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Interview

Jasmine Leyva’s doc The Invisible Vegan aims to expand the frame

by rick May 3, 2017

written by rick

Actor, producer, and now director of The Invisible Vegan Jasmine Leyva doesn’t feel like mincing words.

When asked about why she wanted to make her new documentary-in-progress and how it relates to earlier films like Food, Inc., she responds:

Most of [the] experts are all white males; you don’t even introduce a POC until the 50-minute mark. Black vegans can feel invisible in their own community, and on the opposite side, you’re invisible in white spaces. It’s ok to be vegan, but not ok to be a Black vegan, despite how food impacts racial politics. You’re supposed to check your blackness at the door.

An independent production with a very clear point of view, Leyva’s labor of love follows in the ongoing tradition of folks like A. Breeze Harper, Food Empowerment Project‘s lauren Ornelas, and others, who work to center critical race theory and intersectional activism in the still-overwhelming white animal rights movement. The Invisible Vegan seems determined to upend stereotypes wherever it finds them.

During a brief but wide-ranging chat, Leyva told me about the motivations behind the film, and also what she’s learned as an independent filmmaker:

I think you have to just do it — when you’re female, you’re not upper class, you’re Black, people are not breaking down doors for you. So I learned: you know what? I’m going to use what I have and make what I can.

Ironically, this approach seems to accidentally echo the very foodways mentioned by several people in the above trailer, except in reverse — “make do with what you have.”

What’s inspiring is Leyva’s tenacity and forthright politics, which recognize contradictions and problems but stay grounded in a kind of compassionate assurance regarding nonhuman animals and the wider communities at large.

And, as ever, there’s no lack of (white) skeptics:

She also clearly knows her history, which The Invisible Vegan, with its title riffing on Ralph Ellison’s classic, promises to detail further. “[The Invisible Vegan] attaches veganism to African roots,” she emphasizes. “When people think of ‘African-American food’, they think of soul food — but hey now! Our history didn’t start on a plantation.”

At one point in our conversation, I ask if she has any concerns about tokenism with The Invisible Vegan — I’m, after all, a white, straight, male, middle-class vegan asking her about her film. Animal rights efforts have been notorious over the years for this kind of thing, these blind spots and a prevailing sense of liberal do-goodism.

There’s a brief, total silence on the other end of the line. “You know,” I say, “maybe we should skip that. Maybe that’s not the best question for me to be asking.”

“Yeah. Alright,” Leyva says.

Moments later, halfway through the next question, she interrupts me. “Can we go back to that last one?”

“Of course!”

I don’t mind being a representative. But if it’s presented in a way that I’m one of the sole black women interested in veganism, then it’s a problem. If I’m one of the voices — and there are and have been lots of these voices — and then I’m ok with it.

The Invisible Vegan has its first screening on July 15th, with plans for wider distribution by the end of the year.

May 3, 2017 0 comments

Film Interview

Bridging The Abyss: An Interview With The Directors of Notes On Blindness

by rick November 28, 2016

written by rick

Peter Middleton and James Spinney began with a relatively modest, if challenging, objective: to render cinematic the blind experience of snowfall. Years later, the result is their remarkable film Notes on Blindness, which premiered at Sundance and screened at festivals across the country (including SFIFF, where I was fortunate enough to catch it), picking up awards and accolades along the way. It now opens in locations across the U.S.

In its aesthetic, innovations, and ambition, Notes on Blindness is something much more profound and far-reaching than that original logline might imply. Told through the overlaid audio diary of the partially-sighted and eventually blind theologian John Hull, Notes on Blindness recreates the scenarios described, deploying accomplished lip-syncing actors and a wealth of expressionism. The film presents a “cinema of blindness”; it deconstructs notions of seeing, so key to the very idea of film, while skillfully posing questions about how we encounter and represent our worlds.

At the same time, Notes on Blindness is the deeply personal tale of one articulate man’s journey — not from light to darkness, but from one mode of being to another, with all the pain and grace that entails. And like all stories of discovery and rebirth, it is, at its heart, also a love story.

Middleton and Spinney took some time out from a busy schedule to discuss the development of Notes on Blindness, the challenges (some self-imposed) they faced doing justice to Hull’s insights and legacy, and the exciting ongoing efforts to promote inclusivity in the cinema for blind and partially-sighted audiences.

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Rick Kelley: In a New York Times piece, you note that you met John and Marilyn while filming a short doc on the blind experience of snowfall, implying the issues Notes on Blindness explores have captivated you for some time. What was your entry point into all of this?

Pete Middleton and James Spinney: That’s right. Around six years ago now, we began reading first-person accounts of blindness to inform a short film about experiences of snowfall. And we came across John’s book – Touching The Rock: An Experience of Blindness. The book contains a chapter concerning snow, in which John describes how snow blurs the contours by which you might navigate with your cane, as well as dampening the acoustics of environments. For this reason, snow is sometimes called ‘the blind man’s fog’.

After collaborating with John on this project, we asked him about the audio recordings upon which his book was based. John had recorded an audio diary in the early 1980s, a three year project, documenting experiences of sight loss. He was generous enough to share these recordings with us – a dusty box of C-90 cassettes containing sixteen hours of audio recordings. These tapes became the starting point for Notes on Blindness.

RK: And the feature emerged from a series of shorter pieces?

PM and JS: Absolutely. Listening to John’s audio diaries for the first time, we knew that such a profound journey, from grief and loss to rebirth and renewal, demanded a long-form treatment. But it presented huge challenges in terms of structure and style, which were both exciting and daunting. It was also a difficult project to pitch. So we began making a series of short films, partly as a way of experimenting with the material, partly as an attempt to give a sense of what the feature might become. We were confident that anyone who heard John’s diaries would get a sense of the power of his account – and the depth and poetry of his enquiry.

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RK: Notes on Blindness relies on that pre-recorded audio and also lip-syncing from the actors, a technique shared with Clio Barnard’s film The Arbor, about Andrea Dunbar. I thought it works tremendously well in your film, and adds a kind of haunting quality to the aesthetic, but also imagine it must’ve required extensive preparation. How did you settle on this technique, and how did the cast and crew respond to its demands?

PM and JS: Well, from the beginning it was clear that John’s original audio recordings had to be front and centre – that the film had to be told in John’s own words. But the account is a very internal journey, exploring his dreams, his fading visual memories, his imaginative world, as well as new sensory awakenings.

Of course, these are difficult areas to access through a conventional documentary approach, especially when the diaries were kept thirty years ago. So we began thinking about creative ways to follow John on this very internal journey, whilst preserving the authenticity of the voices.

The Arbor was an important reference in developing this approach, which led to an approach in which actors Dan Skinner and Simone Kirby play John and Marilyn on-screen, lip-syncing to the original recordings. And the soundtrack is built not only from John’s diaries and the interviews we did with them, but also tens of hours of home audio recordings, which captured Christmases, birthdays, bedtime stories, which contain the voices of the entire family.

Dan and Simone spent the weeks running up to the shoot familiarising themselves with the audio, working with mp3s of each line of dialogue. Each line was preceded by a series of beeps to help cue them in. Working like this meant that we didn’t record any sound on set; instead we had someone who triggered the audio clips, responding to Dan and Simone’s performance. And at times we had to recut dialogues on set if the rhythms felt wrong and there was need for additional pauses.

Funnily enough, after a couple of weeks it became strangely normalised. I suppose there are plenty of processes in filmmaking that are equally bizarre. Ultimately, we were amazed, from the first audition to the final day of shooting, at Dan and Simone’s ability to naturalise such a precise technique, and to subsume it into a much greater and more subtle performance.

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RK: I hadn’t initially appreciated that Joakim Sundström, who also worked on the very excellent Berberian Sound Studio, was the supervising sound editor on the Notes on Blindness. Given the centrality of sound design here, can you talk a bit about the process and about that collaboration? Did you have a very strong sense going into the project of how this should function, or did things develop as you went along?

PM and JS: We worked with Joakim on the short film in 2013, so we’d been talking about the project for a number of years. During that time we were sending audio edits for the feature back and forth, culminating in a 90-minute sound cut which would provide the structure for filming of the visuals. Many scenes were constructed with sound as the starting point.

We spent a lot of time in early discussions with Joakim talking about how to embed the documentary audio. The original tapes are pretty raw, so our re-recording mixer Per Boström spent a great deal of time de-noising the diary recordings to make them easier to understand, whilst at the same time trying to preserve the distinctively analogue quality of the tapes. Wherever possible we layered in material from John’s archive in more subliminal ways, such as the baptism scene early in the film, or the voices of the students in the scenes of John at work in the University of Birmingham, which are all from his tapes.

Aside from these recordings, all of the sound was built in post production, so Joakim and his team embedded John’s original recordings within textured sound environments, emulating the necessary ambience and presence of the locations into which they had been re-staged. Much of the textural detail is constructed from foley work, recorded to match the movements of the actors, who in turn had matched their movement to the documentary audio. It was an experimental process. Though we felt confident in the approach, there were no guarantees that it was going to come off!

