Well it's been a long while since I've seen a film before it hits the theaters...but I recently was able to catch the amazing documentary that has been making the rounds- most notable at my favorite film fest in the world True/False down in Columbia, MO and also just last week over at the Tribeca Film Festival- and that film is none other than Cutie and the Boxer. And it is one of the best films I have seen in years!
Cutie and the Boxer peers into the creative life of Ushio & Noriko Shinohara, a Japanese couple who have lived in New York for decades, building their artistic visions, lifestyle and love in a way that is to be admired, observed, and pondered. Cutie is the R. Crumb like scroll style narrative comic book creation of Noriko - her braided ink drawn alter ego portraying life in the shadow of a virulent man. The Boxer is Ushio, known throughout the NY 70s pop art scene for his found object sculptures, action painting- literally boxing paint onto canvases-, and general overwhelming artistic spirit/ego. They live in their own dilapidated studios, they move in & out of sparkling galleries, they support, push and struggle to maintain a lifestyle that audiences are rarely allowed to see....and the filmmaking that captures their sweeping togetherness is the perfect compliment to this story.
The director of this film won some kind of first time director award at Sundance this year and he definitely deserved it! His crafting of this film is near perfection with a personal yet distanced eye feeling around the emotions and environment he is documenting with a touch of his own creative intensity; animation sequences of Cutie's drawings provide backstory, archival & vhs footage of Ushio as a younger artist, distanced sequences of creative production rarely captured on film (think Pollock footage but with a much more humanistic eye)...event the carefully chosen music (Yasuaki Shimizu & Saxophonettes) held together the feel of the film in such a beautiful sense...in fact that is the way I would describe Zachary Heinzerling's filmmaking as a whole: sensory. A new cinematic voice that seamlessly blends the eccentricities and wonder of what it means to live a modern artistic lifestyle both as subjects and as a documentary filmmaker- both as artists.
I've been finding it very difficult to articulate my review of this movie...thanks to it hitting a little too close to home. I didn't make an official announcement on this here blog that I have parted ways with my collaborator....One can become so lost in their own head, in their own ideas, that the needs, ideas and heads of others are clouded with the visionary creativity of another- a problem that is so hard to reconcile, and one that, seeing the relationship of Ushio & Noriko, makes me yearn to kidnap her! How many apologies can we make for the gifted & talented minds that cause so much destruction in the wake of their enormous, brooding, towering ideas...? To see Cutie, a film executed with such poise and care, is to witness a type of living that is both immensely passionate and also immensely destructive- two things that are often needed to instigate and balloon shadows of ideas into realities....but sometimes the realities behind an artistic vision are can be a little trying.... Cutie and the Boxer is a must see film about a not often described unreal life of heartache, love and imaginative invention a film that I know all too well...
Woah! Sorry about the blog break- I'm not dead yet! Breaking one's leg is a pain in many, many ways. Mainly there is the pain. Then the pills meant to intercept the pain and lie to your brain that there is no pain. Then there is the hazy immobility. Then you see someone acting suspicious out your back window through your binoculars...wait, I mean (check out this awesome Rear Window time-lapse video if you get a chance!). My head is a bit more together and my pain, still there, but at least I am able to be somewhat coherent (the pain was so piercing I one day found myself biting my tongue in an attempt to offset it). I even have sobered up enough to enjoy some reading and grant applying. Speaking of which...I never get grants. Of any kind. Which I only find weird because people read this blog. Not a ton but a decent amount. Enough that I've been asked to write other things for other people. You know what...I want to talk more about this I think?
I just got denied a fellowship to this Summer's Flaherty Seminar- a film organization that seeks to define, discuss and promote the beautifully lush grey area between real life and the film life of the documentary landscape. This is a topic I am VERY passionate about. One that I've devoted a large chunk of my life to in a weird sense. But...I didn't get this grant. And I can't afford to go to the seminar without it. Which makes me wonder: who DOES get these grants? Who is deemed worthy of project loans and other forms of money doled out by organizations who support thinkers in need? Well the answer is...no one new.
A lot of grant-like outlets tend to act like a centrifuge, spinning around academia in a way that both perpetuates itself- picking out the ideas that it deems worth more inquiry- and removing the impurities of those of us without elaborate letters after our names...but, this has never been the way I view an intellectual life. In fact, I view it as just the opposite. I think the more ideas and influences that reach out beyond specific disciplines can lead to a more rounded way of problem solving- a thing that, in fact, has been proven to be a sign of real intelligence.
One of the major collector's of the filmmaker I used to work with was a scientist. He turned to the arts to spin his brain around, to think outside of science and look for creative solutions to problems in his own field. One of the most successful art related projects I encountered during my travels over the past few years was X-Square, a "Cross Institute Initiatives" class at Arizona State University. It was a class that produced a sustainable campus public art project, the catch was that each team had to contain students across different majors forcing each group to move beyond pure aesthetics and think about psychology, science, and the ways data & ideas are communicated- interdisciplinary problem solving & inquiry ballooning concepts into one vision.
