I knew this was a famed doc about door-to-door bible salesman, have previously seen multiple parodies of it, did not foresee a scene where a salesman gets lost in a Florida town designed like an Arabian Nights theme park. John Semley: “Sad men with no money bilking lonely housewives with slightly less money for salvation on the installment plan.”
Absolute charmer of a birdwatching doc – free on youtube and better than most fest-premiering docs we’ve seen lately. Clear from the opening credits that Owen has got visual ideas to spare. His brother Quentin gets most of the face time and has got the charisma to back that up. Most importantly we see hundreds of beautiful birds.
I did not like the lab scene where they implanted an eXistenZ gamepod port into a dog’s underside. After that, I felt free to skip ahead during the other b/w lab horrors. Observational long takes of Moscow street dogs pays off when one is filmed catching and killing a housecat. Or maybe “pays off” isn’t the term, since Kedi played theaters across the country, and this one played nowhere. Narrator (the star of Leviathan) tells of Russia’s history of firing animals into space, intercut with observational doc scenes of Moscow street dogs. The directors followed up with another Moscow street dogs movie, and their first film about people debuts in a couple days at Locarno. The Tori Amos song > the movie… Katy’s least-favorite shorts director edited.
The directors didn’t have space in mind when they started filming [Seventh Row]:
Suddenly, when we found out that Laika had been living on the streets, the film became so rich. These street dogs we see in the film are real explorers. They have to be in order to survive. They have to understand every movement in the city. They have to know how the city is changing and how they can find a place to stay and survive. We found it interesting that there were similarities between these dogs and their ancestors, the heroic cosmonaut dogs.
Told K this isn’t a doc when she asked, but it turns out all of Paul’s social media stuff is real, oops. Paul’s in his oversharing era with public video diaries and Q&As with followers. The #1 thing I like about the movie is the record-crackle sound on certain edits.
My blu-ray of Treme is arriving tonight and I just realized I’ve never watched its prequel. I know I started it at least twice, but pretty sure I’ve never made it to part two before, because I don’t recall armed police “defending” the bridges from residents of other parishes.
Historian Doug Brinkley: “I’ve never seen such a time when the US government turned its back on people in need to this degree, to have a people in such dire need getting such little help from the federal government while they’re screaming for help, I think it’s unprecedented.” Maybe in 2005/06 that was new, but it’s doubly depressing to watch this the week FEMA is getting dismantled. Movie opens with Mayor Ray Nagin under great suspicion, then by episode two he becomes a great populist hero fighting for the people, so imagine my disappointment when I pulled him up on wikipedia to see where he went next (to jail for corruption). Fighting for the people might now have gone permanently out of fashion. Very good music, at least.
Honestly a documentary about homework, interviewing kids about their homework in order to make points about schooling and parenting. AK discusses not knowing what kind of movie he’s making at the beginning (“it’s not really a film, more a piece of research”), and at the end he breaks up the format to engage more deeply with a boy who didn’t want to be interviewed.
Two kids’ ambitions:
During the interviews (the central bulk of the movie) he cuts to the cameraman really frequently, presumably for sound edits. My main takeaway was the kids answering yes/no questions with a clicking sound, which I like even more than the “mmm!”-with-head-nod I picked up from anime.
Catching up with some Lynch-related artifacts, I’ve got two different behind-the-scenes docs about Blue Velvet.
Blue Velvet Revisited (2016, Peter Braatz)
Movies are magic, but making movies is dull. Occasionally has sync sound, asking unenlightening Qs to Lynch, or sometimes overlaying shoot audio, or sometimes just playing trippy music, flashing up the old footage with fancy titles – it’s tough when you’re trying to piggyback your art off one of my favorite films.
It’s a Strange World (2019, Shane Callahan & Benedict Fancy)
In the first five seconds someone says the town was like a character in the film. Director of the first doc appears in this doc. Props guys tell stories about the ear, the “In Dreams” worklight mic, the brain splatter, a steadicam shot on the stairs, some random little things.
