DEAD CHANNELS—The Prodigy

Usually when you think of child prodigies, you envision mastery over a piano or a violin, not murder. This action thriller starts off with a video interview with a young kid being asked what it feels like knowing he has violently hurt others. "It doesn't," he states flatly staring into the camera. This catches the attention of assassin Claude Rains who admires the kid's candor and obvious talent for coldblooded mayhem. He appoints him his successor and anoints him with blood.

Mike Watt at Film Threat was perhaps the first person to promote William Kaufman's The Prodigy, way back in October 2004. I'd be curious to know how he accomplished this since the film didn't actually have a world premiere until horror impresario Bruce Fletcher nabbed it for San Francisco's (Yet Another) Hole in the Head Film Festival in early June 2005. Notwithstanding, Watt kickstarted the praise by stating The Prodigy was a crime movie that played like a horror movie. Hell, he called it "a little come-out-of-nowhere masterpiece" and fervently opined: "If there is any justice in the business, when The Prodigy starts making its festival rounds, a studio with clout and integrity will pick up this little gem and allow the principals to pay back their supporters and themselves."


So much for justice. The Prodigy premiered at Holehead in San Francisco, Fletcher took it to the Idaho International Film Festival, it played the Raindance Film Festival in London, England, and had already gained a following at private screenings in Dallas. Yet it's never had an official U.S. distribution so—before its Fireside Releasing launch on DVD later this month—Fletcher stepped in once more to champion the film by running it at the Roxie Film Center under the aegis of Dead Channels from Friday, May 25 through Thursday, May 31. I encourage you to catch it on a large screen like it's meant to be seen and to take advantage of director William Kaufman and actor and co-writer Holt Boggs opening night apperarances.

When Dennis Harvey caught the film at Holehead and reviewed it for Variety, he tempered his reservations with genuine enthusiasm: "William Kaufman more than compensates for sometimes murky tale's familiar genre elements with punchy ultra violence, vivid atmosphere and a first-rate tech sheen on a smalltime budget." Sheen is the perfect word. The stylized look of this film is nearly hypnotic, even if sometimes confusing. The Prodigy has cult clout.


So it turns out the young kid who doesn't feel when he harms others is protagonist Truman Fisher (Holt Boggs) as a young boy. Whatever plans he might have had to give up his criminal life and settle down with his squeeze Nicki (Mirelly Taylor) goes out the window when mythic assassin Rains shows up to begin his initiatory training. He's been tracking Truman all these years and wants him to take over his reign of terror. He's nicknamed Claude Rains because he's an "invisible" hitman who, as Watt states it, "makes hardcore criminals eat their vegetables." Apparently, along with the nickname, Rains' wardrobe was intentionally modeled after that of the Invisible Man in the 1933 classic. Thus, all the taglines rush in where angels fear to tread: "Sometimes what you are looking for ... is looking for you"; "Every man has a dark side ... One man's dark side is about to be awakened"; and "If God uses suffering to refine us; then why blame the Devil at all?"

C.G. Jung's answer to Job seems particularly relevant while staring into this dark and violent whirlwind of a movie and Holt Bogg's character Truman Fisher is precisely ensnared in Job's biblical dilemma. Boggs—who has been likened unto Ben Affleck—deserves a classier comparison than that. I'd say he looks more like a young, thin Orson Welles. He's the film's "true find", its "star", infusing his morally-ambiguous character "with a depth and intelligence not usually found in low-budget crime thrillers (or big budget ones, for that matter)" (Watt again) and I hope to see his upcoming performances in Road To Red (in post-production) and Tenebrous (filming) soon.


When an independent first feature looks this good and is this compelling, it deserves the support of its audiences. If you're a fan of independent film, vote with your bum in the seat. Likewise, my vote goes to Bruce Fletcher and the quality he's continuing to bring San Francisco through Dead Channels.

Cross-published at Twitch.

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA—The Evening Class Interview With Brook Hinton

This coming Sunday, May 20, 7:30PM at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room, the San Francisco Cinematheque in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) will be presenting Excavations of the Recordable World: Brook Hinton and Katherin McInnis In Person. Brook Hinton will present Wave/Wake; an "extra-temporal" study of Union Square, Transit; Trace Garden: Markings where found home movie footage is presented as communication from beyond; and the San Franciscan premiere of a new work. Katherin McInnis will screen Landscapes in Alphabetical Order, an examination of how moving images are coded, organized and archived; Predictions, a portrait of the Musée Mechanique and more, including a selection of new work.

Several years back when Brook Hinton was the host of The WELL's Arts Conference, he and I got into a mini-thrash about experimental cinema. I ignorantly said experimental cinema was boring and Brook rightly took offense. Since then, Brook and I have frequently interacted as members of a Bay Area salon wherein art projects are shared for peer review and between his efforts and those of fellow WELLpern Eric Theise, I've come to more fully appreciate experimental cinema. Thus, it was with a certain amount of sweetness that Brook and I finally sat down to talk about his work and the role of experimental cinema among today's audiences.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Brook, I'm delighted that I have matured enough to no longer be a slave to the narrative and able to sit down with you today to discuss experimental cinema. So right off, what is the importance of experimental cinema? Why experimental cinema?

Brook Hinton: It's an interesting question right now because there's a lot of debate about whether experimental cinema is even relevant within the world it exists in or whether it's become a genre; something that had its heyday in the 70's and is now overwith. I've always been a little uncomfortable with the term "experimental" and the work that I find inspiring—and that a lot of even old school experimental filmmakers are doing now—doesn't fit in that genre necessarily. I have taught my students that experimental isn't a form, it's an approach. It doesn't necessarily mean non-narrative; but, it doesn't require narrative. It's more a spirit of trying to push the medium and explore it and find out just what is possible within that language that isn't being explored in the more traditional and conventional forms that we see.

Guillén: "Narrative" itself is an indefinite term. I can't say there isn't a narrative in your films, though I'm not sure they contain a consensual narrative; but, that openess to variant projection is exactly what I find intriguing about them. While reviewing the pieces you've compiled for your wonderful dvd collection Glimpse, I realized that story lines or concept lines surface—I think at least some times intentionally—through the imagery and insofar as you intended specific ideas to be associated with specific images, those ideas definitely do come across.

In the popular medium, I would suggest that the most evident usage of experimental cinema that I've seen incorporated into a mainstream narrative has been the infamous video sequence from Hideo Nakata's Ringu and its American remake The Ring. Would you agree with that assessment?

Hinton: I guess uncomfortably so because it was also bordering on a parody of experimental cinema. Of course, it's kind of awful to see this idea that experimental cinema causes murder or something like that; but, what was interesting in the context of The Ring was this idea that this [video] was almost compelling; that you couldn't look at it because, if you did, you would keep looking at it and then the phone would ring a certain number of times and that was it, you were transformed in a terrible manner.

In terms of narrative, I have taught classes in narrative to experimental filmmakers where I have emphasized that there is no such thing as a lack of narrative. You can't actually get away from it. If I see a hand-painted Stan Brakhage film, where every frame is just these various blotches of color that he's meticulously arranged, I end up imposing a narrative on it as I'm watching it. It's, y'know, the roughly-textured red rough-edged areas of the screen are trying to get something from the blue parts of the screen. Then the yellow part is interfering, etc. I don't consciously in my work set out to create—in my non-narrative work because I also do narrative work—but in these films I don't consciously set out to make a narrative but I definitely am trying to present a cohesive world that the viewer can enter and then have an experience that, in the end, I have to [admit] does have the qualities of a narrative.

