Kennelco Film Diary

(2008) dir. James Marsh
viewed: 08/08/08 at Embarcadero Cinemas, SF, CA

The title of the film “Man on Wire” comes from the police report that detailed the arrest and description of the public nuisance charge perpetrated by Philippe Petit in August of 1974.  Simply descriptive but cannot begin to capture the enormity of the feat that Petit executed with the help of friends and collaborators.  Petit and his team snuck into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City, strung a high wire across between the buildings, and Petit crossed the wire, at the insane heights of the then tallest buildings in the world, performing his simple and elegant highwire act, even laying upon the wire, hanging above the world.

It must be said that it doesn’t sound like the most compelling topic for a feature-length documentary, but the film is constructed with the power of the narrative, from Petit’s earlier highwire stunts to the collaborative adventure that drove his friends and colleagues to help attempt one of the most amazing stunts of such sort ever perpetrated.  The narrative grows, particularly through the vivid storytelling of Petit, and the beauty of the idea and the passion and the execution eventually becomes quite palpable.

The act, which is compared a few times in the film to that of a bank heist, is acknowledged as criminal by the crew, but recognized as also one in which no one is harmed, rather an act of performance and grandeur is perpetrated.  Which again sounds potentially insignificant, but the immensity of the act and the artistry of Petit’s athleticism is strong.

But what makes the film resonant beyond the history and the grandeur of the achievements is the very backdrop of the event.  The now long-gone, and far from forgotten towers loom throughout the film.  It is when Petit first hears of their construction, when the work is just initiated on the structures, that Petit is inspired to accomplish his strange goal.  The builidings speak to him, even from before they existed.

But the invasion of the building, the infiltration with all the equipment, while the building was being utilized yet still under construction echoes of the ultimate events perpetrated on the same structures.  Petit and his team run against harrowing odds to accomplish their infiltration and execution of the stunt, but yet they run into far fewer, smaller problems than one could imagine.  It’s not just the invasion and vulnerability, the heist of sorts, but the contrast in human aspiration behind the invasion.

Petit is not merely an artist.  It’s not merely performance.  While the cops and media keep wondering aloud to him as to “why” he did what he did, he has no answer.  It is someting, something of human achievement and artistry, something bizarre and dangerous, radical and risky, something that is in a sense indescribable.

(2007) dir. Julien Temple
viewed: 07/20/08

Director Julien Temple already made one excellent documentary about the 1970’s English punk scene, The Filth and the Fury (2000), a revisioning and revisiting of the Sex Pistols which really contextualized their songs in the culture of Britain at the time.   Eight years later, he approaches the period again, this time in a film in tribute to Joe Strummer, the leader of the Clash, perhaps still worth considering as “the only band that matters.”

Temple’s career has been pretty much married to music, starting with early work with the Pistols in their day, then music videos, movies with David Bowie, and on and on.  I’ve read that his documentary, Glastonbury (2006) is also good.  He knows the musicians and his interviewees seem to be fairly loose and comfortable, which works for these documentaries, these somewhat oral hisotries of the punk scene.

Temple seats most of his interviewees around campfires, reminiscing while flames flicker on their faces, an interesting aesthetic, but also a tribute to Strummer’s appreciation for campfires and the culture of sharing around them.  Temple also interweaves snippets of a radio show that Strummer compiled, playing music from his diverse fields of taste and influence, which is part of Strummer’s main “voice” in the film.

The movie begins with radio announcements of Strummer’s untimely death at age 50 from a congenital heart defect that he’d never known about.  And from there it goes back to his birth, to the family of a diplomat, and his diverse youth spent in several different countries, surrounded by different cultures and languages.  All this comes to influence the man who would be the leader of one of the most diverse and political of punk bands.  His years in boarding school and his middle class background put him in an odd place since he clearly identified with the working class and oppressed people arond the world.

I’ve seen a couple of documentaries about the Clash and quite a few about the music scene in general.  Don Letts’ The Clash: Westway to the World (2000) had the benefit of interviews with Strummer in his later years, the strongest part of a fairly weak film.  And most recently, I had watched Rude Boy (1980), a pseudodocumentary made during the Clash’s hedey which benefitted from lots of live footage of the band while they were still up and coming.

