Greek Student Protests Silenced

Please Return the Tour Director
or...Waiter, There's a Fly in My Souvlaki

When forty-three half-awake Americans touched down in a sub-tropical Athens last March, most of them had no idea what the country had been experiencing for months. No one had read a Greek newspaper, or called a distant cousin or watched a clip of international news. The only thing any of them had prepared for was the weather: balmy but windy, with the risk of chills at higher altitudes. The tour guide who picked up the mish-mosh crew of Penn State alumni, students and faculty members pointed out landmarks and bits of travel information as the bus wended its way from the airport to a hotel tucked into a corridor of Athens' crowded Center.

Tips on where to exchange currency and purchase rudimentary tourist items gave way to the overall presentation of what the tour would entail, with only a hint of warning about guarding against garden variety pick-pockets. As the bus turned the corner onto Akadamias, a statement about the student uprisings introduced the Athenian University's Administrative Building covered in graffiti and protest banners largely in Greek, in addition to tables arranged mysteriously at the building's mouth.

No mention of the riotous demonstrations that have been an ongoing part of Greek life was made, even though only two days before the plane's arrival the streets that the weary but smiling tourists now travelled had been swarmed with tens of thousands. Some had been armed with petrol bombs, some with signs, but many had just been there to make their presence known to those on the opposite end of the streets: the Greek police, dressed in full body armor to protect them from the occasional petrol bomb as they used rubber bullets and tear gas on the protesters.

Home Base: University Administrative Building

That's the essential protection that the tables provide, hindering the ability of any tradition-clinging soul to simply launch tear gas or any other foreign matter into the building from the sidewalk or from across the street. Although the building is under truce, such precautions appear to have been perceived as necessary by the remainders of the protesters camped out inside the building. The identities of the sixty-one had also become a concern, as the following Wednesday the Greek courts would be trying forty-nine arrested on minor charges, many of whom had yet to meet with a lawyer and prepare a defense according to a Greek independent news source.

What was all the fuss about? The privatization of the socialized university system was identified as the instigation for the takeover. From the tour director's perspective, though, the protestors were little more than rebels without causes. "Whatever you are for," Dimitrius dismissed their position without question, "we are against." An interesting summary, considering that enough students had protested to shut down the entire public university system in Greece -- approximately 300 locales -- for over four months. The only institutions of higher learning operating in all of Greece during that time were private universities, most of which aren't Greek. All of this becomes clear slowly, over nine full days of foreign educational enlightenment.

An Education Wrapped Inside a Riddle

Anna Zora takes great pride in her work as a tour guide, bearing herself as a representative of everything that Greece once was and everything that it currently strives to be. Her demeanor speaks of a country where rest and relaxation define an industry and a work ethic slowly, stodgily prevails. Her job is simple: visit ancient ruins and lecture on their significance in history and to posterity, smile with poise and grace and winning confidence and treat each guest to a gem from her acumen. Not just anybody can be a tour guide in Greece. Licensing requires a baccalaureate degree with courses zig-zagging all over the humanities and social sciences. Each site claims a complicated history which comes to life better when its archaeology is considered from botanical and zoological perspectives, economic, political and so on.

Anna Zora: Former History Major

Zora's main route lies in Athens, where she guides her ever-changing flocks of bus-propelled tourists through the remaining ruins that can be witnessed best as a whole from the Acropolis. Aloft that windy summit it is easy to see the ancient path to Hadrian's arch, beyond which what's left of the Temple of Zeus still makes an impression. On the opposite bank of the citadel, the Temple of Haphaestus still stands with most of its roof or "cap" intact -- the only ancient Greek ruin that can boast that particular feat. These sites make up the tour guide's daily routine, and she cuts a memorable figure as she talks avidly and knowledgeably about the theatres and the stadiums that time has not completely forgotten, nor it seems will ever.

Fixing a hole where the rain gets in...

Despite her daily soak in such history, though, the events of modern Greece have not escaped Zora's notice. She hunkers in front of the Parthenon and talks eagerly in English of where the country has been in recent years and where the country is headed. The progress in terms of its environmental responsibilities is tangible. "Pollution is not as bad as it used to be because now we have the Metro, since the time of the Olympic games. We have the tram for public transportation, the trolley buses...so, there is a way in the last few years to, let's say, eliminate the pollution." In addition to the subway and tram systems that Athens implemented in order to host the Olympics in 2004, car owners have been placed under an ordinance that allows only cars with license plates matching a specific day of the week by odd and even numbers on the streets. After all, Athens' infrastructure hasn't changed much since 1834 when it was made the country's capital and inhabited by only thirty-four thousand. Today the number is five million, with much of that population bulging in Athens' Center.

"In the beginning, I think this system worked very well, the odd and even numbers," Zora smiles, "...but now, it doesn't help so much because all the families have at least two cars, so they can enter the Center every day." In a country so far willing to achieve and maintain Kyoto Accord compliance, it is strange to witness one of its citizens admit to an environmental failing, especially with a random method that has been implemented all over the world with mixed results. Rome allows traffic in the city based on the same system, and London requires fees of drivers that keep poorer people using public transport. [1] In Butte, Montana, where drinkable water is increasing in value, residents may only water their lawns or wash their cars on days corresponding to the same system but based on house numbers. What Greece might be lagging behind in on car pollution is swiftly made up for with its implementation of solar cells on nearly every rooftop and windmills that can power up to 75% of a region with strategic mountain-top placement.

Every little bit helps...a lot.

The restlessness of Greece's youth remains a distraction, though. Zora sees the dispute the students have as a narrower issue than the generic rebellion that the tour director described. "The University students are against the new law," she says, "...they're going to make renovations and changes in the University system regarding the private universities -- public and private universities -- because so far in Greece we have only public universities and private foreign universities. [We have] public and private colleges, but only public universities...and also, they want to change the system of the exams. They are going to put a time limit, for certain periods of time that one can complete their studies." What she describes entails a great deal of nuance that requires context beyond the commercialization of the educational system and a square look at the military service that's compulsory for young men born into a country neighboring so closely with uncertain nations like Iraq and Iran and in eternal border dispute with Turkey, a country with the world's third largest military outfit.

Traditional guards scurry past re-taken building.

Dimitrius points to the flaws in the educational system as a social institution, noting that it comes before higher education, and even then, "Only the best students that have written a good deal on their exams will be able to participate in Greek universities." Those who do have so far been allowed to study and complete their degrees at thir own pace. But no more, once the reform law passes. "I must say that this reform that everybody's protesting against has a couple of good things," he continues, "but I must say that it's not complete, so maybe that's why the kids are against it because it's not a really good, complete decision reform, it's just patches, like sometimes we patch the roads or highways." Zora appears to agree, albeit from a more passionate point of view that sees the students and professors aligned together on a losing front. "In a country where democracy was born, really sometimes we do not work in a democratic way, and this is something that is disappointing...the future of this country, and all the hope, the hopes of this country, are based on that. So we must do our best."

Life Is What Happens to You
...When You Are Busy Making Other Plans

"I don't really understand anarchy myself," declares Ashley Meli, flopped on a bed at the Aryon Hotel in Athens' Center the night before the group leaves the crowded city to tour the countryside. "[Anarchy] doesn't make sense to me; like, there has to be some order to things." George Propovik, idling near her with a flower given to him by a Gypsy woman, agrees with her implicitly. "...because people are naturally evil," he asserts quietly, "...anarchy implies, like, no government and no laws and no police and all that, right? So you'd probably just have a lot of corruption." The pair of twenty year-old students didn't go to the Administrative Building, but their thoughts on the students' activities are pretty clear. Neither of them understands why privatization might be a bad thing and both agree that there are probably a lot of students who just want to go back to class, and would if they had the chance.

