Film / Video

When Miloš Forman arrives here on April 12 for his sold-out Regis Dialogue with L.A.-based critic Scott Foundas, the 75-year-old filmmaker deserves to be greeted like a rock star, his fans scrambling for autographs, shouting out requests ("Rock me, Amadeus!"), and perhaps even flicking their Bics until the Walker's fire alarm goes off.

I don't say this because Forman directed a valiantly recovering Courtney Love in 1996's The People vs. Larry Flynt, or because R.E.M. helped inspire his Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon a few years later, or because in the times-they-are-a-changin'-back days of '79 he let it all hang out with Hair, or because the Czechoslovakia-born filmmaker's well-named U.S. debut Taking Off (1970) sports enough pricey tuneage (by Woodstock vets The Incredible String Band and others) to have indefinitely forestalled a commercial video release anywhere in the world. I don't even say it because the apt title of the Walker's accompanying retro–"Cinema of Resistance"–all but begs us to defy the museum's easy listening vibe ("Freebird!"), like Forman's R.P. McMurphy righteously railing against Nurse Ratched's wretched Muzak in the Cuckoo's Nest.

Rather, I'm thinking of the classic Minneapolitan rock tale–lovingly told by Jim Walsh in the Pioneer Press and well worth repeating here or any other time–wherein the Revolution-era Prince sits alone at the back of the dearly beloved Southtown Theatre several nights in a row, swinging his high heels to the beat of Forman's funky Amadeus (screening in its director's cut edition this Friday, April 4, at the Walker).

That His Royal Badness would just a few months later join the director among 1985's Oscar-winners (Prince's gold came for writing the Purple Rain soundtrack, of course) means our reclusive homeboy might already have serenaded Forman for his vision of a flamboyantly costumed control freak whose musical genius was without equal at the time. But I doubt it. So let us be sure to thank Miloš Forman for rocking the Kid of Purple Rain–along with kids of all colors, really, to the extent that the "Resistance" leader has always been a youthquaking revolutionary.

"I remember seeing Amadeus as a kid and really liking it," says Foundas by phone from L.A. "Particularly for a period film, it has a very contemporary feel. So besides the fact that it's about young people, it's a movie that a kid could easily access."

For another budding critic, it was Hair that first flipped his wig, although, relatively speaking, I was still a pup when I saw Forman in the flesh at the Virgin Megastore, of all places, where he was pimping Larry Flynt in workprint form for the New York Film Festival press screening crowd. “I’m not interested in Hustler,” Forman said of Flynt's rag, “but I am interested in the idea that someone could tell me not to buy it.”

Foundas, who's excited to be encountering Forman (and Minneapolis) for the first time on April 12, says that as interviewer he hopes to explore, among other things, the relationship between the director's life and work.

"His early films," Foundas says of Black Peter (April 1), Loves of a Blonde (April 8), and The Firemen's Ball (April 16), all key works of the Czech New Wave, "clearly reflect the sensibility of someone who grew up under Communism and had an almost Dickensian childhood and adolescence. Given what his life was like, it's amazing that he became a filmmaker rather than a coalminer."

At the age of eight, Forman witnessed his mother being taken away from the family home by Nazis; both she and Forman's father, a teacher, perished in a concentration camp after having been marked for death by a former employee of theirs. Sudden shocks, some matter-of-factly presented, are understandably commonplace in Forman's work. "The Germans just cancelled culture," the director told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1994 by way of explaining that, among influences, his childhood itself factors far more significantly than his childhood experience of movies. Disguising his early social critiques under cover of comedy, Forman became an early master of the fine art of smuggling, although Firemen's Ball (1967) allegorized Communism clearly enough to inspire some 40,000 Czechoslovakian firemen to threaten picketing the film–which was summarily banned in his homeland. Ball was the first of Forman's works to screen at the New York Film Festival, which provided a ticket to the U.S. as well as a chance to begin making high-profile American movies–less dissimilar to the scrappy Czech ones than they might appear.

Foundas, who hailed Forman's Goya's Ghosts (April 2) as "irreverent" in LA Weekly, says that comic impiety, along with an outsider's point of view, can be traced across the entire oeuvre.

"Goya's isn't a portrait of the artist so much as the portrait of a society that's constantly reinventing itself as one regime opposes the previous one," the critic says. "So you have this absurd cycle of contradictions seen over the course of a lifetime–which is how the world must look to someone like Forman, who has experienced democracy, Nazism, and Communism. Even [Forman's] Czech films are made from an outsider's perspective, with nonconformist characters rebelling against parents or patriarchal figures. And the [American] biopics are unorthodox as well. Man on the Moon seems to channel the personality of its subject, being both entertaining and enigmatic. It's a movie about Andy Kaufman where you learn as little about Andy Kaufman as Andy Kaufman would probably want you to learn."

The Walker, as if to help preserve the mysteries of both Kaufman and Forman, isn't screening Man on the Moon. Children of the resistance would thus do well to download the bootleg.

Upon winning the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, "Japan's leading woman director"–Naomi Kawase, now in the "spotlight" of the Walker's Women With Vision series–spoke in Buddhist terms of the benefits of difficulty. "You try to find strengths–and I don’t mean money, cars, or clothing," she said. "It’s not necessarily something visible. It can be the wind, the light, the memory of the ancients…"

Nature and ancestry are indeed key elements of Kawase's The Mourning Forest, whose weighty production stumbled a bit en route to the Cannes stage–merely by way of gathering strength, its maker would say. (She'll have more to say about the film when introducing it at 7pm Thursday.) If anything, though, the relation between past and present–the focus of this year's "Vision" program, as it happens–bears even more directly on the filmmaker's little-seen documentaries.