Guillén: Would one of the values of experimental cinema be precisely to educate a movie-going audience about standard—and perhaps even unquestioned—practices of narrative film? Most films come handed to us on a silver platter. This is one of my main complaints about most films; that an audience member isn't allowed to think for himself or herself. With experimental cinema you have to think for yourself. It's not made easy for you not to. You have to figure out who you are sitting in the audience watching a piece of cinema, the likes of which you might never have seen before, using unfamiliar narrative strategies, or non-narrative strategies. For example, your non-narrative pieces are atmospheric, almost brooding, achieved through the sound in your pieces, which is often a low-rumbling ambient noise. How do you achieve that?

Hinton: I actually have another life as a sound and music person. In fact, I started out in theater, went into sound, and then went into film. I studied music. I mostly create the sounds with synthesizers. They're usually not samples. They're old school oscillators and I use a lot of FM and additive synthesis. So they're basically scored but it's not a melodic—it's a more ambient—type of score. Some of them use existing sound effects that are reprocessed.

Guillén: Your scores remind me—and, again, I hope I'm not creating a false analogy here—but, they remind me of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's scores. He likewise uses low, rumbling noise that agitates tension and anxiety. I don't feel like your films are calming me down when I watch them. [Brook chuckles.] I feel they are provoking disturbed emotions within me. Is that intentional on your part? Or did you mean for them to be more contemplative?


Hinton: It depends on the piece. I like the idea—getting back to what you said before—that people aren't going to be led into what they should feel in the films. In fact, at a self-criticism level, the sound is too leading for my own taste in the way I'm using it now. But in Transit (2004), for instance, when I watch Transit now it's a comedy. It's this poor man who's trying to get across Union Square with his cup of coffee and he just can't quite manage this for himself. It becomes very funny if I'm in the right mood and other people have said that it's a very peaceful piece that makes them think about time, etc. Other people have reacted the way you have.

Guillén: Transit isn't one of the pieces that makes me anxious. I agree it's peaceful. I remember you actually showed that to the salon when you had just finished it and I maintain—as I did then—that Transit has a beautiful, shimmering, evanescent quality. The guy walking across Union Square is ghostly and I never thought of it as a comic effort to get across Union Square. Slow Force Glimpse (2004) is one of your pieces that makes me anxious and almost borders on horror with its stroboscopic disorienting effects. How do you do that?

Hinton: It would take a very long time to explain how it was done and, in fact, sometimes, I go so far in transforming something that I've lost track of the steps I've taken to get to a certain point. I'm just listening to the image itself. I used to do a lot of work on the optical printer when I worked with film. One of the things that I experimented with a lot was with the ability to use mathematical formulas to create relationships between different pieces of imagery. I didn't want to imitate that exactly but I wanted—when I started working in digital—to be able to explore those same areas because time is such a crucial part of my work in relationship between different moments in time. So it's really just a collection of filters, and techniques—mostly using Final Cut Pro; the blink filter (which editors will know about)—but, it ends up being a very long process because it's a lot of trial and error to get just what I'm looking for, and experimenting—that's the experimental part! Seeing if I put these two things together in relationship to each other and then try to compress them using that effect, so that they're occurring at the same time but still separate, what relationships evolve? Maybe that leads to another piece.

Guillén: How would you define your term "introjection", as in your Introjection Series of which Slow Force Glimpse is a part? What does that mean?


Hinton: My understanding of "introjection" is that in psychology it's often used to describe when something external takes a real form inside a person's psyche. In Freudian or Jungian terms—and I'm not an expert on those—it would be the Mother Figure, the Father Figure, the Anima, the Animus. But I have also seen it used to describe things that someone encounters going through their life. I've always been fascinated by the things that don't quite register in our consciousness but still have an effect on us. You can walk through a particular landscape or go into a room with a certain number of people and you walk out and you feel differently. You don't necessarily remember specifically the way that building was shaped or the look on this person's face; but, those things did become part of you if your senses actually experienced them. For me, introjection is just that: it is the way that external phenomenon becomes part of you. Even if it's something that didn't really resonate with you at the time. It's taken from carefully examining a much longer set of footage and finding these things that at the time I didn't notice but I realize as I'm looking back at the tapes that they had some resonant quality and it was related to what I was experiencing, and then trying to construct a piece out of that to get to the psychological reality of it, if that makes any sense.

Guillén: No, it makes sense to me. It likewise points to an observational responsibility people have to understand what it is you're getting out of what you're seeing. Case in point: your new work about the MUNI T-Line made me laugh out loud. You're on the T-line and you're filming these different segments, moving in an episodic progression through neighborhoods south of San Francisco, and then you come to this one sequence where the train stops and the camera's just looking out the window at a static shot. But it's not really a static shot because I saw a bird fly across the sky so I realize it was filmed in real time. Knowing that the composition was being filmed in real time made me very alert for any minor movement to understand what was going on in the sequence and how the environment was addressing my attention. So within the composition there's a guy standing there. He's just standing there and he's standing there and he's standing there and all of a sudden he swings his leg and the train starts back up and moves away from that scene. I'm sure that was sheer serendipity, but for some reason it tickled me and made me laugh because I was waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen.

Hinton: That film is all unedited. If there's any movement, it's the train. It is just taken from one journey back and forth on the train. It was a silly conceptual thing: Oh, I'm only going to do this one trip so that it will have this validity, whatever, and I was so depressed after I shot the footage for that piece. Partly because I just didn't think there was anything there. But then the more I looked at the footage carefully, I realized what was there! It was very different from what I thought I was going to get. I'm going to be very curious how people react to that film. It's loaded in some areas and I'm not sure … it's an uncomfortable piece for me.

Guillén: I appreciated it. Living in this part of the City, south of Potrero, and familiar with the City's industrial and maritime districts, I thought your film was an important historical document. It baldly captures these neighborhoods just before they're going to change, partly as a consequence of the T-line. There were two images I especially liked. You had one of a blank, grey-walled structure that I thought was quintessentially South San Francisco and then you had another of an establishment—a bar I think—called Da Corner which indicates a threatened demographic, again by the T-line that provides access. So there's really a lot in that footage that the observer can cull out.

Returning to Slow Force Glimpse, another quality that intrigued me was its counterpoised pacings. You have the frenetic stroboscoping imagery countered against slow ice flows. Currents—registered through the flow of water currents or the effect of wind currents on foliage—as either a metaphor or an indicator of the passage of time seems to be very important to you. It's strong in your visual repertoire.

Hinton: Yes. Whatever conceptual or thematic issues I'm interested in exploring, it ends up coming down to time and the experience of time and mortality and being alive. I'm fascinated with the fact that a moment in time—you always hear the phrase "to be in the moment"—can't actually be captured. It's really not possible. I suppose photography in a sense captures the moment; but, if you think about it, "All right, I'm going to really experience every moment" and you sit down and are quiet, how do you define the moment? It's continuous. It is like a flow, a current, a river. In my pieces I'm definitely trying to work with this idea of time and the awareness of time. A fundamental thing about cinema—particularly when it's in a theater, when people are sitting down and the lights go out and you're giving yourself over to this experience—is that you have the time that's in the frame in front of you occurring and you're giving yourself over to this passage of time but you are also experiencing the time of sitting there in this chair in a different reality, in a different set of time. It's like you're placing time in relief against itself, which if you think about it, is a pretty profound thing. That's why film is so good at dealing with issues of mortality, of what makes life meaningful, what makes life not worth living, that all does really come down to time.

Guillén: What you're describing is exactly what Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul said to me when I asked him what was Buddhist about his films. He responded it was the audience being aware of sitting there, watching the film, attending to their breath. That, he said, is what is Buddhist about his films. Not necessarily what's in the film alone. I love your image of placing time in relief against itself.

Turning to your film Wave/Wake (2002), which you describe as "a meditation on states before and after a catastrophic event, reflecting in this case on the 9/11 attacks in NYC." In Wave/Wake you employ an image of a confluence of waves washing up and overlapping on shore. I immediately thought about physics and the laws of action and reaction as understood through forces in motion. I watched one wave go into the other and the next thing I thought up was the hijacked airliner hitting the World Trade Center. But what really got me in Wave/Wake was the elliptical text crawl. You show news commentators who aren't commenting, who are silent, while the text crawl beneath them registers a long, continuous ellipse. That said volumes about media chatter without a single word or sound. I thought it was brilliant. Did you go into the film with that concept in mind?

