Steady Diet of Film

Short Films: Johnny Kelly's "The Seed"

Commissioned by Adobe to promote their Creative Suite 4, The Seed is Johnny Kelly's short animation about nature’s life cycle.

Why the financial collapse is good for documentary film

Inspired by the recent fury directed at Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner we here at Steady Diet of Film have elected to take a brief break from dwelling on the misfortune and anxiety of the present economic climate. Instead, let us examine some of the good news for documentary/independent film-makers within the crisis.

1a. Venture capital removed from the financing process

Back when the economy was (artificially) good and there were millions of dollars in hedge fund proceeds with nowhere to go, many independent film producers found themselves on the receiving end of no- to low-strings attached investments. This money came from people with little to no interest in long-term careers in the film industry but who were excited to see their name listed as an Executive Producer on the big screen and the VIP treatment they received when visiting a film set. Unfortunately the projects that were most likely to attract this kind of investment were the ones generated from the odious and rapidly failing "Sundance model" of attaching A-list actors and actresses to projects imbued (not always legitimately) with credibility due to their lower budgets and quirky subject matter (thereby insulating the actor's reputation when they chose to follow up by doing movies with talking dogs). Films produced under these circumstances were unofficially dubbed the Sundance model because producers hoped their films would springboard from the annual Park City film festival to plush studio distribution deals.

In recent years, the viability of this model weakened. Fewer films were recouping their enormous purchasing prices. A few examples of spectacular Sundance failures are chronicled by the Onion AV Club here. As the Sundance model began losing steam in the narrative film market it was being applied to the documentary form with mixed results. A-list celebrities began doing voiceovers, on-camera appearances and promotional tours for documentaries with which they seemed to have little conceptual involvement.

Distribution is an incredibly lop-sided business tilting towards DVD sales. Very few films recoup their production, print and marketing costs theatrically. Yet they are forced to have some kind of run in theaters in order to garner press attention and avoid the stigma of going straight to DVD. Smaller films work with even tighter margins to ensure successful DVD sales. Ancillary revenues (such as television rights, pay-per-view as well as the embryonic but generally optimistic world of digital streams) pay out a much larger proportion of a film's final proceeds.

In the mid-aughts celebrity involvement was being courted more heavily to bring more immediate attention to documentaries. Theoretically, the hope was to elongate the theatrical runs and create more interest in follow up sales. In practice it proved somewhat effective for Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen's environmental documentary 11th Hour featuring Leonardo DiCaprio which took in just under $1M at the box office. But this strategy fell flat for Nicole Kidman with I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, Don Cheadle with Darfur Now and Joan Allen with The Rape of Europa. While celebrities are human beings, perfectly entitled to personal investments in social and historical causes the present climate of celebrity culture is inextricably enmeshed with crass commercialism. This makes it difficult for the public to distinguish between an endorsement of a social issue and a line of Louis Vuitton handbags.

1b. No new social networks.
According to a recent report from the BBC Facebook's user base is up 25% from last year. The user base of Twitter, the recently en vogue micro-blogging startup is up 1689% (the only services with that kind of growth in this economic climate are food banks). Without venture capital money at the ready to be poured into new and exciting (but completely profit-adverse) social networking ventures, it's safe to say that already exisiting sites are going to continue to be the main online avenues people use to connect with friends, meet people and learn all about your awesome film.

Independent film-makers having been sternly lectured to by distributors, festival panelists and filmmakers from the trenches that their MySpace/YouTube/website presence is the troika of their (necessitated) internet presence. Having a closer relationship with your audience will also give film-makers a greater stake in how the embryonic but generally optimistic world of digital streams will take shape over the coming years.

2. Newspapers are on their way out and people need to get information somewhere.

As print journalism dies a slow and painful death, news consumption is actually soaring in the United States. The Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the News Media report earlier this month. They found that not only are audiences gravitating towards individual journalists (and away from institutions of journalism) but that cable news networks have become perfectly acceptable venues for political discourse. Audiences have become too cynical to expect objectivity from reportage, but with increased access to their own universe of fact checking they are willing to give smaller outlets the benefit of the doubt. This creates a climate of receptivity to informative, thoughtful documentary work that critically engages its audience.

3. Audiences still pay to see movies

People are responding to economic uncertainty by cutting back on a lot of non-essential expenses like dining out and elaborate cell phone plans. But they're not willing to be bored no matter how bad it gets. The number of movie tickets sold dropped slightly last year, but it's worth noting that the gross revenues increased because movie-goers were willing to pay higher ticket prices than they had in previous years. The online movie rental giant Netflix hit 10 million subscribers in February 2009. In their 4th quarter for 2008 (when housing, insurance and stock markets hit crisis status), they posted profits up 19% from the previous year. Even Sony's pricey gaming console the Playstation 3 (starting at $400) trounced its top competitor the xBox360 (which starts at $250) in large part due to its built-in BluRay player.

