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Romeo Is Bleeding

CommentaryFilmStreaming Selections

Streaming Selections: Oddball Films (Stephen Parr, RIP)

by Sam and Rick
written by Sam and Rick

Since its founding in 1984, the aptly-named Oddball Films has constituted one of the stranger spaces in the cinema world. An archive as interested in orphan home video, Italian psychedelic cartoons from the 60s, and instructional bumpers about hygiene intended for American classrooms as any neorealist classic or lost masterpiece, it was the brainchild of Stephen Parr, who passed away on October 24th.

Oddball Films’ distinct “only in San Francisco” vibe has long been immediately apparent to anyone attending an event there; for my birthday one year, we drank beer on couches while taking in a program that included The Story of Menstruation, the 1946 Disney/Kimberley Clark collaboration that the Mouse House promptly buried, followed by excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl films double-projected over vintage pornography. (We left with a printed copy of Very Personally Yours, which you can read in awe here.) Punk, puckish, and playful, with an undercurrent of very real affection for the materiality of film, it was Oddball and Parr in a nutshell.

Of course, Parr’s work wasn’t just preserving weird ephemera, though that was a big part of it. (“I’m really in the memory business,” he dryly notes in Joshua Moore’s short profile.) Oddball Films’ first paying client was Ridley Scott, looking for unusual footage for a Chanel commercial.

More recently, the archive has provided hard-to-find footage to any number of documentaries. Sure, this likely helped keep the lights on, but there’s no real sense of contradiction; Parr’s passion and love of film in and of itself seems to blur the boundary between the commercial and experimental. It’s all film.

Parr’s passing hit many in the SF film community hard, as a quick perusal of comments on any story about him reveals. He was by all accounts an unusually generous and committed guy, and in Oddball Films built a very unique legacy.

After checking out Moore’s short, you can burn as many hours as you’d like sifting through the digital stacks on their website and program your own strange night, the next best thing to visiting the space itself. (I highly recommend including this tripped-out ad for Life Savers from 1977, as well as this inscrutable footage of couples falling asleep during a “dance marathon.”)

Oddball Films seems determined to continue, and they deserve everyone’s support. There’s no archive like it, and Parr’s weird, delightful contributions need to be honored. Here’s Oddball’s “In Remembrance.” RIP Stephen Parr. I can’t imagine a more fitting tribute to someone in “the memory business” than doing whatever we can to keep those memories on hand, those off-kilter glimpses into the collective image, stacked lovingly on the shelves, and projected onto screens for the next generation of oddballs.

Sadly, founder and Director of Oddball Films and the San Francisco Media Archive, Stephen Parr, passed away suddenly on October 24, 2017 after a struggle with declining health. His family and Oddball staff have come together and are carefully working on ensuring a productive future for both entities while preserving the proud tradition of providing the most eclectic footage to our customers. Oddball continues to fill your orders for the most unusual and hard to find material for your projects.

 

Concurrently, we are accessing the arts community of the most creative city in the world to help reshape Oddball Films. Exciting and challenging, we are confident that we will be able to maintain the high quality of our product and services.

 

A Memorial Service for Stephen Parr is being planned for early 2018. Details to follow.

Quick Links

Beyond the Black Rainbow

It took me more or less the entire runtime of Beyond the Black Rainbow to realize what it isn’t.

I assumed it was just an incredibly patient slasher in the mold of The House of the Devil, and that the other shoe was going to drop at any moment. In reality, it’s one hundred percent a mood piece. It’s not really building up to anything – just luxuriating in its hyper-specific aesthetic. You probably already know if that sounds good or not.

(Liz -Streaming on Shudder)

The Five Obstructions

Lars von Trier had the worst thing that could happen to a scrappy, impish, occasionally-dickheaded young artist: he became respected.

So it’s wonderful that Mubi has put up The Five Obstructions, a documentary of him provoking experimental filmmaker/poet/sports commentator (yes, really) Jørgen Leth into remaking his 1967 short film The Perfect Human repeatedly, under increasingly strict guidelines. It’s worth watching, if only to see von Trier having fun.