But Julien Temple has certainly added to his work in the documenting of the music scene.  Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten is a well-crafted, interesting film about one of the most intellectual and important leaders of the UK punk scene and man who made a difference.

(2007) dir. Yung Chang
viewed: 07/08/08 at Opera Plaza Cinemas, SF, CA

I was somewhat disappointed with the documentary Up the Yangtze.  I didn’t care for some of its techniques and found it kind of boring at times, despite the fact that I have developed a keen interest in the subject matter, the Three Gorges Dam project in China, the largest hydro-electric project on Earth and its effect on the people, the environment, and its symbolism and impact on China and the world.  As I was sitting in the theater, I was thinking to myself that I was probably the only person that I know that was actually excited about seeing Up the Yangtze, or perhaps even knew about it.  It had gotten good reviews in a lot of places.  I didn’t think it was all that good.

Made by Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang, the film starts with the director’s voice-over about a trip that he is taking with his grandfather on a luxury liner “up the Yangtze”, a ride that is one of reflection for the older man, having grown up in the area, seeing the change.  It’s also a culture shock of the change, the scale of change and the effects that it has on a couple of specific families and individuals.  “Personalized” documentaries aren’t my favorite approach to film, but Chang actually doesn’t even stick with it.  His personal story is only partial and despite opening the narrative, ends up only being a piece of the picture, and not a well-integrated piece.

The majority of the film follows a family that is desperately poor.  Relocated from their initial home in a city that is now a ghost city, abandoned and deconstructed and soon to be underwater, the father had been a coolie or rickshaw runner.  When they were moved out, he and his wife built a shack on the side of the Yangtze and started growing their own food.  But this shack is not long for the land and air, it also is in an area that will be flooded as the dam nears completion.  Their story also follows their daughter, who wants to go to high school but has to take a job, as she winds up working on one of the luxury cruise liners that go up and down the river and the culture shock between their abject poverty and the tourist industry right in front of them.

My problem with the following of this family is that some of the scenes seem staged.  I say this based on camera angles and certain shots that seem so implausible as some of the family drama unfolds.  

There is a lot to take stock of in the film, but I don’t feel the film really acted strongly in drawing some of these more dramatic contrasts and changes.  The ghost city where the family began is eerie and odd and a shocking contrast to the neon glowing city that has been constructed on the other side of the river, modern, glowing, Vegas-like against the beauty of the sloping hills and mountains.  The family that Chang follows is a striking story, showing how much of an outcast some of the peasants are just in their being.  Some of the people that Chang talks to offer their feelings toward the government and its role in the lives and decisions made that are so dramatically changing the landscape.  It’s a myriad of opinion.

The fact is that this is an amazing construct, this dam.  It represents the vastness of power of the government in China and the technological and industrial power of the country.  The landscape itself, the Three Gorges, are vast and beautiful themselves, and while the river is often brown, its majesty and power and history are dramatic. 

But oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), I found director Zhang ke Jia’s Still Life (2006), a narrative film set against this change and landscape, much more compelling.  Because Chang takes such a narrative approach with the poor family, the contrast may not be so stark.  Besides, Zhang’s films have a documentary-like approach to the landscape and the evolving history.  Still Life featured some amazing images or desolate towns being torn down, people living amidst signage of doom (soon to be flooded) areas.  Though both films inhabit the region and the culture, Still Life even with its weird surrealistic moments, used its visual imagery to a stronger extent.

I don’t know why I was so bothered by the inconsistencies in Chang’s Up the Yangtze, but it felt like a less sophisticated piece of filmmaking.  Not that it’s bad, just that I was hoping for more.

(2007) dir. Amir Bar-Lev
viewed: 05/11/08

The story that spawned this documentary, that of a 4 year old Binghampton, NY girl whose abstract paintings were being shown and sold in galleries in New York, had come to my attention back when the story first gained mainstream media attention in an article in The New York Times four years ago.  So, when I’d seen that a documentary feature had been made on the subject, I wasn’t surprised, but I was interested.

There are some obvious pre-thoughts one might bring to such a story: exploitation by the parents, the question of non-representational art inspired by the film’s title, the whole media frenzy over things like such a phenom.  What signifies a true “child prodigy”?

