Nostalgia for the Light

(2010) director Patricio Guzmán
viewed: 10/10/2011

Contemplative and thought-provoking, the documentary Nostalgia for the Light peers into space and time, the deepest edges of which astronomers use massive telescopes to view.  But the film also peers into the muddy depths of a more recent history, the coup d’etat in Chile in 1973 that brought to power the murderous Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the many people tortured and killed under his regime and the ongoing silence that mars Chile’s presence about this dark time not long in the past.

What brings these potentially distant topics together is the setting of the Atacama Desert, considered the most arid place on Earth.  For those looking into the sky, the clarity is better than anywhere else on the planet, adding impact of vision to these earthbound telescopes, whose tasks are to venture back in time.  The concept of looking “back in time” in Astronomy relates to the fact that though light travels at such a great speed, even the light of the sun takes time to reach us.  So the stars that we see, the moment of light that we see, actually occurred in the past.  And the further into space one looks, the further and further in time we “see”.

Both poetic and scientific, these concepts drive director Patricio Guzmán.  He opens the film on the opening of one of these massive telescopes and shares his personal connection to astronomy.  As he turns his gaze to the desert itself, this dry wasteland (rich as it has been in minerals), the comparison to the surface of a foreign planet is not a hard one to follow.  But beneath the cooked, cracked desert are many, many bodies of “the disappeared”.  And some of their loved ones continue to scour the desert for their bodies.

Due to the aridity, bodies do not decompose as they would in many other places, and a body of some ancient llama driver, millennia-old could show up almost as complete as one that had been left there in the last century.  The Pinochet government cruelly removed many of the bodies (or claimed to at least), saying that they tossed them into the ocean so that they could never be reclaimed.  One woman who shares the story of having found her brother’s foot, how even alone with that small fragment, connected in a way that mourners yearn for.

It’s a remarkable film in that sense.  While not at heart a post-modern discourse, it did actually bring me to mind of Jacques Derrida.  Not so much a “play” on concepts, but a deepening and enriching of these two potentially disparate foci.

The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story

(2009) directors Gregory V. Sherman, Jeff Sherman
viewed: 08/06/2011

More that 20 years ago, a friend turned me on to a 3 CD collection of Disney music, which I took to in a big way.  It featured songs from the earliest films through to the then present, but also contained theme songs from live action films, television shows, and even theme park rides.  I’d say that about 75% of it was brilliant stuff.  And oddly, of that 75% that I was really into, I discovered that the songs were written by a team named “Sherman/Sherman”.  At the time, I didn’t know that these two were brothers, but that they wrote a good deal of the best of the Disney music, for animated films like The Jungle Book (1967), mixed live-action/animation films like Mary Poppins (1964), and even Disney theme “rides” like  In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Room.

Who were these amazing song-smiths?  Brothers Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman.

When I saw that this documentary was coming out, I was probably of a small minority of people who were kind of excited about it.  I really knew little of the brothers who wrote songs from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, and “Winnie the Pooh”.  It turns out that the story between this writing team is more interesting than one might expect.

For all of being siblings only 2 1/2 years apart, the two are as different as night and day.  And for all of their success, they are not at all close.  The film is actually directed by two of their sons, Gregory V. Sherman and Jeff Sherman, who along with others of their children, have tried to find ways to bring them together.

Bob, the elder of the two, is the lyricist, the darker of the two, who served in WWII at the age of 17 and saw some terrible things.  Richard, the younger and more buoyant, is the music writer.  They both earned their musical ear from their father, who had also some success as a songwriter before the war.

The film is one of a number of Disney documentaries that seem to further the story of the studio, the legend of Walt Disney, and capture a larger story behind the movies, the theme parks, the world of Walt.  In this sense, the film only really deals with the strange estrangement of the brothers, not delving into any real issues with Walt of the studio.  And this is certainly the case for the Sherman brothers, who seem to have been personal favorites of Walt’s from the time they earned their first hit for The Parent Trap (1961).  And the two brothers refer to Disney as a wonderful, imaginative paternal figure for whom they both have great respect and admiration.

Interestingly, the Shermans had big successes outside of the studio, such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and interestingly to me, Snoopy Come Home (1972).  So many of their songs are so hummable and catchy, you have to really strive to get them out of your head.  They also wrote It’s a Small World After All.