RK: It does! I’m interested in this whole notion of a cinema of blindness. There’s a lovely quote in your piece: “One of the great tensions of the work is that it is constantly working at the limits of expression, straining language dominated by visual referents and imagery. Yet it is at these moments that the account is at its most poetic.” Could you elaborate on this a bit? And how does it relate to Hull’s sense that “blindness is the easiest disability to simulate by closing your eyes but it’s the hardest to empathize with. Behind those closed eyelids you have a sighted person’s brain”?

PM and JS: Yes, those two ideas feel very closely related. John said that for several years he didn’t feel he was a blind person, he was a sighted person who couldn’t see. In other words, his mind expected and longed to see, he felt an absence of vision. But as the diary develops, John begins to register a change. Partly through a conscious attempt to no longer live in ‘the nostalgia of the visual world’, partly through an unconscious neurological rewiring, he says that increasingly ‘the things which once one took for granted, then mourned the loss of, then tried so desperately to compensate for, in the end cease to matter. One begins to live by other interests, other values, one begins to take up residence in another world’. At this point John felt that he was no longer a sighted person who could not see: he had become blind.

John and Marilyn talk very movingly in the film about the concept of ‘different worlds of experience’, and their struggle not to lose one another on either sides of this divide. And part of John’s diary project is an attempt to reconcile these different worlds, to find a bridge through communication. In some ways, our everyday language assumes common experience. And in John’s writing he powerfully finds a way to deconstruct both the sighted experience he is leaving behind and the blind identity he comes to discover, analysing how the senses play into our sense of identity, our relationships, in such a way that recognises and values what is individual to how we each perceive the world, but always as an attempt to, in his words ‘bridge the abyss’ that separates different worlds of experience’ and find ‘a common humanity’.

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RK: You’ve spoken about specific, self-imposed restrictions you deployed – for instance, making faces elusive in the frame, shooting on longer lenses, avoiding wide establishing shots, refusing to shoot the reverse of supporting characters in Notes on Blindness. To me, this almost brings to mind Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions (on which Joakim Sundström worked too, as it turns out). What were the motivations and advantages of such an approach? What were the difficulties?

PM and JS: Certain shooting conventions felt instinctively wrong when thinking about how to approach this material in a way that was empathetic to the subjectivity of John’s account. It felt wrong to shoot clean establishing wide shots when John talks about the initial shrinking of his perceptual environment. It felt wrong for the audience to clearly see the faces of John’s children when his narration describes his distress at losing precious memories of their faces.

This is something we developed with our cinematographer Gerry Floyd whilst working on the short film and in development of the feature, so from the start of the shoot we were always thinking within this mindset. As is often the case with restrictions, the limitations came to be creatively freeing: the visual style of the film is largely a response to them.

RK: Notes on Blindness has a VR companion piece, which has been exhibited at Sundance and Tribeca, will soon be more widely available, which seems tremendously exciting. How does it tie in to the film itself?

PM and JS: Yes indeed, the virtual reality experience is now available for free on the Oculus store, iTunes and Google Play. Like the film, the VR is also narrated by John, from material edited from his audio diaries, but it’s an animated 360 experience led by binaural sound.

And sound was very much the starting point: exploring the development of John’s awakening perception of ‘acoustic space’ – how multi-layered patterns of sound bring depth, detail and contour to an environment. Though there are two chapters that bridge both the feature and the VR, they’re very different experiences. So we’re excited about how they speak to each other, and how they can provide different entry points to John’s account of blindness.

RK: There are also plans for different types of exhibition formats that will emphasize accessibility for blind and partially sighted audiences. This sounds pretty unlike anything else I know about going on right now.

PM and JS: Well, cinema can often be quite an unrewarding experience for blind and partially sighted audiences. Often the process of making films accessible is an afterthought in the creative process – and undervalued by distributors and exhibitors. We’ve been working closely with the UK’s leading blindness charity, the RNIB, to make Notes on Blindness part of a conversation about how film is experienced by blind and partially sighted audience.

The result is that audiences can choose from four soundtrack options. As well as the standard version of the film’s soundtrack, you can choose an audio description track by Louise Fryer, a leading audio-describer, or by the actor Stephen Mangan. The two versions are very different in their tone and dramatic character.

We’ve also worked on an ‘enhanced soundtrack’, which works as an audio piece. Instead of relying on the voice of an external narrator, we’ve edited in about five more minutes of narration from John and Marilyn, as well as additional sound design and music cues so that it works entirely without picture. This version has been mixed in Dolby 5.1 so it can be a cinematic experience. In the UK release we’ve been working with our distributor Curzon Artificial Eye to put on screenings of the audio-described and enhanced soundtrack versions.

All three versions are also available via an app called ‘MovieReading’, which means they can be accessed even at cinemas that don’t have AD headsets, as well as at home. And the different versions of the soundtrack are also available on the DVD and via on-demand services. It’s been a fascinating process, and we hope one that other filmmakers and distributors can build upon in thinking about how cinema can be made more inclusive.

Notes on Blindness Australia

RK: Over the course of your work, from the earlier pieces through Notes on Blindness, you came to know John Hull quite well. In closing, I’d like to ask what you personally came to value most about your interactions, and also what you think he’d want emphasized, if anything, as his legacy?

PM and JS: One thing that we’re conscious the feature film doesn’t quite capture is John’s tremendous sense of humour. Which was one of the motivations for producing a companion piece called RADIO H, a ten-minute short film narrated by John’s eldest daughter Imogen, featuring the recordings that she and John kept together in her youth. This captures something more of John’s warmth, his irreverence, as well as his political activism.

In terms of what John might have wanted to emphasise in with regard to the film, a few years ago we asked him to go back to certain passages from his audio diaries and respond to them now. And in particular, the diary entry from 1983, where he confronted the loss of precious visual memories of Marilyn and his children.

He concluded that, on the other side of a complex process of mourning, of trying desperately to compensate for the loss of these things, in the end they cease to matter. Because ‘being human is not seeing’, he said, ‘it’s loving’.

November 28, 2016 0 comments

Interview

7 Days in Ohio: An Interview with Nathan Rabin

by rick September 12, 2016

written by rick

Nathan Rabin — original head writer of The AV Club, author and memoirist, prolific pop cultural critic, noted Juggalo — is one of the funniest and sharpest observers of our current media landscape and the way we live now. His work, rooted in a bemused outlook and anti-cynical, democratic approach to material, is as likely to tackle the 1966 Batman movie or the vapidly handsome train-wreck that is Ryan Lochte as it is the rise of comedy geek culture or his own experiences of recent fatherhood.

Rabin’s view is expansive, to put it mildly.

His new book, out tomorrow, contrasts the Republican National Convention and Insane Clown Posse’s annual festivities. 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, The Gathering Of The Juggalos And The Summer Everything Went Insane is a portrait of clowns and cartoonish maniacs, and also ICP fans.

With the book barreling toward your Kindle like a backyard wrestler in clown makeup, Rabin was kind enough to field a few of our most pressing questions, including whether or not RNC delegates shared their drugs with him, if he considered starting a riot, and to what degree his experiences echoed the classic American film MacGruber.

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Rick Kelley: So how did the idea for 7 Days In Ohio first come about? Obviously, you’re already something of a Juggalo chronicler — arguably the preeminent one. But was it just the weird happenstance that the Gathering was occurring so close (in time and place) to the RNC? Were there other motivating factors that made you connect the two events?

Nathan Rabin: I suspect it might horrify my wife to admit this, but, real talk, going to the Gathering of the Juggalos is a highlight of every year, personally and professionally. It’s what The Long Shot podcast‘s Jamie Flam might refer to as a “place of enchantment.” Tragically, however, people’s fascination and curiosity about Juggalos has a limit, so I need to find a new angle to cover it every year. Last year my angle was “family.” I was supposed to write specifically about families with the questionable judgment to bring children to The Gathering but I expanded it to be about family in all its forms — biological, surrogate, even the family of man as found in the gospels of Juggalos For Jesus, an interesting group of true believers trying to spread the message of Christ to Juggalos. I ended up writing about Juggalos for Jesus fairly extensively.

So when my long-lost half brother Vince re-entered my life unexpectedly about three months ago, brandishing a massive homemade sword that he had made for me, and radiating a very Juggalo kind of desperation, I knew I had my angle: I would reconnect with my brother and have this intense, spiritual, cultural and familial experience attending my fifth Gathering and his first. THAT, alone, I think would have made for a really compelling piece. But then I found out that the Republican convention was being held on overlapping days in the same state and I saw an opportunity to take a really big idea and make it positively epic. So I seized upon the overarching concept of dysfunctional family reunions and violently differing takes on our country’s future and problems and thank God, the experience lived up to my expectations. I had a chance to say something important about a singular moment in our culture. Hopefully I succeeded.

RK: One of the striking things about your writing is the way you meld personal experience and social/cultural observation. That’s been true for a long time, and prior to the book, you wrote a really fascinating piece about this whole Juggalo/Trump endeavor and reconnecting with your brother. Did you anticipate how intense this was going to be?

