Port Townsend Film Festival '08

I enjoyed the Port Townsend (WA) film festival last weekend, even though I waited too long to book a hotel and had to settle for what was possibly the last room within a 50 mile radius, in a low end place that just barely met my wife’s minimum standards. PT is a charming Victorian seaport on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, fifty miles northwest of Seattle.

The four PTFF founders were veteran attendees of the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, which served as their model. The Port Townsend festival showcases new work and emerging filmmakers, and offers a variety of film education programs, symposia, and training offerings, including a film camp for kids. The Festival organization also maintains a film and book library in Port Townsend, available to members. See www.ptfilmfest.com/participate

The highlight of the festival for me was the first film I saw on Friday night, The Exiles, a 1961 documentary drama by writer and director Kent MacKenzie. It tells, or rather shows, the lives of some working class Native Americans in downtown Los Angeles, over one long Friday night in 1960. The hybrid film is part interview, as the characters soliloquize over gritty black and white scenes of themselves, and part documentary, as the camera just follows them around home and town, and part dramatization, as the characters play out little scenes in bars, on the highway, in their apartments.

The film was shown at the 1961 Venice Festival then immediately fell into obscurity. It was recently restored at UCLA and re-released, and it looks good. There is no story or character development. Rather, the almost nameless characters just hang out, existing for the sake of existing. The men drink beer in a bar, smoke and play cards. Two of them go searching for a poker game. Two others pick up girls and go for a joyride. One of the men’s pregnant wife goes window shopping and then stays overnight at a friend’s house.

The air is saturated with dead, heavy time. All the characters endure it without hope or ambition. One of the men says that he can “do time” in prison or out. It makes no difference to him. Relationships among the men are caring, but without adequate modes of expression become ritualistic. Women are not taken seriously at all. Yvonne, the pregnant wife, talks about how she used to pray every night for some change in her life, but after years of disappointment, stopped praying and going to church.

The film was introduced by Native American author (and recent National Book Award winner) Sherman Alexie, who also provided Q&A afterward. I asked him to comment on the sense of time portrayed in the film. On the reservation, he said, time is poetically cyclical. You live with the land and the seasons. There is always a sense of renewal. But in the city, the cycles of time are just crushing repetition. And poverty is boring. “I was poor,” he said, “and when you’re poor, it is the same shit every day. The same fears and worries and problems. It’s like being in prison.” I was stunned by the honesty, force, and depth of his answer.

He also pointed out examples in the film of androgyny among Indian men. “Indian guys are androgynous,” he insisted. “We are the ones who wear the red feathers and sing. And we cry a lot. It offers a choice for women. What do you prefer, a white guy grinding diamonds in his ass or a drunk Indian crying?”

You could see Alexie authentically struggle with his identity, a process obviously painful for him, but he seems to realize that struggle is also the source of his power and wit. He referred to an earlier time in his life when he could go places without “having to answer questions about Indians.” Now, he appears at festivals like this one, as “The Indian.”

I met him again the following morning and thanked him for his honesty, and asked him this time about the lack of ambition portrayed in the film. I told him I could not get inside it. “Don’t forget,” he said, "to have ambition means to accept the world of the people who destroyed you. In a way, lack of ambition, even drug addiction and suicide, are acts of rebellion.” “Are people really thinking that way,” I asked? “Subconsciously,” he answered. Again I was thrown into silence by the depth of his remarks. My wife came to the rescue and told him how she had read and enjoyed all his books. “Well, thanks,” he said with a smile. “You are helping pay for my car and put my children through college.” But what was on his subconscious mind, I wondered?

We shook his hand and let him be, and we talked about what he had said for hours.

Fix (2008) is another fictionalized docudrama, this time the story of a young man (Tao Ruspoli) and his girlfriend (Olivia Wilde), who try to get his wild, drug addicted brother (Shawn Andrews) into rehab before a court ordered deadline, to avoid a prison term. They also must raise $5,000 to pay for the rehab. The three of them buzz around Los Angeles trying to raise the cash, stopping to hit up acquaintances at Beverly Hills mansions, East LA, and in the Watts projects.

Throughout, the protagonist (Ruspoli) runs a video camera, recording their adventures. The filmmaking is good, individual scenes interesting, editing excellent, and acting more or less convincing. Unfortunately, all the characters encountered are stereotypes, even the three main characters, and little is revealed about them. I never did believe that the brothers were brothers or even that the videographer’s girlfriend was really his girlfriend. The whole thing was emotionally flat, just scenery.

There was a thin theme about helplessness. The younger brother is helpless to change his drug habit; the older brother helpless to control his brother; the girl helpless to affect anything. There is a transient segment about an urban farm in downtown LA that was once lush with food and greenery but is now desolate because of legal maneuvering: helplessness on a community scale. It is a good theme, but since the characters have no inner life, the theme seems didactic rather than organic to the characters’ experience.

There might have been a very subtle commentary about making documentaries, as if the story device of a character carrying a hand-held was the only way you would ever see “the truth” about the inside of a chop shop, an authentic Vietnamese restaurant, a marijuana purchase, or a heroin shooting gallery. But that seemed more an epiphenomenon than a conscious theme. Overall, the film is visually strong and technically solid, intellectually interesting and worth seeing, but not emotionally engaging. As a zero-budget indie, I don’t know how you could see it anyway, but I think it is good enough to eventually find some kind of commercial release.

Petals: Journey Into Self-Discovery, was yet another documentary, this time about the book, “Petals” by photographer Nick Karras (www.nickkarras.com). The “petals” are the inner and outer labia of female genitalia. Karras photographed over a hundred women to get the pictures in order to demonstrate the beauty of the female body (at least that part of it). Most of filmmaker Beck Peacock's documentary is given to reactions of women, and clips of various sex educators, such as Betty Dodson. The photographs find a line between pornography and medicine that could be construed as art.

The film itself is the mildly interesting story of the book’s creation, but its main point seems to be simply desensitization. All the slang words for the female genitals are discussed and women talk frankly about their sex education and early sexual experience. The film is thus like the Vagina Monologues in desensitizing a taboo part of the body. However, unlike the Monologues, the desensitization is not directed to the audience. Instead it shows other people being desensitized, one step removed. Consequently, I thought the whole project was a weak effort. However, in line for another film later, I heard a woman behind me describing “Petals” to her friends in enthusiastic terms. “It made me want to rush home and get a mirror,” she exclaimed. “I have no idea what I look like, and everyone is so different!” So, maybe my evaluation of the film is not correct – maybe it is powerfully cathartic for women viewers. What do I know?

A longish, 35-minute “short” film was Al’s Beef, a tongue-in-cheek homage to the spaghetti western by writer and director Dennis Hauck. Shot in Arizona, it successfully captured the colors, the heat, and the dry open spaces of the spaghettis. A taciturn and mysterious woman (Persephone Apostolou) rides into town and after belting back her drink, pays for a hooker. She immediately throws the hooker out of the room so she can get some sleep. Later, in the bar, she shoots a guy who hassles her, but it turns out she really just wanted his boots. She is searching for somebody and through a series of flashbacks, we learn why. There is the mandatory showdown gunfight.

The film captures the spaghetti idiom to a large extent, although the acting is too obviously comic. Unlike Eastwood’s nameless stranger, the woman seems more goofy than menacing. A lot of that is because most scenes were subtly off tempo. The camera lingered too long on the wrong scenes, and not long enough on others, and was too jumpy overall, so we did not get a sense of the woman’s emotional slow burn.

