Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

Our friend and former co-worker Andrew has just had a significant piece of criticism - the cover feature, no less - published in Cineaste magazine, which you can read about here. Unfortunately the article is not available online, so make an effort to track down the actual publication, either at your local library or periodical vendor (such as The Newsstand, here in Bellingham — hello Stephen!).

Anyway, congrats on the article, Andrew, hopefully it’s the first of many.

Former Film Is Truth employee Andrew (along with Ian Morgan) has made a documentary film about a shameful incident from Bellingham’s past. The film will have two showings locally in the next week; please read the press release below and consider attending the film: 

First Showing:
Location: Whatcom Museum and History and Art
Date: Sunday, January 13
Time: 2:00pm
cost: FREE

Second Showing:
As part of the 10th Annual Martin Luther King Jr.
Human Rights Conference*
Location: Whatcom Community College - Syre Auditorium
Date: Saturday, January 19
Time: 1:15pm
cost: Free
*Please come participate in the whole exciting and
educational conference.  For more info, see the
Whatcom Human Rights Task Force website.

Here is a short description of the video:

Community to Community Development and Whatcom Human Rights Task Force present…

“Present in All That We Do”

In 1907, more than two-hundred South Asian migrant
workers in Bellingham were attacked by a mob of white
workers. In the course of one night, an entire
community was driven from the town – in the approving
words of a local paper, “wiped off the map.” One
hundred years later in 2007, hostility towards
immigrants of color in Bellingham continues. Raids and
detentions by government immigration agents are
ongoing; so are surveillance and harassment from both
government agents and groups like the Minutemen. How
have the events of 1907 shaped Bellingham as we know
it in 2007? What has changed and what remains the
same?  These issues and questions are examined in the
independently produced documentary, “Present in All
That We Do.”

Written and Edited by: Andrew Hedden and Ian Morgan

Length: 52 minutes

The Whatcom Museum and the MLK Conference committee
have been kind enough to give us these venues to show
our video.  If you can, please come to watch our
documentary and ask some questions.

I love the formal reduction or expansion of a “finished” work of art, in this case film, by someone other than the work’s original author - be it Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho“, this analysis of movie poster color combinations, or this recent collection I found (courtesy Blog Flume) of Alfred Hitchcock films abridged to 1000 key frames each. I don’t suppose there’s any profoundly meaningful purpose behind these sorts of experiments, but they’re fascinating nonetheless and, at the very least, make you reconsider how to see a film, and what the film means. No substitute for the actual films as they were intended to be seen, of course… but with a director as meticulous as Hitchcock, it’s certainly worth looking at his work in this novel way as it really highlights his thorough sense of design.

My favorites of the examples posted at the site are as follows:

Marnie — One of Hitchcock’s more underrated and strange films. Seeing the stills lined up, punctuated by nearly solid frames of pure hues, really emphasizes the striking, psychological use of color he employed here.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) — A merely “average” Hitch production, but one with many exotic, almost surreal touches. The overall look of the color and light reminds me of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, though the same could be said of a lot of stuff from the 1950s.

Notorious — This has some really gorgeous, velvety B&W photography.

Frenzy — One of Hitchcock’s last films, and another one often overlooked. Pretty vicious, but not without his usual droll humor.

Johnny Ryan, one of the funniest - and (coincidentally?) most offensive - cartoonists alive, currently has a show of paintings “inspired by a variety of whacked-out horror, cult and exploitation films” on display in Los Angeles. The show is being held at The Secret Headquarters, and they’ve previewed the pieces on a special flickr set here. It’s great stuff. Too bad it’s a thousand miles away.

The following titles are my “Best of 2007″ choices. The list includes recent films released on DVD this year, old films making their DVD debuts this year, old films I finally saw just this year, etc. I’ve included one title not yet out (Two Lane Blacktop hits the shelves in a week) and I may amend this depending on what I watch the remaining four weeks of the year (for example, The Simpsons Movie) but otherwise, this is pretty much all I’ve got — though I’m sure I’ve forgotten something:

• American Gigolo
• Black Christmas (1974, Clarke)
• Blue Collar
• Daisies
• Face of Another
• Films of Kenneth Anger Vol. 1 & 2
• Fires on the Plain
• Flash Gordon
• The Girl Who Knew Too Much
• The Holy Mountain (1973, Jodorowsky)
• Idiocracy
• Imitation of Life (1959)
• Inland Empire
• Ivan’s Childhood
• Killer of Sheep (pictured above)
• Late Spring
• The Little Fugitive (VHS only)
• Maya Deren: Experimental Films
• Mouchette
• Muriel
• Old Joy
• Overlord
• Pitfall
• Princess Raccoon
• Puppetmaster
• R Kelly: Trapped in the Closet
• Raising Victor Vargas
• Salesman
• Sansho the Bailiff
• The Science of Sleep
• The Seventh Victim
• Spider Baby
• Straight Time
• Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip: Music for Experimental Film
• Two Lane Blacktop
• Woman in the Dunes
• Zodiac

My “Best of 2006″ can be read here.

