Imagining the Real—Paul Rusesabagina: An Ordinary Man

This April marks the 12th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide when almost one million people were killed in Rwanda. Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved the lives of over 1,200 fellow Rwandan people during the horrific events of 1994, and whose story was recently portrayed by Don Cheadle in the film Hotel Rwanda, is on tour with his new book, An Ordinary Man. He'll be making a few Bay Area appearances. Via Stacey's Bookstore and the World Affairs Council, Rusesabagina will discuss the events depicted in the movie, the international response to Rwanda, and his role in this chaotic time on Friday, April 21, noon, at the Marine's Memorial Theater. For reservations and information, call (415) 293-4600. If you're not a member of the World Affairs Council, you will have a second chance to catch Rusesabagina at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books at 7:00 that evening.

2006 SFIFF—LATIN AMERICAN & SPANISH LINE-UP!

Graham Leggat, Executive Director for San Francisco's 49th International Film Festival, and his programming team came under fire at the press conference late last month when the festival's program lineup was announced. Critics claimed female directors and African films were underrepresented. I had to agree; but, couldn't complain about the festival's Latin American and Spanish line-up, which boasts eleven entries this year, three of whom are vying for the 10th annual SKYY Prize of $10,000 (honoring emerging talent in feature debuts)!! Latin American/Spanish films remain my fave rave!

"Urban landscapes are explored in Alicia Scherson's lively Play (Chile) and in Roberto Gervitz's Underground Game (Brazil). In Play, a SKYY Prize contender punctuated by a powerful soundtrack, a woman from the country and an upscale urbanite cross paths as each looks for love in Santiago. In Underground Game, Roberto Gervitz turns the subways of Sao Paulo into a playground for finding love as a piano player spends his days constructing a specific route on the subway, hoping to find a woman who follows the same route. [Both directors Scherson and Gervitz are expected to attend the festival, as well as Underground Game's composer, Luiz Henrique Xavier.]

"Two South American expatriate directors residing in France (Raoul Ruiz, born in Chile and Juan Solanas, born in Argentina) weave tales that involve crossing the Atlantic. The Lost Domain (Ruiz, France) tells the story of various meetings between a French aviator and a young Chilean, whose lives intersect despite their opposing natures through a shared love of flying. In the SKYY Prize contender Northeast (Solanas, Argentina), a French woman's attempts to adopt a child in Buenos Aires go awry, so she travels to the northeastern region of Argentina and meets a pregnant woman who may be able to solve her problem. [The Lost Domain and Northeast are both West Coast premieres and Northeast's director Juan Solanas will be attending the festival.]

"Three sultry Latin American films explore passion and relationships. In Delicate Crime (Beto Brant, Brazil) a theater critic falls for a one-legged beauty who is also involved with the painter for whom she models. The critic's jealousy and intense feelings lead to an encounter which the woman claims is rape and the man says is an act of passion. [Delicate Crime is a U.S. premiere.] In Bed (Matías Bize, Chile) shows two young Chileans who spend the night together in a hotel room, as they contemplate life, love and sex. [In Bed is a West Coast premiere and director Bize will be in attendance.] And Sérgio Machado tells a story of two best friends who fall for the same beautiful young hooker in Lower City (Brazil). [Machado will be attending the festival, as well as his leading actress Alicia Braga.]

"Characters struggle and hope for better lives in three Latin American films. In the beautifully shot The House of Sand (Andrucha Waddington, Brazil), three generations of women struggle amid the inhospitable sand dunes of northern Brazil. [The House of Sand is a West Coast premiere and director Waddington will be attending the festival.] Ricardo Benet's News from Afar (Mexico), a moving and surreal SKYY Prize contender, is about a teenager living in the Mexican highlands who decides to seek a better life (and his biological father) in Mexico City. [Director Benet will be in attendance. The film is being co-sponsored by The Mexican Museum.] And in the passionate documentary The Dignity of the Nobodies (Argentina), director Fernando E. Solanas investigates Argentina's economic collapse and follows the efforts of various citizens to fight back and create a habitable living situation for themselves and their country people. [The Dignity of the Nobodies is a U.S. premiere and Solanas will be in attendance.]

"Rounding out SFIFF's selection of Latin American films is Viva Cuba (Juan Carlos Cremata, Cuba), a delightful film featured in the Spotlight: Family Films section of the program. In the film, two best friends (a young boy and girl) are faced with separation when it is revealed that the girl's mother is seeking to leave Cuba. When they find out, they run away in search of her father so they can persuade him not to sign the documents that would permit emigration."

Along with the festival's specific Latino showcase, there will also be the West Coast premiere of Sólo Dios Sabe (Carlos Bolado, Mexico/Brazil), co-sponsored by The Mexican Museum. "Road movie, passionate romance and spiritual quest—a lost passport sparks a voyage of discovery for a Brazilian student and a Mexican journalist. Their journey takes them on an exploration of mystical religion and destiny and a final leap of faith." Bolado will be attending the festival and—as mentioned before for Lower City—actress Alicia Braga will also be here. Must be sweet to be the actress of two Latin American films in the festival!

