Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie (2008) - Vietnam DOES have a Bigfoot!

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eleven, part three- a film distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories!

(Chosen by John!)

(To be read to the tune of All This Time.)

Events of late make it difficult to say how one should feel about the main subjects of Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie.  In fairness, Dallas Gilbert and Wayne Burton's conspiratorial mindsets should always make it difficult to determine the best approach to understanding them, for a conspiratorial mindset will always mean an otherwise amiable person is given towards myopic views on who knows how many otherwise agreeable topics, towards pushing friends and family away in the name of maintaining ideological purity, and towards twisting the world before their own eyes into something that will always agree with them no matter what.  From the documentary, we know Dallas and Wayne are (were in Dallas' case - he passed in 2016) given to these mindsets, for they admit it readily enough on-camera numerous times.  I more mean, however, that with conspiratorial attitudes taking over so many online spaces friendly towards the elderly in recent years, and with those views being so easily coopted by bad actors looking for an easily riled army to spread more substantially dangerous lies and calls to action amidst the Bigfoot hunting and the UFO spotting, the notion of a harmless conspiracy theorist is difficult to believe in this day.  Any one might prove the pressure point in an online campaign to harass the families of shooting victims, or fire a vulnerable population into protesting coronavirus quarantine protocols, or spread coded language to radicalize the youth.  It's difficult to sit back and believe in the notion of a harmless conspiracy theorist when even belief in Bigfoot is the merest step or two removed from something far more sinister, and with a decade-plus passed from this film's release and Jay Delaney showing little interest in cross-examining his subjects, I don't want to reflexively think kindly of these two when I don't know what the next few years brought.

Let's back off from the bully pulpit, though, and examine the actual film.  Important as it is to acknowledge a documentary cannot show one all the facts, what's on-screen still matters, and what's on-screen here does paint a sympathetic picture.  Dallas talks about estranged family members, Wayne makes it clear he has and continues to use threats of suicide to control people (something I'm inclined towards and find detestable in both myself and others), and both men make it clear they've staked their families' financial futures on proving Bigfoot real, but it's hard to think them wicked figures.  Given a stretch to talk about their mutual passion, both men speak with conviction and passion, and importantly a respect for others who show them respect in turn.  To Dallas' mind in particular, he believes in the Bigfoots he finds in his clearly empty photographs so deeply and dearly, it is more a matter of lacking faith in others that stands in his way of finding proof.  Such an attitude can read as sad, and for sure in a few quiet, solitary moments, he seems morose at how impossible his self-appointed task seems.  Yet from what we see, he's got his family, he's got his beliefs, and even if he doesn't have nearly so much money or respect as he'd like, what he holds is his.  Similar attitudes are evident in Wayne, who talks just as much about his attempts to continually better himself and accept his past failings as he does his regrets over those failings or his oncoming financial and legal woes.

It helps when Delaney captures incidents which incline us to understanding how easily others can takes advantage of Dallas and Wayne, foe and friend alike.  When Wayne appears on an internet radio program to discuss his theories and misspeaks about the timing of showing a photo to a dead friend, it is the host who seizes on the error and mocks Wayne to the point that his followers deface and doxx Dallas' website.  When Thomas Biscardi, a noted Bigfoot hoaxer cum hunter comes to town, the contrast between his hunts and the expeditions Dallas and Wayne undertake do much to frame him as an antagonistic figure.  These two older men go into the woods with their Native American words of power and their cameras ready to capture any moving shadow, the trip as much a reason to spend time with buddies as it is a serious attempt to capture Bigfoot; Biscardi drags everyone out late at night, plays disturbing recorded screams into the dark, and berates and belittles everyone who's not taking his mission to fool people seriously as he is.  The pair are plainly uncomfortable around Biscardi, and yet when he abandons them and skips town the next night, it is still a sad moment for the pair as their chance to work with someone they consider one of the greats slips away.  It's much like Wayne says in a roundabout manner during his (somewhat uncomfortable) rant against all political figures: nobody ever considers them as two old men chasing after something they sincerely believe in.  All anyone ever sees are rubes to mock or exploit or celebrate when they take a lick.

Owing to the evidently serious monetary strain both men place their families under thanks to their focus on Bigfoot rather than more sound routes to money, I can't quite say Dallas and Fred's obsession makes them admirable.  The difference between the mystique of sincere belief and taking it too far is the moment when you stop inconveniencing only yourself and start worsening the lives of those who depend on you. At the same time, though, their strategy for making money rather dispels a good deal of my concerns from the opening paragraph: the pair aren't able to see their blurry nothing photos cannot possibly make them any money, and so lack the dishonesty to fake them and exploit others.  Being victims within their own community who also use their mutual conspiratorial belief as a means through which to bond and better themselves makes me think, whatever happened in the years after this documentary, however the conspiracy theory crowd has become something terrible and ugly beneath the wing of the Alex Jones and Steven Crowders of the world, Dallas and Wayne have likely sequestered themselves away from all that.  I hope to God they have, for while Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie won't win anyone over for its filming or ambition or deep insight into anything beyond these two men and their little corner of Ohio, something in the cozy banjo music and amiable manner from our main subjects makes me want to believe in the goodness of their hearts.  I might not ever see what they see or think what they think, but long as they aren't out there trying to make others less or do harm to the marginalized, I'm happy to let Wayne live as he lives and wish Dallas a restful sleep.

(The Amazon rental for this film includes Delaney's 2001 short, American Dream, which interviewed Dallas and Wayne on the same topic and eventually morphed into this production.  It's nice to see it there, but it's also more focused on just letting the two of them explain their Bigfoot theories than talk about and live their lives, which is the main draw of the feature and not half so interesting, so I can't confidently recommend the short, even if it is only ten minutes.)

Kedi (2016) - Cats know that people act as middlemen to God's will.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme eleven, part one - a film distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories!

(Chosen by me!)

I should like to avoid melancholy while writing this review.  Kedi is exactly the film to get me feeling depressive in the watching, thanks to its documentation of the cats from Istanbul including numerous scenes of people tending to stray kittens and discussing their methods for dealing with death and monologuing about modern developments making the city less suitable for humans and animals alike.  It's enough to inspire thoughts of personal inadequacy and inability to handle a crisis, or fall into the depths of fear towards losing pets and loved ones, or spiral the drain of powerlessness at the advance of progress taking away green spaces and wild places.  I've issues aplenty readily triggered by seeing these sights, and I could very easily dedicate the entire review to a bleak, despairing outlook.  However, while Kedi contains these passages as a matter of necessity, in order to honestly discuss all aspects of life with cats in the Turkish city, it is not dominated by them.  The dominant mode is one of watching and appreciating and loving cats, celebrating all they do, and our role as their companions and caretakers.  If Ceyda Torun has the fortitude to film and edit and present such sad sights, I have the emotional strength to discuss her movie as its own thing, an even piece of documentation whose highs are equally worth discussing as its lows.

What makes Kedi so special a film, worthy your consideration beyond offering eighty minutes of cats running around doing their thing?  Universality, I think.  Between the structure built around a glimpse into the daily lives of seven different cats throughout the city with plenty breaks to trace the non-central players as well, the interviews with the people most familiar with these four-legged inhabitants, and the wide scope Torun and her crew trace across Istanbul, Kedi imparts a strong sense of kindred spirithood across the distance.  Of finding feline personalities similar to those we know wherever we are, of applying personhood to the cats and thinking of them as we would any other neighbor, of feeling an ethical obligation to ensure their health and safety, of balancing the scales between getting so little in return for so much effort and understanding the nuances of their affection for mutual benefit.  Cliched (and untrue if we're honest) as it remains to call love for cats or any other companion animal the one global constant across all cultures and walks of life, the film is inclined to make anyone who loves cats believe the idea by virtue of showing us so much.  A man breaking off an interview to take an injured kitten to the vet for emergency help, a woman with depressive issues talking about how caring for the alleycats in her neighborhood proves therapeutic, a sailor alternately discussing the history of cats in Istanbul and wondering at their supernatural side, numerous off-screen narrations describing the personalities they find in the local psychopath and the ladies' cat and the social butterfly and the conniving thief - amidst it all, you're liable to stop and say, "Hey, I've known/know a cat like that!" or else, "I've done that/thought like this before!" and the distance between you and Istanbul becomes a vacuum and collapses instantly.  Might not work for everyone, but it certainly worked for the whole watch party last night, and worked constantly.

There is, I've seen, some debate as to whether the inclusion of the human interview segments dilutes the film any, takes away from the potential of a work purely dedicated to watching the cats go about their business free from interpreting voices.  Being as great a lover of purity in form as I am, I can definitely see the argument, and think it has merit.  After all, the universal appeal of cats is quite obvious on the face of it, just by how utterly dominant videos of the same have been in the culture before even the internet - America's Funniest Home Videos and the like.  It would doubtless make a wonderful meditative experience, the only voice the silent word of the camera operators and editors as they guide us through the streets from a cat's eye view.  In total, though, I think the imposition worth it, for the simple reason that verbalizing the humanity the human residents find in the cats is probably the most potent idea Torun advances through Kedi.  To find human traits in the non-human animal is, of course, a quirk of the human condition, a somewhat ridiculous extension of useful traits that proved adaptive to survival many millennia ago.  We all do it, though, because lifelong/generational proximity is bound to engender such thinking patterns, and while we might agree this or that cat has this or that personality from simply watching, part of the point is that vacuum collapse, and one feels certain in their thinking far better if another speaks and confirms yes, I do think this cat is a little clingy, or a bit of a troublemaker, or very suave for a cat.  In effect, we need the humanity of the people as they commentate on the humanity of the cats to find the commonality across it all just a little bit clearer.

You run the risk of losing common agreement when you go the tone poem route, and despite thinking cats excellent subjects for a tone poem, I do not think Torun's vision for Kedi runs down that route.  It is not merely about the cats of Istanbul, but the cats of Istanbul, and the people of Istanbul, and modern Istanbul itself, as viewed through the frame of cats.  You could focus on them exclusively and count on the resonance of the city and its movements in the background to communicate the same ideas, or you could keep it all in frame and find the unifying whole with an unusual subject at the forefront.  Either choice works, since cats are cats and lovely subjects all the same, but Kedi is only Kedi if the people vocalize alongside their less verbal furry friends, in the same way I only feel right discussing the film in total effect rather than drilling into what strikes me hardest about the watching experience.  It's fine and good to take a single idea and squeeze it until all potential is wrung and a paint can be derived from its contents with which you paint the whole canvas.  It's perhaps more worthwhile (and in my case, healthier) to draw from many sources, and coat the canvas with all you can acquire.  Striking though a solid color block be, the total picture of life best emerges when you consider the joy of a cat leaping from ground to roof in a single bound alongside the human who marvels at their superhuman power, and the lamentations at how they can't do more for the less fortunate.  It's all necessary to get what's going on.