Kawase–still not 40 years of age–had made more than a dozen docs before her first narrative feature, Suzaku, took its own Cannes prize, the Camera d'Or, in 1997. Since then, she has made a half-dozen more nonfiction works, all exceedingly rare in the U.S., including Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth (2001) and Birth/Mother (2006)–nature and ancestry, past and present intertwined in both, each film connected inextricably to the other.

(Some practical details: Birth/Mother screens at the Walker on Thursday at 5:30, just before Kawase introduces The Mourning Forest, while Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth screens the following afternoon in room 155 of Nicholson Hall, introduced by the director and co-presented by the U of M's Institute for Advanced Study Film Collaborative and its Consortium for the Study of the Asias. Both of these screenings are free–and not to be missed.)

The more experimental of the two (in a close contest), Sky, Wind finds Kawase combining discrete audio and video tracks in complex and sometimes disorienting ways. Clips of the director's teary phone talk with the biological father she had never known–"How did you get my number?" he asks, among other, more generous things–are played over benign images of people watching TV, as if to measure the oceanic distance between raw familial drama and an evening's entertainment. (Kawase has made it clear in interviews–as if it wasn't obvious in her films–that she's no fan of the Hollywood style.) Elsewhere, shots of nature–slow pans up the stems of dead or dying plants, for example–appear immediately poignant in the context of the filmmaker's own separation from her roots. (Kawase's great aunt Uno–star of Birth/Mother–raised the girl from birth at her niece's request.)

If the soundtrack of Sky, Wind bears the burden of conveying the film's story (i.e., Kawase attempts to come to terms with her father), the visuals serve as the director's reflection on the details–as the present rather than the past. This autobiographical doc also juggles elements of fiction–as when a clapperboard appears in a long scene of Kawase talking to an artist about getting a tattoo to match her dad's. What's amazing about the presence of that clapperboard isn't so much that it breaks the spell of nonfiction, but that it gets us thinking about the fundamental artifice of most any documentary, a personal one not least. Clapperboard or no, isn't "reality" already being directed in a film whose maker chooses to visit a tattoo artist and roll the camera? Here, Kawase effectively collapses the distinction between her life and her art–much as a tattoo does, you might say. To etch one's story in celluloid or on the body itself is to leave a permanent record–or, in some cases, a scar.

Birth/Mother–naturally–is about pain. Its first words are Kawase's, spoken from offscreen to her great aunt Uno–"Why did you adopt me?"–over the close-up image of something indistinctly bloodier than a Peckinpah frame, perhaps a placental sac. Filming while her elder was in the final stages of dementia, Kawase dares to begin the doc with her confrontational approach to the 90-year-old Uno, who's reduced by the conversation to tearful quivering. It's a fascinatingly bold, even abrasive film, never more so than in extreme close-ups of Uno's bruised, sagging flesh in a bathtub–shocking images, these, beautiful only through the viewer's strenuous effort (and not necessarily then).

Nearly every image in the first half carries with it the smell of death, reminding us that it's not a film about a relationship, but about the end of a relationship–the end of a life. At one point Kawase sings "Happy Birthday" (in English) to her great aunt and giggles as the old woman struggles to blow out candles with her thin breath. As much as the 1970s' American family docs of Western legend, Birth/Mother is unsparingly direct–and the gutsiest film of Kawase's that I've seen. The film's eventual focus on Kawase's pregnancy–culminating in the emergence of baby boy Mitsuki–relives it only somewhat of its ingeniously harsh vibe. Kawase fictionalized this material for the relatively gentle Mourning Forest, in which a young nurse befriends an old man with dementia, following him on a quest to find his wife's gravesite. But Birth/Mother plays as a work of the toughest love–a cathartic purge, seemingly at the expense of a dying woman's final memories. (Message: Past and present may indeed be closely connected–but the world belongs to the living.)

Kawase's films–her narrative films in particular–have been widely compared to those of Ozu and Naruse for taking intimate approaches to interpersonal relations. Not surprisingly, the work has proven too intimate for some. Writing from Cannes, Esquire's Mike D'Angelo–not a critic generally known for his great sensitivity–issued sarcastic advice to Mourning's bereaved heroine: "Talk to a shrink, lady." Expressing himself more tactfully, the Buenos Aires-based IMDB writer who notes Kawase's "exhibitionism" does have a point. Both Birth/Mother and the narrative feature Shara–labors of love in the literal sense–climax with Kawase's delivery of Mitsuki, while Sky, Wind contains glimpses of the then 27-year-old filmmaker receiving her first Cannes prize. "After Kurosawa and Oshima, I think Kawase will be the next internationally known name among this generation of [Japanese filmmakers]," said… Kawase!

The director, a noted lover of basketball, is hardly her winning team's only cheerleader, as evidenced in a post-Grand Prix message to GreenCine Daily from a fan named Beruk: "I'm so happy for Naomi Kawase! Please marry me Naomi!" Note to Beruk: Sorry, she's taken. Might you find what you're looking for in the wind, the light?

I worked for years as a projectionist in archival screening venues that handle films of all kinds from all eras. These venues, the Walker counted among them, are typically equipped to handle just about anything that comes in the door, often via the octagonal shipping cans like those pictured on the left. As most projectionists can attest, it is not uncommon to receive a print that is not marked with the film’s proper aspect ratio. This typically isn’t an issue, especially with a modern film produced in the US. 99.9% of the time, these films will be one of two aspect ratios: 1.85:1(often referred to as ‘flat’) or 2.35:1 (referred to as ’scope’). A quick look at the image on the print will quickly determine which of these a particular film is.