Spain's official Oscar candidate Obaba (Montxo Armendáriz, Spain/Germany), set in a mythical region in the Basque country, creates a beautifully enigmatic world, which fascinates and puzzles a young teacher who has arrived there with her video camera on a class assignment. Armendáriz will be attending the festival.

Master director Carlos Saura doesn't just make dance films, he makes films dance! In Iberia (Spain/France)—his intensely beautiful tribute to composer Isaac Albéniz—Saura tours southern Spain through music and performance, including ballet, flamenco and contemporary styles.

The Grönholm Method (Marcelo Piñeyro, Spain/Argentina) is about a large multinational corporation in Madrid where seven job applicants are thrown together in a room in a suspenseful dog-eat-dog competition, Survivor style, for a high position in the company. Director Piñeyro will be attending this West Coast premiere.

And finally, the documentary Favela Rising (Jeff Zimbalist / Matt Mochary, Brazil/U.S.A.) takes the filmgoer into one of the toughest barrios in Brazil where a drug trafficker turned social revolutionary musician leads his community into an art-inspired war against the drug trafficking army holding them captive. An inspiring story of redemption and survival within a battleground of drugs and violence. To be screened with the short, Phoenix Dance. Documentarian Zimbalist will be in attendance.

So there you have it! Only Lower City and The House of Sand have hold reviews so you can anticipate The Evening Class reviews on all of the others and as many interviews as my broken Spanish can muster!!

TAIWANESE CINEMA—Kôhî jikô (Café Lumière)

It was Doug Cummings' 2004 Toronto International Film Festival review of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Kôhî jikô (Café Lumière) that first brought my attention to this film. I added it to my wish list. Then while in Paris last September I had my first opportunity to view Café Lumière, albeit in Taiwanese with French subtitles. I'm proficient in neither language but elected to experiment with immersing myself in the film's visual imagery. It was an interesting way to watch a movie and not a completely worthless experiment; I lost a lot even as I watched a lot. I focused on composition, camera work, lighting, while my traveling companion Michael Hawley—who has much more of a command of French than I do—every now and then would whisper some key plot detail into my ear, just to keep me tangentially moored. So I was especially glad to have a second chance to view Café Lumière (with English subtitles!) at the 2006 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Unfortunately, however, I had a fever and bad cough by this stage of the festival and halfway through the film had to leave to go home and rest; I was just too sick. As much as I wanted to, I didn't feel I could write it up.

If Michael Hawley has been responsible for awakening my love for world cinema and festival fare, Frako Loden—in her write-ups for the SF Weekly, postings on The WELL, and preview capsules for various Bay Area festival programs—has, without question, furthered and deepened my appreciation of Asian and Asian American film. Thus, it is with particular delight that I offer Frako's recent "rough notes" on Café Lumière to counter my own lack of commentary on this lovely, measured film. What I appreciate about Frako's review is its keen perception of Tokyo's spatiality.

* * *

I just loved Hou Hsiao-hsien's Café Lumière (2003), or (the Japanese or Taiwanese title) Coffee Jikou. I don't know what jikou means—it's a compound I've never seen. Maybe it's Mandarin? It's the ji of toki (time) and the kou of hikari (light).

The story is simple. Yoko (Yo Hitoto), a young woman writer, has come back from one of her many trips to Taiwan, where she has a boyfriend and where she's been doing research about a (real) Taiwanese composer, Jiang Wenye, who lived in Japan most of his life. She lives near Kishibojin-mae station, which is on the Arakawa line. Her friend Hajime (Asano Tadanobu) runs a used book store in Ochanomizu and is a recorder of train sounds. Maybe in that same area they hang out at a cafe called Erika. When she returns from her Taiwan trip, she visits her parents near Yoshii station and they visit her grandparents' graves in Takasaki. Most of the time she travels on the Yamanote line trying to figure out Jiang's haunts while he was alive, like a cafe in Ginza 2-chome that is no longer there (it's Paper House now). She also visits Jiang's widow.

Meanwhile she's pregnant and tells Hajime and her parents. The father is her Taiwanese boyfriend, but she doesn't plan to marry him because he and his mother are too close. His family runs an umbrella factory in Thailand, and he wants Yoko to live with him there. She seems content to give birth and raise the child by herself. Her parents are very concerned, but not much discussion gets accomplished. Her mother urges her father to talk to Yoko, but he pretty much sits and says nothing although you can tell he wants to say something. Instead he offers her chunks of potato from his bowl of nikujaga, which she loves and has her mother bring on a visit.

