my five year plan. stumbling toward movies since 2006…

The Shorts Project – Carmichael and Shane (2005)

A bit of a trifle, but it's a trifle that's played at a bunch of prestigious film festivals: Carmichael and Shane is a low-budget mockumentary about a single father's gambit to put all of his effort and financial resources behind one of his twins, leaving the other to fend for himself. It's silly, and there are a few solid chuckle moments, but what strikes me about this film is the way it shows how a lot of conservative precepts about the uneven distribution of resources are pretty sociopathic.

Especially funny is the father's dismissal of Shane's possibility for later success: "I think names guide your future to a certain degree. There are no Shanes in federal parliament."

It's a pretty decent sign of what you're able to do on a really limited budget - it was shot in about four hours on a $20 budget by co-directors Rob Carlton (who also stars as the father) and Alex Weinruss. It looks absolutely terrible, even by then in-practice standards of digital video, but it's well edited and the shots are decently framed.

As a screener, I've probably seen 100-150 terrible mockumentary short films, that genre being the go-to for filmmakers who realize they don't have the budget to give their film production values or the talent to clean up the film structurally. As such, I tend to consider the mockumentary, with some very obvious exceptions (Christopher Guest films), a grim and not particularly fruitful genre. I suppose if there's a difference with this film it's that the performer is a really nimble improviser and is able to milk laughs from his kids' moment-to-moment temperaments well.

The Shorts Project – Harmonia (1947)

Wojciech Has' Harmonia is a snapshot of childhood in Poland in the post-war era: a young boy desperately wants to buy an accordion, seeing it as the ticket away from his dreary life, but struggles with poverty and a frankly awful father.

It's a really affecting film, and given its production context very admirable, but I kept thinking that Has' parade of indignities was too one-note, too easily miserable a journey for this boy. Even the boy's fantasy is meager: the children of his village crowded around him, in circular dance, as stone-faced teenagers watch on.

Available to watch here on New York Magazine's website.

The Shorts Project – Glory at Sea (2008)

1) I really don’t like Glory at Sea.

Glory at Sea is the stuff of legend. It’s a film by the Court 13 film collective, headed by directors Benh Zeitlin and Ray Tintori, and it’s a sort of epic rumination on the lingering affects of Katrina as filtered through a post-apocalyptic steampunk narrative of an unlikely savior who inspires a group of survivors to build a boat.

Since its release a few years ago, Court 13 has become a huge deal – this film has played at a buttload of festivals, Zeitlin and Tintori have directed all manner of music videos for big indie bands, and their feature Beasts of the Southern Wild has been accepted to the screenwriting, directing, and producing labs at Sundance. Which is a big deal. It just finished wrapping last month.

But I just don’t like Glory at Sea – there’s something about it that, instinctually, pushes me away. Maybe it’s the maximalist score, co-composed by the director, which is incessant and oppressive, a alternating push of major-chord brass and minor-chord strings that demands attention and is pushed awkwardly high in the film’s audio mix.

Maybe it’s that I find the whole Katrina-as-sci-fi-dystopia aesthetic thing really distasteful? I appreciate that Court 13 went to New Orleans and worked with the local community to develop the film, casting non-actors, but there’s a sense for me here that the filmmakers weren’t really interested in Katrina so much as their own noodly conceit, a Malick/Korine pastiche that borrows equally from the former’s transcendental-philosophy-as-style and the latter’s imagery of a ruined world of trash.

The first time I watched Glory at Sea, a few months ago, I had to start and stop it a few times. It was just too much, too many signs and symbols at odds, and I couldn’t complete the film without getting frustrated at the baffling cluster of images Court 13 had put together.

2) I really like Glory at Sea.

Maybe that’s going too far, but I do like it – despite my trepidation about the work as a whole, it traffics in themes far too human for me to dismiss it entirely, and its end sequence, in which the survivors find what their savior has been leading them toward, is genuinely moving.

I of course love the Malickisms that characterize the film’s style (the young female narrator, the sweep of the camera, the editing scheme that minimizes the scene in favor of montage). If you’re making a film that explores the intersection between reality and myth (which is what this is, basically), why not borrow liberally from Malick, who’s made a career of interrogating that intersection?

I think I like Court 13 even more than their film: there’s a gumption and an optimistic spirit to the Filmmaking Collective idea that I really admire, a democracy of credit and collaborative effort that’s only slightly undermined by how many times Zeitlin and Tintori’s names appear in the end titles.

3) Maybe I’m just jealous.

No, I definitely am, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and I don't think that discounts my concerns with the film. Seeing someone who’s just a few years older than me do so well is a huge kick in the ass motivationally. I can only hope that down the line I encounter some of the successes Zeitlin has (and will continue to).

