Review: Approaching the Elephant

It is a new kind of indirect cinema that one must experience instead of watch.

The camera looks up at children as they scale the limbs of a tree. Then the camera sidesteps to catch other kids on the ground walking through a row of hedges as if the landscaping doesn’t even exist. You feel the camera nervously swerve, trying to capture what’s on the other side of the lens but also, as seemingly the only adult present, try to take in the sudden range of conflicting responsibilities. This is the inaugural year of the Teddy McArdle Free School, a progressive establishment sprawling out of a church basement in northern New Jersey.

The free school model is based on the belief that schools should fit the students, not the other way around, an attitude that began early in the 20th Century and resurged in the freedom movements of the 60s. They have little structure, rules are voted on in a democratic process, classes are optional, areas are set up to encourage exploration- it’s like Montessori on steroids: these kids have saws! You slowly see the children create an understanding of self, however anarchic the steps are to get there. Ids and egos bounce off the walls of the confined space like tennis balls. Like the students, filmmaker Amanda Rose Wilder immerses herself in this unsteady environment, her observational approach favoring poeticism to pure representation. She fully embraces the unreliability of the documentary form to create a unique, fluid, personal, emotional experience.

The look of the film is incredible, a high contrast digital black and white (DVX100?) that beautifully imitates the harshness of Super 8. The closely cropped shots fill the screen with an engaging intimacy. The imagery is punctuated with shrill screams, in situ music and rare moments of quiet. The whole film mirrors the textured rawness of childhood. But it is the editing that places all of these lines into poetic form. A composed tension is perfectly induced through montage as sounds and visions float across scenes, cuts and movements take on an otherworldly sense of time and space. The film highlights the ability of digital craft to make art, a smooth manipulation of the medium, a lyrical editing that amplifies the sensory experience.

Approaching the Elephant is a mini existential crisis that is shared between the compelling students, the wide-eyed teachers, the filmmaker and the audience. It reminds that wonder, exploration, and expression are vital parts of being, no matter the age. With this debut feature, Amanda Rose Wilder has internalized her subject resulting in something timeless and progressive, personal yet empathetic. It is a new kind of indirect cinema that one must experience instead of watch. 

Approaching the Elephant screens Feb 20-26^th as part of the IFP Screen Forward series held at the Made In NY Media Center, 30 John St. in DUMBO. Q&As with the director & guests follow each screening, tickets only available online. For more info visit the film’s website.

Review for H2N: Appropriate Behavior

Appropriate Behavior Reviewed for Hammer to Nail.

"Like Woody Allen, Akhavan wraps us up in a scary & warm Freudian blanket and explores the complex relationship between fear, inclusion, and desire that comprise the human condition, states of being that New York City loves to goad." 

 

 

Review for H2N: Force Majeure

Force Majeure reviewed for "Hammer to Nail." 

Review for H2N: The Overnighters

This might be the best documentary of 2014. 

The Overnighters reviewed for Hammer to Nail.

Review for H2N: The One I Love

The One I Love reviewed for Hammer to Nail.

Deadly Ponies Gang!

On horses, humor & heart.

Dwayne & Clint are best friends living in New Zealand, well meaning deadbeats that have opted for souped up equines instead of souped up cars. Oddly enough I looked up the phrase souped up (because I've never typed it and didn't want to spell it wrong) and some say it has origins in horse racing, a term used to describe steroid injected animals! Ha! Not that these ponies are on drugs exactly...but their riders definitely are! The duo are the subjects of the comedic documentary The Deadly Ponies Gang which is full of stoners, graffiti, rapping cowboys, dentures, horse girls, horse thugs and extreme hilarity & heart.