The film's connections with [Yasujiro] Ozu: Both this and Ozu's films were made at Shochiku Studio. There's a title at the beginning honoring the centenary of his birth (1903). The opening scene is of a person being greeted on a return from a trip (while Tokyo Story's first scene is of a person being greeted just before he leaves on a trip to Tokyo). The film slows down for long shots of passing trains, like so many of Ozu's films do. The film has many scenes of families coming together and having meals or cleaning graves, making casual conversation. There's tension between a father and daughter who obviously have unspoken affection for each other. The camera is still and at the so-called "tatami level" in many scenes. Yoko's parents visit her in Tokyo. She doesn't pack them off to a hot springs resort like the offspring do in Tokyo Story, but there is a divide. For example, she seems more moved by Jiang and his wife's lives than that of her parents.

One of the train lines often featured in the film is the Arakawa line, Tokyo's only surviving above-ground streetcar network. Unlike the subways, the Arakawa line trains are slow, weave through untouristy neighborhoods not destroyed in the 1945 firebombing, and allow riders to view the landscape. It's considered the train line from another era.

Yoko lives on the Arakawa line at Kishibojin-mae station, which is located in front of Kishibojin (or Kishimojin), a Nichiren Buddhist temple housing the goddess who protects mothers and children (formerly the monstrous Indian demon Hariti, a child-kidnapper and devourer who was converted by Buddha. "Now she represents the Buddha's appeal to compassion, and his devotion to the welfare of the weak. Kishimojin is portrayed as a mother suckling her baby and holding a pomegranate in her hand (the symbol of love and feminine fertility)."

It's the temple that Yoko's mother drops by when they first arrive at Yoko's house, making Yoko and her father wait. It's her way of expressing concern for Yoko's unborn child without talking about it. It might also be a habit for her own sake, presumably having no children of her own since Yoko is a stepdaughter. I remember an enormous 600-year-old gingko tree at the temple that is also thought to confer fertility. Just the proximity of Kishibojin to Yoko's home seems to ensure the safe birth of her baby.

[Slant explains that Café Lumière's title is] "a reference to the Lumière Brothers' seminal short film of a train entering a station." Of course the kou of Jikou is translated into lumière in French. Actually Nick Schager's [Slant] review is worth quoting: "As is his hallmark, the director's formal rigorousness takes the form of measured, protracted takes in which the camera detachedly lingers on its protagonists (or, at times, on mundane, uninhabited scenery), and both the general absence of a score and Mark Lee Ping-bin's delicate, naturalistic cinematography—a far cry from his color-saturated work on Hou's Millennium Mambo—create a mood of enveloping serenity."

Yoko and Hajime are a species of Tokyoite depicted in movies who are not alienated by their urban environment. They are like the Angelenos that Phyllis Dietrichson envies so much in Double Indemnity: "It sounds wonderful. Just strangers beside you. You don't know them and you don't hate them." But of those she does know, Yoko has created a comforting environment of supporters. Hajime finds books for her, the master at Cafe Erika serves her hot milk and helps orient her toward the Jiang landmarks in Tokyo that have disappeared. When she rides the trains, she either stands near the front behind the driver's shoulder, watching him and the windscreen, or falling gently asleep. When she feels sick, she slumps against the wall of the platform and tells Hajime she'll be late. Nobody threatens her or looks at her weird. She doesn't shut out her environment with headphones or text messaging.

While watching Café Lumière I kept forgetting that it was directed by someone who doesn't make Tokyo his home. The film is so deeply familiar with its setting and mood somehow. Maybe he shows trains more than somebody who lives there, though. His shots of trains snaking across the landscape hint at an outsider's fascination. But more than any other non-Japanese director, Hou shows how Tokyo is a collection of tiny villages that Tokyoites create for themselves. The Yamanote circle line surrounds the center of Tokyo, the Imperial Palace (the sun), and from the stations on that circle radiate the rays to the outlying parts. So it takes you where you need to go, but it provides a reassuring and teeming "womb" composed of tiny villages, the form Tokyo took centuries ago.

* * *

My thanks to Frako for picking up my slack!! Along with her insightful impressions of Café Lumière, I would further recommend Girish Shambu's comments from the Toronto International Film Festival: "The experience of watching a Hou film does a funny thing to your mind and body. It slows your rhythms right down, and chills you out—not in a narcotic or somnolent fashion, but in a way that sharpens your attention, pulling you deep into the depths of the movie screen."

Also Filmbrain's commentary from the New York Film Festival: "The composition of the family scenes, shot at tatami-level from an almost voyeuristic point outside of the room (door frames often take up a portion of the screen), can be found in nearly all of Ozu's films. There's also a tremendous attention to detail, including several items that appear multiple times and in multiple places throughout the film—clocks, umbrellas, fans, and even milk."

Rouge has published an excerpt from Shigehiko Hasumi's keynote lecture for the Hou Hsiao-hsien conference held last April 2005. Hasumi's excerpt studies the role of trains in the director's oeuvre. "How does Café Lumière depict the railway networks that criss-cross Japan's capital city? The Tokyo of this film, Hou's first foreign work, includes none of the bustle of government and business in the downtown areas, none of the city's skyscrapers, and none of the neon signs of the entertainment districts. Hou's view of the city is characterised, rather, by the fact that his camera ignores completely the expressways that have been the image of cities of the future ever since Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972)." Incidentally, Hasumi is cameoed in Café Lumière as the café waiter delivering coffee to Hajime's bookshop.