Paranoid Park arrived, unmarked, and a quick look determined that it should, being a modern film produced in the US, be projected in the 1.85 aspect ratio. A few sources on the net confirm this. In the hours preceeding the screening, I glanced at the film’s press kit and noticed that an aspect ratio of 1.33 was noted. 1.33 (often referred to as ‘academy’, and more accurately 1.37:1) is basically the aspect ratio from the earliest days of silent cinema, and the predominent aspect ratio of the first five or six decades of film history. It also matches the aspect ratio of a standard 4:3 television. Outside of some video production (most of that has shifted to a 16:9 aspect ratio) and standard 16mm production, that format is very rarely used these days. We were a little puzzled. Was it possible that Paranoid Park was actually intended to be presented in the 1:37 ratio?

A little more in-depth research found that to indeed be true. What cemented that for me was the lead-in to an interview with Gus Van Sant on the excellent film blog Twitch. It describes a conversation between Van Sant and Andrew Bailey at the Letterman Digital Center:

“Van Sant mentioned that--because the Letterman Digital Center is one of the few places equipped to do so--Paranoid Park was going to be projected in its original aspect ratio, 1.37--”so it's a big square." He explained that he's been shooting his last few movies in this format, partly because they were commissioned as HBO television projects, allowing for the square format. Likewise, when he was a film student in school, he used to shoot in 16mm so he's continued to do so. Though 1.37 is Paranoid Park's original aspect/ratio, it's sometimes shown in different formats due to the limitations of in-house projection systems. When it comes out in theaters it will most likely be shown in 1.66 [the predominant ‘flat’ format in European cinemas] or 1.85. The rare opportunity to screen in the Letterman Digital Center allows the film to be projected as it was meant to be seen. Andrew offered the keen insight regarding using aspect ratio as character development, with which Van Sant fully concurred.”

So we proceeded with the plan to present the film in the 1.37 aspect ratio, but decided, thanks to the never-ending patience of our projectionist, Aaron, to run some tests to compare the 1.37 presentation with a 1.85 presentation. This was an interesting experiment, and it demonstrated how different a film can ‘feel’ with a different aspect ratio. The images below aren’t directly from the print, but you can get a sense of the difference. On the left is an image from the film in the 1.37 aspect ratio. On the right is the same image with the top and bottom blacked out, mimicking the presentation the film would have in a theater that can only show the film in the 1.85 aspect ratio.

With the film presented in 1.85, the top and bottom of the frame is cut off. It’s clear that though Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li shot the film with the images composed for the 1.37 frame, they were very cognizant of the fact that the image would likely be presented in theaters that needed to eliminate the top and bottom of the image. Audiences seeing the cropped image won’t miss any details important to the plot, but they will, in my opinion, have a very different viewing experience. The cinemtography on this film is absolutely stunning and I can’t recommend more highly that you see the film projected from a 35mm print. If you missed the screening at the Walker last night, you can catch it locally at the Lagoon Cinema starting this Friday, March 21.

· Deb Wallwork and Mike Hazard’s C. Beck, featured in the 2007 edition of MNTV, took the grand prize from Independent Lens‘ online shorts fest. Indiewire reports. If you missed the airing of MNTV, the films can still be viewed online.

· Past Regis Dialogue guests Ang Lee and James Schamus talk to Entertainment Weekly about Heath Ledger, the new Hulk movie, and their upcoming project. Thanks to Matt Dentler’s blog, as EW is nowhere near my radar.

· I look forward to David Bordwell’s posts from Hong Kong every spring. They are always envy-inducing and chock-full of great snapshots. Head here to read about his trip thus far and check out that picture with him and Hou Hsiao-Hsien!

During the last week of March, Walker's Women with Vision festival offers the rare opportunity to meet Japanese director Naomi Kawase, who's not only Japan's leading female filmmaker but also one of its most internationally known independent filmmakers. It's no wonder everybody is heading for tickets of her latest film Mogari No Mori (The Mourning Forest) which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival last year, and which will be introduced and discussed by her in person.

But Shara (Sharasojyu) the other fiction film screened in the "Spotlight on Kawase" series should not be missed either. The film contains an amazing scene that blew me away the first time I saw it, and did so every time I have seen it since. You shouldn't pass on the chance to see it in the cinema.

The 7 minutes long dance scene I am talking about is surely not the only reason for seeing the film, but it will strike you emotionally in a way that seldom happens. It's neither pathos nor a melodramatic constellation that is touching about this scene. Its stirring momentum is more a healing force that evolves out of the street dance of the city festival one of the protagonists is taking part in. There is the physicality of the voices and the energy of body movements, as well as the rhythm of singing or rather shouting, which provides a connecting bond for the group dancing as well as for the people watching. And all of this is transmitted by the film in a way that the liberating force of healing becomes perceptible to the audience of the film, too.
There is another reason why Shara, which was released in 2003, is interesting in terms of Kawase's work. Kawase herself plays Reiko, who is pregnant in the second half of the film, and at the end she gives birth to a little boy at her home among her family. One year later Naomi Kawase is pregnant herself and gives birth to her son Mitsuki. And she includes scenes of her giving birth in the documentary Tarachime (Birth/Mother). So we have two birth scenes, both with the same woman and directed by her as well, and the fictional scene precedes the one in the documentary.

Film Critic and Walker Blogger Rob Nelson, clearly a man of many hats, is currently teaching a documentary film studies class at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He asked his students to weigh in on Nina Davenport’s documentary Operation Filmmaker, which will be playing at the Walker this Thursday (It’s a free screening!) as part of the Women With Vision Film Festival. Head over to the MinnPost page to read what they had to say.

· Anthony Minghella, Oscar winning Writer and Director of The English Patient, died at 5am this morning after a brain hemmorhage. Variety reports.

· Cinematical reviews Older Than America from SXSW, hot off the opening night of Women With Vision.

· South By Southwest Winners announced.

