2006 NEW ITALIAN CINEMA—Marco Bellocchio's I pugni in tasca / Fists in the Pocket

The Criterion Collection dvd release earlier this year of Marco Bellocchio's debut feature Fists in the Pocket / I pugni in tasca (1965, 105 mins.) engendered favorable critical response from a new generation of film commentarians 40 years after its provocative appearance, confirming the film has held up well over the years and still speaks to (and entertains) contemporary audiences. But whereas most folks will be seeing this film for the first time on their television screens, Bay Area audiences have the choice privilege of seeing it as it was meant to be seen: projected on the large screen, introduced by Bellocchio himself.

In Italy, Fists in the Pocket caused a ruckus when it premiered at the 1965 Locarno International Film Festival—41 right-of-center Christian Democrat politicians called for its ban as an offense against the Italian family—and the film proved equally memorable in San Francisco at the 10th San Francisco International Film Festival. It thrust the then-26-year-old Bellocchio into international prominence, establishing him—along with Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini—as one of his generation's most significant film-makers. "The great advantage of first films," Bellocchio has admitted, "is that you're nobody and have no history, so you have the freedom to risk everything." Bellocchio took that risk and his freedom proved frenetic, thrilling and enduring.

In her informative essay for the Criterion dvd release entitled "Ripped to Shreds" (in reference to film critic Paolo Mereghetti's description that Fists in the Pocket "ripped the collective film imagination to shreds"), Deborah Young does a good job of tracing the film's influences on Bellocchio's later work, implying that for some critics Fists in the Pocket remains Bellocchio's masterpiece, overshadowing his subsequent films, and—in the case of his young actor Lou Castel—typecasting Castel in similar roles for years afterwards. Castel himself admitted in a Senses of Cinema interview with David Pellecuer, that he became an "actor who's been too conditioned by his character."


Castel literally drops into the film like one of Heaven's expelled angels (one of the most memorable entrances of a new actor I've ever seen) and it's easy to understand how his breakout performance as Alessandro (variously nicknamed Ale and Sandrino) became difficult to surpass in later films. He's simply riveting. His sociopathy is spellbinding. You can't take your eyes off him. Most critics liken him unto a young Marlon Brando, though I'm prone to concur with James Kendrick of Qnetwork that "with his tightly centered, boyish features and prematurely receding hairline, he looks like no one so much as Neil Patrick Harris, which gives him an additional edge of the uncanny." The resemblance to Brando, however, seems to be thematically reinforced by Alessandro's incestuous relationship with his sister Guilia (Paola Pitagora) who—as Girish Shambu has noted—has insinuatingly taped a photo of the young Brando to her bedpost. Deborah Young furthers that Brando's presence, by way of this photo, makes it seem as if he's acting in the movie's ensemble.

In his recent Senses of Cinema essay on Fists in the Pocket, Karl Schoonover argues against the ready interpretation that the film exemplifies "a premonition of unrest." As he observes, "For many, this film stands as a prophetic parable whose images, such as the fists evoked by its title, register the pent-up frustrations of mid-60s youth in the West—a tension that would eventually lead to the mass political demonstrations of 1968." But rather than indulge this "safe concept of the '60s 'youthquake' Zeitgeist", Schoonover encourages the more interesting consideration that "we approach the film less as a barometer of an impending Zeitgeist and more as a dialectic with the past." He suggests that not only should we consider how the film "retaliates against postwar Italian film aesthetics (particularly neo-realism)" but also how it "engages and confronts history (particularly the persistent vestiges of fascist subjectivity in contemporary Italy)." By this approach, he more accurately captures the poignant spirit of Alessandro's anti-heroic nature. "Alessandro emerges, here, not as a herald of '68 but as a symptom of fascism's lasting and subtle hold on subjectivity" or, as Jessica Winter states it even more succinctly at The Village Voice, Alessandro is "meant to personify a nation's fascist hangover."


That's one political spin that can be applied to the movie. Another is more conflated with the psychology of the family. If any film promotes the psychological suspicion that bad parenting induces narcissistic wounds, this is the one. Not only is the father absent from this bourgeois family but the mother is blind. The children are left to seek affirmation in their own subjectivities and obsessive self-reflections. Alessandro and his sister Guilia hover hazardously in front of mirrors for longer than is probably healthy. Schoonover likewise offers that, as a national allegory, "the fatherless family may mirror the Mussolini-less Italy and its growing pains." Offering a maternal tweak to the allegory, Steven Carlson writes, "I see the matriarch of this dysfunctional family as representative of Bellocchio's perception of the Italian government, ancient and outdated and blind to the suffering of 'her' children; as such, her death is followed by Ale and his sister Giulia pitching and burning furniture, clothing and other such accoutrements (destruction of the old ways!)."

The claustrophobia of family—so wonderfully depicted again and again by Arturo Ripstein in his films—factors heavily in to Fists in the Pocket, and might indeed have the same shared Buñuelian source. Buñuel pulled no punches exploring what Schoonover describes as "the violence of upper-middle-class stagnation and the brutality of elitism." Michael Atkinson, formerly with the Village Voice, in turn describes Fists in the Pocket as a "family bell jar of sociopathy and funeral rites." The psychological toll inflicted by "the tedious tension of mandatory suppers, the taunting abuses of sibling hierarchies, and the weight of financial squabbles" (Schoonover) has damaged each and every one of the adult children in this constrictive household. The Christian Democrat accusation that Fists in the Pocket maligns the nuclear family chafes against Bellocchio's supposition that "the dominant mode of familial relations [has become] useless, outmoded and even dangerous."


Perhaps its most dangerous exponent is Alessandro's quiet and seemingly "functional" older brother Augusto (chillingly portrayed by Marino Masé whose stunning good looks incriminate desire in his siblings). His decision to move away from the family household to set up an apartment in the city with his fiancé initiates the chain of events that propels the story forward. The jealous sabotage of his incestuous siblings stress their commitment to keeping the nuclear family together at whatever cost, including death, which Augusto capitalizes upon and exploits. His apparent frustration with dealing with his family's dysfunction—so mired it would, as Tim Knight wryly notes, "give the Borgias pause"—motivates Alessandro to misguidedly act on Augusto's behalf. To a certain extent Augusto can be seen as manipulating the dysfunction of his siblings for his own benefit. As Lou Castel himself later assessed, even though Bellocchio did not discuss the political meanings of the film with his cast, they became apparent in the process. Castel figured out "the capitalism metaphor: the sick branches are cut, the cynicism of speculation, the logic of the economic system and its ruthless operation", all of which Augusto represents. A blind mother, two younger brothers afflicted with epilepsy, and an emotionally-stunted sister personify the "sick branches" Augusto must prune in order to achieve a respectable life. His sport of shooting rats at night by way of the car's headlights prefigures this ambition.

Illness as existential plight is important to this film, much as in Tsai Ming-Liang's films. As David Pellecuer noted to Lou Castel, Alessandro's "crisis" in the final scene seemed to "somatize all the tensions and traumas accumulated during the film." Schoonover reminds us that "a fit of epilepsy is often called a crisi epilettica in Italian. Thus, for the Italian ear the word 'crisis' carries a double valence, connoting not only a political, social, or moral predicament, such as crisi finanziaria or crisi d'identità, but also a traumatically somatic episode." Thus, Schoonover concludes, the film's central gesture is not so much the title's fist but the epileptic fit. "We might do well to question a political aesthetic built upon the allegorization of the disabled body," he writes. Moreover, at the time of the film's release, Bellocchio remarked, "Film sometimes needs symbols, and to me epilepsy meant all the frustration, all the troubles and weaknesses often found in the young."


Acquarello synopsizes it best at Strictly Film School: "Bellocchio presents moral desolation and psychological fracture through the manifestation of physical disability (an involuntary metastasis similarly incorporated in Bruno Dumont's Life of Jesus and Tsai Ming-liang's The River), in order to provide an allegorical examination of the intrinsic corruption and perverting nature of fascism's inherently isolative, centralized authority."

All of this implicates the film as being overbearingly serious but, to its credit, what makes Fists in the Pocket enduringly charming and entertaining is precisely its perfectly-pitched sardonic humor. In some ways it reminded me of Harold Prince's Something For Everyone with a touch of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema. Though here the incestuous shenanigans are not so much introduced by an outsider as they are implicated from within. Paola Pitagora's performance of Guilia, in this light, comes off as a pathetic figure, not unlike the whore passed off from elder brother to younger. Her final triumph is to consciously permit death by doing nothing at all.