In his write-up for Bright Lights Film Journal, Ian Johnston shies away from drawing too many resemblances between Hou and Ozu, and focuses instead—and rather interestingly at that—on their differences and distances. "In the end," Johnston writes, "the differences between Hou's and Ozu's film worlds are as great as their similarities."

04/05/06 Addendum: Meanwhile, Acquarello at Strictly Film School is not as impressed with Café Lumière, opining that "Hou resorts to familiar devices of expounding minimal narrative through telephone conversations, overdistilled ellipses (to the point of incoherence), and distended temps morts." Further, Acquarello comments: "[T]he theory about Ozu shooting his films at tatami level (popularized by Donald Richie) has been disproven by [David] Bordwell and critics like Tadao Sato. The camera height is actually around 18-24" inches, and unless these are small kids, the eye level from a tatami mat would not be that low."

04/10/06 Addendum: Steve at globality.org provides a wry rant against the audience that attended his screening of Café Lumière: "[I]f you're obviously drunk and looking for a good time, how do you end up at a movie prominently advertised in the SFIAAFF program as a tribute to I-wouldn't-dare-move-the-camera Yasuhiro Ozu by five-minute-shot-meister Hou Hsiao-Hsien? '...elegant, stark calligraphy of images'? '...often letting silences fill in the lines'? What part of that says, 'nice capper to a wild evening on the town'?"

Steve also provides an appreciative review of the film. "[B]efore watching this film," Steve cautions, "it's important to give up all expectations of a plot. If you take it on its own terms, watching it can be a soft and comforting experience." He furthers: "The earlier you give in and just abide with these people, the more you'll enjoy Café Lumière." He concludes: "[T]his is a film about birth, and it quivers with quiet, yet growing, energy."

2006 SFIFF—La Vita Che Vorrei (The Life I Want)

By comparison to Perhaps Love, the film-within-a-film love story in Giuseppe Piccioni's La Vita Che Vorrei (The Life I Want) seems downright old-fashioned, yet all the more engaging for it. Even the love theme from Laura is layered into it, lending the film an old romance movie feel as it gestures to the film's female protagonist, aspiring actress Laura, played by Sandra Ceccarelli. La Vita Che Vorrei (The Life I Want) is a tasteful setting for Ceccarelli's jewel of a performance. Talk about a camera loving an actor's face!! She strikes me as the Italian counterpart to Liv Tyler (via her self-amused smile) and Allison Janney (via her mature sensuality).

As for her male co-star, I'm beginning to wonder if I shall ever see an Italian film without Luigi Lo Cascio? I just saw him in La Bestia Nel Cuore (Don't Tell) and—previously, of course—in The Best of Youth. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you. I enjoy Luigi. He does a fine turn in La Vita Che Vorrei (The Life I Want) as Stefano, a successful actor concerned his career is about to fail even as he falls in love—despite himself—with an actress on her way up.

The two are cast in a period drama whose plot and characters neatly align with those in their "real" lives. Unlike Perhaps Love, however, subtlety is not eschewed in La Vita Che Vorrei (The Life I Want) and, thus, I felt something for these two souls and the complex emotions summoned through and drawn into their performances.

Cathleen Rountree has already made the specific comparisons to Truffaut's Day for Night and Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman, noting as well the film's melodramatic allegiance to Camille and La Traviata.

As an aside, Cathleen introduced herself to me before one of the press screenings with a query about my digital recorder, which she'd spotted me using at the press conference earlier in the week. We started sharing enthusiasm and I discovered that Cathleen is working on a book—The Movie Lovers' Club—exploring the social possibilities of cinema experience. I hope to review her book and interview her in the near future for The Evening Class.

2006 SFIFF—Perhaps Love

Whether through intention or coincidence, the two press screenings this last Thursday—Peter Ho-Sun Chan's Perhaps Love and Giuseppe Piccioni's La Vita Che Vorrei (The Life I Want)—were both love stories structured as films within a film. As meditations on a theme, they enhanced each other, though they were styles apart.

Perhaps Love is the first Hong Kong feature to open the San Francisco International Film Festival. For that alone, the programmers deserve a nod. Director Chan will be present to accept accolades and there's no doubt this visual dazzler will launch the buzz right into the opening night gala at the Regency Center. But I'm conflicted about Perhaps Love. I loved the look of it but really didn't like the film much at all. I side very much with Twitch on this one: "Perhaps Love is one of those rare films so visually impressive that you [could] literally take it apart frame by frame and not find a single weak image. The images on screen are simply stunning. Unfortunately Perhaps Love is littered with so many other flaws that, pretty pictures or not, the film verges on unwatchable."