Yet the peaceful, almost vacation-like setting on Akadamias told a different tale earlier that afternoon. The busy banners and graffiti and poster-stapled barricade tables aside, the atmosphere at the Administrative Building was friendly and relaxed. A PA system had been set up and was blaring odd music that was neither punk nor really 80s ballads, but somewhere in between, and the 61 protestors left inside the building could be seen behind that wall of sound, milling around as though they were at a family reunion. In fact, the general mood was so pleasant that even the approach of a journalist didn't mire it too much, even though eyes narrowed. Only a short time ago, a French journalist had passed through and conducted interviews and had, according to one thin, long-haired student named Caephalus, misrepresented them entirely.

But even that was only part of the reason why the group flatly refused to be filmed; mostly, they didn't want to misrepresent any of the other participants for whom they did not feel they could speak. "A lot of us are anarchists," Caephalus said, "but not all. We all have our own political views." Shrugging through his snug green sweater, the young student relayed that not even all of the people camped inside the building for several months were students. The building, which is the face of the university and not its actual locale, was undergoing renovation when the takeover began, and one of their number was a construction worker. Anna Zora's understanding that the faculty had generally dissented with the administration was in evidence too, as one professor was demonstrating his support by sacking in with the students also every night.

Almost immediately it becomes clear that the protest and the takeover are not about privatization, despite the Club Med vibe that the square gives off. Beyond the music and new decor to boost morale and promote their cause, the students are tired. But they're more tired of obstinate channels in their society. They're tired of social issues going untreated and unnoticed, swept under a carpet to keep the hotel lobbies shiny and full. They're tired of a slow-moving government and a press that acts as lip service to that government no matter how ineffective their policies are. And they're tired of living in a country that "pretends like everything is okay when it is not." Caephalus pointed to the job situation, the government situation and the media situation, stating that they are all clearly in need of reform. "So many people are living on 600 euros a month."

Homeless Athenian sleeps in shade of heroic statue. [2]

Being anarchists mostly, no one person spoke for the group. Each day they assembled publicly, no cameras allowed. That was the only plan. Three hundred campuses were involved in the strike which shut down the entire university system in Greece. How they got organized, said Caephalus, was not through any one system but through several ways which he didn't divulge. He also seemed to think that there was considerably less backlash in Greece than in America where he believed that the government was much more hostile in its dealings. "If we had done this in New York," he said, "we would have gotten shot."

Only days later the law for privatization passed, changing the truce status of the square. All of the remaining protesters were escorted off the campus and quick dabs of paint were applied to the building's walls. The only souvenirs the group left behind were bits of graffiti still visible on the building's harder to deal with marble base and a few statues. Classes would resume the following week, as though nothing had ever happened. On the same day that a conference was being held inside the upstairs ballroom and lecture hall, young student tourists are snapping pictures of each other on the steps outside in the full sunshine of a fine, March day in Athens, the touched-up background setting the mood. No police oficers guard the building, nor do any university officials either. Only one man stands just inside the Doric columns and greets people as they come in. Whether the lack of concern for any more protesting is for show or not is hard to tell but it appears that for now, at least, education is back to being business as usual.


[1] Great thanks to Harry Tuttle of Screenville for making me aware of these very checkable facts about which I otherwise may have never learned.

[2] To narrow this blog's content to the trackable evolution of Unclear Pictures' upcoming documentary on modern Greek social conditions, gods in disguise, just click here and stay tuned.

Sound & Sympathy in Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973)

Terrence Malick's haunting, lyrical re-envisionment of the 1950s Starkweather-Fugate killing spree provides an interpretative and non-judgmental perspective of what it might have been like for a fifteen-year-old girl to have absconded with her father's murderer and passively participate with the subsequent domino-like murders that followed. Through a combination of sound techniques, the subtler, more nuanced aspects of the story help to shed light on how a situation like that might have played out in real life. Told in a sparse voice-over with a reflective journal writing-like quality and a series of non-traditional sound choices, Badlands manages to convey the empty, nowhere feel of a small town where boredom might prevail over reason.

Malick shows that ennui like a hairline fracture, separating its two main characters -- Kit and Holly -- from everything but their most natural surroundings. That implicit, diegetic context imbues the film with a great sense of symbolism concerning the loss of innocence, coming of age, and self-realization; and, as the story progresses and Holly simultaneously comes out of shock and withdraws from Kit, the voice-over takes on new strength and self-awareness -- just like any journal would when the writer, secure in solitude, abandons everything but her own voice.

Holly chooses a different path...

Similarly, sounds that are and aren't used in Badlands denote certain moods and reinforce the disconnect between these characters and their environment. Kit cuts out early from collecting trash in the opening scene and stops to crush a can under his boot in the alley, and then kick it away. Meanwhile, Holly practices baton twirling quietly during her voice-over. Later, when the father discovers his daughter has become intimate with Kit, her mouth moves soundlessly and instead we hear her voice over telling us about her father punishing her for it by shooting her dog. We also hear the gunshot. Kit sits up awake in bed during another voice over which tells us, without letting us listen along, that he hears what sounds like the sea in a conch shell when he's away from her. In both of these instances, the film allows its audience to infer by imagination how these scenes may sound and feel; they are contemplative and open to interpretation, inviting and engaging the senses to open up to these two characters and their unusual and normally unsympathetic dilemma.

Certain other omissions in the soundtrack stand out as well. One interesting consideration is that many unpleasant or simply more mundane sounds don't reach the audience's ears, such as the cattle feeding when Kit gets hired on a ranch after losing his position as a trash collector. Instead, we hear Holly's sweet, lilting voice-over and are left to infer that Kit's mind is, as she he claims, elsewhere and more with us as we watch them. That binding effect between audience and characterization works well, and Malick is very careful not to throw in any distractions, rendering the "noise" level of Badlands practically non-existent. Like a good poem, there is no extra line, word, or letter that does not serve some muscular purpose to the film's bare bones. Diegetically, we hear only the sounds that hold importance or significance to its characters, and the absence of diegetic music speaks volumes. Holly tells the audience about her piano lessons, but we do not hear them; likewise, when we are told that her father has switched her lessons to concentrate on the clarinet as a way of making a lady of his wayward daughter, we do not hear the clarinet either, not even when we see her with the reed in her mouth. This not only serves to evoke the truer world of the characters' inner lives but to create a great sense of quiet, lucid emptiness within the frames.

