Found myself back at the black fake fur door for more Friday night fun much sooner than I expected! I allowed my friend Gus to lead the way so that he could experience the place firsthand for himself. There were three times as many people this time! Word must have traveled.
While walking through the stacks back to the "screening room", I noticed the "Reasons" sign high up behind me on the back wall. For over 60 years the 17 Reasons Why! sign graced the top of the Thrift Town building at 17th and Mission; a city landmark. A few years ago it was torn down (many feel, illegally). I had no idea the sign had been preserved and was resting in the Oddball Films Archives. Apparently Jane Martin from Plant SF has the "Why", Oddball Films the "Reasons" on the aforementioned back wall as well as the "17" (leaning up somewhere between the stacks). Maybe I can find that "17" next time. There's something talismanic about this old sign; a talisman the City once wore to protect itself from developers.
Steve Parr gave a sweet intro on the objectives of the Oddball Films nonprofit. Images are licensed out from the archives for documentaries (such as the one on the Weather Underground), etc. He lectures around the country on archival film. His respectful affection for film apparent, Steve claims that if treated properly film will stick around a lot longer than dvds. There's no question films age and deteriorate, of course they do, and they need to be spliced, they get scratchy; but, that only means that many people have repeatedly watched and enjoyed them. Steve is speaking of the character of film, much like one would compliment an elder's laughlines or the patina on silver or gold. Film, by its very nature, can be tempermental and so Steve cautions patience, with film stock itself and with the changing of the reels.
Tonight's "event"—Trance Cinema: The Power of Possession—featured Ma'Bugi: Trance of the Toraja (1973, color) shot in Indonesia; Holy Ghost People (1967, B&W), San Franciscan Peter Adair's verite documentary about Pentecostal snake handlers in rural West Virgina, and a rare, musical short—Buck Dancer (1965)—by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Unfortunately, due to a late start and previous commitments, I was not able to stay for the last reel. But the first two raised my eyebrows!
Per Steve's press notes: "Ma'Bugi: Trance of the Toraja depicts an unusual trance ritual that functions to restore the balance of well-being to an afflicted village community. This film clearly portrays the song, dance and pulsating tension that precede dramatic instances of spirit possession in the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi (Celebes) Island, Indonesia. Ma'Bugi: Trance of the Toraja augments the growing body of documentation of ritually sanctioned altered states of consciousness. This remarkable film communicates both the psychological abandon of the trance state and the often neglected motivation underlying such activities as the supernaturally curing of the chronically ill and the ascent of a ladder of knives. The ceremony is narrated by the Tominaa, priest of the ancestral Toraja religion."
In a day and age when even the Lacandon Maya have dvd players and satellite dishes, it's difficult to configure a world where media's intervention has not yet induced a more passive trance state. In the old days among old ways the rituals of the Toraja required active participation by each individual and by the community in sync. Those touched by the spirit would cut themselves with knives and use their blood to heal the sick and the wounded. They would climb barefoot up ladders constructed from bamboo poles and sharp knives.
In a world reconfigured by AIDS the vitality of blood has been necessarily reined within health protocol. I've long felt this fascinating. As a student of the Maya culture of Central America, I was taught about the chu'lel, the magical and vital quality of human blood. The chu'lel itself was very dangerous and had to be contained within certain rituals. It was invisible. It could not be seen, heard, tasted. In many ways it was as dangerous and as invisible as radioactivity. As modern people it has been difficult for us to understand the power so-called "primitives" granted blood, or at least it was difficult until the AIDS pandemic broke, at which time out of fear we recognized the parameters of our essential vitality.