I’m not hating on Zeitlin here, though I have strong disagreements with certain aesthetic strategies present in his film. I have tremendous admiration for the dude and hope I like his next film better than this one. I take comfort in knowing that someone making a film that’s so defiantly strange can get as much attention as he has.

The Shorts Project – Six Shooter (2004)

(You'll have to click through the link on one of the other videos to watch part three - there's a spoiler in the screencap YouTube has assigned to the video.)

I really admire Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter. It’s a strange film, a grimly dark comedy that manages to approach life-affirming through the sheer madness of its narrative: a new widower (Brendan Gleeson) riding to Dublin in a train car with three other people, all of whom have also recently lost family members, and all of whom cope with their loss in startlingly different ways.

There’s enough surprise in the narrative that I want to leave it at that. Suffice it to say the qualities that make McDonagh a fascinating playwright translate admirably to the screen: his talent for crafting dialogue that could only come out of a particular character’s mouth, the way a sequence of events escalates into surreal brutality at alarming speed. It’s not for nothing that McDonagh is often called the Irish Sam Shepard, and unlike a lot of storytellers who ‘interrogate death and violence,’ McDonagh actually has a profound sense for the moral/ethical implications of the images he’s putting on screen, drawing a line between institutional violence and individual violence and between a childhood anecdote and a violent present-day sociopath, inscribing a young man’s tendency toward cruelty as endemic to an Ireland plagued by continuing sectarian strife.*

McDonagh examines all this within the sweep of a briskly-paced comedy-of-errors plot about gaps in verbal acuity, the inability of humans to live up to cinematic imagery of violence, and the social forces holding people apart in modern Ireland. In McDonagh’s film, as in In Bruges, people are constantly failing miserably at whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish, and they’re not even failing upward. This won Best Live Action Short? A film so admirably unwilling to bend to its viewer’s expectations? A Grand Guignol pageant of blood and death?

*Similarly, his feature debut In Bruges was sold here in the states as a Guy Ritchie knockoff but was actually about the way a hitman's moral crisis after accidentally killing a child festers into ennui and despair. That's a strange, not entirely successful movie, but it's one that refuses to romanticize its hitmen protagonists and makes some intelligent and defiantly uncool statements about the search for moral absolution.

The Shorts Project – Monster (2005)

Jennifer Kent’s Monster is a promising short film – which is why (I think) we played it at the festival a couple years ago. It’s a very simple story: a mother protects her son from the horrifying creature for whom his creepy doll is a talisman. But it’s very effective in startling up some PG-13 rated scares in its ten minutes, especially with one very alarming image of the creature hopping up the stairs in rapid motion.

I'm pretty torn on this movie - it's not very good, and yet I have a lot of admiration for certain things Kent does over its course. The acting is pretty bad (especially the affect-less mom), but the moodiness of the camerawork is really choice, the beautiful, stark high-contrast black-and-white imagery an admirable way to communicate both the existential dread of this single mother's day-to-day life and the horror of the doll. It's well-paced, too, in the sense that the scenes of banal action leading up to the attack are admirably slow, with lingering images of dirty dishes and piles of laundry.

The ending is an afterthought, and not a good one at that.

The Shorts Project – Riding with Sugar (2005)

I should just leave well enough alone.

Here I was, feeling all good about Global Film Initiative and their Global Lens serie, and I felt like watching another of their shorts. So I chose one at random, available on their YouTube account, and…

Oof. This On The Lot-ready film is a whole bunch of Whatever: City of God stylizations, BMX badassery, and then some extended intro-level dialogue scenes. Then more style. Then more BMX badassery. Then some more subtext-free talking.

Really, the first bit in the second YouTube video should be watched by everyone. It’s a masterclass in how not to stage a sequence:

1)    Poor drug-addicted protagonist looking at BMX dudes off-screen without any real and consistent geographical relationship to the action.

2)    BMX Coach inexplicably screaming as his riders pull off their moves immaculately in slow motion on a tiny half-pipe.

3)    Love interest from first dialogue scene relaxes by the half-pipe on one side, propping her head up with her hand, exactly the way no one really does.

There’s a bad chase scene following, in which an Isuzu tracks down our protagonist as he courses through the uncrowded streets of his township. No number of jump-cuts and Dutch angles can mask the fact that this chase is being conducted at about 10 miles per hour.