Toward the end, the narrative moved from a droll but mainly realistic style, to surreal farce. The woman takes five bullets in the chest and the result is only that it makes her limp a bit. The sheriff (Dean Stockwell) empties his pistol into the preacher, lifting him off the ground, soaring backward in slow motion. These elements refer broadly to the spaghetti style, but in parody. The sound of the gunshots was not right, although the music, consisting mainly of a tom-tom, was a fair approximation to Marricone’s austere style.

I ran into writer-director Hauck later that evening in one of Port Townsend’s charming bars and talked to him about the film. In contrast to my conversations with Sherman Alexie, I was unable to communicate with Hauck. After complimenting him on the film, I asked him if the timing was difficult in spaghetti scenes. His reply was about how tough it was to edit the film down to 35 minutes. I asked what was next for him; if he was he committed to westerns. He answered by talking about all the film festivals he had been attending to promote Al’s Beef. I asked him about the transition from realism to farce in the film. He said he thought there was a lot of humor in the spaghettis. I complemented him on the strong story idea, and he replied that it was inspired by Eastwood’s (1985) Pale Rider (an influence only microscopically evident).

It was a strange conversation. I was not anybody who could do anything for him so I guess I did not warrant a genuine conversation. He is from LA, after all. I did learn that he would like to make Al’s Beef into a full length feature, which I don’t think is a good idea, although I said nothing. I suggested he take a look at The Legend of God’s Gun, another recent spaghetti homage, but he said he never heard of it and expressed no interest. The guy is only late 20’s, early 30’s and I give him credit for gumption and a pretty good start to his career with this short film. I wish him well.

Off Off Broadway is a scathing satire of avant-garde theater production and a parody of Waiting for Guffman (1996). I never saw Guffman, so I took “Off-Off” on its own terms, as a satirical comedy, and it was successful. The aspiring but clueless and egomaniacal director hires a cast of naïve New York acting students to stage his 6-hour long play, which has only pre-recorded voices while the actors move about the high contrast stage in crypto-meaningful gestures, expressing the director’s commitment to “specific conceptualism”. The result is so far beyond bad, it is hilarious, perfectly skewering so-called “avant-garde” performances I have endured. Off stage the actors, crew, and director squabble and strut while the pretentious “making-of” video camera rolls. The humor is subtle and for that reason deeply tickling. Audience members, many of them obviously filmmakers, squealed in delight at the subtlest of inside jokes. The writer-producer is Jeff Huston. I think this one should find commercial release at least as an art house film.

Fashion Victims is a German project (subtitled) released in 2007. A middle aged salesman of “classic” women’s clothing is threatened by competition from a younger salesman who has a younger line of clothing that the older man disparages as “cheap fabric from North Korea” that no woman would ever wear. But in fact he is being out-sold. He cannot accept that times are changing, as he adopts a Death of A Salesman combination of bewilderment and denial. As the pressure mounts, he is mean to his wife and cancels his son’s vacation abroad to make him be his driver on the sales rounds. Meanwhile, the son falls in love with a slightly older man, who turns out to be the father’s competitor. The comedy develops as a blend of Marx Brothers and Keystone Cops as the “misadventures” continue. Secrets and rivalries are separated only by coincidental doors closing in time, crossed paths, and overheard conversations, conventions too hackneyed to be funny, although some audience members were hooting, so maybe I am out of touch. The gay romance between the two young men is also a well-worn theme, no longer the least bit shocking, but at least it is handled respectfully and is well-woven into the story. Strong acting and directing lift the film above mediocrity and the Blake Edwards-Peter Sellars kind of storytelling buffoonery will amuse many people. Co-writer and director is Ingo Rasper.

I also enjoyed the “2880” event at the festival. That’s the number of minutes in 48 hours, which is how much time the filmmakers are given to create a 10-minute short film after the constraints are announced. This year the constraints were that the film had to use the phrase, “It’s not over until the fat lady sings;” the required prop was a live animal, and the theme was “trust.” The top 6 entries were shown and although they were highly variable in quality, the scope of creativity was astonishing. They were remarkably well produced for such a short time frame, although they all seemed strained and contrived, which they were, of course. I thought that was because the three constraints were incommensurate. But I guess having them be utterly random can promote creativity as well as contrivance. It was a lot of fun to be in the audience with the screaming, whistling, and hooting crews who made the six shorts.

Well, that’s enough. I saw and heard other things too numerous to describe. Overall, I was impressed with the quality and scope of PTFF. It was awfully long on documentaries and docudramas, and short on feature length, fictional, dramatic work (compared to Seattle’s SIFF, for example). Still, the small town atmosphere is a lot more fun and the offerings well worth the effort. I’m sure I’ll go next year to the 10th annual, September 25-27.

PDX Jazz RIP

The annual Portland, OR Jazz Festival (PDX Jazz) has closed down, due to, what else, not enough money. In its five year history it brought to town such notables as Cecil Taylor, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Ravi Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and many others.

Besides the loss of the music, it is sad to see the loss of the educational emphasis the Festival embodied. A lot of young people were involved. And of course, there is the economic loss to the city of 36,000 absent fans. The Portland Jazz Festival was nominated as one of the top five jazz events by the Jazz Journalists Association last year.

Is Jazz dying out in America? It is a hotly debated topic. Much depends on how you define “Jazz.” Still, I think it is indisputable that jazz is not as accessible as pop music. You have to train your ears or you can’t hear jazz. Few people are willing to put in the time to learn, pleasurable though that learning is. For anyone who wants to learn jazz, rent, borrow or buy the Smithsonian collection of classical jazz, 5 CD’s that go from the dawn of recording through the mid-60’s. If you don’t find a few items there that turn you on, there’s something wrong with you.

The 2009 PDX festival was supposed to be a tribute to Blue Note Records. But sponsors (many of them in the past were banks) did not step up this year. Ticket sales are never enough. So it’s over. I’ll miss it.

Barn Music

This was the 25th year for the Olympic Music Festival in Quilcene, Washington, out in the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle. All summer, there are multiple programs of chamber music presented in a large barn on a rustic dairy farm. The audience sits on bales of hay or wooden benches, or sprawled on the grass outside the barn doors. There are about 250 people in the barn, including up in the hay loft. CD’s, souvenirs, coffee, and wine are sold in the adjacent milking shed, as are carrots for feeding the nearby herd of donkeys, which mostly stays quiet for the performance.

The festival has been the labor of love of violist Alan Iglitzin, who for years toured with the Philadelphia String Quartet, which eventually took up residence at the University of Washington. In 1984, Iglitzin acquired the 55-acre farm and created the performance space in the barn. Performances in the barn are recorded for later broadcast on the Seattle classical radio station, KING-FM.

I attended three concerts this season. The first, in June, was “Beethoven – the Last Sonatas.” Pianist Paul Hersh, from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, played the last three piano sonatas, Opus 109 through 111. I am nuts about Opus 111 in C-minor and have several recordings of it. Hersh’s rendition was as good as any of them. But hearing the three sonatas grouped like this added a whole new dimension to my appreciation, especially from realizing how Beethoven “stole” or “borrowed” ideas from the earlier ones to populate the last one. I also understood for the first time why Opus 111 was his last piano sonata. Beethoven clearly said everything he could possibly say on piano, and needed more complex instrumentation to continue his breakout from classical tradition.

