OSCAR FOR BABEL

Mirabile dictu! I read in the Chronicle, the same paper wherein Mick LaSalle savaged it, that Alejandro Inniaritu’s BABEL is considered a potential Academy Award winner. Academy Award? Last year CRASH and this year BABEL? I haven’t watched the Academy Awards, except for an occasional illicit peek, for 35 years. Now, two good films in a row?

If this is not a cruel joke, I’m going to laugh anyway. I suppose minus Brad Pitt, an Oscar for BABEL would be impossible to contemplate. But as far as the film goes, he’s the least of it. His character is solid but a foil for the unknowns, players who generate the real interest. I couldn’t erase Koji Yakusho, the sex- driven deaf girl, from my mind even if I wanted to. And Adriana Barraza, the Mexican nanny was unforgettable… making a bad decision for a good reason with near-tragic consequences. The two “bubble dwelling” American children aren’t bad either and then there are the players from Morocco, riveting because Inniaritu has allowed them the freedom to be themselves. In this he recognizes and skillfully exploits the biggest secret emerging from the digital revolution. If a director can instill trust, relaxation and concentration and inspire strong feelings and commitment to expressivity, he can find the highest level of performance in people with no “acting” experience. ATANARJUAT: THE FAST RUNNER is one of many films which routinely prove this rebuke to acting schools and the star system.

Could it be possible that people are really getting sick of Hollywood and its inferior products? Could it be possible that real filmmakers as are found in places like Mexico, Iran, Taiwan and China might find a substantial audience in America? Is it possible that American filmmakers might learn to become culturally literate, put the work first and resist compromise? I look and wonder… solid progress or just a run of poker luck?

Citizen Cinema E4_VFX

In Citizen Cinema episode 4 we take a look at visual effects and how it is impacting our filmmaking process. Rob weighs in with a discussion on how he has used vfx in past productions and how they can integrate with character driven work. Michael also speaks with Kenji Kato of the Pixel Corps about their "digital guild", and the future of VFX as it relates to the indie filmmaker.

click here to download episode 4

BABEL

I have a lot of respect for Inniaritu, director of AMORES PERROS and 21 GRAMS, but was put off by the first few minutes of BABEL. They struck me as inert, like scenes from those films you're obligated to like because they were made in Dunnowistan somewhere. But then the three interlocking stories started to grip me and before I knew it I'd fallen off the precipice into a hellish world of clashing cultures and terrifying contradiction. Particularly impressive was the structure, book ending the somewhat convenient, but still gripping, stories of an American mother and father in crisis in Morocco at the same time their children are in danger in a Mexican/US border no man's land. The cultural sharp edges which cause both fear and unexpected solidarity in those who may have heard all the racial stereotypes but then get to live the real thing, are the true subject of these two accounts.

And in the middle story, a brilliant contrast, we see a different kind of frontier people fear to cross: the line between the deaf and those who hear. This story which shows the sexual anguish of a Japanese deaf girl who longs for love and sex with people across the sound border who seem so beautiful, easy in their ways, and, most of all, gifted with language creates a brilliant contrast to the first two accounts, which exist in more socially charged class and ethnic terms.

But all three stories about scary borders and contradictory frontiers are linked by another artist's device. A Japanese man, father of the deaf girl, whose wife shot herself (maybe with this same gun), gives a rifle to a guide during a hunting trip in Morocco, which a young boy later uses to shoot randomly into a passing tourist bus, hitting the mother of the children who are in jeopardy in Mexico. It's a literary device really, but it shows us that Inniaritu reads more than pulp fiction and understands the use of linking ironies. This unique structure shows us the geometry of mayhem we constantly face in a world threaded together in ways we don't expect and can't anticipate.

I emphasize the beauty of this wild, expressionist way of building art because of the opacity of critics who dismiss it. Unfortunately, these arbiters of conformity sell newspapers by providing safety from stories which catch people in uncomfortable paradoxes. When this happens transcendent art gets ignored in favor of simplistic formulas and genre bromides. The only critique I would level against BABEL, a film I recommend to everyone, is that it elects to choose, at the end, a different kind of safety, one of reconciliation fueled by stirring program music and admittedly impressive cinematography to offer... is it hope? I was moved but in retrospect, I felt that Inniaritu was letting his us off the hook.

I think that the true Babels exist today in places like Afghanistan and Iraq where seriously crazy people are allowed to be clerics and patriots of a medieval zealotry which can destroy centuries old Buddhist statues, set fire to entire oil fields as an act of political zeal, strap on explosives and kill will nilly anybody as proof of faith. The victims of this madness are, as usual, rank and file people who, for the most part, would prefer to be left alone with their families, their thoughts, their local ways of working, worshipping, and measuring the weights and measures of birth, death and what matters in between.

