no substitute for a proper memorial, which are entirely missing. The bereaved keep private memorials on their mantles, but there is no sense of collective loss. …In fact, nowhere in Lebanon is there a single memorial to the fallen." I would suggest that Lebanese cinema itself has become the necessary memorial demanded by the Lebanese collective psyche to counter the institutionalized denials of demolition and erasure, under the guise of reconstruction.

"The man who personifie[d] the will to forget," Kramer profiles, "is Rafiq al-Hariri, who served as prime minister from 1992 to 1998 and was reelected again in October 2000. One purpose of Solidère, Hariri's private corporation for the reconstruction of Beirut, [was] to bulldoze away the physical traces of the war." Laboring under the profitable premise that "out of sight is out of mind", Kramer characterizes Hariri as "the clean slate, a man not implicated in Lebanon's wars, a super-contractor who [tore] down the past to build a new, antiseptic present behind reflecting glass." Reconstruction is configured as a form of cleansing and yet Lebanese cinema implies the stains—resistant to such efforts—go much deeper than the surface. Despite Hariri's efforts to put the past behind, he was assassinated by a presumed Syrian suicide bomber. So much for the will to forget through sanitized surfaces.


I bring this up only to underscore that the protagonist Malek (Ziad Saad) in A Perfect Day is a construction worker at just such a demolition site who, curiously, suffers from bouts of narcolepsy, unable to stay awake to complete the job of reconstruction. The film's theatrical poster shows him unconscious. The demolition is further hindered by the discovery of corpses. The film's title connotes "a perfect day" when the exhaustive burden of vigil and memory can finally be put to rest. After 15 years of awaiting news of his kidnapped father, Lebanese law allows the bereaved to officially declare missing loved ones dead. And yet Malek and his mother Claudia (Julia Kassar) find themselves unable to follow through on the legal declaration and Malek is morbidly obsessed that the corpse discovered at the demolition site might bear some identificatory marks that would identify him as his father. These are wounds of absence that shun legal remedy. Curiously, in Falafel the father never makes an appearance and is, in effect, likewise absent.


Further, in Falafel there is a moment when protagonist Tou (Elie Mitri) witnesses a kidnapping while making a telephone call. He is ineffectual and can do nothing to help the victim. When he is later himself the victim of random abuse, he can only look at his wounds in the mirror and weep. In his fantasies of violent revenge he is momentarily valorized; but, in life he is consistently emasculated. The "wages of silence", Kramer suggests, become evident by the fact that "[a]cross Lebanon, revolvers are still under pillows (and easy enough to buy on the street)." A revolver plays into both A Perfect Day and Falafel as a necessary prop, a kind of wishful thinking that violence will bring resolution, if not healing.

Another similarity in both films is how mothers wait, estranged and distanced from their husbands and sons. Lebanese women can no longer rely on men to protect them. They maneuver the stages of grief on their own. Perhaps they represent the abandoned body of Lebanon?

Another scholar who has mined the subtleties of latency in Lebanese cinema has been Laura U. Marks, author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002). Dr. Marks has curated programs of film, video, and new media for venues around the world and is the Dena Wosk University Professor in Art and Culture Studies in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Though her research far exceeds a Lebanese subject, her insights are valuable.

In her recent essay "Mohamed Soueid's cinema of immanence" (Jump Cut, No. 49, spring 2007), Marks states that Beirut is "already performing a psychoanalysis. It is already archaeological. It knows all about ruins." Film out of Lebanon, and specifically Beirut, require not only interpretation but excavation, aligning with the familiar practice of philosopher William Benjamin to interpret "the failures of ideology from the ruins of its demise."

Following up on the reconstructive strategies of Rafiq al-Hariri and bringing his profile up to date, Marks writes: "Lebanon is a country whose vulnerability to outside powers (including Israel, the United States, Syria, and lately Iran) and internal divisiveness make it impossible to assert a unified narrative of the nation's history or confidently to draw causal connections between historical events. There has been no agreement as to the facts of what happened during the civil war (1975-1990), no Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and no official strategy for healing from the war's savage effects. The political upheaval surrounding the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri on February 14, 2005 and the subsequent Syrian withdrawal continued acutely to test Lebanese people's ability to narrate history in a linear and non-contradictory way. In July 2006, Israel criminally bombarded civilian targets all across Lebanon, in an attack supposedly against Hizballah that demolished the infrastructure that, during Hariri's rule, had begun to unify the country geographically. This attack divided Lebanon's population even further along religious lines, and further underscored the country's utter vulnerability to the whims of international powers.

"In the post-civil war era, it was already impossible for documentary filmmakers to identify historical events and fix blame. Now this situation is only exacerbated. Insofar as Lebanese documentarists are able to continue to function at all, they continue to work by imaginatively stretching the truth, mixing documentary, fiction, personal and conceptual approaches. They confront the country's history like a plane of immanence. The acts that are known and demonstrable are less politically salient than the teeming sea of virtuals, events that have been bulldozed over, witnessed only by the dead and disappeared, forgotten in the official history that seeks to reinsert Lebanon into the global economy, and even forgotten by the participants in the war, for who can afford to live with a gaping wound?"

By applying her comments to feature films, Marks lends insight into the nature of "latency" in Lebanese cinema. Latency, as Limbrick implied in his introduction, characterizes the domain of the repressed in Lebanese society which pops up to assert itself. Marks describes this as happening through narratives "structured by a symptomatic course of declarations and disavowals" and "a tendency to avoid attributing root causes and to favor this-ness, fragmentariness, indirection." The fatigue and stress of living with postwar uncertainty connotes a collective trauma. Though writing on the films of Mohamed Soueid, Marks' comments could equally apply to the characters in the three films under discussion. They are obsessive characters. They are people "whose neuroses and tragedies make them truthful historical subjects." By "subjects" she means individuals who are essentially "knots of tics, bad habits, and accommodations that allow them to deal (not without flair) with impossible situations. They are not so much psychological subjects as knots in a political field, their individual neuroses the manifestation of political trauma."

In an earlier interview on the question of latency, Dr. Marks described the phenomenon where "everything that is expressed conceals many other things that have not been expressed." Not only is this observed through the effects of the civil war on the particularities of everyday life as registered through individual narratives of neuroses, but also through a quest for truth in media representation. Extolling the virtues of Lebanon's experimental video documentary movement—which Marks proclaims is "Lebanon's greatest contribution to contemporary Arab and world cinema"—she then notes with interest that "what the contemporary film and video makers in Beirut are doing … is mostly about what counts as truth, how do you represent what really happened?"

This especially comes across in Falafel during a compelling reimagining of the lunar landing as watched on a television set. A giant falafel approaches the lunar surface like a massive meteorite and spins history awry. This underscores Marks' assertion that the problem of mainstream media is a problem of "indexicality" or—as she states it—"there are so many images in the world that don't tell the truth. Any mainstream representations, whether they are from the west or overseas, or whether they are local, official images; for example in Lebanon the official histories of the civil war try to cut it up, erase it, and smooth it over."

Just as cinema provides the memorial sorely lacking to commemorate the missing and the dead, so does it also provide a means to express what remains latent and inexpressible, particularly through an audio-visual expression "rather than simply reiterating something that has already been expressed." On that point I consider Malek's narcoplepsy in A Perfect Day to be a profound effective expression of trying to awake or to keep awake even as the culture aspires towards forgetfulness. All three films traverse a nocturnal vigil that waits or maneuvers towards dawn or some incremental increase in consciousness.


Perhaps the most interesting of these three in that respect is The Last Man, highly touted as Lebanon's first vampire film; but as Peter Limbrick has swiftly pointed out, "it's the strangest vampire movie that you're ever going to see."

In his introduction to The Last Man at its Roxie Film Center screening, Limbrick stated Ghassan Salhab had made two previous feature films—Beyrouth Fantôme and Terra Incognita—whose titles provide a sense that his films all tend to use Beirut as a focus. "They're all interested in multiple kinds of layers of history of Beirut," Limbrick explained, circumambulating around the now ready theme of ruins and psychological excavation. "Salhab describes his own city as a place where he says 'constantly small fissures can turn into gaping abysses.' I've seen him also quote—I think Samuel Beckett—who said 'Beirut is a city continually being undone and redone.' " Again, the theme of reconstruction as a means of forgetting and cleansing.

Acknowledging that—despite its thematic similarities to A Perfect Day—The Last Man, Limbrick clarifies, "does its work in a really different style and I'd like to say a couple of things about that style. First of all, as befits a vampire movie, it is certainly not shot in a realist style. We can see a lot of places where there is a kind of naturalism about the way Salhab presents the city, but he and Jacques Boquin—who did the absolutely incredible cinematography in this film—have really sort of … as you see the film unfold, you begin to realize that it presents Beirut in a way that is stranger and stranger. It has a stylized color palette in places, we see architecture and space of the city given to us in ways that are alienating and distancing. Its editing works like that as well. This is a film that is put together in a discontinuous style. So don't be watching thinking for everything to make absolute narrative sense. It doesn't flow like a Hollywood film. The result is enigmatic. It sat with me for a long time after I saw it. I grew to appreciate its enigma. I should mention also the soundtrack for this film is stunning. Here again there's a link to A Perfect Day. Both these filmmakers are interested in the soundscape of Beirut and are attentive to the sounds found in the city, everything from cell phones to other aspects around us."


In fact it is the audio-visual design of The Last Man that proves stunning as a means of expressing the gradual recognition on the part of its protagonist Dr. Khalil Shams (in a completely understated yet mesmerizing performance by Carlos Chahine) that he is becoming something unknown, nearly unfathomable, to himself. Lapses of sound pull him out of his common world into another requiring a different attention and an altered self-perception. Silence, an aversion to daylight, and a lack of reflection become the vampiric tropes by which Shams intuits his new self. As Limbrick writes for the program capsule: "The Last Man evokes the layers of the past that make up Beirut's sedimented present. Rather than approach history and politics head-on, Salhab's film does its work through an unlikely idea: a vampire is sucking the lifeblood from Beirut's citizenry, one victim at a time." Dr. Shams gradually suspects he is the vampire. "Recoiling from sunlight, [he] explores the darker dimensions of a wintry Beirut … as he increasingly questions his own capacity for intimate violence."

Summoned into fraternity with his "maker", The Last Man's final image of Dr. Shams receding underground as dawn approaches is devastatingly nihilistic. All three films provide nuanced reactions to recent events in Lebanon expressed in indirect but insightful ways and I am immensely grateful to the Arab Film Festival for providing this welcome exposure to Lebanese cinema.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 AFF: A Muslim Childhood—Moumen Smihi On Towns: Literature: Cinema.

The Arab Film Festival boasted the U.S. premiere of Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi's latest film El Ayel/La Gosse de Tanger (A Muslim Childhood). As Peter Limbrick wrote for the festival catalog: "Moumen Smihi's career as a director spans more than thirty years, making him one of the most eminent figures in Moroccan cinema. In A Muslim Childhood, Smihi creates a sumptuous mise-en-scene of Tangiers in the 1950s, where a young boy, Larbi, tries to find his place in the collision of cultures and influences he experiences around him. Under the sway of his strict Muslim father, modern mother, and French high school, the solitary and timid Larbi finds escape from his personal traumas in the International Zone of Tangiers, where cinema and decadence beckon and offer him another kind of world. Smihi's film is saturated throughout with a color palette of Mediterranean blue that helps the film achieve the mixture of Proustian nostalgia and Dickensian fictional style that Smihi consciously sought. In an arresting and contemplative style, in which voiceover often accompanies shots resembling tableaux vivants, Smihi attempts to recreate the singularity of a time, place, and cultural identity for his viewer. In so doing, this stunning film, part fiction and part autobiography, declares its love for cinema while at the same time rendering for its viewers the rich cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of life in 1950s Morocco."

Moumen and I wanted to get together to discuss A Muslim Childhood, but our schedules were at odds with each other and we, unfortunately, missed during his visit. Until we can achieve same by email, Moumen has forwarded me some of his thoughts while visiting San Francisco, especially with regard to the influence the San Franciscan Beat poets had on his own work. Moumen acknowledges Joe Garofoli from the San Francisco Chronicle for "triggering" these remembrances. I, in turn, am most grateful for his permission to share them with The Evening Class.

Howl

Ginsberg censored in the States when he was acclaimed in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world! What a terrible contradiction! In the fifties, Allen Ginsberg was one of the brilliant representatives of the American literature that haunted my town in North-Africa, Tangier. Gregory Corso, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs were the other U.S. literature giants that time to time visited Morocco or were living and working there. Their books were exposed in the bookshops (as in one called "Librairie des Colonnes" in Tangier) and libraries (the one of "The American School" for instance in the same Tangier) and Moroccans as well as all the readers of many countries of the world were diving with the biggest admiration into The Naked Lunch, On The Road or A Streetcar Named Desire. Drugs, homosexuality, communism (we heard proudly that Paul Bowles had once been a member of the American Communist Party) ... nothing of these scandalous and repressed themes could interfere or mix the pleasure of meeting this immense literature of liberation, of deep humanism in its conterculture entity. My generation of Arabs coming out of the colonialism period was so excited to find in these books and minds what [could] enhance their thirst of anti-conformism and liberty. Then, America and her writers and intellectuals were a model, an ideal, the hope of our future. When—as a young man—I was watching members of the Beat Generation at the cafes all around the little square called Socco Chico in Tangier, or listening to lectures of poems and texts in Paul Bowles place at Chemin des amoureux Street, I never could imagine that censorship was acting in their prestigious country. In fact I must say that I was a dreaming boy ... but nevertheless a kind of a coquelicot, a savage grass breathing in cosmopolitan marginalism. And that is what I filmed many many years later in A Muslim Childhood, a feature about the fifties in Tangier.

Hussein

The Egyptian writer Taha Hussein in modern Arab culture is the symbol of a similar rebellion against orthodoxy and fundamentalism, and his influence in literature, in religion's history, in education changed the face of the Arab World and will change it more and more: he was a dominant figure in Tangier by his books: one of his masterpieces, Wednesday's Lectures, was born in The American University in Cairo in the fifties.

Hitch

Alfred Hitchcock is not as much the master of thrillers as of the anti-conformist feelings and psychology, his films being always in the tradition of the Surrealist's "mad love" (l'amour fou); in cinema: Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou, L'Âge d'Or, That Obscure Object of Desire). Vertigo: San Francisco: up-down, left-right: how to fight against phobia: against the "repressed" in psychoanalytical meaning.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 AFF: MAKING OF—The Evening Class Interview With Lotfi Abdelli

Lotfi Abdelli is a charismatic, handsome young Tunisian who carries himself confidently. His left eyebrow is accented by a diagonal scar. The award-winning actor for the Arab Film Festival's opening night feature Making Of was, as we reported earlier, detained for five hours at San Francisco International Airport upon his arrival. We met in the newly-situated AFF offices to discuss the incident with artistic director Sonia El Feki graciously providing translation (when allowed). Abdelli, who has joked that he has spent five thousand Arab dollars learning English, insisted upon practicing. Thus, I have elected to retain the charm of his broken English out of respect for his accomplished effort.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Lotfi, as a San Franciscan and an American, I wanted to express my deep regret regarding your detainment at the San Francisco International Airport. I hope that—during your stay here in San Francisco—through your festival audiences and the people you meet on the street every day while you're here, that you'll come to realize that the average American is essentially like the average Tunisian; we all want to reach clarity about these matters. To that effect, in hopes that it will further that clarity, I've brought you a rock crystal that I've had blessed by Native American elders, shamans, and I'd like you to take that home with you to your country.

Lotfi Abdelli: Thank you.

Guillén: Could we talk a little bit about what happened at the airport? I don't want to stir up too many bad memories, but there are some things I would like to know: were you treated respectfully by airport security during your detainment?


Abdelli: No. They are respectful but they ask me questions for five hours and sometimes the same question, sometimes I didn't understand which kind of question. They ask me why I come here and I explain to them that I am invited by the festival. They tell me why you come here again and I explain again, "I'm here for the festival." What is your job? I explain what is my job. What is your business? I explain what is my business. What kind of film? After they take the DVD and they see the film they ask me, "You are encouraging and glorifying the fundamentalist in your film" and I said, "It's not true. We are against this and it's very nice for American people to see this film because we explain how it's fragile to become terrorist. It's good to know about this." They ask me what I think about America. After, they take my telephone and they go through the [contacts list] and they ask me what is this names? Who are these people? What is my relation with these people? Sometimes they left me waiting for half an hour and they come back and they ask me again the same questions.

Guillén: Did you have a translator with you so you could better understand their interrogation?

Abdelli: No.

Guillén: They didn't even bother to provide a translator?! [I have to stifle my irritation.] Well, again, I'm very sorry that you had to go through this and I'm especially grateful that you didn't just jump on the next plane home because we—as San Franciscans, as Americans—have benefited from your being here.

With regard to Making Of, I appreciated the film, precisely because it falls within a category of films—and your performance joins a group of performances such as Robert DeNiro's in Taxi Driver and Edward Norton in American X—which focus on the theme of indoctrination. These are films about impassioned individuals without direction and appropriate guidance. Your performance is stunning.

Abdelli: Thank you.

Guillén: How did you get pulled into the project? I understand you are a professionally-trained dancer and have started your own company in Tunisia, is this correct?


Abdelli: Yes. I start with the National Ballet, classic. We create the National Ballet when I was dancer with Tunisian people and we invite French and American and Russian dancers because there were not enough Tunisian professional. We invited a lot of dancers from the world and we created the National Ballet. It's classical and modern and, after I've done a lot of contemporary dance, dance theater all this, and a lot of theater.

Guillén: So it was through your dance performances that you achieved visibility? And then directors began approaching you to do film work?

Abdelli: No. I start to, like 10 years ago, I've done much Tunisian movies—Poupées d'argile [Clay Dolls] with Nouri Bouzid…

Guillén: Ah, so you were involved in an earlier film of his? [Poupées d'argile played at the 2005 Arab Film Festival.]

Abdelli: Yes. And he think about me and he tell me, "Maybe we work on the next film together?" When he just finished the script, he call me and he tell me, "Okay, there is script, and I think about you and what do you think?" I say, "It's okay." Everybody dream to work with Nouri Bouzid.

Guillén: Did you read the script before committing?

Abdelli: Yeah, I read the script. I read the script but Nouri change a lot. That mean for Nouri, a script is a script. But when he start to shoot, it's another thing. He can change a lot. He can improvise and develop it. When we start, you know, reality is not like when you write or read the script. It's not reality. And when we start the reality, that means the real thing start, and I ask him to explain to me which way we are going now because it's so fragile.

Guillén: These "making-of" sequences that are within the film—what we here in the States call breaking the fourth wall—were they scripted? Or did they develop out of your conversations with Nouri during the shooting of the film?


Abdelli: No, no, it was not in the script. But when we are making the film, there is a big tension between me and Nouri, a big discussion, and all the time we have some people with camera like this filming, and I tell him, "Okay, maybe tomorrow or after tomorrow, I don't know, when I will say stop. There is some points at some moment I want to speak with you about." He tell me, "Okay, let's speak now." I say, "No. We speak when it's time. Just be ready with your camera and we speak." He tell me, "What you want to tell me? Maybe we write something?" I tell him, "No. We write nothing."

Guillén: So you're telling me those sequences are verbatim discussions you're having with Nouri? They're not scripted? They were filmed and inserted as verité?

Abdelli: It was what I think. It was what Nouri think. And it was surprise for me what Nouri answer for me and I answer for him. He don't know. I don't know.