Blog’s been a bit slow lately… neglected, the poor thing, so many readers left with bated breath for something, anything… so here’s a review I pulled from one of the store’s email newsletters from earlier this year. Get all excited and lose your mind and stuff:

I don’t believe Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep captures the essence of dreaming as well as the best surrealist films, but it does convey a convincing sense of disorder and weird synchronicities in the guise of a charming (albeit ultimately painful) romantic comedy.

Gondry’s previous films (Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - both scripted by Charlie Kaufman) teetered on the brink of delirium and madness, but here he more or less throws his main character (Gael Garcia Bernal - what a dreamboat, *sigh*) headfirst into a Freudian soup of fractured families, questionable motivations, workplace frustrations and unfulfilled longings. Bernal’s protagonist escapes from this misery into his dreams, which begin to overflow the boundaries of slumber and imagination, coloring his daily life with plastic, childlike designs and creations: water made of cellophane, mechanical horses, one-second-time-machines, etc. Gondry’s trademark visual inventiveness has never been more vivid and intuitive (nor more deeply felt and profound) than it is here.

To be perfectly honest I was not an admirer of Gondry’s previous work (including his many music videos) nor of Bernal’s acting (which seemed to consist entirely of puffing up his lips and squinting - wow, sexy!) so I was pleasantly surprised how affecting I found this film, and how taken I was with Bernal’s performance. The film manages to be both melancholy and funny, and frightening and beautiful at the same time.

Only 12 of Stanley Kubrick’s 13 feature-length films have ever been available to the general public. He considered his first film, 1953’s Fear and Desire a learning experience (”student level”) and made every attempt throughout his life to suppress the film. Bootleg tapes and discs were releatively easy to come by, but now the movie is available on YouTube for those who would like to see The-Greatest-Filmmaker-Of-All-Time in his nascent form. The clips are in extraordinarily lousy shape, but I guess beggars can’t be choosers, etc.

Begin here:

Fear and Desire

***

Additionally, Kubrick’s three early documentary shorts can also be eyeballed at that site:

Day of the Fight (1951)

Flying Padre (1951)

The Seafarers (1953)

Here are a couple films related to or adapting the work of JG Ballard, whose superb novels Empire of the Sun and Crash have been made into pretty good films by, respectively, Steven Spielberg and David Cronenberg.

The first, J.G. Ballard - Shanghai Jim, is a 1991 BBC documentary about the author and his remarkable life.

The second is a 1971 interpretation of his daring novel, Crash. The short (and much discussion regarding it and its source novel) can be seen here. Incidentally, the film features Gabrielle Drake, who was the star of Gerry (Thunderbirds) Anderson’s science-fiction series UFO and was, also, the sister of Nick Drake.

Pretty amusing interview with David Lynch here.

For his succinct view on “product placement” in films (an excerpt from the above interview) see here.

I’d recommend watching the latter first, just because.

Lodge Kerrigan’s “Clean, Shaven“  

While Hollywood filmmakers have never shied away from the theme of mental illness, they’ve also rarely handled the subject with the responsibility or imagination it has deserved. Films as varied as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shock Corridor, Rain Man, or A Beautiful Mind might seem to consider the multitude of psychiatric disorders in as many different ways, and might be momentarily troubling, but they generally resort to feel-good sentimentality, undeserved heroism, or cheap “lessons learned” conceits that would be better suited to a TV-movie-of-the-week.

Director Lodge Kerrigan’s intentions and skills as a filmmaker set Clean, Shaven apart not only from the subgenre of “mental illness” films, but also the stolid glut of mid-90s independent films (the willfully quirky Hal Hartley, the unearned “cool” of post-Tarantino crime comedies, etc.). Star Peter Greene is recognizable by his presence as a baddie in a handful of big hit genre pics, namely Pulp Fiction and The Mask. Made with a visual precision that parallels the obsessive “ordering” of its main character, Clean, Shaven gives Greene the rare opportunity to transcend stone-cold badness into a more uncomfortable - and more realistic - terrain: the moral blurriness of life as it is, and not how we’d like it to be.

In doing so, Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven is the uncommon film willing to acknowledge the unpleasant otherness and isolation of a disturbed individual. His behavior elicits no easy sympathy or understanding and few clues are forthcoming regarding his motivations; in fact, his conduct seems as baffling to him as it does to us. Roger Ebert (yes, Roger Ebert) says Kerrigan “…doesn’t see Peter from the outside, as a danger or a threat, but from the inside, as a suffering man who still retains those instincts that make us human, including love for our children. That society cannot see him with the same empathy is perhaps inevitable. Peter is the kind of man we quickly cross the street to avoid. Now we understand how much he needs to avoid us, as well.”