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