Rabin: I think I anticipated it being intense because my brother is intense. Really intense. Like, pummelingly intense. And that’s a big part of what made him so fascinating to me. I think I am a little less intense because I’ve had an easier life. I write about silly movies and go to The Gathering. He uses fire and iron to forge steel to his will. He’s been in multiple knife fights. At various points in my life, I’ve collected ALL of the early EPs of both The Smiths and Belle & Sebastian. And my brother is tormented by his relationship with our biological mother because it’s so intense whereas I am liberated from it, in a strange way, by having her out of my life. So I think I realized going in that this wouldn’t work if my brother and I were both super intense, so I think he was intense, and then his wife and myself tried to be mellowing influences, with some success. The Gathering began on kind of a weird, dark note but it improved tremendously.

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RK: In your earlier book You Don’t Know Me, But You Don’t Like Me, you go out of your way to shelve cynicism and try to find the redeeming aspects and connective threads between frequently despised subcultures — in that case, not just ICP but Phish fandom. Are you in any way able to recuperate Trump’s lunatic legions of supporters? Are they somehow redeemable in context, or at least explicable? Or are they exactly what they appear to be — namely, garbage bigot monsters?

Rabin: I was wondering about this going in. When I went to my first Gathering a long, long time ago I knew almost nothing about them except that people thought they were the worst, they dressed like clowns and sprayed Faygo and did that silly “Miracles” song. And I was writing a book about them! So I learned through experience that they were not what people derided them as being, or at least were a whole lot more complicated and impressive than the stereotypes held. On the other hand, I knew far too much about Trump going in. And he’s EXACTLY what his detractors accuse him of being. So while there was half of one percent of my brain that wondered, “What if you go there and Trump starts to make sense to you? What if he converts you?” I doubted that anything there would change my opinion of Trump and his supporters. And nothing did. If anything, it made him seem even MORE terrifying and wrong.

RK: The Gathering is known for the pervasiveness of clowns and drugs. The RNC, of course, has no shortage of clowns, but I’m curious if you went full Hunter Thompson and ate a ton of mescaline to deal with it. In retrospect, are there narcotics you wish had been distributed more freely to the delegates?

Rabin: To be brutally honest I had two different visions for the trip. In one, I would take a Greyhound bus to Cleveland with the whole Fear & Loathing accessories unit, with mushrooms and molly and pot but I had to choose between taking a bus 14 hours so I could be on some powerful drugs I shouldn’t have been on in the first place, or go the sober route and save myself the time and the hassle. So I went the sober route in Cleveland and the very non-sober route in Thornville and I’m glad I did. The convention was trippy and nightmarish enough without drugs, and the wall-to-wall ubiquity of cops would have freaked me out if I had been stoned. And while a lot of the revelers seemed to be drunk and possibly coked up at the RNC, it was, on the whole, less of a druggy scene, or at least no one was sharing their stash with me.

That’s what I really hate about Trump supporters. They’re selfish in all respects, including not sharing their drugs with me.

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RK: I watched some of the Republican National Convention, and it was a resolutely dour affair. One of the great ironies here, it seems, is that ICP has been deemed, alternatively, a pitiful subculture of losers (Mr. Trump’s favorite word) or a dangerous clown gang (by some of the very people attending the RNC). Yet it’s The Gathering that seems the more positive, affirming event. What do you think explains this weird nexus of political rage and carnival joy, given that both are in essence spectacles?

Rabin: I think Trump’s brand, as a politician, is fear. It’s xenophobia. It’s racism. It’s sexism. It’s racial and cultural division. Those are all scary, dark, paranoid qualities to build a political brand around. To Trump and his supporters, being pro-American or patriotic is shorthand for anti-immigrant and xenophobia. The Gathering, in sharp contrast, is a celebration. It’s supposed to be heaven on earth, a place where people who are mocked and ridiculed are elevated and revered. It’s supposed to be the four happiest, most upbeat days of a Juggalo’s year. And they need it, because Juggalos lives tend to be hard, whereas I imagine most of Trump’s delegates have pretty cushy lives. The same can’t be said of a lot of his working class supporters, but then they’re looking to build themselves up by tearing other people down, which is a very un-Juggalo way to go about things.

RK: This is a film website, so I figure I should close with a film question. What movie did your experiences at the RNC, the Gathering, and the spaces between them most evoke, and why is it MacGruber?

Rabin: That is a good question, and also a good answer.

The RNC did remind me of MacGruber in that Trump is a dithering idiot convinced he’s a genius whose dangerous incompetence threatens the lives of the more competent and less insane people around him. And it’s hard to get around the obvious Idiocracy parallels.

But I’m going to go in an even more obvious direction and go with Medium Cool, particularly the RNC parts. At its most electrifying, I felt like I was watching history unfold in front of me and I would be lying if there wasn’t some part of me that secretly kind of pined for a riot. Even one I would perish in. That’d sell another 100 copies of each of my books at least. I was on my Mookie/Sly & The Family Stone shit, and I ended up doing the right thing. Which in this case was not starting a riot. Confusing, huh?

RK: Lastly, the basics: when do you expect the book to come out and how can people get it?

Rabin: The book comes out on September 13th! (which is probably, at this point, the distant future) and is only available on Amazon. [Ed. note: That’s actually tomorrow.] I’ve got nothing against conventional booksellers. In fact I love them and appreciate their support through the years, but this story was perfect for a Kindle “short reads” so that is the form it ended up taking.

Nathan Rabin’s 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, The Gathering Of The Juggalos And The Summer Everything Went Insane is available for purchase here. If you like funny, smart things, you should buy your copy immediately.

Thanks once again to Nathan for taking the time to chat.

September 12, 2016 0 comments

Film Interview

Film Critic Phil Dy talks New Filipino Cinema

by rick June 17, 2016

written by rick

Phil Dy is one of the most prominent Filipino film writers working today, a staunch advocate for the emerging cinema of the Philippines and a sharp, vocal critic of institutional problems in the industry.

He’s also the co-curator of New Filipino Cinema 2016, a film series screening through July 3rd at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Dy was kind enough to answer a few questions about the SF program, his excitement about the gains made in regional cinema, the critic’s role in society, and the pressures, concerns, and promise of the contemporary Filipino screen.

Unsurprisingly, he also doesn’t mince words.

(Many thanks to my friend, astute cinephile Kieff Iporac, who provided invaluable input.)

Rick Kelley: The lineup for this year’s festival is quite diverse, in terms of content and concerns. Can you talk a bit about the selection process? What were your criteria? And how do you see the film series developing in the years to come?

Phil Dy: The whole point of the showcase is to highlight the kind of Filipino films that tend to not make it abroad. Filipino films have been around the festival circuit regularly for the last ten or so years, but only certain types of films and filmmakers tend to make it out there.

So while we do try to make room for films that already have buzz, our first priority is to highlight the diversity of Filipino cinema. Although to be honest, it’s pretty tough for us to get big new films anyway. But we’re more than happy to shine a spotlight on stuff like Miss Bulalacao and Sleepless over other films.

Joel [Shepard, YBCA curator] and I basically program this thing over emails, based on what we like and what we can actually get. It isn’t too complicated. We just try to hash it out.

Tonight, I was able to finally see Lino Brocka’s 1976 masterpiece Insiang screened, in a newly restored print. In your introduction to the film, you spoke a bit about its influence. What specific resonances do you see issuing from it in the new crop of Filipino cinema showcased at the festival?

I can tell you right now that if a film is shot in the slums, or in any poor community, it is working under the shadow of Insiang.

I think Brocka showed us how to shoot the slums, how to find the strange beauty within the squalor, and how to highlight the humanity that shines within the latent injustice. Something like Manang Biring, despite being worlds apart from Insiang, owes plenty to what Brocka established in his masterpiece.

You see and review nearly every movie that comes out in metro Manila each week. What sorts of trends – in terms of the productions themselves, their distribution, or audience response – do you find most exciting right now? What are the most pressing challenges Filipino filmmakers face?

The most exciting thing in Filipino cinema right now is the rise of regional cinema. For most of our hundred-year history of making movies, production has been centered in Metro Manila. The Philippines is a very diverse place, its geographic makeup allowing for the development of very different cultures all within the same nation. A film from Bicol is very different from a film in Cebu. Seeing those differences builds a cultural discourse that just hasn’t been seen in our history.

A Filipino cinephile friend (and an admirer of yours, I might add!) notes that almost every film festival in the Philippines is funded by the festival itself, often either privately funded or funded by the government. In recent years, he reports, the festivals retain the rights to these movies, which makes it harder for them to be distributed within the country and outside its borders. This is a topic you’ve written about. Do you have any further thoughts on this dilemma, and how to address it?

I don’t. It’s a fair enough tradeoff. The money’s not super great, but the platform that these festivals provide might be enough to get you a real start in this industry. And having a film tends to be better than not having a film.

And there are options. If you don’t want to give up your rights, you can apply to a festival like QCinema, which doesn’t take those rights. Patintero and Sleepless were QCinema products.

My friend also singled out the Metro Manila Film Festival – obviously a huge deal in terms of raising the profile of specifically Filipino film, but a fraught one, dating back to its inception under Imelda Marcos. Are you hopeful for the prospects moving forward? And what role does a program like the San Francisco series play in this dynamic?

The MMFF is certainly changing. There was a congressional hearing last year that basically revealed that the entire thing was being run by just one person (or a very small group of people answering to that person). They’ve already announced a restructure, and a complete overhaul of the submissions process.

I’m not entirely convinced that the changes made will necessarily make things better, but I do like some of the people in place right now. I’m always hopeful.

Our program does nothing to change the MMFF.

Distribution and the power of local cinemas has been a recurring theme in my reading on the Filipino scene, particularly its effect on independent film. Movies are directly competing with Hollywood productions, often to the detriment of Filipino independent filmmakers, and some theaters have blocked R-18 movies entirely, affecting the sorts of films available for general audiences. My friend reports that Heneral Luna, screening at the YBCA, almost didn’t make it to cinemas in its 2^nd week but was saved by good word of mouth, and expressed similar sentiments about Honor Thy Father, a film he highly recommends and one you’ve also included. Can you speak to this issue and how the situation appears to you?

The cinema owners aren’t at all concerned about building audiences for local films. To be honest, it doesn’t make economic sense for them to do so. It would be good for everyone in the long run if every kind of film made money, but right now it makes a lot more sense to minimize risk and go with products that everyone recognizes.

It isn’t the cinema owners’ responsibility to make sure that the independent scene thrives, though. The entity that would be best suited to protecting this burgeoning industry is the government, who could make it worth the cinema owners’ while to keep these films in cinemas. It’s a model that’s worked well enough for South Korea, and I could see it working here, too.

Or a forward-thinking business person could come in and create alternative spaces that focus on screening these films. And it’s starting to happen with small, non-traditional spaces, like the A Space gallery, or the Pineapple Lab, or Cinema ’76. But I think somebody could make a decent amount of money with a real theater showing these films that people actually want to see.

In your impassioned intro to the festival’s lit, you write,

It was a year of battles. For too long, the more serious aspects of Filipino cinema were shunted off to the side, where they could compete among themselves and make no real dent in the fabric of the national consciousness. But this year we fought.

It seems clear you’re no mere observer of an art form. In closing, I wonder if you could speak to what you consider the critic’s role in shaping the discourse and engaging with cultural production.

I’m one of a very small number of critics in the Philippines, so our role is magnified somewhat. Two of the more serious critics in my circle happen to be in the selection committees of a couple of the local festivals, so they actually have a lot of influence in what gets made. I’ve mostly turned those roles down, except for last year, when I took a seat at the selection committee for the MMFF, and subsequently burned the place down. I’ve kept up my status of being an outsider, and this allows me to be less polite in talking about things that go wrong in our industry. So I blew the whistle on the absurdity of the selection process, and ended up testifying in congress. If granted the chance to actually change something, I’ll always try to take it.

But for the most part, all I really want to do is to get people talking. My presence as a critic is most felt on Twitter, where I encourage people to express real opinions about our cinema. We don’t have a culture of criticism in the Philippines, and I’ve tried to take on the role of being a moderator of sorts, asking people questions to try and get them to express themselves in a way that adds value to the conversation.

You can follow Phil Dy on Twitter at @philbertdy (and you should). The YBCA’s New Filipino Cinema 2016 runs through July 3rd; check out the full program.

June 17, 2016 0 comments

Commentary Film Interview

“I Love Seeing Film Projected.” A Conversation with Susan Oxtoby

by rick March 22, 2016

written by rick

In Part 2 of our discussion with Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, we talk a bit about film preservation and restoration, about archives and collective memory, and the future of film in the digital age.

Oxtoby also went out of her way to encourage folks to come out to the Nuri Bilge Ceylan series, emphasizing “his use of the natural landscape in Turkey combined with his aesthetic,” and Bam/PFA’s three-day event with Charles Ferguson. I will be following this advice and hope to see you there.

(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Part 1 is here.)
______

Rick Kelley: Can we talk about preservation for a second? What are the general difficulties and concerns today to preserving film and film ephemera?

Susan Oxtoby: The challenges are always time, money, and changing formats. The good news is that a lot of very important work is already being cared for by the world’s film archives. It’s so exciting to be in the digital era, because a lot can be done using digital techniques to help restore aspects of film. There are all the ethics around that, as well …

RK: Yeah, I got some questions about that, too. [laughter]

SO: Yeah. I’m not going to be able to go too deep on this one, but one of the challenges of just the overhead and management of digital archives or having … I mean, you’re always trying to protect the original format. So if that’s celluloid, it’s important to have it stored under proper conditions and well cared for, but then a digital interface can [be useful] in restoration. But the costs associated with the digital technology is more expensive than working in photochemical restoration.

I think, though, when you look at what’s been happening internationally, it’s really exciting, all that’s being done. [And] here in the U.S., from the film studios and the nonprofit archives to the universities to the schools that are teaching the next generation of archivists. There’s a lot that’s happening very well. And a lot of material is getting saved. If you just look over the last 15 years, even the thought that this term “orphan films” exists … there’s a sense that we need to have our collective memory preserved by archives, even when it comes to the tradition of home movies or video. This is all very exciting. We learn so much about ourselves from what’s been recorded on film.

RK: Is that how you would define archives, as a repository of collective memory?

SO: Sure, that would be a good definition. [Pause] Yes. [laughter]

Unfortunately, archivists have to be so selective in terms of what they can give the full treatment of preservation to. In the sense that, often, you need to protect the things that are the most highly threatened – if it’s nitrate composition breakdown or it’s color fading or material that’s affected by vinegar syndrome. So in some ways you both have to save the things that are unique and maybe most greatly threatened. And then there are the aesthetic choices that one makes, protecting the legacy of important film directors or artists working in film.

Part of that is public awareness. You know, from country to country, there are different ways that funding archives works. The tradition in Europe may [include] more financial support for culture, the overhead of what it takes to do archiving. There’s some countries in the first world that are lagging behind in this area.

RK: You also hear horror stories of vast swaths of collections just being lost, just being gone.

SO: And that could be because of war, bombing, and things that get lost for that reason. Or it could be climate conditions, maybe in Southeast Asia and collections that are in parts of the world affected by humidity and heat and rapidly changing temperatures really affecting how things are stored. And it’s not cheap to run an archive. I mean, the energy bills are quite extreme. So it’s a lot altogether.

The good news is that there are a lot of international partnerships and there’s been, even when it comes to filling in holes in the history of American film production, there are things that have been found in different parts of the world.

RK: Do you have a favorite discovery along those lines? Like, [lost reels of] Metropolis famously turned up years ago.

SO: I don’t know if I can name one right here and now, but it is amazing just how it’s a constantly evolving history. Things keep being found and keep being added to what we’ve already preserved.

The long and short of it is, it’s always a work in progress. You always protect your originals, because you know at some point there may be a better technology developed to help us with restoring works, or there could be new material found.

RK: Your comment earlier about the use of digital to help with restoration seems to imply that you’re not … you know, there’s the whole “film vs. digital” divide that happens and these sort of debates that go on. It seems like you have a more nuanced view of that.

SO: I love seeing film projected. So of course, if we can show a film, we will. And we go to great lengths and expense to import prints to include them in our public program.

Increasingly, I see digital restorations that I’m okay with, but I will still often be looking at digital restorations and saying, “Aw, this is paling from my sense of how this film should look on the screen.” There are good combinations of archivists working with particular lab technicians who are getting it right, and [who are] very, very concerned about how you can replicate a work in digital format that’s a really good rendering of its original film format. So I’m not opposed to it at all. But I certainly love the fact that our theater is set up and still the majority of what we show on screen is film, celluloid.

RK: Absolutely. [But] it seems like everyday there’s a new doomsday scenario about how theatrical exhibition is just going to go away. Just last week, Sean Parker’s Screening Room idea, which you might’ve heard about …

SO: I have not.

RK: Ok, so the idea is users pay, you know, $50 to get a special box and you can put on your own cinema at your house …

SO: I guess that sounds great, in the sense that people can learn issues about curation. [laughter] And how to DJ your own film program. Why not?

I’m just not opposed to digital. I mean, when I was in university, they were kind of between the 16 mm reduction print and early VHS. That’s when I was studying films and had to write papers. But then, when DVD came along as a way to preview at home or be able to go back and study something closely and see how a film is actually put together? I’m all for that. I think it’s very important to be able to have access to a work. It’s important to see it projected well in a theater and to have the cinema experience with other people in the audience, and hopefully it’s a very well presented experience of the film. But to be able to go back and study it? I think that’s very important personally to have access to digital copies. I would think that film criticism is better off when we have greater access to work in digital copies.

Of course, I’m not troubled over film attendance patterns, but then I’m also not actually programming in a commercial theater! I’m working in a very specialized context, so …

RK: How do you see the PFA’s role in that?

SO: It’s very important to have all options catering to the next generation of cinephiles, and to be offering general filmgoers a chance to understand what makes film an art form, to interact with filmmakers. I really feel like young … I’m sorry, “cinephiles” is a little precious. But I think it’s certainly important for, say, junior high students to be introduced to interesting cinema, well-programmed films, well-made films, and the sense of watching a film with an audience in a nice cinema. You don’t want to wait until university for that to happen, you know? These are art-going patterns that you want to instill at a young age, and you want people to get excited about the world of culture younger.