Clint & Dwayne's "gang" consists of them. And sometimes a young boy who rides a horse and makes pretty stellar cardboard art cars. They idolize a country music rapper who often performs atop a sleek, gorgeous horse. They bring their horses to a beach to pick up chicks. I think there are even gang related tattoos at some point? The documentary mostly revolves around the pursuit of getting toothless Dwayne teeth, a tale that director Zoe McIntosh tells through keen editing, a soft eye and a mellow presence behind the camera that feels respectful & affectionate yet wholly curious of her one-of-a-kind subjects. When I saw this film I remember going through a lot of phases- first wondering if it was some sort of mockumentary, then laughing at the gang, then laughing with the gang, and then ending in a genuine caring for this pair of wayward pony lovers. It is a sweet, funny film that looks at friends creating their own very unique lifestyle while trying to do what all of us are trying to do, to be happy and find love in whatever form it chooses to take.

A free screening of The Deadly Ponies Gang is being presented by Rooftop Films & Industry City at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City Queens tomorrow (Wednesday July 15th) at 8pm, weather permitting. The director and one of the main subjects will be in attendance too! I don't want to say it's a family film exactly (drugs?)....but it is a film that I think anyone can, and should, easily enjoy.


The Deadly Ponies gang trailer. from Zoe McIntosh on Vimeo.

Review for H2N: Who Took Johnny

Who Took Johnny reviewed for Hammer to Nail.

The Search for Emak Bakia

A lyrical documentary whose surreal subject is defined through the movements of reality.

Have you ever tried to describe a poem to someone? It is hard. Really, really hard. It is so difficult because poems often deal with emotion as a medium, emotion that is delivered through a re-imagining of the way we have been trained to use words. Trying to describe The Search for Emak Bakia (and also the film's namesake subject, the modernist/dadaist/surrealist Man Ray's 1926 experimental film Emak Bakia - embedded below!- whose Basque translation is "Leave Me Alone") is like trying to describe a filmic poem that splinters, spins, risks, and is made with an entirely new look at the form.

With this debut feature, director Oskar Alegria sets out on a journey to find the illusive place of Man Ray's film which was shot somewhere along the South Coast of France. But, it isn't really the name or location that is the subject of this film, it is the journey in search of the name that becomes the off-centered focus. Alegria takes the phrase "Emak Bakia," shines light on the amorphous meaning, and explores how it is the humans uttering the phrase that breath into it life, purpose, meaning, and beauty of all kinds.

Like Man Ray and his contemporaries, The Search for Emak Bakia is also similarly preoccupied with movement, light, technology and expectation. Alegria uses digital film as the secretly malleable form that it is, mediating the world around him through the possibilities of the camera lens and his own keen mind's eye. A documentary film is never a completely objective act and approaching the form as an artist crafting art the director, the subjects- nearly every aspect of the film- are able to have a freedom that makes the film feel like it is levitating. This freedom silently, imperceptably, creeps out into the audience, hovers over each viewer, and offers them a brief moment of communal experience, feeling, & understanding that only the best art can conjure.

Another way to attempt to speak about this film is to relate images from it but the luscious dreamscape is to be seen not described: intertitles and interviews are posed between shots of sculptural wonder and fluid forms that are enmeshed with a texture of noises, songs, nature that implicate the space & viewer in a web of connectivity that this rhizome-like film expands from. Another angle is to try describe this film through the humanistic stories encountered along the director's journey, but these stories are best told by their individual protagonists: an aging princess drawn to the pulling shores, a wayward glove guiding the way in the breezy streets, a dead clown who becomes a prism for a multitude of musings. The whole film feels like a shared dream.

There is no way to describe this film other than to say it is indescribable. And I am not saying this as a cop out. Or an attempt to lure you into a screening. I am saying this as someone who gets chills when seeing a new, luminous vision with a strong, resilient purpose. You must dream this film with a room full of strangers.


The Search for Emak Bakia plays Rooftop Films Friday June 13th, 2014. Rescheduled due to weather for Sunday 15th @ 8pm due to weather (Note: I wrote the description of the film for Rooftop Films which can be found at this link! ) 

Blue Ruin

Blue Ruin is the most confidently made film I've seen in years. It is a film made by someone who has a preternatural feel for the medium. A rounded, complete understanding of the way a film is created, each piece a purposeful decision with no lull or weakness.