The film delves into all of that, but more, happily. 

I am always a bit skeptical of documentaries that figure their directors in their narratives, not due to obvious lack of objectivity but rather egotism, the need to insert oneself into a narrative about something or someone else.  And when the opening shot featured director Amir Bar-Lev chatting with Marla Olmstead, the four year old of note and her brother, I was a bit worried.  But as the story goes on, as the film takes on a personalized view, one in which the director himself expresses his lack of certainty and the basic nature of “knowing” what the facts of a story are, it comes to have made sense.  And I think overall, Bar-Lev did an admirable job with the subject matter.

Marla Olmstead’s story starts innocently enough.  Her father gave her paper to paint on while he was painting simply to distract her rather than putting her in front of the television.  She showed an aptitude for non-representational imagery and visual aesthetic higher than the average toddler and he moved her on to canvasses to see what she would do.  When on a whim, a friend at a cafe offers to put up her art to see what people would say, the family finds themselves on the threshhold of a world of art and media and public scutiny that they had never anticipated.

A local artist (interestingly a photo-realist painter himself, who turns out to truly have issues with non-representational art) capitalizes on the pint-sized ingenue and after an article in the local paper gets usurped by The New York Times, all hell breaks loose.  Marla’s art starts selling for thousands of dollars.  She gets calls from Jay Leno and Oprah and 60 Minutes.  The local artist who pimped her work locally gets her a show in New York City and the whole show sells out.

Marla’s mother clearly never pushed for her daughter to experience the limelight, focussing on her experience as any child, not seeking money nor fame.  Her father, especially with the help of the local promoter, saw opportunity for money and fame, but perhaps with a naivitee that might absolve the father at least of greater disdain. 

When the 60 Minutes piece runs, two days before her West Coast art opening, the shit hits the fan.  Interviewing with a psychologist who specializes in “child prodigies”, anchorperson Charlie Rose raises great skepticism of Marla’s authorship, suggesting that Marla’s father either coached her or actually painted the paintings himself.  Everyone is blindsided, including the film’s director, who had not questioned the work’s authenticity.

Here is where the issues become so much more complex.  In interviewing Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, the most discerning and wide-ranging discussion of the issues around non-representational art are raised.  The historical criticism that “my kid could paint that” and how such visual gibberish is an affront to the hard-fought skills and draughtmanship of the fine and representational painter are well-elucidated.  That the impressario, Marla’s dealer, the photo realist, later comes to voice these specific critiques after the 60 Minutes scandal and that he had ulterior motives to sort of put a “fuck you” to the art establishment underscores the continued reality of such perspectives.

The family becomes devastated by the question of authorship.  But the authorship is a big part of the golden eggs that little Marla is birthing.  The paintings have aesthetic beauty, but none of this story would be a story if her father Mark Olmsted was the artist.  It’s utterly that the hand of a 4 year old could create something so aesthetic and so beyond the typical artistry of children that makes the images fascinating and gives the story its story.  But for the family, as well for the promoter, integrity becomes a much bigger factor.

The rise to celebrity, the stink of scandal, the sense of betrayal by those whose exploitation was initially sought…it’s a very compelling story.  I would say so even more so for parents who have had small children and can relate even more to the choices and reprecussions therein.

And for the director, who also has the local author of the initial newspaper article on Marla as his other primary strong interviewee (a mother herself, and a sensative and sincere, intelligent counterpoint), there is a balance struck, one that singularly questions the perspective taken on representing this story.  The objectivity of documentation, in primal counterpoint to the subjectivity of non-narrative representation, has to recognize the limitations of objectivity, especially when pointedly questioning the integrity of people upon whom his own success as a filmmaker relies.

There is a lot here in this film, a lot to consider.  I certainly recommend it to anyone who has thought this far in my description that anything within it might be worth inspecting.

(2003) dir. Errol Morris
viewed: 05/09/08

I had always intended to see this film when it first came out.  Errol Morris is probably one of the more well-known and perhaps important documentary filmmakers of the past 20 years, and this film, stemming from a long interview or series of interviews with Robert S. McNamara, one-time Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, during the period of the Cuban Missle Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, and the onset of the Vietnam War.  It’s interesting stuff.  But when contrasted with the many documentaries that I have seen lately in reference to the current war in Iraq, it seemed utterly timely.