Speaking of Pasolini, Deborah Young quotes his famous remark that "in contrast to Bertolucci's 'cinema of poetry,' Bellocchio's films represent a 'cinema of prose' in which the style—the camera work and editing—is not foregrounded; the film language is transparent, and what counts is the content." Girish Shambu contests this "pat and clean" dichotomy by insisting that—though Fists in the Pocket is "raw and rancid"—it is no less poetic "than the bits of torn newspaper floating preciously in the wind in the opening shot of La Commare Secca. Poetry comes in many flavors, tones and colors; not all of them taste sweet, sound lyrical or look beautiful." He nudges comparisons even further by noting Bertolucci's theory "that the difference between his films and Bellocchio's might have something to do with their hometowns. Bertolucci is from Parma (elegant, refined, aestheticized) and Bellocchio from Piacenza (hard-edged, enshrouded in grim weather)."

Finally, mention must be made of Alberto Marrama's crisp black-and-white cinematography which pays studied homage to the nouvelle vague (and which I anticipate experiencing on the big screen). Also, Ennio Morricone's "modern, mocking score" (Young) lends an atmosphere of mental disquiet with its "ringing bells and atonal cacophonies."

Fists in the Pocket will be shown on Monday, November 13, 9:30 pm, Embarcadero Cinemas.

Cross-posted at Twitch.

2006 NEW ITALIAN CINEMA—Lineup

The San Francisco Film Society's New Italian Cinema returns November 12–19, 2006, to Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinemas for an eight-day series of Italian narrative features and shorts. Now in its tenth year, this window into today's Italy balances Opening and Closing Night films by established filmmakers with seven debut features paired with shorts. Something old, sure, but especially something new! What better way to appreciate Italian film?

The Opening Night film will be Marco Bellocchio's most recent venture The Wedding Director / Il regista di matrimoni—featured in the Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year—with Bellocchio present for the opening festivities as well as the festival's two-film retrospective, which includes his legendary 1965 debut feature Fists in the Pocket / I pugni in tasca and 2004's controversial Good Morning, Night / Buongiorno, notte.

The Closing Night film will be Vito Zagarrio's Three Days of Anarchy / Tre giorni d'anarchia (2004) which will bookend the Closing Night ceremony, wherein the City of Florence Awards will be handed out to the debut feature and short that festival audience members have ranked the highest.

The seven debut features in competition are Giovanni La Parola's . . . And if Tomorrow / E se domani . . . (2006); Carlo Luglio's Beneath the Same Moon / Sotto la stessa luna (2006); Lamberto Lambertini's Fire at My Heart / Fuoco su di me (2006); Gian Paolo Cugno's Salvatore—This Is Life / Salvatore—Questa è la vita (2005); Paolo Genovese and Luca Miniero's Sorry You Can't Get Through / Nessun messaggio in segreteria (2005); Francesco Amato's What the Hell Am I Doing Here! / Che ci faccio io qui! (2005); and Giorgio Diritti's The Wind Blows Round / Il vento fa il suo giro (2005).

THE THIRD I FILM FESTIVAL—Lineup

Evening Class contributing writer Michael Hawley offers a critical overview and his personal recommendations for The 3rd I Film Festival launching this weekend in San Francisco.


Most people would agree that San Francisco has a fairly sophisticated film culture, perhaps being outshone in this country only by New York and Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it appears we're becoming increasingly less immune to America's phobia for reading subtitles. Case in point: last week there wasn't a single foreign language film in theatrical release here (unless you include The Science of Sleep, which I don't) and this week there's only one, a revival of the 54-year-old Fanfan la Tulipe.

Fortunately, November brings us a trio of festivals to make up for this scarcity: The San Francisco International Latino Film Festival, the San Francisco Film Society's New Italian Cinema series, and the one I'm most looking forward to, the 3rd I Film Festival. Now in its fourth year, 3rd I will present three days worth of films from South Asia and its diaspora at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Castro Theater and the Roxie Film Center from November 10 to 12. Since I haven't actually seen any of the films in this year's program, I can only comment on the ones I'm most looking forward to, based on the reputations which precede them.


The selection that excited me most when I first looked at the line-up was Vimukthi Jayasundara's Sulanga Enu Pinisa / The Forsaken Land, from Sri Lanka. This film won the Camera d'Or for best first feature film at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival (a prize it shared, incidentally, with Miranda July's You, Me and Everyone We Know), and I had pretty much resigned myself to never being able to see it here in the Bay Area. Described as a meditative examination of the lasting affects of Sri Lanka's long civil war, the film has been praised for its visual poetry and painterly compositions, its dramatic use of landscapes to convey states of mind, and its masterful use of off-screen sound. The festival has obviously made a wise decision in selecting the Castro Theater and its large screen as the venue for this presentation.


A pair of interesting-sounding documentaries, Bombay Calling and Between the Lines: India's Third Gender will be shown at the Roxie Film Center. The former is a look at the issue of corporate call centers and the outsourcing of that work to India. The film focuses on the young employees who struggle to reconcile traditional Indian values with a Western-style corporate mentality and newly acquired, trendy, fast-paced lifestyles. If you've called any toll-free customer service number in the past few years, you've spoken with these young men and women and I'm looking forward to seeing this portrait of lives and culture in transition.


Originally, I wasn't planning to see Between the Lines: India's Third Gender. Over the years I've seen a number of features and documentaries about the hijiras of India (most of them at the Frameline festival), and thus wondered if I really needed to see one more. Between the Lines, however, happens to be photographed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of the exquisite Andy Goldsworthy documentary Rivers and Tides. So yes, I do need to see this one, too. Praised by Variety's Jay Weissberg as representing "the best view to date into the world of the Indian eunuch," Between the Lines casts its focus upon three of these marginalized beings as they guide renowned photographer Anita Khemka through their singular world.


Bollywood old and new is well represented in this year's festival by three selections, recent hits Omkara and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (aka KANK) and the all-time classic Sholay. Omkara is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Othello, reset in modern times against a backdrop of rural gangster warfare. This is director Vishal Bhardwaj's second Shakespearean adaptation (the first was 2003's Maqbool / Macbeth) and it's being described as "art-house Bollywood." I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but I'm looking forward to finding out. Karan Johar's Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna stars the ubiquitous Shahrukh Khan in a New York-set story about marital infidelity. These two films are being screened back-to-back at the Castro, and if you want to see both it will require a near seven-hour commitment. If you can pick only one and need help choosing, there's an amusing IMdb thread in which some enthusiastic Bollywood fans debate the relative merits of each.


The festival's closing night film is a revival of what is frequently described as the biggest Bollywood blockbuster of all time, 1975's Sholay. This film has been floating around my Netflix queue for years and I'm thrilled that my first exposure to it will be in a theater, in a new 35mm print with the original ending restored (bringing the running time to a whopping 204 minutes!) The term "Curry Western" was invented to describe Sholay's blending of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah's classic films with quintessential Bollywood elements. The film is also noteworthy for having made an international superstar out of Amitabh Bachchan, starring here as a petty crook anti-hero who's hired to capture the bad guy terrorizing a small village. Wikipedia has a lengthy entry for Sholay and here are a few highlights:

• Sholay took 2½ years to film and is the highest grossing Indian film of all time, adjusted for inflation.
• It was considered a box office flop when first released, but soon people were waiting in kilometer-long lines in monsoon rains to buy tickets.
• Sholay ran for 286 consecutive weeks at the Minerva Cinema in Mumbai.
• The film's dialogue became so popular that cassette tapes of it were released, along with those featuring the film's musical score.
• Watching Sholay in theaters became something like a karaoke experience, with audience members reciting dialogues in tandem with the on-screen characters. Some fans had even memorized the sound effects.

And in that spirit, the 3rd I Film Festival is inviting audience members to come dressed in their favorite retro-Sholay attire. This should be enormous fun and one of the Bay Area's movie-going highlights of 2006!

For the complete festival line-up and additional film descriptions, please visit the 3rd I website.

11/09/06 UPDATE: Greencine's Hannah Eaves offers her own recommendations.


11/12/06 UPDATE: Opening night for the SFISAFF at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was a sold-out event, with enthusiasts even sitting on the edge of the stage. Seema Aurora advises the event was heartwarming and has sent along this photograph she took of the young directors in attendance. (l-r) Alka Raguram (The Ant and The Monkey), Saqib Mausoof (Hansot By The Bay), Runjan Dhar (Loops & "MuZak"), Neshma or Single Beige Female (My Beige Foot), Tania Chattopadhyay (The Flight), Kirthi Nath & Amanda Davidson (Come on, Big Empty).

The Saturday crowds for Bollywood at the Castro were likewise large and excited, cheering when their favorite idols appeared on screen. I'm looking forward to today's afternoon documentaries capped off by Sholay.

CARLOS BOLADO—Peregrina, A Revolutionary Love Story

Dawn McElligott reports to The Evening Class from Milford, Pennsylvania's Black Bear Film Festival and cautions moviemakers weary of film festivals that you never know where an unexpected opportunity might lie.