I don’t know if you could compare them to the great American songwriters like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, and the others who are considered as part of the Great American Songbook. Certainly, their music comes at the close of that classic period, and certainly, some of their songs are probably either more inane or kitschy, compared to the classics of the middle 20th century.  But they certainly are the best musical writing team to have worked at the Disney Studios and they have a well-earned legacy.

There is a sadness to their lives, their estrangement, a melancholy beneath the story.  It makes for an interesting film, for me because I was already interested in them and their music.  But it could be an eye-opener for a number of fans of the Disney classics, a pair who had some fame in their day (they won Oscars for Mary Poppins for instance).  But how many have heard of them today?

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

(2009) director Jessica Oreck
viewed: 06/05/2011

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is a funky-sounding title for a very interesting and thought-provoking documentary about Japanese culture and the Japanese “obsession”/relationship/appreciation for insects.  The film, while produced and directed by an American, is narrated in Japanese, instructing and giving some background, historically and culturally, about a long-standing relationship with the insect world.  Though the film has this instructive voice-over, it also tends to flit around across various aspects of the ways that insects are absorbed in Japanese culture.

The film begins with the large beetles that are collected in the forests and sold in the cities as pets, revered and well-cared for by children and adults.  But the film doesn’t merely focus on beetles.  We are told how dragonflies came to symbolize strength and became symbols for the Samurai class.  There are festivals in which people travel to watch fireflies swarm in the night.  There are also some less-appealing creatures like silkworms and another that looks like an enormous maggot.

Writer/director Jessica Oreck traces these connections to Japanese aesthetics reaching back to Shinto animism, belief that spirits embody every living thing.  Thus all creatures are honored, even some of the most lowly.  She also connects other Japanese cultural motifs such as Mono no aware, which bears an appreciation for the transience of life, the short-lived transitional world, the impermanence of things.  She also draws on the form of haiku and how it’s simple concision represents the aspect of impossibility of communicating some concepts in words.

What also comes to the fore is the contrast between the urban world where these insects are sold, where most of present day Japanese people live, and the woods and mountains and countryside that from which these insects are collected.  The insects represent a connection to nature, something from which the modern day Japanese (or modern day anywhere city dweller) has detachment.   The deeper connections to aesthetics and beliefs systems that honor and revere the natural world, reflect a culture that was once much more in tune with.

I actually found this film quite interesting, probably one of the most interesting I’ve seen this year.  It is, of course, an outsider’s perspective on Japanese culture, while it does try to document and reveal information accurately.  It is  what it is, and to my mind, it was very contemplative, and something that I have been recommending a lot to anyone who will listen.

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer

(2010) director Alex Gibney
viewed: 05/08/11

Eliot Spitzer, the man who fought Wall Street, the man who would be king (or our “first Jewish president”), former New York State DA ass-kicker, former New York State Governor, high-end “escort” consort.  Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008)) turns his camera on the shamed world-beater, the great liberal hope, Eliot Spitzer, in a story that does have all the elements of the classics, a rise and fall, yet a story for our time.

Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010) opened a dumb-founding glimpse into the global financial melt-down, pointing a very accurate finger at the banks and government institutions that conspired to create the “bubble” whose certain burst reaped global damage.  In watching Inside Job, it seemed clear to me that Spitzer was one of the few voices of reason in the build-up to the crisis, one of the few who aimed to expose the frauds before the shit hit the fan.  And I became interested in knowing more about the fallen New York governor.

Spitzer, it seems, was his own worst enemy.  His bulldog style that made him the effective state district attorney that he was, gunning for the fat cats and looking to police Wall St. in a way never policed before, was also an alienating style that created enemies big and small.  When he parlayed his rising star career into the Empire state governorship, many believed that the White House would be his ultimate end.  Few thought that the rider of such a moral high horse would come to such a devastating fall.

But Spitzer was probably at his best as a DA.  Maybe he should have been made Attorney General (if he’d kept from falling from grace before a Democratic regime took the White House).  But as a politician, he flopped.  Not playing politics with the experienced, entrenched (even if they were corrupt) elite, he made more and more powerful enemies.  And when his moral superiority was exposed for the hypocrisy it was, with him utilizing a supremely high-end prostitution ring, he had a lot of folks gunning for his demise and not many sticking up for his merits.

And it’s really, really too bad.

Spitzer, as an attorney for the state of New York, achieved a lot in a short time.  He was a bulldog, and he was in his rights, going after a completely corrupt system that was bound for gruesome failure.  He had great potential.  And his style as well as his misdeeds undid him completely.  And all of America is perhaps the worse off for it.