That and this week saw the opening of Morris’ new film Standard Operating Procedure (2008), a documentary about Abu Grhaib prison and use of torture in the U.S. government.

I have to say that The Fog of War is a tremendously contemplative film.  Before it’s release, I wasn’t even familiar with who Robert McNamara was.  Which is scary that such an important, key figure in the history of the past 50 years is obscure enough that I have trouble knowing who he is, much less the average American.

The stories he tells, interpreted as “lessons”, are stunning, fascinating insights into American history, into politics, the process of information distribution and what is really happening in the world.  McNamara is strikingly intelligent and his life story, rising from his role as a Harvard professor into military analysis and into the ultimate role as advisor to the U.S. presidency about the steps to take in some of the most important crises of the past half-century.

He strikingly notes that under his few years as Secretary of Defense that the U.S. came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear war, World War III, perhaps the end of life as we know it three specific times.  There is a depth of insight and reality here that echoes deeply into much of what we have come to accept and understand as “history”.  And it’s not that McNamara is offering a “no holds barred” interview.  He clearly states that certain understandings up culpability and of responsibility he will not address, nor the effect that these choices and experiences had on his own family. 

McNamara is an incredibly intelligent man, whose role in history is significant, whose insight is keen and specific, whose knowledge and ideas are well worth hearing, taking for what they are, for their specific clarity and specificity.  Knowledge is never 100%.  Hindsight is not necessarily 20-20.  But hindsight is history.  And this personal perspective is fascinating and well-evoked by Morris.  I do recommend it very much.

(2007) dir. Loretta Alper, Jeremy Earp
viewed: 05/07/08

War Made Easy, and its cumbersome subtitle How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, is not one of the better films about the Iraq conflict.  The ideas are there, and many of the things said have great significance, but the film itself is very weak, cobbling together snippet after snippet of soundbytes and talking heads of pundits and politicians from the major television news sources.  Really, it’s not purely about the Iraq war or the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but about the way that the government and the media manipulate information and access of information about the events to sway and attract public opinion.

It’s kind of like Noam Chomsky lite.

The film is adapted from a book of the same name by Norman Solomon, who is the sole interviewee for the film.  Solomon’s ideas and critiques are interesting and compelling.  But the format of this film lacks the self-awareness necessary to truly communicate the complexity of objective information.

The film itself is a disseminator of ideas.  And by cobbling together the soundbytes as it does, the film in many ways creates a similar fallacy that it is critiquing the media of.  Solomon describes the manipulation of information, the lack of hard, independent reporting even in media outlets that are considered to be “liberal”, like CNN.  I mean, it’s scary, really, if you think about the state of “news media”.  The newspaper is dying quickly, struggling to move online in a viable way, but hundreds, if not thousands, have folded or have cut back on reporting.  Television media has fallen prey to not just military manipulation but public perception and media backers.  They’ve tried to alter the format of news dissemination to make it “entertainment”.

Almost everyone I know (besides myself) gets their news from NPR or web resources.  Or even from English reporting, which has yet to decline the way that American news has.  Of course, the web and blogging has become the new forum and format.  Media and knowledge and the control of information.  This film really made me think of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), which was my first exposure to the breadth of Chomsky’s thoughts.

The bottom line about this film is that it’s not the best way to access these valuable thoughts and ideas.  Perhaps Norman Solomon’s book is a better starting point, or other such books, blogs, information.  Ultimately it’s the ideas that are important.  Facts should be supported by proof or data.  The rest are the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unkowns”.

(2005) dir. Doug Block
viewed: 03/21/08

51 Birch Street is a documentary shot on video, featuring some semi-home movies, in which director Doug Block merely wanted to catch his parents in their actuality, talking about their lives a bit, not so much for creating a theatrical film, but simply for posterity.  But after his mother dies, his father suddenly shacks up with a former secretary, who he had been close to for 35 years, triggering a series of reactions and questions in his children about the reality of his parents’ relationship.

Block’s mother, who battled depression in the mid-1960’s, started detailed diaries, notebooks and notebooks of them, boxes of them.  These also come to surface when his father marries his former secretary and leaves the house that he’d live in for more than 50 years of marriage.