* * *

Moviemakers weary of film festivals should take note: one such event gave birth to a production company and an independent film with a multi-million dollar budget. The new film by Carlos Bolado is largely the result of events surrounding the 2003 Black Bear Film Festival, held annually in Milford, Pennsylvania, a popular weekend destination for New Yorkers about 70 miles northwest of the city. Schmoozing at the 2003 film festival brought together a disparate band of moviemakers. They eventually chose Bolado to direct a movie about eternal love, heroism, betrayal and revolution.

At the 2003 Black Bear Film Festival Opening Night Gala, an attendee discussed Greased Lightning (1977) with the festival's programmer, Joe Revitte. Revitte was immediately interested in the film for two reasons. First, it had a NASCAR theme. Second, it was co-written by local resident, Ken Vose. Revitte worked with Black Bear Film Festival Board member Fred Buchholz to screen Greased Lightning at the 2004 Black Bear Film Festival. Festival sponsors, Bill and Devi Rosado, discovered Vose through the screening's publicity.

Northeastern Pennsylvania residents know Bill Rosado as the founder of the Rosado Group, a consortium of auto dealerships. Few knew he had another passion: honoring the memory of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, a hero in his native country, Mexico. Rosado had been trying for years to attract moviemakers to the love story of Felipe Carrillo Puerto and New York Times reporter, Alma Reed.

In the early 1920s, Carrillo Puerto became governor of Yucatan. The progressive leader fought for the rights of the largely impoverished indigenous people. He ran afoul of the henequen plantation owners. Many were becoming wealthy by exploiting the laborers of Mayan descent.

As the plantation owners or hacendados conspired against Carrillo Puerto with certain members of the government, Alma Reed arrived in the Yucatan. When the journalist met Carrillo Puerto, it was love at first sight. The governor called her "Peregrina"(pilgrim). He had a love song, "La Peregrina" composed by Yucatan poet Luis Rosado Vega with music by Ricardo Palmerín. The governor also divorced his wife of many years and became engaged to Alma. However, Carrillo Puerto was executed by rebel soldiers just 11 days before he was to marry his true love in San Francisco.

Carrillo Puerto's memory is greatly honored today, especially in the Yucatan, the region of Rosado's birth. The car dealership entrepreneur had written letters to such directors as Steven Spielberg, hoping to bring the transcendent love story to the big screen. For years he received no response from Hollywood. Media coverage of the 2004 Black Bear Film Festival helped him to discover the screenwriter around the corner.

Rosado contacted Vose and the two began hammering out the details. Rosado Productions was born. At times, the task seemed too demanding and the project was almost cancelled. Yet, the love story haunted Rosado. It needed an experienced, sensitive director. Within a year, Vose secured Mexican-born, Carlos Bolado, to direct the film. Bolado's debut feature, Bajo California: El Limite del Tiempo received seven Ariel Awards (the national film award of Mexico). Promises, a documentary he co-directed with B.Z. Goldberg and Justine Shapiro, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002.

Bolado's latest film, Sólo Dios Sabe, was presented at the 2006 Black Bear Film Festival on October 14. Sólo Dios Sabe, whose English translation is "Only God Knows," explores themes of fate, faith, romantic love and the legacies of our ancestors. Some of these themes are sure to be woven into the new film, Peregrina, A Revolutionary Love Story.

Immediately after the Black Bear Film Festival screening of Sólo Dios Sabe, the Director conducted a Q&A session with the audience. The viewers gushed with praise for the film's visual beauty, sensuality and symbolism. Rosado Productions will begin filming Peregrina, A Revolutionary Love Story in February. A wider audience will be able to see Sólo Dios Sabe a few months later, as it is scheduled to be released in US Theaters for spring, 2007.

The photograph of Ken Vose and Carlos Bolado at the 2006 Black Bear Film Festival was taken by Dawn McElligott. Cross-posted at Twitch.

SILENT FILM—Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever

"Louise Brooks was not just a Jazz Age actress," Kenneth Turan wrote in the L.A. Times, "she was a drug that went right to your head."


November 14, 2006, marks the centenary of Louise Brook's birth and—by way of tribute to this enduring legend—Rizzoli International Publications has published Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever, a lush hardcover volume with over 200 photographs and commentary by Peter Cowie, a world-renowed film critic, film historian and author of some 20 books, among them The Cinema of Orson Welles, and John Ford and the American West. Cowie is considered the leading non-Nordic expert on Scandinavian cinema and the films of Ingmar Bergman (whose biography he has also written) and has penned some of the best commentaries for the Criterion Collection. Founding editor of the annual International Film Guide, Cowie was the International Publisher of Variety from 1993 to 2000. He has lectured on four continents, and now serves as a special consultant to the Berlin International Film Festival.

Peter Cowie became a close confidante of Louise Brooks in her later years and his affectionate and insightful portrait of Louise as actress, myth, and legend demonstrates how and why "Lulu" has outlasted nearly all her screen contemporaries to become an influential cult figure, as well as an abiding and fascinating symbol of 20th century Hollywood.


Bay Area audiences will have two great opportunities to hear Cowie speak on Louise Brooks. First, he will introduce a new 35mm print of Pandora's Box at the San Rafael Film Center on Saturday, November 11, at 7:00. As you might recall, Pandora's Box was the centerpiece attraction of this last summer's Silent Film Festival.

The second opportunity for San Franciscans to hear Cowie lecture will be at Gary Meyer's Balboa Theater on Sunday, November 11, likewise at 7:00, where Cowie will introduce a program that includes one of Lulu's most rarely shown features, a short comedy, and coming attractions. The Balboa is being enticingly secretive about the program titles but—knowing Gary Meyer's discriminating taste—you can be sure it will be well worth the experience.


The Balboa Theater event is being co-sponsored by the Louise Brooks Society, who is likewise mounting a photography exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library—"Homage to Lulu: 100 Years of Louise Brooks"—commencing November 4, 2006 and continuing through January 5, 2007. On display will be dozens of vintage objects—such as books, magazines, sheet music, postcards, film stills and related ephemera—which will tell the story of Lulu's life and films. Highlights include American and French photoplay editions (the movie tie-in editions of the 1920's), an editorial comic strip explaining the scandalous circumstances behind Brooks' affair with Charlie Chaplin, Brooks' inspired novels, a jumbo-size lobby card, and a full-page newspaper advertisement for Show Girl—the Brooks-inspired novel which became a hit stage play and the long-running comic strip "Dixie Dugan." The exhibition will be held at the Main Library, 100 Larkin Street (at Grove), Fourth Floor, Steve Silver Beach Blanket Babylon Music Center, and will include a related program, a screening of Louise Brooks' flapper comedy Love 'Em and Leave 'Em (1926, 70 min.) with an introduction by Thomas Gladysz, director of the Louise Brooks Society. That screening will be on Tuesday, November 21, 2006, 6 p.m. in the Main Library's Koret Auditorium.

Further, the Silent Theatre Company is currently performing "Lulu: A Black and White Silent Play" at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco. The S.F. Chronicle has described the production as "…a feast…playfully expressionist…hilarious physical comedy…period-perfect piano accompaniment—with a surprisingly flavorful tragic aftertaste…" and SF Station has written that "Lulu is a dreamy, gothic piece that's otherworldly in its idiom, but as obsolete as the silent film may be, Silent Theatre has produced a piece to rival any contemporary depiction of obsessive love and female sexuality, in all its glory and societal baggage."

On Louise Brooks' birthday, Tuesday, November 14, commencing at 7:00 the Silent Theatre Company will feature a special birthday bash that will include a screening of Love 'Em and Leave 'Em, live music, birthday cake, and festivities with the cast and crew of "Lulu"—followed by a 10 p.m. staging of the Wedekind play, all at the Victoria Theater.

11/07/06 UPDATE: A wonderful essay on Brooks by Dan Callahan has just been published online in the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal. Also, Dennis Harvey writes Lulu up for SF360.

11/09/06 UPDATE: The Greencine Daily has jumped on to the Luluwagon with Sean Axmaker's review of Peter Cowie's Lulu Forever.

2006 ILFF—The 10th International Latino Film Festival Kisses Subaru Butt

This is going to be something of a rant. So if you don't like rants, move along, there's nothing to see here. Between the anemic ambition of Cine Acción and the unbridled avarice of the International Latino Film Festival (ILFF), what's an aficionado of Latino film supposed to do? Hopefully, focus on the films and ignore the deathdealing invisibility of one and the deathdealing visibility of the other.

In the past year I have secured press credentials with the San Francisco Asian-American Film Festival, Frameline, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival (Docfest and Holehead), the Silent Film Festival, the Jewish-American Film Festival, Global Lens, the Muslim Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, and the United Nations Association Film Festival. I've recently been approached by the publicity personnel of the upcoming Third I and Italian Film Festivals to prescreen and cover their films as well. Not too bad, if I say so myself, for someone who came out of nowhere with time on his hands and a passion for film. Usually I try to write about two or three films and interview one or two individuals per festival. That feels manageable for me.