4. Ken Burns is out of a job

No offense to the Emmy-winning documentarian who re-invented the slow pan of the still image, but the news that floundering auto giant General-Motors was ending their 22-year commitment to the film-maker signals great opportunity for film-makers down the food chain. Consider that Burns's previous films (covering the subjects of Jazz, WW2, Baseball, the formation of the West and the Civil War) have a combined runtime of 76.5 hours and have been PBS staples for the last 20 years. After Burns' six-part series on the national parks system airs this fall there will be an enormous gap in public television programming nationwide. Some of the larger PBS affiliates may respond by following in the steps of HBO Documentary and acquire more films from the festival circuits. Smaller affiliates may see this situation as an opportunity to work with more local filmmakers. Which brings us to my final point...

5. Film-makers will be forced to focus on their own backyards.

We do not need more western gonzo filmmakers heading to warzones to make documentaries  about the experience of being a western gonzo documentary film-maker in a warzone. These films are at best shallow, slight works and at worst self-congratulatory. They shamelessly exploiting the suffering of others for the sake of adding more mediocrity to the world. It's the film world's contribution to cultural imperialism and it simply needs to stop.

In a perfect world, these films couldn't get funding. In today's troubled economy, they might not, which might allow for film-makers indigenous to these regions and conflicts to speak for themselves. But really the chief concern needs to be the cessation of crappy gonzo docs.

Far be it for me to make light of events that are causing anyone anxiety or suffering. But in a time of chaos, when the systems we know are quickly eroding, there is opportunity for us to seize upon, adapt and destroy what doesn't work for us.

Short Films: Alex Budovsky's Last Time in Clerkenwell

Alex Budovsky's short animation Last Time in Clerkenwell imagines a world where the Royal Legion of Birds have taken over London and are now vying for world domination.

Review: Sex and the Single Girl

Sex and the Single Girl

Rating (out of 5): **½

It should surprise no one that when Warner Brothers tapped Joseph Heller to adapt Cosmopolitan editrix's Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 bestseller Sex and the Single Girl the scribe behind hyper male-centric satires like "Catch-22" and "Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man" would be somewhat befuddled by the plot-free (though delightfully ageless) testament to glamour and female sexual liberation. The resulting film would be a toothless sex farce celebrating marriage that feels at times oddly spiteful.

Natalie Wood plays Dr. Helen Gurley Brown, a psychologist whose titular bestseller touting the virtues of pursuing careers and casual sex has made her the target of Stop Magazine, an uber-sleazy, low-budget tabloid. Tony Curtis plays journalist Bob Weston who writes a fake expose to smear her good name by alleging that she is a virgin and that her depictions of women's desires are total fantasy. Since she won't sit down for an interview with him, he eavesdrops on his neighbors (Henry Fonda and a disturbingly tan Lauren Bacall) whose marital arguments he uses as a ruse to become one of Brown's patients. But hijinks ensue when he falls in love with Brown and concocts a complicated scheme to make her fall in love with him, first by threatening to commit suicide and then getting her drunk.

Read the rest of this review on Greencine. 

See also:

• The New York Times review of Jennifer Scanlon's Helen Gurley Brown biography "Bad Girls Go Everywhere".
  

Portland International Film Festival 32, pt. 3

Everlasting Moments/Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick

Inspired by the life of his wife's great-aunt, Everlasting Moments plays like Jan Troell's loveletter to family values. Only slight emotionally dysfunction required to relate. Maria, a young Finnish woman, is swept off her feet by the charming Sigge, whose zest for life (and respect for his wife) is quickly ground into dust through the trials of having to support a rapidly growing family as a low-wage dockworker. He descends into full-blown alcoholism, chronic infidelity and violent outbursts that leave his family reeling from embarrassment and uncertainty. With her husband in and out of jail and work and her extended family unsympathetic, Maria is left to raise her children and find small pleasures in their grueling life. She rediscovers a camera won in a raffle and is convinced by a flirtatious camera shop owner to keep and use it as a means of expression.

Troell deftly illustrates the quiet dignity of human kindness with a mercifully light hand. In one scene Maria asks her eldest daughter to prepare a dead pigeon for dinner. Maja is a thoughtful, but sensitive adolescent. She protests, "They have such beautiful eyes, Mama. It's staring at me..." A situation we've seen in turn of the century, desperately poverty-stricken stories before and viewers have been trained to expect a blow up. Yet Maria's reaction is to quietly dismiss her daughter from the gruesome duty. It comes as an enormous relief because it feels like what a mother would actually do, an attempt to preserve what little innocence she can in her child for as long as she can. We see this theme echoed in scene after scene. As we get to know Maria  it's inspiring to see a great nephew-in-law pay such loving homage to a woman whose existence was so much about the utility of life.

Speaking of the utility of life, Everlasting Moments was made for $7 million, a sum that couldn't even get Jessica Alba into your movie in the States. This film, however, is an exquisitely rendered period piece. It spans more than twenty years and looks like it could have easily cost ten times more.