Hinton: Almost everything I do starts with more of an emotional or intuitive approach. When I started working with that image, I didn't think about the specific meanings that were read into it until I had already reconfigured them, reedited those people, found those sections where they weren't speaking, and then as I continued working on the piece, the thematic and conceptual things that are coming out become more apparent to me. Then it's a balance of how explicit do I make those because—again, as you were saying—I don't want to lead the audience. I'm not really interested in saying, "Here is what this event means." The experience of seeing that in relation to the other things the film is about is what's primarily important; but, yes, after that image started to resonate with me, I tried to think about why. The why is, in fact, that we're flooded with media chatter and whenever there's an event like that, when there's something terrible happening in the world, nobody really knows what to say but they're obligated on all of these news stations and text crawls everywhere in the world to chatter about it, say the same things over and over again, stating what we know, what we don't know, and it ends up being meaningless. I thought, My God, this is such a huge thing, in the United States particularly, and there was no silence, which was what I was feeling when it happened, this kind of terrifying silence inside. So yes, the film does reflect that absolutely.

Guillén: I liked your synthesthesiatic reference earlier when you said an image "speaks" to you. The images I remember in response to 9/11 was that of people covering their mouth in disbelief.

Hinton: You're right!

Guillén: It's an automatic response humans have to a horrific event to cover their mouth and I felt Wave/Wake played with that. Also, you played with reversing the footage, pulling the explosion of the plane crashing into the World Trade Center back into the building, which implied a certain hope.

Hinton: It's partly that and then there's another side simultaneously, which is a wishing that something had not happened, wanting to turn time back. I have since learned there are other filmmakers who have done the same thing with that footage. It's, in a way, an obvious thing to do and that's probably why I used this very pixilated version of it. I didn't want it to be so explicit. I wanted it to be muted. But there's also the thing about cycles. There are waves and then there are wakes. There are events and then the receding of the events. These things just continue in a more circular pattern. Since 9/11 we've been on a subsequent wave and we don't know what it's going to crash into; it's very terrifying. The backward image in a sense is a hopeful looking forward in addition to a wishing one could turn back the clock.

Guillén: Returning to the Introjection Series, which tend to be observational from a moving vehicle, there's this dread, this sense that something's going to happen, that the vehicle is going to crash.

Hinton: I don't want to think about what that must mean about me. [Laughs.]

Guillén: It reminded me of something Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano once wrote, that—with regard to cars—the term "accident" is a misnomer; that it should actually be called "consequence." He says that the minute the car was invented, collisions were inevitable. Ever since reading that, whenever the fear or paranoia around a vehicular accident comes up, I recognize it as a meditation on consequences. And though experimental or independent filmmakers frequently use the device of filming a coursing landscape through a car window, yours has this added sense of apprehension that makes it more interesting.


Hinton: The shooting out of a window is almost cliché in experimental film, it's true. When I made Shimmer Crash (2006), in fact, I thought—and I told people—that this is the final piece I'll ever make that has anything shot out of a window. It's difficult to work with that material and transcend that kind of person who's always shooting a camera outside a window. There are things that draw a filmmaker to those shots and one of them is, again, you have time. You have the motion of the car. You're moving from point A to point B and time is passing at the same time as things are passing and they're passing in multiple directions, forward and backward on all these various planes. For me, though, I've always been very uncomfortable with vehicles and cars. In fact, I recently switched to trying to ride a bicycle in the city for most of my transportation….

Guillén: Well, now you really have to worry about cars.

Hinton: Interestingly, I feel it's a complete—knock on wood—but I don't feel that constant dread and fear when I'm on the bicycle. Not that I'm unaware that something terrible could happen as a result of a car. Maybe it's because I don't feel quite as complicit. Most people need a car. It's not realistic not to [have one]. But the car, a vehicle, is something that does have a sense of "I've now given over control to something else", even if I'm driving it because the freeway, the other cars, it only takes one person to lose attention for one small amount of time and that's it. There's also the fact of the window, the portal, the looking through something, which adds a second layer to the camera. I think that's interesting psychologically and it can maybe make the filmmaker feel more protected? Safer observing? I don't know what it is exactly; but, I do know that the window aspect of it is a big part of it for me.

Guillén: I don't know if you know this or not, but, I'm 53 and I've never had a driver's license. I don't drive. Partly, because—going back to Galeano—the presiding consequence of a car is death. Or so I fear. That's why I don't really like to be in them because I have this constant fear of death. [Laughs.] That attitude also stems from being influenced at a young age by the existential writings of Carlos Castañeda who used the image of riding at night in a car and the headlights of a car behind you reflected in the rear view mirror as a symbol of encroaching death.

Hinton: It also gets back to what you were saying about currents. The world is full of all of these natural forces. Because I know a lot of people in the animal welfare community and I'm a city person and not so much a nature person, we have a lot of discussions about nature. I'm always saying half-jokingly, "Well, nature is not your friend." There's nothing good or benevolent about nature. It's just that it's so powerful that, if you mess with it, you're going to be in even worse trouble.

Guillén: It's a predatorial universe after all.


Hinton: Yeah. But there are all these forces in nature, the currents, the water, earthquakes, these [forces] that move through us, that take our experience of time and change it, interrupt it, accelerate it. It's almost a cliché also to say that when some terrible thing happens suddenly, a person is much more aware of all the details around him. The car and the train and the airplane and all these things are man-made currents of that type. They've done wonderful things in many senses for people. They also have this great potential for destruction as 9/11 showed. It's remarkable that that had not happened before in a sense, if you think about it. These are gigantic pieces of metal loaded with gasoline and it is a terrifying thing. So, in a way, it's like the ultimate messing with nature. Another thing about my fascination with vehicles in some of my work is that it is yet another force and current moving through time; this one coming from our own creation as opposed to coming from nature.

Guillén: And not being quite as resilient as nature. You depict your two waves intersecting on a little tern and the tern just stands there and enjoys being washed by the two currents from both sides. Quite a contrast to a plane hitting a building. There's little give there. Speaking of wind and water currents, your piece Flow (2001) is Monetesque; it reminds me of Monet's water lily series.


Included among your upcoming Yerba Buena program—along with Wave/Wake and Transit—will be a newer project Trace Garden: Markings which represents something of a departure for you. Though you've begun working with found footage and photographs, thematically Trace Garden links to Transit and underscores the spectral quality of your work. What is the impetus behind Trace Garden?

Hinton: The original impetus was simply that I had this footage and had started collecting other similar types of footage as well out of a fascination with this idea that we are so mortal and we are such blips basically in the world; in terms of time, we barely register. It's interesting to me how human beings try to mark their presence in the world, ranging from taking photographs and recording what they've done. In a sense tattoos are a marking of time directly onto the skin. You're trying basically to grasp time somehow and it's impossible in the long run; but, there's something very moving to me about that process. A lot of the footage that was used in Trace Garden has a quality to it—because of the way the images had deteriorated—that it almost stopped being like film and it started to feel like, as I was going through it, communications. This is what these people left but now something's happened to it. It's not in the same form as they left it. Somehow it just naturally evolved into this conceit of a series of films that were presented as though they were communications from beyond but they were actually those people's memories that were distorted both by the distortion of memory and then in the transmission from one world to the other. It's really not that different a process from what I've used in other experimental work because I have visual material—it's just that in this case I didn't create it—but there's always an intense mining process. It's actually the most time-consuming thing that I do; taking apart all this imagery and moving it around in time and speed and juxtaposition to find what kind of hidden meanings in relationships and resonances are there. Trace Garden doesn't feel that different to me except that perhaps I'm freed of the necessity to have a more overriding conceptual framework for a piece.