But Muslim cultures allow little power to the everyday man and woman. Tribal histories from the time of Mohammed emphasize obedience and rigid social hierarchies. And the predations of the Ottoman Empire, and the colonial era after World War I when European powers called the shots, provide little room for populist causes. In these places people are not saved by plot devices and touching refrains. In my view the citizens of Babel have lost the gift of coherence due to the hubris of their leaders. I would have liked BABEL better if Inniaritu had allowed his tragic instincts to play out. Hope, conciliation and redmemption are tricky categories. We already hope. Better we know the truth.

PAN Q and A Episode 4

Here is the audio to the sold-out screening of Pan at the Mill Valley Film Festival. Comments from Rob as well as cast and crew. Check it....

Download episode 4 here

The Observatory

After months of solid work, finishing OPENING and premiering at the Kansas City Filmmaker´s Jubilee, shooting PRESQUE ISLE and finishing PAN, 9 @ Night film #8 in time for the Mill Valley Fest, then attending sold out houses for both PAN and OPENING, I was ready to breathe free and forget about the digits for awhile. Even Chikara Motomura, the hardest working collaborator I´ve been lucky to know, didn´t complain when I told him it was time for me to go.

The Yucatan has been my primary escape hatch for the last 30 years or so, and it was to be again. Got a cheap flight to Cancun, still recovering from last year´s Hurricane Wilma, a shuttle bus to Puerto Juarez, and a ferry boat out to Isla Mujeres. Five years since I´ve been to this small island with its narrow, tiled streets, ubiquitous motor scooters and golf carts doubling as cars, its small coffee houses and sidewalk cafes, its northern beach which every night features the most spectacular sunsets on the Caribbean.

I went immediately to the Rocamar, a small hotel right on the surf on the Eastern edge of town. The room I had five years ago, on the second floor with a veranda right over the sea wall fronting the surf, hadn´t changed. Two platform beds with deep blue serape style bedsteads, a crude wooden dresser and an equally crude bedside table, bathroom and shower, no TV, no radio, only the incessant sound of the sea, amplified somehow by the configuration of the veranda to a constant roar. This is perfect for me... listening only to the water Gods now for 9 days, thinking, reading Dante´s INFERNO, the exact wrong book for this trip, THE CODE OF KINGS about seven major Mayan sites including Copan, Seibal, Chich`en Itza, Uxmal, etc., organizing a book of my poetry, writing a framing device for FRANK, the Direct Action film Chikara Motomura and I shot in South Africa, and a treatment for a film where a contemporary disillusioned New York painter meets a 7th Century Mayan temple painter on an isolated beach after a hurricane.

And everyday an hour or two lying in the sun absorbing the heat, the sun, the wind and even, a couple of times, the rain.

At night, my veranda becomes my Observatory where I watch the stars move slowly across the skies, monitor the shooting stars, Orion directly overhead, the satellites, and the late night flights pushing towards unknown destinations, and ponder the next steps in the development of Citizen Cinema. Floodgates opening. The rush of inspiration, the mind wandering free, the slipstream providing a malestrom of impulse, almost too much to absorb. But this is what happens when I jump off the moving train for awhile, roll down an unknown hillside in the middle of nowhere and live for awhile by my wits, fueled by instinct and listening only to the elements.

War and Peace

I've recently been working my way through the 7 or so hours of Sergei Bondarchuk's 1965 version of WAR AND PEACE. A very odd and I think, very great pot boiler, occasionally brilliant although, in my view, not up to Tolstoy himself. But then, who is? But so much more intelligence and class than David Lean, probably the best of the Western big screen guys. Still I prefer Ellem Klimov and Alexi Gherman, to say nothing of Tarkovsky, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and even Abram Room, of the Russians I've seen. The bromides about epic stories and high concept themes abound in the tomes of critics like David Thomson, but the only film I've seen which combines a ground level view of human behavior and historical yarn is Klimov's COME AND SEE. This is the one film to wrap into your winding sheets. And in Bondarchuk you see a little influence of the long lamented European and American avant garde cinema, although briefly, as a kind of knowing nod to what he might have done more of if he hadn't lived in Soviet Russia. And yet the social tragedy which befell the people of Russia as a result of the 1917 revolution, probably mirrors the tragedy of the North and South American Indians when faced with European conquest. No civilization has arisen without the bloodshed necessary to establish custom, culture and finally, conformity. The early revolutionary days were filled with brilliant experiment and heady aesthetics, but although Bondarchuk made his film 15 years after the death of Stalin, I think he was making a film for a wide general audience, Russian style, which only means he didn't compromise as much as Hollywood has always demanded. And so you see a touch of Ed Emshwiller or Jordan Belson here and there, just to let you know he knew. Or did it come from Cocteau or Bunel? But if you haven't seen this film, get it on Netflix. I think the characterizations of Pierre and Natasha in particular, are worth thinking about. Personally, I'm more interested in life "as it seems to be" which is more the province of the humble cockroach, than the exalted eagle. Somehow there are more of us insects than there are fowl to peck us into submission. And I like the view from angleworm level. Whenever anyone starts talking about Stars and Heroes, I detest the race I belong to for its refusal to honor the simple joys and virtues available to (almost) everyone. But then I remember my own passion for recognition and find it predictable, all too human and contemptible.