Only a moment after Holly, still and silent clarinet in hand, runs to greet her father coming home, the scene in which Kit shoots him begins. Thus far, the sequence of events has been natural: the couple has met and fallen in love, and Kit has approached his girlfriend's father to attempt have a man-to-man conversation with him. Yet the underlying events upset the balance of things: Kit is twenty-five to Holly's fifteen, and she lied to her father right after meeting the significantly older man. We hear the lie in direct dialogue in an otherwise affectionate scene and then the next time we see Kit and her together, birds are chirping lazily in sunshine and their relationship is obvious and progressing quickly. So when he shows up after failing to get any satisfaction from his girlfriend's father about being left alone to enjoy his time with Holly, and enters the house to start packing her clothes without speaking to her about it, the unnatural act of entering seems more natural than it otherwise might. Had it not been for the gun in his hand, both the real life story and the film would've gone much differently. [1]

But Malick makes as much use of the small-town sounds as possible to house the first and most important shooting scene in a sturdy, almost amicable fashion. Directly after the shot, a neighborhood dog barks. Kneeling by her father, we hear the words, "This is Holly," delivered by a Spacek completely in touch with the fact that her character has little identity to lose. The use of music is minimal and accompanied by rocking, handheld camera movement that conveys almost a slight Dutch angle sense that helps to keep the audience in suspense as to what kind of character Kit might turn out to be after all, now that he has evolved from reticently charming to wieldy. A cut to the basement where Kit drags the dead man gives way to a cut of him emerging from the basement into cricket-laden evening with a toaster in hand, which he then declares that he has found even though no former dialogue supports that it was lost. We are left, again, to our imaginations to decide how much of the relationship we see unfold is real and how much of it falls into a strained, gray area where two people simply co-exist.

An aural and visual treat, Badlands takes care to ensure that the non-diegetic music does not distract from the story, but enhance it instead. Often the score serves to convey emotions too complex to be translatable through any other means, and these are placed most often in transitions. After Kit leaves the house with the father in the basement, the bereft daughter wanders the upstairs with a cigarette that would have been foreign to her only weeks prior, trying to make some sense of everything that has happened but unable to. This is cued not just by the music but by the lack of voice over when we see her move to a window and watch two boys sitting on a curb across the street. Her separation from her youth before her time is obvious and apparent, and the music grows louder and more frenetic later when Kit sets fire to her house in an attempt to make the entire affair look like a murder-suicide that ended in arson.

This includes a brilliant scene in which the newly minted murderer records a suicide note that claims that the reasons for the tragedy "are obvious" onto a record that he then places in a turntable on repeat only yards away from the blazing inferno they leave behind. By this point in the film, everything from Holly's childhood has disappeared: her father, her mother's memory, her dog, and her home. As the setting changes from restless town to daunting wilderness in the titular surroundings, the ease with which these two got so far and the understandability of her absolution of him becomes ever more apparent.

[1] It should be noted that Malick took great creative license with the Starkweather-Fugate story. In reality, Charlie (Kit) Starkweather was nineteen and had already killed a gas station attendent when he showed up at the fourteen year-old Caril's house. He murdered both her parents and then proceeded to choke the babysitter to death while his young girlfriend made him a sandwich. It's difficult to get a read on the real-life events and perceptions fifty year later, but somehow Malick recreates a family structure that allows Spacek's character to mature onscreen and be pitted against the popular views of her involvement with Starkweather, which is an interesting commentary in and of itself. In the film, even the Texas Rangers who hunt him down find the mass-murdering Kit charming and respectable while Holly feels the glaring judgment of their captors.

It seems that in reality, Caril Fugate would've received a kinder reception after having both parents murdered and being kidnapped from her babysitter, but it's hard to say where Malick pulled that aspect from. It does, however, make for excellent, character-driven storytelling. If you haven't already seen Badlands, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Dory on Kelly Green

Ok, so I've just done something rather unusual for me: I entered an online photography contest. This post is in part an enticement (of you, the reader) to vote on two upcoming contests (for me, preferably, the writer, filmmaker and photographer). Of course, you don't have to. I'll still continue to write about many a lovely topic. Coming up soon, in fact, will be a look at Terrence Malick's use of sound to support story and characterization in Badlands (1973) and a seriously in-depth look at editing in Fellini's Amarcord (1974).

I may also write something about John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974) but no promises on that one. If you have a thought about whether I should tackle Cassavetes and from what angle, feel free to leave a comment. I'm feeling rather open to suggestion (it's the weather) and would love to take your thoughts.

Cheers.

(...and check out JPG Magazine, all you web-surfing faerie folk!)

directions (2007)

Here's the third entry in a series of shorts inspired by the notion of colliding consciousness. The final cut and score are still in the works...(and it's YouTube, so it's the low-fi version.)

For those of you not quite in the know, the film stars Penn State-New Kensington's own reclusive, hard to find Danielle Donahue whose career is already being fertilized over at Rotten Tomatoes. Give it up, folks. This was Dani's first film that didn't involve oodles of blood and first work with a director who said more than, "...okay, go!"

Enjoy.

Coming Soon... gods in disguise (2007)

Moving forward in the world of independent filmmaking, Unclear Pictures will unveil its look at social and environmental conditions in modern Greece on June 1 of this year. The short documentary will deal with the last days of the anarchists' siege of the University system.

Stay tuned...

Things Happen: Reversals of Fortune in John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) & Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1956)

Since classic Hollywood cinema by Bordwellian definition deals in reversals of fortune ad nauseum, this treatise will examine the specific vehicles of catharsis employed in these next two films. Ford's titular object and Sirk's small 1950s town provide, respectively, compression and the ultimate denouement necessary to off-set its characters' accomplishments, each doing so in a unique way. Where the literal stagecoach brings together a rag-tag ensemble through proximity, the more conceptual town actually eats at the sense of space between two people until it seems like there's simply no room for a relationship. The difference between the uses of mise-en-scene in these films, beyond the obvious adjustment for makeup and costume in black and white, speaks to a meaning deeper than the surface stories. The lighting and setting especially contribute to the psychological parameters of the characters' relationship to each other and to their setting, the cohesive and centrifugal forces of these plots.

Ford was making a Western. A train could have been the natural option of vehicles, but it would have ousted the potential threat of attacking Apaches and allowed its passengers too much leg room. The stagecoach instead redirects the eye to its passengers rather than the setting. The long shot of it moving through the desert establishes and re-establishes the wild surrounding it, both letting the audience know that the gang is on the move and reminding it of what a small capsule careens through this unknown country. Inside, though, space is constructed in such a way to study each character. Since the relationships between certain characters change substantially by the end of Ford's film, special notice should be given to the placement of those characters within the narrative, lighting and the costuming that offers more than standard, Western denotative functions.

Social position feeds the main conflict and resolution of Stagecoach. Although the natives present the variable of a potentially hostile threat, they remain as such; it is the people whose lives intersect on the journey who threaten the peace more intimately. While inside of the vehicle, the shots are largely formal, medium compositions that dance between straight shots and more angled ones. Part of the justification for this lies in keeping the conversation participants and their respective seats in the coach straight, to witness who is looking and speaking to whom and who is avoiding eye contact and discussion. John Wayne, as the black sheep of the pack, sits in the odd seat on the coach's floor, allowing for nearly 360 degrees of camera movement which the cinematographer uses to compress the air between the stuffier inhabitants when appropriate. It also allows for a variety of exterior events to be visible through the coach windows. Partly in keeping with the development of the characters, but also to aid the impact of the eventual surprise of the Indian attack, the camera only leaves the coach interior when the action justifies it wholesale.

The director makes good use of the film's mise-en-scene at the intermittent stops outside of the coach, too. If the coach is his characters' catalyst, the breathers between act as air sacs for expansion upon the theme of social justice. The scene which exposes the society woman to be pregnant provides ample goodies that demonstrate the changes occurring in the group in subtle ways. After she faints at the news of her husband's wounding, the rest of the gang rushes in to see her, and for that brief moment, they are all the closest together that they will ever be. The lighting of that scene has the advantage of existing in one of the larger interior sets used, and it interplays with the suspense not only in terms of shadows against a wall but also in terms of significant costuming highlights.