In July, I enjoyed a program of music featuring the cello, one of my favorite instruments. Amy Sue Barston, a widely traveled cellist on the faculty at Julliard, played with sister Elisa Barston, Principal Second Violinist for the Seattle Symphony. The Barston sisters began with Halvorsen’s update of Handel’s Passacaglia Duo for Violin and Cello, which was sublime. That was followed by Kodaly’s Duo for Violin and Cello, Op. 7, which was a little wilder. It reminded me a lot of the Kronos Quartet sound, because they play a lot of Kodaly (at least on the recordings I have). Even though this was just a duo, not a quartet it was a big sound that filled that old barn.

Finally, with Alan Iglitzin joining them on Viola, the trio played the Mozart String Trio K. 563. It is heresy, but I am just not a huge Mozart fan. I like certain works a lot, like the Jupiter symphony and some piano sonatas and chamber pieces, but most of his work seems formulaic to me. That is probably just my ignorance talking. Nevertheless, I am not complaining about a beautiful summer day in the country listening to world-class Mozart.

Scheduling problems kept me away from the “All Dvorak Festival” and “Quartet Masterworks” and many other temptations, but I did manage to catch “The Amazing Clarinet” on the last weekend in August. The program began without the clarinet, with Iglitzin introducing the Hayden String Quartet, “Sunrise,” Op. 76, No. 4. He was joined by Michi Wiancko and Alisa Rose on Violins and Paul Wiancko on Cello, in what turned out to be, for my money, the best performance of the afternoon.

Then Teddy Abrams, a recent graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory, and currently a student of conducting, came out. He gave an informative, but inadvertently humorous introduction to the Weber Clarinet Quintet Op. 34. His enthusiastic but academic and self-important introduction made Iglitzin unable to suppress a world-weary smile and the audience chuckled, to the bewilderment of the young Abrams. But his clarinet performance was no laughing matter. The performance by the whole quartet was extremely enjoyable, with Michi Wiancko and Alisa Rose, violins and Paul Wiancko, cello, joining Iglitzen and Abrams. The Wiancko siblings have both performed with Yo-Yo Ma. Michi is a member of the east-coast based Los Angeles Piano Quartet, and is also a singer and songwriter. Brother Paul is principal cellist of the Colburn Orchestra in Los Angeles. Rose performs widely in classical, jazz, bluegrass, and new music festivals and runs a conservatory of music outreach for disadvantaged violinists.

The Weber piece highlighted the sound of the clarinet and sounded surprisingly modern. I kept wanting it to break out to Rhapsody in Blue but it would take another 125 years for that to happen. The piece was showy rather than sophisticated, but was a good introduction to what a clarinet could do in a chamber setting. The program was topped by the Mozart Clarinet Quintet A Major, K. 581. It was not one of my Mozart favorites, although I recognize that Mozart is unquestionably a crowd-pleaser.

Next weekend is the season finale, with a Beethoven, Ravel and Brahms program and I regret that I will not be able to attend. Tickets to most concerts are only $27 to sit in the barn on a bale of hay, or on a wooden chair around and behind the performers. It costs less to take your chances with the weather on the grass outside. The Olympic Music Festival is a real Northwest Gem.

PT Blues

Early in August I attended the annual Blues Festival in Port Townsend, WA. The festival took place in a WW II balloon hangar on an old military base, now a beautiful state park.

To my surprise, but not disappointment, all of the eight acts offered “traditional” acoustic blues from the deep south, and a selection of piedmont blues, a mid-Atlantic east coast style from the early 20th century that mixed black African and white styles. There were no amped-up Chicago sounds, no Kansas City crooners, no R&B, no rock or funk crossovers. I might have seen only one electric guitar all afternoon. Instead it was acoustic guitar, harmonica, piano, and the odd gospel singer. The festival was advertised as “country blues” and maybe I didn’t know what that meant, but the selection was excellent nevertheless.

Rick Franklin strummed a modern looking Dobro steel guitar (it looked like it was made of pewter or even hi-tech composites) and sang humorous country songs from traveling shows in the piedmont region in the early part of the 20th century. It was a good way to warm up the crowd with laughter, and his guitar picking was subtle, sophisticated and impressive. Sample his work at http://www.hokumblues.com/.

The reverend John Wilkins sang spiritual blues and used a steel slide. I love slide and was disappointed there was so little of it in this festival. Wilkins did have one of the rare electrics of the day but it was way over amped, losing much of the music’s definition. The sound engineer got that fixed about halfway through but then the harmonica was fuzzed out, so overall, there wasn’t much to recommend this show. There were two performers in the festival titled “Reverend,” and while both gave heartfelt performances, I thought they were more focused on singing to Jesus than on the music for its own sake, to the detriment of the music. Prayer and gospel singing is a part of the genuine blues heritage, of course, but I was there for music.

Mike Dowling played some very precise ragtime tunes on a mirror-finish, modern-looking steel guitar with sound holes in a mathematical grid up near the neck. The music was not so much foot-stompin’ but very professional and accomplished. Sample him at http://www.mikedowling.com/music/index.html

Jerron “J-Dog” Paxton (aka “Blind Boy Paxton”), got a huge sound to come out of a tiny guitar. He might have been using steel picks on all his right hand fingers. His picking was excellent and his songs light hearted. One I remember was “Po’k Chops Is Best!” an authentic snapshot of a certain way of life. His presentation was intimate, as if he were in a small bar instead of a thousand-seat auditorium. The audience was amazed when he put the guitar on the floor, turned around on the piano bench and played a very hot boogie rendition of “Exactly Like You.” Afterward, he remarked, “You should try that with your eyes closed!”

Ari Eisinger played some hot licks on acoustic and treated the audience to one Leadbelly number on a huge 12-string. His voice was a bit high and nasal, but that worked well for his renditions of several Blind Blake tunes. He also covered Mississippi John Hurt’s 1928 version of Frankie and Johnnie, and it was interesting to hear it as a natural folk song. For example, “He done me wrong” is all sung on the same tonic note. Eisinger clearly knows the blues literature.



The Reverend Robert Jones opened with a very moving gospel song that kept the audience in a hush. The rest of the act, full of bible stories and prayers, “Lawd! Deliver me from the flood” kind of stuff, did not live up to that opening promise, despite Jones’ remarkable vocal range and a voice that reminded me of Lou Rawls. He did one brief harmonica number, a train song with lots of lonesome whistles. I am a sucker for those. He was joined by “Sister Bernice” who sang some gospel tunes that didn’t do a thing for me.

Cephas and Wiggins are a killer act. That’s John Cephas and Phil Wiggins, who have been playing Piedmont style together since 1977. Cephas has a deep but clear voice that he uses methodically, like an engine plowing through some terrific old blues numbers. His expression of emotion is subtle, but perfect, with well-placed grunts and moans that remind me of John Lee Hooker. Against that backdrop of barely restrained feeling, the Wiggins harp bursts out like a flock of escaping birds. The overall result is so expressive it makes you crazy. Sample some of this amazing sound at the bottom of the screen at:
http://facstaff.unca.edu/sinclair/piedmontblues/cephasandwiggins.html
Wiggins is also the artistic director of the festival, this being the final of his five year tenure, so we have him to thank for this fine selection of music.