(Liz – Streaming on Mubi)

Get Out

Still one of my favorites of 2017, Jordan Peele’s breakout piece of racially-fraught nightmare fuel demonstrated a real love of genre and a deft directorial touch. (Please let his Twilight Zone reboot move forward!)

In any other year, we’d laugh at the the notion of a clever, small-scale horror like Get Out generating year-end awards talk, but this is no normal year. Issues of race and gender dominate the news cycles, shops like Blumhouse and A24 are among the most notable success stories in cinemas (to say nothing of the juggernaut that is IT), and there’s (yet again) a demonstrable audience for adult-oriented films that do not center on or cater exclusively to the white men in charge.

Get Out is entirely of a piece with the zeitgeist, and horror is, shall we say, having a moment. If you haven’t seen it, now’s your chance.

(Rick – Streaming on Netflix, 11/4)

Romeo Is Bleeding

Finally!

Now that I’ve raved about its initial screening at 2015’s SF International Film Fest, reflected on a second theatrical viewing, interviewed its director, and placed it on a best-of-the-year list, Jason Zeldes’ moving, poetic portrait of Richmond, CA and the folks growing up there is available to stream. Click play and see what I’ve been on about for 2 years.

(Rick – Streaming on Netflix)

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CommentaryFilmReviews

The Futures of Documentary Past

by rick
written by rick

Watching She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, director Mary Dore’s perfectly agreeable and accomplished 2014 documentary about the birth of the modern women’s movement in the U.S., it’s hard not to feel there’s something staid about the proceedings.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry documentaryThis is less the fault of the film itself than a reflection of how exciting the landscape of documentary film has become in recent years. There has been such a steady stream of formally daring and aesthetically interesting entries in the genre that good, old-fashioned expository docs can’t help but seem prosaic, with their array of talking heads in mid-shot, narrative-driving needle drops, and carefully curated archival footage.

That’s not to say She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is unnecessary or without important things to say – if anything, its discussions of concerted political attacks on women’s health, heroic examples of community self-help, the dangers of resistance movements replicating the power dynamics they assail, and the importance of intersectionality are more timely than ever. But the film’s aesthetic throws into sharp relief the innovations that have been taking place in the form.

Of course, multiple modes and narrative traditions of documentary film have co-existed for most of film history. From the early actualities and Flaherty’s Nanook of the North through Dziga Vertov’s montages, from avant-garde juxtapositions and more poetic treatments to journalistic approaches, pure propaganda, cinéma vérité and direct cinema – just to scratch the surface – a diversity of forms is nothing new.

But the last few years have seen a remarkable resurgence of experimentation, or at least a renewed mainstream attention to it. For a while, it seemed that things like Michael Moore’s performative interrogations and Errol Morris’ self-reflexive films  (along with the more cult favorite status of someone like Ross McElwee) represented the only really viable alternative to what most of us probably think of as “the standard documentary.” Even a madman like Werner Herzog’s forays into documentaries, while consistently fascinating, have hewed pretty close to convention (though he’s been quick to deploy newer technical approaches and all are imbued with his characteristic weirdness).

act of killing documentaryMore recently, however, Joshua Oppenheimer’s remarkable masterpiece The Act of Killing, and more conventional but still bracingly participatory The Look of Silence, represented a sudden, dramatic shift. (In fairness, Herzog and Morris were both involved as producers of Oppenheimer’s projects. But as far as institutional appeal, it’s worth noting that the first lost out at the Oscars to the crowd-pleasing 20 Feet From Stardom and the second to the heart-breaking Amy, both entirely worthy but more conventional choices.) Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, which saw the doubt inherent in the approach of someone like Morris and raised it substantially, represents another offshoot into new areas. Elsewhere, on a wall somewhere, Frederick Wiseman is still out there, doing his Frederick Wiseman thing.

Romeo Is Bleeding documentaryAs it happens, my favorite films from the past two years at the San Francisco Film Festival were documentaries – Jason Zeldes’ Romeo Is Bleeding last year and Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s Notes On Blindness this time around. And, interestingly, both Zeldes and Middleton/Spinney have cited Oppenheimer and Polley as influences, in spirit if not necessarily in specific form. Romeo Is Bleeding blends numerous narrative and aesthetic strategies – in Zeldes’ words, “it’s vérité meets archival meets theater, dance, and poetry” – and Notes On Blindness seeks nothing less than the creation of an entirely new mode of filmic storytelling, one that grapples with the paradox of a cinema of blindness. Both are tremendously successful in different, unique ways.

Notes on Blindness documentaryAll of which makes me wonder if the traditional, expository form She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry takes is likely to become more the exception than the rule one day. There will always be a demand for well-told histories, and Dore’s film is certainly that: the interviews with 60s and 70s luminaries like Rita Mae Brown and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz are full of wisdom, the archival footage (some of it provided by local SF heroes Oddball Films) still thrills, and, with the exception of some painfully unnecessary staged readings (ironically, the film’s only real attempt at mixing things up aesthetically), all of the pieces fit. The film also deserves bonus points for its frank airing of internal grievances, its emphasis on its subjects’ reappraisals of tactics in hindsight, and how far it goes out of its way to complicate the overwhelming whiteness of the movement’s founders, giving plenty of space to the Black and Brown feminists who forced their way into a discussion that didn’t seem to realize it was shutting them out.

 

 

 

Or maybe this will remain the dominant approach. It may be that audiences will always prefer it to other, more challenging or jarring ones, and so, therefore, will those who bankroll documentary film. There’s something reassuring about its familiarity, as archival footage of a young person morphs into a contemporary interview, and name cards comfortingly locate us. We can’t get lost or lose our footing, even for a moment. We are in the capable hands of creative technicians with worthy stories to tell, in ways we recognize without hesitation.

Which is fine. None of this is to say that the archival approach is without merit, or that, somehow, archives themselves are of any diminished value. (Quite the opposite.) But the hopes for new insight in the documentary films to come lie more with the modes being explored by the Oppenheimers and Polleys – and the Zeldes’ , Middletons, and Spinneys – than they do in the discreet forms of the past we’ve come to know so well, which ably inform but fail to startle.

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FilmGreat Movie ProjectReviews

Documentary truth, falsehood, and the spaces between in Nanook of the North

by rick
written by rick

Part of an ongoing effort to watch each of the films in Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series. The introduction and full list can be found here.

What is a documentary? What are its aims, ambitions, and responsibilities – to its subjects, to its audience? To what degree is it permissible to shape the realities on display, rather than stand back as much as possible from the events depicted? Is it even possible to extricate a filmmaker from a film? Is it desirable? Is filmic truth bound by what we think of as journalistic ethics?

These are vital questions that continue to be asked to this day – indeed, Romeo Is Bleeding director Jason Zeldes brought them up in a recent conversation on this very blog – and they date back to Robert Flaherty‘s 1922 Nanook of the North, often cited as the first example of the form. (As many have pointed out, this isn’t quite true: the vast majority of early films depicted “actualities” – people emerging from a factory, trains in motion, etc. – but Nanook is almost certainly the first to approach what we generally think of as a “documentary” today.)

Allakariallak in Flaherty's Nanook of the NorthNanook, one of the first 25 films selected for preservation in the National Film Archive, is Flaherty’s chronicle of a season in the Arctic with an Inuit family. We watch Nanook (actual name Allakariallak, one of many liberties taken) as he hunts salmon, seals and, in a memorable scene, a walrus. We visit a white trading post with the family to trade for spears and other supplies. In the film’s most celebrated sequence, we discover how an igloo is built from the ground up, complete with a window. In the tradition of Western ethnography, little happens apart from the machinations of day-to-day life, or what the film would have us believe to be day-to-day life for these people. It’s by turns brutal and tender, and often rather boring, but there’s no doubt it presents a series of “exotic”, nearly alien images of a landscape and way of life that had never been caught on film before.

Of course, that way of life was already on is way out when Flaherty and his crew arrived. Many of the sequences were reenacted by Allakariallak and his “family,” none of whom he was actually related to. (In fact, one of his “wives” was actually Flaherty’s common-law wife, a rather problematic discovery.) The Inuit stars wore traditional garb for the camera that they wouldn’t wear in real life. Rifles had already been introduced and largely replaced the ubiquitous hunting spear that Flaherty seems to exalt. Several of the hunts were entirely staged. During the visit to the trading post, Allakariallak pretends to be amazed by a gramophone, even curiously biting on a record in wonder, in a rather insulting portrait of the naive native. Even the famous igloo sequence isn’t immune from this: upon discovering that there wasn’t adequate light to shoot inside an actual igloo, and building a larger one led to its collapse, Flaherty and his team instead created a three-walled version for “interior” shots. And on and on.