So I approached the International Latino Film Festival—their PR director Eric Thomas, to be specific—about how I might help the festival promote its fare on The Evening Class and Twitch. I was told in no uncertain terms that online film critics didn't hold much weight for them. After all, what could we possibly offer them? Could we help secure them big-name big-bucks sponsors like Subaru? Could we provide better coverage than, let's say, the Mercury News or SFGate? Why should they deign to offer press credentials to an online film commentarian when all their large name media sponsors have their own online presence? Because, as Eric insisted, even though the ILFF is a film festival, it's really a BUSINESS. Their goal is to achieve an international profile, which of course they can't do without big sponsors and big names. How could The Evening Class possibly make them attractive to Subaru?

Now, I'm not quite the naïve bumpkin Eric Thomas is assuming I am, I'm fully aware that an international film festival relies on corporate sponsorship to fund its programming objectives. But somehow I took offense when Eric said that—if they were to give me a ticket or two to come to the festival—and that was an if with a capital "I"—they would require that I plug their sponsor Subaru in my write-ups. Now, even if I wish I had been born yesterday, I wasn't, and that not only seems downright manipulative but heedless of my journalistic integrity. I tried to explain to Mr. Thomas that online film commentary is a word-of-mouth resource that shares information about films and festivals between individuals across the country and around the globe. That might be so, Mr. Thomas countered, but we've determined that online film people can't afford our ticket prices and so we can't rely on them for our audiences.

???

At this point, I felt it was important to talk to this individual face to face. So Eric Thomas offered me the "opportunity" to attend the press conference before the screening of the opening night film. There were the usual personages fashionably dressed in black to either mourn the death of film culture or the birth of big business, I wasn't quite sure which. There was a table with what looked like a Costco party platter, some bottles of water, and a few bottles of wine. Some of the help were already complaining that they didn't have enough wine glasses to serve the guests and were wondering if the Castro staff could supply same. I was introduced to Eric Thomas who pointed to the glaring lights of the t.v. cameras and said, "You see? We really don't need online coverage. We have all this media coverage." I couldn't believe I had been invited only to be insulted to my face. So since this representative of the ILFF had made it sternly clear to me that they had no use for my services, I left.

But since I was already at The Castro, Ninfa Dawson—the reigning champion of festival volunteers—offered me the evening's two films. A kind thing for her to do to compensate me for hauling my ass down there in the first place. We've interacted at so many festivals this last year that it seemed standard course. But even as I sat there in the Castro auditorium, for the first time ever I felt like some kind of interloper; something I have never been made to feel before. But I wanted to observe and here, for the little it's worth, are my observations.

ILFF will do anything it has to in order to promote its objectives. They don't care if they try to usurp festival dates previously reserved by other festivals. They don't care if they squat on every possible film venue they can find in the Bay Area to claim outreach. They don't care if they are self-congratulatory to a fault, praising their Subaru youth video and film project that achieves—what else?—commercials about Subaru cars. These young kids are taught—as Eric Thomas succinctly stated it—that films are about business not art.

Sylvia Perel, the founder of the festival, has unquestionably gathered together some fine films to premiere here in the Bay Area—and for that she should receive credit—but it's unfortunate that she has to keep crooning, "I love Subaru" on stage in order to get the funding. I would suggest to the ILFF that they take pride in the films they bring to San Francisco and environs and that—if they really want to join the stage of international film festivals—they might figure out how to start their programs on time (they were 30-45 minutes behind schedule), shorten the speeches to their decamisados or just go ahead and run for political office, and give credits to their corporate sponsors without hitting their audiences over the head. Each film last night was preceded by a montage of obnoxious commercials filled with soccer cheers and jiggling boobs. Judging from the hisses and the whistles as last night's audiences sat through the ads and then in darkness while waiting for a film to actually appear, the ILFF might do well to consider that the people who really do make their festival possible year after year are more truthfully not the ad men who drove the Subaru to the front of the Castro, but the audience members hoping to see Latino film.

That's probably about all I'm going to write on ILFF this year (or any year) because—well—by now you know why. And that doesn't mean I won't be going to the festival, because I can certainly afford tickets, or that I won't be writing about the films because that's what I do, but, it won't be under the aegis of the ILFF.

FAST FOOD NATION—The Evening Class Roundtable Interview With Eric Schlosser

Eric Schlosser, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, had already received a number of journalistic honors—including a National Magazine Award for an Atlantic article he wrote about marijuana and the war on drugs—when he authored his first book, Fast Food Nation, wherein he wrote: "What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the last forty thousand." His investigation of the fast food industry unflinchingly exposed the "dark side of the All-American meal" as well as how the industry had brought about the "homogenization of our society" and "unleashed the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, spawned an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad." The book proved controversial and popular and, as might be expected, was soundly renounced by the various constituents of the fast food industry upon its release. Now they have a chance to go a second round with Richard Linklater's film adaptation of Schlosser's book.

As ever, Dave Hudson at The Greencine Daily has provided a compendium of current reviews on the Linklater adaptation so there's really no need for me to add another drop of milk to that already overflowing bucket; but, when I was offered the chance to sit down with Eric Schosser at the Ritz Carlton with a couple of other journalists to discuss the film adaptation, I couldn't resist. I want to be sure to emphasize that—though structured as a one-on-one interview with The Evening Class—the following interview with Eric Schlosser incorporates the shared queries of a round table discussion with Pam Grady of Film Stew / Reel.Com and Yumi Doi of the Nichi Bei Times. I thank them both for their mannered intelligence.

* * *

The Evening Class: Eric, why did you choose to fictionalize your book? Why didn't you film it as a straightforward documentary?


Eric Schlosser: The film is different than the book. It's really a Richard Linklater film and it's his vision of the same subject as the book. For about a year and a half after the book came out, I tried to get a documentary based on the book—and a documentary would be a very logical thing to do and I think a really good documentary could still be made, not necessarily on my book, but on the same subject and the same theme—but, this was before Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine had really shown there was a real interest and a big interest in theatrically-released documentaries. I was dealing mainly with some very good filmmakers but they were all affiliated with one kind of network or another and it made me uneasy. I decided I'd rather no film ever be made based on the book than something that was a compromise or felt like a sell-out.

I was still meeting with documentary filmmakers when Jeremy Thomas contacted me. Jeremy is one of the last true independent producers. Saul Zaentz is another but there aren't very many left. Jeremy Thomas works with some of the best European directors. He raises the money totally outside of the system and he has real integrity. I met with him. He had been given the book by Malcolm McLaren, the wild impresario of the Sex Pistols, and I really enjoyed meeting them and talking with them; but, I didn't give them the rights to my book. There wasn't really a clear idea of how they would approach it yet. They just felt like this might be a good idea.

I was on a book tour in Austin, Texas, and I met with Rick and he and I both felt the same way: this could be terrible or it could be something that was interesting to try to do. When I think of the directors right now who are roughly my contemporaries in this country—Rick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, Steven Soderbergh—these are directors who are often really pushing the limits and their work, each one has a distinctive voice as a filmmaker, and so I loved Rick's films and we agreed to just talk about it. From our first meeting, the only way it was conceivable to do this was to take the title of the book, take some of the themes from the book, maybe the spirit of the book, just put aside the book, and whatever film Rick was going to make was going to be just completely different from the book; but, to me, that's totally valid. I started out as a playwright and I was a novelist. I worked for an independent film company in New York and actually was commissioned to do the screenplays so I had the beginnings of a career as a screenwriter. This was all before I became an investigative journalist. So that really led me to see that no one form of writing is more valid than another. No one way of approaching a subject is more valid than another. My book is a work of investigative journalism, heavily footnoted and annotated, but, why not do a fictional film on the same subject? It's going to be different but it's going to be equally valid.

So Rick and I got together on and off for about a year and a half. I didn't sign over the rights to my book. But once it became clear that he felt passionately about this and he wanted to do it and once it became clear that he would be completely empowered to do it, that he would have final cut and total creative control—my work in the film world and my own experience of the film world convinced me completely it's a director's medium and for a good film to be made you need a good director empowered to do what he or she wants to do—and the third thing that was important to me was that this film be financed outside the Hollywood system, that there not be a studio involved giving notes and putting pressure to make the film one way or the other. Jeremy agreed with all that. Jeremy was able to raise the money and Rick was able to have full creative control. I was quite clear with him from the beginning because of how much I respected his work that—if he just wanted to take the book and make a film that he wanted to make—I'd be glad to show up for when it opened. I'd be really interested to see Rick Linklater's vision of this subject. He wanted me to stay involved. I wound up working closely with him writing the screenplay, but, that was up to him.


