Steady Diet of Film

Review: We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco

There are films that take on a mythic levels of importance in their community, the gravity of their reception often owes more to timing and necessity than merit. Some stories reflect so much pain, regret or shame that any mention of the subject in a public way immediately transforms the casual film-going experience into a cathartic purge that in all likelihood has little to do even with filmmakers' intentions. These works still serve a purpose: they give voice to those under-represented in mainstream culture, they open people up to human experiences they may not have even known existed and they spread that much ballyhooed disinfectant -- sunlight -- into places that desperately need it. But they don't typically reflect a great deal of craft and rarely hold up to repeat viewings (anyone revisit Torch Song Trilogy recently? Yeesh.) They are films that serve an important function, but are largely disposable.

We Were Here: Voices from the AIDS Years in San Francisco is not one of these films. If the emotionally charged two-and-a-half-hour discussion that followed the rough cut screening I attended last month is any indication, it will have a similar, immediate impact on a lot of viewers. But co-directors David Weissman and Bill Weber (The Cockettes) have made a thoughtful, firsthand account of what it was like to be at ground zero during a widely misunderstood epidemic and the beautiful, ugly and ultimately mundane human impulses that natural disasters lay bare.

We Were Here follows five people living in San Francisco in the late 1970s when AIDS exploded in what probably wasn't but will still be thought of as a utopic paradise. Far from the violent, hard-edged legacy of the Stonewall riots in New York City, San Francisco, bathed in the golden California sun, with all precepts of the 1950s WASP-y perfection already demolished by the Haight-Ashbury hippies and diverse immigrant populace, was the Promise Land to queer kids escaping hateful or hate-inducingly dull Midwestern burgs looking for a taste of the hedonistic, good life. 

The story relies solely on five interview subjects strategically placed to cover much of the breadth of the crisis: a hospice nurse, an artist who dated a clinical biologist, a budding politician, a flower shop owner based in the Castro and a young journalist.

As the death count grows one interviewee makes the astute observation that the epidemic was like a hurricane, for every five people destroyed overnight there was one left completely untouched. When surrounded by so much misery and misfortune people can't help but repeatedly ask the question they know there's no answer for: Why did I survive? With a constantly shifting sentiment about the predicate issue. Even among those who became infected, many survived by random circumstance -- getting access to one successful drug trial while getting shut out of one where everybody died.

There are some harrowing images drawn by the film, a stubborn lover arguing about whether to be taken to the emergency room over a low temperature then dying during the short car ride to the hospital, a room full of doctors at a national conference to discuss AIDS drug trials breaking down sobbing over how badly they were failing their patients and the dread every person faced having to choose between which sick friends to attend to and which to shut out as a matter of self-preservation.

The film deftly avoids too much blame-shifting or rearview mirror grandstanding in lieu of underscoring the personal experiences in total chaos and uncertainty. At the apex of anxiety President Ronald Reagan appears. The oft invoked Republican icon of kinder, gentler (whiter, straighter, wealthier) days -- is typically portrayed in documentaries about this time as having been at best a clueless dolt and at worse a cruel dilletante who laughed off a genocide as it was happening on American soil. Here he's treated with some mild deference followed by a quick cut to a young, overwhelmed community organizer trying to put together a plan to deal with the sudden upsurge of people starving to death in their apartments because they became too sick too quickly to feed themselves. 

Weissman and Weber understand that cruelty and destruction hardens some, vulcanizes others but leaves most simply baffled. There's nothing extraordinary about the people who survived the early years of AIDS. And a lucky combination of chance, privilege and clear-headed thinking in times of pandemonium does not make for a happy ending to any cognizant human being. Still, it's a cliche for a reason, out of the wreckage and despair came real medical breakthroughs, a new respect between gay men and lesbian women and a generation of queers who had too much to be proud of (and too much to lose) to consider a life in the closet.

We Were Here will be screening at festivals later this year.

News round up

The legal edition! Some interesting things happened this week in the thorny world of intellectual property rights.

