The Den: Horror Movies are Killing It

Horror movies are the most innovative genre of fiction film. Production costs of these films can remain pretty low, emotion, tension, fake blood, and terror aren't exactly costly, but it takes a real master to piece together these hugely important elements into something worthy enough to be called cinema. The director has to be able to tell a story (of sorts) through sheer craft. They have to build suspense. They have to push the limits of every tool they have. After watching The Den a few weeks ago I continue to stand by the intensely progressive filmmaking of such a transgressive genre!

The Den was released in theaters and on VOD at the same time, another relatively new experiment happening in the post-theater world. It even had a spot on price point online too, $7, more than a rental but less than a multiplex ticket. I love horror movies and don't live in a city where I can just hop outside and see a brand spanking new slasher movie any time I please, why wouldn't I watch this? I watched The Den on my computer. In the dark. At night. It scared the sh*t out of me. Like really, really did. To the point where I was pausing it because, I dunno, maybe I need some water? Maybe I should make sure the door is locked? Maybe there are lots of things that need to be done at 11pm BESIDES watch this freakishly tense film alone in my bed? And the reason it scared me was completely unexpected and utterly groundbreaking: it used this new way of watching movies against me.

The Den was one of the first films I have ever seen that was designed to be watched at home on your laptop in bed, just as I was doing. Yes, things like Paranormal Activity 4 and a handful of short films I've seen recently fall into this category too but The Den has done it best as nearly all of the deathly horror of the film takes place on the protagonist's computer screen. Elizabeth, the film's hot protagonist (and true to Horror form we see her in her underwear for no reason at least once) is writing a thesis on internet chatting culture specifically on the site"The Den," sort of like Chatroulett's fake bastard cousin. Yeah, this is far fetched, but whatever. As she begins her "study" she comes across something that might be a murder and then her whole real world begins to collapse in on itself as it merges with that of an alternate underbelly of internet existence brought on by a torturing hacker, or is it hackers?

Images of Elizabeth's computer screen flashed across my desktop (seriously even making me wonder why my screen was frozen at one point, yes I am lame old), log-ins, e-mails, chats, once the camera even a shaky cell phone-ish first person shot that made me feel like an awful intruder in someone's home as they fold laundry and watched bad tv. The film used the new way we are watching films as a resourceful, mood setting tool that raised tons of questions both on & offscreen. Who is in control (hi NSA!)? Who is it that is taking over the computer screen, MY computer screen? Where am I in terms of the film? Am I now implicated in her plight, paying to see her running around to her possible death? Or am I like the sick surveillance cameras in Elizabeth's room, a creepy voyeur watching her game of cat & mouse? Or am I Elizabeth- ohmygod is someone watching me on my computer ready to pounce at any moment for pure entertainment alone? EEPS! Even if the acting is spotty & the plot full of holes, the questions brought up by The Den elevate it into something else besides a B Movie.

Once again a horror movie has shocked me by looking at a new facet of cinema, playing with the expectations of the medium, and producing something unprecedented... and scary as hell. Like other boundary pushing horror films (Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity) and directors for whom this gory genre acts as a portfolio/springboard (Raimi, Peter Jackson), The Den presents a new vision of the state of film and technology. I am not telling you the ending of the movie, this is one that I recommend you watch on your computer. With the light off. Or on. Full disclosure: I turned the lights on.

Boston Underground Film Fest March 26th-30th 2014!!!

A series of fortunate and unfortunate events have kept me from attending my first ever BUFF, the Boston Underground Film Festival. I am sad. But I am also poor. So the not going is necessary and the paying gig I am replacing my trip with is also necessary. (Film writer for hire. Right here folks. Get your film writer for hire! Or programming. I want to do more programming...anyway...) But, I like to think that my press-passed butt not being in a seat is freeing it up for some other splatter lover, or another giallo freak, or someone who refuses to watch anything but obscure Japanese sci-fi, whose movie poster collection is a beautiful, papery, yellowing wonder cultivated from the early days of internet auctions, or maybe even the total creep stranger who invited me to his house to watch Salo that time...shudder... In preparation of attending BUFF I made a list of my top three films that I was hoping to see which I will share with you film thirsty folks below! Big love to all those at BUFF...I feel like that's not fitting...big nightmares to all you BUFFers? Better.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

When I read the description of this film I was like "I bet the blood is going to be some shade of wildly unnatural, fetishistic red that doesn't exist anywhere in nature." And I have a feeling it wouldn't have disappointed. The sparkling black full bodysuit topped with luscious blonde wig, the squeaky pink-leather gloves that seem fashionably poised to stab, sharply pointed gemstone rings that appear to be skin tearing accessories, and the booming pounces of blaring soundtrack (Morricone? YES! PS Morricone is doing live shows? This summer? Mouth Agape!) all in this brief trailer alone, is a legend of Freudian symbols that can only play out the fine, gushing line between sex & death.