"Rightly hailed by Margaret Mead as one of the best ethnographic documentary films ever made," Steve's notes continue, "and a staple of every documentary film studies course, Holy Ghost People by the late San Francisco filmmaker Peter Adair (Stopping History, Word is Out) examines the Scrabble Creek, West Virginia Pentecostal congregation whose fundamentalist philosophy encourages a literal interpretation of the Bible. The film reveals the religious fervor, the faith healing, the trances, the glossolalia (speaking in tongues), the anointing, the ingestion of poison (Strychnine) and the use of rattlesnakes in the church's religious services." Gary Morris has a great write-up on this film, included in his Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror) section for Bright Lights Film Journal:
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/45/stabs.htm
To be honest, after watching both films, I wasn't sure which one scared me most: the blood-focused self-afflicted rituals of the Toraja or the crazily-conservative beliefs of the Scrabble Creek parishioners!! Both seemed so literal and misguided.
Morris points out that the lure of these dangerous rituals can be sometimes lethal and concedes that it "would be easy to dismiss these people and their primal ways as cranks and fanatics" but he qualifies that Adair's respectful, nonsensational approach precludes such a facile dismissal.
Saturday, 4 March 2006
Friday, 3 March 2006
CATCHBASIN No. 4—Citizen Dog; Altman Blog-a-thon, El Twitcho
Fellow blogger Brian Darr has posted his own review of Citizen Dog on his site Hell On Frisco Bay, which incidentally is perhaps the most up-to-date compendium of upcoming film activity in the San Francisco Bay Area. I check in there every morning to find out what he knows! Without question it gains immediate link status to The Evening Class. His write-up on Citizen Dog includes an informative link to thaicinema.org as well as Chuck Stephen's 2001 Film Comment write-up on Tears of the Black Tiger:
http://www.hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/
Todd Brown at Twitch has long been one of my main sources of Asian cinema information, especially with regard to buzz. I love the clips that he seems to conjure up out of midair. That he linked in my review of Citizen Dog into a recent post on the commercial films coming out of The Film Factory—Wisit's production company—meant a lot to me, especially since he and Chuck Stephens were the first two to turn me on to Wisit. Recognizing a lack of reportage on things Latin American, Todd and I have negotiated to have me be his Latin American correspondent at the upcoming 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival!! It's a welcome opportunity.
http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/005286.html
I'm also adding Matt Zoller Seitz's site The House Next Door, and not just because it's "a long, strange journey toward a retrospectively inevitable destination", and not just because he is the faithful ringmaster of the amorphous Altman blog-a-thon (in process!!!), and not just because he's promised to send me a screener tape of his new film Home (snail mail has never seemed so cruel). None of those hurt, of course, but the true reason I'm including him is because I like his writing. Imagine!! A year or so back I went into a printing mania and printed out a good ten beacon boxes worth of online film commentary, amongst which were many of Matt's archived reviews for the New York Press. Little did I know I would end up interacting online with this consummate film critic, filmmaker, and blogsmith. How he manages to find the time to do all this is inspiring to someone with a little too much time on his hands:
http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/
http://www.hellonfriscobay.blogspot.com/
Todd Brown at Twitch has long been one of my main sources of Asian cinema information, especially with regard to buzz. I love the clips that he seems to conjure up out of midair. That he linked in my review of Citizen Dog into a recent post on the commercial films coming out of The Film Factory—Wisit's production company—meant a lot to me, especially since he and Chuck Stephens were the first two to turn me on to Wisit. Recognizing a lack of reportage on things Latin American, Todd and I have negotiated to have me be his Latin American correspondent at the upcoming 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival!! It's a welcome opportunity.