So yeah – I think it’s really important. It would be nice if people could often see films in a theatrical context, but that’s not always the case. But … I think we do well in that role and that we offer a really nice venue in the new theater.

RK: Speaking of the new theater, when I saw Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg here last month – a really hilarious, fascinating, striking movie visually – but also it sounded so good. How involved were staff with the specifications for the design of the theater itself?

SO: We had quite a bit of input. Part of that input was to create a theater that had a high enough ceiling that it recedes out of your consciousness, that you’re not conscious of a ceiling that’s closing down on the projected image. I wanted it to be high enough that it receded from your mind. And to have a well-masked image, a movable masking on the top and bottom and right and left. To have a theater where the rows have a slight curve – we have so many events where we have guests, and the fact that there’s a Q&A discussion and the audience can see the person who might be speaking at the end of the row. I think that curve was very important, and [it was] was something that we requested.

And we lucked out, because Meyer Sound very generously donated. They fed into the acoustical design of the room with the architects and AV consultants who were designing the room, but they also of course produced the speakers and worked very hard to make the acoustics in that space just ideal for cinema.

RK: It really shows.

SO: Yeah. So this is great: we can play the volume on these films at just the right level and you hear all the elements of the soundtrack.

I’m very happy with the sight-lines – we actually asked for a combination of a gentle rake down at the front of the theater and amphitheater towards the back. We had a theater in mind that we were modeling the rake after. So we fed into this quite a bit.

The darkness of the room is something we all were suggesting would be very important. [And] the stage – that was another request, that we have a short stage. I previously had worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario – the Cinemateque Ontario was based at the Art Gallery of Ontario when I was there. Some of the features of this room remind me very much of [that] theater. I do like the fact that the person at the podium is looking into the room almost at eye-level. That’s good. And I think the lighting in the theater is a big improvement for us, because we can do a lot with it, and at the same time, it’s so nice to have an inviting space for discussions.

RK: Yeah, again, Guy Maddin was my recent experience and it did feel really approachable. It didn’t feel like I was at a lecture so much as a communal screening.

SO: Good!

RK: So to wrap up, what in the rest of the season are you most excited about?

SO: All of them! All of them. [laughter] Oh, let’s see. I’m not going to dodge the question.

One of the things I do love is when you see a lot of programs, you see the throughlines between different series, the way that they work off each other. That’s one way it’s lovely. But I’ve really been enjoying the Jean Epstein series. The thing is, Epstein’s work, I’d only seen a few of these programs after all these years. Many of these works are recently restored, and [with] Epstein as a filmmaker and as someone who began in the silent era, the films are beautifully composed and the editing is very fluid, so it’s an eye-opener for me to get to know his body of work.

RK: So after all these programs and different locations, there are still things for you to encounter …

SO: Oh, absolutely. It’s always like that. And I’ll never even see all the films I’d love to see in my life.

March 22, 2016 0 comments

Commentary Film Interview

“There’s Just a Wealth of Filmmaking That Could Be Shown”: A Conversation with Susan Oxtoby

by rick March 21, 2016

written by rick

Susan Oxtoby knows film.

Over the course of her career, the current Senior Film Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Bam/PFA) has programmed countless series and retrospectives, introducing audiences to under-seen, rarely-screened masterpieces from throughout the world and across cinema history.

A filmmaker in her own right (her late friend Stan Brakhage charmingly provides her film All Flesh Is Grass with the most Stan Brakhage-esque recommendation imaginable), Oxtoby’s passion for and commitment to cinema — its preservation and exhibition, its relevance to our lives and cultural memory — are evident.

Both were very much on display when she graciously agreed to sit down and chat about Bam/PFA’s first two months in its new location, what she’s most looking forward to this season, and what surprises future seasons might hold.

This is Part 1 of our interview: tune in tomorrow for a closer look at the challenges of film preservation, the role of archives in the modern world, and a curator’s thoughts on the “film vs. digital” debate.

(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.)
_______

Rick Kelley: So it seems to me you have the world’s coolest job. What led you to enter the world of film curation in the first place? What was your path like?

Susan Oxtoby: In terms of curating films, programming films, that really began in a student film society at the University of Toronto. It was called the Innis Film Society – Innis was one of the 8 colleges in the School of Arts and Sciences system at the University of Toronto, but it was also where cinema studies as a program and discipline was based. And so I had actually gone through that cinema studies program at the University of Toronto and was in another degree, studying film production, and I realized I should get involved with the student film society because they were showing such great work.

And so there was a period of about 7 years – this is the essay answer! – where I was completing my second degree but I was also back at the University of Toronto showing this very impressive year-round program of largely avant-garde film, or art films. It was a Thursday night program, so that was where I got a sense of how to construct programs. Every year, we brought in about 15 visiting filmmakers, Canadians and Americans, some international guests, but usually it was working in the area of avant-garde film.

Then, my early jobs were actually in independent film distribution. In Toronto, there’s the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, which is much like Canyon Cinema, the same kind of philosophy. So I worked in distribution for about 3 years representing independent work in an artist-run center and was always meeting with visiting film curators from all over the world, and helping them interpret this large collection of some 3,000 films, largely Canadian but also international in character. A position opened up at the very young Cinemateque Ontario, which is now TIFF Cinemateque. So I kind of joined and became a young film programmer for my first professional position in curating back in 1993 and stayed with that institution for 12 years and became the Director of Programming.

That was an interesting period because that was a young institution – I’d say for its first 15 years it kind of went from 0 to 60 in terms of becoming very well-known for its programming. Of course, I was working with the wonderful James Quandt, who was the founding Director of Programming and is still there as the Senior Curator. So that was great. And we really built it up. You know, we were modeling ourselves largely after the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal and, frankly, the Pacific Film Archive.

RK: It all comes full circle!

SO: It comes full circle. And so we were in very close contact with this international network of film archives, and we partnered a lot with the curatorial staff here at the PFA.

RK: So it was sort of a natural transition when you came over here. You already had the groundwork laid in some ways.

SO: Yeah. But that was how I got into programming. And, you know, from my early teens, I really got interested in foreign films. My parents were cinephiles, so I saw a lot growing up. [They] were really into films, concerts, interesting international travel. And I was growing up as a child of the ’70s, let’s say, in my university days, and that was when a lot of places would have the latest Fassbinder film, the latest new, contemporary Italian film playing in art houses around Toronto. So I very quickly got into following that as a major.

RK: And you made a few films of your own, too. You’re a filmmaker in your own right.

SO: I definitely studied film production and I worked with independent filmmakers for a couple of years, filmmakers in Toronto, either avant-garde filmmakers or documentary or narrative filmmakers. And then I have two 16 mm films that are in distribution.

RK: So, for those of us (like myself) who don’t really know, what is a day in the life of a film curator like? What do you, you know, do?

SO: [laughs] I think a lot of people think, “Oh, you spend your whole day watching films!” Actually, this is not the case.

We spend our days in correspondence, and, of course, as the head of our department, I spend a lot of time in meetings. And then I’m fortunate to see most of our programs, so I spend my evenings at the theater. But it’s interesting. When you’re dealing with contacts all over the world, I start my day very early, corresponding with Europe, and then of course the East Coast, and whatever I can get done by the end of the day in Pacific Standard Time. And maybe by the end of the afternoon, we’re working with contacts in Asia, trying to get those emails off …

RK: It sounds exhausting, actually!

SO: [laughs] Yeah, but you know, you work against the world’s time zones. I mean, it’s extremely varied. I love the fact that we’re in this new location, Bam/PFA, and that we have so many visitors coming in, like this chance to chat with you today or to host [filmmakers]. There’s a visiting filmmaker yesterday, Wang Bing from mainland China, who’s here in the Bay Area for a few days, and he wanted to come over and meet with our staff. So that was exciting. We’re not even hosting his work right now, he just wanted to come see our institution. It was fun to show him around the galleries, the couple of theaters and the outdoor screen, and talk about what we might be able to do in the future.

So that’s the thing. It’s been so exciting for us now to be in this new location meeting with so many visitors. It happens a lot, and in any given week we’ll have the guests that we’re bringing in for our programming but also meeting with the public.

I’m really delighted that in this spring semester, we’re offering some programs that are lecture screenings – the In Focus: The Role of Film Archives and this upcoming series of Japanese film classics – and that’s where I selected the programs we’re showing and invited guest speakers to come in and share their knowledge on specific film programs or topics. One of the things I think we do particularly well at Bam/PFA is the involvement of guests and specialists, from filmmakers to archivists to practitioners who might be editors or the wonderful academic talent here at UC Berkeley and beyond.

RK: How does the PFA build its collection? I know there were large donations back in the day, but how do things work now?

SO: Well, it’s very difficult for us to actually raise funds to go out and purchase prints. Some of our patrons are learning that it’s possible to make a gift that would go toward our film acquisition budget if it’s designated for that. But a lot of prints come in currently from film distributors who know they’re getting out of the business. [They] understand that we are an archive and that they can offer their prints to us and, if those prints are still in exhibition condition, we would take them in and be able to show them over time. So basically, donations from filmmakers and film distributors, acquiring films outright, [and] also working with other archives that might have recently worked on restoration … that’s the perfect time for us to acquire a new print.