Block dives into this material and his exploration of his mother and father and their relationship has true depths, attempting to understand the mysteries that have surfaced, understanding the hidden lives and the surface lives of his parents.  Perhaps this is a really interesting thing, in a sense, for anyone.  Understanding our parents, who we are too young to understand when they are young, who we know as protectors and teachers and nurturers, more powerful than us as children, but who as we become adults ourselves, do try to understand as people who we could have known or identified with.  We always have the years of separation from ever really knowing.

Block delves pretty hard, going through the reams of diaries, photographs, effluvia.  He turns the camera on himself (quite literally), putting his own marriage and children under the lens as well, personalizing beyond an already highly personal story.

This is part of the film’s strengths but also its weaknesses.  It’s very touchy-feely, soft-hearted, and whiny.  And ultimately, the film’s subject matter isn’t really as rich as he feels it is.  In fact, maybe this film would be more interesting made by someone else, with more distance and objectivity…the opposite of this film’s approach.  It is interesting, but in thinking of the crazy story that is Crazy Love (2007), another documentary about a New York man and woman and their long story (only vaguely similar — this is a bit of a stretch to compare them), but the core story of Crazy Love is actually much, much more fascinating.

Maybe Block shouldn’t have made 51 Birch Street, a question that he asks in the film more than once.  Maybe it isn’t as significant a story to sit through.  Maybe it is more a small tale, a segment of something potentially bigger. 

The film did make me think about my own marriage and my children, as well as the break-up of my parents’ marriage and the secrets and reality that I was unaware of as a child.  It’s not that I didn’t find the movie somewhat provocative, just ultimately not all that interesting and not all that special.

(2007) dir. Alex Gibney
viewed: 03/11/08 at Opera Plaza Cinemas

Winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary just a few weeks ago, I’d been reading about Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side in a number of good sources, including The New York Times and The New Yorker, that this was indeed a compelling film.  And compelling it is.

This is another of a recent spate of documentaries that criticize the Bush administration, as it is still in office, over innumerable offences and crimes.  It’s often hard to tell what is perhaps the most brutal and disgusting thing to have arisen from their administration, especially with the breadth of the content of these films.  Taxi to the Dark Side focuses on the authorized use of torture, actively flaunting the the Geneva Convention, by the Bush administration in regards to terrorists (or suspected terrorists) since September 11, 2001.

The story focuses on a specific murder, which the killing was classified by a military autopsy, of a young Afghani taxi driver who was captured by a militia and turned into Bagram prison, which turned out to be a training ground for military prisons, particuarly Abu Grhaib.  Prisoners and hung by their wrists in forced standing positions for 20 hours a day, kicked, waterboarded, humiliated…all in the interest of “interrogation”.

Gibney points out the the soldiers on the field are given little guidance or training, and acted very much on orders that came down from the very top.  Of course, it is those soldiers who are ultimately courtmartialed and punished for these crimes, while the senior officers and officials keep climbing the ladders of their offices.  Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney John Yoo are all severely complicit in the actions of these people.

Yoo is an interestingly evil character, a consumate lawyer, who helped pen the missives and orders in ways that via vagueries and legalese, comprise nothing clear, nothing that one could simply and easily pin on them as “torture”.  It is the way that language is used and abused to escape clarity, hiding behind documents whose intent is to hide intent.  Yoo is the scribe of evil.

The taxi driver, Dilawar, is murdered by his capturers, the U.S. government.  His legs are pulverized.  He was also innocent.

The film goes into Guantanamo, the Kafkaesque holdings of prisoners, whose tortures were developed in these aforementioned prisons, who have no access to legal counsel and are held with vague, if never stated crimes.  There is a statistic quoted that as few as 5% of the detainees have ever been tied directly to terrorist activities.

Of course, this is the greatest of hypocrisies.  Not only does it show that the U.S. goverment is medieval in their practices, but the argument of protecting “freedom” is being defined by absolutely tearing it away from other people.  What the Bush administration has enacted is the opposite of American ideals.  They are true terrorists, and after this film, I would hope that the U.N. would seek the administration out for war crimes.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you wish there was a hell.  And those who have enacted these tortures should be punished perhaps under their own auspices.