Everlasting Moments is 78 year old Jan Troell's contribution to the unofficial alliance of Medicaid-qualifying working film directors. That class, that this year alone, boasts Andrej Wajda, Agnes Varda, Woody Allen, Manoel de Oliveira and Clint Eastwood's one-two punch of The Changeling and Gran Torino. Plus last year contributed wonderful new efforts by Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Errol Morris and Claude Chabrol. Some of these recent films haven't been perfect but they all lack the cloying self-consciousness that comes from too much exposure to the internet. Perhaps it's time the AARP started hosting its own awards ceremony?

RIYL: After the Wedding, The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio, 16 Years of Alcohol.


See also:

• Martha Polk's (appropriately) effusive review over at What Is This Light and thoughts on photography at The Auters Notebook.
• The Danish Film Institute's interview with the film's producer Thomas Stenderup.

The Beaches of Agnes/Les Plages d’Agnès

Beaches of Agnes joins the ranks of recent films like Of Time and the City and My Winnipeg (and to a lesser extent Waltz with Bashir and Hunger), memoir-style films. The genre of late has been focused on a connection to a place and how that place has shaped a person's life. In contrast to focusing on the time the film-maker chooses to stop experiencing life and start reflecting on the past with some sense of finality.

Starting with her birth in wartime Brussels (just like Jean-Claude Van Damme!) Agnes Varda traces her extensive film-making career in the French New Wave scene. Detours through Los Angeles during the 60s and back again to France as her husband Jacques Demy died a slow, ineffable death from AIDS. Varda fans will recognize the (miraculously unchanged) settings her past films: the village scenes from La Pointe Courte, the woods-y picnic spots from Le Bonheur, the barren off-season vineyards from Vagabond and the Parisian open-air markets from Cleo 5 to 7 and The Gleaners and I. 

Varda's charming narration and bohemian life story are their own reward. Former collaborators like Harrison Ford, Gerard Depardieu, Jane Birkin and Alexander Calder all participate but never as mere talking heads. Birkin, in a full suit of armor, rides a horse down a Paris street playing a modern Joan of Ark. Jim Morrison and Chris Marker also make appearances respectively through archival footage and cardboard cut outs of the artist's signature cat illustrations.

This is remarkable documentation of a remarkable life. Fans of Varda's films who have never had the privilege of seeing her installation work clearly realize that her true heart is in being a visual artist. The film opens with a group of harried assistants trying to find ways to prop up dozens of mirrors in the sand on the beach while Varda walks through them introducing herself to the camera. In another scene she tracks down the villagers whose playful rowboat scenes as children brought some levity to the story of a fracturing marriage in her first feature film, La Pointe Courte. They remember the experience fondly and the town has named a street after her. She convinces the now middle-aged men to push a cart around the town projecting films onto a sheet while discussing the man on the screen who has long since passed away. It's a depiction of how an artist, even one who's made an indelible mark in her field, can still feel like a culmination of her shortcomings. The feeling is playful but honest, a combination I, as a total neophyte, rarely associate with contemporary art.


RIYL: Rivers and Tides, Basquiat, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, Manufactured Landscapes, Persepolis.

 
Snow/Snijeg


The first Bosnian film to win the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival's International Critics Week focuses on six women living in a small village one year after the war has ended. All of the men (including male children) have been rounded up and killed by the Serbian army. The surviving women work hard to keep the village's only industry, jam and sauerkraut production operational. It's grueling work to create a delicate product that the women then transport in handcarts through rough mountainous paths to sell on the roadside. We see the women raise the orphaned children left behind all the while trying to keep each other's spirits up with games and craft projects but the fact remains, the only commonality they have is that their former middle classic lives have been transformed by tragedy. Each of them still holds out secret hope their husbands, sons and fathers somehow survived and will someday return. When two Serbian businessmen representing a commercial real estate developer show up with an offer to buy their land each woman is forced to re-examine the reality of her situation and what her priorities moving forward will be. 



Like many of the wonderful documentaries from this area (some of which my company, A Million Movies a Min ute distributes), the film contrasts of the breathtaking beauty of this area with the horrendous things its people have endured. At the start, the somewhat self-conscious diversity of the group threatens to be something akin to a Slavic United Colors of Benneton ad: a Muslim, a Christian, a bawdy dame, a thrill-seeking younger woman, an elderly woman who spends her time working the loom and a demanding, bed-ridden mother-in-law. But director Aida Begić let's their stories unfold naturally. The film never condescends to think an audience will understand their situation by the end of the film.

Portland International Film Festival also featured works this year from Poland's Andrzej Wajda and Sweden's Jan Troell two film directors who have resisted the siren call of Hollywood and dedicated their massive talents to reflect upon each of their country's complex histories. That the exquisite Snow and Jasmila Zbanic's powerful 2006 film Grbavica: Land of My Dreams were both directorial debuts from Bosnia-Herzegovenia indicates both an exciting new chapter in film-making at large and what Cintra Wilson calls 'the cultural conversation', providing a voice to a group of people who have mostly been spoken for in the past.




RIYL: Secret Life of Words, Backstage, I've Loved You So Long, No Man's Land.