http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/005286.html
I'm also adding Matt Zoller Seitz's site The House Next Door, and not just because it's "a long, strange journey toward a retrospectively inevitable destination", and not just because he is the faithful ringmaster of the amorphous Altman blog-a-thon (in process!!!), and not just because he's promised to send me a screener tape of his new film Home (snail mail has never seemed so cruel). None of those hurt, of course, but the true reason I'm including him is because I like his writing. Imagine!! A year or so back I went into a printing mania and printed out a good ten beacon boxes worth of online film commentary, amongst which were many of Matt's archived reviews for the New York Press. Little did I know I would end up interacting online with this consummate film critic, filmmaker, and blogsmith. How he manages to find the time to do all this is inspiring to someone with a little too much time on his hands:
http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/
Thursday, 2 March 2006
2006 SFIAAFF—Water
Bound by the "hold review" policy on films pending distribution, I am limited to a 75-word capsule for Deepa Mehta's Water, the Centerpiece Presentation of 2006 SFIAAFF (where Mehta will be in guest attendance):
Witnessing an anquished widow lose her spectacles inspired Deepa Mehta to complete her elemental trilogy (Fire, Earth) with the visionary, revolutionary and emancipatory Water, which resuscitates this resilient wisdom: water that flows will clean itself. Gandhi's sage discernment that the worship of God as Truth leads to social ills whereas the worship of Truth as God does not is flexed into powerful beauty here. A festival gem not to be missed!!
CATCHBASIN No. 3--Oscar-nominated Animated Shorts
Doug Cummings at FilmJourney his written up his impressions of the Oscar-nominated animated shorts. His write-up includes a clip from Canemaker's The Moon and the Son, the official website for Jasper Morrello (soon to be released on dvd), and Animation World Magazine's interviews with the animators:
http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/discuss/msgReader$3007?mode=topic&y=2006&m=3&d=2
http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=search&sval=badgered&article_no=2800&page=4
That picture of the badger in his warren went straight up onto my computer screen as wallpaper. I can actually hear two crows outside my window!!
http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/discuss/msgReader$3007?mode=topic&y=2006&m=3&d=2
http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=search&sval=badgered&article_no=2800&page=4
That picture of the badger in his warren went straight up onto my computer screen as wallpaper. I can actually hear two crows outside my window!!
2006 SFIAAFF—Memories in the Mist
Memories in the Mist is my first Buddhadeb Dasgupta film, though this feature comes well into his career. The frequent references to his being the heir apparent of Satyajit Ray ring true, particularly his "layered portraits of Bengali society" in Kalkata/Calcutta and the humane non-judgmental treatment of his characters.
This is a story of an estranged father Ashwin (Mithun Chakraborty) and his son Sumanto (Rahul Bose) who meet in the realm of memory and fantasy to resolve their differences. Memories in the Mist makes a strong effort at posing a son's intrapsychic conflict as an imagined interpersonal dialogue with his absent father and might have succeeded more forcefully had it established its conventions clearly early on in the film. Notwithstanding, once the conventions were grasped, the story began to coalesce, swirling into form out of mist.
Similar in theme to the Oscar-nominated animated short The Moon and The Son, Memories In the Mist escapes that short's bitter rancor to achieve what one reviewer has called "a domestic ghost story." Once you realize the father is a ghost, the story takes on a complex depth belied by its leisurely surface. Raymond Carver has written of the energy left behind by the death of a loved one, what he calls "the white shadow", the presence of absence. This film falls within that domain.
A nostalgic leitmotif is established between father and son through the musical intercession of a flute player who plays a tune that both lean into on their insomniatic nights of walking. Is it that Ashwin is haunting Sumanto? Stalking him? Or that Sumanto is summoning him back from the dead, to ask advice about how to live his own life?
A devoted and beloved father to two children who are not really his own, Sumanto is nonetheless seen as a failure by society. His wife Supriya prepares to leave him for another man and a chance at career (Sameera Reddy in the first of three roles) and his boss overlooks him at promotion because Sumanto is upright and seemingly incapable of guile. His co-workers berate him for not playing the game. The Kalkata mob resent him for defending the downtrodden. Deceit and obvious cruelty baffle and agitate Sumanto. Spurned in his social life, Sumanto recedes into the fecund interiority of memory. Having lost the love of his father, he senses nothing is more important than being a father to his children.
