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By John Demetry
Playboy's number one "party school" and "Gay Mecca of the Midwest" Madison, Wisconsin provided the home for The 3rd Annual Wisconsin Film Festival. As undergraduate in the film school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I learned quickly to be skeptical about these titles. Now, as a visiting film critic, I'm walking down infamous strip-mall-style State Street. At this point, it gives me tunnel vision. There just isn't any mystery to it. I know it like the back of my hand. All of that cynicism was thrown into whack when I see visiting filmmaker David Gordon Green walking down State Street. This is, after all, the 25-year- old whose first feature, George Washington, led me to honor as "the future of American movies"--a title one should not take skeptically. In the midst of some existential window-shopping, I asked myself: "How well do I know the street mapped on the back of my hand?"
The critically aclaimed George Washington played at the 3rd Annual Wisconsin Film Festival
Later, I ran into Green again on State Street and he pointed out a guy with a crazy mustache, which I had totally missed. As wide-eyed in the flesh as his Cinemascope first feature George Washington would suggest, Green delivers the world--of landscapes and of the intimately physical--with unwavering wonderment. There's a moment in George Washington where Nasia narrates over a close-up of George's hand: "Sometimes, I look at my friends' hands and imagine I can see the bones inside." If George Washington encouraged faith in that vision, then two of Green's earlier shorts also screened at the festival were proof positive. A densely plotted, some thought incoherent, condensation of Green's comic sensibility, A Biography of Barrels is the funniest bit of cinema you're likely to see in 2001. (The new Tomcats, a delirious jaunt through hetero-male insecurity, has just as many belly laughs but is eight times as long and just as "incoherent.") The breakneck plot of A Biography of Barrels reflects Green and his friends'/colleagues' impulse to make every moment count--as if it were their last chance to try something new, to put on film what they've always wanted to see in a movie. You might recall that the same impulse fueled the early films of the French New Wave.
The Green team puts wings on every private giggle and see if it flies. With their boundless imaginations, they make it soar! Every image is an utter delight. The golden lighting, familiar from George Washington, highlights a care--an interest and glory--in a rainbow of skin tones. A slow-motion "shoot-out" hits the satirical target, while an upside-down point-of-view shot fits right into Green's topsy-turvy sensitivity. There's undeniable poetry in that the most exciting film movement in the United States today comes out of North Carolina, rather than New York or L.A. You might call Green's humor regional, but really it's communal idiosyncrasy untainted by cultural ubiquity.
In 1975, an all but forgotten French masterpiece called Jonah Who Will Be
25 in the Year 2000 was released. The wacky, divergent dreams of its
post-hippie protagonists, who are not unlike the eccentrics one might meet
hanging out in, say, Boone, North Carolina, give birth to a new hope embodied by the
newborn Jonah. Green turned 25 in the year 2000. While Jonah escaped the
whale, David (Gordon Green) might be the filmmaker to take down our cultural
Goliath.
If A Biography of Barrels is pure pleasure, Physical Pinball exhibits Green's blissful mastery of the pleasure that takes us deeper. The surface structure of Physical Pinball is painfully familiar to anyone who's taken a college production course. It must at first have been a maudlin story concerning a girl's first period and how that effects her relationship with her widowed father. Green's too interested in the relationship between people and their environments to make such cliches a bore. Instead, through Green's singular milieu, the film achieves the same aching beauty as the solitary strolls in George Washington. Green masterfully orchestrates the reverse high and low angle shots of the sequence when the daughter, sitting on a bridge over the street where her father stands, tells him, "Daddy, I got my period." He concludes the scene by dissolving the two out of a haunting long shot of the blue-and-orange suffused space. A time and space jape, it's as heartbreaking a cinematic coming-of-age image as any in Francois Truffaut's Les Mistons, The 400 Blows, or Small Change. Green calls the film a "twisted Sesame Street episode." He twists the simple lesson of a tomboy's impending femininity and sexuality to develop a common entrance into a milieu unexamined by American movies. Green doesn't make a point of viewer fascination for the junkyard in which father and daughter live. He uses the mise-en-scene for some clever, dramatically piquant hide-and-seek between the two characters. However, the issue is inescapable when the screening encourages questions about Green's comfort in making the film about African-American characters. Concerns are allayed by the particular joy invoked by Green's ear for Black girls' rap sessions about boys that highlight both Physical Pinball and George Washington. And the question is answered in Green's unprecedented identification with Candace Evanofski, who played Nasia in George Washington and stars in Physical Pinball --a testament to her range and status as a major find. As Jean-Pierre Leaud was to Truffaut in his epochal Antoine Doinel series, Evanofski may be to Green. The film opens with Evanofski in the midst of a brawl with a boy. Green takes us inside of her head, manipulating the soundtrack and the speed of the images to express the rage and confusion that preludes her first period. The effect is (nearly) as awesome as the similar technique used in Wendell B. Harris, Jr.'s Chameleon Street during the meltdown of race, gender and cinema history when the Beast is unmasked at the costume ball. This movie-challenging audience-character identification makes Physical Pinballthe greatest "first period" film since Brian De Palma's Carrie. Like Robert Altman for Pauline Kael, Green's films ruin others for me. And so these shorts, along with my fifth big-screen viewing of George Washington, made the other new works at the festival suffer by comparison. It was the audience that suffered during two experimental shorts, Barbara Lattanzi's Muscle and Blood Piano and Andre Ferrella's Earthstar. Muscle and Blood Piano showcased an innovative technology that allows a person to use a computer to spin images from a film like a d.j. does with music and sounds. Lattanzi, however, seems unfamiliar with the aesthetics behind jazz-impulse appropriation and all she manages to do is transform F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu into unintelligible pixels and garish strobe effects coupled with a droning soundtrack. Earthstar is one of those indistinguishable computer-generated backgrounds at a rave, but we had to watch it without either the music or the drugs that would make it interesting in spite of itself. Almost in spite of themselves - and my distrust of such "objective" documentaries--Tom Shepard's Scout's Honor and Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid's Long Night's Journey Into Day proved incredibly moving and informative.
Long Night's Journey Into Day follows four cases in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission intends to heal the country's wounds caused by crimes committed by both sides of the freedom struggles through a public ritual of confession and forgiveness. Each powerful story suggests the weight of the individual risk in the process. However, the radical conception of social spectacle and catharsis isn't dealt with very deeply, signified by the uncritical use of footage from America's own work of homegrown fascism, Mississippi Burning. Even bad French Realism like Samia has its pleasures, such as images of Samia swimming in the Ocean or sitting in the sunlight in her family's stifling apartment. The desire for freedom is palpable in such moments. As I told a friend afterwards, Samia is just about the prettiest after-school special I'd ever seen. The style doesn't take us inside the character, nor does the story or one-note performances detail the psychic scars of racism in France and misogyny at home.
All I can judge for now is the experience of the work-in-progress screening. It was an appropriate introduction to Crouch's cinema for an audience probably largely unfamiliar with her earlier work. It invited the audience into an unguarded intimacy that Crouch delivered in One Small Step and one can hope from the completed Stray Dogs. The special screening of Stray Dogs also exemplified the importance of the film festival experience. It's about heightening our critical skills as audiences and placing films within the context of current film culture. It's also about celebrating the artform and participating in the culture at a higher level. Don't leave this improved vision on the theatre floor with the popcorn bag. Bring it out onto the street and view your familiar world with heightened clarity. |
Scouts Honor covers the efforts of a group called Scouting for All to
allow gays in the Boy Scouts. Focusing on straight teen-age Scout Steven
Cozza's leadership, the film makes a strong case for the kind of moral and
social awareness, and resulting activism, that the Scouts can inspire. But
it's pretty scary that the archival footage meant to suggest healthy
American youth is uninvestigated lily-white homo-eroticism. A campfire
rendition of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", anyone?
Guinevere Turner stars as Darla Carter, a lesbian coming out in Stray Dogs
© 1997-2002 BEI