 



Starry Eyes

The trailer for this one begins with a textured, haunting, layered scream that is almost a redefinition of the sound. An extremely gaunt, pale, wet eyed girl, her clothes hanging off of her sticklike frame, is the one doing the howling, her figure then shown running towards, or is it away from?, some sort of ineffable, intangible goal or evil. Starry Eyes is a horrific meditation on what we desire and how far we are willing to let those desires devour us, a film that, perhaps, turns in on itself as it questions the nature of fame or famine.





Blue Ruin

Revenge movies are one of the most complex subgenres of horror. Revenge implies that a wrong was committed and someone wants to even the scales, an eye for an eye, quite often literally, in a lot of these movies. There is an inherent confusion of audience identity: who do we side with? Who is "the bad guy?" Whose wrong is wronger? This twisting of logic & emotion is why I love revenge movies. And, truthfully, why I tend to think of them as a real American artform. When the first still of Blue Ruin surfaced awhile back, a musty, bearded man, wide eyed, sitting in a simultaneously rusting & inexplicably bright blue car, the presence of blood just out of reach, his face scared but somehow filled with resolve- all of this conveyed in one simple still frame- I knew that Blue Ruin was something I must see and something that has the potential to be a terrifying, suspenseful, artful new horror classic. This one comes out April 25th, in theaters & on VOD. I cannot wait.

 

True/False Film: Sacro Gra

Sacro Gra is one of those movies that you just get swept inside of. The repeating characters become friends, neighbors, people who you- as a strange voyeuristic audience member- check in on from time to time to see what they are up to. You worry about their futures. Their families. Their careers. But like all superb stories, Sacro Gra uses this highly controlled sense of the familiar to express something much larger: the current condition of not only Rome but of all cultures whose natural ways continue to be compromised, improved, or altered by our notions of progress.

The title Sacro Gra is apparently a play on Holy Grail (Sacro GRA(il), the GRA being an acronym for the large, speeding, roaring ringed road that encircles the city of Rome, Italy and also maybe referencing our changing notions of modern worship. The filmmaker, Gianfranco Rosi, circled around this highway for years capturing the lives of various roadside dwellers, each with their own sprawling personal narrative that became tucked into the folds of the film, creating a give & take that really captures the watcher: will we learn more about the ambulance medic's remote family that he speaks to via webcam? Is the scientist going to conquer the invasive beetle population? Will the "Luccioles" (aka Fireflies, aka Prostitutes) be ok dancing in heels on such a high countertop? Nearly all of these questions remain unanswered, the rhetorical nature of the film lending itself to a slight lean in, a personal investment, that makes the film speed by. The way the camera in this film positioned itself added to this near audience participation too.

Most of the shots were distanced, a series of scenes filmed outside of the windows of a large apartment complex, a floating omnipresence that allowed the characters to take on a dreamy, zoo-like quality. Sometimes I felt like I was on a European Safari, an anthropological National Geographic documentary revealing, educating, transmitting the lives of a wild world we've never seen but is still very relatable. The film is also the single best document of the Anthropocene Era yet, deftly displaying our ability to carve into nature our ways of life- positioning the great feat of an enormous roadway against a snow that renders it useless, the outspoken Eel fisherman debunking the newspaper article about the traits of his slithering income, the strange, unnatural ways we have learned to entertain ourselves. And I think that was the whole point of this film, to express the connectivity in all things- from humans to animals, from palm trees to car accidents. No matter how far away one's own culture is from another, or how much we as a species inflict our realities upon the natural world, we are all humans on an Earth that is changing as rapidly as the rush of the highways that connect it. Sacro Gra, in a gorgeous, dark, hypnotic, watchful way, reminds us that we are all responsible for the future, the extreme artistry of the film acting not so much as a warning but as a reminder to see the potential for beauty in the ever fluctuating truths, and truth in the fluid ideas of beauty. Filmmaking at its finest.

True/False Film/Interview: Life After Death

Life After Death - Trailer from Joe Callander on Vimeo.


I spent a long time trying to write about Joe Callander's amazing film Life After Death but the more I thought about it, the harder it was. The surface subject of the story is difficult and complicated to start as it follows struggling adult Rwandan Genocide survivors that are primarily supported by donations from their religious, white, well meaning "mothers & fathers" in America, a relationship that feels intrinsically helpful but possibly detrimental at once, reminding that there are no clear solutions to fixing the results of unfathomable events. But adding to the difficulty of trying to talk about this film is the layered filmmaking itself. Callander's sly, insightful editing and intuitive directorial choices create a polished, thoughtful telling of this dense story. Similar to the works of writers like George Saunders & Kurt Vonnegut, Callander hits that collision of comedy & tragedy that are inherent in the beautiful, inane, and dark world we've created and manages to do it with the added difficulty of using real life subjects, his choice of main characters ranging from Kwasa (a young man who is funny, mischievous, and deeply wounded by the past) to the cheery, caring, wise, concerned Suzette who dedicates her life to the well being of others, praying with her family over their spaghetti for those in need. After failing at writing about Life After Death for awhile I decided to track down this wry, brilliant director and have him explain how this exceptional work came to be.

