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