Guillén: It's more figurative. It's actual people.

Hinton: Yeah, it's actual people and I think it's leading me to shooting another narrative film later in the summer. Trace Garden led me to working with people. I started in theater working with actors and it's always been a conflict with me, this obsession with more direct experience and then with the creation of something using actors. Trace Garden's leading me to a place where I can finally bring these things together. We'll see.

Guillén: I especially liked the Game In the Forest sequence, which is reminiscent of Shimmer Crash, because you have these light flares in both pieces that—since I'm reading into them—indicate some increase in consciousness. Especially with Game In the Forest, the image of the figures becoming more and more illuminated from within until they're nearly balls of light seemed very much an accurate depiction of ghosts or some consciousness from the past coming across.

One final thing I would say about the temporality of your pieces, I was trained in Central American art to appreciate that temporality registers both in sequence and aspect. Sequential time can be understood on a narrative continuum, you have then, you have now, and all the space and movement inbetween those locatives. But the aspect of time implies a constancy, which includes the then and now, but is actually always happening all at the same time because you're always looking at it and you're always thinking about the then and now but it's always happening.

Hinton: That makes me wonder if Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five with the whole concept of time on the planet Tralfamadore was directly lifted from the Mayans in that sense. All time is present all the time.

Guillén: Possibly. Whether the Mayans or any number of indigenous groups who understand intimate time, indigenous time, being "unstuck in time" as I think Vonnegut phrased it.

THE RAPE OF EUROPA—The Evening Class Interview With Bonni Cohen and Richard Berge

Quick on the heels of its two sold-out screenings at SFIFF50, The Rape of Europa is opening Friday, May 18 in Bay Area theatres (Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco, Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley and Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael). Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Nicole Newnham's remarkable documentary is based on the book by Lynn H. Nicholas and narrated by acclaimed actress Joan Allen. It begins with the story of Gustav Klimt's famed painting "Gold Portrait," stolen by the Nazis from Viennese Jews in 1938. In a journey through seven countries, the film takes the audience into the violent whirlwind of fanaticism, greed, and warfare that threatened to wipe out the artistic heritage of Europe. For 12 long years, the Nazis looted and destroyed art on a scale unprecedented in history. But heroic young art historians and curators from America and across Europe fought back with an extraordinary campaign to rescue and return the millions of lost, hidden and stolen treasures. Today, more than 60 years later, the legacy of this tragic history continues to play out as families of looted collectors recover major works of art, conservators repair battle damage, and nations fight over the fate of ill-gotten spoils of war. The Rape of Europa tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival of Europe's art treasures during the Third Reich and World War II.

I recently sat down with Berge and Cohen in the Larsen Associates offices to discuss The Rape of Europa. Richard Berge is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who has produced documentaries for PBS, Showtime, A&E, and others, including Yesterday's Tomorrows with director Barry Levinson and Sing Faster: The Stagehands' Ring Cycle with director Jon Else. He has a Masters degree in Documentary Film from Stanford University. Bonni Cohen is a founder of Actual Films in San Francisco and filmmaker for PBS, BBC, and Arte. She is currently producing Wonders Are Many, a documentary about the making of the Peter Sellars and John Adams opera, "Doctor Atomic." She has a Masters degree in Documentary Film from Stanford University. Her previous films include Democracy Afghan Style (co-director, 2004), The Nobel: Visions Of Our Century (2001), and Eyes of the Storm (1998).

* * *

Michael Guillén: As I was thinking about meeting with the two of you today, I was trying to decide how to approach talking to you about your documentary. The Rape of Europa is so rich, its breadth and depth astounding, that it's almost daunting to begin. First of all I should say how much I respect and appreciate the intelligence you grant your audience. Yours is a truly historical document that I believe will be watched for years to come.

Richard Berge: Thank you.


Guillén: Since I have a particular fascination with the "substantiating connective tissue" between a book and its film adaptation, I was wondering if we couldn't talk first about how you went about securing the rights to Lynn Nicholas's book The Rape of Europa and how you then used her book to structure your film? And what is in the film that is not in the book?

Berge: How do you make the translation from the book to the visual?

Guillén: Exactly.

Berge: [To Cohen] Why don't you start with how we got the book?

Bonni Cohen: Nicole Newnham is the third of our triumvirate. She and I were working on another film about the combat artists of WWII and she was reading Lynn's book, finished it and handed it to me and said, "We have to option this book." It reads like a Graham Greene thriller. It's a narrative that has a dramatic arc with good guys and bad guys and treasure to be discovered and heroes at the end. Plus, it's a piece of this history that we knew very little about and we had really fancied ourselves as WWII buffs, certainly very well-educated in Holocaust history. Not that this is necessarily a Holocaust story….

Guillén: It's way beyond that.


Cohen: Yes. So we optioned the book and really mostly wanted to visit this new chapter. It seemed to simultaneously humanize the Nazis in this weird way. You got a deeper sense of them as people, not just these monsters who killed people. There were likes and dislikes and obsession and greed and well-thought-out cultural policy. It made the whole tale so much creepier and more evil in its depth. That really motivated us. The thought of putting art and culture at the center of an existential question about how people survive was compelling.

Berge: Lynn was a little apprehensive in the beginning because she spent a lot of time writing that book.

Cohen: She'd spent 10 years! She'd actually read the obituary of Rose Valland in Le Monde and that was what motivated her.

Berge: It may have been hard for her to turn this over to us but once she did and once she saw what we were doing, she trusted us and was supportive all the way, even to today. She's there for whatever we might need her for using her research.

Guillén: Clearly you promoted her. You gave her ample on-screen time to discuss her knowledge and you certainly have motivated interest in reading her book. Admittedly, I haven't read her book so that's why I was curious if the way she structured her book was a template by which you could then outline your film?

Berge: Her history is an exhaustively-detailed one. It's the definitive [history on the subject]. Obviously, people are doing to discover new aspects of this history but she really laid down the main themes and points….

Cohen: …and there are countries that we never get into.

Berge: So she's very comprehensive. She's chronological. We decided, "How are we going to tackle this? Do we have to tell the history of WWII? What can we assume about viewers' knowledge of WWII? Can we just do signposts along the way?" We decided to do chronological and then break it up into geographic themes so each country would represent a certain theme of the aspect of looting or wartime destruction. For instance, in Poland we talk about the degeneracy of so-called Slavic peoples and the [Nazi] need to eliminate their cultural vestiges, whereas in France they preserved it. [The Nazis] liked the Western Europeans. Holland had very much the same experience as France so we decided not to replicate that history even though they could have their own chapter. Italy was also stolen from but we decided to use Italy as a way of exploring the effect of the Allied invasion on art, which was inevitable. That also happened in France but we decided to use Italy as a good example of that. And then Germany is a place where—after it had been flattened—we explored the lengths that were [taken] to hide art underground and in castles to put it out of harm's way. So we tried to use each country as a theme that would fit into a chronology.

Cohen: The biggest departure from Lynn's book for the film adaptation were the contemporary stories. If you're asking a film audience to watch a straight history, it's almost impossible. You have to be able to bring them in on some level so it was a real challenge to find restitution cases that were going to play out during the course of our production period. In fact, we joked about how ridiculous it was to try to write the Maria Altmann Klimt case into the film because we had finished the film and then the [Altmann] case settled and we opened up the end of the film again.

Berge: We were taking a big risk on some of those [restitution cases]. Some of the avenues we went down, nothing ever happened.

Cohen: Nothing panned out.

Berge: So we had to can those. The other issue is that, while we were in the process of optioning the book and developing a treatment, a lot of restitution cases were happening—this was in the late 90's or 2000—some really big cases like a Matisse in a Seattle museum that was being fought over. There was a Degas that was being fought over in the collection of the Chicago Art Institute.