I don't know as much about movies as others do, but, I do know that if I go into a movie and immediately discern that it has skillfully thieved from Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baz Luhrmann and Rob Marshall, that I'm about to choke—albeit dazzled—on the derivative. But at least derivative of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baz Luhrmann and Rob Marshall, all of whom I like a lot in fact! So, in between trying to figure out whether I'm in the past, present, in the movie or in the movie within the movie, I was also distracted identifying lifts from Phantom of the Opera, some Moulin Rouge, a bit of Chicago…. By the time the whole phantasmagora was over and my mind had been run over by cinematic citation, I really didn't have much left over to feel for any of the film's characters.

Notwithstanding, it's an exuberant eyeful! Even as your eye is drawn in to the clear aesthetic of winter in Bejing—soft snowfall framing two hearts on fire—you are later reminded how fake the snow is, and how the snowfall is cleverly effected by offscreen technicians. That's not very nice. Just when I start to feel something, I'm reminded any feeling I might have would merely be a manipulated sentiment. Not nice at all. After a while I didn't want to risk any feeling whatsoever. Why should I? But then, maybe that's just what the film is trying to present?

So I allowed myself to be the visual sponge the film demanded I be. Sumptuous restless cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Peter Pau (my favorite were the circus scenes, lit from beneath like Degas, staged in bizarre Cirque d'Soleil chic, archetypes in the center ring, rendering love without a net as a trapeze act of trust in the high air). And I applaud Farah Khan's extravagant choreography, especially the "prostitutes" song. Meant to remind you of the "Cell Block Tango", it compiles the gist of this clip, for your perusal via Twitch.

Rewatching that clip reminds me that it looks much better and engages more forcefully without subtitles. Yet another distraction: Subtitles whose cerebral and calculated poetry effectively blocked any sensuality the visuals delivered.

The greatest distraction a film can make is to draw attention to itself. That's why breaking the proscenium and films-within-a-film are true challenges, best for laughs, and difficult to achieve. Chan almost achieved it here—and I really wanted him to!—but ultimately he has weakened the project by winking one too many times at influences, references, resemblances and a steady diet of major talent. An unknown might have injected a bit of love into this piece. Perhaps.

I agree with Graham Leggat that the pan-Asian cast is "ravishing." But someone still needs to buy Takeshi Kaneshiro a swimsuit and his love interest Zhou Xun a dental guard. Please.

2006 SFIFF—The Heart of the Game

I'm so glad that Ruby Rich acknowledges the optimistic heart of Ward Serrill's The Heart of the Game. "It's being described as a hoop dreams for girls, but I don't think that's fair to it. …It's not just about basketball and the individual experience of poverty. It's much more about the intense pressure of gender socialization and the amazing display of what happens when you begin to undo it."

As disinterested as I am in team sports generally, I really loved The Heart of the Game. I am impressed with Serrill's devotion to the film's premise, that he spent six years following the rise of the Roughriders, an all-girl Seattle basketball team. His editing is lean and tight as he adeptly abbreviates the various seasons of the team—their wins, their losses—and builds the film's momentum even as relationships are established between coach Bill Resler ("Santa Claus in Birkenstocks") and the team's key players, notably Darnellia Russell, whose talent and perseverance against increasingly unfair odds are sure to inspire sports enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts alike. Resler's ingenuity in providing inspirational guidance to his players—either through offering driving metaphors ("You're a tropical storm! You're a pack of wolves! You're a pride of lions! You're a school of piranha! DRAW BLOOD!") or bringing in senior citizen Maude Lepley, one of the original girl basketball players, to talk to her young cohorts—is near to genius. I was biting my fingernails as the Roughriders took it to the hoop. This, hands down, has been my favorite film yet from this year's festival!

Sir! No Sir!—The Evening Class interview with David Zeiger

I met David Zeiger midmorning at San Francisco's Ninth Street Independent Film Center after he'd already done a Quake radio interview and had a little breakfast afterwards. Eager for the opportunity to interview him in the midafternoon while he was visiting S.F., I negotiated a pick up of a screener dvd of his new documentary Sir! No Sir! and caught BART home to watch it.

Riding MUNI on my way back to the Center to conduct the interview, I was disappointed I didn't get to at least watch Sir! No Sir! twice. I would have liked to have had more time to appreciate it fully. As an incisive historical document, it deserved at least that much respect. David Zeiger immediately put me at ease, said not to worry, the guy who was interviewing him on the radio hadn't even seen the film and thought it was a feature. So I relaxed and decided to just have a casual conversation.

On the bus getting there I had reviewed Jonathan Stein's Mother Jones interview with Zeiger, which I felt more-than-adequately covered the background of the film so I didn't feel any need to ask any of those questions, but I was intrigued by some of Zeiger's comments in that interview and he agreed discussing those would be a perfect start.

Sir! No Sir! tells many different stories of resistance from within the military, but one of its most intriguing is that of "The Worms", Air Force interpreters trained in Vietnamese whose job it was to fly over North Vietnam intercepting radio communications. Seeing the difference between what they knew was going on and what the American people were being told, these interpreters formed the WORMS ("We Openly Resist Military Stupidity"). During the infamous 1972 Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, many of them went on strike. In Sir! No Sir! they bravely attest to "…The bombing of populated areas, civilian areas; the bombing of hospitals—things that the US denied over and over again that we were engaged in. Those are things that we were engaged in and we had access to that information. And the lies were so stark, it challenged your own dignity, it challenged your own loyalty, it challenged your own humanity."