Ending on a high note were Arthur Migliaza and Daryl Davis, two boogie piano players, who do not normally work together as an act, as far as I could tell. Migliaza electrified the crowd with a fast tempo rendition of the classic, Clarence’s Blues. Bowing off the stage, the young, thin, delicate frame of Migliaza was replaced by the hulking Davis who bounced into some wild and woolly boogie tunes, even resorting to the Jerry Lee Lewis style of slapping the keyboard now and then. Sample his work at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmpgxPqh_m0 . After a couple of alternations between these two artists, they did a four-hand duet, fooling around as if they were fighting over the keyboard. It was great showmanship, great music, and the audience left the festival dancing on tiptoes

MOMA

The last time I visited the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, it was in Queens while the downtown space was being remodeled. The remodeled MOMA seems larger (I don’t know if it is), is much easier to get around in, and it shows more of the permanent collection. I spent one whole day there recently, which is only enough time to cruise the galleries, nodding to familiar old friends. But I did stop to think about a few items.

One was a gallery of Picasso’s sculpture. He is better known for his painting but this collection of sculptures highlighted his versatility, wit, and radical ideas about sculpture.

“Bull” (1958) is made of plywood, a tree branch, nails, and screws. It’s a great image from the front, but what makes it a radical sculpture is that it is almost flat. The whole point of sculpture is that you can walk around it to appreciate different points of view, and you can do that here, too, but what you discover is disorienting because it is a flat, anti-sculpture.

By contrast, “Guitar” (1914) is a sheet metal work hung on the wall, and from a distance it looks like a cubist painting. When you walk up to it, you realize it is not a flat painting but a wall sculpture. Curation at the MOMA is itself a work of art. You can’t help but notice the guitar high on a nearby wall as you walk around the flat bull in the center of the room, while the comparison boggles your mind.

On the topic of sculpture, I also paused at Giacometti’s “The Chariot” (1950) which I have admired for years. (An early prototype Segway?) The ancient-seeming bronze woman stands on a primitive cart balanced on wooden blocks. It should be unstable but I don’t get that feeling. She is compressed into a stick by the palpably massive air surrounding her. Or is she dessicated by time rather than crushed by air? I puzzled over the wooden blocks. Perhaps without them the feeling would be forward motion. On blocks, she is not going anywhere, the still air holding her eternally in place.

I was repeatedly amazed at the way works of art are displayed at MOMA. How they are shown can add entirely new dimensions of appreciation. For example, These two pieces by Malevich are positioned in a way that echoes the abstract theme of the works, a very nice touch.

Another work of Malevich, before he flipped out into that abstract suprematist thing, was positioned right next to a piece by Ferdinand Leger. It was a shock to realize how similar they were. Who knew?

I also had to pause and consider the relationship between Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Both are abstract expressionists, but from different planets. Pollock’s energetic, whole-body activity is recorded on his huge canvas, while Rothko’s works are serene, quiet, far away, even though you know he had to work just as hard to create them. Pollock is the body and Rothko is the mind? I especially appreciated what I call “the evil Rothko”, which was displayed in the center of a large wall, between two particularly “easy” works in harmonious pastels. The “evil” one is in harsh, angry colors and has a huge scratch through the center of it, suggesting fingernails ripping the paint off in a fit of rage. So Rothko had his moods.

Similarly, a collection of works by Rauschenberg made me reconceptualize what I thought of him. There were some drawings I never would have associated with him, and I was looking around for a welded pile of crumpled car parts when I saw “First Landing Jump” (1961), a typical Rauschenbergian collage of objects but which were arranged in an almost formal way that suggested a portrait of a 1940’s automobile garage. The colors, textures, composition, and especially the little light, took me to that place. I could almost smell oil on the floor. I think that white reflector at the top is my favorite part, because those old red brick garages always had a light like that at the top over the sign. (There is no brick and no sign, but I see them anyway!). A fascinating piece of impressionism.

A featured exhibit had the paintings and films of Salvador Dali. I am not a fan of Dali’s paintings but I was quite impressed at the creativity of his films, which seemed way ahead of their time. Modern art film makers would benefit from taking a look.

I greatly enjoyed the architecture and design galleries, but I can’t begin to describe the treasures there. Instead I will show just one selection, a carved wooden chess set by Josef Hartwig (1924) which perfectly illustrates that old design slogan, “form follows function.” (Click to enlarge it and see it better).

Fiddling Around

On the Fourth of July, I attended The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes at Port Townsend, WA. This festival has been going on annually since 1977, to celebrate traditional fiddle music. In the week of workshops and two days of concerts (I only attended the first day), there were performances of traditional music from New England, Scotland, Ireland, Mexico, Alabama, West Virginia, and elsewhere.

The venue was Fort Worden State Park, an Army artillery installation guarding the entrance to Puget sound since the beginning of the 20th century. The beautiful 430 acres on a high coastal bluff became a Washington state park in 1953. Performances were in a huge, modern-looking balloon hangar built in the 1920’s, converted to a performance hall. Counting rows and seats, I estimate about 1,000 people were in attendance on Independence Day.

Wendy MacIsaac is a fiddler from Inverness County, now residing in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She played fiddle, piano, and performed Celtic step dancing in a lively opening performance. Sample her work at http://www.cranfordpub.com/mp3s/wendymacisaac1.mp3 . The traditional Celtic dance reels were compulsive toe-tappers, but as is the case with nearly all folk music, it was really quite narrow in its variety. To keep things moving, the 4/4 rhythms are often doubled and sometimes redoubled; small key changes relieve the monotony of the cadence-oriented, restricted tonal range. There are lots of gingerbread notes disguising a simple repetitive harmonic pattern of tonic, subdominant, dominant, tonic. However, MacIsaac’s show had variety and energy. For example, she was joined by David Mac Isaac on fiddle, and Paul MacDonald, also from Cape Breton, on guitar, who had a magnificent touch with subtle overtone management. He was quickly sucked into the foot-stomping dance music so we got only a hint of his sophisticated guitar talent. When MacIsaac took to piano accompaniment, she put a backbeat against the guitar and the other fiddle, again staving off boredom. So overall it was an enjoyable show.

An off-program duo appeared next, Beverly Smith and Carl Jones. Smith is a well-known singer, fiddler, guitarist, and dance caller, while Jones, also well-travelled, plays mandolin, banjo and fiddle along with his vocals. They treated the audience to some fine harmony singing with gospel numbers, mountain songs, and traditional country tunes. Get their recordings at http://www.smithnjones.net/recordings.html.

Harold Luce and Adam Boyce play old style New England dance music. They are members of a traditional dance music band that has been performing since 1934. I think Harold must be 90 years old but his fiddling was impeccable. Boyce, on piano, did all the talking, and he introduced the various traditional American dance forms, such as reels, hornpipes, quadrilles, and square dance tunes. They even played Stars and Stripes Forever. Luce’s fiddle seemed to be a particularly fine instrument with a real “fiddley” tone, hard to describe. It might have been higher pitched than others, and not scratchy, but maybe with a bit of fuzz at the top and the bottom of the range. It was a very nice country sound. The New England music seemed so controlled, spare, even algorithmic, after the other acts. Comparing them, I thought Luce and Boyce could be saying, “We’re from Vermont and this is as happy as we get.” The high precision was enjoyable, but it did seem a little methodical for dance music. I guess that’s the New England style, not overly demonstrative.