Cohen: And the law was changing.

Berge: So we thought, this is something that happened after Lynn wrote her book. In Russia, for instance, they passed that law nationalizing the stolen loot after Lynn had written her book, so we decided to incorporate that.

Guillén: Cultural patrimony and repatriation issues intrigue me because my training was in Central American archaeology where the looting of archaeological artifacts and their subsequent appearance in private and public collections has been a hot button for some time now. I'm well-steeped in these issues. I had never, however, applied them to stolen art from Europe. For some reason, when I saw European paintings in a museum, I just assumed they belonged there.

Berge: For somebody interested in Central American archaeology, I think it's arguable that the issue of Nazi art restitution, and the cases that have happened, has opened up the issue to broader claims about artistic patrimony from South America, from Greece, Italy. There are a lot of cases that are coming down.


Guillén: Absolutely. The other theme I much admired in your documentary is your treatment of how what is morally heroic within the individual crosses over generations. You have Rose Valland, a true hero during WWII in her efforts to chronicle the trafficking of these art treasures through a private diary. You have Dean Keller, another true hero during WWII attempting to save art treasures from accidental damage through the efforts of the Monuments Men campaign. But then you have someone like David Carroll of the Utah Fine Arts Museum continuing this heroic morality right to the present day by returning stolen objects to their rightful owners. He didn't have to do that but, in his own words, knew it was essential to do so to reinstill a humanity to these events.

Berge: That's right.

Guillén: How have museum officials responded to The Rape of Europa?

Berge: May I first just make a comment about what you've said? It's very interesting that—up until now—there's a whole group of metropolitan national galleries, the big institutions, and whenever they have a case they bring the lawyers out. They have to, because of their fiduciary responsibilities, [deal with] these things very carefully. It's the smaller museums like the Utah Fine Arts Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art that have been very forthcoming with turning these things back to claimants once the claims have been justified.

Guillén: Does that discrepancy in the track record between the larger institutions and the smaller museums have anything to do with fears of compromising the ability to be eligible for loans from overseas international museums? I know that there was the relatively recent controversy over Egon Schiele's "The Portrait of Wally" at the Museum of Modern Art that actually got David D'Arcy fired from NPR. Does the size of the museum and its in-house policies regarding the foreign loan of art play into how willing they are to accommodate claimants?

Cohen: I think absolutely, right, yeah. It's much more incumbent upon the small guy to make sure that they know that their stuff is legally their's; there's much more risk.

Guillén: In terms of the talking heads then, did Lynn include several of these individuals in her history book? Or have you secured these individuals on your own? I was particularly impressed with Jonathan Petropoulos.

Cohen: He's another author in his own right who has as many books on this subject. It's not the one book of the exhaustive history, but he has a whole book out about the dealers and the historians who made up the team that found the art for Hitler and [Hermann] Goering.

Berge: He's a specialist in Nazi art policy. He's written two very interesting books. He spent 20 years researching this and he teaches at Claremont McKenna. He spent a lot of time talking to old Nazis for his research.

Cohen: Exactly. [Laughing.] Remember his story about the silverware with H.G. on it? He'd be visiting with the peasants or with families in the areas surrounding … he'd look down from eating and they'd be using Goering silverware.


Berge: He told me one story. He was in Austria and there was an area actually near the place where the mine is in the film? Near there was a retirement community for old Nazis. He went there to meet with them and he had a friend along with him once in this one town. He went into the local café, a small restaurant, and it was one of those places … you know how restaurants put pictures of patrons on the walls? Most of them were anonymous people, just locals, and he sat down, the place was full, and his friend goes, "Oh look! There's Herr Somebody"—some Herr Ex-Nazi Guy—and the whole restaurant turned and looked and they felt so uncomfortable they got up and left. Because they knew this was one of their friends.

Guillén: I can speak to that because I lived in Vienna for a month and, during that visit, had a dissonant moment one day when—after receiving some horrible looks from old people on the metro—I realized these were the selfsame folks who cheered Hitler into Vienna! So it's not that far removed.

Berge: No.

Cohen: The Austrians were much worse than the Germans in many ways.

Guillén: And you really pick up on that in your interview with the representative from the Austrian National Gallery. [In my best Daffy Duck voice]: He's just despicable.

Both: [Laughing.]

Guillén: So what are you hoping audiences will walk away with from this documentary? What do you want to motivate audiences to understand or do with regard to these issues?

Cohen: The critical thing at this point is where we are with Iraq and Afghanistan, to a lesser extent. We're desperate for people to see that this was a moment in time in our own history when our government rallied around art and made it a priority and went in there and did the right thing. It is an unprecedented moment in our history that has not been repeated. Unfortunately, we are now in a situation where our troops are in a country [that] is a minefield of archaelogy that we cannot replace and looters are just rampant in the country and we're doing nothing about it. Richard's done quite a lot of research on this. It's not a good situation. The hope would be that we can raise some awareness of what the right thing is to do and, hopefully, try and guide our government to start doing it.

Berge: In general, whether we pick WWII—I mean, this is the setting for this film, WWII—but, I think the big theme is the importance that art has for people. It's the human condition, of recording it in memory, and perpetuating what it means to be human. That tie that people have to their art comes through in the efforts that people made in this history to save it. This could apply to any conflict, to any situation that we need to say to protect art, to save our humanity and Iraq's a good case. When we were just starting to make this film, the Taliban in Aghanistan destroyed those giant Buddhas. You think of [how the Nazis defined] "degenerate art", it's exactly the same thing: power misused, misuing art for control.

Cohen: [To Berge] You made such an interesting point at one of the Q&As about how ironically Saddam Hussein's policy towards looters preserved the art.

Berge: Hussein seems to have shared some traits with Hitler. He wasn't a connoisseur of art like Hitler was but he knew the power of it. He used the Babylonian heritage to buttress his role as the modern Nebuchadrezzar. If he caught looters, he would execute them and that really dampened down the looting during the Hussein era….

Cohen: [Laughing.]

Guillén: Or at least careless looting.

Berge: After the first Iraq war, the looting started happening but he clamped down on it and it only happened at night. Then during the Clinton years, during the embargo and all the controls, he booted out all the archaeologists so the looters started to come in and loot at night. Then when the second invasion happened, collectors and dealers—don't know who they are but, probably in England and the United States—had put in orders to looters for specific things they wanted out of museums and out of archaeological sites so looters went in right on the moment of the invasion and started cutting out friezes from old palaces. Now it's a free for all. There's not enough people to be controlling any of these sites.

Guillén: Another point in your documentary that was well-taken—if not horrifying—is the bureaucracy behind the plundering. You've detailed that well, along with the shocking realization that military strategies were predicated upon the potential for the plundering of cultural artifacts.

Cohen: That there would be dealers and art historians that would go in before the invasion [to assess collections].

Guillén: I tend to think of wars as being fought for property defined as territory and not so much property conceived as the fungible currency of cultural artifacts such as paintings or smaller objects of art that were being transported and used—as you were saying, Richard—to bestow validation.

Berge: Prestige.

Guillén: The thirst, the hunger, for prestige goods brought in from vanquished cultures I know from my Mesoamerican studies, where you might have—let's say—a Mayan king who somehow through the course of historical events has acquired possession of an Olmec heirloom that strengthens and legitimizes his reign. So, to synopsize here, you're hoping that The Rape of Europa will profile individual acts of moral responsibility and heroism from which we can glean guidance today? Shining examples of people doing the right thing. This is one of the most positive and affirmative documentaries I've seen in a long time.

Cohen: The European efforts are really something to behold. Americans can learn a lot from this film just by watching how the Europeans responded to this crisis. In Italy, in France, bricking things up, sandbagging, moving out entire museums—these weren't just curators; these were truck drivers and receptionists.