The budding auteur here is Jeremy Saulnier who comes to the film with a background mostly as a cinematographer, working on a bunch of low key and respected indies over the years, a background that lays a strong visual foundation for Blue Ruin but by no means acts as a crutch. His visuals are strong but not overpowering. They don't fade into the background as scenery either, they are a full presence that tell the story alongside the actors, almost like another character.

There are similarities in setting to the confused rural America of rusted cars and easily accessible guns, a sort of Cormac McCarthy vibe of dirtied blood and the empty spaces of thought between action, but the film seems to create its own universe. Each perfect detail unfolds, the momentum building slowly, every line an important conveyor of information.  Blue Ruin is so contained and expertly designed that it feels like another possible world, or like the tale of a complex parallel world that exists in the neighboring house. Each scene, each detail, stacks upon one another so precisely but on such a precarious edge that it constantly borders on collapse, keeping us voyeurs wholly, almost sickly, engrossed.

The story?  It is a hazy, bold psychological revenge thriller with a tinge of unsettling dead pan comedy. But to try to simply relate the film's narrative would be to disregard the intricacy of the film's formation and the incredible acting that tells it.The controlled understatement of skill behind the camera extends in front of the camera too as Macon Blair carries almost the entire film with acting that surpasses acting. Moody, brooding, claustrophobic psychological interiors with a flat, dark humor that smoothly glide across the planes of the film. Blair's depth, range, and complex understanding of Saulnier's vision makes him seem to exist as opposed to act.

The journey the filmmaker went on to make this film, discussed in great detail over here, is a reminder that if something needs to be made, if someone has a new creative voice to share, it will find a way to be heard. This film was the hardest film I have ever tried to write about. But that's because it's not a film. It is a beautiful, fresh, entertaining new perspective of visual storytelling that is simultaneously elegant, bloody, emotional, terrifying, and heartfelt. It is more of a living being than in it is film.

Review for H2N: The Sacrament

 The Sacrament reviewed for Hammer to Nail.

Tribeca Film: Art and Craft

Hollywood has made me come to expect movies about art forgers to be all intrigue, romance, and fast paced, nail biting excitement. Art and Craft is a documentary about an art forger that is pretty much the opposite of these expectations. Mark Landis lives in a small apartment he once occupied with his now deceased mother. He obsessively takes in tv (and alcohol). He goes to doctors appointments to check in on his wavering mental health. He paints and draws. He dresses up like a priest and nonchalantly donates his forgeries of minor masterpieces to small, unsuspecting museums. There is no money changing hands. No fireworks. I guess there are mild aliases and a costume, but a priest's collar isn't all that much of a costume. At most there is a small time museum worker who has become consumed by bringing the dastardly forger to justice. But his ire is more sad than thrilling, he loses his job and even his very, very young daughter is wary of his obsession. Landis' motivations are unclear (or nonexistent?) but it seems that he enjoys, and is good at, making art and that by gifting these works he is able to have a controlled, positive human interaction- like a blip of a rehearsed tv spot- that his reclusive tendencies can manage.

Art and Craft follows around this man and his lonely existence while quietly & constantly balancing looming issues such as mental illness, responsibility, justice, humanism, societal structure, and more but, where it becomes most interesting, is the ways it looks at our current value system of creativity. The art world continues to prop up "vital" visual art, often distilling it in terms of money & rarity, the importance of a work is increasingly based on market analysis instead of skill.  Hazy artspeak runs rampant as a means to justify what makes an artist worthwhile,  the elusive (and unquantifiable) aura nearly a thing of the past. What makes art good or bad? How do we choose to canonize particular artists? If Landis' work is passing as the work of well regarded painters then why isn't he a well regarded painter? Who decides artist's place on the continuum of "fine art" and "crafty art." The questions that Art and Craft raise are, of course, rhetorical mirroring the mild manner of the subject and shying away from any real stance on anything, it is an exploration not an expose. 