1. So, in the intro I wrote to these questions I called you brilliant. Just so you know...so don't say anything stupid, okay? Kidding of course.....no pressure!

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING. SHHHHHHHH!!! 

2. How were you able to make this film. I had to run out of the True/False Q&A so I missed the details about how this film came to be but it seemed to somehow involve a faith based charitable organization? And you becoming the filmmaker in residence at a progressively operated leather works company...? Not your typical indie filmmaker route! 

The leather company and the charitable organization are the same entity. Saddleback Leather, run by Dave and Suzette Munson, makes really high quality leather stuff. Dave and Suzette funnel a significant amount of their profits to relief work in Rwanda. They work with a non-profit over there called Africa New Life Ministries. Suzette also runs a company called Love 41, which is structured as a for-profit company, but she effectively runs it as a non-profit. 100% of Love 41 profits goes straight to relief work in Africa.

Back in 2010 I was struggling as a filmmaker in LA, and saw Saddleback was hiring. So I landed a job in customer service, which turned into marketing, which turned into a filmmaker-in-residence. Dave wants his employees to be doing what they love, and he knew I loved making movies. So he created a filmmaker-in-residence position for me. I do all his marketing videos, and he gives me a lot of freedom to work on my own projects on the side.

I met Kwasa the second time I went to Rwanda with Dave and Suzette. At first, filming Kwasa [was] my own little side project. But after they saw what I was doing with it, they decided to let me run with it. The film was captured on three separate trips over the course of 18 months.

3. The film begins with a figure of how many days had passed since the end of the Rwandan Genocide, a figure that quietly stands in for the memory of a huge humanitarian crime. The title is an affirmative separation between the past and the present. Was this decision just inherent in the producer's story or did you specifically decide that the future is more important a subject than the past? I guess I am preoccupied with this since so many films about incomprehensible tragedy tend to focus on teaching about the tragedy as opposed to focusing on the equally as important results of the event, the cause more than the effect. Reparation seems to be a nearly forgotten aspect of most conflict and is equally as important.

I decided to mark the time since the genocide in days instead of years, as a subtle indicator of what life has been like for guys like Kwasa and Fils. They do not measure their time in years. They have no 5 year plan. Life passes day by day, and most days are a struggle to find enough to eat to see the sun come up again tomorrow.

The thing about the Rwandan Genocide is, PBS and the New York Times have covered it just fine. There's a few real great documentaries out there about the actual genocide. I felt I had nothing to add to that conversation. What I wanted to explore was, how are everyday normal people [are] dealing with it, 20 years later? I didn't want to turn them into talking heads of horrific tragedy and loss. I wanted to show them as human beings that have been through terrible things, and yet, they still have to live. They still have to try and make lives for themselves. And I wanted to show that no matter where you come from, we're all not so different on the most basic human level. We all just want to have dinner with our friends, try to find a stable, secure life, and maybe even fall in love.

4. Even though the film covers a weighty subject...it is hilarious. And you skillfully made it that way, interjecting a punchline or observation always at the exact right moment, even if the subjects brought a lot of the humor to the story, your comic timing is impeccable. Are you just an inherently funny person? What led you to the decision to use humor as a tool to tell this story? Laughter is missing from a lot of documentaries and it is a facet of (hopefully) every life.

Thank you. The tone of this film is how I want to tell stories. I think life is inherently tragic, absurd, heart-breaking, and hilarious. When I tell stories in real life, they're usually funny. Why should my voice as a filmmaker be any different than my voice as a human being? Life is strange everywhere you go and a little laughter helps when you're trying to deal with it all.

To me, the film is a very serious film, and the jokes only make it more so. If you're laughing at something, that means you've experienced something true. Laughter is the most powerful way to connect an audience to a film and the characters in the film. Jokes are very serious business.

5. The amount of respect and heart in this film was palpable. You were able to see huge confusions or contradictions inherent in the subjects but the way you went about bringing them to light were beyond fair. As a documentary filmmaker it felt like you managed such an objective, yet earnest, position which doesn't seem natural for most documentary filmmakers who have a distinct agenda...how did you develop this seemingly honest, autonomous, attitude yet still manage to inject it with your personal creative style? What position did you approach the subjects from? Are you just a nice, brilliant dude?

haha now I'm blushing. Through the humor in the film, I have a little fun with my subjects. But my intent with humor was never to bring them down. I wanted to use humor to reveal their humanity. Some people have mistaken the film for satire. It absolutely is not. If I'm poking fun at anything with the film, it's the fact that we're all here in the first place, stuck on this rock barreling around some tiny star in the middle of nowhere. And we all have to deal with each other.

I wouldn't say the film is objective, but the subjective point of view is more existential then anything else. A lot of people may have trouble seeing that, because when you've got a documentary that covers interactions between Westerners and Africans, we've been conditioned to expect that such material must come with a political, social, or religious agenda. Viewers will certainly bring all that baggage to the film, but I've done my best to focus on the humans first, so if people do want to discuss the film in terms of issues, I hope I've forced them to start with the humans and move out to the issues, instead of starting with the issues and trying to shoehorn the humans into them. 