In her recent rave review of Paranoid Park, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis invokes Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Dargis’ connection is no accident, as Van Sant himself credits Tarr’s work in helping shape his own vision in making his last four films: Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park(screening this Wednesday at the Walker). Last November the Walker was lucky enough to host a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective with auteur Tarr, whose mesmerizing, languid films are rarely shown in the U.S. Tarr was certainly a bit more tight-lipped about his thought process as a filmmaker than Van Sant, but analyzing the connections between the two is interesting nonetheless. I love how both Tarr and Van Sant’s work have so many similarities in terms of their sublime cinematography of long takes, shot with a slow-moving camera–and yet each is so rooted in their particular location: Tarr with his vast Hungarian wastelands, Van Sant with his Pacific Northwest ethos.

For a MOMA retrospective on Tarr, Van Sant wrote an essay about Tarr’s films, which I’ve reproduced below. When so many current filmmakers seem to eschew the past, I admire Van Sant for having the capacity to learn from a true master of cinema–and can’t wait to see Tarr’s influence manifest itself in Van Sant’s new work.

The Camera is a Machine

I have been influenced by Béla Tarr's films and after reviewing the last three works Damnation, Satantango, and Werckmeister Harmonies, I find myself attempting to rethink film grammar and the effect industry has had on it. This is the way I see it. Cinema started as simple single-shot full-length proscenium compositions resembling theater, the only thing that it could find to reference to commercialize itself. By the next twenty years there was a new vocabulary. The close up, montage, and parallel storytelling fragmented the continuity of the previous proscenium-encased static-frame full-figure images. Separate fragments were now placed together to form meaning, the director could play with time and cinematic space. It was exciting. Was this an absolute inevitable direction or just one road cinema chose to take?

I believe these cinematic innovations complimented industry and created an Industrial Vocabulary. The director could tell you how to think about scenes by the way he played with separate pieces. He could control his characters, he could control time and story, and he could control you. Left behind were the proscenium and the static take, which were old-fashioned.

Things were modern, things were easier, like doing your laundry, there was a washing machine now that would do it for you. The modern cinema was an invention that could think for you, you didn't have to do in anymore, like in the theater.

The Cinema of Industry has progressed into mega-industry and mega-cinema but remaining ideally the same? The cinematic vocabulary of a 2001 television show like Ally McBeal is virtually the same as Birth of a Nation's. It is no surprise that Citizen Kane has been considered the greatest film of all time, a film about selling oneself down the river along with the copper, coal and timber while nostalgically longing for a lost Victorian era, and film vocabulary's original beginnings, a Rosebud, that has been left behind in another century.

Béla's stuff seems to be a successful and authentic departure, a wholly other cinema beginning over again. A cinema that needed to come from outside our Western Culture, a lost Rosebud, one of the many directions cinema might have before we sold ourselves down the river.

Béla's creations use static full figure landscapes, as if referencing the 1800's steam engine pulling into a station that would force audience members standing in the gallery to run for the exit so they wouldn't get hit by the train. Somehow Béla has gotten himself back there psychically and learned things all over again as if modern cinema had never happened. An angry crowd marches down a street to burn down the hospital in Werckmeister Harmonies, a shot that lasts about five minutes. When asked after a screening why the shot of the crowd lasted for so long, Béla answered, "because it was a long way." The question was an honest one, why would the audience weaned on post modern industrial cinema sit and watch an angry mob for so long when they have been used to a shot that lasts only a couple of seconds, even a shot ten or fifteen seconds would be too long. But the answer, although funny, is also an honest one, it was a long enough way that to show it for five minutes it affects the way we think about the event, the mob, the march, the hospital. Not shorthanded, not as clipped as in Industrial Vocabulary, but played out lyrically and poetically, letting us in on the thoughts rather than just saying one thing like, the mob walked, rather; the mob walked, and grimaced and raised their torches, and walked in synchronized and unsynchronized steps, advanced, fell back, and when they arrived it had been a long way.

Hitchcock said in response to a question by François Truffaut that major stylistic film changes could happen through character, perhaps, but here is a very major change through ideas.

Béla's works are organic and contemplative in their intentions rather than shortened and contemporary. They find themselves contemplating life in a way that is almost impossible watching an ordinary modern film. They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like seeing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.
--Gus Van Sant, MoMA Bela Tarr Retrospective Catalogue, 2001.

We’ve been following the career of Gus Van Sant for some time now. He was here in 2003 when for a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective. We premiered his film Gerry at that time, and that film marked the beginning of a departure from the style of filmmaking of his previous work. Longer takes and improvisation became a part of his filmmaking. Gerry might be my personal favorite, but Elephant really blew me away as well. I’ve been looking forward to Paranoid Park since hearing about its premiere at Cannes last year. It’s taken a while for it to make it’s way to the theaters, and it should be a spectacle on the screen here at the Walker. With Cinematography by long-time Wong Kar Wai collaborator Christopher Doyle and Kathy Li, and a newly completed sound sytem upgrade (more on this soon) in our Cinema, this should prove to be a great show.

We will be presenting a FREE screening of Paranoid Park On Wednesday, March 19.

Take a look at the trailer to get a sense of the film. (and a taste of the super 8 skateboarding footage.)

Faces of a Fig Tree (Ichijiku No Kao)
Directed by Kaori Momoi
Saturday, March 15 7:30 pm

This year's festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today's challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I often joke that "A Japanese man prefers a woman he can take down" but in Japan, which has a long history of chauvinism, women--let alone women filmmakers--still have a difficult time in the work place. As proof of that, there is not one female director in the Japanese major movie industry. I feel that now and from now on, with a rooted coed system (where men experience being bested academically by women), young men find it easier to work with and share a respectful relationship with women. As an actress I wrote scripts on set and participated creatively as an actor thinking to become a filmmaker. The time for female filmmakers has only really just begun. I can assure you that from here on out there will be a deluge of women artists.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

I think there is a certain something that films express better than other arts such as literature or music. It's something subconscious or intuitive that a living being gives birth to. This instantaneous feeling that emerges from my body keeps me making films.