The more global we get, the more technology transmits ideas across the invisible plane of ones and zeros, the more widespread our discussions become, the more informed our thinking can be... a thing we should foster off the web too, right? I dunno...maybe I am just trying to reconcile the fact that some deem me unworthy of membership in their organizations and, who knows, maybe my applications to these things aren't the best.... But, like a lot of fellow film writers, independent bloggers, and citizen journalists I know, I consider myself a part of a community that is working in a larger conversation and pushing around our individual ideas- our ideas culled from the experience of seeing underground movies in a darkened basement of a micro theater or experiencing the skeleton of a Ground Sloth for the first time, not just ideas learned in classrooms or on our daddy's film set...- to others in a way far more important than ever before! So, chin up to me and chin up to all other independent culture makers, critics and the like! We might not have the grant money but at least we have our thoughts....! xox (PS. I'm not saying academia is useless hell, I love reading a good film theory essay more than most... but, what I am saying is academia needs to be a little less closed off!)
So recently I got a message from a friend in desperate need of help on his most recent film project. Despite being incredibly busy (so busy my blog has been in shambles with a half dozen, half started posts lingering in the unpublished section of the internet jungle) I agreed to help...mostly because it isn't everyday that one is asked to aid in a deadline completion for the latest film of Ken Burns' and his local Florentine Film Crew! The task at hand: transcription. Transcription is the type of detail I think more documentary filmmakers should embrace as it helps manage interview content, a thing that can be daunting if not handled correctly. After completing this tedious task of transcribing I asked my friend what exactly they use the finished product for, his reply was that they use them to mine for potentially usable footage and also as an early stage in script writing- yes documentaries (mostly should!) have writers!
I've mentioned recently how I think it is important for documentaries to build a story, purpose or point around the subjects they are filming (a sore spot for me given my recent film fest screening committee time in which many a mere camera rolling in front of some real life subject tried to pass as a film...), a feeling that has been greatly reinforced by my forray into transcription! When thinking of the work of Ken Burns I think of sweeping yet detailed histories of a particular subject, subjects that are so dense and complex that they seem impossible to encapsulate through a film. But, it is the intense structuring of the information- the sweep and zoom across archival images, the questions asked of the interview subjects, thought provoking voiceover narration, humanized events, incredibly researched facts- that are able to make Burns' style move past photo album, vacation slide show or boring slapdash film category and into historical document territory.
The NY Times recently published an article about the sudden increase in writing credits attached to documentary films...and the conclusion drawn was: people are confused by it. But why? Turning a camera on a subject is one thing but shaping that subject into an interesting story, person, comment on the world is quite another. First off, editing itself is a form of writing, of building footage into something watchable, why should writing not act as an obvious extension of editing? I mean we all know that reality tv is concisely edited to portray it's characters as such- to create tension, drama- all of the things that dominant media tend towards- so why not expect the same from nonfiction films? Maybe though, it is the history of the film medium itself that creates this strange dynamic between editing and writing about reality.
Vertov fought for the Cine-Eye, the unfettered documentation of the world through film and Eisenstein was a lover of montage as he edited together two dissimilar cuts of film to create a tension full of meaning and inference but...we no longer live in a world where a camera is just a voyeur or where a simple image next to another can suffice. We now live in a society where information is accessible all the time, images splintered into micro-mediacosms where no consistent understanding of montage seems possible, and where the ability of cameras to lie is at an all time high. So, what does this mean for documentary film? Personally I think it means we should, and are (!), becoming even more reliant on words in films to be a conveyor of information. In fact, one of the best docs I previewed as a Screener consisted nearly entirely of voiceover narration that built up a complex understanding of one man's intangible personal journey, adding a deeper layer of meaning to images (much like good old Herzog and, to a certain extent, the very film this blog began as a companion to!). I have a feeling that words and writing are going to become a bigger part of the independent film landscape- especially in terms of documentaries- as the camera's abilities continue to grow and the world continues to become a more visually saturated place. Hell, even the rise of the internetmeme is often a thing of pictures and words, pushing us closer to a cultural communication (the fact that English is the dominant conveyor is a whole other matter...sigh...) creating a new static form of montage! A picture might be worth 1,000 words, but a picture with 1,000 words? Think about it. All this from the tedium of transcribing for the studio of Ken Burns! Good times in the documentary world! (Side note for haters: I don't think all docs need to be narrative but I do think a more thoughtful editing process is important to crafting the history of the subject you are making...in fact, think about it that way: A documentary film is a historical document, craft with the importance of this in mind!). Here I leave you with some interesting takes on documentary subjects and stories, with every piece of film calculated in writing, editing and beauty to leave behind a wondrous cultural relic for the future!
Well it's been a long while since I've seen a film before it hits the theaters...but I recently was able to catch the amazing documentary that has been making the rounds- most notable at my favorite film fest in the world True/False down in Columbia, MO and also just last week over at the Tribeca Film Festival- and that film is none other than Cutie and the Boxer. And it is one of the best films I have seen in years!