While much of the costuming in Stagecoach is denotative of societal rank (as with the banker, who wears decidedly authoritative black dress) or ancestral background (like the doctor who wears an Irish-style derby to set off his accent) Ford also personalizes each actor's garb. By doing so, he opens up the floodgates of symbolism through clothing. The gambler, for instance, wears a spotlessly white hat that glows in a spike of light during the suspenseful delivery scene; yet, doubts had been raised during his introduction regarding his status as a gentleman. Whether the glow is meant to be sinister or not, it is intriguing because his character has so many shades of nuance -- and in a way, that is reflected in the hat. An even greater development exists between the society woman and the more coquettish one that we can assume to be either a dancer or a woman of looser morals.

The society woman rejects every offer of help from the woman, often in the form of an item of clothing that would wam her. By the film's end, the new mother not only uses the clothing but accepts it as a gift. In this way, Ford allows the personalization of costuming to permeate the cathartic bonds that the stagecoach helps to create.

Sirk's town in All That Heaven Allows sets the pace of the film from the opening scene of a church's bell house, upon which the clock hands read as noon. The town, like the time, is already in full swing; at least, as much as any sleepy, little American town can be. Yet the town will also share another characterisitic with time: both are products of human invention and, as such, are transient. To support the themes of self-reliance and independence introduced in the film, time is used as a suggestion, perhaps, that its illusory power has as little true consequence as the town that is the psychological obstacle to Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman's romance. Many of the motifs in the film likewise support the natural world of American transcendentalism, but Sirk does not limit the mise-en-scene to the typical perception of all things New England.

The spacing of the characters, like the objects in the setting, is airy and uncluttered. Very little physically separates the actors in Sirk's melodrama besides light and dark. Characters are alternately alone and close together, as they need to be, as if to suggest that all is well and to reinforce the naturalness of independent thought through independent action. In her own home, the film never once shows the mother in her kitchen surrounded by gadgets; it is the children who bring some small sense of clutter to the film, when the son mixes drinks or when the daughter plays with her mother's makeup. Sirk even goes so far as to create a sense of cacaphony visually speaking during the party, by placing people chaotically throughout the frames on the evening that ends in social disaster. Meanwhile, on the hipper side of town, Rock Hudson's friends present a more ordered universe as they sit to eat at a long table that, although arranged at a 45 degree angle to the room's walls (denoting, perhaps, their differences with society), has seats in a uniform pattern for people to dine together charitably.

After the more chaotic party, Sirk reveals the clock again, in the full darkness of midnight. The temporal reality foreshadowed at the film's opening now takes on a deeper meaning and the interior lighting follows suit. When there are misunderstandings between Jane Wyman and her children, for example, they exist more in the shadows of the frame than in the lighted parts. It is interesting to note that that particular phenomenon of people conversing in shadows takes place only in the house that once belonged to her and her now-dead husband. By such extension, his ghost reaches into her life as effectively as the town reaches into the main relationship. Vibrant colors and patterns of light -- especially upstairs in the more familiar, personal rooms -- further emphasizes the haunted feeling without resorting to pointing to it through dialogue or special effects.

The absolute vibrancy of such shots acts as a relief from the story's progress, even if the diversion is one from romantic conflict to mother-daughter tension. Opening up the characters' relationships, these lighting choices add a whole, new dimension to the film that may have been more flat had it not begged the audience's attention to the strangeness of these people's lives. A woman in emotional solitary confinement, a daughter who feels like she knows better than her mother and an overprotective, fickle son would have played much differently -- as if these were people we had already met and there was no real story here -- without the lighting and color choices.

Character development especially benefits in certain areas. Consider the scene in which the busybody best friend attempts a heart-to-heart with Jane Wyman. The friend realizes that the housekeeper can hear them despite the vacuum cleaner and the action moves from this:

to this:

Although Sirk never spells it out, such actions clearly delineate the understood separation between society people and the working class in small-town America and underscores the social conflict resulting from Wyman seeing her gardener. By contrast, Rock Hudson's friends make no such separation and the audience can realize this by comparing the difference between a catered party that is already in full swing at the busybody's house and the more rustic do-it-yourself shindig that happens across town:

where Wyman discovers Walden:

Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of All That Heaven Allows is the museum-like quality of much of the setting. Exteriors reveal a very New England-looking autumn, but interiors often appear very serene, with a sense of almost sterile grace. The cold, damp grey of the old mill -- which Wyman prefers to the dowdier yet cozier house Hudson sleeps in -- would be uninviting were it not for the fireplace and the view. Sirk even uses framing to depict a sense of artistic stasis, exampled by this shot in which Wyman looks more like a bust on display than a woman about to go somewhere:

Such images are beautiful and haunting, with an organic quality between them, including a reference to the dead father's trophy on the mantelpiece that appears in a later visual reference on the patio at the party when a neighbor attempts to kiss Jane Wyman. [1] The reference is book-ended by the son's later protests against Rock Hudson marrying into the family, during which he brings up the trophy again, none the wiser that were Wyman to marry a man more acceptable to him and their society friends that she would be reduced to little more than the trophy that she sees reflected in the TV set the children buy her as a consolation to her widowhood. In that moment, the denouement is complete as Wyman realizes the falsity and emptiness of the life that stretches before her if she continues to care what other people think of her.

Although Sirk's approach is more subtle and perhaps craftier than Ford's, each film still exists within the framework afforded it. The distractions that occur within each film serve purposes in conjunction with -- and not contrary to -- the films' best interests. The singing Apache woman may seem at first like a considerable and even jumpy digression from the film's internal movement toward peaceable relations and certainly from its explicit movement toward the end of the coach ride, but it acts as cover for horse thieves to get away, distracting both the audience and the on-screen characters at once through unexpected entertainment. The early, somewhat shocking medium shot/jump cut of the banker warns the audience that something is not right without giving away an important plot point that would have detracted more from the film than the shot does had it been gleaned early.

These considerations promote the pleasure of viewing, the addition of information occurring only when necessary. Perhaps more important, though, to the filmic world is the sense that each film acknowedges that duration is short and fleeting, that the stagecoach ride can only last as long as a town or a memory's hold upon a person. In that sense, each film takes a greater place within the cinematic world, each aware of its own transience and mortality as surely as anyone who ever lived in the Old West; or anyone who has walked the streets of a small town with her thoughts miles away in Walden's Pond; or anyone who has ever noticed how silly and filmic real life can be.

[1] It is impossible for me to determine whether I would have picked this out on my own, so I must give credit where credit is due: former film blogger Andy Horbal first pointed it out in a post complete with screen grabs. Check it out.

Turning a Negative into a Positive

Years ago, I had an abusive boyfriend who had very few qualities, but one of those qualities was his ownership of an iMac with a few peripherals. When we broke up, he owed me a bit of money that he "repaid" me by slashing prices on these items and sort of splitting the difference with me. Since then, I've gotten back on my feet and finally got a new computer set-up...which is where you, dear reader, potentially come in to play.

You see, the only good way I can see to dispose of the iMac and its scanner, printer, zip drive and Alpha Smart is to sell all of it in one sitting for a very affordable, reasonable price and to turn the money over to the charity of my choosing. If you would like to help in this endeavor, please email me at: fleet528@hotmail.com.