The world in which the Kadowaki family lives seems at the border of reality and fiction. Their environment appears dominated by fantasy while all the characters are going through intense transformation. What kind of aesthetic and style did you use to enhance this sort of surrealism?

To die, like a television switching off, suddenly causes the picture of daily life to disappear. Consequently, to live, means partaking in daily living. Daily life doesn't contain a lot of big surprises; if we don't look at it through our memories or other people's eyes, it doesn't hit home that we're actually happy. The themes in this film are 'Why can't we feel the happiness we have now' and 'isn't it a let-down not to be able to?" I wanted to show people that calmly eating around the dinner table, if you stop to look at it, is beautiful.

You are well known as an established actress. With Faces of a Fig Tree you directed a film yourself for the first time. Did the experience of directing change your view of acting?

Actors are an entity that neither transform nor perform. I found that I wanted them to lend their talents and become creators on set.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

During filming, I never explained to the actors what scene we were shooting. I wrote the script, but the majority of the time the actors spoke in the scene as a response to my lines and instructions. Then it was a matter of arriving back at the lines from the script.

I like the dining table where the family is eating croquettes after the father has died. The children knew that they were eating at the table after their father's death, but with the mother's line "Your father sure is late tonight" it seems as though they become completely unsure of whether he is even dead anymore and they just continue eating silently. I think of them as children clumsily trying to support their mother, who's grown a little bit funny in the head after the death of her husband, through the mundane daily routine of eating. That's my favorite scene.

Translated from Japanese by Robert Behnen, edited by C. Marran

We’ve got a very exciting weekend ahead of us!

Women With Vision opens this evening with what will be a packed, sold out screening of Older Than America. If you missed your chance to get tickets, don’t worry, I know the filmmakers are planning to bring the film back to the Twin Cities for more screenings.

Saturday brings three exciting programs: The first of two Women With Vision Short Film Programs, the WIFTI Short Film Showcase, and the local premiere of Maria Speth’s Madonnas. Tickets are still available for all three of these programs.

Sunday, in conjunction with the Sabes Foundation Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival, we will be presenting the documentary Making Trouble. The Walker’s allotment of member tickets have sold out, but there are a very limited number of tickets remaining from the Jewish Film Festival box office. Call 952.381.3499 to check availability and purchase a ticket.

The Mirroring Cure
Directed by Charlotte Ginsborg
2007, UK, video, 28 minutes
Saturday, March 8, 2:00 pm

Women With Vision is proud to announce that Charlotte Ginsborg is flying in Minneapolis from London this Friday to introduce her film The Mirroring Cure presented March 8 on International Women’s Day. Part of the Short Films, Program One, The Mirroring Cure is a genre mix of documentary and fiction which tries to understand how the employees of a company are affected by the demolishing of an old building and the construction of its replacement.

Operation Filmmaker
Directed by Nina Davenport
Thursday, March 20, 7:00 pm

This year’s festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today’s challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I hesitate to be so blunt, but I do think film is still an extremely sexist industry. Just look at the statistics published each year by the fabulous Guerrilla Girls. They have fantastic billboards, such as one proclaiming, “Even the U.S. Senate is more progressive than Hollywood: Female Senators: 14%, Female Film Directors: 4%” and “The Anatomically Correct Oscar: He’s white & male, just like the guys how win!” Fortunately, things are much better for female documentary filmmakers, probably because the industry is less hierarchical. We don’t need anyone’s go-ahead to start making a film. But even then, you see a kind of sexism in the sensibilities of the festival programmers, a major factor in determining which films succeed and which fail, and also with audiences. And the majority of well-known documentary filmmakers are male.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

I actually began my career as an artist in still photography, specifically black & white street and portrait photography, inspired by photographers such as Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson. In the photographs I admired most, you could feel the connection between the subject and the photographer and I think that had an enormous affect on my filmmaking. I have been a subject to greater or lesser extents in all my films because I am interested in how people respond to being photographed. I’m also interested in my relationship to the people I film. Needless to say, Operation Filmmaker takes the subject/photographer relationship to an extreme.

Was the production of this film a learning experience for you in terms of documentary ethics and narrative as well as film production?

My film is in fact all about documentary ethics. The conflict that often occurs between a documentary filmmaker and his or her subject is normally kept out of the film, but since I’m an American and had control over the film and Muthana is Iraqi and felt powerless to control the film - and sometimes felt invaded by it - there was an obvious parallel to the American invasion of Iraq. This seemed the perfect set-up to examine an issue that lurks behind the scenes of many documentaries - that they are often made by people with resources about people without resources - which always poses a real moral quandary.

You have a very interesting way of blending the reality and the fiction of war. How do you think the representations of war and its portrayal in the media in particular affect the sense people make of war?

I think the way we sanitize the war in the news makes people more complacent than they would be if, like Al Jazeera, we showed images of dead bodies - or if we let scenes organically unfold and play out, the way they do in documentary, rather than reducing everything to superficial sound bites. I think today’s news media in the U.S. is of appallingly poor quality, it is actually much better in Europe.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

One of my favorite scenes is when Muthana is angry that I tried to set parameters on the idea of getting him a visa to the U.S. and he is so fed up with me, his life, and the documentary, he yells at me, “Fuck you! Fuck Kouross! And fuck David Schisgall!” I just love the idea of the documentary film subject totally rebelling and telling the filmmakers off. At the moment it occurred, I was extremely upset that I was trying to help him and his only response was to be angry, but when I watched the footage later, I found it hilarious. I also love all the scenes from DOOM and how uncanny and surreal it was that Muthana ended up on a multi-million dollar film set that was all about creating an atmosphere of war when he was trying to escape war. Not to mention, all one had to do to see war was turn on the nightly news. But by the time you’ve edited 400 hours down to an hour and a half, you pretty much love every scene that’s managed to successfully avoid the fate of ending up on the cutting room floor.

