Film and Video

Some incredible and unique things happen in the twin cities, and the annual Sound Unseen film festival is among my favorites. A film festival dedicated to music movies (not to be confused with musicals) is right up my alley. The 9th iteration of the festival got underway last night with a pair of screenings at the Riverview Theater. Tonight, the festival moves over to the St. Anthony Main theater, and there’s no shortage of excellent programming.

Here are a few recommendations:

Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake - I’ve been waiting for this one for quite a while, and finally caught up with it last night. It’s showing again this evening. It’s basically a SY concert film interspresed with interviews with the band. The project came out of a program in Reno, Nevada called Project Moonshine that basically teaches teens how to make moves. Sleeping Nights Awake was entirely shot by the kids in the program, and they put together a pretty great film. It caught up with the band on the Rather Ripped tour, and they sound fantastic. There’s an amazing performance of “Shaking Hell” that shouldn’t be missed.

Sigur Ros: Heima - If you’re a fan of the band, this one is a bit of a no-brainer. This documentary follows the band on a tour of their native Iceland in which they played free shows as a thank you to their homeland and fans. They set up in deserted factories, expansive fields, and
virtually anywhere they could be had. The music is sublime, and the film paints a beautiful portrait of the Iceland that roots Sigur Ros’ sound. It’s as much about the landscape as the music. It’s incredibly well done from all perspectives.

Low: You May Need a Murderer - I think I’ve seen three different docs on Low at this point, and this one is clearly the best. Low’s music is there, but the real interest here is that the filmmaker caught the normally introverted Alan Sparhawk at his most open and generous. It gets into the core of what Low’s music comes out of. Sparhawk offers insight to own battles with mental illness and addiction, and goes deeper into their family life and religion. Its honesty is refreshing and goes to really heartbreaking places.

Dead Man - This one’s not necessarily a music film, but the movie is forever connected to the score by Neil Young, thus fits in very nicely with the festival. That said, who cares. Any reason to bring this film back to a cinema screen is fine with me. It’s easily my favortite Jarmusch film, and the experience of seeing it projected on a big screen from a 35mm print is unparalelled. Do not miss this chance.

Rust Never Sleeps - Following Dead Man, this is an excellent second half to a rare Neil Young double feature. I was able to preview this print, what might be the only 35mm print left of this film, with Sound Unseen director Rick Hansen, and it’s a treat. They don’t make concert films (or live records) like this anymore, and it’s a shame. It captures a full Neil Young show from a stop on his 1978 tour. The set is half solo acoustic and half electric with Crazy Horse and features a crew of dancing jawa stagehands.

There are a bunch of other great programs as well. The festival covers a wide musical spectrum and offers something for everyone. Check it out, and support one of the most unique and innovative film festivals around.

Enjoy some sneak peeks of the upcoming retrospective, In the Realm of Oshima: The Films of Japanese Master Nagisa Oshima

Boy (Shonen)

Cruel Story of Youth (Seishun zankoku monogatari)

The Sun’s Burial (Taiyo no hakaba)

In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no corrida)

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Furyo)

Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Shinjuku dorobo nikki)

Violence At Noon (Hakuchu no torima)

Mike Leigh on the set of Happy-Go-Lucky

Our Mike Leigh Regis Retrospective kicked off last week with Bleak Moments and High Hopes. This week brings us Life is Sweet, Naked, and the premiere of Happy-Go-Lucky. I’ve got some links to whet your appetite:

• Our trusty intern, Evan Cook, popped into work one day having put toghether a fantastic trailer for the Mike Leigh program. You can find it in the image bar at the top of the page.
• Tickets for the Regis Dialogue have sold out, but tickets remain for the premiere of Happy-Go-Lucky. Take a look at the trailer.
• indieWire posted an interview with Mr. Leigh this morning. If you haven’t had the chance to give it a read yet, take a look at Rob Nelson’s interview for this blog as well.

Ballast, which screens here on October 29, opens in New York City today. This is a critical juncture for any filmmaker, but the pressure is extreme for those distributing films themselves, as director Lance Hammer is.

Easing the pressure somewhat is the virtual consensus that Ballast is a true work of art - you can read the critical hosannas in Variety , the New York Post (!), and the New York Times (be sure to check out the beautiful audio slide show that accompanies that review) - but Hammer is also getting considerable press coverage related to his distribution decision. Going the DIY route means signing on for a huge amount of work that normally would have been done by others (for a price, of course - not just in terms of dollars, but also creative control).

As Manohla Dargis wrote recently, also in the New York Times, “With the support of some publicists, Mr. Hammer and Mr. Raphael will attempt to do what usually takes an army of handlers and entire studio departments to pull off. Mr. Hammer is creating the poster artwork and making the trailer, and together they are booking mainstream theaters and also taking “ Ballast” around the country to universities, film clubs and art centers, just the way many independents have sought and found audiences for decades.”

In that same article, Dargis offers an excellent and concise history on the rise and decline of independent filmmaking since the 1980s; for her part, she doesn’t believe that the recent closings of a number of small film companies is necessarily a bad thing - not, at any rate, for “those who think films have worth beyond their box office returns” or for filmmakers whose “aesthetic sensibility and worldview are of no economic use and interest to the studios or to most audiences either.” Ballast seems to fit on both those counts.

Incidentally, the Times really seems to love this film, not just for itself, but for the larger story it tells about independent, highly personal filmmaking. It figures into this Times story from last summer about DIY distribution, which is geared more to the layperson, and this story from critic Dennis Lim, which traces the story of how Ballast came about - a long, circuitous process that involved an extensive road trip through the Mississippi Delta. Lim also notes that when it comes to techniques, the filmmaker took inspiration from Robert Bresson and Wong Kar-wai, as well as Mike Leigh, the subject of a Walker film retrospective, Mike Leigh: Moments, screening October 3 - 25, as well as a Regis dialogue on October 15.

In the article, Hammer also makes another connection, one worth considering while walking through galleries of Eero Saarinen’s work here and at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Having graduated from USC’s architecture school, he believes what he learned there prepared him for filmmaking - perhaps even better than film school would have. “ Architecture’s about having faith in something unformed,” he points out, “which you then have to manifest materially.”

(By the way, here’s a more in-depth, industry-oriented story about Hammer’s decision to self-distribute Ballast, from indiewire.)

Mike Leigh is talking about his 10 feature films–from Bleak Moments (1971) to Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)–and the relationship among them.”As much as anything,” he says, “and not altogether consciously on my part, all of my films deal in one way or another with the whole question of parenting: having parents, having children, teaching, learning, the question of whether to have children, unwanted pregnancies, all of that. It goes all the way through my career.”

Leigh’s summation of his work, given to me during a recent interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, is not just thoroughly authoritative–anything this director says is thoroughly authoritative–but conveniently timed. Throughout October, the Walker is showing all 10 of Leigh’s features, starting with Bleak Moments on Friday, and the event will bring the distinguished filmmaker to Minneapolis for the very first time, on October 15, for a Regis Dialogue with LA Weekly film critic Scott Foundas (whose brilliant handling of Milos Forman at the Walker some months back leaves no doubt that he’s perfect for this even more daunting task).

Leigh has a reputation–not unearned–for being dark, onscreen and off. And it’s that reputation, in part, that the director plays with in Happy-Go-Lucky (October 11 at 7:30 p.m.), which starts with a scene that’s almost magical in its joie de vivre, the camera tracking bicycle-peddling grade-school teacher Poppy (Sally Hawkins) through a candy-colored fantasia that just so happens to be London–not art-directed London or computer-generated London, but London. A committed realist, Leigh doesn’t fabricate. Which is to say there’s something right in the first minutes of the director’s typically groundbreaking new film that finds something real worth smiling about–a rare act these days, and one of which optimistic Poppy herself would approve.

Leigh and I talked for a half-hour or so about–among other things–optimism, subversion, the future for kids, and the true meaning of Poppy’s clothing.

Q: I find Happy-Go-Lucky, like many or all of your 10 features, to be a deeply philosophical work.

A: Good. Because it is [laughs].

Q: It’s an inquiry into what it takes to be happy and sustain it. But do you think that happiness can sometimes be a disease, too, like depression? Is there a fine line between the two?

A: Well, I think we need to deal with part of the premise of the question, because the film isn’t really about happiness. It’s about fulfillment. I don’t think fulfillment can be a disease. Maybe happiness can be a disease, I don’t know–even that sounds perverse. But certainly fulfillment is not a disease. Maybe the question should be, “Is it dangerous, this condition of delirious bliss, this state of being blind to realities?” In that case, the answer is “Yes.” But that’s got nothing to do with the film, because that’s not Poppy’s condition. Poppy is grounded, focused, sensible, intelligent, sympathetic, caring, motivated, committed professionally, and someone who cares for other people. She has a sense of humor, an exuberant spirit, and all the rest of it. There’s nothing dangerous in her condition at all–it’s positive and it’s healthy.

Q: Good. But you allow for a range of interpretation of the character and the work itself, yes?

A: Look, my films are not prescriptive or, in the crude sense, didactic. Are they philosophical? Yes. I invite you to respond as you will to a look at people who, hopefully, have been rendered in a three-dimensional way, like real people. And your response will be determined to a degree by how you are as an individual, whoever you are. So, yes, there’s a variety of interpretations. It is also true, on another level, that, because of the way I constructed the film in the initial stages, you could be forgiven for thinking possibly that this could be a young woman whom you may not want to spend two hours with.

Q: Yes.

A: But even that, I have to say, is all too easy. Because the first thing you see of her in the film is her riding through the city on her bike; the only thing that happens in that rather straightforward opening sequence is that you see her waving at people in a friendly manner. Then she goes into a bookstore, where the [employee] there is especially antisocial and catatonic–he’s got his head screwed up with his own problems. She deals with that guy with gentleness and humor. She gets her bicycle stolen, and she deals with that philosophically, too. Then you see her behaving in a kind of outrageous way with her girlfriends, just having been out for a night on the tiles, you know? And from there on, you see her being responsible and sensible–but funny as well. So really, she’s there to get to know. And that constituency–and there is one–that says, “I wanted to throttle her by the end of the film, I couldn’t stand her,” well, I just can’t get it, really. I don’t know where they were when all those things were happening in the film. I don’t know where their heads were. Or rather I do know where they were: Their heads were up their asses, basically.

Q: We’re talking about this character in psychological terms as well as philosophical terms, and I’m struck by her diagnosis in the film of Scott–her driving instructor–as being an only child. I’m very interested in that. How did that line originate?

A: She’s a teacher and she knows about kids; she thinks about kids all the time. She would have taught kids from big families and kids who are without siblings. Her instinct, which comes from that long experience, would lead her to that conclusion. You kind of understand from his reaction to what she says that [Scott] probably is an only child. So the line is just a way of opening that up. It comes organically out of her ability to be perceptive.

Q: Are there movie characters that you thought of in relation to…

A: Absolutely not [interrupting]. No. Some people have mentioned Holly Golightly [from Breakfast at Tiffany's]. But I don’t think about movie characters at all.

Q: So she’s modeled on real people then?

A: My job is to make things up. It’s what fiction-makers do. So Poppy is drawn from all kinds of sources, really–including none at all, you know? She’s drawn from my idea of something.

Q: While inventing this character, did you imagine how you would react if you literally bumped into her on the street?

A: Yes. I’d love to bump into her on the street. She’s someone I’d like to know. Oh, yeah. She’s the kind of person I like. I’d get on with her well. We’d get each other. Like Pygmalion and Galatea, really. She’s a gas.

Q: Poppy seems to gravitate most strongly to the social worker–they have a kindred connection around helping others, kids in particular.

A: They also fancy each other and they fuck each other, yeah. I can’t say it any clearer than that, really.

Q: Did any part of you want to show it more clearly?

A: Don’t know what you mean.

Q: You say “fuck,” so…

A: You mean did I want to have something in the film that isn’t there?

Q: Well…

A: Answer is no. Everything is just…

Q: Well said.

A: See, we don’t make films that other people interfere with. We make films far away from the nonsense of Hollywood. We make films with freedom. So this one is exactly as it should be. You don’t need to see any more than you see in the film, but it’s important that you see what you see.

Q: Bear with me for a second: Could you imagine having seen Happy-Go-Lucky in, say, 1973, just as you were starting to make films?

A: You mean could I have made this film in 1973?

Q: No, what I mean to ask is: If, by some crazy miracle, you were allowed to see your work from 35 years into the future…

A: Oh, I see.

Q: …how would you react to it?

A: Would I be watching it knowing that I had made it?

Q: Right! That’s the question–I suppose it hinges on that. Perhaps you could answer it either way?

A: Well, first of all, I have to say that this is a ridiculous avenue to traverse. But very well, I’ll go along.

Q: I could say one other thing.

A: Go on.

Q: Well, I think another way to ask the same question is: How do you personally–in the ways that matter to you most–measure the course of your progression as an artist?

A: That’s a more tangible question.

Q: Sure. But keep in mind the other question, perhaps, as you answer.

A: Well, the truth is, if I saw, in 1973, at the age of 30, Happy-Go-Lucky, and, having made only one movie before, I didn’t know it was a film by me, it would simply be a film that would blow me away. I would actually be very excited by it. I would be very influenced by it. I would be very taken with it. Now, on the other hand, if I was gazing into a crystal ball…but you don’t mean that, do you?

Q: I’m interested in either answer.

A: I don’t know. Your question really is about progression, yes?

Q: Yes. You took so many steps in between to arrive at Happy-Go-Lucky. And the retrospective marks each of those spots.

A: Yes.

Q: What if you had skipped those steps?

A: Okay. Are you familiar with Bleak Moments?

Q: Yes.

A: Okay, I’ll tell you the truth. What interests me is not so much the differences between the films, but the sibling relationship between them–the homogeneity, the similarities, if you will. Because actually, if you look at Bleak Moments and you look at Happy-Go-Lucky, you would find quite a lot that resonates beween them.

Q: And Naked, too. Maybe that’s what I was getting at in that question about whether happiness can in some cases be a disease, can be dangerous. These films that appear opposite–and these states of mind or mood that appear opposite–are maybe not as different as they appear.

A: Okay, sure. Yes. You could bring any of the films in. And in a way, that’s part of the answer to the question. On the other hand, part of the answer is about something else completely. Which is that I was 28 when I made Bleak Moments, and I was 64 last year when I made Happy-Go-Lucky. All of my progress as a filmmaker, my trajectory, can be identified in terms of a simple before-and-after: There are those films I made before I was a parent, and those films I made since becoming a parent.

Q: When did you become a parent?

A: I became a parent in 1978. Now, I do hope that at 65, my worldview and my experience of life inform what I do. So it’s not a question of Happy-Go-Lucky showing that, hooray, at last, he’s happy, he’s a happy old man, he’s made a cheerful movie. That’s rubbish. Because in fact, we haven’t seen what the next film is going to be.

Q: Indeed.

A: But I think there’s a more rounded view of people and things in Happy-Go-Lucky than there was in the films of 30 years ago. As an artist develops, his skills develop. And also, there’s another thing, too, which is rather mundane, I suppose, but it’s very important, and it’s this: Every time you make another piece of work, that piece of work claims territory that you’ve not been to before. So the territory left to explore diminishes. And that makes you more imaginative about where to go next.

Q: We’ve been talking about your personal life in relation to the art–at least in this idea of the films being distinct for having been made before or after you were a parent. So the other question is: To what extent did your decision to make this film at this time reflect the current sociopolitical climate–which many would characterize emphatically as not happy-go-lucky?

A: Totally. We’re living in really bad times, tough times. We have a great deal to be gloomy about. And we can sit around here being gloomy, yes. But while we’re doing that, people–not least among them teachers–are out there getting on with it. The act of teaching kids has to be, by definition, an act of optimism. Because it’s about cherishing the future, nurturing the future. What future? Now that’s another question. God knows what future. How old is your kid?

Q: He’s six.

A: Six! What sort of a world…I mean, how old are you?

Q: Forty.

A: Forty. What kind of world will your six-year-old be living in when he’s 40?

Q: I don’t know what he’ll inherit.

A: Yeah! Exactly. But we have to be positive. We have to get on with it. So that’s the answer to that one.

Q: Let’s switch gears a bit. How were Poppy’s costumes chosen? These are fantastic creations.

A: Everything she wears you could buy off the rack at prices that Poppy could afford last year in London–that’s the first thing. So there’s nothing phantasmagorical about them. Edith Head did not earn credit for Special Gowns Worn by Ms. Hawkins, you know? We’re very strict. Nobody wears anything that his or her character wouldn’t wear or couldn’t afford. And they’re also a function of Poppy’s taste–her sense of humor and sense of life. And, of course, it’s a movie! We’re being a little bit pious about it in this conversation, because the fact is: It’s a film! It’s an entertainment! I’m here to amuse and entertain you, to give you a good time, make you feel jolly! It’s my first widescreen film. Just before we started shooting, [cinematographer] Dick Pope went to a trade fair in London where Fuji announced this new [35mm] stock called Vivid, which accentuates bright primary colors. So we used that. And so it all comes together, it all coheres.

Q: I guess that’s the sense in which I’m encouraged to think and ask about other films, other film characters. The images in Happy-Go-Lucky really pop in a pure, kinetic kind of way, in terms of how the colors excite one’s eye. It makes me think about, say, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, for instance.

A: Well, I hope that Happy-Go-Lucky is a more interesting film than that [laughs].

Q: I’d say it is, yeah–because of its complicated relationship to genre. I mean, if you want to see Happy-Go-Lucky as a movie, and to some extent you do…

A: It’s a movie, yeah.

Q: …then I think it’s a movie that investigates the inner workings of other movies, other genres–like the one that includes The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

A: What I would say is that the film subverts that genre. What I do very often, in fact, is subvert genre.

Q: Indeed.

A: For example, Naked subverts film noir. In fact, nothing that happens in Naked has anything to do with film noir, but the general feel of it does. Topsy-Turvy absolutely subverts the costume film, the period film.

Q: And the musical, too, I would say.

A: Yeah. And Happy-Go-Lucky subverts. It’s interesting what you’re saying. You do have to talk about the movie as a movie. Because it is a movie. At least I think it’s a movie, anyway.

Q: I won’t disagree with you.

A: Yes.

Q: It’s a screwball comedy.

A: Yes it is, on a certain level. Except that if you said to people that Happy-Go-Lucky is a screwball comedy, you would be…

Q: Subversive?

A: Well, you would be not telling the truth. The film has screwball comedic elements in it, yes. But the truth of the matter is that the story of the film is a perfectly real series of events. And unlike a screwball comedy, the narrative is cumulative, not causal. It’s not all about the farcical messes that people get into. It’s just about what happens to people.

Q: To the extent that Happy-Go-Lucky, as you say, is designed to surprise and subvert, and that this is something you’ve done throughout your career, has that effort needed to change over time by dint of the fact that the world has come increasingly to know the films of Mike Leigh–enough to know that they should expect subversion?

A: Yeah, but I don’t think about that. I really don’t. I just think about what the film is about. One thing I could say, I suppose: Life is Sweet is followed by Naked, which is followed by Secrets and Lies and Career Girls, then Topsy-Turvy and All or Nothing, and then Vera Drake comes in. So there is a thing of doing something completely different than you did last time–deliberately doing what I think you’re not expecting. Happy-Go-Lucky has a pretty obvious element of distinction from what came before, from Vera Drake. So in that sense I think about these things, yes. Maybe that’s what you’re talking about. But ultimately, I just get into thinking about the movie is about. Within my genre, if you want to call it that, if you want to be pretentious about it, I do what I do, which is fairly limited, but within that I also vary the style of the films. But fundamentally, the films are all the same–they’re torn from the same cloth.

Q: Maybe there’s a sense in which the ideal viewer of Happy-Go-Lucky is one who has never seen a Mike Leigh movie–or at least doesn’t know that he or she has.

A: I don’t think that’s true. As a matter of fact, I think that would be ridiculous. I certainly think that people who have never seen a Mike Leigh film are more than welcome to see Happy-Go-Lucky. But the film certainly hasn’t been made for people who’ve seen my work or for people who haven’t seen my work. It has been made for people.

*Mike Leigh photo by Rob Nelson

The student symposium programmers must’ve wanted this year’s batch of up-and-comers to stay hopeful and excited about the world. In a festival packed with grim content (most notably Steve McQueen’s Hunger which explores the Irish Republican Army’s 1981 hunger strikes in Long Kesh prison; Gomorrah which brings Roberto Saviano’s expose of contemporary Neapolitan crime to the silver screen; and Nandita Das’ Firaaq which takes on the 2002 communal violence in Gujarat India through a series of tragic vignettes), we skipped out on some of this darker material and saw a disproportionate number of films celebrating life and human beings in their best form.

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s documentary Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love, which follows the great Senegalese musician through the contentious release of his latest album, Egypt, certainly fits this category. More than the filmmaking, Peter Sellers’ loving introduction and the sounds pouring out of Ndour’s heart convinced me this guy was about more than being one of the biggest musical sensations of our time. Indeed, Youssou Ndour begs us to fill our souls with light and hope, to face our friends and enemies with nothing but love, and to sing and dance with our whole beings. And, after the documentary and the live three song set Ndour shared, it became pretty much impossible to say no.

The series “Laughing ‘Til It Hurts,”composed of four slapstick shorts from the pinnacle (and end) of the silent era, provided another instance at Telluride where joy was unabashedly held up as something to be saught, captured, and savored at all costs. The series was curated by Paolo Cherchi Usai, a man who–from his position as director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia to his wiry, hunched figure and sun-deprived aura to his beautiful indignation that silent film might EVER be considered primitive or “less than”–perfectly fits the mold of silent-film archivist and enthusiast. And great choices he made. The Cook (d. Roscoe Arbuckle, 1918), Should Men Walk Home (d. Leo McCarey, 1927), There It Is (d. Harold L Muller, 1928), and Pass the Gravy (d. Fred L. Guiol, 1928) kept the audience rolling (especially the ridiculous, squawking woman behind me) pretty much the whole time. As it turns out, fat dogs running up ladders and dinners made out of the neighbor’s prize-winning chicken are still unmanageably funny.

Above all, Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky–which will show as part of the Walker’s Mike Leigh Regis Dialogue and retrospective this October–embodies the world view behind the slapstick-ers’ comedy and Youssou Ndour’s music. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is an elementary school teacher who maintains a pretty serious high-on-life disposition and calls on those around her–a disgruntled but complicated driving instructor, an impassioned flamenco teacher, one feisty, sarcastic sister and one super square sister–to do the same. That we sometimes identify with these supporting characters’ impatience and frustration with Poppy and her perpetual joy, drives the point home. For when Poppy brings unharnessed energy into the suburban home of her married and pregnant sister, or goads the inner rage of her driving teacher, or wanders into desolate surroundings and shares a moment with a crazy person, we’re put on edge. We get annoyed or tense up in response to Poppy’s behavior. And just at that moment, it becomes crystal clear that through Poppy, Leigh is asking all of us cynics in the dark theater to give ourselves over to optimism, to see colors in all their vibrancy and life in all its opportunity, and to engage in the joke before all else. Once I realized Poppy and Leigh have a point, a really really good point, Poppy transformed from a naive and slightly annoying distraction into a mindful being exercising the courage to confront the world’s bleak moments with laughter and grace. Leigh and Hawkins serve up digestible portions of this life philosophy throughout the film; The wild giggling of best friends, Poppy’s mantras of you’ve got to make your own luck, haven’t you?, and Leigh’s choice of Kodak’s brand-spanking-new color-friendly film all work to shout, go ahead and live!

Transcribed below from an old-fashioned audiocassette, presumably without the knowledge of Vice President Dick Cheney (though one can never be sure these days), my recent marathon phone chat with Robb Moss–Boston-based co-director of Secrecy, screening four times at the Walker as part of the “Cinema of Urgency” series–began, in the interests of narrowing an almost infinitely expansive topic, with my reading to him from a piece I wrote for Cinema Scope just after his collaborative effort with Peter Galison (who’ll be present for the Walker screenings) had premiered at the Sundance Film Festival:

[Sundance] jury member Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight) got choked up when announcing the big prize to Trouble the Water. News flash: Intellectuals have hearts! A much better example than an egghead’s awards-night tears (or, uh, this article) is the aptly dizzying and mournful Secrecy, in which Harvard film department legend Robb Moss and co-director Peter Galison begin their interrogation of U.S. executive privilege from the Manhattan Project to Gitmo with Errolesque shots of classified files stacked floor to ceiling, but return repeatedly to the story of sad old widows who’ll probably never know why their government scientist husbands went down in the “Reynolds crash” of 1949.

Beautifully paradoxical in its own withholding of answers (this in an era when you can Google-search for nuclear bomb-making tips), Secrecy asks: To what degree is government secrecy necessary even as the force by which it’s kept puts a chokehold on investigative journalism, the U.S. constitution, personal freedom, et cetera? And how is this ever-increasing force related to the widening gap between haves and have-nots? Among almost countless other things, Secrecy is about the erosion of the middle, about how the powerful are left to their darkened inner sanctums (or screening rooms) while the rest of us are stranded, restricted, out in the open. Money is power, yes, but what the secretive have more than money or power per se is the formerly free commodity it buys them: the right to privacy.

Q: So yeah, that’s what I wrote, Robb. In relation to your sense of the film you made through years of research and shooting and editing, what do those two little paragraphs make you think?

A: They make me think you have an interesting take. I hadn’t quite thought of things in that way. Certainly the relationship of secrecy to privacy is an inverse one–the more secrecy, the less privacy. Secrecy doesn’t take this on directly for the reason that we just couldn’t go in every direction that the film would want us to take. The film does suggest that direction, though, and so you’re right to point it out. And if the cliché is true that information is power, then it’s also true that the powerful have more information. And if the powerful are those in the executive branch, then they just get to do whatever they want, with no oversight. And when they’re acting in the name of national security, the executive branch gets to behave in a way that the constitution was expressly designed to restrain. It’s also true that the executive branch needs a certain amount of secrecy in order to perform its function of protecting the nation; the film wants to take that duty seriously and not just dismiss it.

Q: How did you go about that?

A: Well, one of the things that [Peter and I] struggled with was how to present a strong point of view at the same time that we would give voice to this other myriad of positions. Our basic thought was: If we’re going to express a belief about secrecy, we have to do it by moving through difficult ideas rather than starting with a conclusion–with, for example, Secrecy is bad or Secrecy erodes democracy. The film doesn’t adopt that style of advocacy: It doesn’t start with its conclusion already mapped out. We wanted to go through the kind of dizzying and difficult thinking that people inside the system of secrecy have to do, and that we had to do as filmmakers.

Q: It’s rare for a film, even a documentary film, to favor the range of ideas over the single perspective, don’t you think?

A: I suppose, yes. One of the things about our film that presented a real challenge to us as filmmakers is that we were dealing with one of the worst film ideas on earth: the idea of government secrecy, which is just completely inert, visually speaking. There’s nothing to film! So it has to start as a poor film idea, even if it’s a consequential idea on paper or in your head. One of the ways we hoped to work with that as a problem was to film people who had experience within the system–people inside the NSA or the CIA, people who’ve had experience in the secrecy system as civilians, people who have spent their lives trying to get secrets from the government–rather than experts holding forth about the issues. We waned to get some patina of the personal. Which seemed right because secrecy is always personal–even at the highest levels of executive power. As human beings, we’re constructed from out of myriad secrets.

Q: So many possible directions to go from here–I guess I have to choose, huh?

A: Go ahead [laughs]. We did!

Q: Right [laughs]. Oh, the agony of art: all the things that won’t happen because of one little choice or another.

A: It’s like growing up. You marry this person and not that person, you get this job and not that job…

Q: Oh, God, yeah… Okay, so here we go! The people you chose–ahem–for the film are ones who could bring an experiential perspective to the film. That’s also to say that they have a kind of passion, a hunger to express themselves, which is not always easy to get within a talking heads documentary situation. Are there things you and Peter did before filming to make the subjects want to be so forthcoming and articulate? Or did most of that energy come as a result of your careful selection of subjects?

A: It’s hard to know. But let me say this: For the first interviews that we shot, we went to the subjects’ environments–filming them in their offices, at home, et cetera. We worked very hard to make the settings as ordinary as possible, but there were always elements in the frame–a bookshelf, a desk, whatever–that seemed to distract the subjects and the film itself from this profoundly powerful, invisible, all but darkened space that secrecy occupies in our imaginations and in the U.S. government. So at that point we said, Well, maybe we should see whether our subjects could come to us. We could fly them to us [in Boston], we would shoot on a soundstage so that the environment is completely theatrical in a way, and very dark. It’s like the moviegoing experience: You’re in a darkened room, you’re looking at this beam of light, focusing your attention. That’s what we wanted: We wanted to focus the subjects’ attention fully, and the camera’s. And by choosing people from within the [secrecy] system–practitioners rather than pundits–and by not choosing famous people like former heads of the CIA and so on, we didn’t have people arguing their own failed policies and answering questions that weren’t being asked. And you didn’t bring the glare of celebrity into the room. These are people who wanted to tell us what they thought about things they felt were terribly underrepresented within the political discourse. We gave them the time to develop ideas. Hopefully we don’t have sound bites in the film, but paragraphs.

Q: The film is about secrecy, but it’s more a work of philosophy than investigation per se–it’s about the uncovering of ideas, not of facts, a meditation rather than an expose. It’s a humble film, in a way–which it could only be, really, in the face of these gigantic forces that even people with executive power can’t always have a full handle on. You get a sense of all of these people playing a three-dimensional tug of war, a sense that on some level they’re all patriots, fighting one another to realize their version of patriotism. You agree?

A: Yes. I think this idea of patriotism–of not shying away from patriotism as a thing to claim–is one of the things that sets up the film. If you’re in the intelligence community, you know things: You’re thinking very dark thoughts, you know things about the world that are frightening, and you’re doing your best to try to make the world safer–at least safer for Americans, if you’re in the U.S. intelligence community. In the film, we spend a fair amount of time showing the relationship between secrecy and the nuclear threat. Because that’s the scariest element, and it’s the thing that [secrecy officials] know better than anybody. We want that fear to leak into the movie, because that’s what you’re really addressing at some deep and fundamental level: Policy gets driven by the fear of some kind of nuclear calamity.

Q: Watching the film, you catch yourself thinking, You know, the need for government secrecy kind of makes sense. It’s not something that can be dismissed immediately. And it’s surprising to recognize that feeling.

A: I agree with that. I’m glad you think that from seeing the film.

Q: It prepares you for an overall experience in the film that, as we’ve said, is dizzying rather than stabilizing. The conclusion of the film isn’t a conclusion, really, but a continued feeling of irresolution. The biggest secrets simply can’t be uncovered.

A: I suspect that if we had made more of an expose film–an angry film–it would have gotten more attention in the press, a higher level of play. But that’s never the kind of film we wanted to make, not ever. There were friends of ours who were pissed off at us for not making a more angry film.

Q: That’s interesting. I don’t want to exaggerate by suggesting that anger is passé right now, but, in August of 2008, there is a natural sense of a long chapter being closed, a sense of looking ahead to a period that hopefully will be not so enraging as the last eight years have been. And since a lot has happened in the last nine months since Sundance, maybe those friends of yours who were pissed–for not being angry enough, funny as it sounds–would feel something different now that we’re seemingly on the verge of Hope with a capital H?

A: It’s hard to know. And also, in three or six months from now, the landscape will be different yet again. I know we wanted to make a film that was completely responsive to current events but not beholden to them, not tethered so tightly to them. I think the seductions of secrecy are present in every executive. Lyndon Johnson was one of the greatest abusers of secrecy and he was a Democrat. Issues of war often transcend issues of political party affiliation. While this [current] administration has been particularly and willfully bent on increasing executive power by every means necessary, including the abuse of secrecy, the problems are not going to go away if there’s a Democratic president next year. They’re not. And if there’s another [terrorist] attack on the horizon–and it’s hard to think there isn’t–then these issues of the problems of secrecy in a democracy will be raised again. I hope the film will have a life that evolves, that the film can be read in different ways in different political environments. We’d want the film to be open enough that it can be useful to people in thinking about these key problems.

Q: One of the interviewed subjects is a Washington Post reporter who says that his job is precisely to disrupt the government’s privilege of secrecy, to get new information to the readership, to the public. But newspapers, to put it mildly, have had a tough year. Does the film play differently than it did at Sundance [in January] as a result of the hits that print journalism has taken as a business?

A: It’s a good question. In a way, the ground is still moving under us, isn’t it? Speaking of current events, [Salim] Hamdan has just today been convicted by the military tribunal. We can’t really account for that in the film, obviously. And whenever you put explanatory titles at the end of a documentary, you’re basically shouting to the audience that you’re lost in time, scrambling to catch up.

Q: What do you want to say about Hamdan? How does the news strike you?

A: I think it’s horrific. This is a guy who was convicted of driving weapons from one place to another place in Afghanistan, in the service of al Qaeda–just a salaried guy who was hired by bin Laden to be his driver. Hitler’s driver, by the way, was never charged with war crimes, and actually made a lot of money from his position by writing books–his memoirs of life with Hitler. So of all the people out there who are enemy combatants, the one to prosecute is a courier making deliveries? A non-ideological guy, a poor guy from Yemen? This is the guy they convict on these grounds, for the first time since WWII? It’s basically a way to instantiate the military tribunals, which are a travesty–a means to undermine the entire legal framework of the United States. I’m afraid this signals that [the U.S.] will go forward with prosecuting other people, and that at a certain point we’ll just accept these tribunals as a reasonable way to deal with terror. I think it will further undermine our moral stature as living under the rule of law.

Q: When you look into your crystal ball, drawing from the things you discovered in making Secrecy, what do you see for the futures of Rummy and Rove, Cheney, Dubya. Once their administration has officially passed, will they be forced to face the music?

A: I think that’s very unlikely. There’s going to be no stomach to go after elected officials for these kinds of crimes. The Democrats will feel that if they do, there’ll be pushback from the Right. My guess is they’ll hold their noses and not indict. But I don’t know.

Q: Is that another way of saying that anger is yesterday’s news?

