Exactly one week ago today I was in a clear green field near an aspen grove here in Colorado, staring down at a suspiciously mutilated cow. Aside for a few flies, nothing else was near it. Oblivious to its gender I dubbed it “Fred.” My girlfriend and I took some pictures and we continued along on our hike. Less than an hour later we returned along the same path only to bear witness to one of the most bizarre things either of us had ever seen: a bunch of Fred’s pals – PREVIOUSLY far afield and seemingly (and understandably) avoiding the poor, dead beast – were NOW suddenly swirling about Fred’s carcass in a frenzy, like white-on-rice or flies-on-poop. They were jumping on top of each other and pushing one another around in an almost perfect circular pattern, trampling about on poor, dead, Fred. I’ve seen my share of punk shows, but this was one slow-motion-mosh-pit-from-hell scene I’ll never forget. There was something so downright unnatural about this spectacle that both my girlfriend and I immediately got the heebie-jeebies.

To honor the weirdness that occurred one week ago today, today’s blog looks at how a movie buff digests such a strange event. READ MORE

Photographer Julius Shulman may not be a household name but you’ve probably seen his work or at least its influence in Hollywood films. Shulman spent much of his life photographing architectural wonders in Los Angeles and his photos of private homes, office buildings and public structures helped shape the way that we all see the “City of Angels.”

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Color me green with envy after reading all those positive reports from all over about the recent TCM Classic Film Festival. While giving friends who attended the third degree to extract every droplet of vicarious enjoyment from their accounts of that long, delirious weekend in LA, one of the things that stands out in their reporting is the mention of the large number of young people in the audience, as well as the “lifers,” (aka those of us who have been movie-mad since childhood).  Recently, I was delighted to make the acquaintance of a youthful filmmaker who could be representative of this fresh wave of classic film lovers on the horizon.

From the viewpoint of most of us, Rebecca Bozzo, a twenty-something graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, is already a working film professional, but her ebullient enthusiasm for what she describes as  the  “collaborative energy” of movie making has an infectious quality that blends real knowledge and a joyous passion, even as she describes the sometimes arduous but invigorating process of collaboration with diverse people. Growing up in a household where her supportive parents exposed her to great films from Hitchcock, Cukor, Stevens, and Minnelli, her father was particularly involved in the National Film Society efforts to preserve films. With this cinematically aware family background, a growing desire to be a part of the film industry as a director and producer almost seems inevitable.

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Director Alex Gibney came to prominence with an eye-opening look at financial corruption in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2006. He would go on to actually win the coveted statuette in 2008 for another doc, this one looking at the horrors inflicted by U.S. policies condoning torture in Taxi to the Dark Side. Taking a breather from these tragedies, his next subject was Hunter S. Thompson, which must have recharged his batteries significantly because this year alone he releases three films – and the subjects are Freakonomics, Al-Qaeda, and infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Given the recent blog topic dealing with Native American Images on Film, Gibney’s doc on Abramoff, titled Casino Jack and the United States of Money, hits on a related note. No, it doesn’t touch on “Race & Hollywood,” but it’s got a heaping big dose of privileged, rich, white-guys-in-power defrauding Indian tribes. It doesn’t stop there because, as is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to our political climate, we are all being defrauded by a corrupt system that works overtime for money rather than principles.  READ MORE

The inaugural TCM Classic Film Festival kicks off on April 22nd, and there’s going to be wall-to-wall coverage here once it begins. Jeff Stafford has already posted a wide-ranging, must-read interview with Norman Lloyd, who’ll be introducing Saboteur on the 25th. But like the Cannes Film Festival a few weeks later (May 12 – 23), I’ll be unable to attend, marooned as I am on the East Coast. But I’ll be checking back here at Movie Morlocks for reports on the TCM-fest, and there will be an endless array of outlets covering Cannes. But what about seeing the films, the vast majority of which won’t receive stateside distribution?

The on-line cinematheque The Auteurs has come through for me on at least one title on my list, with an assist by Stella Artois. They’re streaming nine former Cannes selections for free thanks to that mediocre Belgian beer sponsor. These include Our Beloved Month of August (2008), a Portuguese experiment highly regarded by  Cinema Scope’s Mark Peranson and Robert Koehler, Jonathan Romney of Sight & Sound, and filmmaker C.W. Winter (The Anchorage, which I wrote about recently), who placed it on his best-of-the-decade list. It was never picked up for the U.S., and I was ecstatic to find it offered along with a group of higher-profile past Cannes selections including L’aaventura, Mon Oncle, and Amarcord.  The kind of curatorial adventurousness that led to August being included among this canonical group is sorely needed in programming these days, and The Auteurs should be praised (once again), for loosing this strange beast upon American eyes.