So the short answer is, yes, I'm just a nice, brilliant dude (Sorry. Couldn't resist).

6. When I left the theater after seeing this film I remember thinking "O, THIS is why I love film! I almost forgot!" The storytelling, voice, production design- all of it- was so unique, new, and hopeful: I want more! What are you working on next?

I'm doing a lot of marketing films with Saddleback at the moment. I've got a few ideas for another feature, which I'm hoping to get started on before next year. Don't want to say too much though. If you keep a little mystery around things, people think you're really interesting and sophisticated. That ones on the house.  

True/False Film: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

When I read about Stand Clear of the Closing Doors online I was like "Ummm, he follows a dragon? Onto the subway? Uh-oh." Then I began watching this film and quickly let the preconceived images of Harry Potter fandom (are there even dragons in that? I have no idea...because I am a grown up!) fade away and make room for a truly accurate portrayal of what it means to live on the edges of New York City.

The reason this narrative was unique, and why it represents the real spirit of NYC, is that it deals with so many existences that hover on the fringes of society: the main character is an adolescent autistic boy named Ricky, his family illegal immigrants trying to find their rights while struggling for a better life, the family resides in the Rockaways where the beach meets the concrete (a place of increasing danger & tumult caused by climate change), the supporting characters are people who we do not see in films (the funky/angry/self styled teen girl forging her own path against her parents in the weird NY she chooses to live in, the employer of Ricky's mom who is a self-obsessed juice fanatic crooning on a piano as she dusts his marble), Ricky journeys through the subway system that is primarily an in-between space where life is suspended, invisibility feigned, and sometimes even a place where one's world is dramatically enhanced (If you ever want to hear the story about the homeless man who hung on my back on the F Train lemme know!). Shot in a digital hazy grey on the days leading up to the shattering Hurricane Sandy, the style of this film is an intense, near experimental collage of scenes from Ricky's viewpoint, the overwhelming sights & sounds he encounters, that are then mediated by scenes of a sweet, loving narrative that allows the progressive filmmaking to uphold a character's story instead of getting in the way of it (as is so often the case with "arty" film). Added to this delicate balance of progressive storytelling is a mix of on-site reality that exposes the failing systems, extreme diversity, and undying strength that define this great city.

The New York portrayed in this film is one that most people do not see, the gritty & fluid lives that settle just below the Disney-fied attractions and streamlined facades of commerce that so many visitors of the city choose to take in. But what makes this film truly beautiful is that its subject is an unseen contemporary NY that is all too aware of the near future one, one of rising flood waters and social issues that cannot be ignored for much longer (poverty, immigrant rights, resources for autism, decaying infrastructure etc.). Stand Clear of the Closing Doors really does embody a type of NY Neorealism and, much like its Italian neorealist predecessors, seeks to show the stories of the new American working class who have emerged in a time of sociopolitical upheaval. The surface story is one of emotions, everyday activities, the "simple" lives of families but the depths of the story quietly unfold like a vast subway map, displaying a network of looming fragility, questioning what will become of this metropolis, its people, and beyond. The only screening of this film I see on the horizon is in May in NYC, after having already played places like Tribeca Film Fest & Rooftop last year, but it is the type of film that embodies so many pertinent issues and in such a lush and accessible way that I hope it reaches much further shores! (UPDATE: 5/23/14 NYC Screening at Cinema Village, also see link to inquire about requesting a screening!)

True/False Films: Tim's Vermeer & Particle Fever

In Tim's Vermeer engineer Tim Jenison is determined to uncover the mechanism Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer used in creating his paintings, the speculation that he used an augmented painting device in order to accomplish his (pre)photorealistic images in the 17th century an often debated issue among painters& historians. In Particle Fever a group of experimenters at the Swiss research center CERN set out to create a machine, THE Large Hadron Collider, to prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle that the Standard Model of particle physics relies on, and whose discovery might lead to a better understanding of the origins of much of life/mass as we perceive it in our universe. The basic pursuits of Tim Jenison and the team at CERN (and beyond CERN since the project is an enormous ongoing international quest) are one in the same: building a machine, to test a theory, to find answers to nagging mysteries of the physical world. But, the thing that both also so slyly brought up is that imperceptible line between art & science, a line that's fitting when displayed in the medium of film!

Tim Jenison is painted as a subject who seems excited by life. He is an engineer that feels the need to create things, to understand the mechanics of the world, to positively (or amusingly) add things to make it a more tolerable place. Goaded by his friend, Tim becomes obsessed with the idea that Vermeer used a machine to create his work, setting out on a journey that takes him to the hometown of Vermeer in the Netherlands, behind the reins of a lathe, into the world of lo-fi optical instruments (image directly below), into the studio of the lovely painter David Hockney, and beyond- his obsession alone a feat of endurance. Yet this isn't really a story about a dude attempting to paint a Vermeer, it is so much more. Is there less value in Vermeer's work if he did use a "machine" to paint his masterpieces? Why don't we consider the creator of a machine an artist? On the continuum of creativity where do art & science meet? Overlap? Are skill & passion the same thing? What do we each find beautiful? Tim's Vermeer slyly posed question after question about how people appreciate, configure, and define not just art but everything really, bringing these questions to light through film, the perfect medium of an alternate reality, one that we capture through a lens and one that perfectly underscores these questions of originality and perception.