It’s sickening, really.

As a film, I still consider No End in Sight (2007) a better constructed documentary.  But the focal point of torture,…is disgusting.  And deeply, deeply disturbing.  And as for John McCain, who suffered torture in a Vietnam POW camp, who endorses the government’s use of waterboarding…that is a huge chink out of the armor of his integrity.

(1970) dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin
viewed: 03/04/08

Gimmie Shelter is one of those films that I’ve been kind of interested in seeing for years.  My biggest stumbling block about it is that I pretty much hate “classic rock” and almost all of its purveyors.  This is a personal quirk, due to growing up in a town whose primary radio stations played way too much Beatles and Led Zeppelin and turned me away from mainstream music, especially of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Like I said, that’s just me.

Perhaps not so oddly, I’ve come begrudgingly to an appreciation of the Rolling Stones.  I won’t try to analyze their music or importance here, but just to say that I’ve come to not view them in the same light as the aforementioned bands that I still hate passionately.

After seeing the Maysles Brothers’ film Grey Gardens (1975) at the Catsro, I felt more inspired to see others of their films and had queued Gimmie Shelter up at that point.  Somewhat on a whim, though an interestingly timed whim, I pushed this to the top of my queue and finally watched the controversial film of the Stones and the Altamonte Free Concert that took place in December or 1969, which was the year that I was born.

It has been often cited, the Altamonte Free Concert, due to the violence and deaths that took place at what was intended to be the “Woodstock West” experience, that this event was a cultural turning point, the sign of the “death” of the hippie era.  That, alongside the Manson Family murders earlier in the year, perhaps are the signifiers.  I can’t really comment on that per se.  My understanding of American culture allows for me to more or less not disagree necessarily.

The film documents the Stones’ tour of the States, with footage of a concert in New York, a studio session in Alabama, the concert, its planning with attorney Melvin Belli, and a film editing and review session with the Maysles brothers and Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, reviewing the footage, the events, and leveeing small commentary on it.

During the early part of the film, one is struck by how close the fans are to the stage, with their arms on it, the singers only feet away, occasionally closer.  You don’t see that at any large venue really with a band with the popularity that the Stones had in 1969.  Also, the Maysles portraiture of the Stones themselves, mainly Mick Jagger, whose swagger and style the cameras capture and appreciate.  At one point, the film gets less “purely” documentarian (fly on the wall style) and does some double images of Jagger singing.  There is an aspect of adoration(?) perhaps?  Recognition of a rockstar in his prime, a band, arguably one of the “greatest” of rock and roll, in their prime, playing some of their best music.

But as the film moves forward, there is an aspect of foreshadowing, with enraptured fans rushing the stage and being roughly and sternly pulled off-stage.  I say foreshadowing, because that is how it struck me, especially in consideration of the fans proximity to the band.  In a sense, there is no pure foreshadowing, because after one of the first concert sequences, we are drawn into the editing room with Jagger and Watts, reviewing and commenting on the footage.

One of the Maysles brothers plays a recording of a radio talk show broadcast from the Bay Area, in which the summarization of the tragic events is played, including a call in from a member of the Hell’s Angels, who defends their role at the concert saying that they had never been formally hired to do anything.

The concert itself is a disaster.  Originally planned for Golden Gate Park, until the city of San Francisco bowed out, the concert was then targeted for Sears Raceway in nearby Sonoma County, but at the last minute, and I do mean last minute, they move it to the Altamonte Speedway in East Alameda County.  The whole operation had to be moved overnight, the stage, the facilities, and everything, when they anticipated an enormous crowd (ultimately estimated around 300,000).  It should have been canceled or post-poned. 

What they ended up with was a mass of heavily stoned humanity, including the Hell’s Angels, whose role of “security” was sawed-off, weighted cue sticks for beating, and a lot of pretty big name bands at the time.  Though only Jefferson Airplane and the Flying Burrito Brothers made the film, Crosby Stills Nash and Young and Santana also played, with the Grateful Dead wisely stepping down when they caught wind of the violence.