The final act blew the doors off restraint. De Temps Antan is a French-Canadian group playing regional and Arcadian Quebecois music, with so much energy you could hardly remain sitting in your chair. This 5-year old group consists of three young men, André Brunet, Pierre-Luc Dupuis, and Éric Beaudry, who play violin, accordion, and bouzouki, respectively, and all three sing, and play foot percussion, a sort of sounding board they stomp on while playing, often in complicated syncopated patterns, a technique called podorythmie in French. Dupuis does most of the talking, is the lead singer, and also plays Jew’s harp, harmonica, and concertina. The music was loud, upbeat, fast tempo, and energizing, with lyrics in French. In one charming moment, Dupuis explained that they enjoyed traditional call and response songs, so the audience should join right in! Of course, since the song was in French, few people could. The slower traditional ballads were in a less interesting stentorian mode. On the other hand, the high energy, high percussion music occasionally verged on rowdy noise threatening to overwhelm the sound system, which was not well adapted to their style in any case. The accordion was chronically undermiked, as was the mysterious sound of the bouzouki and the haunting Jew’s harp. Nevertheless, it was a fiddle festival, so one can’t complain about hearing too much fiddle work. You can sample their more articulate, Arcadian style at http://www.myspace.com/detempsantan .

I would have liked to hear some Cajun music and also some down home bluegrass, but from the small segment of the overall Fiddle Festival that I did experience, it was a richly varied and satisfying event.

Below: Wendy MacIsaac dancing (18 sec).

D. J. Hall

Artist Debra Jane (“D.J.”) Hall has a major 35 year retrospective show at the Palm Springs Art Museum. It runs through September 14, 2008 and is well worth a visit.

There are 50 large paintings and numerous pencil drawings and photographs, plus studies and notes used to advise the art director in the film “Spanglish,” which used her look and style.

I’d never heard of this artist and I was in Palm Springs for other reasons, but I’m glad I stopped into the museum. The work grows on you. At first glance I was disappointed, since photorealism doesn’t interest me much. I always think, “Yeah, it’s technically amazing; looks just like a photograph. But so what? Why not take a photo?”

Hall’s paintings mostly show rich, leisured women lounging at well-appointed pools and patios. The sunlight is ultra bright, the colors are primary and crisp, and the subjects (nearly all Caucasian women), haven’t a care in the world except to have a drink and soak up the rays. It’s a pleasant, dreamy atmosphere that just says “California.”

The large size of the canvases let you see how Hall makes the figures so realistic-looking. Almost every contour is outlined with a very thin line of bright or dark color. For example, if you get up real close and the museum guard does not blow the whistle on you, you can see a fine hair of brilliant cadmium yellow just touching the edge of the skin tones all around the women in the sun. From 18 inches you can’t see it, but it makes the figures pop out in the sunlight. Almost every object, no matter how small, is outlined in a similar way.

Still: “So what?” Hall often stages and photographs her scenes then paints from the photograph. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it begs the question, why not be a photographer then? Hall’s answer is given in an artist’s statement of 2001:

"Ironically, my images cannot exist in physical reality, as they are highly contrived composites of various real and imagined sources. I approach each new painting as though I am producing a film: selecting models, wardrobe changes, locations, props, time sequences, etc. For the photo sessions I devise scenarios for my models so they will project what I envision. With the resulting photos I add, delete, and re-configure information to achieve a strong visual structure which conveys my current interests."

So what is her message, her vision? She emphasizes the importance of women’s physical appearance, and most of her models are attractive, while some are older, but “well-maintained,” implying former beauty. That juxtaposition suggests fear, even denial of aging and death, just under the surface of these happy scenes.


Once you realize these pictures are not really about carefree youth and beauty, but their opposites, the paintings begin to look sinister. The shiny, reflecting sunglasses are more than eye protection: they are hiding the reality, from the viewer, and from the models themselves. The omnipresent alcohol, is it a desperate attempt to escape from time? What kind of person has time to sit and drink in the garden with a friend at mid-day? Someone with no plans, no appointments, no prospects, no life beyond appearances. Everyone smiles, but time hangs so thickly in the air it’s a wonder these people can breathe.

Older women have lumpy thighs and wrinkly faces, but big smiles, perfect teeth and expensive clothes to pretend they are still beautiful. They are with younger women -- not girls, but women of experience who have the economic resources to paint themselves with the timeless, confident, carefree palette of youth but who must know it has already passed. Their smiles start to look not light-hearted, but like clench-jawed determination to stop the clock. They are lying to themselves and to you. They know, even if only subconsciously, that turkey neck and accordion lips lie not far ahead. Gradually, these pictures of beauty and light become utterly depressing and you realize you’ve been “had.”

Then you understand the photo-realist technique. It presents ultra-real reality; the California reality of eternal, sun-drenched, leisured, youth and beauty that does not exist except in the minds of these delusional models, and perhaps in the initial fantasies of the viewer. After viewing a dozen or so of Hall’s pictures, you get the joke. It’s very subtle.

If she had shown a more typically diverse selection of multi-colored, not-so-beautiful, overweight women in JC Penny clothing, on plastic furniture, eating hot dogs off paper plates around a pool full of screaming children, all in photorealist style, then we could say, “So what?” The way Hall started on the other side with a delusional fantasy of eternal wealth and youth and made it ultra-real with her meticulous technique, the contrast between reality and imagination could not be more stark. Brilliant.

You can see more of her pictures, and buy them, I think, at http://www.koplindelrio.com/hall/hall.html

MFA Exhibit- Henry Art Gallery

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle was the first public art museum in the state, opening in 1927. I enjoy visiting there because it usually has challenging contemporary work. The annual Masters of Fine Arts exhibit is usually especially good. Spring graduates show one or two pieces of work that represents their best effort. Pieces are selected by the students, with their thesis committees.

Stupidly however, the gallery does not allow amateur photography, so I am unable to show what the exhibit was like, and not even able to associate the artists their work. I am unable to properly acknowledge this remarkable display of creativity. This is a pet peeve. Who is damaged by amateur photography at art exhibits? Nobody benefits. It is a stupid rule.

Anyway, about 20 artists presented their work, most of it “installations” or sculpture. There was very little traditional paint on canvas. I wonder if everything has finally been said in two dimensions. I don’t believe it, but it certainly does seem strange that only about 2 out of 20 newly minted artists would think that their best work was in painting. Perhaps that reflects a bias of the faculty at UW.

One of the most memorable pieces was a white, human-sized, human-shaped figure made of cotton batting. It looked sort of like a huge voodoo doll, horizontal, “face” down, suspended from a ceiling panel by several wires which were differentially lengthened and shortened by a set of motors above. This caused the figure to slowly writhe as if in agony as it rose and fell. There seemed to be no pattern to its movements and there was no sound except that of the motors. This was all in a darkened room, making the scene sinister, suggestive of death, mummies, or torture perhaps. Behind the figure was a shattered glass wall, onto which was projected a play of light from behind. The light from behind was reflected from a mirror mounted on the wall, reflecting a projected film clip of the cotton figure rising and falling. The film clip did not seem to be related to the actual motion of the figure. I got the impression I was looking at the ghostly spirit of the cotton figure on the other side of the life and death division. Or maybe its memories. I don’t know. It didn’t obviously mean anything. But it was haunting.

A large installation on the floor of one room showed cedar blocks about 4 inches long and a half inch high, stacked irregularly up to a couple of feet high, in various organic rising and falling shapes, especially cylinders. It was slightly reminiscent of Maya Lin's work. From the center of the cylinders emerged something like blue fingers with white tips; I think they were clay. The whole thing gave me an underwater feeling, as if I were looking at a strange coral reef with blue anemones. Nothing moved, but I still had the impression that everything was undulating.

One large sculpture, in clay or fiberglass, had three figures that were half woolly sheep and half young boy, like mythical figures. They were detailed and life-like, and disturbing. The boys’ spines curved back to meet the body of the sheep just in front of the animals’ front legs. The children were young, clean, with expressive faces and big blue eyes. One was lying down, the other two just looking around, curious. They were mythical figures that didn’t really remind me of any particular myth or mythological creatures. That made them connected to realism as much as mythology and gave them shock value.

Another interesting exhibit was a set of thousands of pins stuck into a white wall. On the end of each pin was a clover leaf shape made of paper, actually cut from pages of a German history book. The flowers near the center of the display were yellowed and the ones right at the center were almost brown, as if the paper had aged, but the net effect of the whole presentation was that there was a large brown stain on the wall. Some of these “plants” extended out onto the floor, and some around the corner onto the next wall. There was also a brown dressmaker’s mannequin wearing a sort of scarf made of wire twisted into loops containing more of those yellow and brown pages from the history book. Many of its petals had fallen to the floor so it looked derelict. Was this supposed to be a political comment about Germany. A stain on German history? A formerly glorious history that has become dry, lifeless, derelict? I don’t know. It was an impressive display though, well-conceived and executed.

One other remarkable piece I remember (without any pictures!) had an organic feel to it despite being made out of thousands upon thousands of white, plastic flex-straws. Those are the drinking straws that have an accordion folded segment that allows them to be bent 90 degrees. Individual straws and bundles of two and three of them were bound by white plastic cable-ties to form a brachiating network that grew out of the wall horizontally, narrowed into a roughly cylindrical area about 3 feet from the wall, then expanded again for another 3 feet to fill a 6 foot square, red window frame. This horizontal structure is suspended from the ceiling on invisible nylon wires. If you look from the front, through the red window frame, you can see all the way through the open, somewhat geometric structure, which seems only slightly denser than the air around it. The overall effect though was like some kind of white ivy on a building, something that had grown aggressively out of the wall onto the window. This organic, plant-like impression was all the more remarkable for being achieved with plastic straws.

Nearly all the presentations were very “organic,” and by that I mean they had natural forms, shapes, and materials, generally soft materials. I saw very few right angles, few “hard” materials like glass and steel, no neon, no mechanical gadgets, no words or numbers. Everything seemed to come from nature or to reference natural forms and motions in some way. Again I have to wonder why this would be a universal among 20 graduating artists? Are they all drinking the same kool-aid? Doesn’t it seem like at least one of them would prefer to work in polished stainless steel, or do something geometric? Perhaps it is the zeitgeist. Frank Gehry comes to mind in architecture. I am not tuned into contemporary art well enough to know what the young people are thinking these days. But from this exhibit, it seems like the young people are all thinking dangerously alike.

SIFF 2008

The Seattle International Film Festival is the largest in North America. This year they screened over 400 films from all over the world. I’ve attended one or two films during the festival in years past, but generally, I have not participated much. It’s easier to attend a film festival in another city when I’m on vacation. I am too busy and too tired after work to be racing around Seattle in the evenings and on weekends. Also, I just don’t enjoy going to movies. Theaters are expensive, hot, oxygen-deprived, smelly, sneezy, and too loud. Nevertheless, this year I grabbed my earplugs and made an effort to see more of the festival.

My first experience did not auger well. After standing in a quarter-mile line circling the block, I found myself sitting in the balcony of the lovely old Egyptian Theater in Seattle, right under the projection booth. An hour into the film there was a loud thud from inside the booth behind me. I looked up and there was bright white light in the booth window, then the projection room and the screen went dark. Staff swarmed quickly but the booth was locked and nobody seemed to have a key. I assessed that this film was not going to resume any time soon, so I headed for the exit and walked home.

The film I saw an hour of was Mermaid, a Russian Film, starring Anastasiya Dontsova as a girl of 8 living in a shack by the sea, presumably the Black Sea, with her mother and grandmother. She tells herself that her mother was a mermaid, her father a sea captain. She awaits her father’s return, but it is clear to the audience that the father is long gone and this family is abandoned to abject poverty. The girl dreams of becoming a ballerina. We see her again (Mariya Shalayeva ) at 17 in Moscow, trying to make a living at odd jobs in the gritty city. She shows signs of clinical depression (in my humble opinion). She is still slow-moving, uncurious and glassy eyed, and continues to fantasize the ballerina life. She copes with her harsh reality without ambition or hope. She had found a job as a housecleaner when the projector fell over.

Throughout the film there are brief dreamlike episodes of fantasy, sometimes surreal, to demonstrate that her spirit is not crushed by her difficult life. Slick advertisements ironically remind her that all her dreams can be fulfilled. The second revolution in Russia paid off for the gangsters and cronies, but left no place for a young girl's dreams. I don’t know how the story turned out, but I would guess there was no revelation. Perhaps she returns to the sea (her childhood) as an underwater ballerina. The yellow subtitles were often completely lost, against a yellow sand beach, for example. But that hardly mattered since nothing was said of importance. It is a highly visual film, lovely to look at, but aggressively banal in detail. It was interesting to see modern Russia and hear the language, but without narrative drive or character development, it is a slice of life for its own sake. The director was Anna Melikyan.

The next film was screened at the comfortable, airy, SIFF Cinema hall at the Seattle center. Love and Honor is a beautiful Japanese-made film (director Yoji Yamada) set in the Samurai (“Edo”) period prior to 1868. It’s hard to tell just when, but the doctor washed his hands before and after tending a patient, and sanitation was introduced into medicine around 1847, in the West, at least. In any case, this is not your usual swashbuckling samurai movie. The protagonist, (Takuya Kimura) is a food-taster for the local lord, and he goes blind from shellfish neurotoxin and falls into despair. When he suspects his wife (Rei Dan) of infidelity, honor compels him to a swordfight to the death with the other man, even though he is blind! It is a fine, classical story, well told, in beautiful settings and with beautiful costumes. The acting and directing seemed stagey, wooden, and somewhat repetitive, but that may have been on purpose, to convey the classical nature of the story, the well-defined roles participants would have lived back then, especially in courtly life, and to give a sense of distant time and place, much as we get from watching an original Shakespeare. Yet the dialog was colloquial and the characters were humanized, not archetypal forms, and the story was personal. All that familiarity grated with the formality of the acting and directing. Despite that dissonance, it is a satisfying story, well-told, beautiful to look at, with good actors and enjoyable music. I felt that I had been delivered to another era for a couple of hours.

Man, Hungarians can make a dark movie! Opium: Diary of a Madwoman, directed by János Szász, is set in a mental institution around 1900 in Hungary. A doctor (Ulrich Thomsen, who reminded me of a young Kenneth Branaugh) joins the staff at an insane asylum for women run by Catholic nuns. The scenes there are beautifully photographed but it is a dank, dismal, horribly depressing place. This would have been a hundred years after Pinel’s reforms, so the insane were seen as ill and suffering, not possessed, but since psychoactive drugs were still a half-century in the future, there was really nothing that could be done except warehouse these unfortunates. Still, this hospital is progressive for its time, and the very latest techniques in treatment are shown, such as immersion in ice water baths, spinning in a centrifuge, electroshock, and of course, pre-frontal lobotomy. When the camera closes in on the brass rod being inserted beside a patient’s eye, I couldn’t watch, and even though my eyes were closed the “clink, clink” of the director’s hammer on the brass stylus as it penetrated the skull, made me cringe in my seat. Thomsen is assigned to a 25 year old schizophrenic woman (Kirsti Stubø) who writes typical “word salad” madness into volume upon volume of diaries as the only way she knows to deal with her demon. The doctor, we learn, is a morphine addict, and the reason he took the job was have access to his poison. Acting by the two principals, especially Stubo, is utterly gripping. They try to understand each other, and maybe they do, a little.