(I do so love Gamsız and his little sideways knock.  Hope he and all the other cats are still doing fine four years on.)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) - There seems to have existed a visual convention extending all the way beyond Baywatch.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme ten, part three - a cinéma vérité film!

(Chosen by John!)

Let's not make the whole, "Well this film isn't good, proper, Christian cinéma vérité in the true sense, but the list said it was and we stick to our picks," thing a little postscript at the end.  Let's address the matter right up front: director Werner Herzog is not one to embrace the theory of observational cinema.  When he's crafting fiction, he is determined to leave his thumbprint on the work prominently as possible with his often unsafe working practices and method of handling actors; when helming a documentary, his unique, strangely compelling voice is perpetually at the forefront, and we are given constant reminders of how there is a camera, and lights, and a crew, and the person of Werner Herzog involved in every stage of production.  He will not vanish into the background like a fly on a wall, and indeed noted his belief that a director should instead serve as a hornet constantly attacking their subject in an interview chronicled by the New York Times around Cave of Forgotten Dreams' American release.  We have, to all appearances, chosen a film whose contents scantly reflect the tradition of an invisible camera and subjects captured in perfectly natural surroundings.  As he notes, by virtue of the Chauvet cave paintings' depth within their cavernous home both upon initial creation and after a rockslide buried the initial entrance from view, one cannot appreciate them without artificial light, be it from a torch or stage light.  Herzog and his crew at first cannot stand in this space without accompaniment from researchers well-versed in the safety protocols and history behind the cave, and because they are along for the ride, we are going to hear more than plenty from them throughout the film, their words addressed directly to Herzog and the camera.  Peppered throughout we find many vignettes showing the work towards digitally mapping every inch of the cave, inspecting reproduced artifacts from nearby sites in a museum, talking of ancient hunting practices and music and sniffing for cave scents.  Cave of Forgotten Dreams is anything but cinéma vérité, moreso than High School owing to Wiseman's disdain for the term, or Man with a Movie Camera due to Vertov predating the very idea.

And yet, for all this, Herzog does employ techniques we might call purely observational.  At a few key points throughout and most prominently for the climax, he ceases his speech, banishes all persons from the frame, and chooses to only film the paintings in all their preserved beauty.  It is of course impossible to say there's NO intended influence from the director or crew in these passages - he places so much emphasis on the importance of light in making the animals on the walls dance and move in a proto-cinema earlier in the film, it's impossible to ignore how his own lights shift across the rockface - but by comparison there is no guiding hand musing about the nature of those who came here before, no expert detailing why certain images are so fascinating.  When we come down to the matter, it is simply us, the painted animals, and the temporal distance collapsed to zero.  One expects this in a documentary cave paintings, naturally.  If you're gonna take a camera into a fragile location sealed off to all save a handful of experts, you'll eventually stop talking and show what you've found to show.  Why make note of Herzog staying quite when anyone with even the tiniest awareness of how incredible it is to find a direct link to a moment and people 32,000 years past would keep their trap shut?

I do so because I think, despite Herzog's disdain for observational cinema and his tendency to make knowing Werner Herzog is behind all this a top priority, his limited use of observational techniques here is more effective for their sharing time with his usual methods than they would as a total work in themselves.  Pan the camera across the walls, let us appreciate the paleolithic artwork, and it is all awe-inspiring, yes, but the context is so much more.  The paintings become more incredible when someone who knows what's up explains how we can trace the journey of one particular painter through the tunnels thanks to his crooked little finger, when we are given cause to deliberately contemplate the fragility of the calcite structures, when someone explains the limitations that prevent us from getting a full look at an angularly protruding stalactite with a union of woman and bull painted round its circumference.  To follow the archaeologists and art historians and geologists and even the strange perfumer fellow who's determined to find new caves by identifying their musk and following his nose is to gain necessary knowledge, place a specific idea behind WHY we find these images of hunts and wilds long extinct so compelling.  Equipped with this understanding, when we are finally left alone like Herzog and his crew in the furthest confines of the cave, with only these ancient paintings before our eyes, we are able to draw on that which we now know, consider them more fully, and feel our unnamed hypnotic compulsion to look and drink and be one with our ancestors coalesce into an informed sense of commonality.  For my part, knowing more about how they took advantage of the texture and contours of the cave walls sharpened my appreciation for how their tableaux takes on the appearance of a plain observed from a high place, certain features tangibly in the distance, others obscured by foliage and rock formations and the like.  It became a true window into another time, thanks to my learning how and possibly why it was made this way.

 My regular readers will note I constantly harp about purity of form when it comes to movies, dolling out greater praise for works that achieve in one particular manner to a sharpened peak.  While my aesthetic preferences will typically swing this way, it's important to note the equal strength found in a marriage between disciplines.  The tradition behind cinéma vérité, when coupled with a more usual form of heavy-handed, carefully guided documentation, can reveal untold truths about the subject when we finally do back off and look with nothing more than mechanical eyes.  With regards to the Chauvet cave and the paintings within, I wonder whether a more adamantly observational director, interested only in filming the walls, could have captured the same sense of compressed time Herzog manages here?  Learning as we do before our time with light against ancient paint and older stone grants the paintings a stronger sense of humanity, some more visible image of an early homo sapien crouched before their work, bringing it to life before our eyes as we puzzle out their thought processes, their intents, their dreams.  Would the cave speak so legible a tongue if presented on its own, or do we truly need all Herzog includes as a Rosetta stone?  Furthermore, could this explain why Herzog chooses to focus on the albino crocodiles in a nuclear power plant-dependent jungle enclosure several miles away?  After all, the crocodillians will not have any guides or experts to inform them about what the paintings could mean or why their creators chose to draw them, anymore than the tourists in Lascaux would in the days those paintings were open to a mold-breeding public.  In an artistic, anthropomorthized sense, when they see what we see, free from intellectual guidance, will they too dream of the horse on the open plain?

Do Crocodiles Dream of Wild Horses is the name of my new album, look for it on store shelves.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) - An experimentation in the cinematic communication of visual phenomena.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme ten, part two - a cinéma vérité* film!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

Dziga Vertov so believed in cinema, he renamed himself for the camera's motion, from the Ukrainian for "spinning top."  His faith in the mechanical eye's ability to capture actualities as they happened, free from any need for characters or narrative, formed the basis for his goals in Man with a Movie Camera.  The three-year project was to serve as a revolutionary cry in support of cinema as the modern art of the people, an artform capable of capturing an entire city in motion without resorting to the techniques of theater or literature, or indeed any medium other than the purely cinematic.  Per the conventional wisdom, he succeeded in his aims while failing to reach the public, crafting an experimental piece of pure filmmaking the likes of which have rarely, if ever, been equaled, just unfortunately timed to release after Battleship Potemkin made a Soviet realist approach the popular mold at home and abroad.  He was, tradition holds, a man fighting the whole weight of narrative film with something completely detached from narrative.  To my eye, however, watching Man with a Movie Camera reveals Vertov failed in even this respect, for his film does adhere to a three-act structure, does communicate in the language of those who came before.  I do not count this failure as a failure he could have avoided, though, nor a failure that speaks to Man with a Movie Camera falling short of its primary goals - rather, I consider it a demonstration of how handily Vertov illustrated the possibility for a moving image to speak the human tongue, and ultimately be a human art.

Let me explain.

The film proper begins with a movie camera atop a movie camera, and the theater's patrons settling into their seats as a projectionist brings the house lights down and the projector to speed, but the first we see of our true subject denies motion entirely.  Our city in the morning is asleep, the rich and poor alike in repose in their quilted bed and bare park benches, the storefronts speak to no one, the great machines all still and quiet.  Trace of activity attract attention ever so slowly: the early risers walking the streets, the pigeons aflutter in the air, the man with the movie camera trotting the landscape and preparing his shots for the day.  With time, the residents rise and busy themselves with freshening and dressing for the day, some already tirelessly working as others blink sleep from their eyes and reluctantly go through the motions.  Even the camera must take time to adjust to the light and focus on the right details and keep its shutter open.  Soon, the traffic begins, workers appearing from nowhere to ready the planes and trains and automobiles, beginning the day's delicate balance of a thousand vehicles narrowly avoiding ten thousand pedestrians.  The pace of life is not entirely even, for the shopworkers have the luxury of sleeping longer than the street cleaners and and transit operators, yet they too must rise and prepare for the day as the machines that truly power the city are brought to life - these, it must be noted, show no hesitance, instantly springing to life and achieving full speed within seconds.  Inside twenty minutes, Vertov and cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman have brought their subject to its full swing, the camera tracing Kaufman as he places himself in out of the way places to get the shot, slipping under barreling locomotives and perching atop moving cars and walking against the crowd and climbing to high perches to find just what he needs.  All is as it always is...

...and then we transition with a stop.  We move from establishment to exploration with a moment's consideration for the editor, Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova, as she holds the celuloid in its raw, unmoving state, and brings it to life with careful cuts.  Initially an invisible hand taken for granted, we will see her numerous times throughout the remainder of the film, keeping us firmly aware that someone must make these images dance as they do, in addition to our existing awareness towards their place in the movie theater and their selection by someone holding the camera.  The kino eye IS perfect in capturing exactly what it is set to capture, exactly as it is before its lens, but it is nothing without those who operate and discern.

Speaking of operation and discerning, we come to our second act, exploring the city's operations.  Vertov contrasts images more here than at any other point in the film, and it is interesting what he chooses to contrast in what order.  The usual choices are right up front, the camera swiveling atop a balcony to capture marriage and divorce at the same instant, a baby's birth and a man's funeral, the celebration of new beginnings and the mourning inherent to passing.  From this lofty comparison of ultimate extremes, he suddenly finds interest in that delicate balance again, positioning the camera between trams and atop trains and at intersections to capture how readily accidents COULD happen, and how narrowly it all speeds on, even tilting mirrored images towards one another to squash Kaufman between passing vehicles with barely an inch to spare - and then we take a minute or two to watch those who ARE unfortunate enough to take a hit, and the rescue and medical services which follow.  Necessity must compliment indulgence, so we next turn our attention to those who partake in leisure and service during working hours, and intercut them with those who package and craft and toil to keep the same functional.  Notably, halfway into this sequence Vertov starts prominently cutting Svilova's editing process in place of the other workers, arguing for the act of movie-making as laborious and necessary a task as wrapping products and tending weaves and minding traffic.  He does not, I think, places these images against one another to imply conflict, for the laborers are shown to enjoy their task just as much as the patrons do their constant repose, and he does them great kindness by then placing them in complimentary positions against the act's grand finale, the thunder of machines.  Mines, forges, power plants, enormous dams, the necessary lifeblood of the modern metropolis, all captured at the height of their operation, tunnels and pools and rushes of water so great they darken all but themselves... and still, the workers and the man with the movie camera are distinctly visible, their actions presented as essential to the continued movement of it all.