The film focuses on his rise and fall, indeed, but also on the conspiracies that probably fed into his ultimate downfall.  Enemies who played dirty politics ultimately probably helped uncover his wrongdoings.  But like president Bill Clinton before him, his misdeeds were those of adultery (a heinous crime socially in the US, but perhaps less criminalized in Europe)  while the crimes of his enemies were more exploitative (actually illegal, not merely immoral).  There is a brutal double standard and greater hypocrisy suggested in his opposition than in himself.

But Spitzer, if he’d been more canny and less philandering, could have been a great man.  And truly, he can still.  His challenge is his own demeanor, a charming but combatitive style that works for a high-moral straight-laced lawman, but not really for a politician.  It’s frustrating.  But it’s also hopeful.

There is no reason that Spitzer cannot find a way to parlay his intelligence and commitment to righting the wrongs of the corporate elite into a significant and important role in the present and the future.  His stance on moral high-ground has been eroded and thus his position and style would have to adapt to it, but he potentially could have fought the good fight and the good fight still needs fighting.  One can only hope for some redemption for someone who has so much to offer a troubled world.  And really, an admittedly flawed human being is perhaps a more compelling voice than one who has the pretense of morality yet hides the hypocrisy of his stance.

Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies

(1994) director Todd Phillips
viewed: 05/06/11

Most musicians are known for their music.   GG Allin was known more for his performances than for his music, though by all accounts he produced a great deal of material in his short life.  Allin’s performances, with his band or in “spoken word” poetry readings, involved nudity, violence, self-mutilation, excrement, and a significant dose of danger.  That is what he believed in, bringing the danger back to rock and roll.  That is if he believed in anything.

Nihilistic and misanthropic to a fault, Allin used music and performance as confrontations, attacking the audience literally (with his fists and anything he could get his hands on) and figuratively (through his outlandish, gross-out antics).  His style and tactics had antecedents in Iggy Pop, and other early punk, as well as in avant-garde groups like Throbbing Gristle.  But in the late 1980′s-early 1990′s, when Allin’s notoriety was at its peak, it’s arguable that the punk scene from which his band emanated, aggressive as the music could be, had become increasingly more predictable, and performances like his were outrageous and transgressive.  His whole style was about being offensive, not simply politically incorrect but baiting and taunting.

This film was shot in the early 1990′s by Todd Phillips, who at the time was a student at NYU.  The film presents Allin and his brother Merle (the bass player for The Murder Junkies), and their drummer, in interviews and in performance, and an interesting portrait starts to come together.  Merle and Allin had a bizarre childhood with a religious recluse abusive father (who named GG Jesus Christ Allin at his birth.  The “GG” came from his older brother’s inability to pronounce the younger sibling’s name.)  And it seems clear that there is really an fascinating story behind Allin’s life.

Phillips, who has gone on to fame as the director of The Hangover (2009), really managed to capture something in his student project, because only days after a screening of this film, which Allin attended, Allin wound up dying of a heroin overdose at the age of 36.  He had often threatened (or promised) to commit suicide on stage, but obviously never followed through on that.  He was often jailed for his abuses and transgressions.

I found the film quite interesting.  But I have to tell you that there is a lot of pretty nasty stuff in his performances. From shoving a banana up his rectum to pounding his face bloody with microphones, defacating on the floor and then rolling around and eating the feces, getting his mouth urinated into and then puking… It’s not at all for everyone.

Nor was Allin.  Back in the day, he was a topic of conversation, but not a personal interest.  I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have gone to one of his gigs, and having seen this film, I think it’s safe to say that was the right idea.  His shows were good opportunities to get injured or covered in scat.

But I guess I’m feeling a little of, well, perhaps not respect, but understanding of what he was and what he did, at least in the way that the film portrays it.  He was a crazy, fucked-up person, who found an outlet for his pain and anger, which he even suggests probably kept him from murdering anyone.  But there isn’t a touchy-feely positive sensibility in his world, and I found it remarkable how his brother lived alongside him and recognized his being for what it was.  He can’t have been an easy person to know.  And while his music remains somewhat of an unproven thing to me, I think his performances were dangerous, offensive, and at the same time not exactly riveting.  Not riveting the way that most musical performances strive to be.  It was ugliness exemplified.  And I think that was the intent.