These men who came out after 35 years to reveal their participation in The Worms had basically been hiding their story all this time for fear of legal repercussion. In the Mother Jones interview Zeiger stated he didn't know what would happen to these men when the film was released. I had to know if anything had happened? Had they been placed in any kind of jeopardy? Had there been repercussions?

"Not as far as we know at this point," Zeiger advised, noting that it had been a very difficult choice for them. They had all talked a lot about the issue of potential ramifications for coming forth at this time. "They came to me, they contacted me, when they heard about the film!" Zeiger stressed, emphasizing their voluntary bravery.

Zeiger explained they all felt—for one thing—that principally what was being talked about in the film and the aspect of their work that was being revealed was essentially the politics of what they were doing and their reaction to it. It wasn't as if anything they would be discussing would harbor information that would threaten national security. The technology has since gone way past what it was at that time.

"We have new ways to wage a war," I suggested and Zeiger laughed, agreed. "Exactly", he said, "and I think they've all been—on some level—waiting for the opportunity to tell their story and this was really the time when it was important to tell it."

"On one level I would say I don't really expect any legal ramifications," Zeiger offered but then suggested that on the other hand there have been recent cases of former servicemen who have been arrested for their anti-war activities in the 60s and 70s. One case in particular sprang to his mind of a guy who was living in Canada who had crossed the border dozens of time to visit friends and family. A few weeks ago for the first time he crossed the border and his name showed up on a wanted list and—wham!—he was arrested, taken to Camp Pendleton and held incommunicado. Zeiger wasn't sure about the guy's current status; whether or not he will be belatedly court martialed, but said the situation serves as a reminder that it's not like people's actions during the Vietnam war were irrelevant; they remain relevant today.

I expressed my hope that nothing happens to The Worms in his documentary. "I do too!" Zeiger emphasized and added that he and his company were prepared to get something done for them if need be. "But the more out there the film is, the more public the story is," Zeiger believes, it will serve to protect them from recrimination.

Zeiger further commented in the Mother Jones interview: "A big strength of the film, and what I think is going to bring it into the mainstream, is that this is a historical metaphor. We don't have to say a word about Iraq in the film for it to be clearly identified with Iraq for people. But [because it doesn't mention Iraq], the film can't be shoved into the category of a propaganda film." This distinction of the film being a "historical metaphor" rather than propaganda intrigued me. Because clearly not everyone is thinking that. On the film's website Zeiger graciously provides space for dissenting reviews, in particular one from the Marooned in Marin blog, which accused the movie—as well as Beth Ashley's Marin Independent Journal article promoting the February 2006 appearance of Jane Fonda for a benefit screening of Sir! No Sir! at Mill Valley's Throckmorton Theatre—as "simply another forum for her and aging 1960's leftists to spread their lies about Vietnam and claim parallels to Iraq."

It's only natural that with increased visibility comes a higher number of yays and nays. "You make a film and put it out there," Zeiger says matter-of-factly, and there's really no way to know how it's going to affect people. Certainly he wants the film to do good, to make some kind of change, but the best way for a film to do that is by telling a story and not by pounding someone over the head with propaganda. The story the film is telling is convincing in its own right, speaks for itself, and Zeiger wants people to take it that way, to use it that way. If this historical metaphor informs public perception of the war in Iraq, that's valid, even if it is not specifically addressed in the documentary itself. The important thing is for as many people to see it as possible so they can make up their own minds and draw their own connections. That was one of the reasons Zeiger decided the documentary should open in theaters rather than be immediately released on dvd, to get it out as broadly as possible to audiences.

Whether or not Sir! No Sir! specifically talks about armed ground forces in Iraq, it is being screened at several benefits for Iraq Vets Against the War, including one on Thursday, April 6th at 7:00pm, at the Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand Avenue in Oakland. Advance tickets $8, $10 at the door; for tickets call 415-255-7296, ext. 244.

"That aspect of the film is very real," Zeiger concedes, "I'm glad that people are, y'know, taking it that way." But he insists his film is not propaganda.

Part of my training as a young man was as a Mayanist. I studied Maya history and epigraphy. I was taught then to take all historical information gleaned from elite hieroglyphic texts with a certain grain of salt because, as everyone knows, the winners write history. One of the things I liked most about Sir! No Sir! was that it questioned that premise, especially in terms of defining who "the winners" truly are, and the process of rewriting history. What I came away with from my first viewing of Zeiger's documentary was this uncomfortable sense that one of the most insidious thing done in the rewriting of the history of the Vietnam War was the systematic erasure from the public record of this G.I. anti-war movement. "Absolutely," Zeiger agreed, that's part of why it was important to make this film.