 

These liberties – and outright fabrications – have their critics and their defenders. For one thing, while we now expect that a documentary filmmaker will not entirely stage scenes and present them as recorded truth in the moment, Flaherty had no models on which to rely. In the process of inventing the documentary, he simply doesn’t seem troubled by them, and at no point does it feel exploitative, exactly. If anything, his clear affection for his subjects and their culture, or at least his interpretation of their culture, is what shines through. Allakariallak was an enthusiastic collaborator on the project, and dailies were screened for the cast and (largely native) crew. There are moments when they turn directly into the camera and smile with a wink – no one is being fooled here. And, indeed, “Nanook” became something of a star on the film’s release.

Native crew on Flaherty's Nanook of the NorthThe question, then, is whether any of these things matter. Flaherty did create a record, a document, of people and place, and captured incredible images of a land that seems almost like a dreamscape, or a distant planet. In any case, no camera technology at the time would’ve allowed him to follow everyone around recording their daily lives; to a degree, reenactments might have been the only reasonable way to proceed. But the question of truth or falsity haunts the picture, just as it continues to do with modern documentaries. (See the discussions about 2015’s wonderful film The Wolfpack, and the occasional sense of betrayal in them, if you have any doubts about that.)

 

What makes Nanook of the North extraordinary is the sense that a genre is being created on the fly. Instead of a depiction of banal “actualities” that served mainly to advertise the camera, and instead of a narrative feature rooted in the world of fiction, Flaherty traveled to the far ends of the earth to make a hybrid. Nanook means to record something like everyday life for a particular community, but to do so with a narrative sense, and with a protagonist.

Allakariallak in Flaherty's Nanook of the NorthInterestingly, the director made an earlier version on an earlier trip, but, upon returning, discovered it wasn’t compelling at all – just a collection of vignettes with nothing tying them together. (This version is lost: Flaherty dropped a cigarette on the nitrate film stock, underscoring the incredible fragility of early film.) In what now seems an obvious insight but at the time was anything but, he realized that a focus on a single person and his world could be more engaging and illuminating for audiences – someone we could relate to, and a structure on which to hang the various loose threads of observation. It would be, basically, a movie, just one with real people in it, in a real place most of us don’t get to see, doing things they (sometimes, maybe) ordinarily do. In 1922, that was revolutionary, and we’re still grappling with the ethical and aesthetic questions Flaherty was instrumental in raising, whether he knew it or not.

 

One final note, aimed square at the animal lovers in the crowd: this was a particularly tough watch for this particular vegan cinephile. With the incredible igloo-building sequence aside, Nanook is essentially an hour and a half of watching depictions of hunting, skinning, processing, and storing animal carcasses. This is understandable, since these things do and did occupy much of the time for people like the film’s subjects, carving out survival in an unforgiving land, and one in which nothing much grows at that. But you might want to steel yourself, because the constant killing really never stops until the closing frame.

Favorite Ebert line: “The film is not technically sophisticated; how could it be, with one camera, no lights, freezing cold, and everyone equally at the mercy of nature? But it has an authenticity that prevails over any complaints that some of the sequences were staged. If you stage a walrus hunt, it still involves hunting a walrus, and the walrus hasn’t seen the script.”

Next up: Safety Last.

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Interview

Interview: Director Jason Zeldes on Romeo Is Bleeding

by rick
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.

JasonZeldes_Director-240x300 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.

chevron

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.

romeo4

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.

RomeoIsBleeding_Filmpage_476x286

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.

dneise

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.

20 feet

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.

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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.

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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.

romeo awards

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.

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On Romeo Is Bleeding, and the benefits of second viewings

by rick
written by rick

Back in May of this year, I caught Romeo Is Bleeding at the SF International Film Fest. At the time, it was not only my favorite documentary of the year, but my favorite film of any genre I’ve seen in a theater in 2015.