The US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit overturned the lower court's decision from last year's Golan v. Gonzales, stating that Congress did not violate the First Amendment with the the Uruguay Round Agreements Act. The URAA was a trade treaty that restored copyright protection to thousands of books, films, songs and other creative works that had previously been held in the public domain.

This outcome is disappointing for a number of reasons, the first being that all of these works will immediately become prohibitively expensive for filmmakers and artists to use in their works. Also, the predicate decision in Golan v. Gonzales was the first time a court had taken the stance that aspects of the Copyright Act violate the First Amendment. This decision also grants an astonishing amount of discretion to Congress about when/if/which materials should be held to the previous Public Domain standard.

Full text is available here. TechDirt (via Laure Parsons) pulled out this nugget from the court's decision:

In undertaking this review, we “must accord substantial deference to the predictive judgments of Congress. Our sole obligation is to assure that, in formulating its judgments, Congress has drawn reasonable inferences based on substantial evidence.”

“[S]ubstantiality is to be measured in this context by a standard more deferential than we accord to judgments of an administrative agency.” This deferential standard is warranted for two important reasons. First, Congress is “far better equipped” as an institution “to amass and evaluate the vast amounts of data bearing upon the legislative questions.” Second, we owe Congress “an additional measure of deference out of respect for its authority to exercise the legislative power.”
Even in the realm of First Amendment questions where Congress must base its conclusions upon substantial evidence, deference must be accorded to its findings as to the harm to be avoided and to the remedial measures adopted for that end, lest we infringe on traditional legislative authority to make predictive judgments.

Which is buffered a bit later on:

The idea/expression dichotomy ensures that only particular expressions, and not ideas themselves, are subject to copyright protection.... Additionally, the fair use defense allows individuals to use expressions contained in a copyrighted work under certain circumstances, including "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . scholarship, or research . . . and even for parody." ... Section 514 does not disturb these traditional, built-in protections, and thus, such protected speech remains unburdened.

Ultimately this case boils down to yet another sloppy, vague precedent instead of establishing a clearer understanding of what reasonable copyright protections are in an increasingly technologized world. It also spreads authority to interpret and enforce copyright standards to a group of political representatives who -- not for nothing -- due to a recent Supreme Court ruling can now be plied with limitless lobbyist dollars by special interest groups who have a vested interest in the most regressive protections possible.

On a brighter note, YouTube won a $1B copyright lawsuit against Viacom this week. A judge ruled that since the site had enacted policies making good faith efforts to keep copyrighted materials off the site they qualify for safe harbor protections under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Viacom has promised to appeal the ruling and after reading some of the e-mail conversations that were released in the evidentiary findings Mark Cuban is dumbfounded they even lost in the first place. USA Today sifted through the 30-page decision for the more tawdry bits. Such as the one below, wherein Viacom execs deal with the paradox caused by being involved with a lawsuit accusing YouTube of making millions on ad revenues from illegally obtained videos but that because of that high traffic their individual properties also benefit individual shows to keep clips on such a high traffic site and threatening the site with takedown notices began to alienate their own audiences.

"Viacom has altered its own videos to make them appear stolen." Indeed, Google says that a former president of MTV, not named, testified that Viacom didn't take down clips from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report because "we were concerned that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert believed that their presence on YouTube was important for their ratings as well as for their relationship with their audience."

LOLz! Maybe the appeal process will reveal how long it took Viacom to figure out they could put their own properties, on their own sites, charge advertisers and eliminate the need for lawsuits (not to mention the epic amounts of crab-apple e-mailing between CEOs).

 
Guest posting over at Documentary Television, Fair Use guru Pat Aufderheide sees a break in the clouds. She credits the Center for Social Media's creation of the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use for fewer insurance claims being filed for copyright lawsuits and includes hard data indicating documentary filmmakers are still using loads of copyrighted material, now with a greater understanding of Fair Use.

It's certainly encouraging to know that corporations are finding new revenue sources besides blanket litigation which is causing fewer production insurance claims to be filed and undoubtedly, fewer headaches for producers. But I've been told (off the record) what some of these filmmakers paid just for the festival licenses to show their films with copyright-protected footage (typically broadcast news coverage) and in every case it far exceeded all other production costs.