"The process of erasing this from history is a very complex one," Zeiger explained, pointing out that shortly after the Vietnam War was declared over, there was a great emphasis on reconciliation, putting the war behind us, wanting to forget. Focus was shifted to the returning veteran, hailed as a hero for defending his country, and shame was placed on those Americans who protested the war. Their protest was configured as being unpatriotic, tarnishing the efforts of these young men who had risked their lives in the name of their country. The image of the protesting veteran became subsumed in a cultural project of revisionist history engineered by the government and the complicit media. There was some vigilance, of course. A few books were written about the GI movement in the 70s, and since then there have been other books written, some work-up, but for the main part mainstream culture, including the more progressive, have all but forgotten the G.I. anti-war movement. For various reasons the idea of resistance within the military was simply unacceptable. Such an option meant the Vietnam war—in fact the concept of war—wasn't honored. It was not principally a question of the American people being opposed to war. They were opposed to further war, or more wars like Vietnam.

The last thing that would be included in the rewritten history of the Vietnam War would be the fact that the soldiers themselves were opposed to it. That would be the thing that would have to be edited out. To think otherwise would be treasonous and conspiratorial. It just made sense for the whole rewriting of the war to forget such a resistance ever happened and to focus on the heroic returning veteran. Even Hollywood got on the bandwagon. There had never been a Hollywood film about the Vietnam war that even hinted of the GI resistance movement. Sure, there were films about the veterans coming home and the difficulties they faced in readjusting to civilian life, and films about the veterans protesting the war once they were released from duty, but none of the on-duty soldiers who worked against the war. Hollywood gave us Rambo. "Which taught us that women could spit," I grinned. Zeiger laughed. "Exactly." He caught my deferential reference to the urban myth that returning veterans were spat upon by female hippie anti-war protestors.

"Because it's not a matter of something simply disappearing," Zeiger continued. "You can't have those two things side by side; having GIs protesting the war being spat on by antiwar activists. Doesn't make sense, right?"

It interested me how this urban myth had been created. Zeiger intimated that initially its creation wasn't purposeful, it was generated out of the popular culture, through movies. But during the (first) Bush administration, it became very purposeful. That was when ground troops were first being sent over to Iraq and the Bush administration made it a point of debate, actually put it out there, that the worst thing you could do was what they did back in the 60s when they spat upon the troops. This was one of their ways of rallying support for their current endeavors.

The images that were coming through the American media at that time, I remember, was of all the bombing visualized as a video game. The detachment and the distancing dehumanized the enemy. As Zeiger's film testified, aerial bombing had long become the alleged lesson learned in Vietnam. Never sending ground forces into a war that would last too long became the wisdom of experience. Air strikes were the way to go!! More could be damaged and more could be killed at less cost to our own. This strategic style of warfare and its application in Vietnam was never as clear to me as presented in Sir! No Sir! And it further served to clarify how there is dissent, even at top levels, regarding the ground troops that have been sent into Iraq to occupy the country and protect our assets. The military lesson that was allegedly learned in Vietnam is being purposely ignored and at what cost?

Zeiger and I also discussed the depiction of the black soldiers' resistance to the Vietnam war, especially those in the Army who were asked to return home to war against protestors outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They did not want to fire upon their own people. They could not reconcile being sent to another country to kill for their country only to be asked to return to kill their own. It made no sense. And gave voice to an unstated racism.

Though I know it's not quite the same thing, this sequence in Sir! No Sir! reminded me of the presidential response to the aftermath of Katrina and how accusations of racism once again resurfaced. Only this time instead of sending the National Guard in as they had at Chicago, at Kent State, the National Guard—which was so desperately needed at home—was pulled out to defend governmental interests elsewhere.

Another aspect of Sir! No Sir! that I liked was what I felt was its respectful attempt at gender parity. "Hanoi Jane" was great, possibly the best on-film performance I've seen out of Jane Fonda in many a year, but I was particularly intrigued with the voice of naval nurse Susan Schnall who was arrested for flying a small plane over several military bases here in the San Francisco Bay Area, dropping leaflets for the first demonstration of GIs and veterans against the war. "I remembered hearing about the B-52 bombers that were dropping leaflets on Vietnam urging the Vietnamese to defect," Schnall relates in the film, "And I thought well, if they can do it overseas…."

"Susan was great," Zeiger beamed, conceding that there were a lot fewer women in the service then than there are now. But Susan was bold and brave, wearing her uniform to a protest rally, for which she came under much fire. Like many others at the time, there was nothing that could stop her. Just as Keith Mather described: "I had nothing to lose, and I had no idea what was going to come. That's a free place. It's a really free place, you know? You don't know what's going to happen, you don't know where you're going, but you know what you're doing."

I teased Zeiger about the digitalized reconstruction of Schnall's leaflet drop. "No, no," he grinned, "they had a camera up there . . . " Actually, they had a lot of fun filming that sequence, using the sky as a blue screen, and dropping leaflets from the top of his bunker garage.