Another of the film's conventions that confused at first and then blossomed into intriguing dimension is the casting of Sameera Reddy in three roles: Sumanto's ambitious wife, the dancer in the traveling theater troupe that tempts his father into dalliance, and the reluctant prostitute Samanto approaches for comfort. What is gained by her becoming Everywoman in Sumanto's life is balanced by the unfortunate fact that none of the three women—wife, memory, whore—expand past caricature. By contrast, Sumanto's mother Putul (Laboni Sarkar) is a fleshed-out portrait of a woman who drove her husband away from her, fracturing their family by adhering too sternly to social conceptions of marriage. Her own conversations with Ashwin's white shadow prove pensive and reconciliatory.
I adored a scene where Sumanto visits his sick mother Putul. She tells him that she has been talking to his father. That his father wants to talk to him. That his father is just outside underneath the tree. Sumanto resists the invitation to look and closes the shutters. His mother sadly protests: In your house there are plenty of windows and doors. In mine there is just one window. Why would you want to close it?
Sumanto's lack of guile adds a levity to his downtrodden portrayal. He seems genuinely surprised when, during a chance encounter in a rainstorm, he meets a newscaster who he watches on television inform him that he is fed copy and never really travels to the places he talks about or witnesses the events he reports upon. When Supriya becomes a sought-after author for travelogues to places she has only seen in videotapes, Sumanto is equally amazed.
Memories in the Mist will be screened at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival on Saturday, March 18, 4:30 at the Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, and on Tuesday, March 21, 7:30 at the Kabuki, San Francisco. Here's the festival link:
http://www.asianamericanfilmfestival.org/films/film_detail.php?i=79
Cameron Bailey reviews the film at its 2005 Toronto International Film Festival screening:
http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2005/films_description.asp?id=168
Archana Tamboskar reviews for the 2005 Woodstock Film Festival:
http://www.woodstockfilmfestival.com/festival2005/details.php?id=14680
Derek Elley reviews for Variety:
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=features2006&content=jump&jump=review&head=berlin&nav=RBerlin&articleid=VE1117929640&cs=1
Debasree Bhattacharjee's thorough and sensitive synopsis of Memories in the Mist adds local detail that heightens appreciation of the film:
http://www.desijournal.com/movie.asp?articleid=17
This is a story of an estranged father Ashwin (Mithun Chakraborty) and his son Sumanto (Rahul Bose) who meet in the realm of memory and fantasy to resolve their differences. Memories in the Mist makes a strong effort at posing a son's intrapsychic conflict as an imagined interpersonal dialogue with his absent father and might have succeeded more forcefully had it established its conventions clearly early on in the film. Notwithstanding, once the conventions were grasped, the story began to coalesce, swirling into form out of mist.
Similar in theme to the Oscar-nominated animated short The Moon and The Son, Memories In the Mist escapes that short's bitter rancor to achieve what one reviewer has called "a domestic ghost story." Once you realize the father is a ghost, the story takes on a complex depth belied by its leisurely surface. Raymond Carver has written of the energy left behind by the death of a loved one, what he calls "the white shadow", the presence of absence. This film falls within that domain.
A nostalgic leitmotif is established between father and son through the musical intercession of a flute player who plays a tune that both lean into on their insomniatic nights of walking. Is it that Ashwin is haunting Sumanto? Stalking him? Or that Sumanto is summoning him back from the dead, to ask advice about how to live his own life?
A devoted and beloved father to two children who are not really his own, Sumanto is nonetheless seen as a failure by society. His wife Supriya prepares to leave him for another man and a chance at career (Sameera Reddy in the first of three roles) and his boss overlooks him at promotion because Sumanto is upright and seemingly incapable of guile. His co-workers berate him for not playing the game. The Kalkata mob resent him for defending the downtrodden. Deceit and obvious cruelty baffle and agitate Sumanto. Spurned in his social life, Sumanto recedes into the fecund interiority of memory. Having lost the love of his father, he senses nothing is more important than being a father to his children.