Guillén: For us here in the United States—and I'm always so apologetic for us because generally we're such ignorant, fearful Christians as a whole and know very little about any other religion except our own, namely Islam—Islam like Christianity or any major religion of the world has many different expressions?

Abdelli: Yes.

Guillén: In Tunisia, let's say, is there a particular local expression of Islam? Clearly, Making Of is against a fundamentalist approach towards Islam. I'm curious, how does contemporary Islam in Tunisia look upon your dancing?


Abdelli: It's not problem dancing in Tunisia or something like this. They are very open mind, Tunisian and Muslim Tunisian, and Muslim too, on dance. No problem for this. Our problem in Tunisia is with the fundamentalists. We didn't have problem. In our mind we didn't let fundamentalists grow up in our country. You can see Algeria. You can see Morocco. There are a lot of fundamentalists. But in our country we fight for this, Tunisian artists and government, we try to keep them out.

Guillén: Interestingly, there are many who would say that's the exact same problem we're having with Christian fundamentalists in the United States. The separation of church and state is something they are constantly trying to undo.

Abdelli: Yeah, yeah.

Guillén: In the process of making the film then, your objections to Nouri: were they because you were being asked to portray exactly this fundamentalist that you don't personally believe in? Why did you become frightened?

Abdelli: I afraid because sometimes I didn't understand. I want to understand perfectly what Nouri Bouzid want to do with me. It's not like love story, you can say, "It's okay, it's improvisation, you can do what you want, I feel you, nice feeling." No. This is about my religion. We can hurt a lot of people with this film. We can hurt a lot of Muslim. I don't want to do this. "This film," I tell him, "I want me and you, we have to work against the fundamentalists, not against Islam." Because I want to understand what's happen. For this I said, "Stop, now. What we are doing? What are the person talking with me? What you mean with this?" I want to understand because it's so nuanced.

Guillén: Do you think the concerns you expressed to Nouri helped shape the final film? Would Nouri have made the same film had you not been as concerned about these nuances?


Abdelli: I don't know because we made this. I don't know if maybe he's with another actor what he will do. It depends for the moment for the relation between the filmmaker and the actors. Me, I put my energy like in this way. I put my intelligence and my way of thinking to Nouri and I ask him. I don't know if maybe another actor to tell him, "Stop." Maybe he do his job. I don't know. I can't [say].

Guillén: But clearly Making Of did the right thing and expressed the nuance you were concerned about between criticizing fundamentalism and not specifically Islam? Audiences are relating to this film throughout the world. You've said that Tunisians are claiming this film, they're proud of it, it's speaking for them. So you are pleased with the final outcome? Your concerns have been met?

Abdelli: Yes. And I think Nouri is very intelligent because he put this making-of into the film to show some kind of reality for how we are vulnerable.

Guillén: Did you know he was going to do that?

Abdelli: No. He surprise me too.

Guillén: [Laughter.] He sounds like a lot of fun to work with!

Abdelli: Yes, it's very funny to work with Nouri. I tell you, there is no actor work with Nouri [that] didn't have award.

Guillén: One thing I have always wanted to understand about Islam—and not only Islam but in different areas of conflict in the world—is the essential role of women. It's as if the denigration of women, and the categorization of the female body as polluted, serves to create the rationalization for warfare. I was concerned with the scene in the film where you beat up your girlfriend. Can you talk a little bit about what you were feeling during that sequence? And what you hope is actually being said?

Abdelli: I like too much this scene because I think artistically it's very strong moment. It's a moment to show how we can change the way of perception for the girl. In the beginning for him, it's normal, and they indoctrinate him. He change the way to see the woman, you understand? He see her like a prostitute and it's important to show what's the danger, how it's dangerous this kind of thinking, you know? In our country it's easy to see a woman like European, dressing what she like. We [don't] oblige them to have this or this or this. They are free to go coffee. They are free to go dance. They are free to drink alcohol or to smoke. We have this freedom in Tunisia.

Guillén: I think it's so important for us here in the United States to realize that there are expressions of Islam that have these freedoms; that there is a free-minded, free-spirited expression for Muslims in their faith. That it is, indeed, comparable to Christianity.


Abdelli: Islam, it's like all the religions, you do what you want with it. You can take any religion. You can take anything. You can make terrorism with it. And you can take any religion and you can make peace. You can take art and make terrorism with art. You can make peace with art. It depends for the people. It depends for what you want. Some people want to war. Some people want the peace.

Guillén: I understand the reasoning for the film's ending and I thought your response at the film's Q&A regarding the ending of the film was absolutely appropriate; however, suicide is completely forbidden in Islam, is it not?

Abdelli: Yes.

Guillén: So where does this place this character Bahta? How are we then to perceive this character? Committing suicide, he's not a hero? Not only has he violated family bonds but he has gone against the Muslim faith.

Abdelli: He's not a hero. First, he kill himself because he is not intellectual. He is all the time play with thing, you know? He is like animal. He all the time don't think. He never think. Bahta is not somebody who can be intellectual, can understand what's happen, you know? He's not really good Muslim enough. If he's very good Muslim enough, he don't speak with these people. He understand from the first time that they are fundamentalist. This mean the problem of Bahta too is he is ignorant. He don't know what is Islam. For this, they can change his mind. For this, he can explode himself.

Guillén: Would you say the Tunisian government bears responsibility in any way for Bahta's lack of education and his ignorance? Are they responsible for such ignorance among young people?

Abdelli: Ignorance in young people is throughout the world.

Guillén: So it's the commonality of inexperience more than anything else?

Abdelli: Yes. In America you find lots of ignorant young people. In Tunis. In Paris, in France. Everywhere in the world, the problem. I don't know. All the governments, I think, are responsible, not only Tunisian.


Guillén: You mentioned at the Q&A that—if Bahta would have been allowed to go to Europe to pursue his love for dancing—perhaps there could have been a different outcome for his life. That's a veiled critique of the social pressures upon young people that do not allow them to manifest their dreams. I bring this up because I recently interviewed Mario Tronco, the artistic director of L'Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, and Agostino Ferrente, the filmmaker who recently made a documentary about the formation of the orchestra. The orchestra had several Tunisian musicians among its company. These were musicians who had emigrated to Italy from Tunisia who were having problems creating a new life for themselves in Rome. Mario had the vision of organizing a multicultural orchestra combining various musical traditions and traditional instruments from each country and his vision became a solution. The orchestra is a beautiful expression.

Abdelli: I did not see this.

Guillén: But there was an example where young Tunisians broke out of the limitations of their lives in Tunisia and found artistic expression and creative development in Europe. Is there anything the Tunisian government can do to further creative expression among Tunisia's youth?

Abdelli: But it's not only Tunisian government; it's people too. Tunisians have to think about children, about these young people. I think the Tunisian government too has to think more about this. We artists have to think about this too. How to help these people? It's not only one responsibility; it's all our responsibility. We have to do something for these young people.

Guillén: Before actually starting the interview, we talked a bit informally about my belief that you are capable of crossing over and becoming an international star if you want to be. Whether you want to be or not, is of course your choice. But you've definitely had such a success with this film—winning seven Best Actor awards to date while the film's been on the festival circuit—and through the film's circulation creating an international profile for yourself. What do you want to do? What do you hope this film will do and where do you want to go from here?


Abdelli: I hope this film [will] make people think with us and to make people believe that we can think and we can do a lot of good things and we can be good artists. This first. For me, I don't know. It's enough for me to do some films like this to push the people thinking. I hope to do more courageous film like this. I don't mind who's the producer or who the filmmaker—Tunisian, Israel or American—it's not my problem; but, I hope for the future I do this kind of films. Not only on terrorism but engaged activist film. I like these kind of movies.

Guillén: From how you have expressed yourself and represented Tunisia, the impression I'm getting is that Tunisia's actually a hip, smart, educated and brave country. Your participation in this project was brave, was it not?

Abdelli: Yes, but we have to do. If we don't do, who going to do this kind of participation? We have to do. We have to make the first step all the time. If you don't make the first step, there is no step, nothing. You are waiting. And we have enough to wait; we have to do something.

Guillén: Is there any director you would like to work with?

Abdelli: Yes, there is some French director, there is some Arabic director, I want to work with. Yousry Nasrallah maybe. He's Egyptian. [Bab el Shams (The Gate of the Sun) screened at the Arab Film Festival two years ago.] I want to work with the guy who has done Omaret Yacoubian (The Yacoubian Building), Marwan Hamed, we are a little bit friends. [The Arab Film Festival co-presented The Yacoubian Building with the San Francisco International Film Festival.]

Guillén: Well, I hope you get to work with such distinguished directors, Lotfi. I know you want to dance and do stage work, but, I encourage you to continue acting in film. Your physicality is eloquent and a distinct voice in cinema. I'm going to look forward to watching what you do in the years to come. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today and, again, I sincerely hope that your stay in San Francisco will remedy your unpleasant arrival and those bum five hours.

Abdelli: Thank you.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 AFF--Lotfi Abdelli Detained At San Francisco International Airport

Opening night for the Arab Film Festival was marred by the news that Lotfi Abdelli, the actor in the opening night feature Making Of, had been detained upon arrival at the San Francisco International Airport and questioned for nearly five hours by airport authorities regarding his possible terrorist leanings. They asked him, "What are you doing here?" He answered that he had been invited by the Arab Film Festival to accompany the opening night feature. He provided all his proper documentation. They waited a few minutes and began again, "What are you really doing here?" This went on for four and a half hours without the assistance of a translator or without word to his traveling companion and Kathy Kenny, chair of the festival's Board of Directors, who had arrived to pick him up.

This so outraged me that I negotiated a one-on-one interview with Lotfi to discuss the incident and that will be up on The Evening Class within the next few days. I further encouraged Kathy Kenny to contact the local media to report the incident. Michael Hawley, contributing writer here at The Evening Class took it upon himself to contact Leah Garchik at the San Francisco Chronicle to inform her as well. Garchik's column for today's Chronicle revealed the official explanation as being: "Artist or not, you are Arabic, you are young, you have potential."

I cannot express how sad and ashamed this makes me to be both a San Franciscan and an American citizen when the very tenor of a festival intended to promote communication and tolerance is met with thuggish law enforcement that prides itself on a misguided notion of how it is "protecting" its citizens. I do not believe that such harassment protects American citizens. I believe it breeds ill will and broadens the fissure between the people of the United States and the Mideast. It is not enough to say, "We are just doing our job." That rationalization has been used by henchmen throughout the ages, proving regretfully that the banality of evil continues to lie at our very doorstep.

The Evening Class profoundly regrets and condemns Abdelli's detainment at the airport and the official disregard of the festival's mission statement for further understanding and tolerance through the art of cinema. Michael Hawley and I both hope that the people of San Francisco themselves, the audiences at the festival, have helped to counter Abdelli's negative experience so that he can return to Tunisia with a clear perception that he was welcomed by San Francisco.

SILENT CINEMA—Faust, Czech Classics & Intolerance

San Francisco audiences have developed a taste for silent cinema accompanied by accomplished theatrical organists and contemporary ensembles and three programs are coming down the pipeline that I'd be remiss not to announce.

Halloween night, as part of the 25th San Francisco Jazz Festival, F.W. Murnau's Faust (1926) will be screened at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre accompanied by the Willem Breuker Kollektief. Though health will keep Breuker from attending in person, his original score for Faust will be performed by his Kollektief.


The following night, Thursday, November 1, Aquarius Records, Arthur Magazine, and the Dead Channels Film Festival present two mindblowing and ultra rare "Czech new wave" vampire masterpieces—Jiri Barta's The Last Theft (1987) and Jaromil Jires' Valerie and her Week of Wonders (1970)—at the Castro Theatre with live-in-the-theater-accompaniment by telemagnetic soundtrackstars Spoonbender 1.1.1 and shimmering 10-piece touring ensemble The Valerie Project!


Also at the Castro on December 1 The Silent Film Festival offers a triplebill: Vitaphone Vaudeville, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Louis B. Mayer's Flesh and the Devil (1926), accompanied by Dennis James on the Castro's Mighty Wurlitzer.

LANA TURNER—A Life of Her Own

You know how it is. I'm supposed to be covering the Arab Film Festival, or at least wrapping up my coverage of the Idaho International and the Mill Valley Film Festival. I'm supposed to be reading and reviewing a handful of books sent to me by various publishers on a half dozen film topics. I'm supposed to be hacking through the screeners stacked on my coffee table, which are at this juncture vertiginously leaning over the edge. Instead, I plop myself down in front of Turner Classic Movies and catch a morning broadcast of George Cukor's A Life Of Her Own (1950), thoroughly enjoying it along with my morning cup of Joe because—well—I'm not supposed to. A sure case of using a movie to get away from the movies. Been there?


Yes, A Life Of Her Own is a two-star meller with Lana Turner in the starring role playing a successful top model engaged in an adulterous affair with an anguished married man; but, the real star is Bronislau Kaper's haunting signature tune nominated for a Golden Globe for best original score. Apparently, when A Life Of Her Own didn't do too well at the box office, said melody was recycled two years later in Invitation (1952) so it wouldn't completely go to waste.


Hal Erickson synopsizes for All Movie Guide: "Lana Turner stars as an ambitious model who seeks her fortune in New York City. She is befriended by over-the-hill cover-girl Ann Dvorak, whose performance carries the story until she commits suicide twenty minutes into the film. Turner promises herself that she won't end up burned out like Dvorak, but as her fame grows, she is inexorably drawn into the hectic social whirl that sealed Dvorak's doom. Enjoying the favors of wealthy Ray Milland, Turner seeks out Milland's wife (Margaret Phillips), hoping to convince the woman to give up her husband. When she meets the crippled Mrs. Milland, Turner is made painfully aware of the length and breadth of the woman's love for her husband. Turner pulls out of the relationship, and we are encouraged to believe that hers will be a much happier and more fulfilling life than that of the unfortunate Ann Dvorak (ironically, in real life Ann Dvorak's final days were relatively contented ones, while Lana Turner spent her twilight years wondering where the looks, the men and the money had gone). Though not so noted in the credits, A Life of Her Own was inspired by The Abiding Vision, a novel by Rebecca West."

The reviews in 1950 were mixed. Variety excused the soap opera plotting as "polished to considerable extent" with "topnotch" performances by the femme cast under Cukor's able direction. They determined Lana Turner's performance was "a decided asset."


Bosley Crowther at the New York Times begged to differ, stating flatly, "Two years' absence from the movies obviously did not improve Lana Turner's talents as an actress or her studio's regard for what she can do." Turner's performance, Crowther explained, suffered for being "plainly self-conscious of her hair-do, her clothing, her billing and her bust." As for Lana's leading man Ray Milland, his "perpetual air of discomfort" indicated that "he had read the script." But among the shreds of the film left beside Crowther's desk, what most caught my attention in his review was the comment: "Somehow, while watching this picture, with its cliches, its lush inanities and its vacuum-sealed preoccupation with the two-bit emotions of one dame, it was difficult for this reviewer to believe that such a film had been made in this year, 1950, and with the world in the state that it is. Pictures like this were the fashion fifteen years ago, when the screen and its candy-munching audience were in a much more infantile stage."


In all fairness to time and other vagaries, it's precisely because of the world and the state it's in that A Life Of Her Own now proves to be disarming entertainment, distracting me from local responsibilities and global concerns with clever lines like "Talk to a lawyer and all you get is conversation" and "They ought to invent a new kind of ambition; one that doesn't wear out."

On a personal aside, I have to likewise express feeling heartened somewhat by the fact that 50-year-old film reviews still serve to amuse. I can only hope the same for the pros and cons here at The Evening Class.

2007 AFF—Ordure / Garbage

If Lotfi Abdelli's award-winning turn as Bahta in Nouri Bouzid's Making Of wins you over to his promising talent, you might want to check out as well his brief appearance in the U.S. premiere of Lotfi Achour's debut short film Ordure / Garbage (2007), wherein Abdelli plays a butcher who gives his girlfriend "full blows to shut her up and full condoms to make up for it." Abdelli applies the brooding intensity maximized in Making Of to his swift and questionably attractive characterization of the butcher in Garbage. The pitch of his intensity is reminiscent of early DeNiro in Taxi Driver or Edward Norton in American X. Abdelli's got the chops, the looks, the conflicted sensuality, and a long future to hone it perfect.

The lead actor in Achour's short slice of life, however, is Nôomane Hamda as Mounir, a night watchman who becomes comforted in his life of isolation and loneliness by the strange passion he cultivates for rubbish left behind by his neighbor Latifa, with whom he is secretly in love. Mounir takes possession of Latifa's garbage and becomes the secret witness of her life, which is anything but dull. This raises the ugly head of what I discussed with Cartoneros director Ernesto Livon-Grosman: just how private is our garbage anyways?

Cross-published on Twitch.

THE PLAYBOY INTERVIEWS: THE DIRECTORS

Stephen Randall, the Deputy Editor at Playboy magazine and editor of Playboy's monthly Interviews, has applied his editorial talents to compiling The Playboy Interviews: The Directors, published by MPress. He has selected 17 subjects who best represent a window into the creative minds of some of cinema's true artists—alphabetically, Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, Joel and Ethan Coen, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Federico Fellini, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, David Mamet, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Orson Welles and Billy Wilder—spanning nearly 40 years from the June 1963 interview with Billy Wilder to the November 2001 interview with the Coen Brothers. Eastwood and Stone are each interviewed twice, decades apart, to provide a fuller grasp of the span of their careers.

Publishers Weekly has stated "the lengthy, unpredictable interviews prove compelling throughout" and add that "Since the interviews have no length restriction, interviewers are able to probe deep into their subjects and allow them to ramble expansively. While some of the material is dated, most of the interviews were conducted during particularly fertile periods for their subjects, resulting in a detailed snapshot of where these directors were at pivotal career moments."

Booklist cautions that "Serious cineastes may be disappointed that the pieces offer less on individual movies than on filmmaking in general and personality-driven anecdotes. Their digressions, however, often fascinate…."

As the book's liner notes lay out: "Movies are today's lingua franca, speaking to us on an emotional and intellectual level that no other art form can match. While there have been many great films, only a few directors have raised the motion picture to its highest level. In The Playboy Interviews: The Directors, 17 of the world's most widely respected and creative filmmakers discuss with the writers of Playboy what drives and inspires their craft."

In his introduction to the collection Stephen Randall relates that "Hugh Hefner has said that his view of the world was forged in the darkened theaters of his youth." Hefner's editorial approach towards the interviews in his magazine, however, came about in 1962, when Playboy was a mere eight years old. As the liner notes detail: "Hugh Hefner was shown a partial manuscript by a young writer named Alex Haley. The manuscript was actually a transcript of an interview Haley had done with Miles Davis. Hefner was struck by two things: Davis's fiery intelligence, and the fact that the transcript didn't focus strictly on music, but gave Davis a chance to share his views on race, government and society. Hefner dispatched Haley to continue interviewing Davis, and ran the edited transcript as the first Playboy Interview."

Along with Playboy's centerfold pleasures, reading these interviews as a young boy admittedly had much to do with how I approach my subjects today, striving not only for in-depth appreciation of their current projects, but situating them within the political and socio-cultural climate of our times. "Directors often talk to the media to promote their films," Randall stresses in his introduction, "but rarely do they get the opportunity to speak about other aspects of their lives, including the forces and events that have shaped their vision."

I look forward to exploring this volume to see not only how these gifted directors think and work, but how the structure of the interviews themselves might hone my own interviewing technique here on The Evening Class. Anticipate running commentary on this volume of work in the months to come and if any of my readers are familiar with these specific interviews, please speak up.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 AFF—Making Of

At the 2006 Carthage Film Festival—the biannual October film festival hosted by the government of Tunisia—Nouri Bouzid's Making Of won the festival's grand prize: the Tanit d'or, or "Golden Tanit" (named for the lunar goddess of ancient Carthage; the award is in the shape of her symbol).

As the opening night feature of the 11th Annual Arab Film Festival ("AFF"), Making Of offers Bay Area audiences an intriguing conceit: Brecht in Tunisia. As the AFF program capsule cites: "Nouri Bouzid shows the audience the parallels between the creation or 'making of' a suicide bomber from an apolitical young man, and the direction of an actor in a controversial role that both he and his director are uncomfortable with. Thus, director Bouzid stages a debate within his own film concerning the causes of terrorism and the burdens on those (like him and his cast) who are bold enough to try to represent it in cinema." True to Brecht, the film makes you think more than feel and encourages argument about the ideas it suggests. Breaking the proscenium allows the ideas to gain a staged complexity.


Along with winning the Golden Tanit at the Carthage Film Festival, Lotfi Abdelli won Best Actor for his lead performance; a win he has since repeated at the Ouagadougou Panafrican Film and Television Festival (FESPACO); Le Festival International du Film d'Amour de Mons in Belgium; the Tetouan Mediterranean Film Festival in Morocco; the Tribeca Film Festival in New York; and the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily.

As Michael Hawley has indicated, Abdelli's award-winning performance as Bahta is the main reason to watch this film. Variety's Ronnie Scheib concurs that—despite the film's "erratic itinerary"—as a central character Bahta is "brilliantly conceived and thesped" and Abdelli's "edgy, agonized performance" illuminates "the tortured complexity and restlessness of Tunisian youth."


Alongside his theatre and film work, Abdelli is a professional dancer trained at the Ballet Théâtre National and the Tunisian Ballet National and engaged with Tunisia's important ballet and dance ensembles, including the Théâtre de la danse company, which he helped found. The film's early breakdancing sequences are quite thrilling and enforce the film's Brechtian premise that—hired onto the film as a break-dancer and without having read the entire script—Abdelli objects when he discovers the script has his character Bahta being indoctrinated as a terrorist. His protests force Director Bouzid to break the fourth wall and enter the take in an attempt to counter his actor's reluctance and to complete the film as both a fiction and a documentary. This layering of narratives and usage of a film within the film is fueled and sustained by Abdelli's charismatic performance and—though these cinematic devices might prove annoyingly transparent to Western audiences—it should be kept in mind (as the Festival Cinema Africano program capsule contextualizes) that Making Of "offers one of the most original and in depth approaches by Arab cinema to the issue of terrorism, developing the 'unconventional' aspect of religious extremism that is highly appealing to young people lacking self-confidence and rejected by a society that has no respect for them." (Italics mine.) Contextualizing the effort might deepen the appreciation.


A staccato "music video" of the film with some additional footage of Making Of's festival win at Carthage can be found here.

Arab Film Festival attendees have three opportunities to catch Making Of: Opening night, Thursday, 10/18, 7:30PM, Clay Theater, San Francisco; Saturday, 10/20, 9:45PM, Camera 12, San Jose; and Sunday, 10/21, 7:00PM, Roxie Cinema, San Francisco. Check the festival's website for ticketing and venue information.

Cross-published on Twitch.

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL—The Chronicle Interview With Ryan Gosling

I thoroughly enjoyed Lars and The Real Girl when I caught it at Toronto and wrote it up at that time for The Evening Class. Since then, Dave Hudson has gathered up the critical fanfare at the Greencine Daily with his usual skill. Onto that consummate list, I add Pam Grady's interview with Ryan Gosling for the San Francisco Chronicle, wherein I discovered that Ryan was a Mousketeer and that—as I suggested—he too was thinking of Jimmy Stewart's Harvey while performing Lars.

Cross-published on Twitch. Photo courtesy of Jason Gemnich/WireImage for TIFFG.

TRIPLE BILL—Maria Montez, Sabu & Jack Smith

This last Saturday on my way to enjoy African cinema at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I picked up a copy of the San Francisco Bay Guardian at the newsstand and came across a brief mention of a Maria Montez triplebill at the Castro Theatre—Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves, The Cobra Woman, and Arabian Nights—scheduled for the following day. Suddenly, I experienced a true cinephilic dilemma: would I be "serious" and attend the sampling of New Romanian cinema at Mill Valley the following day, for which I'd already secured press passes? Or would I opt out and pay for triple slam camp?

What can I tell you? There I was, one of the first in line, to hunker down for afternoon matinees of three prime vehicles of The Queen of Technicolor. Do I regret my decision? Not in the slightest. Watching Ali Baba & The 40 Thieves, The Cobra Woman and Arabian Nights in sequence proved to be not only relaxed fun but a heady exercise in spectatorial relativity. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. I'll start with Cobra Woman, which I'd seen once before when Kenneth Anger admitted to playing hookey from high school to catch it at his local theater.


It's always fascinating to me what shifts into the realm of camp and what can be "read" by new audiences into old cinematic texts. For me this is a determinant of the shelf life of any film; precisely how it can be recontextualized to suit contemporary appetites. I know there are some who believe films should be left alone and appreciated on their originally-intended merits; I just don't think that's going to happen. It is the nature of film to be malleable. The last time I saw Cobra Woman, no one laughed when the Queen pronounced, "Fear has made them religious fanatics!" This time it got a good huzzah, indicating (I guess) that we've learned something about fear and religious fanaticism in recent years, and are ripe for a jest about it; truth, after all, often being said in jest.


For any self-respecting gay man, it's almost requisite after watching Cobra Woman that you turn to the friend beside you and demand, "Give me that cobra jewel!" [pronounced "Geef me that Coparah chewel!"]. It actually made me laugh to hear it repeated throughout the Castro audience as if a flock of tropical parrots had perched on the Castro's seatbacks. Some lines are just so fun, I guess, they make us happy to repeat them. This also has something to do, I suspect, with what Gayatri Gopinath in her pioneering study of queer diasporas in South Asian public cultures—Impossible Desires—identifies as the fantasy space wherein queer spectators can contest and resist heteronormative hegemonies. It is in fantastic and exaggerated scenarios that queers can frequently imagine and insert themselves as being or belonging. That's not to say that anyone who feels a little different growing up can't access fantastic scenarios, but for many young queers the access becomes necessarily restricted to these imaginary realms when, conversely, the reality of their very being is questioned, denied and rendered invisible or, worse yet, non-existent. If you can't be the sentence on the page; then you must discover yourself in the margin. If you can't be like the other little boys on your block; then you must see yourself in another world of fantastic creatures engaged in tremendous adventures. A towel wrapped around the head will turn you into Ali Baba, Sinbad, Aladdin. At least, that's what happened to me when I wrapped a towel around my head.


The association of Maria Montez with queerdom is well documented, especially with regard to Jack Smith's adoration and iconic reclamation of her. And for myself, aware of Smith's adulation, and aware of Smith's key role in the development of experimental cinema in the U.S., it is impossible for me to watch these Technicolor fantasies without factoring Smith into the viewing equation and to contemplate the seminal role of queer resistance in the development of the American avante-garde.

Gary Morris writes for Bright Lights Film Journal: "Smith was raised on Hollywood kitsch, and … his patron saint Maria Montez—to whom he built an altar and prayed—inspired him. Always a good talker, he insisted on Montez's importance as an actress to all who would listen (and there were many). He called her 'the Holy One' and 'the Miraculous One.' After a screening of one of her films, he told a friend, 'The Miraculous One was raging and flaming. Those are the standards for art.'

"Smith's own standards for art let him refashion Montez and the whole ethos of tinny Orientalia, low-budget intrigues, and what he called Universal's 'cowhide thongs and cardboard sets' into Dionysian revels that were both wild camp and subtle polemic in upsetting an overflowing apple cart of norms: heterosexuality, narrative, social and sexual and aesthetic repressions."


Apparently Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures—his best known controversial featurette—was directly formulated from Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves, even superimposing portions of the Ali Baba soundtrack. Flaming Creatures likewise mocked the elaborate cataclysm of Cobra Woman. Smith achieved his earthquake, Morris advises, "in the simplest manner imaginable—by shaking the camera." (For those curious, time has rendered Flaming Creatures tame enough to be available for download on Ubuweb.)

Senses of Cinema contributor Constantine Verevis writes: "According to writer Ronald Tavel, Smith, while working as an usher at Chicago's Orpheum Theater in 1951, was introduced to the films of Maria Montez when news of her untimely death inspired a retrospective: 'It was then and there [that Smith] became familiar with the star whom he has since referred to as The Wonderful One or The Marvelous One. He felt that all the secrets of the cinema lay in careful study of [that] woman.' Montez embodied for Smith the 'magic' of the movies and his film and later theatre work is filled with references to specific Montez pictures, and to Hollywood exotica more generally."


Smith elevated Montez in his aesthetic manifesto "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez", published in Film Culture 27 (Winter 1962–63): 28–36. When Mary Jordan's recent documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis was screened at New York's Film Forum, Karen Cooper asserted: "If there is a heaven for the wonderfully bizarre, Jack Smith resides there, accompanied by his patron saint, Maria Montez."

So what was it exactly about Maria Montez that created such an aesthetic arrest in Jack Smith? Clearly, as Wikipedia enunciates, "Her Latin beauty soon made her the centerpiece of Universal's Technicolor costume adventures, notably the six in which she was teamed with Jon Hall—Arabian Nights (1942), White Savage (1943), Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves (1944), Cobra Woman (1944), Gypsy Wildcat (1944), and Sudan (1945)." Wikipedia further specifies that Arabian Nights—the first in this series of exotic tales released by Universal during the war years—"bears the distinction of being the first film by Universal to use the 3 strip Technicolor film process."


Was it that when she looked at herself, Montez declared: "I am so beautiful I scream with joy"? It couldn't have been her acting. In fact, after Arabian Nights I smiled to myself when I overheard one guy say to his companion, "She almost acted in that one!" But—if not her acting—it might have been her ability to make believe. In Smith's own assessment of Montez, he wrote: "At least in America a Maria Montez could believe she was the Cobra Woman, the Siren of Atlantis, Scheherezade, etc. She believed and thereby made the people who went to her movies believe." Robert Siodmak, director of Cobra Woman, concurs: "Montez was a great personality and believed completely in her roles—if she was to play a princess you had to treat her like one all through lunch ... method acting before its time, you might say!" And Lucita, Maria's sister, recounts this advice given to her by Maria: "The first thing a young lady should do for being an actress is to believe she is the most beautiful and important of all the women who live on Earth. In other words, behave as if you were a queen. Do not be afraid in front of any of the directors, not even how exigent and ill-tempered they could look to you. Remember, my dear Lucita, it is the public and not them, who has the last word."

Steve Gallagher quotes from Smith's essay "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez" for his Filmmaker review of Mary Jordan's documentary: "Critics are writers. They like writing—and written characters.... Maria Montez's appeal [on the other hand] was on a purely intuitive level. She was the bane of critics—that person whose effect cannot be known by words, described by words, flaunts words (her image spoke)."

That quality of immersing oneself in make-believe is further characterized by its apparent lack of politicization. Having recently interviewed the talent behind The Kite Runner regarding the painstaking detail with which they re-created Afghanistan before the Russian invasion and the rise of the Taliban, Technicolor's insouciance borders on the negligent, if it weren't so preposterously entertaining. Feigned accents in broken English transform Hollywood actors into Arabs, though Andy Devine doesn't even try in Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves. His colloquial inflections reek of backwater America. The slipshod pretense is charming.


So along with the reclamative project of queer spectatorship, Arabian Nights and Cobra Woman offers the intriguing casting of Sabu through Hollywood's reductive lens of ethnic hierarchy. Sabu Dastagir was a child star allegedly "discovered" in Mysore, India by British producer Alexander Korda in the mid-30s who went on to star in Orientalist vehicles throughout the 1940s and 1950s, first in the UK and then in Hollywood. Though to the generation of his time Sabu might have been seen as "having made it", a symbol of immigrant success, contemporary theorists such as Gayatri Gopinath interpret Sabu as "nothing more than an anachronistic emblem of Orientalist and colonialist fantasies of perpetually childlike, effeminized 'native' men." Watching his lithe, lovely body, there is something very sad about the image of Sabu on the screen. As Gopinath summarizes: "Sabu, we are told, attempted to transform his childhood success in British cinema into adult stardom in Hollywood, only to be plagued by racism within both sites. His career steadily declined in the post-World War II era, and in his penultimate role he was reduced to playing the native 'boy' sidekick—at the age of thirty-eight—opposite Robert Mitchum in the 1963 jungle adventure film Rampage. Sabu thus remains perpetually frozen as the 'wonderful, graceful, frank, intelligent child' who so entranced British film director Michael Powell, who cast him in the lead role in The Thief of Baghdad in 1940." (2005:70)


And finally, as if to counter the folly of all cinematic illusion, a moviegoer must content themselves within the moment of projection, when the movies exist in and of themselves flickering colorfully in the dark, outside of the troubling parameters of the real and ragged lives of their casts. Maria Montez died of drowning in her bath tub after suffering a heart attack. Jon Hall killed himself, unable to bear the pain of encroaching cancer. Sabu—doomed to be forever youthful—died at 39 from a heart attack. Even Vera West—responsible for designing Maria Montez's lustrous gowns for Cobra Woman (let alone the wedding gown of the Bride of Frankenstein)—was found dead in her pool, by suicide, escaping blackmail.

All the more reason to celebrate the movies, and the make believe that has survived.

2007 AFF—Michael Hawley's Preview

The Arab Film Festival ("AFF") is one of the essential reasons why film-going in the Bay Area is so rich. But please don't call it the Bay Area Arab Film Festival or even the San Francisco Arab Film Festival—it's simply THE Arab Film Festival, the largest of its kind in the nation. This year's edition (the festival's 11th) features an impressive selection of 44 narrative and documentary features, a like number of shorts, and will take place from October 18-28 in San Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose. Then in a festival first, the whole show will travel south to Los Angeles for a five-day run starting October 31.

Another first for this year's festival is the creation of an annual, juried cash-prize award which will be presented in Feature, Documentary and Short film categories. The prize is called the Noor Award (named after the Arab word for light, not the queen of Jordan) and will be presented at a special Awards Night Reception & Ceremony at the Castro Theater on Thursday, October 25th. Following the ceremony, the festival will screen its Centerpiece Film, director Hala Khalil's Egyptian comedy Kas Wa Lazk (Cut and Paste).

I've attended the festival for most of its first decade and watched it grow from a handful of weekend screenings to its present grand expanse (a development which seems directly related to our increased awareness of the Arab world in general). Every year I come away from the festival feeling like I've seen the best cinema the region and its diaspora has to offer. And sometimes I see films that, when I look back at year's end, rank among my favorites of the year (Yousry Nasrallah's The City in 2001 comes immediately to mind). The only year I specifically remember not attending was in 2005, when I blew what was probably the only chance I'll ever have to see Nasrallah's five-hour epic, Gate of the Sun.

For this year, artistic director Sonia El Feki has put together a program that is half comprised of her favorites from recent festivals in Carthage and Cairo, and half from submissions made directly to the festival itself. I've had an opportunity to preview a half-dozen selections, and can attest that another fine assemblage of movies awaits this year's festival go-ers.


Things get off to a great start with the opening night screening of Nouri Bouzid's making-of-a-suicide-bomber film, titled appropriately enough, Making Of. This is the first Bouzid film I've seen since his notable 1986 debut, Man of Ashes, but a quick on-line check reveals that he has written or co-written most of the Tunisian films I've seen in the past 20 years, including Halfaouine: Child of the Terraces, A Summer in La Goulette, and Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palace and The Season of Men. His new film is a compelling, if perhaps occasionally overwrought tale of how a hotheaded, charismatic young breakdancer named Bahta is manipulated by fundamentalists into committing the ultimate in self-sacrifice.

The film's title, as it turns out, has a double meaning. Well into the movie we find ourselves being taken outside the narrative, in the first of several scenes where lead actor Lotfi Abdelli bitterly argues with director Bouzid about the direction the film's story is taking. My initial reaction to this film-within-a-film device was a wary one. But as an outsider to the culture being depicted, I soon came to appreciate the added context these fiery actor/director exchanges provided. Abdelli's incredible performance, by the way, is what makes Making Of a must-see (he's won several Best Actor prizes at various festivals, including Tribeca). If you can't attend opening night, the film will be screened two more times during the run of the festival.


I can also strongly recommend two interesting documentaries I previewed, Leila Khaled: Hijacker and I Love HipHop in Morocco. The former is a thoughtful profile of the strikingly beautiful Palestinian woman who would become notoriously known as the world’s first female hijacker. In 1969, 25-year-old Khaled commandeered a Rome-Athens TWA flight in order to force the world's attention upon the plight of Palestinians. A year later, after the first of six plastic surgeries undertaken to disguise her appearance, she would unsuccessfully attempt to hijack an Amsterdam-New York El Al flight. (For what it's worth, no one was killed or injured in either of these incidents). Khaled was a teen idol to the film's director Lina Makboul, who was raised in Sweden by Palestinian parents. As an adult, she found herself less certain about Khaled's goals and methodology, and sought to find out whether Khaled herself remained unrepentant.

After a brief history of the Palestinian cause, the film's first half focuses in detail on the two hijackings, and includes present day interviews with the flight crews and passengers. In the second half we travel to Jordan and meet Khaled, where she lives a fairly ordinary life as a housewife and member of the Palestinian National Council. It's a bit strange reconciling the chain-smoking older woman we see vacuuming the house in her pajamas, with the popular image of Khaled as "terrorist." We learn that she has few regrets about her past, and on the issue of terrorism, she declares, "Who decides and defines what terrorism is? As far as I'm concerned, occupation is terrorism." Of all the questions she's asked in the film, however, I was most fascinated by her ambivalent response to the query of whether she believes in God. "Sort of," she replies. "We must say so, I guess." Those are pretty brave words to speak in a culture that places belief in God above all else.


Reconciling one's religion with one's lifestyle is a dilemma faced by nearly all the subjects of Joshua Asen and Jennifer Needleman's fascinating I Love Hip Hop in Morocco. Asen received a Fulbright grant to study the effects of hip hop on Moroccan youth culture, and the resulting film effectively captures a movement in the making. The film's narrative arc is found in the anticipation of Morocco's first hip hop music festival. We're given a nuts-and-bolts look at what goes into making the festival happen—from the securing of artists, venues and technicians—to the all-important procurement of sponsorships. Interestingly, half the money for the festival ends up coming from the U.S. Cultural Attaché (a use of my tax dollars which I heartily approve) and the other half from Coca-Cola (because “Sprite is for freshness and liberty.”)

The balance of the film features intimate portraits of the artists who will perform in the festival. We meet DJ Key (Morocco's #1 turntableist), top-rated Meknes-based crew H-Kayne, Fnaïre (who combine vocal harmonics, beatboxing and traditional Arab rhythms), English-rapping Brownfingaz, and Fati, the film's (and perhaps the entire country's) lone female MC. As one might expect, the film's exhilarating highlight is the festival itself, wherein 36,000 fist-pumping Moroccan youths appear to be having the time of their lives.