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Young New York filmmaker Zachary Levy’s debut feature, Strongman, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival and is now finally hopping around to select cities. The documentary follows a modern-day hulk by the name of Stanley “Stanless Steel” Pleskun. For his day job, Stanley hauls around scrap metal. But his every waking moment seems consumed by a dream of being the best in a small field of metal-bending and strong-man athletic performers. Strongman is a compelling documentary full of heart, humor, and pathos that recalls the achievements of Chris Smith’s American Movie. Its carnivelesque quality and eccentric characters would not be out of place in a film by Federico Fellini, but the more immediate and inevitable comparison reviewers are apt to mention is Darren Aronofosky’s The Wrestler. After all, both films “feature longhaired, seemingly past their prime fringe athletes living in a dilapidated New Jersey who are chasing a dwindling dream as the outside world relentlessly presses down upon them.” (Michael Tully) Last week while visiting Austin’s SXSW Film Festival I met Zachary and we had a chance to talk about his film. READ MORE

“He [D.W. Griffith] missed a certain beauty he thought had disappeared from film, from the way people saw life — ‘the beauty of the moving wind in the trees, the little movement in a beautiful blowing on the blossoms in the trees. That they have forgotten entirely. . . We have lost beauty.’ On that note, Griffith fell silent.” -Richard Schickel, D.W. GRIFFITH: AN AMERICAN LIFE

Griffith’s deathbed lament has turned into something of a mission statement for a disparate group of filmmakers on the experimental side of documentary practice,  who combine anthropological impulses (recording “the wind in the trees”) with a rigorously constructed visual formalism (regaining its “beauty”), blurring the boundary between fiction and non. The great French avant-gardist Jean-Marie Straub is a main influence, and seems to have popularized the quote, as recounted by director John Gianvito and critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Griffith’s words have exerted almost as much influence as Straub and late partner Daniele Huillet’s austere long-take style. I’ve never found the original 1947 interview from which Griffith’s words were taken, so any help on this front would be much obliged.

I was led to three of these hybrid films: Sweetgrass (which I discussed here), The Anchorage, and Agrarian Utopia, by Robert Koehler in his Cinema Scope essay, “Agrarian Utopias/Dystopias“.  Here he introduces his concept of a “cinema of in-between-ness”, which is not a movement as much as a tendency, where “a zone of a cinema free of, or perhaps more precisely in between, hardened fact and invented fiction permits all manner of wild possibilities.” Most of these possibilites, he finds, are focused on “subjects about humans working on the surface of the earth.”

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I love to watch documentaries in a theater on the big screen, where the camerawork can be seen in all its glory and any subtleties of technique are more noticeable. According to some documentary websites, the popularity of this mode of filmmaking has increased, and the advent of DVD has made it more financially viable.

Despite the increase in documentaries, the exhibition and distribution of nonfiction films is spotty. The most lucrative exhibition opportunities exist in the broadcasting market, particularly on public television and cable channels, though filmmakers who make deals in this market find themselves shackled by the tastes and limits of the broadcasting industry. In terms of a theatrical release, docs are generally distributed by small companies, or by the filmmakers themselves who work hard to get their labors of love shown. Few have the money for marketing campaigns, and movie reviewers seldom write about them, let alone advocate for them, preferring to write yet another piece on the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Though mainstream theater chains rarely exhibit feature-length documentaries, doc fans who keep their eyes open know that alternative venues, such as cinematheques, university film programs, museums, small film festivals, and arts centers frequently show nonfiction films of all types.

I am fortunate that my job at Facets Multi-Media allows me to see documentaries I might not otherwise hear about. Nonfiction films are frequently part of the program in our cinematheque, and we often release them on DVD either on our own label or through our distribution partners. Recently, I caught two documentaries that actually made me feel joyful after watching them—something I can’t say for most Hollywood films that I see.

BILL WITHERS NEAR THE BEGINNING OF HIS CAREER

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Early yesterday, news broke that Eric Rohmer passed away at the age of 89. Dave Kehr has a fine obituary up at the NY Times, and I would recommend Michael J. Anderson’s essay on My Night at Maud’s and The Green Ray for an analysis of his style. The Six Moral Tales will remain his legacy, but I found his swan song, The Romance of Astree and Celadon, to be equally extraodinary. Suzi penned a lovely tribute to the recently deceased film critic Robin Wood yesterday, and who else but Eric Rohmer was the publisher of Wood’s first essay (on Psycho) for Cahiers du Cinema. Rohmer’s influence on filmmaking and criticism is incalcuable, and his art will live on as long as we value film as an art form.

Now back to the regularly scheduled sheep programming…

The first quarter viewing calendar I posted last week is off to a rousing start. Sweetgrass opened in NYC after its local premiere at the New York Film Festival, and it’s an overpoweringly tactile experience. Cinema Guild is expanding it to ten more cities through the spring, so check the schedule….now. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash recorded 200 hours of footage of two Norwegian-American sheepherders as they led their flock through Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountains for summer pasture. There are no interviews and the only explanatory text appears at the end of the film before the credits roll. It is a ravishing document of a dying tradition, and one that sets its boots deep in the sheep shit as well as in the rolling plains. This is no romantic gloss of the West, but an immersion in it. Castaing-Taylor and Barbach spent two years filming in and around Big Timber, Montana, which produced a series of short films, but the feature took eight years of editing (and double foot surgery for Lucien after lugging all his equipment over the mountains).

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