Rob

ANNOUNCEMENT: 2 Citizen Cinema Films Accepted into the 2006 Mill Valley Film Festival, "PAN" and "OPENING"

We are pleased to announce that 9 at Night film #8 will have its World Premiere at the 29th annual Mill Valley Film Fest. "PAN" tells the story of a fatherless 9 year old boy's friendship with a charismatic homeless man and his street family. Also showing at the fest will be the West Coast Premiere of "Opening", the latest offering in the Direct Action World Cinema Workshop series. This workshop feature, conceived and shot in three days, was produced by the Kansas City Filmmaker's Jubilee and Citizen Cinema. The usual drama of critics, dealers, anxious artists, and venal business types at a gallery opening is heightened when a tornado warning forces the warring cabal to take cover in a dark basement. Stay tuned for more information and photos as well as a new podcast with interviews from the key players involved.

Both films will play at the Rafael Film Center, OPENING on Friday, Oct. 6 at 9:15 PM and PAN on Sunday, Oct. 8 at 8:00 PM.

http://www.mvff.com

Here are a few stills from PAN

Citizen Cinema Episode #3, 8_11_06

In Citizen Cinema Podcast #3 we speak in depth with Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry, leaders of Filmmakers Alliance and makers of the new feature film, The Dogwalker. We get busy for almost an hour on subjects ranging from work ethics, to film distribution and ultimately, inspiration.

download edpisode 3

Heat and Sunlight at the Rafael

Wanted to let folks know about the one time only screening of HEAT AND SUNLIGHT at the Rafael Film Ctr., on 4th. St., San Rafael 7:00 PM Wednesday, Aug. 2. That's right. Two days from now. Been so busy getting PAN ready to show to the Mill Valley Fest, and editing PRESQUE ISLE, I didn't have time to let you know. Also I was shooting PRESQUE ISLE in the Santa Cruz Mountains when the Rafael called about the date so it never got into their montly catalogue. But it will be on the screen regardless at the appointed time.

HEAT AND SUNLIGHT won the Grand Prize at Sundance and is rarely shown these days, so step up. It's a good example of early Direct Action and also an early tape to 35 mm. transfer. We'll be showing a release print from that time, so it should be interesting. Hope you can make it. I'll be there, as well as Steve Burns, producer.

Rob

People I Support:Jean Shelton & Jacques Thelemaque/Diane Gaidry

Just wanted people to know about two events in the Bay Area. Jean Shelton, the first lady of San Francisco theatre is once again on the stage. First time in 30 years I think, although she's been teaching all that time. But this time she's got to get up and SHOW us what she means. She and her son Chris are playing the leads at the Actor's Theatre, 855 Post, SF in A TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL. Be sure and go up on the web under Actor's Theatre, San Francisco for show times. After the play I was in that inchoate state I rarely experience. Deeply moved. Stumbling around. Changed. Grateful that profound simplicity... honesty, know- how and personal depth had come together to make a work of art worthwhile. After the play Jean told me how she uses everything she knows and teaches... and then discards it and "just goes". It's that "just going" that haunts me. There's a purity in it, a way of being just, well, just being, I guess. I think you're born with it, but you can't always keep it. People get spoiled, jaded, disheartened. Or just too successful. I'm sure Jean has had her share of the pitfalls. I suppose she could have started phoning it in, if it were in her to do that. But I don't think it is. She told me she feels deep gratitude for being able to live her life in the theatre. But if you're going to be an artist I think gratitude and humility require something else. And she has it. Jean spots what's fake and points it out. And she sees what works and celebrates it. And after that she
"just goes."

Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry are a team of artists, relatively speaking, just starting out. Their first feature film THE DOG WALKER, directed by Jacques and featuring Diane, is opening in the Bay Area on Aug. 11, at the Opera Plaza, the Shattuck and the Rafael Film Center. Please go and see it. These are genuine fighters in the battle for a cinema which starts in the dirt and on the ground and aspires to tell us what we almost never hear i.e. that we live in OUR skin, live OUR lives, and that unless we can be OURSELVES, we're no good to anyone. American cinema almost exclusively sponsors illusions about things we cannot be and should not even aspire to. But Jacques and Diane don't buy that cotton candy. They live in LA and they fight it every day. They are the leaders of the Filmmaker's Alliance down there, an organization with the great motto "Greenlight yourself" which helps filmmakers get a toe hold, not in the industry, but in the shoes they put on every day. I recently saw TRANSACTION, a short film they did together as a director/actress team. It moved me to tears. Go to THE DOG WALKER. Watch TRANSACTION. It will be on- the- job learning in how to value what's genuine in American cinema.

Rob

Amazon Readies Launch of Ad-Free Video Download Service

An article in AdAge.com discusses the announcement of mega-online retailer Amazon.com entering the world of online video content distibution. The service, which is referred to as Amazon Digital Video -- or Amazon "DV" -- has evolved over the past year from a music-themed offering to a video-centric one, according to production-studio and TV-network executives briefed on the plans. The reason? Apple, these executives said, already commands such a large share of digital-music sales that Amazon felt it would be too difficult to break into the market.

Further signs that for us independent producers, there is an emerging of multiple avenues for our content to be seen by the world. We will stay tuned, to be sure.

Read the full article

michael

White Heads: thoughts on seeing "Three Times"

Last Sunday I went to Hou Hsiao- Hsien's new film THREE TIMES at my favorite theatre, the 99 seat house at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. More a screening room than a theatre it's a jewel of a room... comfortable, intimate, it seems to wrap around you, putting you in the mood for feeling, thinking, receiving. The film started out awkwardly, returning to the same annoying angle in a pool room where Shu Qi, lead player in all three of the film's segments, worked as a waitress, repeatedly showing us she (and the director) knew nothing about the game. Pool is huge in parts of Asia, particularly in Taiwan and the Phillipines so Hou Hsiao- Hsien had resources he chose not to exploit. I wondered why and that distracted me from a film which demanded patience. But patience was rewarded. This is a film everyone should see. It's about delicate moments of feeling which most critics would call "small". To me they're not small. They are the essential DNA, the organic bottom line. We may imagine a wider, more sensational world "out there", but most of us have little real contact with it. And to the extent that we feel that reality is "out there" and not all around us, we ignore our most precious connections. The first story, set in 1966, is about shy lovers who finally hold hands, at the last moment. perhaps, they will ever have together. The second story circa 1911 is about a prostitute in an upper class bordello who waits, silently, for a lover's "plans" for her. The fact that he has none is never stated, shown only in his face where we see he knows his silence spells doom for her hopes in life. The third story subtitled "A Time for Youth" set in 2005 ends where it begins, with two modern, liberated, beautiful young people on a motorcycle zooming through freeway traffic. Their "liberation" is expressed in free sex, drugs, sado-masochistic snapshots and a demi-mondish immersion in what their pop music describes as "true" feelings. It is devastatingly sad. It made me think of Oshima's REALM OF THE SENSES where lovers learn that death is the final sexually obsessive high. When I walked into the theatre, the house was full. Of white heads. I saw a sea of grey hair, huddled together for thought, for sensibility, for hope that intelligence could still play a part in the cinema. It made me glad... and sad. Why wasn't the theatre filled with young people, with the hip hop generation? This is not an easy question. The answer I'd give is that the times don't lead the young toward art like this. Our culture is not yet ready for Hou Hsiao- Hsien. We're too loud. We're too brash. We're not heedful of the "small". Why should we be? We're consumers. We're invincible, never defeated in war, plenty of plastic in the wallet. The opium smoked in those bordellos of old is a bum trip set up against video games, iPods and camera cell phones which digitally document a cheerful descent into the action movie of our national life.

R.N.

Presque Isle Principal Photgraphy

We'd like to extend a heartfelt congratulations to the cast and crew of Presque Isle for completing our primary round of principal photgraphy on June 29th. There are still some mountains to climb in terms of getting everything in the digital can but this was a tremendous effort that has yielded some breathtaking imagery. We will start our sharing process with some location pics taken by filmmaker and PI crew member Alex Kalafus.