Another of the film's conventions that confused at first and then blossomed into intriguing dimension is the casting of Sameera Reddy in three roles: Sumanto's ambitious wife, the dancer in the traveling theater troupe that tempts his father into dalliance, and the reluctant prostitute Samanto approaches for comfort. What is gained by her becoming Everywoman in Sumanto's life is balanced by the unfortunate fact that none of the three women—wife, memory, whore—expand past caricature. By contrast, Sumanto's mother Putul (Laboni Sarkar) is a fleshed-out portrait of a woman who drove her husband away from her, fracturing their family by adhering too sternly to social conceptions of marriage. Her own conversations with Ashwin's white shadow prove pensive and reconciliatory.
I adored a scene where Sumanto visits his sick mother Putul. She tells him that she has been talking to his father. That his father wants to talk to him. That his father is just outside underneath the tree. Sumanto resists the invitation to look and closes the shutters. His mother sadly protests: In your house there are plenty of windows and doors. In mine there is just one window. Why would you want to close it?
Sumanto's lack of guile adds a levity to his downtrodden portrayal. He seems genuinely surprised when, during a chance encounter in a rainstorm, he meets a newscaster who he watches on television inform him that he is fed copy and never really travels to the places he talks about or witnesses the events he reports upon. When Supriya becomes a sought-after author for travelogues to places she has only seen in videotapes, Sumanto is equally amazed.
Memories in the Mist will be screened at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival on Saturday, March 18, 4:30 at the Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, and on Tuesday, March 21, 7:30 at the Kabuki, San Francisco. Here's the festival link:
http://www.asianamericanfilmfestival.org/films/film_detail.php?i=79
Cameron Bailey reviews the film at its 2005 Toronto International Film Festival screening:
http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2005/films_description.asp?id=168
Archana Tamboskar reviews for the 2005 Woodstock Film Festival:
http://www.woodstockfilmfestival.com/festival2005/details.php?id=14680
Derek Elley reviews for Variety:
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=features2006&content=jump&jump=review&head=berlin&nav=RBerlin&articleid=VE1117929640&cs=1
Debasree Bhattacharjee's thorough and sensitive synopsis of Memories in the Mist adds local detail that heightens appreciation of the film:
http://www.desijournal.com/movie.asp?articleid=17
ANIMATION: Jonathan Marlow's Cabinet of Curiosities
Like some kind of magnanimous idiot, Jonathan Marlow coughed up four grand to digitally convert some films he had in his basement onto disc so he could share them with his audience at this evening's Greencine-sponsored "Cabinet of Curiosities" program at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. We'll never be able to pay Jonathan back for such a generous evening of splendid fun with animated pieces that—unlike the Academy Award nominated program—truly thrilled me!! I consider Marlow something of a mentor when it comes to film commentary and wish he would give a class in interview technique, but, for now I was appreciative of his wisecrack adlibs and his professional treatment of the material, providing not only the films themselves but a handout so we could walk away knowing what we saw. I felt very much like Yuri Norstein's hedgehog in the fog, my little eyes wide-eyed and blinking at the shifting fantasies in front of me.
He warmed us up with George Méliès' 1905 The Scheming Gambler's Paradise. "While Méliès is generally known for his in-camera trickery," Marlow informs us, "he was also a master of deception. One thing quickly becomes another with only simple changes in set design. As one-joke films go, one could do worse. Much worse."