And so we stop again, if in a less jarring way than the sudden freeze frame of the first transition.  The factory workers power down their machines, the laborers put down their labor, and the whole city moves to a third act, one of leisure and play.  We engage ourselves at the beach, the track, the amusement park as the people magically fade into their places naturally as you please, and Vertov becomes endlessly fascinated with their activities.  On those who partake in sport, he makes time to freeze on their most dynamic action, capturing both the total motion and the instant of the human body in peak exertion.  The beachside visitors he photographs simply for their own sake as people.  We watch as many become purposefully dirty before washing off at the same instant, see the children enjoy a magic show as the dancers kick and the track stars hurdle and the carnival-goers shoot and the  motorists ride, the millions upon millions doing as they please with the hours they are given.  Through it all there is the man with the movie camera, Kaufman towering over the tallest buildings and rising from unlikely places to get his shot, the great mechanical eye capturing reverse games of chess and excess drinking at the bar from whatever angle is needed.  As the editing grows faster and the images of the day's activities begin to blur into one impression of pure movement, even the camera takes a break, gamboling an awkward dance atop its spindly legs free from the operator's influence.  At this point, we might expect the film to end with another stoppage, watching as weariness sets in and the city goes to sleep, resting for yet another day of weeks of months of years of this endless ballet we call life.

But Vertov does not stop.  The city does not come to rest.  Instead, it splinters, magnifies, kaleidoscopes into many.  Numerous complimentary views fill the screen all at once, reflections of the city as the every-city, the images we have seen before folding on themselves to become the all that is one.  Rather than halt, the city ascends, returning us to the movie theater to watch as it becomes the very nature of the film before Vertov's audience, before, as we might assume, every audience.  The city IS the art, and as we can see by way of Vertov positioning Kaufman as a giant filming his subjects on the screen one last time, so too are those who create such art.  While the kino eye is great, we have already established its limitations, and here we see this expressed in as literal manner as possible: Kaufman's filming as part of the film itself, and the final shuttering montage of Svilova cutting cut itself with the audience, the film, the cameraman, the camera, until we reach our last, enduring image of her eye within the camera's eye.  It must, Vertov argues, all be one.  The city, the people, the subject, the camera, the operator, the director, the very idea of cinema as the modern art - by their total nature as solid, true subjects before the camera's eye, the mechanical and human alike must BE cinema, nothing more, nothing less.

Vertov, I think, fails to make his point in as pure a manner as he hoped because to tell stories in the mode we are conditioned to understand stories is as much part of what he wanted to capture as the city free from story.  Stripped from all but the barest framing device, however, I also think he makes his point as beautifully as he could possibly have done.  Man with a Movie Camera both is and isn't film freed from all that came before; it answers to the master of segmented structure same as any other tale, while performing under this one remaining constraint as only a movie can, through the contrast of living images and nothing else.  Failure here becomes success, proving his point in a more roundabout manner than his own preferred firebrand manner, and in the process becoming a piece of motion picture-making appreciable to any eye.  He truly makes the photoreceptors of glass and viscera one and the same, the idea of a city and its people as they are the natural subjects for both to consider and subsume, and I would even go so far as to say he does so to such great effect as to make the eventual dominance of narrative cinema something in line with his views.  His techniques here became the basis for so much of the cinematic language as we now speak it, whether directly taken from his visual text or recreated by others further on down the line; regardless of the moving picture lacking so clean a cut as he fought towards, the form is distinctly its own entity according to the pattern he illustrated all the same.

(*Which, again, it's not really cinéma vérité, predating the concept as it does by a good 40 years or so, but we chose what we chose from our list, and some of Vertov's views on the camera as the perfect objective eye do fit with the "fly on the wall" idea behind the movement.)

High School (1968) - It's against my principles, you have to stand for something.

It's the Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme ten, part one - a cinéma vérité* film!

(Chosen by me!)

The uniting theme of discussions about Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary High School typically holds Wiseman shot and edited the faculty of Philadelphia's Northeast High School to argue they less teach their students the assigned curriculum and valuable skills for independent living, and more constantly drill and drone and degrade with the end goal of producing uniformly gray members of a conformist system.  Some arguments further advance this notion by noting how the film takes place against a backdrop of the counterculture revolution and growing dissatisfaction with the war in Vietnam, and construe intent to paint certain amongst the teachers and disciplinary staff as doubling down on their usual techniques in the vain hope of halting the crushing tide.  It is an understandable perspective to adopt, both in face of how Wiseman presents ample scenes of students trapped beneath apparent doubletalk and quickly escalating punishment and the endless bore of great poetry made bland by bad reading, and how the 1960s carry a commonly accepted Identity in the generally held western world and the United States in particular.  This was a time of Unrest, of Change, of the youth who'd seen a rise in visibility and souring of temperament over the preceding decades finally coalescing into a Movement - whether you're living through the moment as with audiences and critics of its day or watching from a distance as now, the image of a teacher reading private correspondence from a student convinced they'll die in Vietnam against that student's expressed wish for privacy within the letter, and then claiming their success as a grunt destined to die in some anonymous jungle is proof High School works conjures the image of a system that's either failing its intended goals, or meeting them perfectly.

I understand these perspectives, and I agree Wiseman's film is cut and presented to drive the idea firmly as he can manage.  His vignettes are carefully chosen and placed in relation to one another with visible intent of wearying on the strength of collective memories within similar halls and against similar authority figures.  High School is a film sympathetic to the teenager in all of us, the person trapped in a sterile, nonstimulative environment for hours of the most valuable years of our lives, wishing the prick at the front of the room would shut up and let us go five minutes early.  It understands your feeling the adults are dead set on grinding every last piece of you from your person with arbitrary rules and unfair detentions and lessons about what a REAL man does, what CONSEQUENCES there'll be in the REAL world if you don't toe the line, how the line and the toeing thereof is the be-all end-all from the moment you graduate to death's door.  I hold it is right for Wiseman and his work to adopt and argue this perspective, for the experience of being in school and blanching against authority is near-universal; even as someone who socialized better with their teachers than their peers and took to lessons so well I'd actively ask for extra work just to keep the mental stimulation going, I've been in the spot of thinking this is all designed to get rid of me and replace that with what THEY want.  You'll clash against authority and find you're not as equal as you'd like in your teenage years one way or another, model student or no.

I hold, however, that a screed against teachers as willing engines of conformity is not all High School contains for the discerning eye.  Indeed, I'm of a mind to argue the film's just as sympathetic towards the faculty and staff as it is the students who struggle beneath their byzantine rules.  Call it a lingering niggle of doubt born from liking my instructors better than the people who'd shun or belittle me, but I cannot believe the high school experience is truly MEANT for such grinding with individualism as the meat.

One has to understand, the film shows Northeast High School as an unpleasant environment for anyone within its confines.  The only people who show a spark of humor or vibrancy are those who don't have to call its blank white brickwork and uncovered fluorescent lights home forty weeks of the year, parents and guest speakers and the like.  The building itself is an unpleasant, confining structure, and the activities going on within are repetitive by nature, necessarily so if a student is to hypothetically retain any information.  Thing is, while we are only shown a lesson or so per classroom, a single meeting of a club, a few handful of shots in the gym, a limited glimpse into the most telling examples of teachers and administrators failing to reach their charges, you must know, from common experience, there is so much more we don't see.  Lesson plans repeated across days, the same faces week after week, the same lessons year after year.  Routine serves as a millstone for those who have to enforce it as well, because there are still people responsible for said enforcement, people who must balance the nightmarish task of imparting information in an interesting, retentive manner, and remaining distant enough from their pupils to act accordingly when a stronger hand is needed.  Both the English teacher reading "Casey at the Bat" in a monotone that robs the poem of all life, and the English teacher trying to make learning cool by teaching Simon and Garfunkel's "The Dangling Conversation" and failing to roue any interest fall prey to the same problem - this environment is not good for anybody.

How could it be?  The United States model of education asks the impossible of those who serve at its whim, to perform as robots while remaining available as a thinking emotional creature when needed, to educate a body of hundreds while thinking of each unit as a person worthy attention and nurturing, to do this until you can perform no more and yet never show signs of fatigue.  The teachers and faculty here can only look bad before Wiseman's camera, for the easiest, most natural response to such conditions is to do whatever you can to get through the goddamned day.  It'd make everything so much easier if nobody piped up or made trouble, if everyone just did as they're told and marched through freshman to senior years without requiring special attention, if those who DID require special attention were dealt with quickly and easily so you can get onto the dozens more who require the same today alone.  All this against a backdrop  of barren walls and glaring lights and prison-like air and the knowledge you'll have to keep coming in again and again and again, that if you leave to do anything else either someone will replace you and endure the same, or no one will and your colleagues will struggle to pick up the slack.  A drive for conformity, I think, arises not because anyone particularly wants to live in a world where marching in lockstep and speaking as expected when expected and thinking authority should not be questioned, but because we've all inherited into a situation so difficult and grinding and so very terribly samey that trying for control is perhaps the response requiring the least effort.

It sucks.  It does.  For everyone.  Understandable as the reaction is, the students are the ones who suffer because their instructors are pressured until they too ask the impossible from their charges, which is the real tragedy of the high school experience, which is why Wiseman's High School is the way it is.  To balance his film between the two perspectives would lose the raw expression of what it feels like to endure these conditions and lessen the youthful drive to push back and be new and different and stubborn on purpose, yet to leave the limitation of its present state with regards to how the situation comes about in the first place unacknowledged is wrong to my mind.  It'd be ever so nice if I could conclude here by saying the solution is and always will be greater mindfulness about what the easy road will do to those around and below you under strenuous circumstances, for those in charge of education to give it their all every single day to the last and fashion a better environment.  Aware as I am, though, of the ever-diminishing value of education by those in power above our instructors, of the constant underfunding across the country, of how even with maximum effort there ARE the bad actors who want to exercise power and genuinely do see the goal of education as the production of unthinking drones subservient to the whims of those who'd use them as gears in a revenue-generating machine or pawns in a holy war... I cannot make such a suggestion in good faith.  Best I can say is we should ditch those enclosed buildings and make the switch to open-air like the schools I came up in, because honestly, so much of the oppressive environment comes down to not getting any goddamned air or sun between classes, students and teachers alike.  Can't bear the thought of working there for decades on end.