We recently purchased a copy of The Seventh Seal from the Swedish Film Institute, and I’d love us to be doing as much of that as we can possibly manage, because it’s a great way to build the collection. We had some local donors who helped underwrite that, and it’s the perfect film for us to have in the collection. It will get screened a lot over the years. We had three very full programs [already].

RK: With the new location, did the move alter the programming, or change the audience, in any way?

SO: It has definitely changed the audience. Our numbers are really great. I think downtown Berkeley has … you know, I think there are more people going out for a bite and coming to the new Bam/PFA to see a film, look at the galleries. So it’s great. We’re now joining with all the other cultural venues based in the downtown core – the jazz festival or Berkeley Rep, Freight and Salvage or the new university theater …

RK: Sure. It’s very much in the community.

SO: It makes a big difference to be on the same block as BART. We’ve heard a lot from people who are just grateful we’re so much easier to get to. And then there are also all the restaurants, and just more night life at this end of the campus. So that really is great.

But I do think that just by launching this building, more people have found out about our programs and there’s been a great public response. The only thing that’s really changed in our programming is that we’ve introduced some limited engagement films, so that’s a place where we might have three screenings of Rocco and His Brothers or, upcoming, we’re showing a contemporary Romanian film, One Floor Below. We’re showing that four times. The only other time that film has shown recently has been at Mill Valley. So it’s a chance to see a contemporary film from Romania, and there’s been a new wave of Romanian filmmaking that’s been highly recognized.

We really wanted our inaugural season to be reflective of all the great strengths that we are known for, in terms of showing beautiful silent films with musical accompaniment or avant-garde film programs, or the focus on documentary filmmaking as always in our spring season. Plus complete retrospectives like the Maurice Pialat or the Jean Epstein series that’s on the screen right now. Upcoming, we’ve got the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and that’s a rare chance to see his works to date in a complete retrospective. To my knowledge, the only venue in the U.S. that’s done a complete Ceylan series is MoMA in New York about a year and a half ago.

So our hope is that we will be on a closer to year-round schedule on our five-day-a-week program when the museum is open, which means we’re going to be showing more films than we were at our old location. And by allowing some of those to be repeated, make it a little easier for the public to get more of those films in their schedules.

It’s hard when you only show something once. I mean, we do, and they do very well, but giving more chances, more opportunities to see particular programs will help us build our membership.

RK: One of the more notable projects in the old location that you were involved in was “Discovering Georgian Cinema”, and I was curious first of all how that came about, and what you think is vital about showing underseen or even never-seen films?

SO: “Discovering Georgian Cinema” was such a wonderful opportunity for me personally, because I had no background in Georgian film before I took on that project. But I think I did have the right kind of background to take on such a complex program because of my connections in the international archival community. So it was this wonderful opportunity and something I know I’ll be returning to, doing more with this area of cinema.

But it started from the point that Bam/PFA’s film collection has, in fact, the largest collection of Georgian films in North America, and I may be right in saying the third largest collection outside of Moscow.

RK: That’s amazing. And similarly true of Japanese films as well, right?

SO: Yes, that is true. Our Japanese collection is a very important study collection, and a portion of it would be of exhibition quality. But it’s definitely very important for researchers, especially researchers who might not have the Japanese language as a capability.

With the Georgian project, I received a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation to allow me to visit a number of archives and to visit Georgia and make connections with the local film community there. So I went to Tblisi, I went to Berlin where there’s a very large collection, and to Moscow, as well as archives in Europe like Amsterdam and Toulouse. And I was partnering on this project with the Museum of Modern Art. It was so important to be working with MoMA because that really increased the profile of our series. It was about 57 different programs here in Berkeley, which is bigger than anything we’ve done. And [it was] an opportunity to bring in filmmakers from Tblisi or from Europe, and experts on Georgian cinema. So it was a great learning experience

RK: Is that one of the key roles an institution like the PFA plays, to bring these kinds of things to new audiences?

SO: Absolutely. And we thought carefully about calling it “Discovering Georgian Cinema”, but I think it is absolutely the case that a lot of these films are completely unknown here in the U.S. If you actually went through to see how many of these films had never been shown by any institution in North America, there would be a good percentage of them represented in that category.

RK: I’m hard-pressed to name too many Georgian films.

SO: [laughing] Exactly. But it is a beautiful body of work. And of course in many different types of ways.

But we were able to do a lot of different things with that program. I think certainly to show enough work from the silent era. Soviet Georgian filmmakers really were doing very inspired silent films. And then there’s the period from about the mid-’50s through the ’80s, which is kind of a beautiful period of narrative cinema and development, in terms of Georgian filmmakers perhaps being critical of the Soviet regime and their relationship within the Soviet Union. But also always making works that were very much about the history of Georgia, the spirit of the Georgian people, the music and poetic and dance traditions.

I’m sure we’ll circle back and present more of these films another time round. You know, we could focus on particular directors or … I think contemporary Georgian film is really exciting right now. Things are coming together and there are a lot of really creative young filmmakers, so I think it’s an area of the world to watch.

RK: Earlier today, I was making a list of all the different filmmaker retrospectives you’ve been involved in over the course of your career, and I eventually just gave up, because there were too many. And I just wrote, “Pretty much everyone I’ve ever heard of.”

But are there series you remember particularly fondly? Perhaps in terms of exceeding your expectations for audience engagement or for really lively discussions?

SO: Many, many. That’s what keeps me going – the relationship between the guests we bring in and the audience response to their work. But I’m a real generalist. I mean, I do have specialties – avant-garde film and now Georgian cinema for sure are two of those. But I really do enjoy the fact I’ve usually been with institutions that show 400+ films a year, and so I’ve always been researching in an area that’s new to me. And I think you need to be a generalist in a lot of ways. I find that very exciting, and I’m constantly learning from the films I’m involved in selecting, but also from my colleagues.

One area I want to come back to – and I haven’t been doing this in the last decade that I’ve been in Berkeley – but I’m fascinated by abstract cinema. Which is squarely within the avant-garde tradition. But I did a series in Toronto called “Abstract Cinema: A Century of Light Play”, and it brought together French films from the 1920s, some German avant-garde film. It was a chance to bring in experimental filmmakers to present their work and show it. One area of cinema that I love, and I think it’s also related to my time going to music concerts, is just films that deal with rhythm and color in a very abstract way. And maybe it’s because I’m somewhat challenged when it comes to narrative cinema. [laughter] I might forget how a story ends, but I’ll remember the mood and atmosphere quite well.

So I would love to start introducing kind of an ongoing series that looks at abstract cinema. I think it’s perfect for us, because we’re also an art museum, and I think that there’s crossover … whether it’s music, poetry, or fine art, [audiences] can connect to that kind of cinema very well. There’s just a wealth of wonderful filmmaking that could be shown. That’s something I’d love to do.

March 21, 2016 0 comments

Interview

Interview: Director Jason Zeldes on Romeo Is Bleeding

by rick December 29, 2015

written by rick

Jason Zeldes’ directorial debut Romeo Is Bleeding is one of the year’s best and most powerful films.

The film deftly tells multiple stories. The story of poet Donté Clark, the story of kids countering violence with art, the story of Richmond, California. We’re introduced to a program known as RAW Talent, and we follow Donté and others as they launch Te’s Harmony, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, to address issues in their lives and community.

The documentary is in many ways designed to teach Te’s Harmony alongside Shakespeare’s perennial favorite in classrooms, with other uses in social studies, history, theater, and media classes. It’s also slated for eventual broadcast and streaming.

As an editor, Zeldes has turned in memorable work on films like 2014’s Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom, but he’s taken a more immersive approach for his first feature-length directing credit.

Zeldes — who emphasized his appreciation to Michael Klein, Rajiv-Smith Mahabir, Katey Zouck, and Kevin Klauber for taking this journey with him — was kind enough to chat for a while about the film, about the risks, rewards, and responsibilities of storytelling, about the prospects for aspiring filmmakers these days, and, briefly, about hula dancing grandfathers.

Rick Kelley: There are a lot of compelling aspects about Romeo Is Bleeding – the performance footage, Donté’s sheer talent, the intricacies and drama of these kids’ lives, the past and present conditions in Richmond, and on and on. You pack a lot of stuff in there. Did you have a sense of all that going into the project, or how did you tease out the narrative strands?

Jason Zeldes: Well, it all kind of started with Donté. My cousin [Molly Raynor], who’d been teaching poetry for years, was telling me about how incredible he was, and so she told me he was doing this play that was autobiographical. It sounded like a good start, or at least a good short, you know? I went up [to Richmond] originally thinking, ‘Ok, it’s about an artist doing an autobiographical piece.’ But once I actually arrived, I got to see that he really was an amazing artist, and this autobiographical story and his artwork draw on this much bigger narrative, which is about post-industrial America, and the systematic injustices that exist in a lot of minority communities.