A: Hmmm. That’s very interesting. I don’t know. I do have the feeling from being on the [film] festival circuit and talking to filmmakers and seeing what’s up on the screen that people are a bit exhausted right now by all the polarization and vitriol, and they’re trying to find ways to maintain beliefs without expressing them in ways that polarize us ever more. Maybe that’ll be to the Left’s detriment. But I do think there’s some feeling out there now that anger is a dead end.

Q: You can measure that feeling purely in the realm of left-wing documentary, in the grosses that have, for the most part, been dwindling. People–audiences–are exhausted, as you say. The documentary wave certainly seems to have crested.

A: I know what you mean. All the Iraq War films tanked last year except for No End in Sight–which was a very angry film, and terrific, too, I thought. It’s hard to know. In some ways, you see that people are going to documentaries not so much to get their own beliefs reinforced–Michael Moore and his audience are an exception to this–but to be destabilized a bit. They like seeing other people’s points of view. And there’s something fascinating about that as a way of adjudicating the real. How do we know what the world is like? How do we know how to vote? How do we know what’s happening in the war, in the cities? How do we understand any issue, politics in general, the media? Actors are politicians, politicians become actors–the whole thing is very confusing. Even in academia, we don’t really know what to teach. What do we think an educated person should know? This is something that has been argued endlessly in liberal arts colleges for the last 10 or 20 years. It used to be that people kind of had an idea of what an educated person should know. Now we don’t.

Q: Many would say the mass media is in charge of these questions.

A: Well, if you work in documentary films, you’re at the frontline of the reality business. How do you make sense of the world? Religion used to do that: People went to church, to the synagogue, people spoke from the pulpit and talked about core values, about what kinds of stories made sense, how can we learn from those stories, what the world is really like. Documentary films are edging into that territory–not spiritually speaking, not exactly that, but in the ways of helping us understand what the world is like. I felt this way when I used to come out of movies in the 60s. I couldn’t wait to see what Antonioni or Godard or Bergman thought of this or that. It helped all of us. Leaving the theater, we wouldn’t even get to the sidewalk before we were talking about the movie. Another hour would go by before we made it to the café to talk some more. Because the world was being revealed to us in some way that was worth talking about. And I think people are having that kind of experience with documentary films. They want to talk about them.

Q: Which doesn’t necessarily lend to box-office grosses, you know? Maybe part of the reason why grosses are down is that the films are not easily digestible, that the genre is evolving.

A: I think that could be right. Certainly some line was crossed when people started being willing to go out–to pay $12 for tickets, pay for parking, pay for a babysitter–to see a documentary on the screen. Ten years ago that was not common. And now it is rather common that you have the opportunity to see these things. I think it’s partly driven by people’s discomfort with how we know the world, how we get our information about things that aren’t in our purview.

The Judge and the General

Flow: For Love of Water

Interview with Peter Galison & Rob Moss, directors of Secrecy

The Listening project

Cannes, France–

Halfway through the Cannes Film Festival, which wraps up this weekend with the revelation of the Palme d’Or and other awards, two absurdly fortunate and extremely busy cineastes from Minneapolis somehow manage via phone, text, e-mail, and various psychic fax messages to schedule one those “ What’ve you liked so far?” chats. (Don’t worry: No spoilers here.)

But by accident, the curator and critic–the Walker Art Center’s Sheryl Mousley and moi–run into one another two hours before the agreed-upon time while queuing for the Dardennes brothers’ Lorna’s Silence, and decide to observe their own quiet. No talking until after the movie becomes Rule #1–the only rule, in fact–of our Dogme of Q&As.

Yet as rules are meant to be broken, we agree to make small talk in French (e.g., “ Le nouveau vol de NWA est magnifique, n’est-ce pas?”) until the lights go down. Then we suspend the discussion even further while trekking through the gargantuan Palais des Festivals to the fourth-floor meeting place known as Le Club. Eventually it trickles out, even before the microphone is on (quelle horreur!), that while we’re somewhat split on the Dardennes’ latest–Mousley’s thumb points straight up, mine sideways–we’re both big fans of Le Club, in particular its jus d’orange gratuit.

So roll tape–and cheers to free orange juice in Cannes!

Mousley, peeling back the curtain on the Film/Video Department’s theater of operations, explains that “judging the film is how everything begins” for her and assistant curator Dean Otto. As well it should. Last year, for example, Mousley’s Cannes screening of The Mourning Forest–“ a film I adored immediately,” she says–led to the Walker visit of Japanese director Naomi Kawase in March. “ Scheduling is always a major hurdle,” says Mousley. “ Filmmakers are filmmakers; when they’re not in production, they’re in pre-production or doing publicity or taking a rare vacation. But with Naomi, it worked perfectly for her to come in conjunction with the Women With Vision’ series.”

Though the next such series remains nine months away, Cannes isn’t too early for Mousley to focus on films by women here. The curator naturally has her eye on Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s brilliantly surreal La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman) as well as Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, which hadn’t yet screened when we met for OJ. Lamenting the dearth of women-directed films this year, I joke that maybe multimillion dollar baby (and Hillary Clinton supporter) Clint Eastwood could earn honorary inclusion in “ Women With Vision” for his direction of the strikingly feminist Changeling (starring Angelina Jolie); and perhaps he could bank frequent flyer miles to Minneapolis for having previously visited the Walker for the very first Regis Dialogue back in 1990, back in the pre-Unforgiven days when proclaiming Clint as an auteur was something close to radical.

“ Of course I’ve looked into whether Clint would come back [for another Regis],” says Mousley. “ But what I’ve heard from Pierre Rissient”–the Gallic “ man of cinema” featured in critic Todd McCarthy’s like-titled documentary–“ is that [Eastwood] doesn’t like to revisit old territory.” Not geographic territory, anyway, as Eastwood does trod generic turf repeatedly: Changeling, wherein Jolie plays a mother grieving for her lost son and suffering the rampant sexism of 20s and 30s L.A., harkens back particularly to the director’s Mystic River and A Perfect World as a critique of socially sanctioned exploitation and abuse.

Our juice glasses still half-full, like le festival itself, Mousley and I note that Changeling is the likely Palme pick for a jury headed by Mystic River’s Sean Penn. But Palme or not, Eastwood’s star vehicle won’t face the slightest challenge in finding a screen, whereas one of the Walker’s chief missions is to usher in the unknown and otherwise endangered. To this end, Mousley is meeting tomorrow with a group of Iranian film exporters to discuss the details of a continued collaboration that would bring more Iranian cinema to Minneapolis at a time when it’s sorely needed anywhere in the United States.

“ Iranian cinema is tricky now, for obvious reasons,” says Mousley. “ Paying film rentals can be complicated, and then, of course, there’s the problem with visas for visiting [Iranian] filmmakers. So it’s very good for us to get together [with Iranians] to work through strategies for keeping these films on the [U.S. festival and museum] circuit.”

And with that, the conversation is fini: Mousley is heading to another meeting in the Marché du Film, and I’m gonna sprint up the Croisette to the Directors’ Fortnight, where Albert Serra’s El Cant Dels Ocells (Birdsong) will be featuring the brilliant screen acting debut of my Cinema Scope editor and friend Mark Peranson, playing Joseph, earthly father of…oh Lord, I almost gave it away!

Metaphor alert: The Croatian protagonist of All for Free (Sve Daba), one of the films in the traveling series known as “ Global Lens,” grieves the violent deaths of his buddies by taking his humanitarian show on the road–rolling his tavern on wheels from town to town and giving away drinks to all comers, young and old.

Alas, All for Free (May 7 at 9 p.m. and May 10 at 7 p.m.) isn’t among the Walker’s complimentary screenings this year (those are on Thursday nights), but you get my drift: The movie’s bartending Goran (Rakan Rushaidat) could be nicknamed Global after the series that, like him, dispenses thirst-quenching culture to those in need.

Established by the Bay Area-based Global Film Initiative in 2002 as a response to the slow decapitation of developing-world cinema in the U.S. (the violent death of a buddy, you might say), “ Global Lens” wheels its cart to the Walker this week as part of a year-long tour that has included stops at the Museum of Modern Art and the Seattle International Film Festival, and will continue on to more than a dozen other locations from Palm Springs to Green Bay.

Minneapolis, thanks largely to the M-SPIFF’s Al Milgrom and crew, hasn’t been nearly as parched as most U.S. cities when it comes to foreign-language film libation from beyond the West, but that doesn’t mean All for Free et al. isn’t a gift. Indeed, the tight focus of “ Lens,” with one picture from each of a mere 10 countries, lends far more easily than the mammoth M-SPIFF to thematic extrapolation.

Thus allow me to summarize the views from Croatia, China, India, Iran, Argentina, and the Philippines: “ The market for earthenware has crashed!”–or so it is said in Opera Jawa (May 11 at 3 p.m. and May 17 at 9 p.m.), justly hailed in January by the Village Voice’s soon-to-be-former film critic Nathan Lee as a “ surrealist Indonesian pomo-folkloric/funkadelic musical-slash-avant-garde pop-and-lock revolutionary romance-slash-Hindu song-and-dance-installation art extravaganza” and a “ nonpareil Ramayana boogie-down gong drum with a tembang gamelan xylophone huzzah and super-tight moves on the wayang orang tip.”

Word yo, what he said–before the market for adjectives crashed, if not that for film crit in all of inkdom. My point here isn’t so much to sell you on the notion of wickety-wickety-wordwiggin’ Lee as an undeserving victim of new times (takes one to know one, perhaps), but to suggest that the age-old question of hinterland distribution (“ How will it play in Peoria?”) is relatively easy to answer these days, what with the market being both global and glum. Ye olde boogie-down gong drum could well beat even in Palm Springs–or anywhere an American can barely afford a “ Global” ticket when they’re not being given away. (Now’s the time to mention that the Chinese Luxury Car is free at the Walker on May 8; the ride will cost you on May 18.)

The title character of El Custodio (May 9 at 7 p.m. and May 14 at 7 p.m.) is fortunate enough to be gainfully employed–as bodyguard to a well-off politician. But he’s also an outsider, as ingeniously articulated by director Rodrigo Moreno in a film-long succession of shots that place the custodian on the periphery of the inner circle, away from the conversation. Taxi driver Travis Bickle would recognize him immediately as God’s lonely man, if you catch my meaning. Yet Moreno’s mapping of the separation between have and have-not remains cinematic not in terms of auteurist allusion (Godard and Scorsese can keep their trademark Alka-Seltzer zooms), but of spatial relationships in the frame and on the soundtrack. When the custodian eventually bridges those gaps, the moment–albeit rough–comes as a relief. (Well, sorta.)

More notes from underground: The Bet Collector (May 10 at 9 p.m. and May 16 at 9 p.m.) makes book on the seedy sides of Manila, where a quickie mart-owning mom must mix with numbers-runners to stay flush. And, though more upbeat than Bet, The Fish Fall in Love (May 11 at 1 p.m. and May 16 at 7 p.m.), from Iranian director Ali Raffi, finds another businesswoman forced into dirty work–cooking for the former flame who would extinguish her restaurant.

That both Fish Fall and Bet Collector are screening free for students (on the mornings of May 16 and 14, respectively) proves the worthy investment of “ Global Lens” in cross-cultural education. But the series, to its credit, doesn’t appear naive about the counterintuitive challenges of giving goodness away for nothing. Goran’s very first customer in All for Free is a Croatian grade-schooler who, when offered juice at no charge, laments that the generous bartender doesn’t have “ the white one” and walks away. Sorry kids, no Speed Racer on this track. But if Luxury Car doesn’t rev your motor, I don’t know automobiles.