(*I know Frederick Wiseman prefers the term "observational documentary" for his films, but the list we were linked to as example includes it as an option, so we're sticking to our guns here.)

Hoop Dreams (1994) - This whole thing is revolving around money.

It's the fifth Letterboxd Season Challenge!  Theme seven, part one - one of Spike Lee's essential films for aspiring directors!

(Chosen by me.)

Some personal context: I ran cross country and track in high school.  Had done so since middle school on recommendation from my parents I find some extracurricular activity, and kept at it until graduation through sheer inertia.  I'd run all through the last few years and somehow not quit, why stop now?  In retrospect, sticking it out was a poor idea, because bad experiences with the team, my coach, my self-esteem, and pretty much anything and everything related to running now comprise the majority of my memories about high school, and play a big part in my reticence to think about that period of my life as anything other than an amorphous mass I wish hadn't happened.  Snapping in the middle of a race and trying to punch a teammate for cheering me from the sidelines, trying in vain year after year to stop the team from hazing new members, almost getting pushed off a cliff during a practice run as a joke, undergoing multiple breakdowns at running camp that probably predicted my more extreme breaks in university, the generally poor recurring impression of someone yelling at or lecturing you for not trying harder when you'd genuinely given your all.  Doubtless there are good experiences in there too, of managing a personal best sub-11 minute two mile race or briefly feeling like part of a cohesive social unit, but it's all overwhelmed by the lingering echo of being flat-out told my life would go nowhere because I didn't get an athletic scholarship for college or getting practically run over by a crowd eager to cross the course without considering the person running last place.  I do not like being reminded of my high school athletic career, and would much prefer it fade from memory entirely.

So, for my part, Hoop Dreams plays as a three-hour protracted reminder of such, and I need to power through these personal issues to discuss its contents.  Regardless of differing circumstances, many of these images and incidents resonate nonetheless.  William Gates' summer sporting camp was a prestigious recruiting program for potential college talent where mine was something run by friendly coaches to keep the team bond high over break, but the sense memory of being angrily lectured over how you have to meet your potential or else you'll amount to nothing stings all the same.  Arthur Agee shows far more potential as a varsity player on his basketball team than I ever did as a member of the JV squad for cross country, yet I still remember the pressure to perform academically and physically.  I never had a talent scout single me out as special while their entire story is predicated on such potential uplift, I took well to study where they struggled, I came from a financially and emotionally stable household where they both felt the impact of poverty around the corner and frequently absent fathers, I'm white and could treat sports as just a thing to do, they're black and got caught in a system where sports were presented as the only avenue to personal advancement.  And despite all of this, despite my lack of serious injury and promise of greatness and any direct parallel beyond "I played a sport in high school," the recurring sight of their coaches getting aggressive in a heated moment was enough to make the majority of Hoop Dreams a very much unwanted trip down Traumatic Memory Lane.

Let us therefore set all this aside, and discuss Hoop Dreams on its own terms, for it is still a remarkable feat of documentary filmmaking that deserves consideration beyond the context of my baggage.  This is, above all else, a remarkably empathetic picture, one originally conceived as a thirty-minute television program for PBS before producer/director saw the potential in his subjects' story well beyond his original commission for a piece about playground basketball.  Such an expansion in scope could easily become like any other documentary following a promising or interesting subject through an atypical period of their life, either fully focused on the subject to exclusion of all else, or filtering other people in their circles as relevant only in how they relate back to the main story.  With Hoop Dreams, James and his crew took advantage of their increased prerogative to film and edit a view into high school athletics and black urban life with an eye for giving everyone in the story a say.  One can be cynical and claim Spike Lee lists this as an essential film for personal reasons (he pulls a brief appearance as a speaker at Gates' summer camp, and audio from Do the Right Thing appears on a radio program), but I believe any aspiring directors should take the film's commitment to a complete picture to heart.

Our core focus is very much on William and Arthur as they are accepted to the prestigious Saint Joseph High School on the strength of their basketball talent, only for William's skill on the court to earn him a sponsor who helps him stick it out to the end despite debilitating knee injuries andnear-misses at greatness, while Arthur's supposed lesser potential costs him a scholarship and forces him back into public education with the private school holding his transcripts and future hostage.  Despite more than half of the story's timeline playing out in the first thirty minutes before James received a grant for true larger scope filming, the film makes the most of its glimpse into these four years by expanding its focus beyond whether or not William and Arthur will perform well in their respective leagues and graduate on time.  It is as much their story as those of Emma Gates and Sheila Agee trying to keep their families afloat amidst long periods of unemployment and uncertain marriages, as of Bo Agee's struggles to stay on the right side of the law for the sake of his wife and children, as of William Crawford attempting to live vicariously through his son's achievements, as of William's girlfriend Catherine and their newborn child.  Its concerns lie not only in the realm of success on the court, but on the exhaustion and frustrations inherent to an underfunded education system, the dual-faced nature of private schools' supposed altruistic uplifting, the unfair pressure to perform, the difficulty of accepting something less when you were promised the world, trying to be more than just your valued physicality.  It will ask and explore questions of just how fair its entire premise is when considered against the value of more substantial social reform just as readily as it will buy into the dream of making the NBA as something worth watching every shot of the semi-finals over.

And importantly, vitally, it does not make villains of its participants, nor martyrs of its subjects.  Regardless of how often Bo slips back into near-compulsive crime, were asked to understand him as a man trying to do right by his family, not a failure or criminal.  William Crawford's relationship to his son is more tragic than disgusting, as we see him a man who missed his shot and never found his center again.  Coach Pangborn of Saint Joseph's is a far, FAR more aggressive, abrasive coach than Coach Bedford of Marshall High, and Bedford's accusations of Pangborn screwing over Arthur because he couldn't profit off the boy as much as he'd have liked land hard and true, yet we also see enough of Pangborn's function as head coach and lead staffer at the private school to understand he goes through such a story with every potential talent he encounters.  There are actions aplenty to flay these people alive over, and justifiably so, if only doing so wouldn't cost Hoop Dreams its vision of William and Arthur as kids doing their best under less than ideal circumstances.  Even without knowing as we do now that neither achieved their golden dream of matching Isiah Thomas and playing for the majors, the film places careful emphasis on how important it is they live their lives according to what's best for them now and in the future, and not forever wallow in the bog of what might've been.  To demonize those who let them down or complicated their lives would be to consequently place shine on them beyond just being teenagers doing their level best - make Pangborn or Bo look worse through open condemnation, and you place William or Arthur on pedestals above what they are.

Certainly, through its willingness to present just how needlessly harsh and punitive student athletic programs can be towards those they tempted with promises of glory, Hoop Dreams isn't at all wishy-washy for its refusal to condemn.  I mean not to claim it thinks the systemic or personal wrongs it observes and presents as guiltless or morally neutral.  Rather, I mean it refuses these moral judgments out of fidelity to the goal of completeness.  Everything here is meant to come across on the same level of persons grappling with their own issues, never invalidating those who cross its camera or implying their personal benefit or punishment would meaningfully change things for those caught in the same situation.  There's temptation aplenty over the course of three hours to find someone who can play the bad guy, and yet we reach William and Arthur's graduations with a lasting sense of these lives as nuanced REAL lives.  All will continue on best they can, regardless of where the road takes them (or took them, in the case of those gone too soon in the following years), and make what comes  their way into worthwhile lives all the same.  Dreams of stardom can motivate one to reach beyond, it it's important to take what you actually grasp no matter what it is, and I believe Hoop Dreams imparts this with a successful totality of purpose better than most documentaries.

It's a withering, difficult film for me thanks to my excess high school baggage, yet I believe it hits so hard precisely because its rounded, detailed portraits of all participants shortens distance and makes the commonalities stand out all the more.

Day Four of the Loft Film Festival - Advocate (2019) and Travelling While Black VR experience (2019)

(Skipping Saturday's screenings kinda sucks on my end, because the presenter announced the judges' having chosen Advocate for the CICAE award right before the screening, and while I'm going to give it a glowing review, finding this out before giving the film a shake for myself feels like it has ever so slightly biased me against it in favor of thinking Aga the better picture.  We'll try and leave that matter for the wrap-up post on Thursday, though, and simply write about the film as seen.)

The greatest trick Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche pull in Advocate is purposefully withholding a critical piece of information until the last moment.  They have, of course, an admirably clever bag of tricks to draw upon throughout, and in deference to the effectiveness of this trick, I shall do the same until towards the end, focusing instead on their other techniques for the time.  Needless to say, all the tricks in the world cannot do squat without a strong subject, and Lea Tsemel is quite worthy of nearly two hours about her life.  The film is divided between her latest cases defending a thirteen-year old Palestinian boy who stabbed two Israeli teenagers and a young Palestinian woman who detonated a bomb that killed nobody but left her mangled, and regaling her life story as a lawyer and human rights activist through media pieces throughout the decades and interviews with her family and clients, who are often one and the same.  In the present day, we see her researching cases, engaging in rapport with her legal team, dealing with press outside the courtroom, counseling her clients, and living her life in the between-spaces, giving the impression of a tough, spirited professional who still embodies great compassion without needing to set a second of it during trials.  In the past, we are perpetually reminded of how the uneasy and violent Israeli  occupation of Palestine has manifested itself in small ways over the years, and understand the importance of even one figure looking behind the decrees of terrorism and inhumanity to try and help those others decry as despicable.

In both modes of documentation, the screen often splits, typically directly along the horizontal middle, showing two different angles on the same event from either vertical slice, or segregating a third of live action footage on the left or right from photographic montages in the remaining two-thirds.  It's a simple technique, one used to increase the density of parsable information in thousands of documentaries, but it has greater impact for what often happens when part of the frame contains Tsemel's clients.  To protect their identities in moments where their faces appear, the filmmakers have commissioned traced-over animations of the live-action footage, rendering a large part of the screen a crinkled mass of paper with inked impressions of people moving through its frame.  Crucially, the paper is not mere drawing paper; it is comprised of rapidly shifting legal documents, court records and written arguments and printed laws, the sort of things Tsemel frequently consults in her line of work.  When the line dividing the client from the solid, present reality takes the same form as the line dividing footage from the past and an interviewee from the present, an entanglement forms.

These clients, though hopeless cases nobody would consider worth defending at first glance, are not just defendants in a trial with the whole nation of Israel set against them.  They are decidedly intertwined with all the lost causes and hopeless cases Tsemel has championed in the past, their fates resting on precedents formed by their attorney and the few like her who think them worth the effort.  Success doesn't just mean freedom or a reduced sentence, it means another stack of papers in the file, joining thousands of others who might help future Palestinian freedom fighters.  Even failure means another well-documented example of injustice, of how the state and the people it represents refuse to hear any possible qualifying evidence or extenuating circumstances, a tiny step forward but a step all the same.  The people Tsemel represents walk through her case histories because they themselves have become part of those histories, for good or ill, and there is perhaps no better way to defend their identities than by constantly reminding the audience of what they will represent legally in decades to come.

And yet, the last time we see Ahmed, the thirteen-year old who stabbed two Jewish boys and plead no intent to kill, the well-worn collage of documents fades away, as does much of the detail, and we only see a young boy's face, rendered with simple black lines against stark white before the slide of an invisible elevator wipes it away.  For they lost the case - Ahmed was tried as an adult and sentenced to a full twelve years.  Leah Tsemel has lost practically all of her cases.  The numerous landmark trials we're introduced to throughout the segments documenting her own history, including the time she defended her own husband for distributing anti-Israeli literature, all ended in failure.  She has lost time and again, counting her victories in the years she has shaved from her clients' sentences, the legal precedents she has set so she can do better next time, the tiniest little things others might only accept as consolation prizes.  It's the only way she can get through it all, and even still, after nearly fifty years' hard work as her state's greatest devil's advocate, she still needs a significant amount of time to process the judge's final ruling that ignored her every argument in favor of reinforcing first impressions.  After all, a young man has to face the realities ahead of him all alone, and a young woman's family feels no recourse when their suicidal daughter and sister is branded a radical terrorist.  And we have to sit there with her, and watch it all play out, and feel it with her from a million miles away.

Advocate does not pretend there is any hope a lone defense lawyer can resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict, or turn the tide of public opinion, or even make the courts care about justice when a Palestinian stands as defendant for a violent crime.  But it does offer us a picture of someone who knows all of this is impossible, and finds reason to continue the fight and scrape away at the problem while protecting and advocating for those who have no one else, while still remaining vibrantly, personably human through it all.  Letting us know Lea Tsemel has stood at the intersection of all these historic cases, inspired so many in her life, fought for decades upon decades simply because she cannot look into suffering eyes and think their plight right, and conveniently forgetting to mention she has only a small pile of relative victories to show for it rather than a blazing record of unqualified wins until the very end forces us to consider those mildly lighter sentences and changes in convicting language as valuable and important as she does.  No matter the ongoing injustice of occupation, what she has done matters.  It has to if any of this is to come to, if not a peaceful end, then a less horrid state.

4.5/5

***

Throughout the last week, I've had a particular picture of Roger Ross Williams' Travelling While Black VR experience in my head.  One hears about an Oculus-enabled piece that takes one through the history and legacy of the discrimination and violence African-Americans experienced on the road throughout the 20th century, one imagines being placed into black shoes to experience such discrimination and violence firsthand.  Facing the reality of what happened firsthand, from the inside, and considering the emotionally straining impact being targeted while minding your own business takes.  On reflection, such an experience would most certainly become exploitative and needlessly salacious, but I could imagine no other form the film would take, and so stuck to the assumption until I actually sat down and strapped on the headset inside the restored Old Pueblo trolley bus.  And boy am I glad that Ross Williams found a far more creative application for the VR tech, because it communicates its ideas  far better than what I pictured.

See, the vast majority of your time in the virtual space of Travelling While Black is spent sitting inside Ben's Chili Bowl, a Washington DC diner named as one of the safe havens for black travelers in The Negro Motorist Green Book.  Though your location within the diner will shift behind fades to black, and occasionally you will find yourself creeping through the back room in the haze of midnight or watching what seems to be the thick smoke of an evening riot while voice-over plays, the point is less transportation to a different time and place, but rather a grounding in the immediate now.  Your viewpoint is that of an observer in the booth while the people next to you recount their stories of life on the road in the mid-20th century, their fears of being killed on a police stop just for being black, the relief they felt whenever they stepped into a space named in the Green Book.  There's brief visual aids in the form of footage playing on the ceiling during some of Sandra Butler-Turesdale's narration, and a moment when you can look to your left during Courtland Cox's segment and see him as a young man reflected in a bus' mirror while the normal diner scene plays to the right, but for the most part?  You are there in the diner, listening as if you were there in the booth with these people, listening to their stories like it's any other day.

The effect is, for someone like me who's never done VR before, perhaps a little too convincing.  Even though I'm pretty sure my headset was fuzzy and out of focus, there were times in my glancing around to take in details that I would lean forward or to the side because I wanted to get a better view of something which caught my eye, only to be reminded the camera was in a static position and would not respond to THOSE kinds of head movements.  Same thing goes for trying to rest my hands on a table that wasn't there so I could listen more comfortably.  On the flip-side of this token, though, the extended segment with Samaria Rice discussing how her son was murdered whilst traveling in 2014 hits particularly hard, because it is difficult to think of yourself as anywhere but in the booth with her, and despite the ability to look anywhere else in the restaurant, I find myself compelled to look her square in the eye as she described every detail of the night.  Perhaps her testimonial was raw and powerful enough to do this in a more conventional filmic experience, but the grounding offered by VR makes it an even more impactful part of the experience than those brief segments that matched my expectations.

Travelling While Black cuts to the heart of the matter, and makes it clear that listening to black voices coming from black spaces and black experiences is more important than vicariously living those experiences in a facsimile of the real thing.  It is not the kind of experience I can rightly rate, for its impact lies beyond the conventions of how I typically judge a work, but I can easily tell you, it is more than worth the time if it comes to your town, or is made available for commercial purchase through Oculus.  I'm even willing to overlook the headache that kicked in halfway through the drive home and persisted for hours afterwards if it meant a chance to sit and listen and feel in this manner.

Day Three of the Loft Film Festival - The Condor and the Eagle (2019)

(OK, so technically it's day FIVE of the fest, but I wasn't here days three and four, so we're going with my count.)

Under normal circumstances, I'd feel more than confident presenting my initial impressions on the film and how its approach to documenting the efforts of indiginous peoples across North and South America to unite their causes and strengthen their voice in combating climate change clashes against my own views on how one should present such information when distributing it to the public.  The circumstances under which I watched The Condor and the Eagle, however, included a presentation by several native activist groups from around the Tucson area, and a lengthy Q&A session with director Clément Guerra and prominently-featured activist Bryan Parras.  Speaking unilaterally without considering what they discussed is wrong, so I shall structure this review around praise of the lengths they've gone to realize their goals, and then critique based around where it falls short in my eyes.  S'the best, fairest shake I can give them, and after the Q&A I'd say they deserve it.

So, it is highly admirable that The Condor and the Eagle seeks to empower voices from all over the planet.  Guerra and Parras spent the last two years travelling from indigenous community to indigenous community, chronicling how corporate greed, lax government standards, and environmental racism have done irreparable harm to each.  As noted during one answer, there is no European voice speaking over the subjects or much in the way of scientific discussion about potential technological solutions - the film is almost pure appeal to emotion, and I think it benefits from taking this route.  When faced with the injustice of multiple corporations burying oil spills and dump sites they've been ordered to clean beneath shallow mounds of earth, or the repeating refrain of segments focused on the fight to overturn a pipeline's construction or halt a city counsel's decision to give a local polluter a major tax break ending with a card noting how these colossal efforts still ended in failure, it is good and right to strike somewhere deeper than logical thought.  It is also good and right to focus that strike on a sense of togetherness, of letting the world know there are still millions who are disenfranchised by this climate violence in a myriad spread of ways (there's a brief but impactful segment about how the construction of a drilling facility on native land strongly correlated with the rise of women disappearing and turning up dead), and in spite of what I am about to say, encouraging the people to focus their own efforts on maintaining those bonds and not letting outside forces splinter their movement or weaken their resolve is a great message to make your take-away, both in the film and in the discussion afterwards.

However, looking at The Condor and the Eagle as a documentary like any other I might see, I do not think this enough.  All respect due to Guerra and Parras for wanting to keep the mood light with the supporting animations and their focus on unity, but artificially accelerated climate change IS, as they note, a really big problem that we are running out of time on.  Though I am sure they work closely with and support plenty of people who give their all to make a substantial difference through on-the-ground, in-the-courthouse-and-legislature political activism, this is not much reflected in the film.  I'm glad we get to see so many communities, but as with Always In Season a few days ago, I wish many were on-screen longer.  I understand the impulse to keep things light so as not to cause the audience despair, but more causes we're shown are lost than won, and the utter devastation of the losses accelerates the problem far more than the often-temporary victories brake it.  If we are to appeal to emotion here, we SHOULD lean into the dark, the depressing, the despairing, and we should come out the other side ANGRY.  If one is to speak on so large a stage about climate change, there should be far more than "Stick it out, keep doing what you're doing, and we'll beat this thing!"  There should be outrage, horror, a sickened tour through these ills, many a montage of hidden polluted pits and devastated towns and corporations getting away with it all.  There should be a direct, specific call to action motivated by how fucking furious we are that the battle is speeding towards a total loss for all players because the opposition refuses to budge unless we do more.

Understand, the film already contains ample amounts of what I describe, in the form of news clips and interviews with passionate activists and numerous vistas ruined by the site of a flaming smokestack in the uncomfortably-close distance.  The problem, as I see it, is one of overarching tone.  I already had my misgivings when the film ended on a series of protests that transitioned into an animation of hands from the north and south uniting around a broken earth and healing all the damage in an instant, but I could chalk this up to visual shorthand.  Listening to the Q&A session and hearing Guerra discuss his intentions for the film, I think there is simply a fundamental difference in how we view the purpose of documentary filmmaking about so massive a subject as climate change.  He wants to get away from the pessimistic views of other climate change docs and focus on the positives of human interaction, I think it dreadfully vital to emphasize the looming danger above all else.  And he and his co-director wife Sophie has very much done both in this film, but their lack of specificity and his (if I may be so bold as to characterize it as such) somewhat dodgy approach to answering questions about actualizing concrete plans for change on a widespread scale make it fairly clear to me he never had any intention of going where I think his documentary might have become most impactful.

This is fine.  As said, it is a difference in philosophies, one clearly not shared by the audience members around me, who were very audibly (and visibly, once the lights came up) impacted by the experience.  There are those who already do far more than I to spread awareness who thought this great, those who simply came out to see a documentary with its creators in tow who thought it great, those with direct ties to the communities depicted who thought it great, and in the end all of their reactions matter more than the that of some dweeb with a blog.  I desire righteous anger and withering, difficult-to-stomach runtimes from documentaries about subjects I think deserving of righteous anger and marathon audience pummelings, and Guerra and Parras and all the other people who are there on the ground think a lighter touch better.  All good, all fair.  This being a space for reviews and myself being a critic in this space, however, requires me to push my own opinion at least a little, and to my mind, The Condor and the Eagle packs some serious wallops throughout, yet overall takes too light, "get out there and march" over directly suggesting tangible actions worthy of the crisis' severity approach to ascend beyond a good first-time work.  If the planet is indeed changing because of the actions of the wealthy and powerful at a rate that will not sustain modern human society as we know it, if not human life period at so rapid a rate, it DESERVES every available documentarian bellowing with shredded vocal cords from the rooftops for immediate, radical action.

And just so I avoid the risk of hypocrisy:

DO NOT TOLERATE THIS NONSENSE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, ANY OF YOU, INDIGINEOUS OR OTHERWISE.  HELL, INDIGENOUS FOLKS AND MULTIPLE OTHER MINORITY GROUPS ACROSS THE COUNTRY ARE ALREADY MOBILIZED. SO THIS IS PROBABLY BETTER ADDRESSED TO ANYONE IN A RACIAL, ECONOMIC, OR SPIRITUAL MAJORITY.  MARCHING AND PROTESTING IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP.  ORGANIZE.  FIND THOSE IN YOUR COMMUNITY WHO CAN MAKE THE COMPLEX LEGAL AND SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES AT PLAY EASY FOR THE MASSES TO UNDERSTAND, FORM A REGULAR, WELL-ORGANIZED GROUP DEDICATED TO STOPING THE PIPELINES AND REFINERIES AND DRILLING PLATFORMS AND WHATEVER ELSE IS COMING YOUR WAY, AND FIGHT THEM IN THE COURTS.  IF FUNDS RUN SHORTS, DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING IN YOUR POWER TO SCROUNGE MORE - DONATION DRIVES, CHARITY EVENTS, APPEALS TO THE SYMPATHETIC MONIED IN YOUR COMMUNITY, ANYTHING.  MAKE SURE YOU HAVE GOOD LAWYERS, ARE ABLE TO ATTEND ALL RELEVANT MEETINGS, AND SPEAK FIRMLY  IF THE BATTLE GOES SOUTH AND YOU STILL TRULY BELIEVE THIS IS WRONG, DO NOT ALLOW IT TO BE BUILT AS LONG AS YOU CAN.  APPEAL TO HIGHER AUTHORITIES, CHECK WITH YOUR LOCAL MUNICIPAL AND COUNTY OFFICES ON THE REGULAR TO FIND ANY VIOLATIONS THE CONTRACTORS COMMIT AND JUMP ON THEM LIKE SHARKS.  BLOCK CONSTRUCTION PHYSICALLY IF YOU MUST, BUT DO NOT ENDANGER YOURSELVES OR THE WORKERS ASSIGNED BY THE REAL ENEMY TO DO THE JOB.

BEYOND THIS, VOTE.  VOTE FOR POLITICIANS AND POLICIES AND RESOLUTIONS THAT WILL HURT THE POLLUTERS MOST.  IF ANY POLITICIAN YOU VOTE INTO OFFICE DOES NOT KEEP THEIR PROMISES VIS A VIS CLIMATE CHANGE (OR VIS A VIS ANYTHING REALLY BUT WE'VE GOT A FOCUS HERE), HARANGUE THEM ON THAT AND DO YOUR BEST TO HOLD THEM TO THEIR WORD UNTIL THEY DO WHAT YOU VOTED FOR THEM TO DO, OR LEAVE OFFICE.  IF AN OPPOSING CANDIDATE WINS AND DOES NOT TAKE ACTION, STILL TAKE THEM TO TASK - JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE LESS LIKELY TO LISTEN DOES NOT MEAN ONE SHOULD LEAVE THEM BE.  IF YOU ARE IN GOVERNMENT YOURSELF AT EVEN A LOCAL LEVEL, WORK TO MAKE SURE LEGISLATION AND RESOLUTIONS ARE INTRODUCED THAT WILL FURTHER REGULATE NEGATIVELY-IMPACTFUL CONSTRUCTION AND POLLUTIVE PRACTICES IN YOUR AREA.  IF YOU HAVE THE FINANCIAL CAPACITY, KNOWLEDGE-BASE, AND WHEREWITHAL TO RUN FOR OFFICE YOURSELF, DO THAT.  BUT SERIOUSLY, SINCE IT'S THE OPTION MOST READILY AVAILABLE TO THE VAST MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION, VOTE.  AND WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT, FIGHT AGAINST PRACTICES THAT KEEP THE MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES MOST IMMEDIATELY AND WORST IMPACTED BY CLIMATE CHANGE FROM EASILY VOTING TOO.

JUST... I DON'T WANT TO PUT DOWN THE PRACTICES OF MARCHING AND PROTESTING, BECAUSE GETTING VISIBILITY INCREASED AND REACHING OUT TO A LARGER POPULATION WHO WOULD OTHERWISE NOT TUNE IN IS A NOBLE, WORTHWHILE GOAL ALL ON ITS OWN.  BUT AS I SAY, IF THIS REALLY IS AS TERRIBLE AS THE WORST STORIES MAKE IT OUT TO BE, AND BELIEVE ME, IT IS, THEN DIRECT ACTION LIKE THIS IS THE BEST.  AND I AIN'T REALLY THE PERSON TO LAY OUT THE PERFECT TWELVE-STEP PLAN FOR GETTING SHIT DONE, I'M JUST SOME GUY WHO'S WRITING THIS IN A SINGLE ACTIVE BUST NEAR MIDNIGHT IN A TUCSON HOTEL ROOM, BUT I HONESTLY FEEL LIKE SOMETHING TO THIS TUNE WAS NECESSARY IN THE CONDOR AND THE EAGLE, EVEN IF GUERRA FELT A LIGHTER APPROACH WAS BETTER.  HE COULD'VE ACHIEVED THAT AND PROVIDED THIS INFORMATION, NO NEED TO GET INTO MY PREFERRED DOOM AND GLOOM APPROACH.  DO SHIT THAT HITS WHERE IT HURTS AND REFUSE TO TAKE "NO" OR "MAYBE LATER" OR "YEAH BUT ALSO NO" AS ANSWERS.

And after all that!

3.5/5

Night!

Saturday at the Borderland Film Festival - Shorts, Los Truenos de San Juan (2017), and A Day Without a Mexican (2004)

Necessary disclaimer: I had a uniquely bad experience here.  The website for the Borderland Film Fest said there would be a showing of Bad Hombres from 2019 at 10:30, so I arrived at the theater at that time.  An employee told me the showing was actually at 11, which wasn't too big a surprise - the Film at the Fence is advertised as being at 8 in the evening, while the paper's story on the festival notes 7.  So, I hung out waiting for the picture to begin... and waited... and waited... and waited until a large group of people arrived at 12 to watch the shorts.  After nearly hour of this, I was roundabout ready to go, only for them to announce they'd be skipping the last short in favor of screening Los Truenos de San Juan, which supposedly ran yesterday.  As such, I was in the theater FAR longer than expected, and got quite antsy through the documentary.  i don't much want to let the experience negatively color my views or result in an unfair post, so the following reviews will be as positive as I can make them, to offset a problem I created for myself.

***

Rapid fire short reviews, lessgo!

-The Battle of Ambos, Nogales is an amateur short interpreting the 1918 conflict that led to the first border wall between the United States and Mexico through music, film, and dance.  A lot of the techniques at play are those you'd expect from a first-time production (particularly the way footage occasionally reverses, and the deliberate over-saturation to the point of eradicating all colors save glaring white in many shots), but it's interesting how they dug into the the loss of life and human cost of the event without making much of the actual fighting.  The twirling specter of death and fire dancer who marks the last frame by dancing out of sight are rather nice touches, and it'd be neat to see what the creators do once properly established five or ten years down the line.  I would've liked a cleaner view of the short, considering the file seemed mildly corrupted, but the jerky nature of presentation adds to the feel of something fully home-grown when contrasted against the more polished material presented afterwards.

-Loving South (advertised as Minuteman on the site, and noted by director Oliver Rendon as having undergone multiple title changes at the screening) is a slice of a border patrol agent's evening as he goes about his tasks between picking up groups of illegals crossing the border.  There's racially-charged, xenophobic talk over his radio, but he himself seems the sort of man to just do his job, dropping off a young man he caught before the start without a word, and calmly accepting the next assignment at the end.  In the seven minutes in-between, we watch him putter about his sparse trailer, attending to chores and putting his thoughts in order with minimal commentary.  He's in-between spaces here, with none of the hats his job requires worn at home, and it's quite an interesting perspective to take.  Maybe there's some sadness to his movements, maybe willful obliviousness to the larger system he engages in, maybe he's just taken a job to try and keep his house in order.  Whatever it is, when he's not out in the field and just doing ordinary tasks about his bland domicile, he's still just a guy all the same.

-El pulso de la tierra (The Pulse of the Earth) was a little hard for me to watch, due to the up-close horse castration scene, complete with dog eating the freshly severed testicle at the end.  The frankness with which Fernando Alvarez presents the event, though, coupled with the short as a whole's tendency towards getting in tune with the natural world through appreciating horses, helps it feel more natural.  We're making a point about the ebb and flow of life out on the ranch, to the point of having sex in the middle of the desert shortly after the castration scene, so why not film it with such up-front honesty?  I was more than OK with the skinning scene in Aga yesterday, so I should be down with this castration scene - it's something ranch-hands do as a matter of course all the time, so why should I feel compelled to look away?

-Figures that in a group of shorts with tons of extended periods of silence and minimal dialogue, the one with heaviest on narration to the point of demanding your comprehension to get the most out of it (like, y'know, pretty much anything with narration) is the one with no subtitles.  Curse you, shoddy high school foreign language programs.  Fortunately, Juan Hernandez's Bajo el Agua (Underwater) is also a very well-shot compilation of black-and-white landscape shots and close-ups, with an obvious throughline of a woman discussing memories of her father, so while I couldn't understand a full sentence of narration, the emotional impact hit me all the same.  I really appreciate the shots of a decrepit house in the midst of a lake, the studies of an old man's face that creep in as the short goes on, and the way shots of a woman I presume stands in for the narrator increasingly come into focus before a fully-sharp image right before we watch her once-more-blurry figure walk into the sunset.  S'a good experience, regardless of whether you're behind the language barrier, and I fully understand the mix-up regarding subtitles when they were also showing this down in Sonora, where English-as-a-first-language/non-Spanish-speaking audiences are a minority, if present at all.

-José López Aramburo's Camuco was, unfortunately, not shown due to technical difficulties.  Alas.

***

Santiago Maza knows exactly what he has in Los Truenos de San Juan (The Thunderers of San Juan).  A good documentary needs a strong, unique hook to get you drawn in as soon as possible, and as hooks go, San Juan de la Vega's annual festival in tribute to San Juan Bautista is among the more immediately eye-catching.  Few religious ceremonies involve sledgehammers with illegal flashbang powder on the head being swung into the ground thousands of times over the course of several days, producing a deafening, thunder-like bang with each impact.  For all his focus on the cultural context and the reasons why people are so willing to risk limbs to celebrate in this way, Maza knows the allure of metal blasting powder against solid ground and rail irons is deeply, almost primally compelling, and so makes sure to seed his documentary with regular footage of anonymous townsfolk slamming sledges and producing white powder clouds in the aftermath.  What passes for climax in the documentary format even involves a long montage of hammer slammers cut and scored to classical music, peaking with a train running over dozens of powder bags in  a row.

I wouldn't have many words for Los Truenos de San Juan if it were just about the joys of detonation, and Maza brings along a fair amount extra.  He explores the less explosively spectacular aspects of the festival with roaming tours of its reenactments of historical events said to have involved San Juanito.  The people who produce the powder bags are given ample time to discuss their tradition, how they've seen it develop over their lifetimes, and voice their concerns about whether or not the children will take up their mantle in the coming years.  There's a good deal of footage showing certain prominent members of the community negotiating with the police for safer practices, while still working a little under the table to ensure things aren't too restricted.  Interrogation of larger issues pertaining to the town's unwillingness to cooperate with the law or willingness to put up with the harm that does befall those who get unlucky or judge their strike wrong is fairly minimal, but I still go with the documentary for exploring a unique subject I did not know about prior to watching with a decently comprehensive eye.

It's one of those docs where you definitely walk in on promise of b-roll footage, and stay for the stories and personalities.  What interrogation Maza does engage in reveals a community with a strong love of their tradition and a belief in the need to carry it on regardless of danger, tempered... or, since tempering implies strengthening, perhaps broadened... by the youthful wrecklessnesss necessary to swing a heavy weighted tool into shatterable rocks or bouncing steel beams with some pretty strong explosive substances in-between.  One might not learn much about the big picture around any of the issues it touches on, but one learns more than plenty about a slice of culture that often doesn't get this level of focus, and learns in an up-close and personal way too.  S'nice spending eighty minutes in this town, learning about its traditions and seeing the people exercise their practices.  And it all goes boom in the end with enjoyable frequency, so you're not liable to nod off while watching either!

***

(Warning: Bad writing ahead.)

Frankly, I think A Day Without a Mexican has too much going on for its own good.  The film, about a mysterious pink fog descending around California and causing all persons of Hispanic descent to vanish without a trace, already has the baseline thesis of showing how vital those from south of the border are to the local economy in a humorous way.  It already chooses to express this through an ensemble narrative looking at, among other things, a woman whose Mexican husband and half-Mexican son vanished while her half-Mexican daughter remained behind, and her sister who tries to take advantage of the moment to push her apocalyptic religious beliefs on others; a Hispanic reporter who seems to be the last Latina in California and the massive media circus around her survival; an old rancher with a xenophobic son who finds his family ties tested by the economic crisis; a Senator tires to use the situation to ascend to the governorship while his family struggles with having to work like normal people; and a set of border patrol agents whose lives are upended by the lack of illegal immigrants to chase after.  All of these storylines are required to be straight-up humorous, ironically sincere, and genuinely emotional at various points in the film, all cross over with one another at some point, and I'm pretty sure I've missed one or two plot threads in here.  This is the "what the film already has going on" paragraph.

In addition to all of this, director Sergio Arau slathers the film with a grab-bag of asides, genre digressions, and editing oddities that confuse the tone something awful.  Many characters have a background in news media, so we are afforded frequent glimpses into what television has become without contact to the outside world.  The result is a mishmash of desperate reaches for content, wild conspiracy theories played for laughs, a man who looks like John Goodman in The Big Lewbowski ranting about statistics inside a cheap TV frame, and occasional dips into mockumentary footage.  Despite this framing device, the film also makes time for quick little montages of California descending into chaos separate from the media's watchful eye, with a few skits repeating throughout.  When these asides become mainline intersections with the plot, they produce bizarre subplots like the government planning increasingly bizarre experiments on the surviving reporter under the supervision of a crackpot TV scientist.  Through this all, the film makes frequent pauses to throw up informative title cards after a particularly misinformed or stupid-sounding line, to make sure we know the score on whatever was just said.  These many, MANY chunks of content produce frequent laughs, but I have a hard time saying they're particularly graceful in their style.

Normally, I'd hit the wrap-up point ans say A Day Without a Mexican is an overstuffed, unfocused package that holds together mostly because it has so much going and trades in such cheap hooks, it'd be hard for something to NOT land every now and then.  It gets into some convoluted territory towards the end for reaching the "now is when we are serious and make our big points" moments, but rallies around a perfectly ludicrous moment for a finale, and earns some respect for digging up so much to throw at the wall.  Review done, publish button pressed.

Thing is, after watching at the border last night, several people called it a great movie, asked me if I thought so too, and I responded, "Yes."  My intent here is to give the film a 2.5 or a 3, which I would normally not qualify as a great movie.  Why respond in such a manner, beyond the obvious answer of, "There's no reason to pull down people who enjoyed a film more than you did, and keeping the conversation light is more important than spitting out your full critical opinion right then and there"?  Honestly, two things.  One, while I don't think Arau and Yareli Arizmendi's script is particularly smart or graceful, and do in fact find it broad to the point of trying to embody every single joke you could make about the border situation in 2004 at the expense of a consistent tone, it IS written in response to a complicated international relations problem that is frequently boiled down to "Those people bad, keep they out" by proponents of quick, "easy" solutions both then and now.  In its way, a film which looks at this situation, determines to find the comedy beneath the surface, and goes about the task with every tool it can manage at a downright manic pace is making the reasonable choice.  Flinging out actually informative statistics alongside snarky asides like "Contrary to popular belief, Israel is NOT part of Mexico," asking serious-minded characters to stand next to broad prop comedy, being anything and everything under the sun related to migrants across the US/Mexico border accurately reflects the reality of the situation, and makes double mockery of those who think simply throwing up a higher wall is the answer when there are so, so many factors at play.

And that's really the other reason I felt compelled to agree A Day Without a Mexican is great where I wouldn't otherwise: the wall.  As with El Norte last year, where the story of two siblings trying to survive after an illegal border crossing was enhanced by facing away from the wall and hearing the soundtrack duplicated from across the line, watching this picture with the barrier that stands as symbol for every ignorant and hateful attitude it rails against right behind the screen makes its otherwise cheesily-delivered message more impactful.  You tear your eye from the picture for a moment, look through the slats, and see, as it argues somewhat inarticulaely, yes, there ARE people on the other side just like any other, watching this kinda dumb movie and having a great time when surrounded by others.  With the stretch of wall in Nogales featuring yet more barbed-wire than it did at this time last year, and with international relations ever-deteriorating under the Trump administration, it's worth taking the time to be there and think about how, for all the anger and complex factors making any simple solutions impossible and dangerous to entertain, so much of what has fueled the fires over the last century has been little more than needless hatred towards people whose place of birth means they call themselves Mexicans where we call ourselves Americans.

It's a weird way to defend a film, I know, and I've descended into inarticulate, wide-swiping techniques myself in trying to do so.  Saying the film makes a good experience and a proper capper to a day of films in Nogales because it reminds you of how simple and complex the situation is seems paradoxical.  The alchemical processes by which a film I wouldn't otherwise like too much becomes a great time are weird and convoluted and not for a mind that has been operating on very little sleep of late to properly understand.  I can just ramble it all out onto the page, hope it makes sense, and say we really should be trying to smooth out the process of border crossing with more ports of entry and attempts at foreign diplomacy focused on addressing the reasons people come here rather than just throwing up more defenses and encouraging a culture of xenophobia.  That's all.  G'night!

(Best joke in this movie is the sleazy salesman's commercial hawking all the leftover merchandise.  Seen those guys on local TV one too many times.)

2.5/5 for the film, 5/5 for the experience.

Day Two of the Loft Film Festival - Aga (2018), Always In Season (2019), and Hjärtat (2018)

No mincing words here: Aga is easily my pick for film to win the CICAE Award.  After today, there's still three other films in competition I've yet to see, but it's hard to imagine any of them ousting this one as most worthy of the honor.  It is a remarkably complete work, covering all aspects of its subjects' lives across the physical and personal, big picture and inner lives, and all the more remarkable for being such a slow-paced, quiet film that we don't even learn anyone's name until close to halfway through.  Aga is a joy to look at, to listen to, to consider on all levels, and if the three judges I've sat beside through these five screenings thus far somehow don't agree, then that's perfectly fine, they know quite a bit more about film and art than I do - but I shall be quite cross with them nonetheless!

Aga is the story of Nanook and Sedna, an elderly couple who live together in a modest yurt within the Arctic Circle.  Their lives are full of work and hardship, requiring strong hands and stern will to obtain food, maintain shelter, carve anything and everything they need from raw materials, and stay ahead of the harsh environment.  Things have gotten quite hard of late, for Nanook is slowing physically and losing his memory, to say nothing of how he spots ominous signs of warming climate and dwindling animal population that often leave his efforts fruitless.  Sedna is presently nursing a grave case of frostbite on her side, though it seems she does not let Nanook know this.  For all these obstacles, they still continue on, practicing survival as taught to them so many decades ago, even without anyone to pass it to themselves.  They are happy to continue with their lot in life, but are definitely marked by the sense of this all coming to an end when they do.

The modern world rarely encroaches on their domicile, and when it does, it is loud, loud as hell.  The passage of a plane overhead, the tread of a snowplow in the distance, or the sound of their son's radio when he comes to visit round the middle cause the soundtrack to explode with droning sounds well beyond the norm.  Aga's soundtrack is by no means a quiet composition, dominated as it is by bursts of noise from Nanook and Sedna's day-to-day tasks, yet the consistency of noise from modern machinery and devices makes all the difference.  There is no pause for breath in the globe below their home, no need to stop for the detail work.  Auditory expulsions run on and on and on, granting the film the air of something immense and powerful turning its gears far away from their home, though not quite so far enough away to keep it from impacting their lives.  Much of the forces leading to Nanook and Sedna's present difficulties are the results of manmade forces far beyond the scope of their humble lives, up to and including the absence of their children.  While Sergei's absence from home lacks a mystery of motive like his sister's (he has a job in the city, so of course he won't stick to the yurt), he still leaves a spattering of oil outside the shelter upon his departure .