Penn & Teller (the uber illusionists & comics that taught me some pretty gnarly parlor tricks when I was a kid and that I, to this day, teach nearly every kid I babysit) are the producer & director behind Tim's Vermeer managing to craft a movie that feels so easy, so natural but that, much like their magic tricks, necessitates a real, serious craft & intelligence to execute. Penn & Teller do not have the answers but they see the blurry line between fact & fiction, art & science, truth & beauty around us and made a sweet, entertaining and thought provoking film to shine a light on the inherent fuzziness. The film might not be extremely artful but what it lacks in difficulty it makes up for in laughs, a thing that I wish more films would recognize as not such a bad thing, and again adding a comment on our unfortunately rigid categories of dry documentary & enjoyable narrative filmmaking.

My favorite scene in Particle Fever was when two particle theorists peer out their window at a large, abstract public sculpture sitting on the grounds of their giant university. They eventually go down to look at it closer. Tiles of what looks like slate are stacked in rows on a bed of stones. The physicists declare there is no order here and that if they weren't meant to be moved they would have been secured to the ground. They then proceed to move the pieces around like a chess board, positioning the big pieces of splintered slate into forms more pleasing to their eyes. This brief scene, similarly to Tim's Vermeer, showed a moment of the grey area between what we see as order and chaos, one man's highly controlled sculpture, another man's mess, one man's highly patterned universe (Standard Model) is another's infinitely diverse one (is it the Multiverse Model? Can't remember...I feel like I failed the test!). This film follows the parallel lives of theorists and experimenters that intersect with the flipping of the on switch of The Hadron Collider, a project that had been decades in the making, all of their long hanging hopes & fears spinning around in two particle beams. But this film isn't a film about a science project, or a film about matter, it is a film about what matters, what passions drive us to continue to create, to look for answers, patterns, meaning in the photorealistic painting (or is it abstract painting?) in which we live.

I've always thought that a rigid discipline model in education is such a detriment to learning. A major in college can so easily focus a student on one path of knowledge. The many types of exploration, creativity and emotion found in one subject can increase the complexity of questions and answers in another. I feel like a lot of the rigid defining of so many things, far beyond education, keeps society from achieving and living life to its fullest. As Tim Jenison and David Kaplan (a producer of PF and a particle theorist depicted in the film) stood in front of me at the screening for both of these films I had a slight glimmer of hope and happiness. There are people out there making very real art & very real science about very surreal realities and they seem to know no boundaries! Seeing these sprawling, heart warming, and scientific stories in film reinforced my ongoing belief in the power of this medium! Tim's Vermeer and Particle Fever hold a kind of understanding, laughter, illumination, and humanity that make me glad to be alive and even more glad to be in the audience of these wonderful movies! Applause! Applause! Yay Film! Yay Science! Yay Art! YAY! YAY! (Yeah, I kind lost it at the end of this post... I blame the Waldorf in me, thanks mom!)

True/False Film: The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga

The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga isn't really a movie but an experimental journey through the timelessness and adaptation of mythic folktales, a rich, creamy 16mm collage of real, present day Eastern European culture next to dreamy storybook illustrations of a collective conscious, a sketch of naturalistic traditions that have continued beyond post-war culture & against the conflicting ideas of progress. It's the type of atmospheric film that imparts a meaning or sense of purpose through feeling instead of story. Because of this reason it is very difficult to write about- the images speak clearly for themselves. Film is always intangible but this one danced out of the projector and floated off like a thoughtful bedtime story that embeds itself in your subconscious, seeping into your dreams.

There were really well illustrated, graphic novel-like sequences whose images and calm voiceover relayed the tale of the traditional folk villian Baba Yaga, whose home is a hut that resides on the giant legs of a chicken. These sections mirrored the changing view of some communities in Eastern Europe, the deep dark woods originally a place of supernatural fear but evolving into a much more complex symbol during the war; a place to forage, a place to hide, a place to live. These drawn episodes were interspersed with tender contemporary footage of things like children eating mushrooms prepared by their grandparents, a bawdy wedding, the (re?)construction of sleek architecture- fluid scenes of present day Eastern European countries that nodded to the legacy from which they came.

There were also passages of writing (that I was a little confused about the origins of? And that someone tried to clarify in the post-screening Q&A but the director was battling a cold so I think the question was a little foggy...) that seemed like excerpts from relevant texts but that I can't clearly remember...and this unreliable remembrance of the film is what I think was the point: a slow, ephemeral patchwork to give pause and create an impression of the idea of Eastern Europe, a culture we think we know little about but is as universal as most human experience and the myths we use to explain it.