Nor does it inspire a cozy feeling that these numbers were provided by a law firm who have recently developed a speciality in protecting filmmakers from IP lawsuits. But perhaps I'm still feeling drained by the 10th circuit thing.

Finally, earlier this week indieWIRE and The Film Panel Notetaker attended a benefit screening of Joe Berlinger's latest documentary Crude. Proceeds from the event will go towards Berlinger's mounting legal fees as he fends of a subpoena from Chevron who claim that they are entitled to his 600+ hours of footage to defend themselves against a recent class action lawsuit depicted in the film. From indieWIRE:

“What’s at stake is the basic trust between a journalist and a source. ... It is American media versus corporate interests and defense attorneys,” Berlinger said at IFC Center, previewing the battle that is brewing over the filmmaker’s footage. He called the coming battle an, “amazing squaring off of the media against corporations.”

“Outtakes are the same as a reporter’s notes,” responded WGA East President Michael Winship, on stage after the Stranger Than Fiction series screening in downtown Manhattan. Seated on the same panel, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who squared off against McDonalds in his own film, “Super Size Me,” also warned of the ramifications of a judgement forcing Berlinger to hand over his footage. Spurlock said it would send filmmakers and journalists down a path that would hinder news gathering and filmmaking. “It’s going to affect everyone,” Spurlock said.

Let's all balm our spirits with a happy little seizure, brought to you by the opening title sequence of Gaspar Noe's latest, Enter the Void:

Review: Space Tourists

Swiss documentary filmmaker Christian Frei's (The Giant Buddas, The War Photographer) third film follows the odd ghost of the Russian space program which became fully privatized in 1991. Originally sequestered in the Kazakhstan hinterland for national security purposes, the program has been cut to the bone and the surrounding townspeople have either shifted to a more agrarian lifestyle, left for bigger cities or created their own cottage industries around for-profit rocket launches. The once great emblem of strength and promise of Soviet power, has been drained of all romantic fervor and now serves as an abundantly ironic icon for how quickly life can change in an empire -- this bizarrely over-reaching, yet somehow self-sustaining capitalist apparatus has become the ultimate fetish object of wealthy and aspirational foreigners.

Our host through this excursion is Jonas Bendiksen a Norwegian photographer of Ukrainian descent whose intrigue with faded Soviet prestige has led to hundreds of beautiful images of the sadly growing, universal experience of small town thrift and ingenuity that springs up in the wake of industrial collapse.

Some of the Kazakh people see the shuttle launches as good business and enjoy the simple riches it bestows on their lives. Scrap metal collectors spend weeks chasing discarded rocket chunks. They set up camp waiting for the pieces to cool, dismantle it, then sell the bits to Chinese manufacturers (take a moment to imagine the geopolitical ramifications the next time you take home leftovers in a tinfoil swan). Farmers forge new sheds and tools out of space debris. And a once heavily guarded military compound has been retro-fitted into an ad hoc Space Disneyland with hourly tours are given and teams of scientists in the basement work out new cost-cutting measures.

Though the wonder and glory of space isn't dead to everyone. The two Americans Frei documents making the trek are full of platitudes about working towards dreams, and dreaming of the stars and stars in your work or whatever. Count me in the crowd of people who when listening to a software billionaire talk about the limitless potential of a borderless world can only hear the ticking off of an imaginary list of all the things that could have been accomplished with the $20M spent on their 6-day space vacation.

Luckily, Frei appears to share at least a little of this animosity. And people who enjoy reality tv shows of the "Celebrities Do the Darndest Things" variety, will be delighted to learn that when in space, billionaires have to do chores. Lots and lots of chores. You had no idea there were so many things to vacuum on a spacecraft. And seeing the delight Anousheh Ansari, the first female space tourist to visit the International Space Station, experiences in rolling a ping pong ball around a metal tube in zero-gravity while her voiceover describes that she would've happily sacrificed her life for this experience, one might deduce that outerspace is probably some kind of psychological roadblock for a certain type of person who will never feel accomplished.