I feel very proud of the film. I feel like it is uncompromised. I think it's ironic that it was easier for me to get an uncompromising tough film on this subject made with British producers and an American feature film director than it was at the time. I think right now—if Fast Food Nation were to come out right now in the year 2006—it would be very easy to get a documentary set-up and get theatrical release. But it was a different world back then. I just didn't trust 100%—not the filmmakers I was meeting with—but who was behind them. In Rick's case, I trusted him completely because his work spoke so clearly about who he was. The more time we spent together, I trusted him as a person. So it took quite a while of our spending time together before I said, "Yeah, let's do this." I don't think that we really got to work in earnest on this screenplay until 2004. That was after a year and a half, two years, of informally getting together socially and also professionally talking about it. I didn't option, I didn't sell the rights to my book and hand it over without being sure that Rick could direct it the way he wanted to direct it. So that's how it came about. It's a counter-intuitive kind of thing but I really like what he did.

The Evening Class: Once it was clear that you were going to be involved in the writing of the screenplay, was there any one thing from the book that you knew you wanted in the film?


Schlosser: It's remarkable how much we were in agreement about what this could be. There was a book that we both loved that in many ways gave us the sense of how to do this as a film, and that's Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. It's a beautiful little novel. It's about a place at a certain time told through the lives of these very different characters, whose lives sometimes intersect and sometimes don't intersect. By doing that about a small town in Colorado, a lot of the themes of the book would be present in these lives. But we really tried not to impose ideas and philosophies. There are guys who talk about politics in the film and there are rants about this and that, but, we tried to be tough and make it seem true to the character. Some people think that what the environmentalist students say is what we actually believe and it's not the case. Some of the comments that the Bruce Willis character makes, I completely agree with. We tried to make complex characters. But getting back to it, we were both completely in agreement on what the fundamental approach should be. The part of the book that meant the most to me and I think the part of the book that resonated most strongly with him was about what's happening to workers in America, particularly the exploitation of illegal immigrants. That's the thread of the film that's set up in a certain way, the structure of the film is leading to that being the emotional core and the heart and soul of the film is what's happening to these poor meatpacking workers. It's the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Jungle this year and we were aware of that and the film in a number of ways pays homage to The Jungle consciously and deliberately.


[Rick had] made a few other films that were ensemble pieces and yet there were real literary influences to what we were doing. I mentioned Winesburg, Ohio and The Jungle and another work of fiction that was hugely important to me and influential was The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos, in which you have all these lives but no protagonist. The protagonist is this country. That was influential on me when I was writing Fast Food Nation and I think in this film we talk about it. The film is ostensibly about fast food and meatpacking but we could have titled it U.S.A. (except it'd been used).

The Evening Class: I admire your admitted homage to Sherwood Anderson and that you're keen about this alignment between narrative collage and cinematic ensemble. What did you gain personally as a writer from this film experience that could be differentiated from your investigative journalism?

Schlosser: It was such a pleasure. I love the writing that I do on my own. I'm not quitting my day job. I'm doing a book on prisons and it's incredibly rewarding, but, I started out as a playwright and I had a play produced in London a few years ago. I loved it. I love the collaborative process. I really enjoy working with actors. I'm talking about the theater experience that I had. The director and I have become very good friends. It's just very different and it's equally valid. Again, I come to it having done enough types of writing that there's just no one way. There are different things that are good and [that] are challenging about each formula. Because on a personal level I felt that Rick and I got along, it was a pleasure to work with him. A lot of it was written just in the same room with us passing the laptop back and forth. He invited me to be part of the rehearsal process, which was similar to me in a number of ways to the rehearsal process of the play that I had. Actors were treated with respect and actors have a lot to contribute. Rick does not treat his actors like they're puppets who are yelled at, who have to do something a certain way. I just saw this dvd on the making of The Exorcist about how William Friedkin treated actors in the making of The Exorcist. Oh my god.

The Evening Class: He was more horrifying than the Devil.

Schlosser: [Laughs.] Have you seen that? It's worth watching. Even the actors who like him talk about what kinds of things [Friedkin] did to them. There was none of that [on Fast Food Nation], it was a very good spirit in this cast. This film was made for a remarkably low amount of money. The actors who were involved were there because they felt passionate about the project. The spirit of the production of this film felt perfectly in keeping with the spirit of how I go about my own work and the spirit of the book. It's being released by Fox Searchlight, which is a really good independent film distributor, but it was done without any Hollywood bullshit whatsoever. Bruce Willis worked really hard for no money, was in rehearsal and working on his character with Rick, and people were there because they wanted to be. They [weren't] there for a paycheck. There was no ego anything. People stayed in lousy hotels and motels, didn't have fancy dressing rooms.

The Evening Class: You were around for rehearsal, but were you also around for the filming?

Schlosser: I was there for a lot of it. I enjoyed watching it. It's his film. It's really a Rick Linklater film but I wanted to be useful and available. He has an enormous ego and it's the best kind of ego. It's one that is secure and, therefore, really open. Not just open to my point of view but open to other people's point of view. The collaborators who are really difficult to deal with are people who don't have a big enough ego and that makes them petty and insecure and needing to insist on something their own way even if they're totally wrong. It's Rick's sense of security as a person that allows him to work in the manner he does. Not just with me as the co-writer but with the actors. He draws out really interesting performances from all kinds of actors—who haven't given that sort of performance before—because they trust him, because he treats them with respect, and he includes them in the process. It was interesting to watch him at work. Now, looking at his other films, I really see how they came to be that way.

One of the other things that really helped us work together is that, as writers, we have a very similar writing process. Which is to say, I heavily, carefully structure what I write before I really write it. What I do may be good, may be bad, but it's deliberate, it's not inadvertent. Rick, as a writer, is the same way. His films are incredibly carefully worked out and structured. It was interesting talking to him about Before Sunset. It feels so loose and improvisational but every scene was carefully worked out and rehearsed. For Fast Food Nation, he didn't have that long of a rehearsal period. He likes a long rehearsal period, again like a play, in which things are figured out and are worked out and it allows him to do things on a very tight budget that—if there were time for improve and 30 takes—he would never be able to do. When he was shooting this film, there were a certain number of scenes that had to be shot every day. There was no margin for error. There was no ability to do 40 takes. There just wasn't the money to do it. Anyway, in writing with him, we work very similarly. We worked on the structure and that sort of thing.

The Evening Class: How were your characters developed out of your nonfiction piece? Did you just banter ideas between each other?

Schlosser. Yeah. We thought about this town. Very early on before we even decided, "Yeah, we're definitely going to do this", we went to Colorado and I took him into a slaughterhouse, introduced him to ranchers and gave him a real strong sense of place and of the setting and then we just thought of, "Who are these people?" We came up with people who would be in that town and tried really hard not to make these people symbols of things. The fast food executive is a nice guy. He wants to do the right thing. He doesn't. That's what happens most of the time. McDonalds is not being run by evil people. It's being run by family men and family women who become complicit in things that are harmful but that's because of the system; it's not because of the individuals. So we really tried to think about each one of these characters as a person and not as a symbol for an idea. We drew upon people I knew, that he knew, and tried to make it feel true to life.

The Evening Class: I was really happy that you guys resisted the opportunities for melodrama. There's that one part in the movie where Paul Dano starts talking about robbing the place and I remember reading in your book about people getting killed, basically by former employees. I thought, please don't go there, please don't have this kid killing Ashley Johnson, that would be horrible.


Schlosser: I'm sorry you had to worry about that. [Laughs.] She's so sweet. That would have been horrible. We wanted to do a film that felt completely true to life and left the audience feeling, yeah, something like that may be happening right now somewhere in the United States, and is going to happen tomorrow in the same way. So the fast food executive doesn't become a whistleblower who testifies before Congress, and the scheme to liberate the cows doesn't turn into 100,000 cows with t.v. helicopters showing, "Oh my gosh, look what's happened!" and there's never a moment in which one of the workers stands on the table and gives a speech about the union and all the workers walk out and they get the sexual-harassing supervisor fired. This film tries to show what's happening right now and it's not pleasant. People can deal with it or people can not deal with it. I hope people go to see the film. If they don't, I sleep soundly about the film. It really feels right to me in terms of what's happening.

I was at a screening in Denver the other night and some people I interviewed for Fast Food Nation, the book, came to see it—a rancher and some meatpacking workers—and I was very anxious about what they thought. They liked the film, which was gratifying, but I was really probing them about what didn't feel right, what didn't feel true, and all I got from one of the meatpacking workers was that the meatpacking plant was too clean, it wasn't dirty enough. It's true. That meatpacking plant was much more modern, much more clean, much smaller. The meatpacking plant in the film slaughters about 175 cattle a day. The one I visited for the book slaughtered about 350-400 an hour. We're talking about whatever that looked like in the film, magnify it on just a gargantuan scale. This wasn't a $30,000,000 film. Rick couldn't build a realistic-looking slaughterhouse. Rick had three hours to shoot in that slaughterhouse and it's incredible he was even able to do that.