I hope I’m not being too unfair in picking on this film’s director, because I recognize that making a film is very difficult, and the fact that the filmmaker was able to tell a coherent narrative at all is a good sign, but there’s a question of taste here that really is insurmountable: what do we look for in cinema? Because if it’s to give you sub-Airborne extreme sports stunts and formulaic plotting, then Riding with Sugar works, but for me every short film should be a promise about the potential for making real change – aesthetically, ethically – in the world. My problem with Global Film Initiative is that they seem to be working from this really cynical, patronizing idea that films from developing countries aren’t going to be very good anyway, so they really don’t need to put that much effort in finding worthwhile films that audiences will enjoy. Which is why half the time they fall asleep at the curatorial wheel. The idea that a film program can consist of a film as good as Your Dark Hair Ihsan immediately followed by a film as bad as Riding with Sugar is upsetting, because it says that the latter can/should be compared to the former.

It’s not enough to be basically competent. You need to push forward. Always. Always push forward.

The Shorts Project – Your Dark Hair Ihsan (2005)

The Global Film Initiative is a very good idea that often leads to very bad results. Its mission is to distribute, as package series, films from developing countries to western audiences, and while some of the films are good, a lot of what they bring to America is very, very bad. While at Dartmouth we unknowingly programmed some of these bad movies as part of a series, including an Indian problem picture about the death penalty called Shadow Kill that remains the single most insipid experience I’ve had watching a movie.

Still, they’ve gotten behind talented filmmakers like Li Shaohong and Garin Nugroho and they give wider audiences to a host of films that would never been seen otherwise, so I salute them. Your Dark Hair Ihsan is a short film that GFI included in a 2007 program of short films from around the world. It’s a thesis film by a Columbia School of the Arts filmmaker, and it’s very, very good. It’s one of the films, in fact, that motivated me to apply to Columbia in the first place. I’ll post my thoughts on the others, if I can find them online, soon.

Equal parts memoryfilm and coming-of-age drama, Your Dark Hair Ihsan recounts a Moroccan man’s journey home after the death of the mother who sacrificed to give him a better life. It sounds saccharine, and to a certain extent it is, but it’s also deeply moving and gorgeously photographed, with tracking shots through eerie, surreal landscapes in the Moroccan mountains that bring to mind Vaunted Figures of Cinematic Modernism: Tarr, Tarkovsky. Though Tala Hadid’s work is not as formally daunting as that of those filmmakers, she has a strong command of their cinematic language, as well as that of her most humanistic forebears: Jafar Panahi, who shares with Hadid a thoughtful and emotionally rich understanding of women in Muslim society, and Francois Truffaut, whose intelligence about children and development informs many of the flashback sequences.

The end is a riddle: a man has searched his memory and rediscovered the anxieties of his childhood, and like Antoine Doinel, he is unsure of what to do next. But unlike Doinel, he is fully grown, and the final image of his staring back forces us to reconsider the role of the home country in the mind of the émigré.

The Shorts Project – …No Lies (1974)

I'm going to take two steps in advance of talking about ...No Lies, which I think is an important film. One is that every single thing that follows is a spoiler. Including my second warning: that this film is potentially triggering.

...No Lies was directed by Mitchell Block while he was a student at NYU in the 1970s, and though it's just sixteen minutes long, it covers a lot of ground. It is a mockumentary (although that word seems inappropriate given the film's gravity) in which a student filmmaker pesters a female friend about where she's going that night as she gets ready. Slowly he coaxes from her - at first unwittingly and then exploitatively - that she was recently raped and that when she tried to file a police report she was harassed by the officers. She becomes upset at her friend's increasingly aggressive and accusatory line of questioning as he follows her around her small apartment with his camera, leading to her breaking down emotionally.

It's a difficult film to watch, but as I said above, I think it's an important one. Its subject is power relationships between men and women - rapist and victim, police officer and victim, filmmaker and... victim. It offers a withering rebuke to the then in-vogue trend of American documentary, the direct cinema style that informed the works of The Maysles, Frederick Wiseman and Alan and Susan Raymond, whose An American Family had premiered on PBS the year prior and whose filming of the divorce of Patricia and Bill Loud was fodder for ethical debates within the filmmaking community in the ensuing months. Surely Block had the Raymonds in mind when he conceived this film.

The film is very smart, asking questions about the relationship between subject and filmmaker early ("You're really intimidating with that camera, you know?" the woman jokes, offhand, unaware that her friend's camera will later become a weapon of humiliation), and recognizing that rape is one part of a continuum of power dynamics in American culture in which men exploit and degrade women. Though it predates the publication of Laura Mulvey's seminal "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (written in 1973, published in 1975) and Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape (1974), it was produced right in the thick of the development of feminist film theory at NYU in its most theory-intensive days and is likely informed by the ideas of Mulvey, Haskell, and the generation of film theorists who began exploring the problematic way cinema treats women. ...No Lies posits the relationship between the documentarian and subject as one of exploitation. It details the way, for example, pushing in for a close-up during an interview gives the documentarian power against his subject by isolating her face (roughly akin to the argument Mulvey would advance about filmmakers using close-ups as a means of fetishizing the female form).