Guillén: As an American filmgoer, I think the first time this even entered my consciousness was with the fictional narrative Tea With Mussolini. I suspect the general American public knows very little about the European grass root efforts to protect cultural legacies.

Cohen: Our hope is that they care somewhat. I mean, who knows?

Guillén: Do you feel that the American public has a sense of art as a cultural legacy to be protected?

Cohen: [Shakes her head no.]

Berge: Bonni might disagree with me, but hear me out for a second. First of all, shortly after Pearl Harbor the major museums on the East Coast and West Coast moved their collections inland. The National Gallery's collection went to North Carolina. The San Francisco Museum stuff went to Colorado. San Diego moved their stuff. So there was some consciousness to protect that stuff. Then, these Monuments Men who—before the war—had never seen these works of art that they studied in graduate school, saw them for the first time in the most dire circumstances and they were responsible for them. They came back after the war and I don't think it was a coincidence that, not only was there abstract expressionism, but there's a reason why the art world went from Paris to New York. These men and women came back and created the post-war art establishment. They created these institutions that we now take for granted.

Cohen: [To Berge] I completely agree with you at that time, but I'm talking about Americans today.

Berge: I'm just saying that that legacy continues to today and I think that there's a much greater sensitivity and appreciation of art now than there was after the War. And I think it's because of how their work trickled through.

Cohen: Can you imagine if there were an attack on American soil that the local 7-11 guys and the guys that run the gas station will be packing up crates of paintings?

Berge: No. No, I don't think so.

Guillén: Which leads me to something else, which speaks to the idea that art is somehow for the people. Perhaps in Europe there are established traditions of art being woven into the everyday life of people, but here in the States I suspect art is more privatized and almost class-oriented.

Cohen: Definitely.

Berge: That's a great point.

Cohen: I think that's absolutely right. When the Maria Altmann case was resolved and the issue came up around what she was going to do with the painting, LACMA (The L.A. County Museum), which is a public institution, were responsible and paid for the insurance to bring the paintings over [from Austria] in exchange for being able to exhibit them; I think it's fair to say in the hope that she would bequeath at least one of the paintings to the museum. That there'd be some consideration. Because if you look at Adele Bloch-Bauer's will, her priority (if you read it) is to insure that these paintings are seen by the public, which is why she wanted them to go to the Vienna National Gallery. Now, she didn't know what was going to happen in Austria but that was the public institution [she had in mind]. A debate arises around how this was handled, right? Because you can't really judge an individual's reaction to getting back something that belonged to her family under these kinds of conditions. However, what is an individual's responsibility to the public, both here in the United States and—I would even argue—in Vienna to having these Klimts seen by the public? We could go on about what we would have hoped to see and then what happened. I preface all this by saying there's no way to judge it, but in an intellectual and rational way I would have wished that the public consideration would have been more in the forefront.

Guillén: For me that was one of the most glaring disconnects in the documentary. To have Maria Altmann say on camera that she wanted her aunt's wishes honored to have these paintings made public or placed in a public institution and then to turn around and sell the painting to a private individual made me pause.

Cohen: [Ronald Lauder] is showing it in the Neue Galerie. It's the other four that we're concerned about.

Guillén: I see. I didn't realize it was being housed in the Neue Galerie.

Berge: It's a complicated issue because there are so many extenuating circumstances.

Cohen: There are a number of heirs and the legal fee; there's a lot going on that needs to be paid back.


Berge: [Maria Altmann] may very well have wished all of these [paintings] to go to a public museum, to go to the L.A. County Museum for all we know, but the single largest shareholder in those paintings was the lawyer who represented her. So how does he get paid? You can't break paintings in half. It does come down to how do you split up the assets? I'm sure there could have been a solution. There was a famous case in the North Carolina Museum of Art of a [Louis] Cranach that was discovered to have been owned by the father or uncle of a couple of Austrian women. When they gave indisputable proof to the museum, the museum said, "Sure, here, take it back." In gratitude for their forthrightness, just like the Utah museum, the sisters said, "Well, look. We thought there would be a fight. Why don't you just keep it? We'll take half the value and you just keep it in North Carolina where it's been for 20 years and everyone loves it." One would hope there would be more solutions like that. The problem with Austria is Maria Altmann was so bitter about the Austrian government fighting her for so long that she wasn't going to leave them there and cut a deal with them.

Cohen: In fact there was a while when they wouldn't even let her in the gallery. She'd come to visit the painting and they wouldn't let her in the gallery.

Guillén: Finally, I know that you did extensive research into this film and you probably left out lots and lots of information. Do you plan to do anything with that material? Is there a coffee table book in the making?

Cohen: The DVD will have extras on it. There's a ton of archival material. Fascinating human interest stories we just weren't able to tell.

Guillén: Well, thank you so much. What a remarkable document. I hope you keep on making documentaries of this caliber.

Berge: Thank you!

Cohen: Thank you for your interest.

Berge: And just to answer you, the DVD, hopefully we're going to have full archival films on there that haven't been seen. The Soviet government made a 25-minute film for the Nuremberg trials that documented their cultural destruction and we want to put that in its entirety. No one's seen that. There's great stuff so I'm glad to hear that you're interested because we're planning to maybe put a two or three DVD set together.

Guillén: That would make it one I would definitely want to own. As it is it's a documentary that one needs to watch several times; there's so much information and so many different stories. You could go off on each individual story.

Berge: I'm so glad. When we were cutting this we were like, "Is it too full of stuff? Is it too dense?" But it seems that people think it's just about right.

Guillén: It's just about right and Joan Allen's narration adds a nice temper.

Berge: She'd never done one before. That was the first time she'd ever narrated. Nice meeting you.

Guillén: Same here.

Cross-published at Twitch.

2007 SFIFF50—Michael Hawley's Wrap-Up

The Golden Anniversary edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival came to a close last week. I wish I could say it was the festival to end all festivals, but I can't. That's because, for me at least, the festival has always been great, and that's why I've been coming to it for 31 years. This year I saw a total of 22 films, in addition to what I had seen pre-festival. Two of them were the kind of mind-blowers you pray you'll experience during a festival, and another five were merely excellent by comparison. Nine more were very much worth the time invested and five were disappointing, but not painfully so. Only one was outright loathsome, and even it had its enthusiastic defenders. Those are great stats, in my book.

I'd like to begin by thanking the festival staff for this year's zero-tolerance policy on any and all electronic devices being used during the screenings. It seemed to work, as I didn't hear any cell phones ring or see any of those annoying lights (thereby making it unnecessary for me to get into any physical altercations … unlike last year.) Hell, I didn't even have to beg anyone to shut up. At several screenings I was able to detect scattered chattering, but it was far enough away to tune out. All I can say about that is, "People, if you have to jabber while watching a movie, pretty please stay home and do it in front of your TV set."

This was the first year I got to experience the festival as a member of the press, and it was wonderful to retreat from the madness at the Kabuki and take refuge in the relative tranquility of the press and hospitality suites. I'm very grateful to the publicity staffers who helped me secure last-minute tickets whenever I found myself with an unexpected afternoon or evening free. As a press member I also received a list of guests expected to attend the festival and learned that it's not a good idea to plan your festival by it. There were several high-profile no-shows (Bruno Dumont, Otar Iosseliani, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, John Carney) and several directors showed up to introduce their films but for whatever reason never returned for a Q&A (Hal Hartley, Im Sang-soo, Kevin Brownlow). On the other hand, there were several surprise guests. The presence of Indonesian dancer Eko Supriyanto helped turn my screening of Opera Jawa into a real event. And I wanted to die when I later learned that Egyptian movie goddess Youssra had shown up for a screening of The Yacoubian Building.