Marlow warned us that the second piece of 1933 Russian animation—The Mascot by Ladislas Starewicz—was long (26 minutes) as far as shorts go and that most programers wouldn't dream of situating it second for fear of putting off the audience. Contrarian commentarian that he is, that's exactly why Jonathan placed it there. "If you can get through this," he said, "the rest is easy." Not that The Mascot was in any way difficult to endure. It was endearing. A mother makes toys to make ends meet while nursing her sick daughter who longs for an orange. It saddens the mother that she doesn't have enough money to buy an orange and so she cries as she stitches together a stuffed dog. Her tears gather on the mascot's chest, pool into heart shape, and then soak into the toy, giving it life. Through a series of fantastic adventures among a truly interesting ensemble of characters, including the devil himself, the mascot secures and defends an orange to return to his mistress. This piece had the heart that One Man Band lacked; but, "[t]hankfully," as Jonathan quipped, it also had a "handful of moments . . . certain to offend and disturb." Don't want to say "awwww" too long, eh?
Peter Greenway's six-minute Intervals was one of his earliest efforts, "back when he showed such promise" (Jonathan has a gift for parenthetical irony). Filmed in Venice it proved intriguing with its static frontal shots of storefronts and walls, edited and replicated to achieve rhythm and tension. It reminded me of Italo Calvino's assertion that storefronts provide "the most open, communicative discourse a city uses to express itself: we all read a city, a street, a stretch of pavement, by following the row of shops." (Calvino, Hermit in Paris, 2003:172.) Jonathan announced this piece along with other shorts will be forthcoming on dvd from Zeitgeist Films come April.
Some years back when Jan Svankmajer was paid tribute at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I fell deeply in love with Svankmajer's bizarre vision and inventive animations. Jonathan shared The Flat, a 1968 13-minute piece that "perfectly evokes one's unpleasant relationship with their surroundings. Why are we here? To be tormented and confused." The protagonist has to put up with quite a lot—doors that open up into walls, slotted spoons for soup, rocks coming out of faucets and beds decomposing into sawdust. Jonathan informed us that Zdeněk Liška (The Shop on Main Street) scored this short.
Břetislav Pojar and Jirí Trnka's A Drop Too Much (1954) was a public service announcement about drinking and driving. Tell Laura I love her.
One of the true highlights of the program was a 2-minute 1968 "scopitone" of Brigette Bardot singing "Contact", giving Grace Jones a run for her money, I'll tell you what! Between this and catching Marilyn Monroe in a Union Oil ad the other night I feel like I'm getting my sexpot fix for the week!!
Alain Resnais' 1957 Le chant du styrene is, as Jonathan attests, "one of the loveliest educational films ever made." Industrial chic. Plastic-making factories never looked so compellingly austere and beautiful.
And finally, my favorite, was Yuri Norstein's 1975 Hedgehog in the Fog. I've never heard of this animator before and must find more. Delightful. Sweet. Magical. Based on a Russian fairytale. Give me a hedgehog over a cat any day of the week.
Jonathan promises to curate a second program later this year. I for one want to applaud his individual investment and devotion to pleasing and educating the rest of us. Kudos, Jonathan!
He warmed us up with George Méliès' 1905 The Scheming Gambler's Paradise. "While Méliès is generally known for his in-camera trickery," Marlow informs us, "he was also a master of deception. One thing quickly becomes another with only simple changes in set design. As one-joke films go, one could do worse. Much worse."
Marlow warned us that the second piece of 1933 Russian animation—The Mascot by Ladislas Starewicz—was long (26 minutes) as far as shorts go and that most programers wouldn't dream of situating it second for fear of putting off the audience. Contrarian commentarian that he is, that's exactly why Jonathan placed it there. "If you can get through this," he said, "the rest is easy." Not that The Mascot was in any way difficult to endure. It was endearing. A mother makes toys to make ends meet while nursing her sick daughter who longs for an orange. It saddens the mother that she doesn't have enough money to buy an orange and so she cries as she stitches together a stuffed dog. Her tears gather on the mascot's chest, pool into heart shape, and then soak into the toy, giving it life. Through a series of fantastic adventures among a truly interesting ensemble of characters, including the devil himself, the mascot secures and defends an orange to return to his mistress. This piece had the heart that One Man Band lacked; but, "[t]hankfully," as Jonathan quipped, it also had a "handful of moments . . . certain to offend and disturb." Don't want to say "awwww" too long, eh?