It Happened Just Before (Kurz davor ist es passiert)
Directed by Anja Salomonowitz
Sunday, March 16, 2:00 pm

This year's festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today's challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I think the situation for woman filmmakers in general is difficult: to be accepted by a man’s world. Here in Austria there are many woman filmmakers but many also claim about the bad conditions.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

Making movies was, and is, the only thing I wanted to do. It makes me happy, full, and live worth it. Besides my family :-)

In your film, the testimonies of women who have experienced human trafficking are told by non-actors filmed in their work place and who could have witnessed such tragedy. Why was it important for you to create this kind of mise-en-scene ?

There are three documentary layers in the movie: the stories of the woman are true, the people who tell the stories are amateur actors in their real lives and, most important, the places where it could have happened are real: the border is real, the brothel is real and also the diplomatic household. So these three documentary layers are mixed together and they give something new.

Normally when you see a documentary about trafficking in woman, the woman tells her story and she cries. She has this black thing over her eyes etc. What you feel is that you pity her. I wanted to take away the pity from the woman - and talk about the things they need. They do not need pity, they need to have rights. A different law situation concerning migration as it is now.

So I separated the stories from the woman to give a look on the pure stories themselves. On the conditions that make them happen.

I was certainly concerned with questioning prevalent documentary methods. Does the victim always have to tell their own story? On the other hand, can someone else recite the story but nevertheless still communicate something of the person? I am concerned with this grey area.

Was it difficult to persuade the protagonists to take part in the film? Were they afraid of being connected with human trafficking?

To find the amateur actors was for sure a big part. We made a long street casting to find them. When someone was found, I accompanied them in their all day life for days, months and years.

And then I rehearsed with them very, very much.

The diplomatic woman I asked again before we shot: are you really sure you want to do this? And she said yes. But for sure it was not easy for them.

They had to deal with these stories, to think about them, to connect them with their own life. This was part of our work. But they were not afraid of being connected with human trafficking because they knew they are doing something against it.

How or where did you find the stories of the women?

The stories are based on true stories, on interviews. They come lefö, an ngo in Vienna who works in the field of trafficking woman, and also from women themselves. It was agreed with lefö that the women should not be able to be identified. It deals with real, exemplary narratives from specific areas in which trafficking in women takes place such as where women are sold into prostitution or, for example, where they have to work, effectively as slaves, in diplomatic households.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

I am often asked if the waiter really hurts his head in this scene or if he plays it...yes, he plays it. While I was rehearsing with this people I asked everything very exactly: how do you start work every day, where do you give the ashes etc. While we were doing this he was awkward, he often hurt himself. So I wrote it back in the script and he also had to do it while we shot.

One of several good reasons in this faux-indie era to admire Minnesota-based filmmaker Christine Kunewa Walker: "I don't make films because I think they're going to be blockbusters," says the producer of Backroads, American Splendor, Factotum, and the new Older Than America, leaving no doubt that it's true. "I try to make films that speak to me, and I try to make them on a budget, so we can get our money back. But it starts with the content–always. I can never think about whether a movie is going to make a lot of money. Anyone who's concerned with that should be working in Hollywood."

It's a day before the Oscars, and Walker–who did her name proud by coming to our interview at Java Jack's on her own two feet–is prepping to debut Older Than America on opening night of the "Women With Vision" festival before taking it down to the ever-hipper South by Southwest. In other words, her commitment to Minnesota is genuine. Walker produced Older Than America–about a Native American woman's struggle to come to terms with a legacy of abuse–for just over a million dollars on the Fond du Lac Reservation of northern Minnesota, booking the entire 50-member crew at the Black Bear Casino Resort for the month-long shoot. First-time director Georgina Lightning, who co-wrote the movie with Walker, had planned to film in Idaho or California, but heeded her producer's suggestion to make America here, and since then has decided to stay–because she loves Minnesota or Walker, either of which would be understandable.

Q: Does this project mark your return to the territory of Backroads?

A: Making this film really reminded me of the challenges and rewards of independent movies. When you're working with the Native American community, a community that has dealt with oppression and victimization, and you're telling their stories, there's naturally a great deal of sensitivity involved. For instance, there are many [Native] people who feel it's not appropriate to show sacred ceremonies such as the Sundance onscreen. As a producer, you want to be the person to deal with those sensitivities in the best possible way. But you are also dealing with the realities of independent filmmaking: not enough money, not enough time. You're struggling to get material on film–or tape, in this case. And when someone says, "I'm not sure if we should use this phrase for the Sundance scene," or "I'm not sure I'm comfortable with your shooting the Sundance scene," and you've got a whole cast and crew lined up to shoot that scene the very next day, and you have to stop everything and smooth over whatever issues there are, then it's a challenge, you know? So that's why I'm there. I consider myself a person who understands those difficulties and considers it important. But then there's also the producer side of me that says, "We've got to get this thing in the can!" We had some of those same issues with Backroads.

Q: On Older Than America, you were also working as co-writer–so you would've been in the perfect position to address both the artistic side and the production side, the creative and the practical.

A: Yes, but let me qualify that a bit. The story really came from the director, Georgina Lightning. I was just the person who helped facilitate it. Georgina had met with a number of writers and tried to work with them, and there was some push and pull with regard to how the story should be told. After a few years of that, we both sat down and said, "Why don't we just try to tackle this together?" Working on this project, it was very important for me to facilitate whatever vision Georgina had for the film. And I think at the end of the day she's really happy with what she could accomplish with the movie, and that makes me feel like I did my job well as a producer and co-writer.

Q: What was it about Georgina and her work that allowed you as both producer and co-writer to trust her so completely?

A: I had met Georgina working on Backroads. She was an actor in the movie–as she is in this movie. I had admired her work as an actor and over the years I had gotten to know her more as a friend and as someone who's working and struggling in the industry. We had long conversations in which she expressed her philosophy of her work, what she's trying to achieve in this business, what stories she wants to tell. So when she asked me to get involved in a project, I was really excited. I thought about the lessons I had learned on Backroads, and I thought I could bring some experience to the table. I also decided that I had to trust her completely. I respected her work and I liked her as a person, but who knows? She's a first-time director, and there are no guarantees with first-time directors–absolutely none. I had to take a leap of faith–to trust in her vision, to get her the resources she needed, and then see what would happen. I tried never to second-guess her–which felt like the right thing to do especially because this wasn't my story. I knew nothing about Native American boarding schools before I got involved with this project. So who am I to tell her how to make this story?

Q: And this project also brings you back to the Walker, with which you have a long history.

A: Yes. I was a publicist at the Walker for years. But the other thing in relation to this project and the Walker is that I worked many years ago on a program with a Native American director named Victor Masayesva. The Walker was trying to get cameras into the hands of Native American youth. The campaign was: "Okay, there has been a distrust of the mainstream media within the Native American community because of the way the community has been portrayed by non-Native journalists and filmmakers. And so in order for us to change this, we have to take control of the medium and use the technology to tell our own stories." I was very excited about that campaign. It changed my whole way of thinking about directors and filmmaking. Older Than America brought back that same excitement: being in a position as a producer to empower a community that didn't have many champions in the media. In my other films, I may have had a bigger role in saying, "Oh, well, you need to do it this way." On this film, I just wanted to give Georgina the benefit of my experience, to let that work for her. I didn't want to become another authority figure to the community, telling them how to represent themselves. I never want to be that. On Backroads, I think the director felt I was playing that role. And it was painful–very discouraging and disappointing. This was my chance to try again and make it work.

Q: How did the project get started?

A: Georgina and I actually started by shooting the trailer for the movie in Idaho about four years ago. She was based in Los Angeles at the time. Georgina and another woman had started a company called Tribal Alliance Productions. That company's mission statement is about creating media that matters, but also about creating opportunities for Native and indigenous filmmakers. I agree with that mission wholeheartedly, so we started working together. When we did the trailer, Georgina hadn't yet figured out what form the story would take: She knew she wanted to tell a kind of suspense story, a drama that had something to do with a Native American boarding school. We had another director attached to the project at that time. But it became apparent to me that he was trying to facilitate her vision, and the truth of the matter–I tell this to everybody–is that you cannot direct a movie from the producer's chair. It always fails miserably. So I talked to Georgina and said, "Look, we're struggling to try to tell your story, we're bringing in writers, we brought in a director, but there's conflict and there doesn't need to be, because it's your story. Why don't you just write this thing and direct it? What's the problem?" She needed someone to tell her that, to say, "You can do this." More than that: "You have to do this. Or else it's going to be a disaster." No one else could do it but her.

Q: Did you and Georgina always want to shoot in Minnesota?

A: Oh, no. At first we took the trailer and a story idea to the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, which is a casino tribe in California. We raised some money from them–enough to go out and develop the project further, write a script, assemble a team, do some location scouting, come up with a budget, and start casting–mostly Native American actors at that time. In the course of writing the script, we realized we were going to need more money–more than a million dollars. So we went back to our executive producer, Audrey Martinez. She put in the rest of the money. The financing came from people who'd had a prior relationship with Georgina, who also believed in her, and wanted to give her a shot. In the end we shot in northern Minnesota, near the end of 2006. It was colder than crap. We had thought of shooting in Idaho. But when I started looking at the budget and thinking about what our resources would be, I asked Georgina to come and take a look at Minnesota as a possible location. When she started learning about the history of the tribes in Minnesota, about the Dakota Conflict and so on, and when she started meeting people in the Native American community who are affected by the boarding school experience, she came to the conclusion that there was no other place to make the film. And creatively speaking, the northern Minnesota locations worked so beautifully for the look of the film. The Fond du Lac Reservation embraced us with open arms. They gave us so much support.

Q: What does it mean for you and Georgina to be in "Women With Vision"?

A: It's really exciting for us. We had to think about it before committing, because the screening is actually before our festival run, and festivals want to have the world premiere. But when [Walker film/video curator] Sheryl Mousley came to us and asked if she could open the festival with our film, we had to think about it–just for a little while. It's really such a great first screening for us. Georgina is definitely a woman with vision–a creative vision, but also a vision of something bigger. My view of female directors in the industry is that they have to be entrepreneurial–sadly so, in a way. You can't just have a creative vision as a woman in this industry; you have to have a larger vision for your career. It's not a given that if you make a good movie and get an agent, then your next film will get a green light right away. When you look at Tamara Jenkins, nominated for an Academy Award for writing The Savages, the last film she made [Slums of Beverly Hills] was 10 years ago–and it was well-regarded, well-received on the festival circuit. What I like about Georgina's approach to this is that she set up a company, brought her own financing, and made connections in various communities that would help support her. For her, that's just part of the way she thinks. Me, I'm a producer, so I'm entrepreneurial anyway–it's not that big a leap for me. But all creative women need to think along these lines. They need to be very strategic. It's a lot of work, no doubt about it. But making movies is hard anyway!

Q: To the extent that Older Than America is about the negotiation between mainstream culture and indigenous culture, between men and women, between haves and have-nots, between Minnesota and the rest of the world, I'm guessing you must've thrived on the fact that the making of the film was a mirror of the story of the film. True?

A: Yes! But imagine the challenge–just the writing challenge for starters. Georgina came to me and said, "I want to tell a story about a mayor and a Catholic priest and a Native American woman and a boarding school, but I want it to be modern, and I want to represent the past."

Q: Just like as a producer you want to appeal to an understandably sensitive community and at the same time reach out to a larger audience, right?

A: Right. It was as if we had set out to make it really hard, almost impossible. Negotiation is a good word for it. We were walking a fine line–negotiating our positions in the world. That's what Native Americans have to do every minute of every day: negotiate for a tiny slice of power. The question is always, "How to go about it? Do you work within the system or outside it?" The answer is different for everybody. Ultimately, Georgina's answer was, "We need to go back to a time before our customs and traditions were taken away, before we were told that we weren't good enough."

Q: Hence the title Older Than America?

A: Right. We have to reclaim that which was lost to us. Then we can move forward on an even playing field. It's funny because it was almost like we had the title of the film before the story–like we had built the story around the idea of this title, Older Than America.

Q: The story works so well on an allegorical level–the idea of a Native American woman being hospitalized by white culture for having visions of the past. The mainstream culture is trying to treat these symptoms with medicine, as if they can be separated from the whole history of oppression of Native people, as if those visions of hers are not a product of that horrible legacy. But in the movie it's never predictable or didactic. There's great humor for example in that scene where the woman doctor sends the male cop out to get her coffee and a bagel–a funny twist on that burden of negotiating for tiny slices of power. In addition to all those other challenges you set for yourselves, were you also setting out to play with expectations of a politically correct movie?

A: I think so, yes. Traditionally in Native American culture there's what you call the Voice of the Res–this all-knowing, perfect spirit. I like the idea of having our male hero get to the point of questioning who he is and finally saying, "You know, maybe I'm not the voice of the res." And he's not, because he sold out way back when. That was a little nod of ours to the stereotype of the all-knowing, visionary Native American voice.

Q: That reminds me to say that the movie is so well acted. You can see that the director brought her personal experience to the film, clearly. But her experience as an actor must've helped too, right?

A: For sure. In addition to being an actor, Georgina has also worked as an acting coach–on the set of Smoke Signals, for example. And she has three children who are actors. That gets back to your question about how I was able to trust her with this: I knew that she had a firm handle on the acting piece of it, which was so important.

Q: Can we talk about Sundance?

A: Sure. For me, when people raise that question, the answer I give goes back to that experience at the Walker with Victor Masayesva. None of us involved with Older Than America could ever identify anything explicit in Native American culture that said you couldn't represent these sacred Sundance ceremonies in art. I mean, you do see them depicted in painting and in literature. So why not film? I would ask tribal elders whether there's something in Native culture that says this depiction would be damaging. And nobody could answer us. So we didn't feel like we were violating sacred law. If other artists can use their mediums to depict these things, why can't a filmmaker? On top of that, Georgina is a Native American director who's very connected to these ceremonies. If she can't depict these things on film, then who can?

Q: What do you think it is about film as a medium that lends to this apparent double standard? Is it because film is so tied to entertainment–as well as exploitation?

A: It could be that. It's a good question. I don't think I've fully answered it for myself. I do think part of the discomfort comes from the fact that in film there's no control over the image. When you have a painting, you can put it in a gallery in a certain place and you can know who's coming in to see it; on some level you can control the circumstances of how it's received. You can set the context. But a film can have a mass audience of people watching in a wide variety of unknown situations–at home on a DVD with popcorn, in between episodes of American Idol or whatever. One interesting thing is that the images I found of the Sundance ceremony were on the Internet–which is uncontrolled, too, although I suppose you could argue that a context is created through the website and what else is on it. I think the difficulty we had with this issue speaks to the overall distrust of the media by Native Americans, which is not at all unfounded. Hollywood, for example, has a long tradition of using film to mock us, to alter the historical record. I respect those who say they don't want anything to do with that tradition. Georgina is much more adamant in saying, "Look, this is my story, this is my art form, and I'm going to do this. And if you don't like it, well, that's your opinion."

Q: You could say she's going forward at the same time that she's going back?

A: Yeah!

Q: Here's a funny thing: When I was asking earlier if we could talk about "Sundance," I was actually referring to the festival! I'm glad you thought I was asking about the Sundance ceremony, because your answer was so interesting. What I meant to ask was about the fact that you're starting your festival run of this film at South by Southwest. And that's unusual for you, right?

A: Oh! That is funny! Yes, we're at South by Southwest this time, and it's great. That's a perfect venue for us, and the timing worked out perfectly in terms of our post-production schedule. Matt Dentler at South by Southwest was so enthusiastic about the movie. I sent him a DVD right after we finished the movie. He watched it on a Sunday, and he e-mailed me that night and said, "Let's talk right away." We talked and he said he wanted Older Than America to be the first film that he booked for the festival. He loved it. His support really made us feel that we were where we were meant to be.

Q: And what about your next project–the one that you're shooting here in the spring?

A: Well, it's a comedy called Nobody, written by Rob Perez, who wrote 40 Days and 40 Nights. It stars Sam Rosen, who's from [Minnesota], but now lives in New York. We'll start shooting in May. It's not about murder and mayhem on the reservation, and it's not about losers. It's a blatant comedy, very different from what I'm used to doing. I was intrigued by the script. It's a new challenge for me.

Q: That reminds me: The quote of yours that I like the best from our past interviews is the one from when we met at Sundance to talk about Factotum. I asked whether it was a coincidence that Factotum and American Splendor were both about curmudgeonly artists. You said, "In one way, it's a total coincidence. But in another way, I know that I like movies about underdogs–people who aren't necessarily understood, people who are fighting some kind of battle with themselves or society. I'm really not that interested in likable characters. I prefer unsympathetic characters who manage to redeem themselves." So does that apply to Nobody?

A: Very much so!