The third act follows the race to create a rocket alternative to space launch. Ansari's investment firm (along with many others) is fronting a $100M reward to the first team to successfully launch a new, tourism-focused method of space travel. A plucky Romanian aerospace engineer seems to be well on his way to blowing up many hot air balloons in pursuit of his own starry-themed dream.

Frei shot Space Tourists on 16mm film giving his images a gritty beauty that when paired with Jan Garbarek's synth-heavy score is oddly reminiscent of William Friedkin's morally dour Sorcerer. A scene where space scrap metal collectors bounce along the off-road backcountry while electric bees seem to buzz around their head in particular. But as an inspiration point, it's merely an aesthetic similarity. As skeptical as Frei may be about the benefits of space travel, Space Tourists accomplishes what the Soviet empire itself could not. Equalizing the ambitions of the millionaire who dreams of stars and the villagers whose contributions to the outlying details and bureaucracies make those dreams go, the film gives ingenuity and hard work of all stripes its due respect.

Space Tourists screened at Hot Docs International Film Festival and is currently playing at various festivals including SilverDocs and the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Review: GasLand

In 2006 director Josh Fox received a letter from a natural gas company offering him a hefty rental fee in exchange for drilling on his family's acreage in the Catskills Mountains. Set in the bucolic parts of Pennsylvania that James Carville once lovingly referred to as the "Alabama" in between the state's major metropolitan areas, natural gas companies have been using a controversial drilling process called hydraulic fracturing ("fracking" for fun) with disastrous results. Chemical leaks and sloppy drilling practices have led to polluted rivers, thousands of dead animals and drinking water so contaminated that it's flammable right out of the faucet.

Fox's background in theater serves GasLand well. He is a pathologically likeable host through an emotionally arduous journey of collecting water samples and brutally sad stories from people across the nation who had no idea their land or water had been compromised until their families became violently ill. With excessive permissions granted by local governments indemnifying the energy companies from any liability, most people affected have very little recourse -- even in cases where the local news media has picked up on the extremely telegenic disaster of flames shooting out of people's kitchen sinks. With no one on the hook and damaged ground water making their homes uninhabitable, most affected people have had to simply abandon their homes, making the quest for "clean and safe" energy sources feel like a modern day, profit-inflicted Dust Bowl.

What emerges in GasLand is an old-fashioned oral history of people blighted by corporations and twice sold out by their government -- first by regulators and then by representatives. Now more than happy to run the risk of upsetting the powers that be in their small towns and sharing their stories (and water samples) with Team GasLand. And while their fate seems fairly close to sealed at this point, it's thrilling to see people who live extremely secluded lives working collectively to take on giants.

Winner of the Special Jury prize at Sundance earlier this year, GasLand is also a thrilling marvel to behold in editing. When sitting with a rancher discussing his rapidly disintegrating way of life, the film stays very still and contemplates the beautiful rolling buttes of Utah that will soon be too toxic to be within 100 miles of. But the film also employs an army of statistical data, legal documents and scientific research -- relying on graphs, fonts and beat-perfect cutting to boil down intimidatingly, large concepts into talking points that serve to galvanize its audience.

GasLand is not an environmental film per se, it's uninterested in taking a stand on which method of energy collection will provide future generations with the most pleasing ratio of doom to comfort. It's an expose on how invisible people (in this case, rural and/or poor) will always be the first to bear the brunt of faulty, short-term decision-making.

GasLand airs on HBO Monday June 21st and screened at the 2010 HotDocs International Film Festival.

Review: Defamation

Rating (out of 5): **

It's difficult to take Yoav Shamir's Defamation in the manner it's intended. Shamir, an Israeli jew, attempts to piece together a light-hearted understanding of the virulent antisemitism his nation's culture, education and news reportage has inculcated their citizenry to believe is running rampant throughout the rest of the world. What he discovers is that many powerful people are applying the "anti-Semitic" label to things that are simply minor annoyances inevitable in heterogeneous societies or outright misguided paranoia. But even as he frames many of these ideas as being over-reaching, or worse yet, being purposely amped up by people who have a vested interest in keeping Jewish people rapt with terror, he sidesteps any discussion of what impact these actions might be having on the international community or Israel's long-term well-being.