One constant topic of conversation was the renovated Sundance Kabuki theater, which recently converted all of it auditoriums to stadium-style seating (with the exception of the main floor of House One). How wonderful it was to finally watch a foreign film there and not have someone's big head, big hat or big hair blocking my view of the subtitles. Everyone I talked to concurred, with the exception of one friend who claimed that because the distance between projection booth and screen is now shorter, wide-screen movies in particular no longer look as crisp. He saw Private Fears in Public Places at the Kabuki and at the Pacific Film Archive and said there was no comparison. This was certainly not my experience. I will say, however, that if the Kabuki wants to start passing itself off as some kind of high-end temple of cinephilia, it'll need to smooth over some rough edges. For starters, they can tend to the second floor men's room, with its leaky toilets, broken stall latches and trash cans that are overflowing by 1:00 in the afternoon. But enough about big hair and leaky toilets. Let's look at the films I saw, beginning with the highlights and working down to the low lights.


Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa, quite simply, did me in. Spellbinding, heart-wrenching, perhaps even revolutionary, I left the Castro Theater that afternoon certain that I had just seen what would be my favorite film of 2007. The film is an all-singing, all-dancing re-imagining of a lusty tale from the Ramayana, given contemporary political subtext, and featuring eye-popping sets designed by Indonesia's greatest installation artists. We were lucky enough to have the film introduced by the man who commissioned it, avant-garde opera and theater director Peter Sellars, as well as having the aforementioned personal appearance by dancer Eko Supriyanto. The latter sat directly across the aisle from me and it was interesting to occasionally glance over and watch him watching himself on the Castro's enormous screen.

After a generous and informative Q&A, I floated over to the Kabuki to hear Sellars deliver this year's State of Cinema address. I'd never bothered to attend the address in the past, but boy did I make the right choice in deciding to tune in this year. Resplendent in an orange shirt with a string of chunky, blue African beads around his neck, and sporting his trademark gravity-defying hairdo, Sellars delivered a searing, impassioned speech that was perhaps more State of Humanity than State of Cinema. I was particularly fascinated by his discourse on the last year of Mozart's life, and how that became the inspiration for the six features he commissioned for the New Crowned Hope festival. He spoke without notes for well over an hour, tears occasionally rolling down his cheeks, and the audience leapt to its feet to deliver a big standing O the split second he finished. A transcription of this stirring address is now available at SF360.

The one-two punch of Opera Jawa and this speech all added up to one of the finest days I've ever had at this festival. Indeed, the following day I decided to scrap my ticket for Sounds of Sand and attend a second screening of Opera Jawa at the Kabuki. Big Mistake! There were major projection problems, the biggest of which was having the soundtrack sputter or cut out completely every single time there was a reel change. I was mortified for the festival, and really felt awful for my friends who were seeing the film for the first time. The experience was more akin to watching a movie in some Market Street grindhouse circa 1977 than attending a world-class film festival celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2007. Opera Jawa was the only film to receive a last-minute added screening this year, and I'm assuming it was in response to complaints about this unfortunate snafu.


The other sublime event of this year's festival was—as expected—the "performance" of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain! at the Castro Theater. I'd been salivating over this silent film with live accompaniment by a 13-piece ensemble, three foley artists, narrator and "castrato," ever since I read about its premiere at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival. It was everything I'd hoped for, and I look forward to the film's commercial release next month so I can more closely consider it without all the on-stage distractions. But what marvelous distractions they were. I never imagined that the foley artists—all wearing very scientific-looking white lab coats—would actually be on-stage in front of the screen. But they were loads of fun to watch as they created all the film's sound effects live. My favorite had to be the twisting of celery stalks to simulate the sound of anything "squicky," i.e. the scooping of human "nectar" from the brains of little children, or the bending of bones calcified by rigor mortis. Joan Chen also made an outstanding narrator, especially in the scene where the protagonist's mother has a fit of orgasmic histrionics. For those unfortunate enough to have missed this incredible evening, San Francisco photographer Steve Rhodes has a terrific selection of photos from the event here.

Of the five films in my "merely excellent by comparison" category, three were first features and two were the works of established directors; Im Sang-soo from South Korea and Carlos Sorin from Argentina. As it happened, I had the pleasure of seeing both of their new films on the same day. Im's The Old Garden is quite a departure from his last two features, the jolting infidelity tale A Good Lawyer's Wife, and the somewhat befuddling political satire The President's Last Bang. Earnest and sentimental, this new film tells the story of a political prisoner who is released after 16 years, the effect his absence has had on friends and family, and the tragic loss of a special woman who was unable to wait for him. Masterfully constructed, the film shifts frequently and seamlessly between the past and present, all leading up to a finale that packs quite an emotional wallop.


After the heaviness of Im's film, Carlos Sorin's light, hilarious fairytale, The Road to San Diego, came as a welcome relief. The San Diego of the title is famed soccer player Diego Armando Maradona, and the titular road is one traveled by Tati Benítez, a young soccer fanatic from the jungles of Argentina's Misiones province. One day Tati finds a tree root that bears a resemblance to his idol, and decides it's his duty to bring it to Buenos Aires where the soccer star is recovering from a heart attack. On the road we're introduced to a host of benevolent characters who help Tati along his merry way, all played by the type of engaging non-professional actors Sorin's films specialize in. You keep waiting for the scene where Tati gets cheated, robbed, beaten up or worse, but it never happens. Realistic? Hardly. Refreshing? You bet! It put a huge grin upon the face of this sports-hating quasi-nihilist that lasted long after the movie was over.

Jean-Pascal Hattu's debut feature 7 Years was the last film I saw at the festival and what a fine ending it was. Deliciously perverse and morally complex, it's the kind of film that's hard to imagine being made anywhere in the world besides France. The story is simple; Vincent (Bruno Todeschini)—in prison for seven years for an undetermined crime—convinces a reluctant guard to seduce his adoring wife and tape-record the sounds of their love-making. Needless to say, things get complicated mighty fast. Hattu, who also wrote the story and screenplay, was at the screening and gave a most interesting half-hour Q&A afterwards. An astounding first film, this would have been my personal choice for this year's Skyy Prize.


The other two debut features that made an impression on me were Zoe Cassavetes' Broken English and Joachim Trier's Reprise from Norway. I went into the Cassavetes film with a love for Parker Posey and pretty low expectations for what sounded like another lonely-girl-in-the-big-city rom-com. To my great surprise it was much better than that; intelligent, touching and hysterically funny. Posey has never been better suited for a role and her many fans should eat this right up. Equally good is Melvil Poupaud as the intense Frenchman she meets at a co-worker's boring July 4th party, and who just might be her salvation. Cassavetes, who also wrote the clever screenplay, is the daughter of director John Cassavetes, and her mother—screen legend Gena Rowlands—plays Posey's mother. Posey and Cassavetes were on hand to introduce the film, and returned for a brief, but spirited Q&A afterwards.

Now we move on to that group of films which I found to be quite good in their way, but which lacked the something that would have made them great for me. Or, conversely, these are films for which I might have lacked the something that would have made me see their greatness. At the top of the list would be Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth, which since its premiere at Cannes last year, has had me wondering which side of the debate I would eventually fall on … masterpiece or Colossal Bore? As it turns out I'm somewhere right in the middle. While I was in constant awe of Costa's stunning compositions and use of spot lighting, I was pretty much at a loss when it came to involving myself emotionally with his characters, which may have even been the point. And as tortuously monotonous as some scenes were, i.e. Vanda's lengthy rant about childbirth, I'm sure it'll be some time before I forget them. Incidentally, by the time the end credits rolled at the 155-minute mark, more than half the audience had abandoned ship.


Michael Glawogger's Slumming also came with some controversy attached. It's about two horribly obnoxious Viennese men, one a bellicose mega-drunk and the other a trust-fund scumbag, whose lives cross paths and are somehow transformed and redeemed by travel. Ultimately, I didn't buy it, but it was certainly great fun in parts, especially the scenes involving a frozen lake and some bobbing garden gnomes. The final scene, set just outside what I think was a brothel along some train tracks leading out of Jakarta, was for me, this festival's ultimate indelible image.