Seeing it again last Thursday, four months later, this remains true. (Sorry, Mad Max; you’re still awesome, though, and you have decidedly more flame-shooting guitars.) But it’s striking how many things can shift from viewing to viewing. These can depend on what you bring to the film, maybe the head-space you’re in or the crowd you’re watching it with, but they can also involve what the film brings to you. Some aspects that went unnoticed (or that you downplayed in favor of others) on a first viewing seem to stand out, and others take on a different resonance.

Romeo Is Bleeding tells the story of several young poets in Richmond, CA staging a version of Romeo and Juliet, drawing on their own experiences as Black youth in a dangerous environment to rewrite, remap, and update Shakespeare’s text. The gangs, the divisions, the family tensions, the painful histories circumscribing people’s current choices, and the desperate love across borders that inform the original all find echoes in their lives, and the film places the whole endeavor in the specific contexts of a particular city at a particular moment in time. Shakespeare didn’t specifically address the environmental racism and lineages of oppression in Verona, of course, but maybe he would now.

In my original review, written directly after seeing the film screened, I focused largely on that guiding narrative. It’s easy to see why — in many ways, Romeo Is Bleeding paints on a large canvass, despite its local focus, and brings in themes of historical migration, corporate malfeasance, absent fathers in the community and by extension the prison-industrial complex, and much more. But it does this so deftly, and the central story of the play is so compelling, that it’s easy to overlook how much is going on here. On second viewing, these subtexts move into clearer view.

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In particular, the film is concerned with women and girls’ experiences in ways I wish I’d drawn more attention to the first time around. Despite his humbleness on camera and low-key demeanor, Donté Clark is a towering and compelling presence in the film, and he’s Richmond’s poet laureate for a reason — he’s amazing. (His performance of a new poem last Thursday after the show, called “Somewhere in America”, removed any doubt of that, if for some reason anyone in attendance was skeptical.)

But this shouldn’t obscure the centrality of the play-within-the-film’s Juliet, D’Neise Robinson, who more than holds her own. More than any other scene this time around, I was caught speechless by an interlude where she discusses her relationship (or lack thereof) with her father, and how that comes out in her re-writing of a key moment in the play. Directly afterwards, the film gives room for a number of young women to talk about the pressures they feel specifically as young women — grappling with stereotypes of “Richmond girls” and assumptions about “down girls” who’ll hide a lover’s gun or otherwise reckon with expectations of them inside and outside their communities. The line “I don’t want to be that. I’m too pretty to go to jail” got a laugh at both screenings, but the second time came through with a melancholy and a steely determination I hadn’t picked up on the first. It would’ve been easy for the filmmakers to focus exclusively on Donté; it’s important that they didn’t, and that should be recognized.

Further, knowing what’s to come in a film frees up the viewer to notice technical aspects that can blow by in the excited rush to see what happens next. For Romeo Is Bleeding, I especially singled out the ways in which both the editing and sound design give the film texture and pace. Right out the gate, the mixing is compelling and advances the film; you feel hurtled forward, in a sort of rush of ambient sound, breathless poetry, whispers, and the unexpected “BANG” that keeps you on edge. The editing is crisp and feels extremely sure of itself, effortlessly integrating images and holding them exactly long enough to make indelible impressions.

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My only second-viewing quibble — and I have to have one, that’s also a consequence of watching things more than once — was with the hand-held cinematography of the evacuation during the Chevron explosion. It must’ve been irresistible to include it, and it speaks to the frantic nature of the experience, but it also draws attention to itself in a way absolutely no other sequence does. For a movie that steadfastly avoids the charge of being “gimmicky”, this is the moment it comes closest.

But even there, it’s in service to the story. Or rather, the stories. Romeo Is Bleeding walks a narrative tightrope, and what director Jason Zeldes and his compatriots pull off is the rare film that just gets more worthwhile and admirable the closer you look. It’s currently continuing to make its rounds on the festival circuit, and you should go check it out if you can.

And then see it again, for the nuances you missed the first time around.