As far as documentaries about lofty subject matter starring their directors go, Shamir is an appealing and thoughtful host. But the explosive nature of his premise is weighted down by his own unexplored uncertainty and the occasionally mean-spirited edit jobs of playing people's clumsy passion for cheap laughs. It's not that comedy can't (or hasn't) been used to demystify or take the temperature down on divisive issues, but real storytelling requires more than just charisma and access.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Review: RUSH Beyond the Lighted Stage

There was a certain 'no duh' quality to the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book "Outliers" -- people who have accomplished great feats of discovery and achievement are both born with some innate talent and in their early stages of development given the opportunity to hone their craft over for at least 1,000 hours. It's a method for success that worked for Beethoven, Bill Gates and the Beatles. And in Sam Dunn's and Scot McFadyen's painstakingly detailed and intimate portrait of a few Canadian guys cursed to "skate on their ankles" -- it worked for prog-rock legends Rush.

Formed by Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee in the late 60s and completed with the addition of Neil Peart in the late 70s, Rush started out, as most great bands have, with a couple of nerds who couldn't play sports or talk to girls. When the drinking age in Canada was lowered to 19 leading to an outcropping of clubs  geared towards a younger audience. So while their suburbanite peers were all playing hockey, Rush was playing up to five gigs a night, affording them the resources to record their first single, "Working Man". The 7-minute grimy epic was perfect for what disc jockeys were constantly seeking at the time, "bathroom songs", tracks that were long enough for the staff to freshen up but weird enough to hold listeners' attention. Rush then landed an opening gig with Kiss, a band with zero song craft but an extremely cohesive concept and presentation. The paradox of this pairing is only briefly commented upon, Lifeson speaks with great admiration about how much Kiss tour and how formative that was for Rush to see firsthand early on. Kiss frontman (and professional sleazeball) Gene Simmons recalls that Rush were a bunch of weird kids that would go back to their hotel rooms and practice rather than get raucous or ahem, spend time with female fans. This last bit truly delighted the sold out, immensely proud Toronto crowd I saw the film with. 

Made with the full cooperation of the band and ipso facto, their legions of devoted fans (Rush's own outliers are quite obsessive collectors), including a bevy of interviews with "respectable" rock musicians trotted out that range from merely establishing Rush's industry-wide influence (Primus's Les Claypool, Metallica's Kirk Hammett, Dream Theater's Mike Portnoy and Pantera's Vinnie Paul) to deep, philosophical engagement on what it means to be a creative genius who the public deems terminally uncool (Billy Corgan, Jack Black, Trent Reznor, Rage Against the Machine's Tim Commerford and "South Park" co-creator Trey Parker). 

Beyond the Lighted Stage documents many of the turning points in Rush's sound and personal lives. Nineteen albums over the course of thirty-five years lends itself to a great deal of introspection, and the group has experienced enough success to maintain a comfortable lifestyle though not enough to let them relax into any sense of their own place in the rock'n'roll pantheon. Similar to last year's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, we see that at a certain point, commercial success becomes a blur and the random metrics of prestige take on a monstrous level of importance in the creators' mind. For Spector, it's being depicted on a stamp, for Rush it's being in the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. For most of us, a stamp is a mundane office supply and the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame is a place you might go if your car broke down in Cleveland. The better music documentaries will break through the noise and self-pity and get to the psychological roots of people who are expected to remain fresh and creative while being constantly criticized and compared to people whose work may have only a dim similarity. 

It's immediately apparent Rush's longevity hinges on their mutual respect for one another and a monk-like worth ethic, beyond that anything goes. They've delight in experimenting with instrumentation throughout their career, the 1980s were a particularly harrowing time for Rushies who weren't fans of synthesizers and Peart's drumkit has grown so much over the years that at their concerts he looks like he's been exiled to a fortress of percussive accoutrement. Style of dress and stage presentation have also drastically changed with passing trends, at one point the band looks back over their "Japanese silk robe uniform phase" with pained delight. The bandmates also have extremely divergent views on how to interact with fans, Lee will shake every hand and sign every autograph while Peart is known to (politely) have even the most famous Rushies removed by security to avoid interacting with his admirers. These ancillary details are what break up most bands, but they don't even seem to irritate the members of Rush.