That, I think, was the big revelation when I was actually in Richmond: that Donté’s story was representative of an entire community. And that by telling it, or by following him telling his own story, I would have the opportunity to tell a very big story from a personal, intimate perspective, which is something I’m always looking for. I’m also really interested in making films about artists who are facing bigger forces or impossible circumstances. Donté certainly checked off all those boxes. Once I figured out it was kind of all part of the same narrative, I just had to figure out how to prove it [laughs] with my footage and, you know, we’re in pretty good shape.

RK: Was there a particular moment, once you started shooting, when you thought, ‘Oh, ok. There is actually something really important going on out here’? Or is that something that built up over time?

JZ: No, there is a very visceral reminder of that right off the bat. My very first day filming in a RAW Talent classroom was the day the Chevron refinery caught fire.

RK: Wow.

JZ: So that was, you know, like I said, visceral. I mean, we’re filming a writing workshop with high school students and all of a sudden there’s air raid sirens and a mushroom cloud on the edge of town. And it’s just obvious that there are bigger stories in the community, and the play they were producing was wrestling with all these issues. Chevron was already written into the script. So [it was] a perfect jumping-off point to talk about everything happening in the community.

RK: Was there a temptation to lead the film with the Chevron explosion, since that actually was the first experience that you had up there shooting it? The way it plays out, it comes somewhat organically in the telling, but I could see there being an impulse to focus on that.

JZ: That’s actually a pretty good idea, because we have to cut it down to 52 minutes for broadcast. [Laughter] Maybe I’ll think about that.

But, yeah, that was actually really tricky footage to figure out how to use. A lot of advisors were telling me to cut that scene out of the movie. For a long time, it was really tangential. But I worked with our editors for a long time making sure that it wasn’t tangential. And it ended up being this launching-off point to this big, crucial ‘historical context’ scene.

RK: Yeah, it’s one of my favorite parts of the movie. I think it does a good job of bringing things back towards the larger structures.

JZ: Thank you. That one was a scene that we spent an enormous amount of time on before we got it right.

RK: In previous interviews, you’ve also spoken about having to build trust with the kids to get them to open up a bit more, and I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that. And how did those personal relationships you developed affect the final film?

JZ: We did spend a lot of time without the cameras rolling to just become friends with everybody and develop the comfort level. So when the cameras were rolling, they didn’t think of us so much as the ‘camera crew’ as ‘oh, Jason and Mike and Jeeves are back.’

And I think all of that starts with the fact that my cousin Molly has done such a great job building this program, and is so close to all her students, that the mere fact that she could vouch for me – and say, ‘Jason’s cool’ – was a really good starting point in the classroom. And once we’re in the classroom, I started to make friends with a lot of students individually. And they became more comfortable with us – so, you know, ‘Can we come with you to your home? Can we shoot at your home?’ And some said yes.

So next thing you know, we’re out in the community, we’re visiting homes and meeting community members. And we tell them what we’re doing, and now the community members want to talk with us. It all starts with having that relationship with my cousin, but then, you’re in the heart of North Richmond talking to three generations, and everyone’s getting excited, saying, “Oh! You got to talk to this guy next.” And so we’re talking to just about everybody.

RK: Do you feel like people were particularly excited to have the opportunity to tell their stories? I’m thinking of the older folks in particular – maybe people don’t ask those questions so much.

JZ: Oh, for sure! I mean, when we went and did kind of man-on-the-street interviews in North Richmond, people were really excited to tell their stories. It’s not every day that someone is out at Shields-Reid Park asking, “Hey, what’s it like growing up here?” So every day that we did that – we did maybe three man-on-the-street days in North Richmond – we would draw a crowd. And it was great, because we had Donté with us, who, again, would vouch for us. We always made sure, wherever we were going, we were welcomed there. We had a member of the community with us saying, ‘This is what’s happening and this is why it’s important.’ And Donté’s such a leader in the community anyway that having him along with us kind of opened up a lot of doors.

RK: Totally. So Donté’s obviously such a central figure in the film, but he’s not the only one by a large margin. The scope widens as the film goes on, and these other stories get told. I’m curious how much of that was part of the plan and how much of it made itself clear on the ground, or in the edit bay?

JZ: Donté was always going to be the main guy in the film. But we did film with a lot of other students; we actually filmed with far more students than actually ended up in the movie. What ended up happening is we filmed with everybody, but then ended up focusing on Donté. And then, in the process of editing, the more that we focused on Donté, the better and more focused the film became. So lots of characters, all the other RAW Talent interns, kind of fell to the cutting room floor.

But the relationships that helped to focus Donté’s story the most were the ones that ended up sticking, [like] Deandre Evans. And then D’Neise [Robinson], because she was playing the role of Juliet, and because she had such a strong narrative in her own right and went on such a journey as a character … she was great. And she was funny, because, you know, in the film you see, at this time in her life, she was pretty guarded. And the same applies to the film crew. I mean, she invited us to her house and everything, but she really only filmed with us a couple of days.

RK: Oh wow, really?

JZ: Yeah. So we had these opposite problems to solve as filmmakers or in the edit bay: We have mountains of footage with Donté and we have to figure out the best parts to use, and with D’Neise we have such a finite amount of footage, we got to stretch it and make it as effective as possible. And we used almost every bit of footage we have with D’Neise.

RK: That’s interesting. I was going to say that I was struck by the focus on young women’s experiences. People have mentioned this to me as well, largely female viewers: D’Neise and the other girls talking about the different pressures and expectations they deal with as women. In a film that’s largely about male violence, that stands out.

JZ: It was always our goal to have a comprehensive view of what it’s like growing up in Richmond. And that’s why we talked to every generation. That’s why we talked to police, that’s why we talked to city officials. And a big part of that is what it’s like growing up as a woman in Richmond. And all the voices that were a part of that. We did sit-down interviews with all the students at RAW Talent, and we followed several of them home to film their personal lives. So it was sad to see them fall to the cutting room floor, because it’s a film and not a TV show. But that [sequence] was a really nice way to let their voices, their experiences shine.

And it would be disingenuous to just show the male perspective, because there are a lot of young women who are there, and struggling, and their voices matter. D’Neise ends up being representative for a lot of them. But there’s some amazing women artists coming out of Richmond right now. Like Nya, who does the Chevron poem in the film. She’s like a super Slam champion now. She’s the coolest.

RK: Can we talk about documentary filmmaking in general for a minute? You’ve been involved, in different capacities, with a string of documentaries now over the last 7 years, I think?

JZ: Yep, sounds about right.

RK: – directing Romeo, but also editing 20 Feet From Stardom and others. What’s your take on the genre and its different possibilities right now? For instance, Romeo is far more immersive than 20 Feet, but there are certain similarities in the shooting and editing, like in the performance sequences, I’d say.

JZ: Alright!

RK: Yeah, I mean – the ‘Gimme Shelter’ sequence in 20 Feet From Stardom is amazing, and I sort of see links between that and certain things in Romeo, but I also see certain differences. So I’m wondering about your take on documentaries at this moment in time.

JZ: Well, good read on that one. Because I think a lot of the DNA of 20 Feet is alive in how we treat performance footage. I think in 20 Feet we let the performances speak for themselves and structure entire scenes. And then in Romeo, we would pick a poem and let that structure an entire sequence, and kind of pepper in some recorded sounds, so yeah, we did treat the performances almost the same. And actually, the Romeo post-production crew was almost identical to the 20 Feet post-production crew …

RK: What do you know!

JZ: I mean, yeah. Documentaries as a genre right now are pretty fun, especially if you are kind of new to the scene, like I am. In that, there’s a lot of experimentation going on in the form that is being accepted by the community at large. So basically, that means there are very few rules right now, and experimentation is encouraged and often celebrated. You can push the form.

I’d like to think that Romeo is pushing the form, in that it’s vérité meets archival meets theater, dance, and poetry. It’s a mixture of a million different art forms pushed down into a documentary. Which I think is cool, and try to bring to a lot of other projects. Like, I’m in Honolulu right now working on a hula dancing prison documentary, starring a bunch of men who want to be grandfathers. That’s pretty juicy.

RK: A hula dancing prison documentary, about people figuring out how to be grandfathers?

JZ: Yeah.

RK: Ok.

JZ: [Laughing] Yeah. It’s a lot of different stuff happening all at once. And it takes a lot of experimentation to be able to integrate all these different elements. I think documentaries in general are exciting because there are very few rules that govern the space, and you’re allowed to be creative. And I always feel like I’m giving back a little bit to the communities that are being documented on these projects.

And yeah, it’s fun. There’s always … ‘stranger than fiction’ is the lamest trope to fall back on. But life is really weird, man.

RK: That actually leads me to another thing, which is the responsibility or ethics of documentary filmmaking. To me, one of Romeo’s central themes is the kids finding their voices, right? And expressing themselves in the midst of all this madness. And you do a great job of showing this on screen. But as a documentarian, and as an editor, you’re shaping their story for presentation, for audiences to encounter and process. Do you feel like that confers a kind of responsibility on you to that community? Does it impact the kinds of narrative or aesthetic choices you make?