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Romeo Is Bleeding (Jason Zeldes, 2015)

by rick
written by rick

It’s only May, but the top contender for documentary of the year has already arrived. Jason Zeldes’ portrait of Richmond, CA and the struggles of its youth in an incredibly dangerous environment is a staggeringly emotional and moving film. It provides narrative context for its subjects, and is both visually interesting and accomplished, but it also has the good sense to let these kids speak for themselves. Holy shit, do they ever.

The film portrays a city under siege, where those from the north and central parts are locked in intractable violence, dating back decades. Or more: the unincorporated part of the north side was where Blacks who came westward to work in the shipyards were pushed a generation ago, a division literally demarcated by train tracks. The Chevron refinery, prone to blowing up every few years (including during the production of Romeo Is Bleeding), spews toxins into the community. Draconian gang injunctions – arguably borne out of a desperate attempt to still the gun violence – essentially criminalize the vast majority of the population. It’s the kind of place where almost no one at all is untouched by the ongoing strife and agonizing list of fatalities.

And in the midst of all this, kids write poetry, trying to get a hold on what they’re experiencing.

The film focuses on Donté Clark, an older but still young poet, and Molly Raynor, who together set up a spoken word and mentorship program for the youth of Richmond. Clark’s a lifelong resident, with family ties to a pivotal incident that might’ve played a huge role in opening the chasm between North and Central, which has been steadily filling with murdered Black men ever since. Without putting too fine a point on it, it’s clear this weighs on him. To the film’s credit, though, he’s not a salvational figure, and neither is Molly. They’re both driven primarily to give voice to the kids – or rather, allow the kids’ voices to come into their own, convinced that the silencing itself is a precondition for the violence.

After remarking on how the balcony of a particular theater they find themselves in would make for a good Romeo and Juliet, Molly proposes they stage one. Donté laughs it off – what do Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers have to do with Richmond. “Nobody would come to that play,” he laughs, not without reason. Then a bit later, he remembers how he read it again, no longer a disaffected 15 year old but as a 22-year-old poet and thought: “Oh shit, this is my life.” It is, after all, the story of violence between crews, of turf wars, of kids who’ve inherited the world their fathers fucked up and so find themselves acting out vendettas they don’t even really understand any more.

The decision? Donté and the group of young poets rewrite the play, holding on to plot beats and some of the language, while transposing it to Richmond and infusing it with rapid-fire spoken word and hip-hop rhythms. The poets draw on their own experiences to talk about home, family, doubt, grief, and rage. And they debut it in El Cerrito, for a crowd of their peers.

If you’re not sort of tearing up at the prospect, I worry about you.

In between footage of rehearsals, we get unobtrusive back stories and snippets of others – neighbors, family, even cops – talking about how things play out in Richmond. We get the frantic evacuation of their practice space downwind from the Chevron explosion, something the film makers couldn’t have anticipated but which just underlines the environmental racism of the situation.

And things being what they are, we bear witness to yet more tragic loss. It’s a lot to take, and the film doesn’t take it lightly, but it also keeps bringing things back to the topic at hand – the neighborhoods aren’t going to be fixed over night, but these kids have things to say and a forum in which to say them. This is valuable, they desperately want it, and self-expression has to start somewhere. To its profound credit, the film takes them totally seriously as both artists and goofy children all too aware of the dangers they face.

There are many ways this could’ve gone off the rails. It could’ve been maudlin, or disrespectful, or “important” (that “eat your vegetables” variety of damning with faint praise) or so worshipful that it obscured the flawed humanity and anxious doubt coursing through the whole thing. It is none of those things. It’s an honest, beautiful, and ultimately profound mediation on art and life, located in a particular place and time, and filled with individuals you immediately want to know better. It was screened at the San Francisco International Film Fest, where it received standing ovations at each of its three showings.

There may be a better documentary this year, but there won’t be a more vital one. It should be screened in every high school in the country. Or, as Raynor suggested in the Q&A, paired with Shakespeare’s play in the curricula. With the near-annual laments about declining readership for The Bard, maybe that’s something everyone can get behind. The connections these poets make to the source material are deep and wonderful, and the stories they tell need to be heard far outside the borders of Richmond, California.

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