The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga Teaser from Myriapod Productions on Vimeo.

The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga Teaser from Myriapod Productions on Vimeo.

True/False Film: Manakamana

 
Manakamana is the kind of experimental film whose description might make you cringe "...the feature begins with a single unbroken shot of an old man and a young child silently riding the car across the mountainside and arriving at their destination, where the Manakamana temple awaits. After a fleeting black screen and the whirring of cable engines, the car reemerges heading in the opposite direction with a new set of passengers. And so it continues, back and forth, around a dozen times over the course of the next two hours." (Indiewire). This sort of summary immediately conjures up images of Andy Warhol's endurance films, and the hours of near still shots prevalent in the student documentaries that I have been bludgeoned with during my film fest screening committee time...! But this movie isn't a torture device at all. In fact it is the quite the opposite. This film keeps you on the edge of your seat. It keeps you fully engaged even with the repetitive frame. It does what so many films try, and fail, to do with scenes of minimal movement or dogged retelling: bring attention to detail, add a layer of symbolic life, compress micro & macrocosms into a single frame, create a moment of contemplation, and shine a spotlight on the beauty & wonder we are swimming in- hopefully making an audience more attune to the seemingly simple sway of a breeze both on film and outside of the theater.

The characters of Manakamana (including a cart full of sacrificial goats, a trio of heavy metal spiritualists with a kitten-Aw alert!-, to two old women trying to negotiate ice cream bars in the enclosed heat of the car) float against a huge, slightly blurry, sprawling backdrop of the green, luscious mountains of Nepal allowing each character equal attention like the stage setting of a play. Focusing on this setting which is in between time & space the words, actions, and mise en scene become magnified, concentrating the audiences attention on the minute, and blatantly exposing the polarities inherent in the journey- an ancient ritual that used to take days to reach on foot now a simple lift away. The audience was so intensely enraptured that at one point a man and a women are sitting in the car slowly chatting when suddenly the peak of a chicken's scarlet red comb bounced ever so slightly into the edge of the frame, causing nearly the entire audience to release a hushed gasping shock of laughter literally at the mere top of a chicken's head. I have never, ever seen an audience so devotedly involved in a film, nor have I ever seen the kind of impeccable filmmaking that made them this way.

I tend not to research info about films before I see them because I don't want anything I learn to cloud my opinion so I had no idea that Lucien Castaing- Taylor (the director of the superb Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard that was also responsible for the alternative, image heavy, humanistic docs Leviathan and Sweetgrass) was involved. I also didn't know Manohla Dargis had it on her favorite films of 2013 list, or that the film got real theatrical distribution (I think I offended one of the co-directors by not knowing this but dude, it is kind of unbelievable that something so true, beautiful, and boundary pushing is seen as valuable enough to make it into the theater world!). After seeing Manakamana these accolades all make sense but none of these accomplishments can explain the ineffable wonder of this film, how these visionary filmmakers were able to construct dense, gorgeous imagery in the space of one single frame, how something so understated is actually an insanely complex portraiture that told more about a place and its people than any narrative film ever could.

True/False Films: Killing Time & Big Men

The best documentary films often take a serious, prevalent issue and are able to explore it from an angle that has been silent. In the case of Killing Time, Dutch filmmaker Jaap van Hoewijk visits a Texas town where he follows the family of a convicted rapist & murderer days before the criminal is set to be executed. Whereas Big Men looks at the multiplicity of humans behind the oil market, mainly through the eyes of a small Texan company on the verge of tapping into a huge oil field and the African countries these types of operations devastate. Both films are very different but both give a new voice & perspective to very old, very controversial, and very sweeping issues.

The director of Big Men, Rachel Boynton, introduced her film at True/False by saying she began making it about nine years ago "with a plane ticket to Africa and a few phone numbers in her pocket," the result a startling slice of greed that slowly unfolds around a series of candid interviews and immersive scene setting. In Africa she brings us on the boats of Nigerian rebels brandishing guns as they break & set aflame pipelines, pirate ships that siphon oil from others expensive drilling operations, entrepreneurs & governments who try to work with American companies but who become lost in the potential for greed or the in attempts to protect their fragile countries. In America, Boynton brings us to the offices of drawling, small time oil men trying to navigate their potentially huge investment against larger companies, tempestuous African governments, and a general confusion brought about by their sudden status change. Even though it is easy to portray the perpetrators of oil drilling as evil, Boynton's film had an unexpected sadness, capturing the grief & emotional response to thoughtless acts on both the American & the African sides. The film leaves you with the feeling that no one actually wins in the oil industry, even those profiting are often deflated to the point of being inhuman, and not in a demonic way but in a pitiful one. By physically embedding itself into the dueling sides of the oil industry- those who want the natural resources and those who have them- Big Men was able to show a story of people providing a face to an inexplicable, enigmatic industry usually only profiled in terms of money, barrels, and a fluctuating stock market.