From Long Island car people to Italian dog people to Argentine horse people, Dweck gets around. Real beauty in every moment of this, and I’m not just saying that because my cinephile senses are stimulated by the black-and-white photography, but maybe just a little bit. The gauchos try to keep juvenile cows safe from the hated condors, teach their kids the skills, excel at rodeo competitions, fight against the school dress code, and reflect on their cool lives.
Same Vogel chapter as The Spanish Earth, “Left and Revolutionary Cinema: the West.” Useful to note that Vogel is never posting lists of his favorite movies, but the ones that illustrate a particular quality or movement – he spends half this chapter complaining about early 1970s Godard.
Unfortunately, the resultant films – from British Sounds to Tout Va Bien – prove that to “will” political cinema into being without the mediation of art is self-defeating. Despite brilliant sequences (reminiscent of the “old” Godard), these works are visually sterile, intellectually shallow, and, in terms of their overbearing, insistent soundtracks didactic, pedantic, dogmatic.
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The Cry of Jazz (1959, Edward Bland)
“Rock and roll is not jazz.” Argument within a college(?) jazz club about whether only Black people could have created jazz, the white boys arguing that there are plenty of white players so race has nothing to do with it. Narrator Alex explains how music works (repeating chorus, changes/harmonies) and how jazz has evolved, culminating in the hottest group of today, the Sun Ra Arkestra. While the kids are stuck arguing in their musicless bland room, our camera hits the streets and the clubs seeking examples for Alex’s explanations. After a savage scene comparing Black life (pool game) to white life (poodle getting a haircut), eventually there’s a short debate over whether Americans have souls, concluding ambivalently: “America’s soul is an empty void.” For a half-hour movie that begins looking like a MST3K educational short, this sure takes some wild turns.
The two restraining elements in jazz are the form and the changes. They are restraining because of their endless repetition, in much the same way that the Negro experiences the endless daily humiliation of American life, which bequeaths him a futureless future. In conflict with America’s gift of a futureless future is the Negro’s image of himself. Through glorifying the inherent joy and freedom in each present moment of life, the Negro transforms America’s image of him into a transport of joy. Denied a future, the joyous celebration of the present is the Negro’s answer to America’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate him. Jazz is a musical expression of the Negro’s eternal recreation of the present. The Negro’s freeing worship of the present in jazz occurs through the constant creation of new ideas in jazz. These new ideas are born by improvising through the restraints of the form and the changes. Jazz reflects the improvised life thrust upon the Negro. Now, melody is one element which can be used in improvisation. The soloist creates this melody through elaborating on various details of the changes. The manner in which each change shall be elaborated upon is a problem of the eternal present. As Negro life admits of many individual solutions, so does the way in which a change can be elaborated upon. Of course the Negro, as man and/or jazzman, must be constantly creative, for that is how he remains free. Otherwise, the dehumanizing portrait America has drawn of him will triumph.
Editor Howard Alk worked on Dylan movies, and one of the jazz club girls grew up to be Magnolia‘s Rose Gator. Bland went on to arrange for Sun Ra in New York and compose orchestral works. From his NY Times obituary:
The British critic Kenneth Tynan, in a column for The London Observer, wrote that it “does not really belong to the history of cinematic art, but it assuredly belongs to history” as “the first film in which the American Negro has issued a direct challenge to the white.”
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I’m a Man (1969, Peter Rosen)
“Police are always frightened.” John walks through a Connecticut town carrying a spear in order to provoke white people, then calls his wife to say he’s about to be arrested. The doc(?) interviews people from John’s court case: the whites think he’s incompetent, the blacks realize he’s an intellectual. John sees himself as a militant, says he expects to die poor and hated, but aims to increase freedom for his kids.
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Wholly Communion (1966, Peter Whitehead)
Something completely different: document of a post-beatnik pre-hippie poetry reading in June 1965 at Royal Albert Hall. “This evening is an experiment” – with minor crowd disturbance or drama or movement, it’s mostly just guys reading poetry with better-than-decent sound recording.
Ginsberg listens and waits his turn:
