By David Ross. Avatar is anti-American propaganda on a staggering scale, with who-knows-what geopolitical implications, as well as a monument to the infantile simplicity of the Hollywood world view. Pulitzer prize-winner Stephen Hunter, writing in Commentary, provides what I consider the definitive dismemberment.
All of this, however, states the obvious, or what should be the obvious. Roger Ebert has done his share of shilling for Hollywood, but here takes on the industry, laying out a thorough argument against the 3-D format. Cinéasts should join him on the barricades. Spectacle is not art; the mere titillation of the senses is not art.
The greatest film art, indeed, resists spectacle as a distraction from its own core of intellect and emotion, and tends to grope toward a certain starkness in which the essential thing – whatever it may – stands stripped of the extraneous and revealed in its essence.
"He says his name is 'Jim,' and that he's from West LA."Films like Victor Erice’s Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and Koreeda’s Maborosi (1995) demonstrate James Cameron’s vast and pathetic misunderstanding of his own art form. Sinking into almost complete stillness, they begin to speak the half-veiled symbol language of the world, and, as Yeats says, “call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions.”
Tobey McGuire confronts the 'horrors' of 1950's suburbia in "Pleasantville."
By David Ross. Avatar would seem to have no rivals in terms of asinine but aggressive cultural politics. It turns out to have a strong rival, Pleasantville (1998), the premise of which is that two modern kids (Tobey McGuire and Reese Witherspoon) get sucked into a 1950s TV show. They must save this world of family dinners and manicured lawns from its soullessness, mindlessness, and totalitarian conformity by literally teaching the locals how to have sex (in one icky scene, Reese gives her TV mother a lesson in the basics of masturbation). People awaken from their celibate comas and the world begins to shift from black and white to color, introducing a gratuitous racial allegory as the “coloreds” are harassed by the black and white remnant. Meanwhile, the pages of books, which were previously blank in token of the general emptiness of things, suddenly begin to fill with the words of D.H. Lawrence, J.D. Salinger, and other proto-liberationists. By the end of this magical process of transformation, the kids are humping like rabbits in the backseats of cars, the parents are headed for divorce, the citizenry is fighting in the streets, and the town is reduced to rubble – in short, thank god, the sixties have arrived, and not a moment too soon. Tobey returns to the present day to find that his dubious divorcee mother has broken up with her boyfriend. Tobey dries her eyes having learned the crucial lesson that life is “all about change,” never mind that it has led to the cultural wasteland depicted in the film’s opening scene, in which Tobey and Reese, nerd and slut, enact the clichés of the modern high school.
Baby Boomer propaganda has succeeded wonderfully, Pleasantville and Mad Men being cases in point. My students constantly parrot the assertion that the fifties were an era of conformity, conservatism, and materialism. I retort that the fifties were a golden age of American arts and culture, whose leading lights – Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Hitchcock, Nabokov, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Flannery O’Connor, Eugene O’Neil, Jackson Pollock, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Muddy Waters, Billy Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Edmund Wilson – have no equivalent in later decades. I remind them, also, that the sixties did not even have the brains to invent themselves, but were invented in the pages of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, whose masterpieces, “Howl” and On the Road, respectively appeared in 1956 and 1957. When you consider those who remained active – E.E. Cummings, Eliot, Faulkner, Frost, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Pound, William Carlos Williams – and those from elsewhere whose work was filtering into American culture – Bergman, Bresson, Camus, Fellini, Kurosawa, Picasso – the fifties become a crushing commentary on our own inadequacy.
Nabokov and Lionel Trilling here discuss Lolita on Canadian public television. Consider what this clip implies about the despised fifties: that a largish number of people not only gave a damn about a novel like Lolita (the third bestselling novel of 1958), but gave a damn what an academic Mandarin like Trilling had to say about it.
By Joe Bendel. After Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Jasmila Žbanić’s Grbavica captured the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival, serious fest watchers had to take Bosnia’s small but accomplished film industry seriously. Unlike most former captive nations, recent Bosnian films have been less likely to address the Soviet experience, instead focusing on the 1994 war. Those ghosts could again be seen in the selections of the Seventh Annual Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival, which is perhaps ironically one of the friendliest fests in New York.
Indeed, the war loomed large in all three programming blocks of three features preceded by a number of shorts. Though already available on DVD (and streaming on Netflix), Hans-Christian Schmid’s Storm (trailer above) would probably be of the most interest to Libertas readers, given its cynical view of the International Criminal Court – portrayed as a typical government office, full of petty corruption and bloated egos. Struggling to prosecute a Bosnian Serb accused of war crimes, Hannah Maynard’s case is in danger of imminent collapse unless she can convince a reluctant witness to come forward. Her serpentine boss, a master at navigating the Court’s roiling bureaucratic waters, backs her efforts, but only so far.
Storm is a German-Danish-Dutch co-production directed by a German starring a Romanian actress as a Bosnian, but its lingua franca is English, with some subtitled German, Bosnian, and Serbian thrown in for good measure. It might be an international affair, but it hardly engenders confidence in aspiring world-governing bodies like the international court. The performances though, especially Romanian Anamaria Marinca and the jowly Rolf Lassgård as Maynard’s world weary Swedish lover, are quite impressive. Political but genuinely nuanced, Storm is an intriguing film worth checking out (despite a Hollywood-style ending that seems at odds with the rest of the film).
From "Sevdah."
A meditation of Sevdalinka, the Bosnian blues, Marina Andree’s Sevdah is also haunted by the war. Representing a culture under siege for Bosnians exiled during the war, the documentary captures the beautiful melancholy of the music. Particularly memorable were a Sendalinka rendition of Gershwin’s “Summertime” and a Delta Blues take on a Sevdalinka standard.
Easily the oddest selection of this or any year’s BHFF was Geoffrey Alan Rhodes and Steven Eastwood’s Buried Land, which recently had its world premiere at Tribeca. Incorporating elements of fictionalized documentary, mockumentary, and performance art video, Land ostensibly documents a film crew shooting a film about the Visoko Pyramids, which may or may not be monuments of an ancient civilization predating the Egyptian pyramids (most experts seem to be skeptical).
In Rhodes and Eastwood’s film, most of the local Bosnians embrace the pyramids as a positive development for their country following the horrors of war. However, they are skeptical of the film crew, fearing they will try to give them the “Borat” treatment — concerns that soon appear to be justified. [Thanks for giving us a bad name, Hollywood and Sacha Baron Cohen.] It is hard to judge, but Land could well be an ironic statement on either provincial gullibility or media cynicism (or both). It is a strange hybrid, but the scenery is striking. Defying easy classification and description, Land is a film for those who appreciate cleverness more than emotional engagement in cinema. It definitely made for a diverse slate at this year’s BHFF.
BHFF might be one of the smaller New York fest (for now), but it always has something good to cover. Usually coming hard on the heels of Tribeca, it is worth sticking around New York for.
The new Libertas Film Magazine (LFM) is almost here! LFM is a new on-line film magazine focusing on the idea of freedom as expressed in movies and popular culture.
LFM celebrates the democratizing of film. Talented, free-thinking artists from America and around the world are currently using digital technology to make films that celebrate freedom and the individual. LFM will feature the best of these independent and foreign films – and occasionally even Hollywood films – that promote the ideas and values vital to the future of democratic civilization.
Stayed tuned for the launch of LFM on May 19th, 2010! The independent film world will never be the same. LFM is the new voice for freedom in movies and popular culture. Join us each day … and free your mind.