Peter Greenway's six-minute Intervals was one of his earliest efforts, "back when he showed such promise" (Jonathan has a gift for parenthetical irony). Filmed in Venice it proved intriguing with its static frontal shots of storefronts and walls, edited and replicated to achieve rhythm and tension. It reminded me of Italo Calvino's assertion that storefronts provide "the most open, communicative discourse a city uses to express itself: we all read a city, a street, a stretch of pavement, by following the row of shops." (Calvino, Hermit in Paris, 2003:172.) Jonathan announced this piece along with other shorts will be forthcoming on dvd from Zeitgeist Films come April.
Some years back when Jan Svankmajer was paid tribute at the San Francisco International Film Festival, I fell deeply in love with Svankmajer's bizarre vision and inventive animations. Jonathan shared The Flat, a 1968 13-minute piece that "perfectly evokes one's unpleasant relationship with their surroundings. Why are we here? To be tormented and confused." The protagonist has to put up with quite a lot—doors that open up into walls, slotted spoons for soup, rocks coming out of faucets and beds decomposing into sawdust. Jonathan informed us that Zdeněk Liška (The Shop on Main Street) scored this short.
Břetislav Pojar and Jirí Trnka's A Drop Too Much (1954) was a public service announcement about drinking and driving. Tell Laura I love her.
One of the true highlights of the program was a 2-minute 1968 "scopitone" of Brigette Bardot singing "Contact", giving Grace Jones a run for her money, I'll tell you what! Between this and catching Marilyn Monroe in a Union Oil ad the other night I feel like I'm getting my sexpot fix for the week!!
Alain Resnais' 1957 Le chant du styrene is, as Jonathan attests, "one of the loveliest educational films ever made." Industrial chic. Plastic-making factories never looked so compellingly austere and beautiful.
And finally, my favorite, was Yuri Norstein's 1975 Hedgehog in the Fog. I've never heard of this animator before and must find more. Delightful. Sweet. Magical. Based on a Russian fairytale. Give me a hedgehog over a cat any day of the week.
Jonathan promises to curate a second program later this year. I for one want to applaud his individual investment and devotion to pleasing and educating the rest of us. Kudos, Jonathan!
Wednesday, 1 March 2006
ANIMATION: 2006 Academy Award Animated Shorts
Caught the program of Oscar-nominated animated shorts presented at the Lumiere Theater.
The program started out with One Man Band (4 mins, USA) directed by Andrew Jimenez and Mark Andrews. As Landmark synopsizes: "With one coin to make a wish at the piazza fountain, a peasant girl encounters two street performers who'd prefer the coin find its way into their tip jars." There is no question this is flawlessly animated and comically paced but its final portrait of a rather cynical child undermined its pathos and left me not caring much about any of the characters. My favorite thing about this piece was the shiny aquamarine fabric of the violinist's vest. Otherwise, nothing much new that I haven't already seen and, as already mentioned, a final lack of heart.
The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation (28 mins, USA) directed by John Canemaker "[e]xplores the difficult emotional terrain of father/son relationships as seen through the filmmaker's own turbulent relationship with his father." The creativity of this piece was a bitter pill to digest. I imagine this has the best chance of winning the Oscar but its anger and rancor made me uncomfortable even as it attests that creativity might be the only recapitulation left to resolve old wounds.
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (27 mins, Australia) directed by Anthony Lucas was visually arresting, reminiscent of Balinese shadow puppets with a Victorian twist but it could have been half its length for twice its effect. The characters dying of disease and the "monster" were eerie.
Badgered (7 mins, UK), a National Film and Television School Production directed by Sharon Colman was my personal favorite. Simply because it was funny enough with just a touch of anti-nuclear polemic to make it relevant. It's the tale of a grumpy badger who just wants the world to let him sleep, but with a pair of cawing crows and nuclear development, how can he?
9 (11 mins, USA) directed (and everything else) by Shane Acker, who can't get enough of himself in the credits. "In the shadow of urban desolation," Landmark writes, "a rag doll must face a monster that is hunting his brethren and stealing their souls." Though interesting to look at, I felt like I was watching Jurassic Park. The best part was the eyes of the rag dolls and their wheel-like graveyard.
To round out the program Bill Plympton's The Fan and the Flower was included. It didn't look much like his normal morphwork, which is good I guess, though it looks like he took a step backward instead of moving on. It also reminds me very much of the logo clip for San Francisco's Doc Film Institute, only there it's a camera in love with a butterfly, yanking himself off a tripod and eventually flying away.
All in all, though I'm glad I saw them, I wasn't thrilled as I often am with animation and didn't feel inclined to stick around for the live action shorts.
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Films/films_frameset.asp?id=52880
Via Dave Hudson and the Greencine Daily I stumbled upon Neil Genzlinger's review of the Oscar-nominated shorts programs (both animated and live action) for the N.Y. Times. He, mentions The Moon and the Son favorably and describes One Man Band as "adorable but appetizer-length."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/movies/24shor.html
The program started out with One Man Band (4 mins, USA) directed by Andrew Jimenez and Mark Andrews. As Landmark synopsizes: "With one coin to make a wish at the piazza fountain, a peasant girl encounters two street performers who'd prefer the coin find its way into their tip jars." There is no question this is flawlessly animated and comically paced but its final portrait of a rather cynical child undermined its pathos and left me not caring much about any of the characters. My favorite thing about this piece was the shiny aquamarine fabric of the violinist's vest. Otherwise, nothing much new that I haven't already seen and, as already mentioned, a final lack of heart.
The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation (28 mins, USA) directed by John Canemaker "[e]xplores the difficult emotional terrain of father/son relationships as seen through the filmmaker's own turbulent relationship with his father." The creativity of this piece was a bitter pill to digest. I imagine this has the best chance of winning the Oscar but its anger and rancor made me uncomfortable even as it attests that creativity might be the only recapitulation left to resolve old wounds.
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (27 mins, Australia) directed by Anthony Lucas was visually arresting, reminiscent of Balinese shadow puppets with a Victorian twist but it could have been half its length for twice its effect. The characters dying of disease and the "monster" were eerie.
Badgered (7 mins, UK), a National Film and Television School Production directed by Sharon Colman was my personal favorite. Simply because it was funny enough with just a touch of anti-nuclear polemic to make it relevant. It's the tale of a grumpy badger who just wants the world to let him sleep, but with a pair of cawing crows and nuclear development, how can he?
9 (11 mins, USA) directed (and everything else) by Shane Acker, who can't get enough of himself in the credits. "In the shadow of urban desolation," Landmark writes, "a rag doll must face a monster that is hunting his brethren and stealing their souls." Though interesting to look at, I felt like I was watching Jurassic Park. The best part was the eyes of the rag dolls and their wheel-like graveyard.
To round out the program Bill Plympton's The Fan and the Flower was included. It didn't look much like his normal morphwork, which is good I guess, though it looks like he took a step backward instead of moving on. It also reminds me very much of the logo clip for San Francisco's Doc Film Institute, only there it's a camera in love with a butterfly, yanking himself off a tripod and eventually flying away.
All in all, though I'm glad I saw them, I wasn't thrilled as I often am with animation and didn't feel inclined to stick around for the live action shorts.
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Films/films_frameset.asp?id=52880
Via Dave Hudson and the Greencine Daily I stumbled upon Neil Genzlinger's review of the Oscar-nominated shorts programs (both animated and live action) for the N.Y. Times. He, mentions The Moon and the Son favorably and describes One Man Band as "adorable but appetizer-length."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/24/movies/24shor.html
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