The best part of the script is having each character talk unwittingly and metaphorically about the other’s demon. She says, “Each day the Devil makes you an offer and each day he takes a little bit of your body until you are his whore.” The doctor nods knowingly yet unknowingly then a little later he shoots up. He writes in his diary that his habit is going out of control and he can’t stop. The woman begs the doctor to “cut out her brain” to relieve her of her torment. Even though the film is extremely bleak, the cinematography is beautiful and haunting, as is the music. The story would be greatly improved by some easy editing, especially some gratuitous nudity and at the end, where it continues unnecessarily beyond the climax. The story of the characters’ developing relationship is compelling. I walked out of this movie deeply shaken.

Transsiberian (director Brad Anderson) has a lot of good talent: Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson, Ben Kingsley, and Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega. An American couple on vacation (Harrelson and Mortimer) take the Transsiberian train from Beijing to Moscow. They are befriended by an American woman (Mara) and her companion, the unpredictable Carlos (Noriega), pseudo-mysterious drifters, possibly drug smugglers. Police detective Kingsley joins the train to add to the suspense, such as it is. But the editing and directing are so overtly manipulative that it ruins the story. We see Carlos with a crowbar in his hand sneaking up behind Harrelson at a stop in Irkutsk, then cut! In the next scene we are back on the train but Harrelson is missing! Meaningful glances are passed around. But wait, it turns out he only missed the train in Irkutsk and he is fine, rejoining the party a day later. That kind of manufactured pseudo-suspense is disrespectful of the audience, actually offensive, and a clumsy attempt to cover up a weak, predictable story.

The first 45 minutes of the movie were obviously added after the main shoot in an unsuccessful attempt to add dimension to the cardboard characters by having them reminisce unconvincingly about previous experiences. If those were important, they should have been shown, not recited. Dramatic helicopter shots of the train moving through Siberia are inserted often to counter the claustrophobia of the train set. Arbitrary blasts of orchestral music attempt to punctuate the waning story line. Lots of “local color” scenes are thrown in to spice up endless shots of people eating, drinking, smoking, and eating some more. An old guy with a gulag tattoo. Wow. Therefore what? Therefore nothing. This movie is a lost opportunity. Mortimer and Kingsley are terrific actors but they can’t save it. The movie will probably enjoy eventual success on cable television.

A film festival is not complete without a documentary feature so I chose Up the Yangtze, by Yung Chang, the Canadian director, who introduced the film in person. His humorous description of the movie (Love Boat meets Apocalypse Now) suggests a documentary better than this disappointment. He took his crew on a luxury river boat up the Yangtze to the Three Gorges dam, and along the way documented some of the millions of people and their cities, environments, and ways of life that will be submerged when the dam is completed. Flooding had already begun in 2003-2004 when he made the film. Poor farmers living on the banks of the river, living in mud-floor shacks, speak of their desperation and hopelessness. They have no plans, no prospects. They reminisce on their ancient way of life, soon to be obliterated by progress. This is important stuff, but it is also old stuff. We should note that these farmers are holdouts who declined to be relocated by the government to safe, high ground. Why? No clue is offered.

Chang has a photographic eye, and we see ooh-aah shots of neon lights reflected on water, plenty of cute kittens, puppies and roosters, charming tableaux of rustic village life. There is some beautiful, layered Chinese scenery, but not much of it. Chang likes shots that draw attention to themselves such as extreme closeups, long flat shots, blurred fast pans. Other shots are offered ostensibly as candids, but are clearly staged. More political, economic, environmental, and sociological detail is needed to justify this documentary. Pretty pictures and fancy camera work are not enough.

The onboard ship scenes are perhaps unintentionally satirical. It looks like an especially tawdry Carnival Cruise, as old people in ill-fitting clothes dance to sappy music. If Chang could have somehow juxtaposed those images more directly to mud squeezing between villagers’ toes, he might have had something. If he could have juxtaposed cruise goers gorging on buffet food against children eating insects… perhaps that would be too obvious. Yet Chang does not shy away from the obvious. City teenagers are shown dancing mindlessly, drinking vodka at a night club, declaring their desire to become rich. With signs overhead showing the future waterline at 175 meters, well above all life going on, there would seem to be ample opportunity for visual metaphor. The film is good-looking and sentimental and was well-received by the SRO audience at Pacific Place Cinema, but I think it has only the most superficial intellectual basis and will have little lasting impact.


Andrzej Wajda is an internationally known director, and Katyn is supposed to be one of his best, the first of his I’ve seen. It is a historical drama with careful, documentary detail about the Soviet Union’s slaughter of 20,000 Polish army officers at the end of World War II, and the subsequent cover-up as Stalin’s army occupied Poland, blaming the massacre on the Nazis. My understanding is that this lie was not exposed until the late 1990s when archival files were released in Russia. So this would be a very emotional topic for a Polish audience.

The film follows a group of Polish officers as they are captured by the Soviets in 1940 and shipped by train to the interior of the Soviet Union, where they were imprisoned for a number of months then systematically executed. The women and children they left behind wait for letters from them or announcements in the papers, hoping to learn of their eventual release, or at least of their survival. The audience knows, because of an English-language announcement at the beginning of the film, that they are never coming back. A sole survivor returns after the war and becomes a member of the reviled, Soviet-run, new Polish army. He argues in favor of collaboration, survival, and life, and against revealing the truth about the massacre, which can only lead to imprisonment or death. It is a compelling argument. The only counter-argument offered is “I choose the murdered, not the murderers.” Is that a good argument or is it stupid, self-destructive self-indulgence?

It is a beautifully photographed story and a fine way to learn about an important historical episode. Wajda’s reputation is well-deserved.


I hadn’t been to the Harvard Exit theater in thirty years and that delightfully funky place on Capitol Hill hasn’t changed much. There I saw a feature-length animation, a staple of any film festival. Idiots and Angels is writer-director Bill Plimpton’s surreal comedy. Plimpton introduced the film himself, explaining that no cameras were used. He scanned his 25,000 drawings into a computer database and assembled the film. Quite a technical feat!

The wordless story is of a lout who goes to a tavern each day where he drinks, smokes and fantasizes about the barman’s wife. He is a violent, self-centered lowbrow. The pencil-drawings are beautifully realized, with minimum but telling detail. Changing points of view are especially interesting and amusing. When Mr. Lout swigs his drink, we are suddenly deep in his throat, looking at the flash flood cascading toward us. Lots of fun.

Without explanation, he one morning sprouts small wings on his back. He is surprised, but sees them as aberrant growths and cuts them off. There is a Groundhog Day theme to this story, so the next day, the wings have grown back, a little larger. He tapes them down. The following day, they are even larger, and so on. He eventually discovers they are wings, and that he can fly, so he swoops around. He tries some purse-snatching from the air, but inexplicably, he is compelled to return the purse. Are the wings turning him into a “good person?”

There are many promising ways this story could have developed, but the writer had no vision of where he was going. Instead, each scene simply attempts to top the previous one in terms of self-conscious creativity for the sake of creativity. And I admit it was very creative. A loosely structured story flows for a few scenes, then is abandoned to some other theme. The ending is arbitrary because there is just no semblance of a narrative thread remaining. It was a shame he couldn’t have gotten a co-writer to lend him some direction.