You'd not only be helping me out; you'd be helping to support the arts in Pittsburgh, and I can't think of a better way to support the arts in Pittsburgh then to take something with negative memories and practically give it to someone who can't relate.

Please, if you can, help make history history.

Update: as of 1 April 2007 this offer has been met.

Local Filmmaker Dishes on Hard Knocks

Friendly City in the Land of the Free

What's the hardest part of making a documentary film in Pittsburgh? "Getting people to call you back, getting people to trust you," responds Pittsburgh filmmaker Chris Ivey of Hyperboy Media. "Getting people to take you seriously. But mainly trust. And support." The premiere of the first leg of his urban renewal triptych East of Liberty: A Story of Good Intentions come and gone in December 2006 at East Liberty's renovated Kelly-Strayhorn Theatre – and with the second, third and fourth showings also fading notches on his belt – Ivey glows as he talks about the various interviews that are keeping him busy and one panel discussion that really energized and excited him. Then he rolls his eyes.

An altercation broke out shortly after the Hill House screening in Pittsburgh's historic and controversial Hill District, when one member of a group of black, Muslim males made an offensive remark to a group of black lesbians. Although enthused about the sparked Q&A session that the film had elicited, the young filmmaker shakes his head as he recalls the incident. When the group tried to smooth things over by saying that he had meant no offense the lesbians, said Ivey, "weren't having any of it." The Muslim faith provides no leeway for acceptance of sexual orientation, nor does the black community in general, he confirms, shrugging. "It's a sin."

Similar conflicts pepper the ongoing spectrum of Q&A sessions that accompany each showing, and Ivey's enlightening film continues to engage a cross-section of people of various races, most of whom happen to live in an area doomed to be repopulated and possibly even renamed "The East Side" as part of a consolidated neighborhood, losing its distinctiveness. At the first showing, when he announced the follow-up leg and its focus on black-on-black violence, one audience member fumed, upset that white-on-black or even white-on-white violence was not being addressed. "I told her that I understand where she was coming from, but it was important to me to address that if I knew someone who was a victim of white crime, I would address that – but what I've been seeing is black-on-black violence exploding – and I wanted to address that."

The thirty-four-year-old Hyperboy Media founder has been living in Pittsburgh since 1995, his personal MySpace page sporting an old wound proudly, like a Purple Heart, as it declares his hometown to be "Monroe, NC…Same town as that damn Jesse Helms." His awareness of black history in Pittsburgh is up to snuff, though, as he talks about watching another documentary about East Liberty in contrast to the one on PBS. "That's the nice one," he smiles as he sits back into a chair at the Southside's Gypsy Café. Friends with the owner and nearly everyone employed there, Ivey looks incongruously at home in décor he describes as "old-school romantic," pausing to consider one of the many modern art works that incorporate old world iconic images of the Madonna and Christ.

Somehow, the renovated Greek Orthodox Church setting suits him.

For two years, the high school and Pittsburgh Filmmakers-educated filmmaker has been working on a PBS documentary about the consequences of AIDS in the African-American society at large. It reminds him of a lot of the woes entrenching an entire race, both in reality and in the media. He recalls a TV show that surfaced at the tail end of the Cosby years, Under One Roof, which included appearances by Joe Morton and James Earl Jones. "It was a really good show, and it only lasted a month," Ivey laments. "One thing from the black community is that you never see any positive images portraying black people in a strong way. It's either comedic, music or sports. It's never anything enlightening." After two years of interviews mainly set up by the AIDS documentary's Connecticut producers, Ivey's no stranger to African-Americans' lack of acknowledgment, which he pinpoints in a word: "Shame. If someone dies of AIDS, [the family] is likely to say it's cancer."

The staggering difference between the gay community's early-1980s response to AIDS and HIV awareness and that of the black community weighs on him, too. "Not many people [in the community] care that the African-American community is number one for AIDS. People only choose what affects them. If it doesn't affect them directly, they don't get involved. I think that goes for everybody, but it goes double in the black community." Those words manifested themselves with the culmination of the first part of his film, which witnesses the destruction of the East Mall Tower, an over-the-street apartment building that once signaled the entryway to East Liberty on Penn Avenue as surely as the Gateway Arch heralds the West. Ivey recalls the building's former residents in plaintive tones. "From the mid-90s until 2 years ago, you could turn on almost any news broadcast and if it mentioned East Liberty, either somebody got shot or something."

Because of the media connection of the East Mall Tower with violence and drugs, the city government made a field day of the building's demise, turning the event into a paintball free-for-all as the inhabitants of the building looked on in stupefied horror and fascination and an entire community repressed mixed feelings too diverse to list. Despite that – or, perhaps, because of that kind of trauma – Ivey had difficulties locating support nerves in the community. "If certain [city officials] felt like the direction of certain things weren't going the way that they thought they would, phone calls would slow down and maybe take a month. And they assumed the worst of the project, like the worst was going to happen and make them look bad."

When waiting for calls to inbound ceased to be a virtue, Ivey took action and went after the foundations himself. A pre-established relationship of sorts from a different project with the Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative helped significantly, as did partnering with other organizations like the Pittsburgh Foundation. "It's kind of funny the way that I saw things a certain way, and the foundations got it, but the development companies saw something different," Ivey reminisces. He had an easier time finding people to talk to him who were hacking out a living on their own, pooling a variety of perspectives to concoct the film.

Two of the documentary's featured interviewees, married couple Ebony McKinney and Davu Flint, hold a role integral to the film's evolution, something that Ivey's waiting to unveil in the second leg set to premiere in September. "[Ebony] pointed it out well when she said that people hear what they want to hear." Learning how to grab people by the ears may have been a critical lesson to him during the documentary process, but reaching people beyond the point of hearing what they want to hear interests Ivey more. "I love being able to create things and express my thoughts and, maybe, entertain and enlighten people. Make people talk, make people dance, and occasionally make people talk back to the TV," Ivey laughs. "I like that a lot."

East Liberty has undergone enough changes in the last few years to keep people talking to their TVs indefinitely, if for no other reason than to bide time while awaiting the arrival of more catapulting paint and a wrecking ball just outside their doors. Changes like signs sporting the greeting, "Welcome to the East Side," the rapid growth of corporate stores that have ousted small businesses through skyrocketing rent payments and the arrival of strange architecture make it denizens leery.

One such oddity exists at what is now an architectural firm on the corner of Whitfield and Baum. The renovation of the building included two massive wooden doors that one morning attracted a crowd of spectators. It wasn't the light coloring of the doors that had pulled the onlookers from the East Liberty branch of the Carnegie Library, though. It was the doorknob, a steering wheel-size sculpture of a bronze man climbing the doors in a loincloth. In order to open the door, a brave soul has to tug on the sculpture's tummy. One African-American library employee seemed especially alienated and turned off by the hardware seemingly placed to fit in to the urban landscape. Before trudging back to work. she managed to mutter, "Well, they're never building anything for me."

Such complacency is pretty much par for the course in East Liberty. Changes are made and people rubberneck without really getting involved. That's where Ivey comes in, exciting people and waking them up. But he also likes the easy sense of brotherhood that exists among most African-Americans, mentioning the understanding that when you see someone on the street, you greet them. He sees this as a good thing, a positive affirmation among blacks. "That doesn't fly in London, though," he smiles. East of Liberty pond hops to a similar neighborhood for a May 7th screening in Hackney, and Ivey will be riding shotgun because gentrification, like poverty, is universal.