We're never privy to why Aga is so estranged from her parents - the knowledge that something broke in the past and cost everyone something precious is enough.  Once we fully understand how deeply her loss pains her parents, though, Milko Lazarov turns his exacting style to exploring how Nanook can do right by his daughter again.  Stretches of the film concern Nanook and Sedna's storytelling traditions, the elderly couple conjuring fantastic visions of ancient stories and semi-prophetic dreams as the camera focuses on the effect they cast over the listener, which is soon followed by a realistic exploration of how these tales unfold on the next day's dawning.  The old folk tale Nanook learnt from  his father and passed to his son about a hunter whose words to a mystical reindeer brought plenty to the land only brings further reminder of how he will not become the wise, mighty hunter destined to return the world to its previous state, while Sedna's dream of following a polar bear who became a man into a cavern of unspeakable light and beauty is soon mirrored in Nanook's efforts to reconnect with Aga at the diamond mine.  This story has the character of an old Inuit folk tale, but is accompanied by Nanook musing about how the music on their son's radio must have been composed by someone with great suffering weighing upon their heart, and is soon followed by his own suffering being scored by grand orchestral music as he attends to his final needs and accepts help from an ice road trucker to reach his destination.  I'm a particular fan of that sequence, for the trucker's slow, methodical attendance the the demands of his job and his fondness for telling stories reflect Nanook's life so well, showing how, despite the fundamental divide between worlds, some of the spirit still survives.

For a time, I considered the enormous, booming score during the third act a weakness, a reason to consider Aga slightly less than five stars.  The film is so very much a near-documentary-like moodpiece otherwise, concerned with the quiet moments of two elderly lovers lying beside one another, an old man exhausted earlier than he's used to by a routine task, an old woman tending to her illness with silent dignity.  Drawing orchestral music from The Revenant to demand we know how to feel at the moment of greatest tragedy seems antithetical to its overall goal, something ill suited to a film so dedicated to losing figures in the bottom corner of the screen before focusing on their faces or tools of their lives in beautiful, close-up tableaux.  On consideration, the choice seems perfect for so complete a film.  Aga embraces the beauty and nobility in the lives Nanook and Sedna lead, lovingly depicting them skinning an animal caught in a trap for sustenance and a potential present for their daughter, but it recognizes how simply persisting in this way of life will lead to their succumbing to old age and the losses imposed by the outside world, and terminate all they have built across untold generations.  Acknowledging how they are linked to modern times, through their progeny, its negative effects on their lives, and the new emotional mindsets it allows, without sacrificing the fundamentals of who they were, is what allows for the beautiful reunion and final aerial shot of a hole as big as the world, with all the light from the stars concentrated in a single weeping woman, the sight of her blotting out sense and memory of all else.

It is an utter, unqualified triumph of observational, humanistic filmmaking.  I support it not only for the CICAE Award, but for success as Bulgaria's submission for Best Foreign Picture at the Oscars.  Sight-unseen on all other submissions, I'm even in its corner for the win, it's that good.  If you're in Tucson, mark out time for the other showing Tuesday at five.  If not, find out when it's playing near you, or available for rental/purchase online whenever it's made ready for such, watch it, and love it.  Please.

(What happened to the dog, though, someone please tell me what happened to the dog, I need to know.)

5/5

***

I did not know about the Moore's Ford lynching reenactments before this film.  I'm ashamed to say I did not know about the Moore's Ford lynching in the first place before this film, but that is rather expected due to my background, location within the country, and participation in a school system that has largely failed to give adequate due to real injustices in American history in favor of an overly distant view of the nation's past.  Learning about past lynchings in specific and seeing photographs of the grim, horrible results is, however disheartening and disturbing, expected in a documentary interrogating the history of 20th-century lynchings to give context to a 21st-century case.  The lynching reenactment, however, is presented without full context first, in the form of a woman watching footage of the event's murder and mutilation portion sans explanation, before a little card comes up identifying her as a lynching reenactor, which threw the whole theater for a loop.  It's something else watching a group of older white men in Klan hoods dragging screaming black couples through the woods while a black crowd watches, screaming slurs and mocking their oncoming deaths, and not knowing what the hell is going on.  Captures the unspeakable horror of knowing so many can so easily deny this unforgivable chapter of American history in a way less emotionally direct methods could probably not.

Always In Season intermingles three investigative lines together, following the reenactment and fresh federal investigations of the Moore's Ford lynchings in Georgia, the lynching of Claude Neal and how it relates to the history of lynchings as a whole, and the case surrounding the death of Lennon Lacy in 2014, ruled a suicide by the police by strongly suspected by his family and community as a modern-day lynching.  Director Jacqueline Olive apparently started the project in 2009 as an investigation into lynchings as a historical concept, and gradually shifted focus to the Lacy case as it occurred and developed mid-filming.  I'm of two minds about the decision, personally.  On the one, so deeply entangling the Lacy case with the other two major strands is absolutely the right decision, as it immediately communicates how these injustices have not vanished into the fog of history or ceased to damage marginalized lives in the modern day, contrary to what many in-power white interview subjects note.  The outrage Lacy's mother, her lawyer, and her reverend express over how the SBI and local law enforcement placed minimal effort into the case echoes the willing complacence from authorities and media figures in days past when lynchings were advertised with mail cards and plainly described on the following morning, and witnessing their testimonies alongside Danny Glover's narrated recounting of disgusting historical documents around the Neal case makes the effect all the more wrenching.

On the other, attempting all of this in a documentary of a mere 90 minutes does not seem enough.  The effect is already difficult to stare directly in the face, but doing so gives the impression of insufficient runtime to fully cover all topics.  Lacy's case in particular feels somewhat shortchanged, like there's multiple other angles to explore, other voices to hear in specific we just can't find time to showcase.  These events and the public's ignorance of their historical import/lasting present effects could easily support another half hour.  It would be a half-hour of emotionally wearying, moral faith-testing collective agony given form through light and sound, yet I believe seeing and imbibing more can only lead to fuller understanding, stronger emotional reactions, potentially even stronger calls to arms.

If the worst I can say about Always In Season is that it needs to show more harrowing photographic evidence, contain more eye-opening interviews, bring past and present even closer together than it already does, then I should think any potential weakness lies with calling final cut on an already difficult film too soon.  It's a difficult picture to consider for the CICAE alongside the others here, being a documentary of very real injustice and loss in a way that doesn't quite fairly compare with narrative fiction.  Gonna take some careful consideration when making the final judgement call, both from myself and the panel officially doing so.  I think it a powerful experience all the same, with plenty moments to equal the big shock of seeing the reenactment for the first time, many of which are far, far worse in their context and implication than watching an actor rip a black baby doll from a woman's fake womb and smash it to the ground.

4/5

***

Hjärtat (The Heart) is one fuck of a horny film.  Quite literally, as main character Mika (played by director Fanni Metelius) opens the picture by discussing how she simply doesn't masturbate, finding as she does greater pleasure in one-on-one sex of any kind, even if it's of the passing casual sort.  When she falls in love with big city art student Tesfay (Ahmed Berhan), she upends her life to be with him, making sweeping promises about spending the rest of their lives together... at least until it becomes clear that Mika needs sex far, far more often than Tesfay does.  There's quite a lot motivating her to stay with him and his deepening funk across the first and second acts that sees her acting out for attention and him going deeper into his viddy gams rather than engaging in intimacy, but whenever it comes to increasingly angry words, the conversation always centers around the sex.  Mika doesn't seem to know how to express her pent-up frustrations with Tesfay's numerous inadequacies or the hole she feels in her life without presenting it as a disappointment over not screwing one another as often as she'd like.  When the couple DO have sex, it's shot in such a way as to emphasize the naked, sticky closeness of it all, yet rarely goes all the way, cutting off on an interruption or a shift in the mood before what its eye and Mika's character really want.

As an idea, I'm all about Hjärtat and its frank exploration of a couple who really do love one another slowly realizing their incompatibility in the long periods between passionate highs.  S'the kind of relationship drama I live for, and it ends in much the same way as Blue is the Warmest Color, which used the same final beats to utterly blow me away.  As an executed film, I find Metelius' work frustrating, approaching average, unfortunately.  The chemistry between Metelius and Berhan seems off to my eye - the necessary emotional deadness between them at their low points works just fine, but the complimentary highs register at the same level due to their subdued approaches, and leaves me unable to really get behind their situation.  Certain key events seem shot more for the sake of enjoying their excess than saying much about the characters' lives, the appearance of title cards at fairly odd intervals to mark the relationship's development are often at odds with the pace of how it plays out on-screen (I swear, three of them crop up in a twenty-minute period after we've gone without one for forty), and the third act simply doesn't land for me.  It follows Mika on a recovery vacation with friends that sees her hit rock bottom and rise back to self-confidence, only to lead to another encounter with Tesfay which ends exactly how one would expect.  There's some daring to how their relationship finally ends on mutually painful yet agreeable terms, but as third act decisions go, dedicating a twenty-minute block to a character partying her brains out amidst the wildest excesses yet for an ultimate payoff of "they couldn't change at all, actually," is a real tweak to the eyes.

Maybe it ain't for me, maybe I'm starting to feel the effects of driving up and back to watch multiple films in a single day and write about them in the evening.  Maybe maybe maybe, but all the maybes in the world can't change how my experience with Hjärtat was less than ideal.  S'not bad by any stretch of the imagination - I'd wager it handles its romance with a greater degree of emotional maturity and tenderness than many other films out there, and I enjoy how the film sees Mika truly self-actualize after all she's been through.  It takes the edge off of some of the more pornographic-feeling sexual scenes by giving us a moment of private sexual expression that works for the character.  "Good with problems that keep me from engaging as much as I'd like" is still disappointing for a film festival entry, though, and I can only really say there's a good possibility others who hook to this stuff stronger or easier will likely enjoy the film more than I.  This is still a positive, recommending review; just one with an asterisk noting a lack of passion from one reviewer.

(Big points for featuring a scene wherein Mika and Tesfay try and fail to bond over one of the Wolfenstein games for XBox, though.  Gotta wonder, given his age - when Tesfay says it's a remake of a game he played as a kid, does he mean Wolfenstein 3D, or the 2009 Wolfenstein remake?)

3.5/5