On the level of aesthetics, the film is a remarkable success, so much so that many viewers believe it to have been actual documentary footage until they see the disclaimer at the film's end and the acting credits. The title of the film, of course, is a lie. ...No Lies is a fiction. And while it contains emotional truth, it nonetheless dupes the audience in the same manner, Block would argue, as direct cinema. By keeping the film to the putatively 'real' footage, Block implicates the viewer in the filmmaker's increasingly misogynistic interrogation and shows the callousness and idiocy of his victim-blaming and that of the police.

The film had a long life after Block made it -- it was used throughout the '70s and early '80s by state and local governments across America as a means of sensitizing police officers to the unique challenges of working with victims of sexual trauma. And though it is itself a problematic work -- the central question that I don't know the answer to: Does this film use cinematic exploitation as a metaphor for rape or rape as a metaphor for cinematic exploitation? I tend to think it's the former, but the latter would be unquestionably ghastly -- I take heart in knowing that this is the rare fiction film that actually made an appreciable difference in public life, marking an epochal shift in the way many police precincts addressed victims of sexual assault.

The Shorts Project – Let’s Get Started (2008)

This film by Azazel Jacobs (The GoodTimesKid, Momma's Man) is like the best student film exercise you could ever hope for - it's got this simple, childlike charm and a playfulness about the physics of the world and inner lives of objects. It's shot on beautiful 16mm non-sync stock and has the feel of like a surreal Sesame Street interstitial by Jacques Tati.

More words would just ruin it. Watch this, then watch it again. So happy.

The Shorts Project – Reverie (2010)

I'm writing on this because it was posted on Ted Hope's blog under the title 'It Does Keep Getting Better and Better.' This statement was not meant as irony, but rather as a serious remark on what new technologies are doing for independent moviemaking.

I have respect for Ted Hope; as a producer he's been behind lots of movies and filmmakers I have a tremendous respect for: Nicole Holofcener, American Splendor, Ang Lee, Hal Hartley. He was an executive producer behind a valid candidate for best film of the 1990s, Todd Haynes' absolutely astonishing Safe. Certainly he has a lot more experience than I do making movies, so I mean all respect when I say this:

I think sometimes his view on film is absolutely cracked, especially when he comes up with one of his massive clusterfuck lists of Ways the Film Industry is Failing, telling us his bogus theories like independent film is failing because filmmakers haven't come up with 'fanboy toys' they can use to squeeze money out of viewers (I'm picturing the My Dinner with Andre action figures from Waiting for Guffman) and (this is a direct quote) "We don’t encourage (or demand) audience “builds” prior to production. Why shouldn’t every filmmaker or filmmaking team be required to have 5000 Fans prior to greenlight?"

He's got this wacky notion that cheap technology and social networking are the keys to solving a crisis in American independent film moviegoing that ultimately stems from the fact that there is no respect for filmmaking as an art form among American mass culture; instead of bolstering filmgoing on a whole as a cultural activity he posits social media marketing as an unguent, as though bait and switch marketing of increasingly bad movies wasn't what drove viewers off American arthouse cinema in the first place (I for one will never forget the jeers my opening-day screening of The Blair Witch Project, the prototype for all ensuing online campaigns, elicited from a San Antonio audience that LOVES horror movies). In the short term he can surely point to cases where films were effectively marketed using the internet, but this is a very limiting and limited solution that doesn't create a long-term and sustainable market for independent film.

So back to my point: Hope claims that the above-embedded short film, shot in 1080p on the Canon 5d Mk II camera, indicates some sort of advancement because of the image quality it represents is now in the hands of the low-budget filmmaker who can only afford a prosumer camera.

Here's my problem:

This movie looks awful.

Which is not to say that I think the Canon 5d Mk II is a shit camera. It's certainly not. But this movie is so poorly lit and incoherently edited that its ultimate lesson is that new technology serves as a mask for bad filmmaking. It took me half the video to realize that the filmmaker even was intending it as a narrative piece rather than as a collection of boneheaded imagery (about half the shots are copped from Michael Mann/Dion Beebe) that Sweet Dudes would find cool: a fast car, a helicopter, some girl. As a narrative, it's barely coherent, featuring nothing resembling compelling characters or interesting plotting.

Like the last big viral independent short, Panic Attack, this is the same old shit you can find anywhere else repackaged and held up as emblematic of some great advance in moviemaking. It's not -- it's a pile of cliches ripped from well-known mainstream filmmakers. I fail to see why we should be excited about this sort of thing.

Simply, despite the millions of views on the Internet, this is a terrible movie, and 99.999% of its viewers would never pay to see a movie that looks like this or has this little emotional resonance with its viewer.

They sure as shit wouldn't buy the action figures.