One interesting aspect of the whole project is the author’s unconscious illustration of Freud’s theory of infant and child development, from oral, to anal, to oedipal stages. The imagery and symbolism are very much open to psychoanalytic interpretation, which no doubt would be quite embarrassing to the author if he were aware of it. It’s probably just as well that I was not able to stay for the Q&A session after the film, because there would be nothing gained by bringing that up. I enjoyed the creativity, but without a narrative thread, it was just amusing, not important.


A collection of shorts is mandatory viewing, and I chose a well-curated batch called The Art of Memory. The first two these nine films were wonderful; one other was memorable; most of the rest only interesting, but all worth seeing, if only to wonder at the diversity of the human imagination.

“Run,” was probably set in a remote coastal town in Australia, judging from the accents. A working class father encourages (commands) his two children to run each day for exercise and health. The preadolescent girl is chubby and struggles to keep up with her younger brother. She also rehearses “Fur Elise” for an upcoming piano recital, but surreptitiously practices a brooding variation she has composed. The children are brown, possibly aboriginal, and on the daily run, white boys delivering milk taunt the girl and throw milk at her. The milk could represent the absent mother, whose picture is displayed on top of the piano, and whose absence might be the source of the girl’s emotional turmoil. She finally expresses herself at the recital when, unable to remember the Beethoven, she plays her own composition to an astonished and mystified audience. It’s a film dense with symbols, emotion, complex family structure, class and race themes, and psychological development, all in less than 10 minutes: a real masterpiece.

Last Day of December was a Romanian production, if I remember rightly. The language sounded more Russian than Romanian to me, but what do I know. A boy of 14 meets his father in deep snow in a birch forest. We gather that the man is on the run. A well-dressed 40-year old watches from the road above. Four pursuers arrive, we assume police, and chase the man through the knee-deep snow, down into a ravine, in kinetic sequence of exhausting energy and dazzling beauty. The pursuers go in the wrong direction, but the young boy finds the man. After a long moment, he yells to the pursuers, who capture the man, beat him, and take him away. Then we discover that this has all been a flashback of the well-dressed man who was not watching, but remembering the action. He goes to his now-dying father’s house, but in a poignant scene, is turned away. Nothing is forgiven. Another masterpiece.

Two of the remaining shorts were animation, one a claymation, proving it still can be done, but not justifying why it should be. One notable short, “PB&J: A Love Story” was a stop-action animation romance between a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jam. They consummate their love in a gooey sandwich. The whole story was no more than 3 minutes long and delighted the audience. The only other short that stayed with me was “Felix,” a German tale about a 14 year old boy who learns sign language so he can have a relationship with a deaf girl he met on the internet. Their budding friendship goes awry when she discovers that he is not really deaf. It is very well acted by the children, but the film only states the theme without exploring it. Could such a relationship work? Maybe for childhood friendship, but not with adults. Now that I think of it, most of these shorts focused on children. That simplifies the ideas and the emotions, but is that really the only way to successfully tell a very short story? Anyway, three hits out of nine is a good ratio so I’d say this package of shorts was a success. [I misidentified “Felix” as a different short in my online review at SIFF.net but it is not possible to edit those posts.]

Young People Fucking: What an inspired title this is for a contemporary comedy of manners centered around sexual relationships! Five relationships are explored: friends, roommates, a married couple, a couple on the first date, a divorced couple. All relationships are hetero, although other tendencies and urges are hilariously suggested. The story rotates through the list of couples to comment on introduction, foreplay, sex, orgasm, and afterglow, to create a set of 5 x 5 = 25 scenes of 5 to 10 minutes each. The camera work and directing are respectful and there is little nudity, because this is really not about fucking, but rather on how twenty- and thirty-somethings understand and deal with sexuality. The writing is brilliant, in a sitcom sort of way, and there are many laugh out loud moments. Afterward however, I realized that I had been manipulated. Virtually nothing about the human condition was revealed or even seriously explored. It was a series of gags, some sophisticated, most sophomoric. There were moments of honesty, as when each of the exes considers returning to the closed door after the tryst, but then each, separately, sadly, wordlessly, turns away from their side of the door. That was wonderful, but most of the scenes were easy gag setups from the beginning, from the “old pal” girlfriend who just wants to be “serviced” to the bored wife who convinces her bored husband to submit to a purple strap-on. The casting was just perfect and the acting truly outstanding, and those considerable virtues made the cliché humor acceptable. The way the audience squirmed, laughed, and groaned, I’d say the subject matter was “very hot” and that sketch comedy was the only way audience anxiety could have been dealt with. I think this Canadian production will enjoy wide release (possibly with an edited title) and will perform an important and much-needed socialization function.

One Hundred Nails
This stunningly beautiful Italian film makes you feel the warm sun on your back and smell the spring grass. A professor of religion becomes fed up with academic theology and disappears from the university for a life of natural simplicity beside the river Po, but not before he takes 100 medieval theology books from the library shelves and nails each to the wooden plank floor with a large (crucifix-sized) iron spike. Out in the country, the peasants embrace him and help him rebuild a derelict stone house to live in, while he tells them bible stories. They take to calling him Jesus Christ. Local authorities levy a huge fine on the town for some infraction and the professor gives the mayor his credit card to pay it, but the police trace the card and arrest him for the library vandalism. In his absence the villagers decorate the town in anticipation of his Second Coming. It’s a long, quiet, and slow film and even the subdued religious allegories are only decoration. Nothing much happens and there is no lesson to be learned. The languid pace communicates the fantasy of spiritual peace one hopes to find in an idyllic village and simple way of life. But if you had the gumption to have acquired a BMW, a university professorship, and an open-ended credit card, I’m pretty sure the ignorant, backbiting civilization of small town life would drive you mad quite shortly. The romantic bucolic fantasy endures best as an imaginary utopia. Even knowing that, this sensuous movie lured me there.

Russian writers and artists often complain that creativity has declined since the lifting of most censorship. Alexandra shows what can be done with a politically sensitive and forbidden topic, in this case the Russian war in Chechnya, right under the noses of the authorities. It is a blatant anti-war film. Or is it? A lovably irritable Russian grandmother visits her grandson at a military outpost in Chechnya. He shows her the inside of a tank and soldiers cleaning their guns. She wanders off-base into the village and befriends some local women there, revealing in mundane conversation underlying class and ethnic attitudes. Russian soldiers are universally transformed from killing machines to boys as each of them shows deference and tenderness to the old woman. Finally she goes home, The End. Who could censor such a banal slice of life? Yet just placing a kindly and feeble old grandmother inside a Russian tank says more than any jeremiad. There are a few pointed conversations, as when she asks her grandson, “Do you enjoy killing people?” He doesn’t answer. I think about several anti-war American films I have seen lately from the stridently didactic Lions for Lambs, to the morally blaming Rendition, or the more intellectually subtle Charlie Wilson’s War. Even at their most indirect, none of those films approaches the artistic audacity of simply juxtaposing a tired, frail old grandmother against roaring humvees festooned with troops. The movie seemed vastly too slow and indirect for an American audience, yet the theater was almost full on a Monday night, so who knows?

The SIFF runs for an astonishing two more weeks, until June 15th. But I am out of tickets, money and time. I feel I took a fair sample of what was offered and I was well-pleased.