Continuing his work state-side, Ivey plans to hang out with kids in different neighborhoods most of the summer. This stage feels of monumental importance to him because it addresses the key issue of gang violence in the city as well as the growth of the black community. Money is also easier now that the first stage has been completed and the foundations are pleased with the progress, Ivey reports, along with a nagging feeling of irony that the project's bane has now become a source of contention. Everyone wants to be a part of it now that the hard part's over, and that frustrates him. "What does it really take for people to really see?" Ivey asks of the air. "It's like making this documentary into a court case, like you have no proof or disproof that this is really happening. If I hadn't documented it, nobody would really care. Nobody wants to talk about failure. Nobody likes to deal with failure. They want to move on. You can't just forget shit."

Spending time with kids rather than adults this summer may be a refreshing change of pace for Ivey, whose frustrations with the broken lines of communication may take a while to die down. He's tired of subservience, appalled at the absence of authority questioning. "Everybody's afraid. They're either living like a citizen or an evil-doer or just a…poopie-head," he laughs, a director already geared to deal with his new subjects.

The second leg of East of Liberty will air at various venues starting this Fall, including The Kelly-Strayhorn Theatre, The Hill House and The Union Project. Each screening is followed by a Q&A session. To get involved, all you have to do is show up.

For more information, visit eastofliberty.com or email Chris Ivey at hyerboymedia@gmail.com.

Who Says Textbooks Can't Be Funny?

As I work frantically on an essay due in an hour and twenty minutes, I take the luxury of pausing to highlight a phrase that caught my attention that seems pertinent to any frustrated bloggers out there in need of a good laugh:

"...but who believed that fire, not water or air, is the chief stuff of the world. In that view, his style was seen as an incidental idiosyncracy, to be explained by a pathological mental condition or (more plausibly) by his contemptuous desire to make it very difficult for stupid humanity to understand him."

-- Merrill Ring on the philosopher Heraclitus

Audience, Meet Screen; Screen, Meet Audience...

Prologue

The title of this post notwithstanding, the subject I'm about to broach has more to do with real life than cinema. It seems that we are at a crossroads of sorts on the blogosphere. A lot of debate and vacillation has been taking place on the act of film criticism and what it means to people, why we do it and how we can do it better. And if you happen to be Andy Horbal, then the days that film reviews excited you as a cool, new way of getting to know a medium may have been relegated to the past as somewhat flat and ersatz-whether this is temporary or not remains to be seen. In a couple of startlingly similar veins, local filmmaker Lucas McNelly not long ago expressed interest in the audience/screen relationship that turned out to be one of his biggest challenges in life by his own admission in a blogathan that he launched to sort of explore why it is that men and women have such a difficult time understanding each other; and, perhaps almost as importantly, why that seems to be the gist of so many gems from male filmmakers from Truffaut to Linklater. What startled me most about this was that I had been looking at the same thing. After looking at this from several different angles, a very simple but solid fact revealed itself through blogathan discussions: We spend so much time wishing our love lives were like movies that we end up using the art form itself to try and figure out why they are not.

So what? This is news? Please, you say, picking up the tea kettle. I learn more in an average morning from my cat.

The discussion started a long time ago, though, at the Unspoken Cinema blog, where many gathered to discuss what HarryTuttle has dubbed contemplative cinema and lots of subjects effervesced to the surface, among which the relationship between the audience and the screen impressed me the most. Cineboy raised the question first: why is it that we watch contemplative cinema in the first place? But I would like to take this a step further and pose what seems to me to be the larger question and, currently, a slightly more salient one (if for no other reason, then for the sake of all those feeling disenchanted with writing about film) which is: why do we engage in deconstruction of film through criticism in the first place? The act of critique is arguably a contemplative act in and of itself. Yet the undercurrent suggests that this is not enough. When Harry first described our scope he cautioned us that simple capsule reviews would not suffice and that we should reconfigure our minds toward something more comprehensive and engaging, an open forum to make Jurgen Habermas weep for delight. That sort of atmosphere seems to have led to unrest in several quarters; or, at least, that's certainly not impossible.

Qui en sait? Having tasted honey, saccharine often simply will not do.

Why I Watch Films
(Mes Raisons Pour Regardant Le Cinema)

I really don't know. Vraiment. That might sound like a polite or trite refusal to dig deeply into my psyche, but let's face it-if I had procured a fancy but accessible reason, I think we both know that I would be lying. If there's anything I've learned from Socrates, it's that knowing myself is as likely a thing as my own common sense. Sometimes on a specific night, I know that I'm avoiding or resisting something that I should be attending to, and I may tell myself that I'll write about the film afterward, as if that really salves my conscience or improves my self-control...and let's do be clear: It's not like this is work, per se. I've never been paid to write about a film, only asked. I received a complementary copy of a film that I was asked to review in exchange last August. I was thanked as I was contacted-via email-for being "thorough and thoughtful" and haven't heard back since. That may have been my fifteen minutes, and you know what? I'm okay with that.

I know also that I enjoy several things about film that I've identified with over the years-learning about other cultures, grasping insights about complex familial and romantic relationships-but suddenly and without any really clear and relayable indicators as to why, I feel bereft of a lot of the reasons I thought I once had clearly defined and could consider not only a part of who I am as a person, but my ethos as a budding film critic and a partial scholar. Where once I felt safe and secure in the knowledge that I was learning about life from film while also taking notes on the medium itself, I now feel uncertain that I've ever really believed that and, oddly enough, that perhaps the only practical use for film and film critique is as a method of de-bugging. This infatuation, after all, began while I was still a child. I was a two-year-old in a basket at Star Wars and a walking, talking four-year-old who watched the ice skaters in Rockefeller Center after a large screen showing of Cinderella in an old 5th Avenue theatre that probably no longer exists. I was essentially kidnapped by film and held for ransom by my own consciousness, which was too young, nascent and unequipped to deal with all of the many texts that film shares with all of us so freely, so innocently. So heartbreakingly.

That's the culture we live in, breathe in and move in. If you're not tapped into some kind of medium-be it film, video games, music or books-you're probably not interacting with many people. And if, for some reason, you're only sticking to one of those-books, say-then you may be dangerous or rather anti-social. A writer, perhaps; but, just as possibly the next Ted Kazinsky. On the same page, but coming from a different angle, if you are so steeped in technology and the media that it facilitates, you may be considered to be somehow malnourished culturally. That's what local filmmaker and communications preofessor Allen Larson tells me upon return from the Academy of Motion Picture Television Arts & Sciences. They're tired of receiving intern applicants who aren't literate, who don't even know the basics about literature and art history. Youngsters today seem to know a lot about various filmmaking technology without having the faintest grasp of content and theory.

When he tells me this, my ego's momentarily bolstered that I don't suffer from that acute disorder, but after a moment I shrug. I'm not really convinced, although I don't mention it, that knowing about literature and art history and the like has ever done very much for me as a person. Somehow discovering so late in the game that I can profit from it monetarily is anti-climactic. It may take a couple months' lateness on the rent for me to see the true value in that one.