Two narrative features in the festival share a similar story structure—that is—one in which we follow the exploits of a young man over the course of one night in a capital city. Michel Kammoun's Falafel is perhaps the more solid of the two, and has been rightly compared to Martin Scorsese's After Hours. The film's good-natured protagonist Tou, sets off for a night of partying with friends in Beirut. Before long, however, an incident involving a thug, a gun and a scratched car sends him recklessly wandering through the night seeking revenge. He experiences several vaguely, and not-so-vaguely threatening encounters during his nocturnal odyssey, which together serve as a metaphor for the psychological aftermath of the city's 15-year civil war. I had a bit of trouble accepting the rashness of Tou's dangerous pursuit of justice, based on the personality we've become acquainted with in the film's first section. But Kammoun's astute ending, literally and figuratively, manages to bring it all home for us quite nicely.


There's hardly anything "nice" about Jilani Saadi's nihilistic, Tunis-set Ors El Dhib (Tender is the Wolf). Our nighttime protagonist on this outing is Stoufa, an immature, unemployed 30-ish layabout who loiters on street corners with his like-minded buddies, drinking and smoking dope. When neighborhood prostitute Saloua ticks them off with her sharp tongue, they all gang-rape her except for Stoufa. He ends up taking the blame, however, and is beaten into unconsciousness. He'll spend the rest of the night confronting his friends and trying to extract revenge on Saloua and her protectors.

I admired this film for the consistency of its dark tone, but thought the director made several missteps. He tries to conjure up empathy for Stoufa's friends, an absurd impossibility after the brutal gang-rape scene, and then presents us with an equally absurd romantic encounter between Stoufa and Saloua. Even worse is his repeated use of a ticking digital clock, a la TV's 24. Saadi does comes up with some nice visual flourishes, such as a recurring God's-eye-view of the action done with black and white digital video. There's also a lyrical tracking shot that follows Stoufa's trip to the hospital, his naked and unconscious body riding atop a garbage cart. Actor Mohamed Hassine Graya has a commanding screen presence as Stoufa, and the other actors turn in generally fine performances as well. All of which makes Tender is the Wolf worth a look, especially if you take an interest in the grimier side of humanity.

Set in the 1930's and 1940's, Selma Baccar's Koshkhash (Flower of Oblivion) is a Tunisian pot-boiler about one woman's descent into drug addiction and insanity. When we first meet Zakia she's being dragged into the nut house, in a scene that's so over-the-top the only thing missing is a guy who thinks he's Napoleon. Once she's in her cell and comfortably straight-jacketed, we learn in a series of flashbacks what it was that put her there. Married into a well-to-do family complete with a gay husband and horrible mother-in-law, Zakia miraculously manages to give birth to a baby girl. To soothe her postpartum pains, she's given an infusion of poppies which over the years grows into a monster-sized addiction (she even marries her daughter off to a guy who owns acres of poppy fields). The movie cuts back and forth between this tale of ruination and her stint in the asylum, where a budding romance with a fellow patient might help her regain her marbles.

Although this a film I would probably classify as a guilty pleasure, there were some things about it that genuinely impressed me. First, it provides a fascinating look at the social mores and rituals of upper class Tunisian society at a certain period of time, with top notch sets and costumes. The other aspect that caught my attention was a rather sympathetic portrayal of Zakia's gay husband. He's not depicted as a villain, but simply as a man who's trapped in a life not of his choosing. And when his mother banishes the male servant with whom he's been happily sharing a bed, it's touching to watch the look of empathetic sadness on Zakia's face for this man she's long considered her rival. It's a point of quiet elegance in a film that's largely painted with broad strokes.


Because nothing beats seeing a movie with an audience on a big screen, I've saved a number of films to watch during the festival proper. I'm most looking forward to VHS Kahloucha, which I understand is a hilarious documentary about an amateur Tunisian filmmaker helming no-budget big-scale epics. As a fan of Arab films, I'm also anxious to see Arab Cinema: The State of Things, a documentary which includes interviews with some of my favorite filmmakers such as Moufida Tlatli and Yousry Nasrallah. I'm very curious about What a Wonderful World, a neo-film noir set in Casablanca, and A Perfect Day, a Lebanese film that explores the lives of youth in contemporary Beirut. And finally on a lighter note, I'm anticipating this year's breakout hit film from Egypt, Awqat Faragh (Leisure Time), the aforementioned Centerpiece Film, Cut and Paste, and a nostalgic look at a young boy's love for cinema in 1950's Tangiers, A Muslim Childhood.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 MVFF30—Frako Loden on Three Docs

Filmbud Frako Loden offers up some off-the-hip commentary on three documentaries she caught at this year's Mill Valley Film Festival.

Chicago 10—An energetic and engaging but superficial account of the police brutality on demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the subsequent conspiracy trial. As an historical account the film is useless—it doesn't even mention who the Democratic nominee was (Hubert Humphrey) and makes a glancing reference to the assassination of Martin Luther King but not Bobby Kennedy's. I still don't understand the title—who are the two additional defendants? The film's decided emphasis is on Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the most ostentatious and media-savvy of the defendants and the figures most likely to inspire the youth of today. Since there are no images from the trial, the film employs motion-capture computer animation and famous voices (Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo) to repeat words from the trial transcripts, with an emphasis on the funny and most dramatic lines. Interspersed with the trial is a recounting of the days leading to the final police assaults using vivid archival footage. Rage Against the Machine stands in for MC5 doing "Kick Out the Jams." For me, the overall effect of the film was to say that the leaders of that antiwar generation were cool and sexy—a great ensemble cast for a future live-action film—and that they had a more challenging political climate to fight against, given Mayor Richard Daley's determination to subdue the demonstrators, charges of Communism still alive in the late '60s, and a war where troops were being killed at many times the number dying currently in Iraq.


Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm is a documentary detailing the history of massage tools (i.e., the vibrator), the 1970s movement to encourage women's masturbation (Betty Dodson), and the 2004 arrest of a Texas woman for selling vibrators to undercover cops. I don't know if it's still true, but in 2004 Texas it was illegal to own more than six vibrators because that implied you were selling them, and it's against the law to sell devices that stimulate the genitals (although there's no problem with the advertising and sale of Viagra). The history of vibrators for the treatment of "hysteria" is fascinating, and accounts of a woman's first orgasm are a tearful delight. Reno the performance artist's comments on this or that were hilarious. It was frustrating to hear about a slide show featuring all the different shapes and sizes of vulvae and not being able to see it ourselves (the film instead uses floral imagery and time-lapse photography of blooms opening and closing)—directors Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori's explanation that they wanted to keep the film "mainstream" since its subject matter was already such a problem was understandable but still frustrating.


So far my favorite documentary at Mill Valley is Soldiers of Conscience, featuring the stories of a number of soldiers who, already in the military, decided they couldn't take lives and either deserted or refused movement. This is an impeccably argued film about an individual's considered decision, after much reflection, not to follow orders to kill. We were sad not to see Lt. Ehren Watada (whose court-martial has been postponed to the end of this month) among them, but apparently his refusal came after the shooting of this film. It opens with some astonishing statistic, I forget the details, about a vast majority of soldiers never firing their weapon once. And that most people, faced with the kill-or-be-killed scenario, simply refuse to kill. It argues that the highest assertion of one's freedom is to listen to one's conscience, and that conscience is wired to have empathy for one's fellow.

Cross-published on Twitch.

BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT—The Wired Interview With Ridley Scott

Switching replicants in the middle of a dystopian dream can get you wet and sometimes scolded, as director Ridley Scott discovered with recent commentary surrounding the release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. One gets the sense that audiences feel entitled to their initial experiences of a film and they don't take too well to said experiences being tampered with, either through a director who's poised to deliver his vision as he initially intended it, or through state-of-the-art technology that can visually perfect it.

Whether or not you feel that Ridley Scott is pulling a fast one by now claiming that Deckard was always intended to be a replicant, and whether or not that makes you feel differently about the film's narrative thrust, or whether or not that admission adds heft to a project that was already heavily-loaded with gravitas, you can decide for yourself when the five (that's right, count 'em, five)-disc DVD release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut hits the shelves in December. Until then, Ted Greenwald's interview with Ridley Scott for Wired (Issue 15:10) offers keen insight into the director's current stance with some sweet reminisces from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Zack Snyder, Raymond Kelly, J. Craig Venter, Thom Mayne, Ray Kurzweil, Mamoru Oshii, and Moby about what Blade Runner meant to them when they first saw it.


One of my favorite bits, albeit a throwaway without much explanation, is Scott's admission that he consciously chose to go Asian with his futuristic scenario rather than Hispanic. Several Chicano theorists have criticized Scott for what they feel is an inaccurate depiction of the future San Angeles.

Twitch, of course, has been all over this, since Todd Brown's initial announcement back in May, Aardvark's follow-up in July, and Todd's most recent update in August when it was announced the film would screen in Venice. Fred Kaplan at The New York Times covered the Final Cut's late September appearance at The New York Film Festival.

Photo of Ridley Scott courtesy of Robert Maxell and Wired Magazine. Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 IIFF: CARTONEROS—The Evening Class Interview With Ernesto Livon-Grosman

Many years ago in my mid-20s I studied with a Hopi medicine woman whose first lesson to me was that—if I did not handle my own garbage—I could do nothing for the Earth. That stern primer in recycling has stayed with me all these years.

When I reviewed the Idaho International Film Festival line-up, the first film that stood out to me was Ernesto Livon-Grosman's 60-minute documentary Cartoneros, which—as the IIFF program capsule synopsizes—"follows the paper recycling process in Buenos Aires from the trash pickers who collect paper informally through middlemen in warehouses, to executives in large corporate mills. Five years ago, a severe financial crisis left Argentina reeling, putting millions out of work and into financial distress—today, in fact, more than 30 percent of the country lives below the poverty line. One particular trend borne of the economic is the increasing number of cartoneros, the poor residents of Buenos Aires and vicinity who make their living by collecting and selling recyclable paper and other materials.

"Between 25,000 and 30,000 people comb through the city's 4,500 daily tons of garbage every night, picking out paper, cardboard, metal, and glass in an effort to support themselves and their families. The scope and variety of cartoneros' enterprises so intrigued Livon-Grosman that he wound up making a documentary about it, in the process discovering the complexity of recycling and its social, political and cultural implications. The film is both a record of an economic and social crisis and an invitation to audiences to rethink the value of trash."

Ernesto Livon-Grosman was born and raised in Buenos Aires. In his early twenties, he moved to Patagonia, where he developed an interest in the history and the politics of that region. He later published Geografias imaginarias, a study about travel writers who created a mythical iconography of the Patagonian landscape, one in which the region is viewed as an uninhabited space despite the indigenous groups that have been living in the area for centuries. During the last military dictatorship, Livon-Grosman emigrated to Costa Rica. He went back to Argentina in 1983 after the return of the democratic government. He now lives in the Boston area where he teaches literature and film at Boston College.


His documentary Cartoneros begins with a quoted poem by Baudelaire:

Here we have a man who has to gather
the day’s refuse in the capital city.
Everything that the big city threw away,
everything it lost,
everything it despised,
everything it crushed underfoot,
he catalogs and collects.

The documentary then proceeds to ask a series of pointed questions that I felt were hardhitting for being so timely:

What do you do with your garbage?

What turns a person into a scavenger? Unemployment? Hunger? A desire to work independently? An interest in ecology?

What bothers you most about garbage? The smell? How hard it is to get rid of? The idea of wasting something that could be useful?

I contacted Ernesto Livon-Grosman through the film's distributor and he graciously consented to an interview.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Nancy Babine's write-up on Cartoneros for New England Film informatively provides the backstory on the making of your documentary so I won't pursue that so much; but, I did want to follow through on a few points that were of interest to me. A couple of years back I had the welcome opportunity to speak with Fernando Solanas about his documentary The Dignity of the Nobodies when it screened at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival. Cartoneros could easily serve as compañero to Dignity of the Nobodies, especially with its focus on the urban center of Buenos Aires. Being someone who teaches about documentaries, who were your influences in shaping Cartoneros?


Ernesto Livon-Grosman: I did have influences, although the filmmakers that I like very much, people who triggered my first interest for documentary making and documentaries in general, are not necessarily visible in Cartoneros. One of them, is Fernando Birri, who was one of the founders of the New Latin American Cinema or the Third Cinema, in which Solanas was certainly a key member. Birri is the first who comes to my mind but not necessarily by any means the only one. Other directors I watched time and again, even though I wouldn't dare or even try in imitating but who are very close to my heart are people like Chris Marker and—to some extent though for different reasons—Jean Rouch. The impact of their work could be seen in the fact that Cartoneros has a clear ethnographic take.

Guillén: You utilized some structural devices that caught my attention, namely your use of split screen. What prompted you towards the split screening?

Livon-Grosman: The idea behind the split-screening was to give a picture of the process and the process was made out of many different parts. I wanted that process to be reflected in the formal structure of the film, in the attempt to put together several elements. What I did together with the editor and co-producer of the film, Angélica Allende Brisk—who was the key person in that process—was to look for a harmonic relation between content and form.

Guillén: Cristina Banegas narrates your film. Is it correct that her narrative voice is somewhat fictionalized?


Livon-Grosman: The narration was a main concern for me: how to find the option for the narrator's voice. I was very aware that one of the major issues at stake within the documentary genre is the narrator. Bill Nichols—one of the most influential critics in the field—described the voiceover as the "voice of God" and a sort of excess of authority on the part of filmmakers. Being aware of that, I was trying to get around that issue. I wanted to have a voice that would be reflective and more intimate and not necessarily telling the audience how things are. I decided to use a female voice because in the documentary tradition, there's a tendency to use a strong, deep male voice that explains it all. As an audience, you are being told exactly how things are. In Cartoneros the narrator is a fictional character that goes back to Argentina after many years of being abroad to rediscover the city where she was born. It's, if you wish, an alter-ego.

Guillén: I appreciate that idea of feminine instruction. That's probably also why La Colo came off so well in the film; she was so articulate and dignified. She worked against what Solanas would call "a culture of despair."

Livon-Grosman: There are many women doing the jobs and it would only be fair that they be properly represented. From the very beginning it was always a job that didn't have a traditional gendered division of labor. That was one factor. But there was also a serendipitous element because it was my good luck to find people like La Colo. The film always hoped to show the different stages of the recycling project as well as the dignity of the people doing this job.

Guillén: I likewise appreciate your play between the personal and the public and how—by beginning your film with a quote by Baudelaire—you incorporate a wide time margin to recognize that this reality of the cartoneros has been going on for some time in many places, long before its current inflection in Argentina.


Livon-Grosman: Thank you for noticing and making the connection. The reference to Baudelaire actually comes from a quoted poem, but it's also been used by Walter Benjamin to describe the flâneur, the person who walks through the city as a key witness and interpreter—in Benjamin's idea—of the modern city. That, perhaps, is a less obvious reference but I thought that the quote could be read without all those references and was clear in itself and if a viewer knew the references and wanted to think about it those terms, that would be possible. I liked that idea that it could be simple and complex at the same time. In that sense the flâneur is also a twofolded character that carries the fusion of the public and the private.

Guillén: Are you familiar with the Chicano aesthetic of rasquachismo written about by Tómas Ybarra-Fausto?

Livon-Grosman: No.

Guillén: Rasquachismo is a sensibility that infuses Chicano art, Haitian art, and refers to the principle of creating the most from the least, often registered as the recycling of detritus from impoverished areas to create beauty and art. Amalia Mesa-Bains has probably captured its poetry the best when she writes: "In rasquachismo, the irreverent and spontaneous are employed to make the most from the least ... one has a stance that is both defiant and inventive. Aesthetic expression comes from discards, fragments, even recycled everyday materials... The capacity to hold life together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado is at the heart of rasquachismo." I felt Cartoneros was right in line with this sensibility of rasquachismo and the tradition of salvaging and gleaning, especially in your profiles of artists Antonio Berni and Alejandro Marmo. Could you talk a little bit more about them or other sculptors who are working with recycled materials?


Livon-Grosman: Today there are several artists in Buenos Aires with similar aesthetics. But there is an important tradition that goes far back. Berni was a turning point in Argentine art history. He became an influential figure among the people who adapted and cannibalized French surrealism into Latin American art, which actually happened in many different areas, with serious attempts to distinguish themselves from the European or the French. Berni was a perfect example of that and a very successful one.

The other thing that was very touching for me—and is mentioned in the film—is that Berni was very much attached to that place where he started to collect the debris that he was including in his work—to the shanty town, or villa, known as Bajo Flores and located in a part of the city where one of the co-ops of cartoneros is now located. The co-op is located there because the shanty towns were there and the shanty towns were there because that was the location of the city dump; one of the oldest and largest ones. For me there is a sense of continuity with the past. It was important to stress that there was also a continuity between Berni's and Marmo's work.

Guillén: There's almost a sense of an architecture of archaeology, layers and strata.

Livon-Grosman: I agree with you. That's why I mentioned Rouch and the word "ethnographic" at the beginning of our conversation because that was, no doubt, the model I was working with. Ethnographic films have been in some cases deeply criticized for the way they portray the objects of their studies. I'm fascinated by that particular area of visual anthropology.

Guillén: Cartoneros has had a great festival run. I'm curious why you haven't played in San Francisco and why I had to go all the way to Boise, Idaho to see the film?

Livon-Grosman: What happened was at the beginning I didn't have a distributor. Now I do, and the distributor DER [Documentary Educational Resources] has taken over in a very efficient way. They are present in festivals all over the country and they have a strong tradition of working with ethnographic and anthropologic material. Once they took over, they started to send it out to festivals that I did not know about. At the beginning—because of lack of experience on my part—I didn't plan the exhibition of the film in a strategic way. Hopefully, San Francisco will be one of the future exhibition venues.

Guillén: I hope so because actually here in San Francisco there is a pronounced recycling community with a whole subculture of cartoneros who actually travel through neighborhoods going through the recycling bins left out on the sidewalks. Your film has prompted me to investigate what San Francisco's official policy is towards this whole subculture; if they even have one. I've never heard or read anything. So I believe there's relevance for your documentary here in San Francisco, though truthfully it's relevant in many parts of the United States. I think your documentary demonstrates that these cartoneros who we render invisible are everywhere.

Livon-Grosman: Thank you for your comments and for making a connection between the film and today's San Francisco. One of the reasons the film might be interesting for American audiences is because environmental as well as globalization issues—which in this case are connected to each other—are present in most of the developed world. It's a clear concern for everyone. In poorer countries, the issues are still visible but with different repercussions. People who have picked the film to show it in film festivals have been matching the film's themes with environmental or Latin American issues, and rightly so.

Guillén: Absolutely. And also here in the Bay Area there are ongoing art programs connected with Bay Area landfill where artists are encouraged to work with recyclable materials to create art. Specifically, I know that Sunset Scavenger—our city's garbage collection service—sponsors or coordinates SCRAP, the Scrounger's Center for Reusable Art Parts, where donations are accepted from businesses and individuals of items that can be used creatively and which are stored in a large warehouse. This also ties in to one of the themes of your documentary.

Livon-Grosman: That sounds really interesting and an unusual approach. It seems like the people there are very aware of the issue and they have devised creative alternatives for what could be perceived as just a problem.

Guillén: Exactly. Cartoneros premiered in Buenos Aires at the 2007 Sociedad Hebraica Argentina (SHA). How was it received? Has it had any beneficial effect or impact on the local culture?