On the fringes of the art world Landis continues to make his well executed classics even after widespread knowledge of his innocuous deceit, while also gaining critical acclaim for his contemporary "performance" art of lies...he is an artist unknowingly confronting the art market and making people look twice at what their eyes and brain believe and feel. What will Landis be remembered for and why? Will he be another creative casualty? Will he ever make a living from his uncanny abilities? Art and Craft is a thoughtful film about the nature of truth and beauty and, like Landis, it is a muted, soft spoken creation that will leave you riddled with questions.

Tribeca Film Review: Ne Me Quitte Pas

WARNING: I am gonna get cheesy up in this post. And maybe even a little flowery/philosophical...I warned you! When a movie is over I like it to be like that silence at the end of a piece of live music. (You were warned bros!) A perceptible pause between the resonating note and the joyous clapping following it. The feeling always reminds me of a Wallace Stevens line from his poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird "I do not know which to prefer,/The beauty of inflections/Or the beauty of innuendoes,/The blackbird whistling/ Or just after." With film, the endnote is something that can almost border on sculptural, combining image, sound, and word in a balance that holds all of the senses in the air for a brief moment before the credits roll. It is the kind of contemplative inhale that only entrancing, complex films can achieve. The final scene of Ne Me Quitte Pas manifests this exact feeling, one of goosebumps & wonder, pure joy & unfathomable sadness.

Marcel and Bob are friends. Maybe drunks. Definitely drunks. Both accepting or dismissing this fact depending on the time of day. Or the leaving of a wife. Or the estrangement of a son. There is a solace in each other, not of a warm, hugging kind but more of a harsh, cold, survivalist kind, the feeling that if one of them lets go they both might sink to the bottom (the films title translating to Don't Leave Me). They push through life toying with death, validating and dismissing both, with a heartbreaking realism and burning edges of dark laughter. The funny scenes so morose that laughing never seems to be the appropriate reaction. Laughing feels wrong. Crying too feels wrong. Despite this cloud of uneasiness that Marcel and Bob create the film does not simply settle in this mood, it refuses to rely on the woozy charms of the drunken. Instead, an exquisite, progressive storytelling turns these two tragic alcoholics into something far greater than themselves.

The use of french pop songs against a visually stunning Belgian countryside, a controlled contemporary documentary with a neo-realism feel. The camera disappears into the shadows of Marcel & Bob's lives, capturing an intimacy, a loneliness, a desire that cameras rarely have access to. Other times, the camera observes from a non-judgemental distance, just safe enough. An open-ness (probably made easier thanks to extreme lubrication!) breaks down the subjects into the contradicting, flawed humans we all are, tightly grabbing the attention (and the subconscious) of the entire audience. All of these elements were then edited with a skill that rivals the French New Wave: a stark cut able to tell even more than an image. The filmmakers, Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koeverden, somehow built up the world of Ne Me Quitte Pas instead of simply recording it. It is a new form of artful documentary, a precise storytelling vision that, in my opinion, has challenged the idea of the documentary.

Today I was reading a piece in the NYTimes Magazine about a writer who has accidentally became the leader of a cultural environmental movement. The movement isn't exactly nihilistic but it does think that saving the planet from environmental collapse isn't possible and that we need to move our thinking towards a post-catastrophe way of life (a similar concept to this other thing I was just reading about the Netherlands approach to climate change, they have accepted rising waters and are adapting instead of fortifying, dams be damned perhaps? Pun. womp womp). The movement's "leader," Paul Kingsnorth, is quoted as saying in a previous article, " 'Whenever I hear the word ‘hope’ these days, I reach for my whiskey bottle. It seems to me to be such a futile thing. What does it mean? What are we hoping for? And why are we reduced to something so desperate? Surely we only hope when we are powerless?' "  He is right. "Hope" is almost always invoked in the name of bleakness, an attempted comfort in the face of something that needs to be overcome, changed, an uncertainty, a desire. When trying to write about the way Ne Me Quitte Pas acts as a film, as a documentary, I kept dancing around the word "hope." When you watch Marcel and Bob they almost seem ambivalent towards life and death. They are living, thinking, emotional beings but the decisions they continue to make contradict this fact. One hopes that they will either improve their conditions or, frankly, not, giving into an end that they are both well aware of. When this film was over, the last shot a simple breath taking image that one must experience to understand, I felt that moment of extreme, weighted silence in which I had to remind myself to inhale. It is not just a hope for Marcel and Bob. It is a hope for everything.