Far more appealing to a prog-rock neophyte is the traditional immigrant story at the heart of Rush. Lifeson's and Lee's parents both fled warzones and persecution to go to a foreign place with the hopes of giving their children a better life. A kitchen table discussion captured on super8 of a teenage Lifeson explaining to his teary-eyed parents that he wants to drop out of high school to pursue his music career seems like a sentimental, unnecessary detail until you see that behind their perfectionism and drive is a fear of failure has much higher emotional stakes than it ever did for the members of Kiss or Led Zeppelin. 

Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage screened at Hot Docs 2010 and will be in Portland at Cinema 21 June 10th-12th. 

Summer documentary review round-up

Here, dear readers, is some great coverage of documentaries coming to you soon:

NY Times Science writer Dennis Overbye reviews the Danish film Into Eternity about Finland's efforts to bury it's nuclear waste in a facility that will then be locked up for 100,000 years:     

It might seem crazy, if not criminal, to obligate 3,000 future generations of humans to take care of our poisonous waste just so that we can continue running our electric toothbrushes. But it’s already too late to wave off the nuclear age, and Mr. Madsen’s film comes at a perfect time to join a worldwide conversation about what to do with its ashes. On June 3, administrative law judges from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will begin hearing arguments about whether the Department of Energy can proceed with shutting down development of the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, where the United States had been planning since 1987 to store its own nuclear waste.

David Denby writes of Laura Poitras's award contender The Oath at the New Yorker:

For the past decade or so, we have suffered from an inability to comprehend, or even to imagine, the inner lives of the young men who wage jihad as members of Al Qaeda. Who are these men, so eager for asceticism, violence, and martyrdom? At first, we think that’s what we’ll learn from “The Oath,” a fascinating documentary directed, produced, and shot by Laura Poitras. We don’t really, but what we do find out is of equal interest, and oddly reassuring.

DocumentaryTech has a great overview and analysis of the latest fallout of Michael Moore-mania: directors' leeriness of appearing too goofy on-camera. They use Alex Gibney's Casino Jack, a takedown of DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff, as a recent example of a filmmaker trying to walk the line of adding some yuks to an otherwise dry subject matter while maintaining their integrity. 

Some have emulated and succeeded (Morgan Spurlock) and legions have tried and failed, often polluting their own subject with their determined intrusiveness. The trend of actors suddenly becoming documentarians seems rooted in the notion that documentary is just one more way of getting your face in front of a camera. And even highly regarded films such as “The Cove” have been testament to the Moore Effect – In the Academy Award-winning “Cove,” Louie Psihoyos positions himself quite well and quite prominently as crusading swashbuckler, with no apparent compunction. It seems more odd these days when you don’t see the documentarian on camera – such as in Gibney’s films.

Renzo Martens' visceral takedown of the West's fetishization of African poverty, Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty is screening at the Tate Modern in London. Back when the film screened at the New Zealand Film Festival Caleb Starrenburg described it as:

A sort of mad homage to Joseph Conrad’s novella "Heart of Darkness", Enjoy Poverty is the result of Dutch artist Renzo Martens’s three years traveling the Congo, documenting the country’s ongoing plunder by foreign interests and our complicity in the ‘poverty industry’. With a purposefully offensive and pyrrhic logic, Martens suggests that poverty should be considered an important natural resource. Foreign aid is, after all, among the Congo’s largest sources of income.

Dave Kehr summarizes some new films about artists now out on dvd, including Gerald Peary's For the Love of Movies, Meredith Monk: Inner Voice and Word is Out.

And the inimitable AJ Schnack's Convention is New York magazine's critic's pick this week as it opens at the IFC Center.

This wonderfully counterintuitive doc about the 2008 Democratic National Convention focuses not on the political movers and shakers but on the everyday civil servants, bureaucrats, and average folks who hover around the event. Offers a generous portrait of the true face of modern democracy—if Robert Altman made documentaries, this is what they might look like.

indieWIRE also has a great piece on Convention's unique ensemble approach to shooting.