The Evening Class: What amazes me is the American incapability to accept visual truth, let alone the truth of an idea, and nowhere is that more apparent than in graphic depictions of the slaughterhouse. The final scenes of Fast Food Nation, I'm sure, will have people squirming in their seats. As a Chicano, I was pleased with the diversity of your Chicano personalities. Having come from a migrant labor background, I was pleased to see how you showed the compromised situations of these personalities in their character development.

Schlosser: We also really wanted to bring to the screen people who are central to the economy of this country and who are kept invisible. I was talking to a union executive the other day who has been involved in organizing meatpacking workers [and] neither of us could remember a single news segment about meatpacking workers in the past five years. Beef is the largest—in terms of dollars spent—aspect of the food economy in the United States. Americans spend more money on beef than on any other thing that they eat. There's like a 150,000 meatpacking workers. 80% of them are Latino. A huge percentage of them are illegal immigrants. They're invisible. You never see them. You just don't see them. That was something we felt strongly about doing.

The Evening Class: I was moved by the story of the two sisters and their fate. Did you consciously intend for these two women to be so emotionally resonant?

Schlosser: The movie was deliberately and consciously structured so that everything would lead you to the kill floor. And to lead you to the kill floor not to show the cruelty to animals—although that's part of the system—but to show the humiliation and the degradation of this young woman [Sylvia, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno] and how she's turned into a piece of meat and how she's turned into another cog in the machine, despite hoping to resist it, hoping to not have that fate. The sister relationship is really important because one sister, in one way, has a more cynical view of the world and is willing to do what you need to do within that system to get what you want, and she does. She has a drug problem at one point. The emotional soul of the film is really the two sisters and Raul [Wilmer Valderrama]. That's where it was all meant to go. Wilmer Valderrama's performance is absolutely wonderful and, for me, one of the most poignant moments is when this character who's been so positive and so optimistic, he's literally doing the worst job in the slaughterhouse, it's even worse than pulling kidneys—but, he still maintains this upbeat thing and at the end there is a kind of a sadness in him and that spirit is gone.

The Evening Class: It's a kind of death as he's lying there disabled on the couch.

Schlosser: But it's not played in a melodramatic way. It's played in a subtle way. "These kids, can't you tell them about the kids?" He still loves them and there's still a moment of affection between them but he's laid low.

The Evening Class: His situation is further complicated by the fact that he's denied medical benefits because of the traces of methamphetamine found in his system and he probably was taking drugs to handle the situation he was in….

Schlosser: That's something that people debate.

The Evening Class: It's left open.

Schlosser: I think he probably was.

The Evening Class: I agree. And that's why he had the compassion he expressed towards the younger sister when she had her drug problem. At least, that's how I interpret it. I felt all of that was lucidly presented without judgment and with an open heart.

Schlosser: Yeah. Even that meatpacking executive who comes in and is the head of human resources and he seems so callous and cold; he's pissed off. It's a terrible accident and this guy has been using metamphetamine on the job. In his world view, "I don't have to have pity for this guy. This guy's endangering my other workers by using crank on the job." He may come off as this heartless villain in a dark suit but he's got a point: don't be using crank when you're working around really dangerous machinery. Now, you could argue with him that conditions are so bad that the workers have to use crank; but, he can't go there on his own mentality. It's cultural. "Drugs are wrong. If you use drugs, you should go to prison for five years." There are people who really believe that and in his world view well this fucking guy is using drugs on the job. "I'm glad he's not really hurt, he's going to recover, but I don't owe him a thing."

I met a meatpacking worker whose father had worked at the plant; this worker had been at the plant since he was a young boy visiting his father; he had been hired at the plant when he was 16—so his whole life had revolved around this meatpacking plant. His hand was completely mangled in the machinery. He was in the most unbelievable excrutiating pain and they wouldn't give him any painkillers and he didn't understand. They kept on telling him that he needed to pee before they would give him the painkillers. Finally, he said, "Why do you want me to pee? I can't pee." They needed to do a drug test before they could give him the painkillers. And he couldn't pee. He wasn't in shock but he had a hand that was totally mangled. He finally could pee, he passed his drug test, but, his bitterness towards this company that his father had worked for, that he'd been loyal to since he was a little kid, and it was more important to them to get an accurate drug test than to give him a painkiller. He was in excrutiating pain for like two or three hours. They could have [he snaps his finger] given him a painkiller like that. That's what's happening right now. You don't see it in the news. Hopefully you will see it in this film.

Cross-posted at Twitch.

11/17/06 UPDATE: The Greencine Daily has generated a compendium of Schlosser interviews and reviews on Fast Food Nation, including their own interview via Susan Gerhard.

Further, David Lowery posted his conversation with director Linklater at Drifting. David asked Linklater about Greg Kinnear's character and his failed opportunity to be a whistleblower. Linklater explained, "The corporate structure allows anyone absolution."

FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS—The Evening Class Interview With Steven Shainberg

After seeing Steven Shainberg's Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus earlier last month after one of its first press screenings, I wrote up my reaction. I was delighted to meet up with Shainberg at the Ritz Carlton, anticipating the film's nationwide release November 10. He was a friendly and charming fellow, eager to talk about his imaginary portrait.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Thanks for taking the time to meet with me today, Steven. I recently had the opportunity to interview David Thomson with regard to the release of his appreciation of Nicole Kidman.

Steven Shainberg: He's a fan of this movie, that's for sure.

MG: Yes, he is. He's the one who first recommended I see it. What struck me about his appreciation of Nicole Kidman—I can't really call it a biography—is this aspect of the "may-have-been." It was then interesting for me to see your own imaginal reconstruction of biography. Already in some of the reviews, critics are complaining the film is not what they would consider biographically accurate; but I felt it was an accurate—if imaginary—portrait.

Shainberg: Well, I agree with you obviously. It's easy to make a film—in my point of view—where you slavishly recreate the literal biographical narrative of someone's life. That, for me, never adequately conveys who someone was. When you have a person who is so complicated and so mysterious as Arbus, and whose work is connected to fairy tale and the unconscious, myth and so on and so forth, it didn't interest me to make a film that was just a straight-ahead bio pic. I was interested in her inner life and in the mystery of her inner life. If you read Patricia Bosworth's biography and you read all the articles that have been written about her and you read the museum catalog, on and on and on, nobody can tell you truly what was going on inside her. Why she was drawn to doing this work. Why at the age of 35 she left her husband, broke up her family, stopped working in the studio with Allan and went off to do this incredible, dangerous, daring, profound body of work. There's no literal answer to these unbelievably compelling questions. The only answer from my point of view, with my limitations, was to make something up that might reflect back on those motivations and might actually give you the feeling of what she was going through.

MG: Once when she was queried why she chose "freaks" as her subject matter, Diane Arbus responded: "Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats." Her facility for intuiting this aristocratic nature seemed to captivate Arbus and I felt your film showed that moment of aesthetic arrest when she first saw Lionel.


Shainberg: What's interesting about these statements that she made is that—and I think that that's a fantastic thing she said, beautiful and mystical—but, in terms of the film, those are only things that she can say four, six, seven, eight, ten years after the time period of this movie. In the time period of this movie those connections are being made deep inside of her unconsciously and it's as if the character is going through a dark tunnel holding onto a string with her eyes closed and just following that string through the tunnel. She doesn't know where she's going but she keeps following it. To some extent, I think that was true about Arbus for a long time before she was able to come to some intellectual or linguistic explanation for what she was doing. For a long time she was really doing something that she needed to do that was deeply compelling to her, despite what society might have thought, despite what her parents might have thought, despite what it would do to her family and so on and so forth; she needed to do it. In a way that's what the movie addresses: that need and what that need consisted of. How fantastic and inspiring it is that she did follow it. That she didn't say, "Oh this is something I mustn't do because of all these other things in my life." One of the things to remember is that all of this unbelievable articulateness that she had didn't come for a long time until after the time period of Fur.

MG: So in developing the story, in coming up with your imaginative resolutions to the limits of biography, had you already crafted what you were going to do before Kidman approached it as a property?

Shainberg: Bonnie Timmermann and Ed Pressman, two of the producers who owned the rights to the Patricia Bosworth biography, had already developed a couple of scripts before they came to me. When they brought it to me, I was very involved with Arbus in my own mind. I knew a lot about her. I had grown up with her pictures as a kid, and so on and so forth. And I had a basic framework for how to make the film. By the time Nicole got involved, there was already a financier involved, there was a finished script, there was actually a production in place and Andrew Fierberg, who produced the movie, had already done a lot of pre-production with me. So she came on board when we were pretty far down the line.