Why I Will Continue to Watch and Learn
(Mes Raisons Pour Continuant avec la Critique du Cinema)

An old writing colleague of mine going back to my freshman year of college used to describe the reasons for incompatibility between the sexes in a very Machiavellian way. "There's a poison that's been handed down to us by our fathers," Jeremy would start, and everybody would look at his hunched shoulders and protruding eyeballs and back away a few steps. He meant well, but he often didn't make it very far into his theory. If I may be so bold, I think that what he was trying desperately to talk about applies more to culture and its artifacts than anything or anyone else-but, specifically to the aritifacts of human communication. Basically, what we have here is a chicken and an egg, but to stay true a moment to a fine writer who is today a father of three, let's think of it as the poison and the apothecary. It's practically impossible for me to define myself outside of my own culture without studying every last moment in my life-most of which can not be recaptured-and yet, I am captive to all of those images and words. Perhaps you can relate. Born without immunity to all of the forces that shape us, we are the products of every interaction that we have ever had. It's a little bit freaky and exciting if you think about it from a backwards gazing perspective on your own character and what has brought you to this precise moment in time. Or, as a girlfriend of mine put it after she had her first child: "I can't believe how much influence I have over this person's life. It's really scary." In a way, it seems that in order to gain any immunity to the poison, we must drink up. The hair of the dog as it were, day by day.

We have all of these images impacting us in ways that we don't understand and won't necessarily ever understand, and we don't even have to go out of our way to consume them. Between ambient sound and light, it's nearly impossible to get away from media. You'd almost have to shut yourself in a log cabin in northern Montana; but, even Ted had to leave the hut to mail things. So as I sit and wonder why it is that life often feels so disappointing, I am led back to my original co-conspirator, Theodor Adorno, who is no longer with the living, but whose thoughts have come back to haunt many over the last twenty to thirty years. Reading the collection of essays bound into The Culture Industry conveys the sense of helplessness in our subjection to media, that we are promised things that are an illusion that can never possibly become reality. And how does the media get away with it? Why, because we let them. Stomp the Yard made the money that it did because people spent money to see it without first deconstructing the publicity campaign or the motives behind neither the film itself nor the rap culture it portrays and co-feeds. Perhaps these consumers thought that they were investing in stock?

That's not to say that the "democratized" sphere of film writers should be held responsible; probably, an education factor and an understanding of basic logic concerning how money flows should be the larger reasoning for divining why it is that people gravitate toward complementary copy, as Gloria Steinem might say. Or, as J.M. Bernstein put it, paraphrasing Adorno, "The culture industry is the societal realization of the defeat of reflection; it is the realization of subsumptive reason, the unification of the many under the one." What an onus Adorno has bequeathed the modern writer! It's easy to see how someone might feel the pressure of the ages bearing down upon his vertebrae, overwhelmed with and confused by the various tugs-of success at the writing profession, whether it pays well or not; of acceptance into some strata of peership; of personal responsibility and its seeming eternal interplay with larger societal obligations. Are we or are we not always seeking to fuse the two, to make our responsibilities those of our community and government and social setting at large?

It seems that we are. It seems that we should. The question remains, though, how much of ourselves do we have to give in order to feel that we're making a difference, and not just passing the time?



This article will continue in a second segment regarding the fun of film and audience expectations. Date TBD.

Love & Loss, Jane Campion-Style

Disclaimer: This post contains material of a mature nature. While it does not get graphic, it requires an open mind and an adult approach to thinking about sex and violence.

Recently, a Pittsburgh blogger and filmmaker named Lucas McNelly, a man I worship from afar, concocted an idea for a blogathan. These expositions of bloggers' works are a revolving part of the film and film criticism blogosphere, and a lot of us who depend upon online resources to have someone to talk to about "boring art film" or foreign films would be lost without them. The theme for this particular blogathan was the eternal misunderstanding between the sexes and a couple dozen of us got together and came up with several different aproaches to adding in our two cents'-worth.

Mine follows:

While airing the old gray matter, trying to recall good love stories written and directed by women for the Lovesick Blogathan, I came across many that could have made for a post rivaling Yonge Street and the Nile in length. Rather than digress upon all of these terrific films, which included Randa Haines' Children of a Lesser God (1986), Sally Potter's Yes (2005) and even unheard-of Canadian director Holly Dale's little-known Blood & Donuts (1995), it seems the smarter idea to tap the one recurring theme that nearly all of these films had, especially the better ones, and try and talk about that instead. Understanding that conflict is vital to almost all writing involving human interaction, it feels a natural course to discover that some major dynamic hurdle exists in these writings on love. Sacrifice, pain and loss seem to be the staples of the humble pie that often accompanies affairs of the heart. Whether at the beginning or at the end or somewhere along the way, it's almost necessary to the real fulfillment of love to experience a loss of some kind. Sometimes that loss prepares Cupid's pathetic victim for what might be the best thing that ever happened to her or him...and sometimes, it sends us to a quieter stage to lie in wait for the next.

Jane Campion seems to understand a lot about love and its partnership with loss and she has a special talent for really peeling away the layers of familial relations to augment the rawness and scariness, the abject loneliness, that can surround and even overwhelm two people who are trying to make a go of it. She did that jarringly, but wonderfully in Sweetie (1989), about (among other things) a woman afraid of trees who co-plants an alder sapling with her new sweetheart as a metaphor for their relationship, and then promptly steals the tree, hides it and pretends to know nothing about the event whatsoever despite the angst it causes her lover . In 1992's more celebrated work The Piano, she takes the idea of loss and gives it a new path that practically begs for close inspection. The technical challenge alone of writing for a heroine who speaks only through a musical instrument -- and by choice -- comes off at first not like a loss, but a study in stubborness, the brand of which can certainly be found among the women embracing the shores of a former penal colony, if it can be found anywhere. That underlying sense of pioneering background colors this work perhaps most of all, imbuing the main character with real spark, but also perhaps alienating some who simply wish to find the love story between Ada (Hunter) and George Baines (Harvey Keitel) tender, romantic and passionate.

Campion uses the film's New Zealand setting well. By opening and ending on the beach upon which Ada's piano is deposited and left to soak in ocean spray, she hinges the entire story upon a place where change is constant, where give and take simply exist. Within the first few minutes, underscored by surf, we are invited to understand the depth of Ada's inner struggle. Her father has sold her in marriage to the Reverend Alisdair Stewart; her very entrance is a glum and unflattering sacrifice. She raises a daughter from a previous marriage, a constant and lonely reminder of her past. When her new husband won't allow the piano to weigh down their caravan, small notepad and sign language between Ada and Flora aside, she loses her voice. Physically, she could speak, yes, but as she tells us right from the start, she has not since she was six or seven and even she does not know why. In a world of films which seem to lean upon the convention of men figuring women out, the admission that a woman can be a perplexing mystery to herself is more than just a departure from the norm. That tiny detail allows us to explore Ada's love affair with life through her piano as true seers, not knowing any more or less than she does at any given moment. We hear only the piano notes and this very fleeting voice that sounds like writing in a journal.

Perhaps because vocal communication can be such a frustratingly limited means of expressing ourselves and making ourselves understood and known to each other, the centrifugal force of Campion's story does most of the work for her. Her husband and his friend are each curious about her in different ways. The former, wishing his wife to like him, attempts to appease her; but George Baines -- the more relaxed man who spends more time among the Maoris than the whiter folks -- wishes her to love him. In an unlikely trade, Baines becomes the proprietor of the piano in order to receive "lessons" and before long is trading romantic gestures for Ada's increasingly clandestine visits. Love has become a negotiation.

(...a very intense and erotic negotiation performed by textured compositions and a terrific full-nude shot of Harvey Keitel that I've never been convinced didn't help Hunter win the Oscar*, despite her apparent talents.)