Killing Time followed in the same vein as Big Men, taking a personal lens to a huge, socio-political issue. So often documentary filmmakers give us the story of the prisoner to illustrate the issue of the death penalty (Into The Abyss, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, The Thin Blue Line), using a speaking, thinking person- guilty or not- to evoke an emotional and instinctual response from the audience: killing a human, this human or any other human, is wrong. Yet Killing Time took an alternative approach, profiling the days leading up to an execution from the perspective of the people balanced on the fulcrum of the event; the ranging emotions of the prisoner's family, the religious house that acts as a sanctuary for relatives prior to the killing, the lively, make-up wearing media troupe acting for the cameras, even one of the victims and her unexpected response to witnessing the final minutes of her attacker.

When I asked the director what it was that he took away from this film, what was an unexpected something that will stay with him forever he spoke of a very distinct image that will now, like his film, haunt me every time I think of the death penalty. Jaap van Hoewijk said that when he arrived outside the prison to film on the day of the execution there was a large ball of crumpled, weatherworn yellow caution tape being unfurled by policemen to hem in the mix of protestors (those for and against what was about to take place) and media. It wasn't the bright, yellow, American tape that struck him, or even the blaring words of caution, it was the fact that this same large clump of tape wadded up on the dry Texan lawn of this prison was unrolled and rolled, again and again and again. This mass of tape was reused each time an execution was to take place, the death penalty a matter of simple routine,  the tape a small symbol of the complete and utter disregard surrounding the taking of a life, the taking of a life that was anything but routine for the survivors of the prisoner's family.


The death penalty and oil industry are two issues that I repeatedly feel a personal shock and embarrassment about as an American, two issues that continue to unnecessarily, and often indirectly, take lives. Killing Time and Big Men did not exactly dive right into the vast complexity of these issues, they focused on the stories of people swimming within them. These films created humanizing portraits of controversial social, political, economic, even religious points of contention in hopes of making these daunting subjects seem less so. It seems easier to take action in the name of a face, a family, a child, a life and I hope these films inspire audiences to do so.

True/False Expanded: Jodie Mack & Dusty Stacks of Mom

What do you do when your family business is about to go under? Obviously you make a stop motion animation rock opera about it. At least if you are the animator/artist Jodie Mack. Mack's mother owned a thriving poster store business for decades, selling the pictures of musicians (from Bob Marley to Britney Spears), artists (Dali to the guy who made that photo of Pink Floyd album covers painted on the backs of naked ladies which was super popular in dorm rooms across New Jersey in my college years), and movie stars (Clooney! Clooney! Clooney!) in a pre-internet age when images weren't immediately accessible by the click of a button and digital printing/print on demand was yet to sweep the industry. Being that Mack's animations are usually made with recycled or redundant materials, a very conscious choice on behalf of the artist, it only made sense that she traveled to her childhood home to use the hundreds (thousands?) of posters who were about to meet their end, bringing them to life once more before their untimely deaths.

Mack set up scenes of posters dancing at their own will, moving collages of bright objects & faces cut out from the posters, her mom's dedicated hand written & high lighted notebooks of inventory, even her mom makes a few jittery stop-motion appearances- all crafted together in an ultimate music video that Mack sang along to live, her music re-workings of songs from Dark Side of the Moon, her lyrics telling the sweet, sad story of market trend, family, and tradition. Mack said she decided to sing along to the film live in order to save time in post-production but her live presence added a rock concert element that really made the film pop. The front woman singing in the shadows her personal lyrics added a layer to the concert nostalgia that these posters hailed from, Mack's witty, talented, bubbly, intelligent presence allowed the audience an even closer connection to the Dusty Stacks of Mom, and even to the normally passive interaction with film & technology- a very strong theme of the film. It is not a business or statistic that suffers from a market change or scientific progress, it is a person, an artform, a culture, the environment that becomes seemingly superfluous or forgotten in the name of "advancement."

When Mack introduced her film she said that she hates the term "trippy," preferring the idea of a "post-psychedelic climate" instead, the style of the LSD days being re-appropriated now as a response to the onslaught of new media with all of its bright flashing pixels of promise. But I do find it intriguing that a lot of her fellow art/film/post-psychedelic-climate artists all seem to choose trippy imagery & live performance (Erica Magrey, Martha Colburn). These artists seem to convey the concept of the new media circus by adding a layer of nostalgic imagery (possibly associated with their parents generation), mixed media (both classic & new), and their live presence to create a physical, tangible version of the digital rabbit holes we all have fallen down. Change might bring about the closing of mom & pop operations but it also brings about the creation of something new and Dusty Stacks of Mom is most definitely a beautiful new hybrid of sound, image, and heart that I hope everyone gets a chance to see.