MG: In terms of the Arbus estate, the family, how have they reacted to the film?

Shainberg: I don't think they've seen the movie. I don't know if they ever read the script. I suspect that they did. As you probably know, her two daughters are very controlling about their mother's work, which is something that I understand. I don't personally have any problem with it. It's not like I'm antagonistic to them or anything like that. I respect how they feel about their mother. After all, she is their mother. But having said that, she is also Diane Arbus. She is an iconic deeply important person to a lot of people. In that sense, her work has gone out into the world and the world responds to it. This movie is just one of those responses.

MG: What is it in her work that people are responding to? What is the allure of her vision?

Shainberg: That's a great question and maybe the most important question about her. People have been trying to answer it for 35 years now. There is a phenomenal intimacy in those pictures. Not just what the subject of the photographs has revealed to her but somehow what she has revealed to the subject reflected back into the camera. Those pictures, many of them, are about a deep relationship with the person that we feel in the room, her, behind the camera. That's one aspect of them. Another aspect of them is that they challenge us with our own terror and our own prejudice and our own squeamishness and our own recoil. And they demand that we admit something, which we might have trouble admitting to ourselves.

MG: Another quote of her's I like is where she says every photograph harbors a secret about a secret; the more it tells you, the less you know. I like how at the end of your film there's this exchange between Diane and the nudist.

Shainberg: That's where it comes from.

MG: Diane tells the nudist to tell her a secret or story and the nudist counters by saying, "No, you tell me first." That exchange reflects this intimacy that you're describing. Something was exchanged between Diane and her subjects that is very powerful for people who look at her photographs. In the development of the story, how did Lionel come into mind?


Shainberg: He's totally made up. One of the things I knew about the film was that I wanted to make the movie about the relationship between her and a single photographic subject. In her life she had several people who were very important to her but two of them were Lisette Model, who was a photography teacher and a very great photographer herself, and Marvin Israel, who was her lover, her artistic svengali, her mentor and a person who was very important to a lot of artists at that time in New York. He was a dynamo in pushing people to realize themselves. At one time in my mind Lisette Model and Marvin were people we would portray in the film, because they were so significant to her in how they got her to do the work. At the same time, because the essential conceit was her and a single photographic subject—who in my mind had to be a freak—Marvin and Lisette's role in her life got rolled in to Lionel. He became a psychological, emotional, artistic composite of Lisette Model, Marvin Israel, and all the freaks that she eventually photographed. That's part one. Part two is that it was always startling to me and a fact of enormous contemplation that the person who became Diane Arbus as a little girl growing up on Central Park West in New York, had a father who was a furrier. If you imagine a six, seven, eight, nine-year-old girl lying in bed at night knowing that the father who just kissed her good night, who she adores, spends his day—in her mind, possibly—killing beautiful animals to make coats, there is some crazy mysterious unconscious connection between that woman who becomes Diane Arbus and that little girl. In the end it made perfect sense that the Lisette Model/Marvin Israel/freak character be the guy that Lionel is.

MG: I liked that her journey with him was initiated by the mask. What I caught was her awareness that she was in a mask, she was in a persona that was constrictive, a persona of propriety that was stifling her. Then she saw this mask being taken up the steps and I loved that because I love masks; I like to study them—

Shainberg: Me too.

MG: —and I was intrigued by your play with the masks, persona, and the surfaces of things—the skin and the fur—I really liked that.

Shainberg: You're absolutely precisely right in talking about it in terms of the process that the Arbus character is going through. It's also true that that's what she was after in her own work, was to unmask her subject. One of the things she talked about is we have a face that we present to the world and that face is a kind of mask. Then we have the face that exists underneath the face that we present to the world, and it's that face that she was always trying to capture. She does need to be unmasked in the film definitively. Lionel also—as the subject of her picture, the one picture that gets taken during the course of the film—he also needs to be totally unmasked.

MG: The film's website capitalizes on the iconic agent of that unmasking: the razor blade.

Shainberg: Do you know Chip Kidd?

MG: No, I don't.


Shainberg: Chip Kidd is a fantastic book designer. For some strange reason I thought of him to do a poster and I contacted him out of the blue and I said, "Listen, you don't know me, we've never met, but I think somehow you might dig this." We met and had a drink. He's a fantastic guy. We showed him the movie. He calls me up and he says, "Okay, I love the movie and I know what it should be. But I'm not going to tell you, I'm just going to do it." So I said, "Okay, man." Two weeks later he says, "Come to my office" and he's got a mock-up done and he's got a curtain over the mock-up. I go into his office and I'm sitting there and we're having a chitchat and I'm like, "Okay, man, c'mon. I'm not here to find out about how your day was, let's see it!" He whips it off and I looked at it. First of all, it was big, I looked at it and I thought, "Man, that is so fucking cool."

MG: Because it is the agent.

Shainberg: It is the thing! Not only that but, when it's larger, it's very sexual as an object. It's like a dildo. Do you know what I mean? It's like a dildo, it's threatening, it's violent, it's beautiful, it's obviously the agent of revelation. It was so brilliant, I thought.

MG: I liked it too. What it made me think of was—in the well-publicized enmity between Arbus and Susan Sontag—Sontag seemed to be expressing the point of view that the face beneath the mask—what you've been describing—was unacceptable. She was comfortable with the mask but not with the portrait of the face beneath it.

Shainberg: Listen, the Sontag position—you're talking about in On Photography?

MG: Yes.

Shainberg: It's not a position that I agree with at all.

MG: Nor I.

Shainberg: Have you read it recently?

MG: Yes, when the movie came out I read it again. I was flabbergasted, to tell you the truth.

Shainberg: You've got to read that and think, "Wow, this is a person who really didn't understand this work." To some extent, I feel like it's better off left like that. It's so limited in its point of view. Susan Sontag was a brilliant woman and On Photography has many fabulous things to say about photography, the experience of taking pictures, the metaphor of taking pictures, and so on and so forth, but, what she specifically had to say about Arbus I just think is absurd.

MG: In alignment with that, I feel that already some of the critical reaction to Fur is missing the point.

Shainberg: Some of the reaction to Fur is a lot like some of the reaction to Arbus's work.

MG: Exactly. That's what I was going to say. It's as if people come with a predisposition of what they want to understand is the biography of a person. You have done a creative thing just as David Thomson did in his biography of Nicole Kidman. You suggest that our understanding of an individual is not necessarily the data points of their lives as much as our interaction with who that person represents to us.


Shainberg: We could go down this path and we would be talking for a long time—which would really be fucking fun—but film is an unbelievably literal medium unless the person who's making the movie can transcend that. If I show you a rabbit on the screen, I'm showing you a rabbit, you see a rabbit, there is no way I can get around that, there's nothing I can do. If I paint the rabbit pink, it's a pink rabbit. If I paint the rabbit blue, it's a blue rabbit. You are going to see a rabbit. For me to get that rabbit to function metaphorically and, in some sense, symbolically extend itself beyond its literalism, I have to perform a sleight-of-hand. People come into the theater expecting literalism because that's what they're used to. They're not used to having a poetic experience in the theater. If I showed you Cocteau's movies now, if we put out Cocteau's movies, do you think people would understand them? No. People don't have the patience for that. They don't have the wherewithal to accept cinema as something which can be more or other than the literal and that is true in spades when it comes to taking a significant historical figure and portraying them. So the film, I recognize, demands a great deal of openness from the audience. To some extent we are trying in all ways to prepare the audience for that. An imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus. When you first go in, I put up two cards that tell you, "Don't expect that. This is a different kind of movie. Please. Open your imagination and your body to that kind of experience."

MG: I wonder why people are so resistant to that? I felt fortunate in having talked to David Thomson because one of the questions I asked him was—as a person who interviews many people and talks to people, what are you looking for?—because I'm a fairly new person in this field; I'm just starting to interview a lot of people and I have particular concerns that I'm interested in so I asked him, "What is it that you're looking for?" He said, "I like to find out the moment when someone becomes themselves." Then I went to go see your film….

Shainberg: …and that's what it's about.

MG: That's what it's about. In contrast to critics who are saying, "Well, why didn't you mention her suicidal tendencies?"

Shainberg: Let me address that because I think that's very interesting. There are many things that people might say about the film, let's say, negatively, which in fact are in the movie. Let's just address that one thing. Patti Smith, the singer, who I had never met, called me up, got my number from a friend, had seen the movie, called me up and said she loved the movie, and she said to me, "Wow. You were even able to get her suicide in the film." And I said, "Yeah, of course." When Lionel swims off and kills himself. When he takes her to see a dead body. How much more explicitly do you need to have her exposed to her own death 13 years later? It's in the movie. One of the things he's teaching her is that taking the risk that she's about to take, discovering herself, making this change in her life, requires an experience of and a connection to her own potential death. It is in the movie. Yes, again, I don't show her cutting her wrists and taking barbiturates and dying in the bathroom.