I enjoyed Hirokazu Kore-eda's delightful, revisionist samurai tale Hana, although it felt too long by about one-fourth. Just as likable (and the perfect length) was John Carney's Once, a self-proclaimed "art-house musical" about a Dublin busker and a Czech immigrant who literally and figuratively make beautiful music together. I also got a big kick out of Hal Hartley's Henry Fool sequel-of-sorts, the comic thriller Fay Grim, although it would have been even nicer if Hartley had stuck around for a Q&A. Or for that matter, if the film's star Parker Posey, had come to the screening at all. (This was very strange, considering that Posey had been in the exact same theater only 45 minutes earlier for the Broken English Q&A. And I don't buy the excuse given by Hartley that she "scraped her wrist and had to return to her hotel.")

Two remarkable films from Chad and Mexico dealt with issues which arise when a country is a war with itself. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Daratt (Dry Season) is a measured revenge tale about a young man who travels to the city to kill the man who murdered his father in a civil war. Unexpectedly, he finds himself apprenticed at the man's bakery and being made a family member, forcing him to confront issues of forgiveness and redemption. His choice is both surprising and satisfying. After the screening it was brought to my attention how much the film's story was like the Dardenne Brothers' The Son, only in reverse. This was another film commissioned by Peter Sellars for the New Crowned Hope festival.


From the other side of the globe came Francisco Vargas' The Violin, which ended up winning the festival's Skyy Prize for best first narrative feature. Shot in B&W to purposefully render vague the time and place in which the film is set, it explores a conflict between the brutal Mexican army on one side, and village campesinos and rebel guerrillas on the other. Connecting these worlds is quietly-crafty Don Plutarco, an 81-year-old, one-handed violin player who uses his talent and his instrument to manipulate and negotiate his way around the conflict. As portrayed by non-actor Don Angel Tavira, this was one of the most wondrous performances in this year's festival.

Of the four documentaries I saw, my two favorites had several things in common. Both documented life on a Caribbean island, both were made by offspring of famous directors, and both were criticized for being too narrow in their focus. The Sugar Curtain by Camila Guzmán Urzúa (daughter of famed Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán) is a nostalgic and bittersweet look back at the "golden age" of the Cuban revolution, specifically the 1970's and 1980's up until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Guzmán Urzúa grew up in Cuba during that time period, when children were "taught life as a spiritual experience, not a material one," and indeed the life she portrays is idyllic. During the Q&A she was criticized for barely mentioning the horrible treatment of dissidents during this "golden age," or the role of the U.S. trade embargo in hastening the island's economic collapse. Her defense was that these issues were better left for another movie, a stance I can't wholly agree with in light of the film's short 86-minute running time. As expected, there were anti-Castro-ites in the audience who lambasted the film in its entirety, claiming as they always do that there was absolutely, positively, never anything at all good about the revolution. Guzmán Urzúa rightly ignored them.


The other documentary was Ghosts of Cité Soleil by Asger Leth (son of director Jørgen Leth, subject and co-director—with Lars Von Trier—of The Five Obstructions). Cité Soleil is a slum on the outskirts of Port au Prince, Haiti, named by the U.N. as "the most dangerous place on earth." Leth's urgent, beautifully shot film focuses on the lives of two notorious gang leaders over the course of several months in 2004. It's amazing to think how a European director could have obtained this kind of access, but as Leth remarked during the Q&A, "When you're in your early twenties and you think you're going to die, you want to tell your story." Access also comes in the person of Lala, a duplicitous white female French relief worker who becomes romantically involved with one of the gangsters, and acts as a mediator to negotiate a truce with the government. As dynamic as the portraits of these two self-proclaimed "thugsters" were, I found myself getting mighty bored with all their macho bullshit, gun-waving posturing (to the point where I nodded out for a while). A little reflection and perspective would have been welcome in its place. Incidentally, local organization Global Exchange was on hand before and during the screening, passing out flyers decrying the film's alleged demonization of former Haitian president Jean-Betrand Aristide.

So that about wraps up all the good stuff I saw. I'm afraid that the rest of this post is paved with disappointment, starting with the two other documentaries I saw. Kevin Brownlow's Cecil B. DeMille—American Epic wasn't bad, it was just your standard issue TCM documentary, and—had I known that—I would have waited and watched it on TCM. Tahani Rached's much anticipated These Girls, about young women living on the mean streets of Cairo, sorely needed some structure and context.

Probably the saddest and most disappointing film of the festival for me was Otar Iosseliani's Gardens in Autumn. It gets off to a rollicking start, but soon dissolves into an endless series of bland, absurdist musings, and the novelty of seeing Michel Piccoli in drag can only keep things afloat for so long. This disappointment came as quite a surprise after having watched Julie Bertuccelli's delightful Otar Iosseliani, The Whistling Blackbird, a portrait of the director and the making of this film. It's enough to make one wonder if the 73-year-old director's years of masterful filmmaking are now behind him.


Tariq Teguia's Rome Rather Than You from Algeria had the dubious honor of generating more audience walk-outs than Colossal Youth. This indulgent slice of Maghrebian mininalism/miserablism was like a compendium of all the boring parts from every boring art film you've ever seen. You've got your disaffected youth, your existential malaise, your cryptic inter-titles, your endless tracking shots of people walking walking walking or driving driving driving or searching searching searching while a cacophonous score squawks on the soundtrack. A woman stands in front of her stove waiting for the coffee water to boil, and—guess what sucker?—you get to wait right along with her. And stick around, because soon you'll get to watch her mop a floor. I came to this screening excruciatingly fatigued and in need of a nap, but forced myself to stay awake less I miss the one revelatory moment which would illuminate all this other nonsense. Surprise … that moment never came. If nothing else, I greatly admired the director's audacity and would have stuck around for the Q&A had I not needed to seek out a press ticket to The 12 Labors. This Brazilian film by Ricardo Elias was also a disappointment, although in a much more conventional way. Basically a retelling of the Hercules legend, with Hercules as a novice Sao Paolo motorcycle courier out to prove his worth, it's an ambitious idea weighed down by stiff performances, clunky dialogue and a labored premise.

Last and least we come to Ying Liang's The Other Half, a well-intentioned social issue film that had all the aesthetics and artistry of a public access TV show. Ying, who won last year's Skyy Prize for Taking Father Home (which alas, I didn't see), took his $10,000 prize money and vowed to return this year with another film. In the industrial city of Zigong, our sullen heroine Xiaofen gets a job clerking in a law office that takes on beleaguered female clients. For a film that purports in its press kit to be "a contemporary report on the status of women," I was surprised how many of these clients were portrayed in their interviews as petty, opportunistic brats and harpies. Xiaofen is never seen during the interviews, but we know she's there because of her constant off-camera coughing, the director's unsubtle way of telling us that industrial pollution is the film's other grand theme. Xiaofen also has a drunken, deadbeat gambler boyfriend who may also be a murderer, and a mother who's always trying to pawn her off on some soulless businessman twice her age. And on and on and on. Stiffly acted, with atrocious sound and a monotonous, static camera that never, ever moves (and not in an artistic Tsai Ming-liang kind of way), I was truly appalled to find this film in our festival. It's especially irritating considering that there were only two films from China in this year's line-up (not including Hong Kong) and this was one of them. I have to ask the programmers: out of all the films made in China in the past year, was there truly nothing more interesting and accomplished than this? For starters, how about Jia Zheng-ke's Still Life, which won the Gold Lion at Venice last year and is perhaps SFIFF50's most glaring omission? As I mentioned in my first paragraph, this film was enthusiastically received by some at the matinee screening I attended. All I can say is, mileage has never varied more wildly than this.

Cross-published on Twitch.