Day: July 3, 2012

By Joe Bendel. Life in China must be improving. They now have round-card girls. Decades ago, Mao banned Olympic-style boxing on the grounds it was too western and excessively violent. He then launched the Cultural Revolution. Legalized in 1986, the Chinese boxing authorities are now taking a long view, recruiting potential Olympians at the middle school level. Yung Chang follows a contender turned coach and two of his fighters in China Heavyweight, which opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Center.

Boxing is an attractive alternative to working in the tobacco fields for many of the students in the Sichuan countryside. The sport has become a way of life for Coach Qi Moxiang. He recruits young boxers, both boys and girls, and directly oversees their training. He is tough, but popular with his charges.

At first, Chang’s primary POV figures appear to be He Zongli and Miao Yunfei, two boxers about to graduate to the regional level of competition. We see a fair amount of training and the mean condition of life in the province that they hope to escape. However, Heavyweight kicks into narrative gear about halfway through, when Qi decides to return to the ring to face a Japanese belt-holder. Suddenly, there is a traditional underdog boxing story unfolding in Sichuan.

Heavyweight is highly attuned to the economic disparities of contemporary China as well as the conflicts between tradition and the drive to modernize. However, Chang largely overlooks Sichuan’s recent tragic history. Rocked by an earthquake in May of 2008, anger boiled over at the local authorities for allowing the shoddy construction practices that acerbated its deadly toll. Sichuan could use a champion, but that might not be in the interests of the vested establishment.

Still, Chang has a good handle on the conventions of boxing movies, capturing some dramatic ringside action. There is even a scene of Qi’s boxers running up a series of ancient steps that echoes a certain film from 1976. He and cinematographer Sun Shaoguang also convey the harsh and lonely beauty of the surrounding terraced landscape. Viewers get a sense of the milieu, but besides Qi, the boxers’ personalities are not so strongly delineated (He is the shy one, while Miao is the slightly more confident one).

Shifting from an observational doc into old fashioned sports story, Heavyweight becomes more engaging as it goes along. The development of organized boxing post-Maoist insanity is a story worth telling, but as a socio-economic investigation, it is not nearly as telling as a raft of recent depressing Chinese documentaries, such as Zhao Liang’s jaw-dropping expose Petition, or the uncomfortably intimate Last Train Home, helmed by Heavyweight co-executive producer Lixin Fan. Oddly recommended more for the audience of HBO’s Real Sports than for serious China watchers, China Heavyweight opens this Friday (7/6) at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on July 3rd, 2012 at 2:43pm.

By Joe Bendel. Robert Flaherty is considered the father of documentary filmmaking. With Nanook of the North, he not only launched the modern documentary film genre, he also introduced the ethical questions that continue to dog non-fiction filmmakers. The legacy of Flaherty and the relatively small handful of films he actually completed is explored in Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín’s A Boatload of Wild Irishmen, which screens as part of this week’s Robert Flaherty series at the Anthology Film Archives.

Boatload opens with the dramatic closing scene of Flaherty’s masterwork, Man of Aran (see above). Struggling against a powerful surge, the salt-of-the-earth fishermen fight their way to shore. Flaherty did not just happen to be in the right place at the right time to capture the action, however. He either sent them out into the roiling tide, or they volunteered to go. Accounts differ, but everyone seems to agree the money Flaherty was offering played a role. Even then it would not have been much by Hollywood standards, but to residents of the Ireland’s hardscrabble Aran Island, it was significant.

Indeed, Boatload’s various on-screen commentators make it clear that staging scenes was a major part of Flaherty’s working method. Opinions regarding the Irish-American filmmaker appear to be mixed at best amongst contemporary Aran Islanders and Irish film scholars. However, such criticism of Flaherty’s authenticity is largely based on current standards of documentary filmmaking, which are rather selectively applied.

Ó Curraidhín paints a picture of Flaherty as more of an adventurer than an auteur. Rather than Jacob Riis, P.T. Barnum would be better considered his forerunner. So what if he did stage a scene, or a dozen? It was for the sake of a good show. In contrast, when recent documentaries like Gasland play veracity games, it is far more serious, because they are advocacy broadsides, arguing for punitive measures targeting specific companies and industries.

Clearly, Flaherty was not a take-only-pictures-leave-only-footprints kind of documentarian, as the interview with his Inuit granddaughter fully attests. Yet the Samoans still regularly screen Flaherty’s Moana, enjoying the sight of their ancestors on-screen, even if the episodes they are recreating were from generations before them. Obviously, the point is that there are many different ways to come to terms with Flaherty’s small oeuvre.

Refraining from passing judgment on Flaherty, Boatload emphasizes his larger than life persona and the lasting audience for his films. Ultimately, the people have spoken. Considerably more film patrons will attend screenings of Flaherty’s films this year than those of silent western superstar Tom Mix by a wide margin, a trend that continues this week at AFA. Informative and evenhanded, A Boatload of Wild Irish is a satisfying survey of Flaherty’s work and controversies. Recommended for those who enjoy films about filmmaking, it screens this Saturday through next Monday (7/7-7/9) in New York at the Anthology Film Archives.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on July 3rd, 2012 at 2:41pm.