  

Film Review/World Premier: The Address by Ken Burns

Have I mentioned this already? Ken Burns lives across a bridge from me? I see him nearly once a month? There is even a mural of him, and other notable New Hampshire residents, in the local discount/expired food store? Yeah. You heard me. Dented can emporium has a Ken Burns mural. I preface the post with this reminder because I actually got to see a film's world premier this evening in the middle of the stately green mountains of Vermont, in the odd beauty of a gorgeous renovated Greco-Deco theater (the same one I saw bats flying in last week!), brimming with an eager audience. And this fact makes no sense without knowing that one of the Godfathers of modern documentary is a staple at my local coffee shop. [Full Disclosure: I did a wee bit of volunteer transcription work for this film sometime last year but had no clue what it was for! Also, it was very hard.]

The Address is set to premier on PBS in mid-April and this one has some kind of ineffable spark that I can only hope translates to the tv sets of viewers like you! The film follows the students of The Greenwood School, a small educational haven in the nearby progressive village of Putney- a town so advanced it recently became completely town-owned solar.  Greenwood School is a private boarding school for Learning Disabled (LD) adolescent boys. LD children are often a marginalized group whose population continues to boom, The National Center for Learning Disabilities estimates that there are currently 2.4million students with LDs, and despite the growing number the American educational infrastructure seems to remain unchanged. As The Address states early on in the film, The Greenwood School approaches LD students by looking at their strengths, not their weaknesses, and it uses those strengths to build not only their education but also as a foundation to build their lives upon. But the film was not just simply a heartfelt portrait of these inspiring, unique children and the committed community surrounding them. The title of the film references Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Each year the students of The Greenwood School set out to memorize this piece of American humanitarian history, a task that is as difficult as it is satisfying for these children, yet the importance of the exercise does not end there. Brief glimpses of Civil War history are interspersed throughout The Address contextualizing the significance of the speech and creating a silent yet omnipresent metaphor. By placing this historically weighted speech within the context of this forward thinking school the film takes on a much, much larger meaning: human struggle & need takes many forms and as humans we must create solutions in the name of dignity, respect and, most importantly, love.

This film felt like a departure from much of Burns' other work, a mood that I think was aided in the liveliness of the students but also the communal efforts of a very talented group of younger filmmakers within Burns' Florentine Films studio who spearheaded much of the project. The typical Burns' tenderness was present but the storytelling moved beyond the simple talking head or barrage of facts & panning of archival photos, the story was elevated into some kind of new digitally (I think it was digital?) floating cinema verite that was able to move about the subjects, freeing them in a sense. This physical un-grounding of the film gave it a buoyancy that propelled the importance of the film forward while still remaining true to the factual & emotional past that Burns' work is known for.

In the post film Q&A Burns made mention of the oral tradition of storytelling, of the loss of language based memory gone with the digital world uprising. He referred to our memories as our hard drives. He seemed wary of living in a world that is increasingly losing its human connection. With The Address, and also his recent iPad app & the larger Learn The Address project associated with this film, Burns has found a way to use technology as a vehicle instead of as a hindrance, to take the narrative tradition inherent in documentary filmmaking and use it to create a connection to eachother, to our collective past, and towards the collective well being of our future. And yes, I wept.