True/False Film: Boyhood

Riding on a shuttle to the airport with the star of Richard Linklater's Boyhood, a narrative film about the maturation & environment of a young boy that was shot over twelve years to capture the actual growth of the actor & provide a strange plane of reality to the fiction, really reinforced True/False's decision to choose this scripted film as the closing piece of their documentary film festival. Seeing the real boy, Eller Coltrane, behind the character, Mason Jr., gave me a brief, panicked flash of Truman Syndrome: was I being watched since this boy is? But, hm, he's not being filmed, right? That was a movie. One that I am not actually part of at all. The story of his character ended and was encapsulated there on screen...but, wait, his life didn't really end since this boy will continue to grow and his trajectory is going to keep hurtling forth into space & time. We are just no longer able to peek in on his life, or this hybrid life of on & off screen, a fine line reinforced by Eller who, in the post film Q&A, talked of how Linklater imbued the script with pieces of his actual life, Eller's costumes oftentimes his own wardrobe. With Boyhood Linklater managed to do something no one has in a long, long time: bring the medium of film even closer to the reality it has always pretended to be. And I say all this without even being a huge Linklater fan.

Linklater's writing sometimes feels like a wooden plank to me, and it is often mimicked in student films minus any of the nuance that comes with age. But with this film his stilted Brechtian dialogue was flooded with such a touching concept that it humanized even the most flat of his signature monologue-like dialogues. Seeing the development of a Linklater character across this span of time, growing into the voice that the director uses, also added to the believability of the character/director voice, seeing the sweet pot-smoking philosopher tone as it naturally develops in a life, real or fake. Boyhood found a way to reveal the director, or maybe the universe the director has created, in a way that makes all his other work make sense to me now. Whether autobiographical or not I saw the development of the thinking white boy protagonist typical of Linklater (and a lot of his contemporaries) and understood the places from which this tradition comes from. I harp on the overabundance of sad sack cerebral white guy characters in indie film (and I still don't think we need so many of them!!!) but Boyhood let me see the places from which this thematic choice comes from- that of male pride, sensitivity, competition, fear- and acted as a story about the development of the male indie director culture as much as it did about this character as he moves about his daily life of homework, divorces, and haircuts.

With this film you are looking in on the feeling of real life over twelve consecutive years; real houses reflecting the real styles of the times, a startling thing to see in quick succession (well, not so quick since the movie is 2 hours and 45minutes long), making transparent our ever evolving versions of reality. The change in music, the change in cars, the change in electronic devices, clothes, bookbags, are all laid out chronologically, plain and simple in a way that makes you able to notice the miniscule changes that we immediately take for granted on a daily basis and the way we so quickly disregard the immediate past. Boyhood allows you to pause not only on the life of the main character but on the lives of us all, letting us bear stark witness to seemingly fleeting detail, choice, and human interaction that we are confronted with each minute into hour, year into decade. All of these details and choices are what make a life, and a world, both in a film and outside of a film, and this is why Boyhood is most definitely a work of nonfiction.  

True/False: I am BUSY!

I've been so busy here at True/False cramming in every last film that I can! Forgoing things like food, sleep, even parties in order to see the brilliance of new documentary films and to talk with friends I haven't seen in years! I promise to write recaps of all of the amazing experiences at the end of this lovely event! So, stay tuned! [Correction: I was so tired/busy I spelled the film fest NAME wrong in the original post....]

True/False Film: Concerning Violence

I don't know what was going on in Swedish TV in the 60s/70s but it sure was something! Actually, the Producer of the film Concerning Violence, Tobias Janson, shed some light on the state of Swedish tv from that era and his previous collaboration with the director Goran Hugo Olssan, The Black Power Mix Tape, both of which were created using footage from the Swedish TV archives. Apparently Sweden urged its people to go out into the world, to bring their culture to other cultures and, more importantly, to return with documentation of what they found. Janson also said that this cultural exchange happened to coincide with much of the Vietnam conflict so the amount of politically charged work was often dense, the nature of struggle and identity a pronounced theme.  In the case of Concerning Violence the images were a harsh illustration of the strong words of the political theorist Frantz Fanon and his meditations on the driving force of colonization and the inevitable result of decolonization: violence.

Fanon's words would boldly & thoughtfully materialize on the screen, text from The Wretched of the Earth, contemplating the fierce realities of decolonization. If brute force was the only thing allowing the colonists to maintain a position of power, the only means of communication between the colonizers and the colonized, the only way to reverse the system was to react with a greater display of violence. The filmmakers saw Fanon's words as fact but interpreted them through the truth of these facts allowing grainy, textured film images such as the decimation of villages resulting in young, amputated mother nursing her equally deformed baby, the blindness of the stark cocktail sipping colonizers and the entire culture they try to destroy that brings them these drinks, the complete confusion that both sides seemed to suffer from since rationalization and communication was impossible. And, even though we tend to think of colonization in the past tense it is a term that unfortunately can be applied to a lot of modern mechanisms in place today.

The truth that a cultural, national, and often racial, bias currently exists in power structures is something that that no one wants to discuss because of the only logical conclusion that can change these situations, that of violence. Concerning Violence didn't feel to me to be a film in the normal sense, it was more of a warning. A warning brought to us from history & precedence that the filmmakers expertly crafted, looking for a balance of truth and caution in a situation that seems unfathomable in retrospect but is actually quite prominent even today. The materials used to construct this film might be from the past but they speak to a world we still live in whether we want to admit it or not.