The key event is the stabbing of Meredith Hunter by one of the Hells Angels, which plays out while the Stones attempt to perform.  The cameras catch the event in vivid imagery, and the Maysles play it back for Jagger and Watts, freeze-framing on the wielding of the knife by the biker and the pulling of the gun by the victim, who died from the beating he took after the sequence.

I think the Maysles turn on Jagger through the film.  During the Stones’ performance at Altamonte, violence is constantly breaking out.  Fans are gesturing toward Jagger to look toward the fights, and Jagger, stopping briefly, begins strutting and dancing and singing again.  The review of the footage ends with a dismissive comment by Jagger, followed by closing shots of people leaving the speedway the next morning.  Watts, earlier in the film, expresses sadness at the events and shock because some of the bikers had seemed nice.

I think that there is perhaps lots more written on the subject, but it does seem that the Maysles do want to impose blame on Jagger of some sort.  While they love and appreciate his magnetism and sensuality, they seem to make him out as morally empty.  I think perhaps that is a bit much, especially based on what is shown in the film.  The tragedies really resulted from a complete lack of genuine planning and out and out bad planning.  Apparantly, the Angels had performed security at concerts successfully before, but paying a biker gang in beer to keep ragingly tripped out hippies at bay during such a massive concert?  Yikes.  But ultimately, throwing such a massive thing together as they did just set the stage for lots of badness.

It’s a powerful movie in many ways, capturing the pulse of culture in its prime, seeing a band that has been known as the “Strolling Bones” for almost 30 years now when they were young and primal and writing and performing at their best.  And who knows, much else, too, perhaps?

(2007) dir. Ricki Stern, Anne Sundberg
viewed: 02/04/08

Janjaweed = “devil on horseback”, so defines the title of this frightening documentary about the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, as witnessed by an American ex-Marine Captain who is situated there as an “observer” of the “ceasefire” for the African Union.  The janjaweed, for those who don’t keep up with the news, are comprised nomadic Arabic-speaking African tribemen, who, funded by the Sudanese government in Khartoum, have been systematically raping and killing the villagers and villages of Darfur, burning whole villages to the ground, murdering everyone that they can.  On horseback or not, it’s about as vile as humanity gets.

The ex-Marine captain is Brian Steidle, and the story is really largely one from his perspective.  Coming from a long line of military, Steidle served his stint and, shunning a desk job, took the opportunity to be an observer in Sudan of the “ceasefire” between the north and the south, the cessation of a civil war that lasted for more than two decades.  Armed with a camera only, Steidle played witness to the absolute horrors and evil that the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed took out on the people of Darfur, unquestionably a systematic “ethnic cleansing” and genocide.  Steidle hoped that his photographs and reports to the African Union would bring about change, but as they didn’t, he left Sudan and returned home.

Still deeply troubled by the events that to which he bore witness, he was eventually convinced to share his photographs with the world via The New York Times.  The reaction to the images was swift, pulling him onto talk shows, presenting to Congress, meeting with Condoleeze Rice and many others.  While the reaction was swift, the action was non-existent.

Much against Steidle’s very rigorously pro-American, pro-military, pro-government upbringing, he, along with his sister, evolved into an activist.  Speaking at rallies, presenting his experience to anyone who would listen, he strove harder and harder to try to get some military action to protect the people of Darfur from their goverment and their militias.  And nothing substantial has ever happened.

Toward the end of the film, he and his sister visit Chad and Rwanda.  In Chad, they work with his sister’s organization that looks to help people displaced by these actions.  And in Rwanda, he looks to find an answer to how to change the situation in looking at the aftermath of a similar genocide only 12 years earlier.  He is left in tears.

In the end, he presents his documentations and his story to the U.N. court in The Hague, Netherlands, hoping that if not through rallying the people to force the governments to take action, that perhaps through the indictment of the leadership for war crimes can perhaps bring about the change.

The horrors of the reality is almost unfathomable.  For us as viewers, here in our homes.  In the pictures, in the facts and stories, in the faces of the people.  For Steidle, having been right in the midst of it, with nothing but a camera, while the horrors were unleashed with no way of stopping it, the reality utterly changed him.  His dedication is noble.  The evil, and that is not a word that I use frequently, but the evil of the actions is loathsome.  It sickens the soul.