MG: You don't need to.

Shainberg: I don't feel like I need to but also I think that interpretation of Arbus's life is in and of itself a cliché.

MG: It's too literal.

Shainberg: It's too literal but it's also not the only story. When you read the Bosworth biography and when you look at her amazing work and the rooms that she put herself in and the people that she exposed herself to, I look at her life as this tremendous fabulous wondrous incredible journey and transformation.

MG: When I first wrote about Fur, the structure that engaged me was when she was at the nudist colony and they told her she had to remove her clothing and she said, "I need a moment" and the movie is in the moment.

Shainberg: Exactly. Like a picture taking.

MG: Yes. I loved that. I thought that was very well-done. The other thing that I went with—just because of the way that I am—I loved that this carnivalesque resonance that she was experiencing was accessed by a ladder that led into her attic. Where did that image come from?

Shainberg: Again, thinking about it as fairytale, thinking about it as metaphor, in a sense she's going into her own mind. She's opening up her own head and in her own head all these things come down.

MG: That's exactly how I took it but I always like to confirm that I'm seeing the movie that you made and not reading too much into it.

Shainberg: [Laughs.] Believe me, of all the people I have talked to, you have seen the movie I made the most.

MG: In terms of the acting then, Robert Downey, Jr. is phenomenal in this movie. Number one, I think he's one of our finest actors but what he was able to convey with—and I am interested in knowing how you interacted with him to achieve this—the liquidity of his eye, how he could get so much across hidden behind that mask of fur, how did you work with him on that?


Shainberg: It was fantastic. The key to this whole movie and the key to his performance was that he did trust his face and his eyes. Robert is phenomenally talented with improvisation. He's incredibly clever. He's linguistically sophisticated. He's a formidable energy. All you have to do is see Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and you know the guy can [clicking his fingers twice] go! In a sense all of that had to be taken away from him. What's interesting for me always is to take an actor who does one thing and take him and let him do the opposite, do something else. It's like James Spader, who can be very cold and withdrawn, to see underneath his incredible vulnerability, that's beautiful and obviously part of him. So to get Robert to be still and just trust the fact that, if you look at her and you're connected with who the guy is and what he's gone through in his life and the fact that he's dying and so on and so forth, if you connect with all those things, they will be in your eyes. It's all there. He has tremendous wonderful and painful life experience. All you have to do is sit there and look at him and it's there. In addition, his eyes are beautiful and incredibly poignant.

MG: The image that comes to me is from Jungian psychology. They have a term scintilla which is that glint of light in dark water, consciousness emanating from darkness, or the light within darkness. His eyes and his voice were unbelievably expressive. I was quite impressed.

Shainberg: That's one of the tremendous pleasures of the movie. You get to feel that from him.

MG: Working with Kidman, what was that like for you?

Shainberg: For some reason when she became interested in doing the film, I went to Sydney to have dinner with her and to talk about the movie. It was one of those meetings where 15 minutes into the dinner it was like we'd known each other for 20 years. I can't explain it. It just happens in your life where you just meet somebody that you know you're going to be friends with for a long time. It was a filial relationship. It was like she was my sister. I can't explain that, but, we just really trusted each other and I adore her as an actress. That was just the beginning of working together and it developed positively from there. She is an actor who is incredibly alive between action and cut. She is totally present. She's completely giving to the other person. Her only question of the director truly is what do you want? So if she doesn't give a good performance in a movie, which frankly is rare, you've got nobody to blame but yourself. She wants nothing more than to get at the character as deeply as she can.

MG: So what did you want of her?

Shainberg: Obviously, because this is not a biopic and because it's a deep unconscious journey, it wasn't important to listen to Arbus tapes. It wasn't important to walk like Arbus or talk like Arbus, all those things that people do. I said, "None of that. Our only task here for you is to connect with what this person is going through." Much of that, by the way, is unspoken, it's all in her eyes, it's all in how she's moving, how fast, how slow, how scared, and on and on. We talked a lot about what is it that she's feeling in this life in 1958 with her husband and her two kids. What is it that's gnarling inside? What is it that's growling inside? What is it that's pushing up against the barriers inside and how are you handling that and how are you responding to that and how do you feel it? What is it you long for? And so on and so forth. All of those things by the time you start shooting have to be alive in the actor and I think they are alive in her.

MG: Definitely. What is it that you hope this movie will do? How are you hoping it will be received—other than just loved—what do you want?

Shainberg: Again, it's a portrait of an internal process and that process is very important to me. I think it's the most important thing that somebody can possibly experience.

MG: How to find your creative authenticity?

Shainberg: How to find your authenticity. It may be creative. It may be something else. It could be anything. It doesn't have to be about making art. But I think that the fact that this woman risked everything to find that because it was so deeply propelling her, I don't think that's a strange story. I don't think that's weird. I've made a very unusual movie but I don't think that those fundamental feelings are unfamiliar to most people. I think that they're more than familiar.

MG: In this time and age when we're so bombarded with ready-made forms the quest for authenticity is more important than ever before. I know I approach films in that way. I look at images to see which images speak authentically or which images are contrived and manipulative. That's why it's so refreshing to watch a piece like yours where the audience is asked to imagine and to invest energy into the film. So what's next for you?

Shainberg: This film is really subtle and poetic and lovely and beautiful to look at, and all that, and that was fantastic. The aesthetic experience was just so fun. But when I see the movie, it makes me want to make something even more dangerous and daring and really talky where people tell you how they feel, and they're expressive and they're raw, and they act on things, and break things, and mess up, where it's just more blatant. Just because the finessing of these images in Fur and the finessing moment to moment with subtle emotions, it makes me want to make something out of brick now. I feel like I've made something out of delicate china. When I watch it, I'm like, "Ah, fuck that, man." I want to make something that just hammers you, hits you over the head, where you're like, "Oh my god." Ten minutes into the movie you're like, "What the fuck am I seeing?" I'm working in that direction.

MG: Has something come to you?

Shainberg: Oh yeah, I have a whole bunch of stuff. I have maybe three, four movies that I want to make. Two of them are in that vein. One of them, again, is a continuation of this sort of style. I think I'm going to wait on that one and maybe do that after this much more aggressive movie.

MG: Well, I do want to congratulate you on Fur. You have created a lovely, delicate, cryptic piece that honors Diane Arbus. Thank you for taking the time.

Shainberg: Certainly. A pleasure. Delightful.

Photo of Steven Shainberg by Jeff Vespa, WireImage. Cross-published on Twitch.

11/09/06 UPDATE: Cross-published in abbreviated form at Entertainment Today.

LATINO AMÉRICAS FILM SERIES—Afro-Latina Voices

There has just been too much going on film-wise in the San Francisco/Bay Area these last couple of months and I've been remiss in alerting my readers to my friend Tere Romo's Latino Américas Film Series at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, co-presented with the Mexican Museum and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), with support from the SF Grants for the Arts, LEF Foundation, and media sponsors: El Tecolote and SF Bay View newspapers and KPFA. You still have a chance, however, to catch the third and final installment of her film series exploring various aspects of the African Diaspora in Latin America. This program celebrates the lives and contributions of two Afro-Latina singers and will screen Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 7:30 pm; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission @ 3rd Streets, San Francisco.

Tribute to Toña la Negra (Jesse "Chuy" Varela, Music Director of KCSM, San Mateo). Varela presents a multi-media tribute to Mexico's famous Afro-Mestiza singer Toña La Negra (1912-81). Born María Antonia del Carmen Peregrino in Veracruz, Toña la Negra moved to Mexico City and made her professional debut in 1933. In addition to many years of radio and recording success, she also appeared in a number of Mexican films, in both musical guest roles and as a supporting actress. But it was her immoral renditions of Agustín Lara's romantic music, especially the African-inspired Caribbean boleros, that made her one of Mexico's most recognizable voices.


Susana Baca: Memoria Viva (Mark Dixon, Peru/Belgium, 2003, 54 min., English subtitles). In this documentary, Susana Baca is not only a champion in the performance and preservation of Afro-Peruvian heritage, but also an elegant singer whose shimmering voice sings of love, loss and life. Baca and her husband Ricardo Pereira have founded the Instituto Negrocontinuo (Black Continuum Institute) in Lima, a spirited facility for the exploration, expression, and creation of Black Peruvian culture. While Baca has dedicated herself to researching and performing virtually all forms of Afro-Peruvian folklore, it is the landó that has become her trademark. A highly evocative mix of Spanish, Indigenous and African rhythms, the landó is the sound of Black Peru.

$8 General; $6 Members of The Mexican Museum, MoAD and YB Center for the Arts (YBCA); Students; Seniors; and Teachers. Tickets available online at www.ybca.org or through the YBCA Box Office, 415.978.2787.