Zeiger paid strong attention to the underground press of the GI anti-war movement. I asked him if anything comparable was going on among servicemen in the current war. "The obvious answer is blogs," he answered, "and the Internet in Iraq." Only one of the many reasons why the Government wants to censor the Internet. Notwithstanding these modern marvels of communication, Zeiger waxes a bit nostaligic for the old methods, the mimeographed newsletters that were passed hand to hand around military bases. You would walk into your barracks and find them on your bed, in your locker. There is something visceral about that, which he misses, even as individuals he knew then that were cranking out newsletters, now do the same with daily weblasts. Certain political choices conjure aesthetic choices, I guess. "One must accomodate the times as one lives them," Stephen Sondheim has penned.

But I knew what Zeiger was saying. It's as if information has become entertainment and not the social call to action that it once was. I was struck by a comment Jane Fonda made in the documentary when she was remembering the soldiers at the FTA concerts. FTA was originally an acronym for Fun Travel and Adventure, the military's recruiting slogan for enlisting young men. Over time this morphed into Foxtrot Tango and Alpha or, decoded, Fuck the Army! Fonda was recalling looking out at the concert audience with those tens of thousands of GIs raising their fists and tossing the peace sign in solidarity with the anti-war cause. She wondered if it could even happen today. Zeiger chuckled pensively.

The lesson Zeiger tries to take from that is that movements of resistance seemingly come out of nowhere, they come out of an element of "total surprise" and that's where he gleans his optimism. You just never know. Maybe it could happen again. Maybe it is just as Faulkner wrote, "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

Coincidentally enough, the day before the interview I had gone out to the Balboa to catch a doublebill of Joyeux Noel and Sophie Scholl and the dirty word that came up out of those two films was conscience. I've long joked that if you ever want to get out of jury duty, and you've been chosen and are sitting in the box, wait until the judge asks if you can follow his or her instructions on the law, and then calmly respond, "That depends." When they ask what you mean, tell them you would have to follow your conscience first and foremost and—bingo!—you're out of there until next jury call. Why should it be that law, and the order it promises, seem so antithetical to conscience? Bertolt Brecht wrote in a poem:

General, man is very useful. He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect: He can think.

The structure of Zeiger's documentary begins with brave and individual voices who by the nature of their conscience are driven to act without any kind of support network. They were the tip of an oncoming wave.

Sir! No Sir! is equally engaging for its San Franciscan history. I was almost ashamed to admit I knew nothing about the "Nine for Peace" and the Presidio 27. The "Nine for Peace" were soldiers who refused their orders to Vietnam and took sanctuary in a San Franciscan church, chaining themselves to priests in support of their cause. The Presidio 27—which included the soldiers arrested from the "Nine for Peace"—were the prisoners in the Presidio stockade that staged a sitdown strike in protest of a guard's murder of a mentally-ill prisoner. "That was just like electrifying for the whole country!" Zeiger said and praised the local San Francisco television stations who have kept their coverage tapes of that time when most other stations long ago had either erased them or thrown them away. "That was a moment when there was a coming together of the San Francisco scene and the GIs," Zeiger summarizes.

I wondered if that had anything to do with the instigation of the urban myth about soldiers returning to the San Francisco airport and being spit upon by hippie anti-war protestors? Were they somehow trying to get back at San Francisco?

Zeiger was amused with the idea. He hadn't thought of it from that angle but, sure, absolutely. San Francisco—because it symbolized the counterculture—was a magnet for that kind of character assassination.

Finally, I commended Zieger on the documentary's music. Especially how he bookended the two pieces: the Shirelles innocently singing "Soldier Boy" and Rita Martinson soulfully singing her antiwar song at the FTA concerts. "Actually there's a third song that comes after her's," Zeiger corrected, one written specifically for the film bringing it up to current events. I'm always interested in music rights so I asked him if he'd had any problems securing "Soldier Boy" and he said no, that it had surprised him since he had been a little concerned about it, but he was granted license. It cost a pretty penny though. I didn't ask how much.

None of the music inbetween those bookend pieces is from the 60s, however, as most folks assume. A lot of people actually thought he had found all this instrumental music from the 60s but, no, it's all original music, meant to create the atmosphere of the time without pulling the viewer back into the time. At one point they had included "Maggie's Farm", a song that became almost an anthem for the Presidio 27, they sang it all the time; but—after trying it in the film—Zeiger realized suddenly that it pulled people out of the film into their own head and their own memories of that time. That's how strong music and some memories are so it became a challenge for Zeiger's composer to elicit the music of the time to position the filmgoer in a historical moment without having to depend explicitly upon any specific song.

I wrapped our conversation up by thanking Zeiger for rewriting history correctly. He laughed again and said, "Thank you!"

Sir! No Sir!, as mentioned above, will be part of a benefit screening next Thursday at the Grand Lake. But then opens for its official San Franciscan premiere at the Red Victorian April 7-13. I highly recommend it. It's an important reminder at a time when history is perilously repeating itself.