Citizen Cinema Episode 2, week 1 in Presque Isle, La Honda

Citizen Cinema episode 2 takes you onto the set of Presque isle, the
new film by Rob Nilsson and Citizen Cinema that is signaling a fresh
perspective on the principles of Direct Action Cinema. Also featured are interviews with Citizen Cinema Producer Chikara Motomura and DP Mick Freeman.

click here to download episode 3

Welcome to Presque Isle

Today shooting will officially commence on the new feature film Presque Isle. To hear more about the project we'll give the keyboard over to the erudite author himself, Rob.
M.E.K.

PRESQUE ISLE, a screenplay I wrote several years ago, has become a co-production between our new production entity Citizen’s Cinema, and the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. Set on a remote island on a lake in Northern Wisconsin, PRESQUE ISLE will be shot on forest and lake locations in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A man returns to the island summer cabin paradise of his youth. The place is now abandoned but the memories, dreams and fantasies of deceased ancestors, current friends and ex- lovers seem to inhabit the untouched forest, long ago preserved as a sanctuary by his grandparents. A man who has lost his way in modern urban culture, now seeks it again in a place which seems untouched by time and progress.

This story came to me unbidden, almost like a poem. It appeared and I wrote it down. I trusted it because it seemed like automatic writing, a gift from the Slipstream. I’m going to take on this complex and challenging film in collaboration with the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking run by Jeremiah Birnbaum and Stephen Kopels and the Pixel Corps, an international Computer Graphics Guild headed up by Alex Lindsay, an ex ILM honcho. I think with these collaborators we can make a unique amalgam of pre-conception, computer magic and Direct Action spontaneity. Both Chikara Motomura (Sound) and Michael Edo Keane (Co-producer), principals in our new Citizens Cinema venture will play prominent roles in the production, and longtime friend and fellow traveler, Mickey Freeman, will be the Director of Photography. Filmmaker James Savoca will co-produce and Nancy Hayes Casting has led the way in finding local actors. Lead players are Kieron McCartney, (also lead in the 9 @ Night production PAN and a character in the 9 @ Night films USED and GO TOGETHER), his wife Kara McCartney and Robert Viharo long time friend and featured player in almost all of the 9 @ Night films.

We are about to dive into a chasm of mutual imagining and collaborative effort to make something emerge on a bright screen, somehow on some small someday out there somewhere, where we hope it will thrill some, outrage others, and make the sun burnt souls we seek feel a little less lonely.
R.N.

See the 9@Night Trailer

Check out our trailer for the upcoming release of the 9@Night Film series. We are currently deep in fundraising for the final push to have everything ready by the end of the year. Contact us to find out how you can help.

view trailer here

Rob featured in New Bay Area Film Book

Our man Rob Nilsson is one of the only truly independent filmmakers featured in this impressive, coffee table styled tome authored by Sheery Avni and Michael Sragow. Among the other filmmakers featured are Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Ritchie, and George Lucas to name a few.

Speaking in Pod

We wanted to let you know about an article we wrote for a very hip and heady site of "dv theorists" brainstormdv. The subject was the release of the new video enabled ipod. Look out for our own video podcasts in the coming weeks. brainstormdv roundtable

Citizen Cinema Podcast #1 5_06

In this episode of Citizen Cinema. Rob and Michael discuss the origins of the 9@Night film series as well as film number one of the series, "Noise".

download podcast #1 5_06

Welcome

To the blog dedicated to the goings on here at Citizen Cinema, The new production entity founded by Rob Nilsson, Chikara Motomura and Michael Edo Keane.

Rob is an OG from the early days of modern Indie film. His film, Signal 7 was the first theatrically released tape to film transfer. Heat and Sunlight, which won the Sundance Grand Jury prize in 1988, was shot on beta sp and converted to black and white, years before dogma 95.

In 2005 shooting completed on a 13 year mission, the 9@NIght Film Series. Born out of workshops set in the hard edged tenderloin district of San Francisco, these 9 films weave a thematic web that will linger long after the manic pop thrill of a Holly wood blockbuster. It is a true cinema of the street.

We are currently finishing post on the last three films in the series. We'll be putting up previews trailers and more as we ramp up towards distirbution.

We are starting production on a new feature, Presque Isle. This film offeres a radical departure from the concrete and neon of the TL. In June we will be in dense forest and lakes on a journey about a journey of a man who goes home to ease the pain of dissolution. Here he discovers erotic and ancestral keys to his buried past.

We are also fundraising, building new projects, going to festivals, meeting supporters, other filmmakers, exchanging ideas, opinions, complaints and discoveries. Now with the aid of the blogosphere we will expand that process to include you, fellow citizen.