Waste Land

(2010)  director Lucy Walker, João Jardim, Karen Harley
viewed: 04/24/11

Nominated for Best Documentary at this years Academy Awards, Waste Land sounded like an interesting film.  Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, after achieving success in the United States and Europe, devised a project that would contribute back to the poor of his home country, a world in which he himself had grown up.  He goes to Jardim Gramacho in Rio de Janeiro, the world’s largest garbage dump and seeks to create portraits of the garbage pickers out of the recyclable materials that they pick from the trash, employing them in the process.

He then photographs these huge constructed images and turns out huge prints that tour at major art museums and are sold at auction, passing the money (or some portion of it) back to the garbage pickers and their union, giving them funding but also exposure, drawing attention to their lives.

It’s interesting, and certainly some of the garbage pickers are charming, inspiring characters.  What Muniz did was generous and meaningful, helping people as he has.  Director Lucy Walker follows him through the creation of the project, down into the massive, overwhelming dump, through the art project and the exhibitions.  And the film has moments of hope and joy.

But it’s not the best documentary in the world.  Not even the best one that had been up for Best Documentary.  But it’s vantage on the marginalized poor, especially with its altruistic, artistic aspect and glimmering “feel good” qualities, it’s easy to see how it might connect with people.  But it’s not “great”, though it’s interesting.  I’m also not so sure about the art that Muniz creates.  It’s a nice project but I would say it’s not great art.  Maybe that’s the same with the film.

Marwencol

(2010) director Jeff Malmberg
viewed: 04/19/11

The real life that the documentary Marwencol details is compelling and fascinating.  In 2000, after leaving a local bar Mark Hogancamp, then 38, was attacked and brutally beaten by a group of five men.  Hogancamp suffered brain damage after this unprovoked attack and it required months upon months and years and years to recover.

Before the attack, Hogancamp was a bit of a drunk with a not particularly notable life.  But in his recovery, having no memory of himself or his life, he found himself in a frightening world where nothing was familiar or the same and he lived in fear of another attack.

In a somewhat random selection of hobbies, he began collecting, crafting and creating dolls for a fictional WWII-era town which he photographed the figures, developed narratives for the characters, and worked through his complex world of loves, pain, brutality, and fantasy as a form of therapy.  Initially, he took to the hobby as a way of working with his hands, which shook too much for him to draw (which some shots of earlier diaries seem to suggest he did well).  Initially physiological, his hobby evolved into his entire town, Marwencol.

Hogancamp is a classic outsider artist.  His doll figures are crafted with intensive detail and his photographs, the telling of an evolving, sprawling narrative, featuring his attackers as the Nazi villains.

His story is fascinating and his art is quite compelling, especially in the context of his life-changing experience and how it informs what he creates.  Part of the beauty of his art is how everything is created through his personal need and narrative, not created as “art”.

Part of the story that the film covers is the “discovery” of Hogancamp by an artist who lives nearby and Hogancamp’s resultant exposure in an art magazine.  All of this leads to an art show in New York of his work (and probably this film itself).  And part of the question that the film hints at is “What will become of his art when it becomes ‘art’?” When his work might become more self-conscious or aware once he’s no longer merely producing it for himself.

But really, the most fascinating thing is Hogancamp’s story itself, his art, or if you will, his creations.  For Hogancamp, his creations were a personal dialog, a therapeutic and specific outlet for his complex self-examination.  From the outside, it’s clearly art in the sense that it’s an amazing crafted work and it could be placed in context in an art gallery or museum.

The film is functional itself.  Documentaries can sometimes succeed despite themselves when the subject matter is strong and compelling.  As long as the documentarian doesn’t “screw it up”, when you have a story like Hogancamp’s, you’ve got something well worth exploring.  And through the film, I was really drawn in.  But as the film has sat with me for a few days, I began to feel that the film didn’t manage to make much more of the story, either by finding something more profound or suggesting something beyond its core story.

The question about what happens to Hogancamp after his art show is left unanswered.  If there was a question of how healthy it is to make “an artist” out of him, to commercialize his work or his story, the film certainly doesn’t turn that question on itself.  I feel, as intriguing as it was, I wanted a bit more.  And really it’s not such a knock at the film but more a comment on how fascinating I found the whole of Hogancamp’s real and fictive world.  Maybe there will be a book written or some other telling that perhaps reaches deeper.  It’s a sad story, though one with elements of hope and the strangeness and weird beauty of some human souls.