Livon-Grosman: The film was well-received. It had a particularly good reception with people who were working with recycling, working with co-ops, or trying to organize them. It's been shown to activists and that's a great thing for the film. Also, it's most likely going to be shown in a conference for cartoneros that will take place in Colombia this coming March. I think they're trying to put together some films about informal recycling and Cartoneros will be one of them.

Guillén: I'm glad to hear that. Another theme that surfaced in the documentary that proved interesting to me is of the privatization of garbage. I've actually witnessed this in action between two of my neighbors; one who became upset with the people who go through the recycling bins and complained that they had no right to do that, that their garbage belonged to them and the city and that the city was supposed to be doing that, and another neighbor who countered that, no, this was giving these people an opportunity to fend for themselves. Can you speak to the issue of the privatization of garbage?


Livon-Grosman: In Argentina, as in so many places, the problem is trying to find a solution that will save the cartoneros' "jobs" but will change the conditions in which they work so that they will have the salary that they deserve and their share of the profit, which is very large at the end of the process when it gets to the paper mills. But it's hard to do that. It's hard enough to institutionalize by default what's going on now—the present working conditions in which informal recycling takes place in Buenos Aires—as opposed to developing a formal structure. The problem is that, in general, the more sophisticated recycling programs all over the world tend to have some kind of governmental support. It's hard to persuade Latin American politicians that they should be putting money into recycling when they think they will have a better political impact putting money into something else, for example housing or public transportation. It's a degree of awareness, I think, on the part of a large segment of the population that we need to change for politicians to be more receptive to the idea that there is political capital there and it will be seen as a positive decision for them to seriously invest in recycling.

Guillén: Cartoneros has been such an articulate first film from you, Ernesto, what can we expect from you in the future? Are you working on another film?

Livon-Grosman: I have started to work on the script for a new project, this time about Patagonia, which is an area I've written about and where I've lived for several years in the early '80s. I hope to travel and film in Patagonia soon, hopefully next year.

Guillén: Thank you so much for taking time from your busy teaching schedule, Ernesto.

Livon-Grosman: I really appreciate very much your interest in the film and thank you again for taking the time to ask such great questions.

Guillén: Igualmente.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 ARAB FILM FESTIVAL—Lineup

Todd Brown at Twitch may have beat me to the punch announcing Washington D.C.'s Arabian Sights Film Festival, but the 11th Annual Arab Film Festival ("AFF") beats them to the punch by starting up at least a week earlier, October 18-28, 2007 in the San Francisco Bay Area. How do you say "Neener neener neener" in Arabic?

Along with screenings in San Francisco, San Jose and Berkeley, AFF extends to Los Angeles this year. One of the most successful and anticipated San Francisco Bay Area film festivals, AFF is the largest exhibitor of exclusively Arab cinema in the United States, featuring national and West Coast premieres and engaging discussions with visiting filmmakers, family screenings, and educational outreach. More than 80 films, representing 13 countries, make up this year's line-up, including the first Lebanese vampire movie, a stylized neo-noir film set in Casablanca, an Iraqi love story, Egypt's latest break-out indie hit and a Jordanian documentary about finding peace through skateboarding. In addition, AFF offers the latest documentaries from Palestine and Iraq and explores stories of urban youth culture in Beirut, Casablanca, Tunis and Cairo. Anticipate some preview picks from Michael Hawley in the near future.

In her third year with the festival, Artistic Director Sonia El Feki has shaped the AFF line-up from films she personally selected from this year's Carthage Film Festival and Cairo Film Festival. A good 50% of the program is the result of her sojourn to these Mideast festivals, cherry picking the best, with the remaining 50% coming from submissions.

Opening night is the West Coast premiere of Tunisian director Nouri Bouzid's Making Of—winner of the Golden Tanit Award at the Carthage Film Festival—with lead actor Lotfi Abdelli accompanying the film. The Centerpiece presentation—in tandem with the First Annual Noor Awards Ceremony—will be the U.S. premiere of Egyptian director Hala Khalil's romantic comedy Cut and Paste.

Other highlights include Tunisian director Najib Belkadhi's documentary profile of Mouncef Kahloucha filmed during the making of Kahloucha's Tarzan of the Arabs. A huge hit among Tunisian expatriate communities in Europe, AFF will screen VHS Kahloucha and sponsor a panel discussion on "Birth of Arab Cinematic Kitsch?" Other panel discussions include "Mission Impossible? Producing A Film in the Arab World" and "Women, Resistance and Political Participation."

Check the AFF website for titles, times and venues.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 MVFF30: THE DARJEELING LIMITED—The Evening Class Interview With Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman & Roman Coppola

I dedicate this entry to Owen Wilson, wishing him grace and strength with the healing he has left to do.

Screened as a Special Presentation at this year's Mill Valley Film Festival just as it opened in local theaters, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited premiered in early September at the Venice Film Festival to mixed reviews and was recently the opening night feature at the New York Film Festival, where it likewise weathered a critical reception fraught with staged ambivalencies. It's hard for me to appropriately gauge that reception because, believe it or not, this is my first Wes Anderson film. No, I have not seen Bottle Rocket. No, I have not seen Rushmore. No, I have not seen The Royal Tenenbaums. No, I have not seen The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. What part of no do you not understand? And quite frankly, I might not have seen The Darjeeling Limited had it not been for Brian Darr's clever Hell on Frisco Bay entry where he simulated a boxing match between Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson when the Castro Theatre programmed both directors' films side by side. No, I did not catch any of that programming; but, YES, I read Brian's entry and, yes, I was amused and, yes, I caught The Darjeeling Limited. Phew! As a film writer I feel like I am constantly playing catch-up to everyone else or—in the immortal words of Alice—"The hurrier I go, the behinder I get."

Notwithstanding, with only one Wes Anderson film under my belt, I agreed to meet with him and Darjeeling Limited co-writers Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola earlier this afternoon at the Ritz.

* * *

Michael Guillén: I'm in a curious position with regard to your work because, admittedly, The Darjeeling Limited is the only one of your films I've seen and, therefore, I can only accept the film on its own terms. But judging from some of the film's critics (some of them who come off as downright bitches), you're reiterating thematic scenarios you've used in your previous films. My gut reaction to that is—as with any artist—you are burnishing themes, not necessarily repeating them. What's your take on this criticism that you're repeating yourself?

Wes Anderson: Well, it might not be good to respond to what critics say. It's probably not a good idea to defend yourself or feel like you've [had] your feelings hurt by critics, because they respond with their honest reactions and that's their job. My approach to my work is there are things I know that I repeat; different things that have to do with my point of view and what I am most interested in. I'm interested in a lot of different things with each film. In this movie, the main principle subject matter is India; but, I don't mind if my movies follow a certain train of thought over the course of them and if at the end of it they can sit on a shelf together and can be connected to each other. I don't mind that. I'm okay with that.

Guillén: It's somewhat of a facetious criticism anyways. If you look at any auteur, you're bound to find striking resemblances between their films and/or a consistent effort throughout the body of their work, themes they're preoccupied with, themes they've developed, and progressed through, and perhaps even cited back to self-referentially.

Anderson: Yes. Right.

Guillén: Following through on the criticism you've received, I was amused by Steely Dan's open letter to you of, I believe, last year. Did you ever respond to that letter officially?

Anderson: No. I didn't really know what to say. I didn't know how to be exactly funny about it in the right way. I just thought, "We'll let this be their project." I mean … now I have responded to it! [Laughs.]

Guillén: And it's an honest response at that. I'm just curious that they were trying to give you such advice.

Anderson: Yes. I appreciated their advice.

Guillén: That's fair.

Anderson: And they wrote some lyrics. I think they had a song called "Bottle Rocket 2", which they proposed I should do. I thought it was pretty good. And they wrote a song about this movie, about their idea of this movie, possibly about what it shouldn't be. I don't remember exactly.

Guillén: At least it was a clever critique. In contrast to some others. Some of these critics, I feel like—if Van Gogh were alive—they'd say, "Paint another Starry Night!" And then if he did, they'd be the first to bite off his other ear.

Anderson: I can't say that Steely Dan made me feel like a million bucks actually; but, I think it was kind of funny.

Guillén: It was at least funny. So how did it come about that the three of you wrote this script together?

Jason Schwartzman: Wes?

Anderson: Roman?

Roman Coppola: We were invited by Wes. We all happened to be in Paris around the same time. Jason and I were working on Marie Antoinette and Wes was staying with Jason and ended up living in Paris at that time. There was something on Wes's mind, the notion of making a film in India with three brothers and there was something bubbling up. He started talking to Jason about it informally, just started with something in the air, and then—since I was there—I was invited to talk about this and the first act of beginning the project was Wes's choice to include Jason and myself. We have all these histories. Jason and I have known each other forever and Wes and I have known each other for many years and Jason and Wes have their own separate relationship and friendship, so right off the bat there was something that resembled three brothers and history and that was the beginning of the project.

Guillén: How did you coordinate the development of the script?

Schwartzman: We wrote it while we traveled together. We went to India together. We had the idea that we wanted to make the movie as personal as we possibly could. Whether that's a good idea or a bad idea, I don't even know if it matters, but that was our philosophy about the movie. Anytime we could answer the question "What happens next?" with "this happened to me" or "this happened to him" and come up with something that had details from our own experience, well, we thought that's the kind of movie we wanted to make. That was the kind of story we wanted to tell.

Guillén: So how much of the brothers' experiences were actually your own?

Anderson: Well, in a way it sort of all [is]. I mean, we didn't buy a cobra. But there's some correlation between moreorless everything in there and something in our own experience and a significant amount of it that was direct.

Coppola: And then some of it was us kind of play acting, testing out the roles and assuming the characters to improvise and come up with ideas. We were a little bit more bold to go to some temple in the middle of the night or go jump in a rickshaw and drive aimlessly because that's what these guys would have done. In a way we tried to experience things in that way to help us.

Schwartzman: We always said say yes to everything, be open.

Guillén: Jason, did you write the scene where you have the tryst on the train?

Schwartzman: The characters are all fictional. [Laughs.] I didn't write specifically for my character.

Anderson: But that came from somebody that we knew.

Schwartzman: Yeah, it comes from something that's very real. It's an honest story from someone I know very well that we put into the film. I'd say the three brothers really are equal shards of the three of us dispersed amongst them and each character, each brother in the script, in the movie, he is made up of the three of us.

Guillén: That being said then, Chris Norris's Film Comment article….

Schwartzman: You say "that being said", did I just walk right into something? Did I just bite hook, line and sinker? [Laughs.]

Guillén: No, no, no, that's just the way I talk. Relax. I'm not out to get you. [Laughs.] In Chris Norris's Film Comment article [September/October, 2007; Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 30-34], he described the three Whitman brothers as "three greedy tourists grabbing at epiphany." Did the three of you have such epiphanies as you were filming The Darjeeling Limited? It's a movie about a spiritual quest in India. As you were making the film in India, with the knowledge of the many people who have made a pilgrimage to India for spiritual enlightenment, did you three experience anything or walk away with any kind of acquired insight?

Anderson: I would say it was a very emotional experience making the movie. I don't know that I would go so far as to say we had spiritual epiphanies, but I can't remember having a work experience or travel experience that I felt was more life-changing than this one, just in terms of how it affects your point of view and just the feeling coming out of it.

Schwartzman: And the distance. I've never been so far away from my home for so long with people that I feel were such a small, tight little bundle. It was life-changing for me and life-changing for all of us together as a group, as friends. I know I feel closer to Wes and Roman and to the actors as well, much closer than I've ever felt to them ever, and I feel that (hopefully) will last.

Coppola: For my part, I think we were all in this quest or search but—what it really was—was the movie. We were trying to figure out what this movie was going to be. We were trying to accomplish this thing. I don't know if there's any tidy answer but the movie is the result of this experience and that's the answer.

Anderson: The thing we found.

Guillén: How long did it take to film this movie?

Anderson: Well, we went to India together to write and that was maybe for six weeks or something like that? Five weeks?

Coppola: Four or five weeks.

Schwartman: Four weeks. Five if you include traveling.

Anderson: And then when we went to make the movie, we were there for four months.

Coppola: Four and a half months.

Anderson: Four and a half, five months. So I'm not the guy to ask. They seem to remember the numbers better than I do.

Guillén: Did you film in the places where you were traveling?

Anderson: Yeah, we found a lot of locations when we were writing.

Schwartzman: We'd be walking around India and—if we had a scene that would take place in a temple—we'd see a temple and we'd take our scripts out and we'd do the scenes, act them out, see how it felt in those environments and often times those would be the ones we'd go shoot at.

Anderson: Also, while we were writing, we met a lot of people that ended up in the movie.

Guillén: Being that this is the first movie of your's that I've seen, it's like dropping a pebble into a pond and watching the concentric rings ripple out. From this moment of entry into your work, I'm now excited to explore your previous films and looking forward to what you will create next.

Anderson: I like that. That sounds good.

Guillén: Barbet Schroeder's appearance in The Darjeeling Limited intrigued me. Can you talk about how that came about?

Anderson: Yes. I'd gotten to know him over the last few years. Part of the time he lives in Paris and I live in Paris part of the time also so I'd met him [there]; I think first through Milena Canonero, who's our costume designer who worked on Darjeeling, who worked on Life Aquatic, who worked on Marie Antoinette, and who we've all known [for a long time]. So I got to know [Barbet] in Paris. He's very smart. He's interested in things. He has tremendous curiosity. He always knows much more about what's new than I ever would and I also like the way he's worked. He's worked all over the world. He's had his own personal projects that he's done, that he's made in South America, now he's working in Japan, and he's worked in America, he's worked in France.


Coppola: Also, he's made some pictures that were intimately [crafted], like La Collectionneuse and whatnot, that were productions on such an intimate scale. That was something we were attracted to.

Anderson: Inspired by. In fact, La Collectionneuse—do you know that movie?—it's an Eric Rohmer film but it's produced by Barbet. It's a great one and was a visual inspiration for us.

Guillén: So was there the character of the mechanic first and Schroeder slipped into that role or was the character written for him?

Anderson: We had a mechanic and we thought, "If Barbet would do it, that would be great!"

Coppola: And it was a Porsche and I think that was a connection that connected Barbet through his name.

Anderson: He looks like he could play … you could definitely cast him as a Nazi. We wanted a mechanic who looked like a Nazi but then turns out to be a good guy.

Guillén: Can you speak about the film's production design?

Anderson: With The Darjeeling Limited our goal was to discover the way the movie was going to look by going there and saying, "What surprises us that we see?" [India's] a place where there's just no shortage of ideas, if you're interested. There's just so much to see and so much to learn. That was really where the whole look of the movie [came from]. It's my point of view, organized maybe, somewhat, but it's all from India. What we made, we made with people we met there who brought their own talents and ideas on how things ought to be done. Often, we'd have somebody—like a guy who paints walls, for instance—and we'd say, "We'd like something like this" and then he would set to work and we would come back and he would have done something completely different and that's what's in the movie. That was our rule: whatever we get back, that's what we want.

Schwartzman: Wes said early on if we wrote the script and it called for a red car but when we go to shoot it that day we have a blue truck, we just shoot the blue truck.

Anderson: From our point of view, whatever is contributed is probably going to be quite interesting and it's a way to learn about the place, by just accepting what comes back.

Guillén: Visually, the film is fascinating. The colors are so vibrant. The production design especially exceled in the "train of thought" montage. That sequence astounded me. Where did that idea come from? How did you construct it? What were you going for?

Anderson: The idea of it was simple. Roman had this idea that Anjelica Huston's character would say, "Maybe we can express ourselves more fully if we do it without words." And then Anjelica was very good in this silent moment but then we wanted to find a way to visually express whatever it is they were saying to each other and we didn't want to explain it. That was our answer to that. We searched for a while to figure out how to physically express it. In the end, we took a train car, gutted it, and we built these sets all in the train car and then we set out into the desert on the train and we shot it live with this construction. A very odd thing.

Coppola: Just to go a little deeper. What I recall is that we were in that moment of let's communicate without speaking and then you hear the bell ringing. At first it was kind of literal. You'd see this person here and this person there, just have a visit, and then that was the first step that led to that thought of somehow….

Anderson: …linking them on a train. We also thought it might be nice because it's a train movie and because there are a lot of metaphors that would come easily.

Coppola: But what's interesting to me is that it was not a conscious thing like "Oh, this is what we're going to do for this reason"; but, it was one little thing that leads to another and leads to another and, before you know it, that's what you have and you didn't think of it; it's just the way it should be.

Guillén: Within that montage, what jumped out for me was the image of Peter's pregnant wife coming to meet him. That profoundly moved me. It was an "aha!" moment where I grasped what was actually happening, that these were thoughts moving through their minds as they were in a state of silence, and that some of those thoughts were desires/fears, and this was Peter's. It told me so much about him. So returning to the construction, you gutted the train car, you dressed the set, and then you just moved the camera along a trolly? Nothing was moving but the camera, right?

Anderson: And the train.

Guillén: The train was actually moving?

Anderson: Yes, the train was actually moving. Because out the window you can see the desert going by.

Schwartzman: The whole movie's shot on a moving train.


Guillén: Let's talk a bit about Hotel Chevalier.

Anderson: It was originally separate.

Schwartzman: It was always a short film that had a beginning and an end and wasn't attached [to The Darjeeling Limited]. It was a companion piece to the feature film. The idea was that it was a prologue, homework really for an audience, and if you see it you will learn a little bit about my character, his backstory….

Coppola: Don't say homework.

Schwartzman: Huh?

Coppola: Homework, that doesn't sound good.

Anderson: The connotation.

Schwartzman: Oh. That makes some people feel weird?

Guillén: I'm not going to watch that short now. [Laughs.]

Coppola: Have you seen the short?

Guillén: No, I haven't.

Schwartzman: They didn't show it with the movie? You saw the movie in the theater?

Guillén: Yeah, I saw it in the theater and they specifically indicated I would have to go find it online.

Anderson: Go to iTunes. You have to get it from iTunes.

Guillén: Oh, okay. But then that means I have to sign up for an account with them.

Anderson: You don't have an iTunes account?

Guillén: No, I'm kind of a Luddite. But I go to movies!! Is that too old-fashioned? [Laughter.]

Schwartzman: Basically, Hotel Chevalier is just a little bit extra information about my character that, hopefully, will help make some things [clear] and fill in some blanks if you want the blanks filled in when you see the film. It was great from an acting point of view because you shoot this thing in chronological order that has happened to my character before The Darjeeling Limited's begun and so usually, at least for me, when you go to work on a film, you think about, "What has my character gone through? Where's he coming from? What are his experiences?" And it's wonderful not to have to imagine an experience but to have really been able to have shot it and to have experienced it and to have lived it and then to just be able to watch a DVD of it. Without sounding funny about it, it's true. You can see it and it really gets inside your body so that—when I'm on the train—I can feel that fucked-up feeling of having been in that room with that person.

Guillén: It's an interesting exhibition strategy to connect the movie theater experience with home computer viewing. Since they initially started as separate projects, at what point did the two become conjoined for purposes of exhibition?

Anderson: While we were writing the movie, I started thinking, "Jason is playing the same character; they should be linked." We thought, "Well, it's a short story and a novel and they're two separate things but they'll refer to each other." It was only after they were done that I said, "Okay, now how are we going to present these?" I had to puzzle that out. At a certain point I thought we would add the short in with the prints of the movie in the theater; but, first I wanted to make it available for free to anybody who's interested to see it and have it not be in the movie and have the movie just play by itself. It will be on the DVD and different people will see it in different ways.

At the end of the movie you hear Jason saying, "I wrote the ending of this short story. I don't know how it starts, but, do you want to hear it?" He reads this scene between him and the girl.

Guillén: The wonderfully mean scene.

Anderson: Yes, the mean scene; well, that's the end of the short. So, if you've seen the short, there's links. At another point in the story, he takes something out of his suitcase and it's a bottle of perfume. He later smashes it. Well, in the short she puts something into his suitcase. You don't know what it is but you see her slip something into his suitcase. It's a bottle of perfume. So there are links between the two.

Guillén: Speaking of that scene where he smashes the perfume bottle, I understand that was configured in the dark?

Anderson: Yeah, we rehearsed it in the dark because we lost the power.

Guillén: How could you see what was going on?

Anderson: It was just the compartment so we could sort of see a little bit. We just didn't have any power. But it gave us a calm, peaceful environment to work in. Everything was sort of stopped because there was no electricity; the power had gone out, which would happen from time to time. So we had a quiet, thoughtful rehearsal in the dark and I have to say that I really liked it. It was a great way to practice the scene. With some of your senses … what would you say?

Coppola: Altered?

Anderson: Incapacitated? Yeah, altered.

Guillén: Speak about the film's score, much of which is taken from Merchant Ivory films and from the films of Satyajit Ray. Was his music a conscious influence while you were writing and shooting the film?

Anderson: I think so, yeah. We had a CD of all those cues, of lots of music from Satyajit Ray's films, Merchant Ivory films, and we played it all the time. The three of us would go to the set together, we would go on location scouting together, we were traveling a lot together and we always played this music during that so it was really not just the soundtrack to the movie, for us it was a soundtrack for the making of the movie. It definitely was in our minds often.

Guillén: The film is richly textured with citationality. For example, I'm old enough to remember when The Beatles went to India so I can see those references going on in the movie. I mean, I'm assuming they were there, right? You were playing with that?

Anderson: Yeah, but I think without even realizing it. Jason looks like a Beatle, with that moustache especially. And then the four of them walking and Jason's barefooted and it looks like Abbey Road. It was not so much planned. We went to Rishikesh at Jason's urging where The Beatles had gone and it was definitely something that was in the mix for us.


Guillén: And also Renoir's The River?

Anderson: Most definitely. That's the movie that made me want to go there. We watched it together a couple of times, but once in Dehli at the end of our long trip together when we were writing, the last thing we did in India was watch the river together.

Guillén: Going back to The Beatles reference, I think Jason looks a little bit like Ringo.

Coppola: This is a good chance to plug something.

Schwartzman: I play Ringo Starr in a movie.

Guillén: You do?!


Schwartzman: It's funny because I'm in the preview for this movie Walk Hard. I'm in the movie but I'm only in it for one scene but—because I'm in the preview—I've been getting a lot of questions: "So did you research the part of Ringo Starr? How long did that take you to do?" I'm only in it for a cameo.

Anderson: What do you say?

Schwartzman: I don't know because—in the style of Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan—in those movies you say a lot of different things during the course of a day and you don't know what's actually going to end up in it.

Anderson: Are you doing a Ringo voice?

Schwartzman: Well, yeah, I'm doing a Ringo voice; but, my whole take on Ringo was that I'm not going to say anything. So I was very quiet and everyone else is improvising and I just kind of sat there. I do a face.

Anderson: Can you do it?

Schwartzman: [Blushing] I can't do it right now.

Anderson: Can you do your Ringo voice for a second?

Schwartzman: [Doing a few words in a Ringo accent, making all of us laugh.] I have some moments where I slide in sideways and talk about drug taking and then slide out. It's kind of like Yellow Submarine. It's a caricature of a Beatle. I was doing more a Yellow Submarine than a Ringo Starr. But my only problem is that I love Ringo Starr so much. He is my favorite drummer of all time and I'm a little nervous that he'll be offended by it because it's definitely a broad depiction of him. It would bum me out if he saw it and was upset.

Guillén: I doubt he would be offended by that.

Anderson: Probably not. I mean, he's Ringo. Does Ringo get offended? I don't know. I doubt it.

Guillén: Ensemble-wise, though I haven't seen your other films, I've read enough about them to know you use the same ensemble of actors. For future projects, is this how you work? When you get an idea, you call up everybody you've worked with and say, "I think I have a new one for us?"

Anderson: Often, my first instinct is to go to the people who I've liked working with who are my friends. I like working with my friends. I like the beginning of the movie to be a reunion. I feel like that can find its way onto the screen. That's usually my first instinct.

Coppola: Anjelica tells an amusing story where she'll get a figurine of a nun in the mail and knows that something's bubbling.

Schwartzman: That's true?

Anderson: Uh, yeah.

Guillén: You sent her a nun?

Anderson: I sent her a nun, yes. And then I think I sent her another nun, having forgotten the first nun I sent her.

Schwartzman: A nun-a-nun?! [Laughs.]

Guillén: Did you send it anunymously? [Laughs.]

Coppola: Nunsense!

Schwartzman: Let's have nun of that. [We all groan collectively.]

Anderson: Oh boy.

Guillén: So when Anjelica got this nun, did she know you wanted to cast her as a nun or is this some kind of code for you're wanting to cast her in a movie?

Anderson: As a nun.

Guillén: So people know you're suggesting something?

Anderson: Yeah, yeah, she started to think something's up.

Guillén: Well after two nuns in the mail, wouldn't you? Anjelica was remarkable in The Darjeeling Limited. She has a way of taking you limpidly into the depths beneath a comic veneer. Her eyes are so wet. They register so much life experience.

Anderson: Yes, yes, yes.

Guillén: So to wrap up here, I'll give you one more chance to refute your detractors. Another criticism levied against this film—if not all your films—that came up frequently while I was researching reviews was the heedless privilege of your characters and the obvious wealth that they have to be traveling around India, throwing away luggage, and what have you. Clearly, you have an artistic sensibility that is unique and creative and which leaps over the hurdle of your films having to be necessarily politicized.

Anderson: I like the idea of that. What I would say is definitely these characters … my theory is Owen's character has money. He's got a business. We don't know what he does; but, he's got this assistant for Francis Whitman Industries. I think he's got some business and he's made some money from his business; but, I don't know that he's that focused on it right now. Adrien's character, I don't know. We have a theory that we won't share what they do. We have information that we wrote that's not in the movie because we decided we shouldn't put it in there. But he probably doesn't have so much money. Jason's character probably got an advance that he's burning through rapidly. He's probably blown most of it. In the short you'll see how he's spent all his money. The father was probably reasonably well-to-do; but, there's a degree to which some aspects of it—like people might say the way they're dressed or something—well, I don't think that's the way rich people particularly dress. They're modeled on something else.

Guillén: Well Adrien didn't even have pants half the time. He was running around in boxers. They couldn't really do that in India, could they? Could he run around in boxers like that?

Anderson: Yeah.

Guillén: Really?!

Anderson: A woman couldn't. A woman might be ill-advised to do so. But a man can do anything.

Schwartzman: That's exaggerated.

Anderson: You want to say anything on that? You had a couple of things on that. Your mother has some thoughts on it.

Schwartzman: My mom said something that's interesting….

Anderson: Because she was responding to the same thing.

Schwartzman: She said she thought it was really funny when people go like, "and they walked around in their suits with this $6,000 belt and this $3,000 loafer" and she said something that I think is really interesting. She said, "They just say it's that much money; but, these guys exaggerate and they're crazy and just because they say it's a $3,000 shoe doesn't mean it's necessarily a $3,000 shoe."

Coppola: My take on it is that they're heavily in debt.

Anderson: Yeah, but you've got to be rich to be in debt that much!!

Cross-published on Twitch.

LIONS FOR LAMBS—A Question for Robert Redford

I'm heartened to know that Robert Redford is as disgruntled with press junkets as I am. That's as much of an indirect confirmation as I need. Rather than subject his new film Lions For Lambs to the tailored and predictable questions that would inevitably haunt the hotel suites that usually host such press junkets, Redford has opted to screen the film for university audiences and to engage their questions. He genuinely wants to know if his critique of student apathy is accurate or not. Thus, he accompanied the film to a screening at the Shattuck Theatre in Berkeley, California—once the hotbed of the activist Youth Movement in the '60s—to explore if young people still have some bite left.

Lions For Lambs braids three accomplished performances by Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, with fine supporting turns by Andrew Garfield and Michael Peña, who accompanied Redford to last night's stage. Redford plays an idealistic political science professor; Streep a compromised journalist; and Cruise a senator and presidential hopeful whose eyes gleam with the dream of military victory. Sound familiar? It should. But where Redford ratchets up the familiarity is in how he articulates the ideas that inform the film's action and his stern caution that "if you don't stand for something, you might fall for anything."

* * *

Michael Guillén: Robert, Lions for Lambs is very much a movie constructed from clearly articulated ideas that seek engagement with the film's audience. Often with films, light and focus is placed on answers; but, here, questions take center stage. It's well-documented that the Iraq War—in contrast to wars before it—has seen an unprecedented preponderance of coverage, first through (as the film suggests) how the media sold the war to the American public, then through a rush of documentaries from the field, and now with an increasing appearance of fictionalized features. Just as too much information can distract from grasping the issues at hand, I fear entertainment can become commensurate noise, further distracting audiences from the very topics the films seek to address. My question to you is: What was it in this script that you felt served the topic and would leap over the hazard of entertainment as noise?

Robert Redford: I never wanted to make a film about the Iraq War because I felt even a year ago that that was going to be treated heavily, either in documentaries or films. I just knew there was going to be a lot of films about the Iraq War. I was not interested in making a film about the Iraq War. What captivated my interest in this was that it was a tryptich of three stories that would try to find some way to connect and would connect on a much deeper level than you might think. That's not easy to pull off; but, it was challenging and interesting to me and I thought, well, if I was going to want to make a film about where we are today—I mean, there are other films I made in the past that were about where we were at various times—it would be … since globalization has occurred and borders have dissolved and lines have dissolved, things are overlapping into each other, the idea that education and politics and the media are overlapping each other with versatile stories, with the catalyst being the soldiers Michael Peña and Derek Luke play in a dire situation that is a result of decisions made by higher-ups who are not qualified and are interested in winning only. To me, that covers a broader territory. That's what got my interest. It was not about the war. It wasn't even about the issues. It was about those three categories being caught up in this situation and about everybody's self-interest. Because it is a very self-interested piece; everybody has their self-interest. I think we all do because we're trying to survive. That's what interested me.

Cross-published on Twitch.

BOARDING GATE—A Couple of Questions for Olivier Assayas

Reporting to Screengrab from this year's Cannes Film Festival, Mike D'Angelo stated: "[Olivier] Assayas' latest film, Boarding Gate, doesn't seem to have much of anything on its mind." He concludes, "Assayas never seems remotely invested in this nonsense—not even in a subversive, strictly intellectual way."

Without missing a beat and with no pretensions to art, Olivier Assayas seems upfront about just that when he accompanied the film to its recent Pacific Film Archives premiere as part of his "Cahiers du Cinéma Week" residency.

Introducing Boarding Gate, Assayas explained: "This movie is, I suppose, different from what I've done previously in the sense that it's an English-language film. I've made movies which are known for mixing languages and mixing cultures; this one is just a straight forward English language. It's also trying hard—no, no, not so hard—but, it's trying at least to be a genuine genre movie. I wanted really to work on a format that is similar to the format of what B-movies used to be. I don't think the movie in that sense is a cinephilic homage to B-movies; I was [more] interested in putting myself in the actual position of making a movie in similar conditions. Meaning, I was trying to make the movie with a tiny, tiny budget—we made the movie with the budget of a small independent French film—and trying to address [not only a] cinephile audience, [but] also modern-day teenage moviegoers. I think that's where the real audience for movies is and I think it's very important to try to keep in contact with [what is] liveliest [in] contemporary movie culture."

At film's end Assayas elaborated on his motivations: "The conditions [under which] I made the film were a very specific moment when it was extremely difficult to get financing in France to make anything ambitious in terms of independent filmmaking. There were a few very bad years. It was right after my previous film Clean, which was ultimately the biggest box office success I ever had. I wrote this screenplay [and] I couldn't get it made. I wrote another screenplay that could not get made. So I started thinking, 'Maybe there's a problem with the very notion of making independent films in France because if I can't make movies—having just made a movie that did very well—then it must be much worse for people, second-time directors, who just haven't had [luck] like that.'


"I started thinking about the logic of what kind of movies you can make outside of the film industry and not lose the connection with the audience. Because, of course, you can make radical movies that end up in film festivals and a couple of independent theaters here and there; but, the point of making movies is because it's a modern art form and it's the one modern art form that addresses a wide audience, potentially world-wide, and that's what attracts one to be a filmmaker: the capacity of being in touch with a popular form of art. I suppose I thought that maybe one way of making movies is using the logic of the industry and possibly turning it or using it to my advantage in the sense of why not—instead of waiting to get my French movies to happen—why not write really fast something that has some kind of modern B-movie type of energy? The very notion of making a B-movie, of making a genre movie that somehow is a way of getting some oblique passage into the mainstream? Using some of the syntax of mainstream filmmaking, but still ultimately using the freedom to get in that space. I think you can have a lot of freedom ultimately if you make movies on a much smaller budget. But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. [Laughs.] Because I end up talking about the economic logic of the film instead of about making a film because at some point there's a story you want to tell, because you meet an actress, because there's something within you that makes you try to express those feelings, and try to make that specific movie happen."

After watching Asia Argento go through her (at times preposterous, alternately perverse) paces in Boarding Gate, and being left with anything but a resolution at film's end, I had to ask: "I can understand what you're saying about the economic parameters of a B-film; but, what I'm not quite understanding is—if you had the money—what would have made this an A-film?"

Assayas responded emphatically: "This is not an A-film! This movie has a completely coherent logic for me. Part of the fun of making this film was because it was designed and imagined as something that had to be done this fast. We shot this in 28-29 days and we had various locations in Paris and we shot a lot of it in the streets of Hong Kong. The film was written having in mind that it was to be done on a small budget. If I had had a lot of money, I don't know where I would have spent it on this film."

I persisted: "By your definitions of a B-film or a genre film, then, what characterizes Boarding Gate as a B-film? Is it the pace of it? The right-sizedness of it?"


"The way I see it," Assayas indulged me, "is making a genre movie with a small budget, meaning filling in for the small budget with some energy, style, and hopefully visual convention. Again, today's genre movies are made with huge budgets in Hollywood, with smaller budgets in Europe but still they are very expensive films because they involve stunts, CGI, or whatever. Here is a movie that has no special effects, no big sets, no car chases. Again, I'm playing with the codes of the genre film but I'm playing on a very small scale. I'm trying to find something which I am looking for, which is the energy and the physical relationships somehow with the viewer. If there is something that I ultimately miss in a lot of independent cinema I see, it is the lack of physical relationship with the viewer. Whereas, extremely bad, dull, conventional genre or Hollywood/French filmmaking deal with that physical relationship and ultimately I think there's a way of not losing that, of making an eventful film but still try to keep that physical connection."

I can't say that satisfied my question; but, it did guide me to be more attentive to the responses of others who have written about Assayas and his past and more recent work. Max Goldberg's sterling Guardian write-up on the Assayas residency speaks of the filmmaker's "hyperkinetic narration" and the "restless confusion" that animates his films. And Premiere's Glenn Kenny refutes the futility of resistance by standing up to compatriots who didn't much care for Boarding Gate, proudly proclaiming the film "rocked" him hard, and appreciatively detailing the "tossed salad of signifiers that is both the casting and the play on genre." Not the least of which is "the unforgettable spectacle of Sonic Youth's [Kim] Gordon barking orders at a pack of low-level gangsters in sharp Cantonese." Kenny concludes: "This is very much a French intellectual cineaste's idea of a B thriller and hence is as far from innocent in its genre as you can get. Which is not to say that Assayas deals in bad faith. There are some genuinely frisson-inducing twists, and he does wrap up the plot pretty neatly despite giving every indication that he's not going to." Dave Hudson at The Greencine Daily has gathered up the rest of the Cannes reviews.

Eurotrash is dead. Long live Eurotrash!

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 MVFF30: LUST, CAUTION—The Evening Class Interview With Ang Lee & Tang Wei

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution—the opening night feature for the 30th Mill Valley Film Festival—is an unsettling piece of film. At first, I felt tripped up by the ample length of its Asian brocade; but, in the days after seeing the film, it kept coming back to me. I kept thinking about it, feeling about it, questioning. In contrast to films that I forget nearly as soon as I leave the theater, Lust, Caution drew me back to Eileen Chang's provocative short story and I found intimations of myself and sifted relevancies from the moral dilemmas of its protagonist Wong Chia-chih, intricately enfleshed by Tang Wei. This marks a great film for me, when its internal conflicts are presented in such austere lines that it's almost like catching one's silhouette in a mirror; when the questions a film raises are, in essence, the questions you ask yourself.

I felt tremendously privileged to deliver my questions directly to director Ang Lee and his lead actress Tang Wei. They are explicit in their responses and, therefore, this conversation is not for the spoiler-wary.

* * *

Michael Guillén: May I start with the obvious question? I think James Schamus has already responded to this, but, why did she do it? Why did she make this decision?

Ang Lee: That is the question. [Chuckles.]

Guillén: Is it one that can be answered?

Lee: No. I think it is something deep inside in the murkiest, most sensitive place at heart, that is very hard to detect. You see how she struggled. How can she let China down? I don't know. When I read [Eileen Chang's] short story, I asked myself: Is it the diamond? Is she bourgeoise? Is it because she had a good time in the sex? Does she think she loves him? Does she think he loves her? All those things. Obviously, she made a big mistake; but, a very sympathetic mistake, I think. It is so challenging, so frightful, to recognize that—being Chinese—to put female feelings and sexuality and that point of view to the glorious war, the holy war against the Japanese, in a patriarchal societal structure, that's unbelievable. It's courageous from the writer. I can't believe she wrote that. I just couldn't believe it. For a long time I thought there was no way anybody could make this into a movie. [Chuckles.] They should be shot!


But then, it just kept calling. Yes, that's a profound question to me; but, it really doesn't have an answer. She just did it. I think that's the movie and we're very moved. Personally, I think she did the wrong thing. That's why she's shot, along with her friends. It feels very painful.

Guillén: What is your impression of the ending, Tang Wei, and why she did it?

Tang Wei: I think to her, it's very good. She understands everything. She controls herself. She controls her life. It's good.

Lee: Women say no.

Wei: Really?

Lee: When they're not collaborating.


Guillén: [To Ang Lee] In the introduction to the published script, Schamus characterized that you have become "ensnared in a game of cinematic and literary mirrors." Whether or not that's true, it made me think that you've chosen two short stories in a row out of which you've conjured epic narratives. What is it that you see in the short story that you can unpack and transform into these epics?

Lee: Elements. We spent months and months and months writing the script. But what is the element? Is it rich enough to take off? To go on the journey? That's what I'm seeing in those materials.

Guillén: In this particular short story by Chang, what were the specific elements that you felt you could amplify through film?

Lee: Performance. Things about acting. Performance not only in a stage play and her parts but in general. A big part of life is about performance. Think about sex, how it's about performance. To me that's very important and that's what I do too. So, the illusion and disillusion is something I know I can dig in a lot and then—even though it's short—it has enough indications of the story poem. It has the theater group. It has the Chinese resistance and the Japanese collaboration and the government. After she loses her virginity, how do they respond? There's nothing written there, just a little bit, but you can imagine that, you can elaborate on that. It's full of potentials. The party in Shanghai. How do they go about their relationship? It's minimally written [in the short story], but you can feel a wealth of possibilities. It's storytelling. It's not just like, "They say…."; it's storytelling. It indicates a lot of possibility.


For Brokeback, it was a story of 20 years. Each one line could make you feel like you have to fill in five years each time you see them, so on and so forth. I think potential in our judgment or intuition, just react to the material, sometimes you can read a long book and think, "Okay, that's the story" and describe it in three sentences. Sometimes it could be poetry that can expand your imagination. So, I think I'm intrigued by the possibility of the short story. It's very lack of depiction—what's her character? Any of the characters?—and things underdeveloped. [Chang] avoided a lot of the details I really need to know. It was written very smartly. Actually, when you go into it, it is not easy.

Guillén: Were you tempted to include the omniscient narrator, which is so noticeable in the short story especially with regard to how Mr. Yee is feeling towards the end? Were you tempted to include that?


Lee: I think I did. It's a very strange structure, I must say, from the short story. We take the girl's perspective and at the end, after she's killed, we switch narrative to Mr. Yee. I don't know if that's legal. [Laughs.] It's totally uncultured; but, it's totally effective. Not only by middle-aged men who think, "Ooooooh." It seems like the ghost of Wong Chia-chih has come to the heart of the man. It has that feeling to me. It's written in a very ghostly way. It's curious and haunting. I think I did inherit [the omniscient narration] but in a cinematic way, with Mr. Yee carrying the death scene of these six students to him opening up the curtain, carrying the weight of killing her. And the reflection of the shadow on the empty blanket. I think he does carry the ghost of her.

Guillén: You don't depict their deaths. And you don't depict any of his atrocities.

Lee: That would be too real. That would be too objective instead of subjective. It has to be switched into more internal feelings that the man has to carry. You almost feel that living is painful and dying is a relief.

* * *

Random House first sent me a photocopy of Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang)'s short story "Lust, Caution" earlier this year, and then followed through with the Pantheon hard cover publication of Lust, Caution: The Story, the Screenplay, and the Making of the Film, which—along with Chang's short story and the screenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus—includes a preface by Ang Lee, an introduction by Schamus, an essay by translator Julia Lowell, and production notes by Co-Producer David Lee, First Assistant Director Roseanna Ng, Line Producer Doris Tse, Director of Photography Rodrigo Prieto, Script Supervisor Sherrie Liu, Production Sound Mixer Drew Kunin, and Editor Tim Squyres. The volume provides a fascinating and well-rounded exploration of this project from root to fruit.

In his preface, Ang Lee writes: "Making our film, we didn't really 'adapt' Zhang's work, we simply kept returning to her theater of cruelty and love until we had enough to make a movie of it." (2007:vii)


Though he touched upon it in the interview above, Ang Lee provides some fascinating, insightful amplification to the character of Mr. Yee, played to ruthless perfection by Tony Leung: "Zhang is very specific in the traps her words set. For example, in Chinese we have the figure of the tiger who kills a person. Thereafter, the person's ghost willingly works for the tiger, helping to lure more prey into the jungle. The Chinese phrase for this is wei hu dzuo chung. It's a common phrase and was often used to refer to the Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese occupiers during the war. In the story Zhang has Yee allude to this phrase to describe the relationship between men and women. Alive, Chia-chih was his woman; dead, she is his ghost, his chung. But perhaps she already was one when they first met, and now, from beyond her grave, she is luring him closer to the tiger…." (2007:vii-viii)

"Interestingly," Ang Lee adds, "the word for tiger's ghost sounds exactly like the word for prostitute. So, in the movie, in the Japanese tavern scene, Yee refers to himself with this word. It could refer to his relationship to the Japanese—he is both their whore and their chung. But it also means he knows he is already a dead man." (2007:viii)


In the interview above, where Ang claimed that "performance" was one of the elements that convinced him Eileen Chang's short story could be unpacked and transformed into a film, he emphasized the importance of "performance" in his own life. In his preface, he elaborates: "Zhang describes the feeling Chia-chih had after performing on stage as a young woman, the rush she felt afterward, that she could barely calm down even after a late-night meal with her friends from the theater and a ride on the upper deck of a tram. When I read that, my mind raced back to my own first experience on the stage, back in 1973 at the Academy of Art in Taipei: the same rush of energy at the end of the play, the same late-night camaraderie, the same wandering. I realized how that experience was central to Zhang's work, and how it could be transformed into film. She understood playacting and mimicry as something by nature cruel and brutal: animals, like her characters, use camoflauge to evade their enemies and lure their prey. But mimicry and performance are also ways we open ourselves as human beings to greater experience, indefinable connections to others, higher meanings, art, and the truth." (2007:viii-ix)

James Schamus pursues the multivalency of performance in his introduction, distinguishing between "acting" and "performing" and suggestively implying that when we exercise free will through conscious decision and choice, we "act" on free will. Free will becomes, in essence, just another performance.


Schamus accepts the premise that masks reveal as much as they conceal when he writes: "One could say that Lust, Caution depicts a heroine who 'becomes herself' only when she takes on the identity of another, for only behind the mask of the character Mai Tai-tai can Chia-chih truly desire, and thus truly live—playacting allows her to discover her one real love. But this is too reductive. For the performer always, by definition, performs for someone. And that audience, no matter how entranced, is always complicit; it knows deep down that the performance isn't real, but it also knows the cathartic truth the performer strives for is attainable only when that truth is, indeed, performed. …[L]ust and caution are, in Zhang's work, functions of each other, not because we desire what is dangerous, but because our love is, no matter how earnest, an act, and therefore always an object of suspicion. If Chia-chih's act at the end of the story is indeed an expression of love, it paradoxically destroys the very theatrical contract that made the performance of that love possible—in killing off her fictional character, she effectively kills herself." (2007: xi-xii)


Schamus's description of this "theatrical contract" adds significant heft to the two words Chia-chih utters—"Go, now!"—upon which the moral complexity of Ang Lee's Lust, Caution pivots. It reminds me how heightened sexual dynamics and their power plays are configured as "scenes." And it sheds enlightened relief upon Chia-chih's anguished monologue in her encounter with Old Wu; a monologue that chilled me to the bone as it unfolded on the screen. Old Wu praises Chia-chih and tells her to keep Mr. Yee in her trap. She responds: "You think I have him in a trap? Between my legs, maybe? You think he can't smell the spy in me when he opens up my legs? Who do you think he is?" Old Wu listens but becomes increasingly nervous. Chia-chih continues: "He knows better than you how to act the part. He not only gets inside me, but he worms his way into my heart. I take him in like a slave. I play my part loyally, so I too can get inside him. And every time he hurts me until I bleed and scream before he comes, before he feels alive. In the dark only he knows it's all true."

This is as sophisticated as anything I have ever read, heard or seen with regard to the power dynamics of impassioned sex, where "consensuality" is only a safe word. Perhaps it is as Roman Polanski once observed: "Sex is not a pastime. It's a force, it's a drive. It changes your way of thinking."

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 IIFF: THE MIX-UP—The Evening Class Interview With A.J. Eaton

Late last month, when I had my mini-meltdown during the Buñuelathon and experienced serious doubts about continuing with online journalism, I received such a rush of confirmation and encouragement that I pivoted back into place. I'm sincerely grateful to each and every kind comment I received. Thank you.

Brian Darr of Hell on Frisco Bay called me on one of my comments, however, wherein I said that something had to change in order for me to continue writing online. He wanted to know what I meant by that. I mulled it over and realized that what I wanted to change was the "right sizedness" of my film writing. This is a directive for no one but myself so children beware.

Though it has been a fun challenge to secure press credentials and establish working relationships with regional and national publicists and distributors, I sometimes have issue with the fact that the whole PR machine is geared towards defining movies as calendared commerce, moreso than art. At times I find myself feeling—as Brian has himself characterized it—like a dancing monkey for the publicists. It seems like no matter how much I give them, often by way of free writing, they always want a little more. And what I've been noticing of late is that what I value as a film writer has become distorted by how the publicists wish to structure their proffered opportunities. In gist, their's is an interference pattern. With regard to interviews, I prefer one-on-ones; but, certain publicists (you know who you are) would prefer to group online journalists into round tables. So sometimes, if I want to talk to a particular individual, it has to be through a round table, which doesn't feel right-sized or comfortable at all. In such instances, the interviews—as I perceive their purpose—suffer. So why bother?

I've taken lately to consciously weaning myself away specifically from the round table press junkets—no matter who it is—and generally from the publicists altogether to solicit interviews on my own through my own resources. That feels right. I get to do it my way, by my interests, through my contacts, and more importantly by my timing. That means that sometimes I'm going to interview someone who just isn't in the glossies of current popularity. It means that sometimes I'm going to interview complete unknowns because I'm interested in how they're starting out. That's one of the reasons I accepted Bruce Fletcher's invitation to cover this year's Idaho International. It's a festival that's basically inconsequential or invisible as far as the festival circuit goes. But as I stated in my previous post, its regionality holds a certain allure and a refreshing authenticity.


In an effort to remain "right sized" about my film reportage, I've long practiced the philosophy that for every "famous" name I talk to, I turn around and talk to someone who's not famous at all. I want to strike that balance. It's the triple Libran in me, I guess. As a consequence, after interviewing an auteur like Bela Tarr at the Toronto International, something feels just right about interviewing a young 27-year old director at his second festival with his first short. It's important for me to include such an interview in my body of work. Perhaps, down the line when A.J. Eaton is gathering his laurels, I can say I was one of the first to recognize his talent and champion his work. Believe it or not, such delayed gratification would give this old film writer much pleasure and satisfaction.

As I wrote previously, A.J. Eaton's The Mix-Up started IIFF's "Local Heroes" program of shorts and set an unsurpassed bar for the evening. A perfectly pitched comedy, crisply edited, well-acted, and concisely written, The Mix-Up is an intact professional piece of filmmaking, integral unto itself. Having already played at the 2007 Palm Springs ShortFest, IIFF was its second stop, on what should be a robust festival run. We got together for coffee, raspberry shortbread, and a friendly (and informative!) conversation on shorts filmmaking.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Where did the idea for The Mix-Up originate? How did you develop this impressively tight script?


A.J. Eaton: It was a conglomeration of a few things. I wanted to do a well-done short film and so I started pursuing two ideas. One idea was a play called Sure Thing [by David Ives] where the same scene [is played out] over and over again. I phoned the author's agent and I said, "Hey, I'm trying to do a short film and I'm really interested in Sure Thing." She goes, "Well, you're about the fifth person to call this week on that. It's a really popular piece and the author's been adamant that it's going to remain in the theater." So that idea was gone.

I decided to go on an idea that my brother and I [had worked up]. We were just joking around in the car. My brother's a musician and we're both theatrical when we get together. I said, "What you need to do is get yourself a ball peen hammer and just beat the hell out of it" and then it just kind of evolved from there. I started thinking about my grandfather who's this little Italian guy who's had this hobby where he does construction. But the problem is that he's never quite done it right. The house that he and my grandmother live in is a 40-year conglomeration of bad construction projects. He took a deck one time and turned it into a TV room. The ceiling's sagging and all of that but it's his work and he's very proud of it.


Guillén: So your grandfather became the template for the character of Bill in The Mix-Up?

Eaton: Somewhat, yeah. But my main concept for the character was like a roly poly older Chris Farley. When I was starting to write it, I thought, "What's my grandpa's value?" Obviously, I love him dearly and his attitude is his value

Guillén: At the Q&A you mentioned that the idea of the mix-up came from when you were working for a television studio?

Eaton: One of my first jobs in live TV was working at a local TV station in Pocatello, Idaho. It was an NBC affiliate and I was a camera operator and production assistant on this early morning show. We were on the air live at 6:00 AM every day. It was murder. We had to fill an hour's worth of news content every day and there isn't a lot of news in Eastern Idaho. I mean, there isn't that much news in Boise, Idaho. At least news that comes reaching out at you. The TV station didn't have the staff or resources to get reporters to actually do hard hitting news stories so we would find ourselves getting "experts" from a variety of different places. Some guy would show up about 10 minutes before he was supposed to be on the air. "Oh yeah," he'd say, "Duffy [the anchor] said I'd be on the second half, so just show up at 6:30" and his segment was at 6:40. My job was to go into the break room where they had bad coffee and go get that person and bring him on to the interview set and I was like, "Now, what are you here for? What are you talking about?" "Oh," he'd say, "I'm going to be talking about fertilizer." "Are you from some kind of greenhouse?" "Oh no, I work for the school district. But I just met Duffy at dinner the other night and I told her that I'd been fertilizing my lawn…" and the rest was history.

Guillén: Would you say that early haphazard environment is why you now favor a tight, lean production style?

Eaton: Yes, absolutely.

Guillén: Among the shorts in the "Local Heroes" program, yours stood out for its fully-realized production value. Some of the shorts were being used to pitch for seed money for features, as the one filmmaker admitted, but what I admired about The Mix-Up was that it was complete; it was an intact universe. Clearly, you'd had some training in production?

Eaton: I started doing production when I was about 15. I was lucky because my dad is a songwriter [Steve Eaton] and he enjoyed some moderate success in the late '70s-early '80s. I spent a lot of time in his recording studio. That's how I got into film production. He was working on some TV music and the two filmmakers from PBS came to my dad's studio. He lived a Sun Valley lifestyle with a recording studio in the basement. We lived on an acreage where a lot of people would come to the studio and work. These guys were talking about sounds and shots and how the sounds work together. From that point forward I was addicted.

Guillén: Has that opportunity for early production training and access put you in conflict with peers who are operating off more of a DIY aesthetic? I sensed this last night. What I recognized as professional, I suspected others felt was privilege. Has this caused tension between you and other filmmakers your age?

Eaton: Absolutely.

Guillén: So what's the philosophy behind your filmmaking? What are you going for?

Eaton: I have a lot of films that I've made that were that DIY type of idea; but, they're not films that I feel comfortable showing in public. However, public feedback is always good; but, I would get the feedback after I showed it to a friend or family member. I've been involved in a few projects where I wasn't the director and I learned from the director's mistakes. A lot. I was so gung-ho by 21 to be a film director but I learned to be patient. I don't know all that I don't know.

Guillén: Let's talk about your directorial style. Your actors are natural. Do you have a way you work with your actors or do you let them bring what they're going to do?

Eaton: With The Mix-Up I took the approach that I was going to let the actors fill in the grout inbetween the bricks, if you will. I knew who was going to be [right] in the casting process. We went with something of an improvisational approach on this. But it all depends on the piece. I have another piece right now that I'm working on [where I] will be very strict with the actors because of the style of it. With this piece, I was so lucky to get all of the actors I got.

Guillén: You had a very good cast.


Eaton: They were. And thank Patti Kalles, who's a casting agent. Casting agents have become almost like executive producers these days. They have access. They know who's out there. They know who's not working. She was very encouraging. I was so concerned for our first day of shooting because even though Wally Dalton ["Bill"] and Rodney Sherwood ["the construction boss"] had worked together before, I hadn't rehearsed their scene. So I wasn't sure how these guys would gel. When I called Wally Dalton, I said, "I'm so excited to work with you, Wally. Your audition was amazing. I cast a guy named Rodney Sherwood to be your nemesis in that first scene…." He said, "Rodney and I used to tour on stand-up comedy together." The chemistry between those two was an absolute blessing; they had this unspoken communication. It was just right on.

I rehearsed everything else, especially that scene where they take Bill into the studio and the people are pouring in and they're testing his microphone; I felt the timing had to be just right on that. I had the script. I had the group of people for the rehearsal. I said, "Here's what we're thinking. The camera's going to be here. You guys are going to be doing that." The actors would come up with ideas, they'd do stuff and I'd say, "Y'know, I don't think that's working for me. That's not right for the character." But they were all very detailed and so eager to work.

Guillén: The Mix-Up runs 13 minutes. How long did it take you to make the film? From the germ idea to writing the script to burnishing the script to actually shooting, which I understand took three days?

Eaton: Right. I started more than a year ago. My feet were on the ground where I decided, "I'm going to do this short film right away." There was a program On the Lot that Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett were producing. I thought, "That would be really cool to get my short on that program." The deadline for that was January 1, I believe, so I was gung-ho to get The Mix-Up done by January 1. We were going to make this happen. No one else was going to hire me to make the film. We shot 80% of the film in November in Seattle. Then we edited it. I put in temporary music and some of the temporary sound effects and then deemed that, okay, I'm going to do some pick-up shots, put in a few more insert shots, and set up the crew again to do some of the fill-in shots that I knew that I was going to need when I was shooting the first two days but we just didn't have the time to do them. So I went back to Seattle and shot. I completed the film after editing in July. There was always something that I wanted to do. "Okay, we're going to have to remix the sound because it's not right." I was really really picky on this. We did it on a full digital intermediate. We shot high definition and the digital intermediate process is becoming an essential part to every great film production. I was lucky enough to get some time with the top colorists in Hollywood.

Guillén: Where did The Mix-Up's central joke of using construction metaphors to represent relationships come from?

Eaton: That came out of thin air, I suppose, going on the theme of how can someone's bad work still be valuable? The last line that Bill says when he's on the show is a verbatim quote from my grandfather. We had this friend who was visiting, came to my grandparents' house with us, and he's kind of a makeshift construction guy himself, but he does things right. He's sitting in my grandfather's living room and says, "Boy, Johnny, this is quite the production you got going here," or something to that effect and [my grandfather responded, tapping the side of his head], "Yeah, it's all about engineering." I worked backwards from that. Engineering, y'know.

Guillén: Let's talk a little bit about reception. You've shown The Mix-Up at the Palm Springs Short Fest and now here at the Idaho International. Have you confirmed any further festival appearances?

Eaton: Not yet. I've been invited to submit to five film festivals.

Guillén: Explain that process a bit. How does that work with a short film? I imagine most filmmakers would start with a short. How do you go about knowing where you want to place it?


Eaton: I'm learning a lot about this. I was reluctant to step to the director's chair until I knew that I was going to do a good short. I happened to come into contact with a lady named Kathleen McGinnis. She is a leading shorts programmer. I didn't even know that when I met her. Someone said she was a film festival consultant. She's programmed the Seattle International, was one of the programmers at Palm Springs, and is a qualified publicist and producer as well. She's so eager to help people, which is amazing. She said, "Well, send me a copy of the film and I'll take a look at it." I Fed-Exed a copy to her and she said, "I like it." One of the things that Kathleen and I talked about is that there are shorts film festivals that are all about shorts [where] the shorts aren't just a side thing to the features, which can be a good strategy. She said, "You want to premiere at a shorts festival and these are the festivals you want to go to." She gave me a list and said, "Good luck." As they say in the business, it only takes one yes. I applied to CineVegas. I was so excited about CineVegas. I thought it was a huge growing film festival. We didn't get into that, but there's only 10 slots for short films. I applied to a number of others but got a yes from Palm Springs. They called me personally on the phone and said, "Is this Mr. Eaton?" and I was like, "It is." They said, "This is Alan Spano and we're from Palm Springs Film Festival and we just want to wish you congratulations." For a second I was like, "Congratulations for what?" They said, "We love your film and we love the character of Bill and we really think it's going to play well here in Palm Springs."