Yet despite all of this hardship and loss -- a basic disrespect for a property that means much to Ada, far beyond the value of its ebony and ivory -- Campion also seems to be saying that people who have no way of communicating and who may not even know about love from lack of experience can find true happiness under even the most grotesque or bizarre of circumstances. Witness when the good Reverend cuts off Ada's finger in a fit of jealous rage, an attempt to wound the part of her that makes love to his indifferent neighbor so effortlessly, using only a housing of wood and some string. It feels like he provides the fulfillment of Ada and George's love in many ways by severing her finger. That violent culmination of a life spent in silence doesn't force Ada to shout out like you might expect it to, but to gather herself in a new way with a fresh outlook.

Were I to discover that I had the love of a man like George Baines, I'd be willing to lose a finger to that end, too.




*Probably one of the best examples among Oscar moments regarding the magic of film and the suspension of disbelief. We all love Holly Hunter, even those who could do without most of her films, but when she spoke in that lovely cagey drawl of hers to accept the award, The Piano lost a bit of its charm.

El Laberinto del Fauno (2006)

Writ/Dir. Guillermo del Toro

w/ Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú

First thing's first with a movie like Pan's Labyrinth (2006): You have to see it to believe it, and if you haven't already seen it, you'll need to remedy that as soon as possible.

It's very hard to go wrong when Alfonso Cuaron is involved with a project, but Guillermo del Toro (who directed this particular project) goes the extra mile to ensure that from beginning to end it is a work of integrity worthy of the passions and innocence of youth, the foibles of tyranny and the eternal struggle to find something pure and safe and lasting.

In short, he has created a classic film.

Those familiar with the fantasy genre will recognize that this film lies somewhere outside of the standard categorization, both in content and in context: set up like a folk tale that could easily have been taken from For Whom the Bell Tolls, our young heroine must brave the tasks set for her by a faun of the underworld despite the brewing storm of Francisco Franco's Spain. Caught between a stepfather whose fanatic loyalty to Franco's dictatorship parallels his indifference to his new wife in everything but to produce a male heir, Ofelia must accomplish what Pan sets her to do or face the consequences of her own mortality. And when the daughter of the king of the underworld has been charged with duties to prove her identity, she must arise to the occasion.

The terrific thing about a film like this is its universal scope. At all levels, it registers with deep and hidden truths about childhood and growing up and the constancy of humanity to maintain a struggle between good and evil, despite ages of evidence arguing that we should give it up. The allegory of the labyrinth operates not in the mists, though, but in the reality of never knowing what's right around the bend. Like any good coming-of-age tale, that's the abiding rule.

Fans of the fantasy genre may need to adjust their expectations a bit. Legend, The Dark Crystal and The Lord of the Rings -- even The Chronicles of Narnia (although the PBS version of that story still carries the brass ring) -- each have their specific places in the movie-going consciousness. Even films with varying production values and themes, such as Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Krull and Clash of the Titans can say roughly the same thing. This film, imbued with life by incredible writing prowess and a childlike savvy, leaves the clichés and typicalities to the past, beating a new path for the international scene.

And while one well-made film's not enough to go on -- to get your hopes up that this will start a cultural revolution -- it's still some pretty exciting stuff.

Why I didn't like Happy Feet...

For those of you who saw the movie and hated it, saw the movie and loved it but didn't know why others reacted to it so violently, or just plain have nothing better to do for the next three minutes of your life and counting, here's my Happy Feet review revisited...

Tap, tap, tap, tap… You may have heard that heavenly, almost hypnotizing sound in movies like Swing Time or Taps, but Fred Astaire and Gregory Hines have been pushing up daisies now for years. So have a lot of penguins, apparently, due to over-fishing. What’s the difference between Fred Astaire, you ask, and a tapping, cartoon penguin? Well, aside from years of practice to hone a skill to seeming effortlessness and the small fact that Astaire was a real person? Nothing. Nothing at all.

2006’s Happy Feet does many things on many levels. It entertains, thrills and tugs at the heart strings of people of all ages who can’t resist that tapping cadence. A classic case of false advertising, Happy Feet’s trailer never foretold of the dark message of over-fishing that’s been stretched to encompass the larger industrial world – oil rigging, whaling and canning alike. Hitting audiences over the head with its message may, in turn, act as a deterrent to a more subtle factor – the film’s aggressive marketing to children who don’t possess the ability to discern the full extent of the problem of over-fishing any more than they could relate who really invented tap dancing.

The accents relay mixed messages it may take some young movie-goers years to disentangle. All of the dominant penguins possess American accents, while the elder Emperors retain British accents. Mexican-accented penguins comprise a smaller group that’s not taken seriously and evil penguin-eaters sound an awful lot like New Yorkers and Ruskies. All of these penguins live in the same country – Antarctica.

Apart from confusing still-developing audiences, the movie scares in places by attaching human emotions and conditions to animals without providing understanding of what it is the penguins of Antarctica really need. What did the filmmakers really wish to say with this film? That we could all just get along, if only we could learn to love tap? That seems to foot the bill. Not since Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest has the U.S. witnessed propaganda on this scale in this medium; but, at least that was done smartly.

Happy Feet would’ve made me much happier if it hadn’t been so insulting.

Volver (2006)

Going to see a Pedro Amoldovar film is a lot like taking a ride on a metal roller-coaster. Unlike the primitive wooden ones, you can relax knowing that you're not going to get jerked around a lot while watching the rush of pretty colors and participating in the squeals of delight. Right from the get-go, the characters are in the middle of their lives and you get to watch them sizzle and spark and diffuse the screen with everyday moments that could easily have been you only an hour ago. One of the best treats of the Spanish director's peculiar gift -- specifically, his restraint in ladling out huge dollops of back story to queue us up to the present -- places the story in the heart, asking only for your rapt attention. He does this so well that I imagine the only better way to watch one of his films would be as a native speaker of the language.

Familiarty with Spanish customs seems an almost negligible dimension, though, so it sounds just as plausible that, other than the slight inconvenience of non-speakers having to read subtitles, his films are seamless and character-based enough that the audience loses very little by virtue of that. And that, to me, is what really makes Almodovar stand out among his peers and predecessors. Not many non-English speaking directors -- nor, even non-Hollywood, for that matter -- can claim the kind of fanatic love and loyalty while also reaping the benefits of a very wide audience. Indie directors would be accused of mainstreamism and many foreign film directors would be accused of a cultural watering-down of their vision.

But Amoldovar is Amoldovar, world without end, Amen. Or so it seems...

Anybody disagree or have an insight? I'd like to do something different this time, and open this up to discussion before proceeding with the usual straight-forward review.

Audience/Screen Relationship ...is life.

So there's been some talk about the role of the viewer in the filmic experience -- not just the actual watching of the film itself (i.e., just showing up), but the bio-rhythms that each individual brings to the screen, the state of mind accompanying and interplaying with and against those bio-rhythms and the importance of these factors in the filmmaking process in general. Mostly, this sort of discussion has been just hinted at and kicked around, and a couple of oscillating examples can be found over at Tucker Teague's (a.k.a cineboy and at an early blogathan post by Marina. I feel like writing something on all of this, but haven't made any concrete decision yet what exactly that is...

I will have something soon, though. I'm not indecisive, not one bit -- and if I ever made you think otherwise, then I might just be rather cunning after all...;)