JZ: I think it’s a huge responsibility when someone trusts you to tell their story. I felt a big responsibility to be true to Donté’s spirit, and to the spirit of Richmond and the community. But as far as filmmaking, you do run into moments when you might, you know, change the chronology of something, or you might change a specific reaction to something…

RK: Sure, or even just practically, your first day of shooting doesn’t show up until the middle of the film. That’s just a fact.

JZ: Yeah, exactly. But I think that there comes this larger question which I love to geek out about with other filmmakers: where is that ethical line? You’re not a journalist, you’re a filmmaker. And I think that’s pretty upfront – these things are consumed in a movie theater, not a news broadcast. So where does that line come, as far as filmmaking versus being disingenuous or unethical?

I think what guides a lot of my decisions on that front is: you can change the chronology of something, or you can change little, tiny details about something, if it still serves the larger truth of the people you are documenting, the community that you’re documenting. And if it supports the larger truth, or makes the larger truth ring far more true, than you’re in great shape, because you’re telling the story in a heightened reality, as opposed to changing the reality. As soon as you start to change the reality, or change the larger truth of the situation, you’ve crossed the line and you need to reexamine what you’re doing.

RK: Could you see yourself making an Errol Morris film, or something like Joshua Oppenheimer with The Act of Killing or The Look of Silence?

JZ: Oh man, I’d hope so. I love The Act of Killing. I thought that was a great film. But also, that takes a very particular topic to warrant that sort of treatment. Like, imagine if I were to go to Richmond and trick Donté into participating or something! [Laughter] It has to fit the topic. But yeah, that’s another example of pushing the form. I don’t think anything has pushed the form more than The Act of Killing did, and that’s why I love that film so much.

RK: And then on the other hand, there are folks working like Frederick Wiseman, with a sort of fly-on-the-wall, ‘this is what’s happening on the ground in real time’ kind of vibe.

JZ: Yeah. Another filmmaker I love and respect. I haven’t tried to make a Frederick Wiseman film yet. [Laughter] I think that takes a very particular eye. That’d be something I’d have to develop over time. I’m not there yet!

RK: Speaking of your eye, you’re an editor by trade, so I’m sure that guided you in a number of ways.

JZ: I think that being an editor is the best training ground for directing, because if I walk into a room to cover a vérité scene for example, I can take a look around and say, ‘Well, ok, we should cover the scene from these two angles, with these three cutaways, and … GO.’ You know? And that’s kind of how we would operate on set. I was actually the production sound recordist on set, so I’d have my two cameramen with me and they’d be looking through the lens, following the action, and I’d be linked into the action but also looking around the space, figuring out, ‘Well, they’re talking about this, so let’s get these five shots to support that idea.’ I could kind of be editing on the fly, and that results in pretty solid coverage for the most part.

As far as conducting interviews, I’ve had the really good fortune to be able to edit the footage of a lot of great directors. So I know how they go about conducting interviews – I know what they do well, I know all the questions that you ask in the moment and all the questions you wait to ask until you’re more comfortable, in a better headspace with your subject. I felt like that editing experience really came in handy. Suddenly, it’s you sitting in that chair, and you’re drawing on experience you weren’t totally even aware you had.

RK: So, you folks hustled for money to get Romeo made – there was an initial Kickstarter to get through principal photography, you borrowed equipment from filmmaker friends, you sought grants and other more traditional funding sources to get it finished. On the one hand, that seems to imply that barriers of access are in some ways being lowered, because there are a number of different avenues you can take to get it done, but at the same time, that seems like a lot of work, with no real assurance that you will get it done. How do you deal with that on the day to day when you’re shooting? And what does it mean more generally for aspiring filmmakers?

JZ: You know, making a film is really hard. One of the many things that I learned. [Laughter]

It was fun, it was a little scary, and I don’t think I’ll be able to make a film exactly this way ever again. It was kind of something that lined up perfectly in that moment of my life.

RK: How so? In terms of access to being able to do it or in terms of the subject matter?

JZ: In terms of just about everything. You know – Molly introduced me to Donté, who’s starting a big project that’s compelling to me. But I am also very young at the moment we started this film. I did the Kickstarter, and the Kickstarter got a number of my friends excited about it. And basically all the Kickstarter paid for was rent to move a couple of my friends up to the Bay with me.

RK: Well, it’s fucking expensive up here.

JZ: Yeah, exactly! And that’s what it paid for. I mean, I just convinced three of my friends to move to the Bay Area for a couple of months, and spend every day following these kids. And then we bought a microphone. And then the Kickstarter money was gone.

But that got us enough really good footage that we were then able to start putting together really serious grant proposals. I completely ran out of money, and I moved to Colorado and worked on Racing Extinction for seven months in the middle of Romeo. And in that time, we started to get some grant responses back, so we now officially had enough money between me saving up and a couple of grants to just say, ‘Alright, I’m going to work on Romeo and just Romeo for the next six months.’ And I did. And then I needed to take another job, so I did. But then we got some more grants.

I mean, you really have to be hustling and working on several projects at any given moment. But Romeo was always kind of my baby and my number one priority, so I would carve out six months here, four months here, and always writing grants. It wasn’t until very late in the day that we officially were fully funded. We were pretty close to heading up our final mix when we got our finishing funds. It’s a never-ending process. And we’re still fundraising, for outreach.

RK: So I first saw Romeo at the SF International Film Fest, where I also first saw Tangerine, which is shot on iPhones. I’m wondering what sort of technical shifts you’ve seen since you’ve started doing this, and what sort of new possibilities might be emerging.

JZ: Camera technology is changing so fast it’s hard to keep up with. Principal photography for Romeo was done on a pair of 5Ds. And I remember when 5Ds came out, they were like beautiful machines and everyone was using them. By the time I shot Romeo in 2012, 2013, 5Ds were like a dirty word. But you know what? They look great for what we were doing, so it was the right camera for the job.

Now what’s happening with camera technology is you’re getting these 4K images – or more, they’re now doing 6K cameras, 8K cameras – that come basically in the size of a 5D. And I think that the more affordable, and the more sort of undercover these things can be, the more access documentarians can get to certain places. It’s just a different beast than working on a narrative film – sometimes you need to be mobile and quick and dirty, and that’s definitely becoming possible at the highest resolution. That’s interesting.

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what camera you’re working with. It’s all about the story. That’s what’s been drilled into my head for the last 15 years of my life. Just get the story. And make sure you have really good sound, because no one is going to sit through a movie that sounds terrible. [Laughter]

The answer to your question, I guess, is that yes, there’s a million new points of access, because of enhanced technology. And I think that because of the enhanced technology, the barrier to entry is a lot lower than it ever was. But that doesn’t diminish the importance of having a good story. Because if you don’t, then you’re just a guy with a really nice camera who is filming stuff that doesn’t add up to much.

RK: What do you hope for Romeo? In some ways, it’s an appeal for arts education, or at least a spirited defense of it, but it’s also not really a polemic or, thankfully, a sort of artless call to social action, with a URL at the end and a number to call. What do you hope people take home?

JZ: Yeah. I mean, if it was more your classic social advocacy doc, with a URL at the end, it would be a lot easier to market. [Laughter]

But being what it is, which is the movie I wanted to make, it’s … you know, Dan Riley, who runs the RYSE Center where Molly and Donté work now, I was talking to him on the phone a couple of weeks ago, and we’re talking about educational uses. And he was saying, ‘It’s so hard to inspire people.’ And he’s someone who puts on poetry shows all the time. He’s like, ‘People come to the poetry shows, and they get inspired. And then they go home, and it kind of wears off sooner than something like a film can.’ You make a film like this that has a lot of heart, I hope, and it can really stick with you, and kind of be this bug in your ear for a long time.

So, in this particular instance, it’s about encouraging people to find their voice, right? So we’re doing a big push to get it into schools, and we’re writing curricula around the movie, to get it to students, at-risk youth, community centers, juvenile justice centers. And really encourage the youth that, regardless of where you’re coming from, sharing your experiences and letting your voice be heard is a valuable thing, and could open up some pretty surprising and unexpected doors if you’re persistent with it. So that’s our big push. And then, there are your more traditional things, like, we’re going to have a broadcast, and we’re going to be on Netflix and iTunes eventually.

So yeah. I’m very pleased with how this whole journey has gone, especially when you consider that my initial goal was just to finish the damn thing. Now that it’s finished, it’s really exciting to see such a diverse group of people respond so positively.

RK: That’s really exciting. So what’s next for you?

JZ: What’s next is an interesting question that I’m actively working on. I really did enjoy being a director, and I think that I will do it again. But I also get a lot of great opportunities to work on other people’s stories in the editing chair, which is a skill set I’ve been refining for a lot longer than my directing skills. Right now, I’m working on a really great project, and then after that, I have more opportunities to work on other great projects in a number of different roles. So I’m just kind of letting my gut lead me toward stories that I find most inspiring. And some of those stories I would direct, some of those stories I would edit, some of those stories I would produce, but I think the important thing is telling stories I connect with, and stories that could be really powerful or meaningful for people.

So all of that is to say … I’m not really sure what I’m going to do. [Laughter] But there are some cool things on the horizon.

December 29, 2015 0 comments

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