Guillén: Did it?

Eaton: It did! The audience was laughing out loud, which was validating.

Guillén: What's it like starting out as a director where you've been accepted into a program of shorts with five or six other directors? What are the dynamics of that? Do you find yourself interacting a lot with those other directors who are submitting shorts? How do you gauge yourself against your peers?

Eaton: I can see the problems with my film but compared with others [here at the Idaho International] I can say, "We might have something." But in Palm Springs, I almost felt like I was the underdog.

Guillén: The caliber was higher?

Eaton: Yeah! Absolutely. These guys are coming from Great Britain and Canada and Australia where they have lottery funding for filmmakers. Budgets were up to $500,000 for a short film.

Guillén: So humility becomes requisite?

Eaton: Absolutely. The other thing I was really nervous about—because, I think, directors are type A personalities; I know that I am—sometimes egos can clash, not as bad as actors together, but egos can clash. When I went to Palm Springs—which was the first big festival of that caliber that I had been to—I was nervous to go into a room with all these other filmmakers because I was thinking it was going to be more of a defense mechanism where I was going to have to defend the choices I'd made in my film. But there were no egos. It was all congratulatory and other people giving points; but, it's from an artist to an artist, so it was really great. The British films that I saw absolutely blew my mind. They were deep, great directing, everything about them was perfect. I've seen movies that have been box office smashes that didn't have the technical prowess that these films had. There was actually one director—Mal Woolford—who had two films in the festival, which was remarkable. One was this dark moody piece called Redblack, a perfect short film, and the other piece was a comedy piece called Fluffy. He and I sat down and we started talking about styles and "How did you shoot that?" It was so inspirational.

Guillén: So shorts directorship then and these festival opportunities become a training ground for you?

Eaton: It's like camp.

Guillén: Is your intention to do a few more shorts before attempting a full feature? Do you want to film a full feature?

Eaton: I do want to go to full features, but when the time is right, when I feel that I'm ready. Even with this short film, I decided I'm going to wait a few years, save up some professional capital, before I'm ready. I feel like I'm getting ready to do a feature. I've got two that I'm really pushing for; but, a lot of people are saying, "We want to see the darker side of A.J. We want to see the angst-ridden A.J."

Guillén: Is there an angst-ridden A.J.?

Eaton: There can be; I'm a chameleon! I just talked to a producer yesterday about doing a short film that takes place in … either the first scenes would take place in New York or Los Angeles at a high-rise music corporation office and then it goes to the French district in New Orleans. It's a story that has a definite twist but it will be dark, it will be very moody, it will be the opposite of The Mix-Up. I want to do it to prove to myself that I can do it. I also want to show everyone else that I'm versatile because I think that's what makes a successful director these days, is versatility.

Guillén: Let's talk some about how a young first-time director like yourself markets a short like The Mix-Up. Marketing. Distribution. Do you have a gameplan of how you want to get your film out there or what you hope it will do for you? How it will pay for itself?

Eaton: I do. It's transformed as the production process has gone about; but, surprisingly enough, there is a fertile market for short form content right now. With media expanding daily, with iTunes. I've gone into debt, obviously, to do this. We built sets. The way that we shot The Mix-Up was to look a little bit Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque. My DP is from Curb Your Enthusiasm. I wanted it to look a little bit more on the video side rather than the film side; but, the construction scene … we shot on a practical location for that; but, the TV set and the TV studio, those are all sets. On the TV monitors we digitally put in the logo of my fictitious TV station. We built risers in a big movie studio and put curtains down and the whole thing. So I thought, "Okay, I'm going to spend some money on this and I'm going to use it as momentum to get me another piece." I've cut my teeth on commercials, working as a producer or whatever on commercials, doing the music for commercials, so I thought, "I can show them this piece to show I can direct a 13-minute movie pretty well. I know where to put a camera and I know how to mix things together." But now I'm finding that—I've been talking to a company in Toronto—they buy short form content and put it on airlines.

I had done a lot of research before fully going forward on The Mix-Up to find out what are my options? HBO and Cinemax, they're dealing with odd-numbered content, movies that can be 105 minutes long, so they end up finding themselves needing 13 minutes. I thought, if we do it well enough, we can possibly sell it there. In Canada there's two short film channels, two! One's called Movieola; the other one's Channel Zero. In Europe Shorts International just launched their own shorts channel too.

Guillén: Are there money prizes for shorts at the festivals?

Eaton: Yeah, at Palm Springs the shorts that won—which were very well-done and now are Oscar contenders—one of the prizes was a $30,000 Panavision package. It's like, "You've done great, kid, now here's your Panavision. Go and shoot another." I think there were some prizes that went down to $5,000 or $3,000. That would be nice to win that. But right now, my goal is to get into AFI.

Guillén: When does that run?

Eaton: That runs in November. I'll hear probably in three weeks whether that happens. I'd also love to get into Toronto Worldwide Shorts or the Aspen Shorts Fest or Clermont-Ferrand, which is a big shorts film festival in France. In fact, right now, I'm working on getting the French translation of The Mix-Up, which has been a fun, amusing [process].

Cross-published on Twitch.

PASTE 36—Rob Davis on Antonioni & Bergman

Though flung off a hyphenated abyss on page 63 only to land face front on page 64, Rob Davis's essay “Bending Light & Baring the Soul” in the current issue of Paste (No. 36, 10/07) is an essential grasp on the cinephilic loss of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman earlier this Summer.

Burnishing his insights on the films of Antonioni, Rob explains that he was a director for whom “existence is an indistinct concept.” “Again and again,” Rob writes, “Antonioni hid his plot in shadows but pulled the questions into the light.”

As for Ingmar? Rob concludes that Bergman “didn’t seem to have any answers to the questions he raised … but he kept asking them, and had a knack for bringing his stories to an appropriately dramatic conclusion without cauterizing all of his characters’ wounds. He was a smooth, precise director, but one who—unlike Antonioni—worked within the conventions of film grammar rather than pressing at the medium’s edges.”

Myself, I am reminded that no less than a month before Antonioni’s demise, Darren Hughes and I—on our way to a film at the San Francisco International—were tickled by a couple in a tennis court volleying with imaginary rackets.

Life is only so much cinematic citation after all.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 IIFF—Ten Canoes

Along with the theme of the regionality of the festival, there’s the theme of how films brought in will play regionally. At the closing night gala I overheard a woman complaining to her friend about the closing night feature Ten Canoes: “All they did was talk about poop!” I shook my head in disbelief and thought, “Regional is as regional does.”

I first caught Rolf de Heer's ethnographic photograph come to life—Ten Canoes—at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. It had won a special mention at Cannes and had just been announced as Australia's Oscars entry in the foreign film category. The screening was problematic in that the print projected did not have subtitles. Misled by the English narrative voiceover, however, I didn’t know there were supposed to be subtitles so I absorbed the film on its projected merits. More than a year later, I finally caught Ten Canoes with its randy subtitles here in Boise, Idaho, which did indeed add another layer of comic meaning onto the film. One of the reel changes was a bit messy and the sound dropped out and I momentarily worried, “Oh no, am I going to get subtitles this time but no sound?” Fortunately, the projectionist pulled it together and I have finally seen the film as it was meant to be seen. I replicate (and tweak) my writeup from 2006 TIFF.


Ten Canoes is visually stunning, depicting movement between real time and dream time through strategic shifts of color and black and white cinematography. The story is simple even as the storytelling is complex. While hunting for geese and geese eggs, an elder tells his younger brother a story that proves relevant for the younger’s own inappropriate feelings for the elder's youngest wife.

During the Q&A after the Toronto screening, Rolf de Heer was asked how he cast Ten Canoes. He responded by saying he would have to paraphrase the question: how the film was cast. It was the most remarkable casting process he'd ever been through. In many respects he could do little. The inspiration for the film was a photograph by the Australian anthropologist Donald Thomson of ten men in canoes on a swamp. The initial casting of the movie was for four of those ten. It was the community itself who moreoreless decided who was going to do what. The ten men in the canoes in the photograph were all named and everyone was related to them in some way and so the people who were most closely related chose to "be" them. The last of the ten canoeists were cast in that way. For the rest of the casting, a number of aspects came into play. Primarily, there is a complex kinship system where everyone belongs to one of two moieties with subsections and classifications that determine who can marry who. As far as he could understand it, in the aboriginal culture there is no concept of "fiction." Thus, the relationships on the screen between the characters had to be allowed in real life between actors playing those characters. This was so complex that there was nothing he could do to even determine who he could cast from. It didn't work for him to ask each actor which moiety they belonged to and try to figure it out from there; they moreorless determined these casting choices themselves. He had to concede to their cultural imperatives.


He was asked how Australians and the aboriginal communities reacted when they saw the finished film. The very first people to see the film were the aboriginals who saw the version that was completely in their language, including the storyteller's narration (in our version the narration was in English). It was the wildest screening he had ever been to. It was complete madness, chaotic, wonderful. It was the first time any of them had seen anything on the screen that was about them in their own language. There was yelling, screaming, laughing. The response was tremendous.


He was asked how he came about to write this story, to know this community, and to become so involved, and whether he spoke aboriginal. Not at all, he admitted, maybe five or six words. It started when he made a film called The Tracker and he cast David Gulpilil [who, incidentally, is the English-speaking narrator of Ten Canoes]. After he cast David, he found himself not knowing how to deal with him because he was so different from anyone he'd ever dealt with before. He didn't even know how to talk to him. David invited him to come meet his people and de Heer realized he had to accept that invitation so he could understand him better to direct him. As their relationship developed during the filming of The Tracker, David kept asking de Heer to make a movie that would be about his people starring his people. As the project developed, David himself moved away from his community and became distant from the project, but, by then de Heer had developed a relationship with everyone else in David's community.

When de Heer was at the Toronto International for his previous film Alexandra's Project, he was walking across one of Toronto's parks ruminating on Ten Canoes when all the contradictory elements of the script's thematic necessities and cinematic structure fell into place. In gist, the story of ten men hunting for geese and geese eggs was fundamentally undramatic but this was what the community wanted in the film and what he had to work with. The community was very attached to the Donald Thomson photograph and they wanted de Heer to bring it to life. They wanted the film to be about old times but they didn't want the old times to be depicted as a time of conflict. Because Thomson's historical photograph was in black and white, it seemed obvious that the recapturing of that image should be in black and white but he was under contract to deliver a film in color. It was while walking through the park in Toronto three years ago that de Heer figured out that if the film was set in mythic time when anything could happen, it would be sufficiently removed from historical old times, and could be contrasted by being shot in color. If the mythic times could be told by a storyteller as the old times geese hunt was occurring, then the film would be provided a dramatic structure that would make it compelling to western audiences while still satisfying aboriginal requests.


Because of his familiarity with the community, de Heer was asked if it has changed much since he first met them. Some aspects remain close to what he first encountered, they retain tribal customs even as some of the aborigines have become enamored with on-line banking.

The script was developed by de Heer sitting down with the aborigines, talking through each scene, discussing what needed to be said to further the scene, complicated by his inability to speak Aborigine and many of them unable to speak English. There was always a lot of talk before they could finally get down to a shoot. Despite all this complication, the performances are amazingly consistent and de Heer explains this as being a consequence of the aboriginal perspective that they were not playing their ancestors, they were their ancestors. This temporal aspect is difficult for Westerners mired in temporal tense to understand. Comparable to the aboriginal assertions that they are the land and the land is them. The western subject/object split, which we presume to be literal, collapses in the face of the aboriginal belief in their own literal connection. In being their ancestors, they could perform with relative ease and continuity.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2007 IIFF—Praising Regionality & Local Heroes

What distinguishes the Idaho International Film Festival (which just wrapped up yesterday evening) is precisely its regionality. Sure, programmer Bruce Fletcher brought Boise some choice films—the U.S. premiere of The Walker, S.F. audience favorite Rolling, vintage ‘70s O, Lucky Man! and the Cannes-acclaimed Ten Canoes from Down Under, but it was the platform he provided independent filmmakers from Idaho and surrounding Oregon and Washington states that characterized the spirit of IIFF’s mission: to encourage local filmmakers with the incentive of exhibition. Motivated by a variety of visions and ambitions, the regional line-up was admittedly a mixed bag of efforts, but here’s a selection of the titles that caught my eye and/or ear.


At each of its screenings, Drew Wattle’s five-minute short Miller Time provoked ire and outrage among its audience, some of who vociferously demanded a refund. This kinky scenario, interpreted by Wattle from writer Will Schmeckpeper’s otherwise innocent script, positions a diorama that ingeniously combines DeWalt power tools, a dildo, and some S&M-tinged revenge wafting in the air. The short’s sardonic humor clearly catapulted over its Boise audience even though it will probably cause a San Francisco audience to cheer gleefully when it (hopefully) arrives Bayside. Wattle and Schmeckpeper interpret the outrage as a “badge of honor”; as well they should.


Inversely, a regional darling at the festival given prime coverage in the Idaho Statesman was Brandon Freeman’s The Broken Quiet, which initially made me want to hurl a few epithets or both of my boots at the screen for its Christian anti-abortionist stance. But as I settled into the screening, I found myself respecting the film if not liking it much. I suspect The Broken Quiet would be booed off the stage of San Francisco’s exhibition venues, which demands some consideration of who the film is for and how it will find its appropriate audience? My respect increased when I discovered this first feature was made for $700! And when it gradually dawned on me that it’s a film that will not completely satisfy Christians because of its strong language and because it somewhat downplays the issue of abortion to focus on the effect such a powerful issue has upon the film’s characters. Which shifts it out of the realm of simpleminded proselytization and brings it down to the work of a single visionary with a story to tell and some notable talent and potential to tell it. That’s not to downplay the film’s position, which I confirmed with Freeman. He is definitely an anti-abortionist, no bones about it. As he explained to Erin Ryan at the Idaho Statesman: “Everything I do, in the end, my motivation is to glorify God, not to preach or evangelize, but to do the best I can for Him.” Conflating prayer with a punching bag, Freeman makes clear this will be a lifelong fight.

So just as the woman in Miller Time’s audience protested that the short had no business being in an international film festival; a comparable argument could be levied at The Broken Quiet. And yet these two examples of regional filmmaking balanced against each other somehow demonstrate the appropriateness of both, and cancel out the crisscrossing objections. Film is meant not only to entertain but to challenge and agitate, no matter which side of an issue you’re on, and perhaps even more importantly, no matter what you’re intending to do with the film. Perhaps precisely because of his short’s acquired status as IIFF's lightning rod, Drew Wattles might push Miller Time out into the world, now that he knows he can get such a rise out of it. It doesn’t sound like that was his original intention; but, his festival experience has provided the insight. Likewise, Brandon Freeman didn’t make his film to solicit a Hollywood deal but because he felt compelled to by the dictates of his faith. As Bruce Fletcher recognized, “[Brandon’s film is] fiercely non-commercial. He made the film to tell a story; he didn’t make it as a calling card to get a job as a director.”

The Broken Quiet’s best scene, however, is when the aborted fetus returns as the vision of the grown man he could have been. Chills ran up my arms as I thought, “Oh my God, this is becoming an effective horror piece based upon Christian principles!” But it was only a tease. Freeman then returned to a more traditional narrative trajectory when he could have yanked open one of the doors to Hell. Regret has rarely been rendered so ominously and it would be interesting to see what Freeman could accomplish combining his faith and the horror genre.

I wish both filmmakers luck navigating the rocky waters of protest.


Arid Lands, directed by Grant Aaker and Josh Wallaert could easily have been two or three separate films. There’s a lot of information to digest, all of it quite interesting, but some trimming might help this film punctuate its points more effectively. Several scenarios are laid out in sedimentary fashion, layer upon historical layer, layer upon geological layer, layer upon cultural layer. Focusing on the arid lands of the mid-Columbian basin with its indigenous scrub brush steppes, Aaker and Wallaert succeed in reconfiguring geography as a cultural force that affects the daily lives of individuals and communities. The relationship of how man shapes his environment is notated in succession by the respectful harvesting of indigenous Amerindians; the reclamation by advancing agriculturalists of godforsaken land via irrigational “baptism”; the Federal appropriation of the land for the Hanford nuclear site where plutonium was produced for the Trinity tests and the bombing of Nagasaki; and the urban sprawl encouraged by the largest environmental cleanup in history with its relentless development tracts and the rise of vineyard agritourism. Arid Lands is essentially an ode to the spirit of a particular place; a landscape of incredible contradictions marked by conflicting perceptions of wilderness and nature.


This Is War: Memories of Iraq, produced by Scot Laney and directed by Gary Mortensen chronicles the yearlong deployment of members of the Oregon National Guard 2/162 in Iraq, specifically through home movies made by the soldiers during their 2004 deployment. Though I will be writing this film up in greater detail, I do want to note that what distinguishes it from the many documentaries and features I have seen in the last two years on the subject is the unexpected usage of necessary gallows humor to survive the horrific circumstances the Bravo Co., 2/162 battalion is subjected to daily. Surprisingly, this movie made me laugh a lot because the soldiers themselves were so damn funny about their experiences under extreme stress, which is not to say that it does not soberly address the horrors of war through a personal register not usually heard in mainstream reportage.


Another great opportunity for the “Local Heroes” to flex their creativity was at a program of shorts under just that title. The program began with A.J. Eaton’s The Mix-Up, which set the unsurpassed bar for the evening. A perfectly pitched comedy, crisply edited, well-acted, and concisely written, The Mix-Up is an intact professional piece of filmmaking, integral unto itself. Having already played at the 2007 Palm Springs ShortFest, IIFF was its second stop, on what should be a robust festival run.

I’m not quite sure why Mack Lewis’s 1991 short Double Crossing has taken so long to be shown. But better late than never, especially with this clever homage to the classic police procedurals of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Filmed entirely in Boise in atmospheric black and white, Double Crossing delivers its script with tongue frequently in cheek.

John Jensen’s Land of the Free is a well-produced dystopian vision of the not-too-distant future where fighting Homeland Security becomes the second American Revolution. Marred only by the fact that it’s meant to be a calling card to solicit funding for a larger project, it frustrates for introducing elements it never develops. Here’s hoping Jensen finds the money to burnish, let alone finish, his vision.

300 Pounds by Ron Torres is an admittedly silly spoof of Zack Snyder’s 300. Torres, who appeared on stage mohawked and happy knows who he is, what he’s created, and how he wants to distribute it, reminding that DYI can be fun. I loved the Spartan helmets that looked like they were made with cardboard, masking tape and bronze spraypaint.

Cross-published on Twitch.

10/01/07 UPDATE: Double Crossing director Mack Lewis emailed an explanation for the timelag between the film’s shooting date (1991) and its presentation at this year’s IIFF. Essentially, this was a revival screening.

"The film was shot over a day and a half in August 1990 with extra shots picked up the following April. Post-production was completed late August 1991. …Several of the locations no longer exist and show a vastly different Boise than the one we live in today. Scenes shot before the revitalization of Boise are the more apparent examples.

"The film can almost be seen as a period film or even a time capsule of sorts. It reflects a different time and style of filmmaking in a way that gives it a uniqueness that it didn't have when originally produced.

"The short was entered in the Idaho Film and Video Association's Nell Shipman Awards in 1992 and won for Best Short and Best Director. The screening held at the Idaho International Film Festival is its first public screening in 16 years.

"The short was also available for many years as a free rental at the Flicks. Over the course of the weekend, many people recounted tales of having rented the VHS tape and enjoying see the short on the big screen for the first time."