Black Maria 2010

This weekend the Black Maria Film Festival rolled through town, and I made my annual trek to catch one of its two programs.

I enjoy the grab bag nature of shorts programs, and Black Maria always feels like it contains even more variety.  So many shorts feel like an audition for a feature - be they narrative, documentary, animation.  Black Maria always features some work that lies outside those parameters.

A notable example in the program I caught was Neil Needleman's film Corporate Art Policy, which was essentially a video essay.  I've heard work like this derided at festivals as better suited to a blog or You Tube.  But despite it's low technical aspirations, it tells a story, it's got a point-of-view.  Plenty of more glossy films don't manage to do that.

On the high end of the production scale was the PBS-ready documentary Worlds of Sound: Ballad of Folkways, telling the story of Folkways founder Moe Asch, and narrated by Pete Seeger.  If this hasn't been picked-up for broadcast, I'm sure it will be.  It's a solid, informative doc.

Pickles for Nickels was a unique, hand-crafted piece of animation.  It was so well-done, I wasn't surprised to see CalArts scroll across the credits.  There was a bit of narrative to the film, but also plenty of non-linear elements more associated with art film.  The filmmaker, Danielle Ash's voice comes through very strong and makes the film something more than an audition for Pixar, as animated shorts so often are.

Sebastian's Voodoo by Joaquin Baldwin is more Pixar-like in its computer animation and its storytelling - but in a good way.  The simple story of individual sacrifice elicited an audible gasp when it ended.

As always, this Black Maria program delivered a variety that made it well worth making time for.

Final Thoughts on True/False 10

I was more prepared for the rhythms of True/False in my second year, but no less impressed by event and its films.

I enjoyed every film I saw, which makes it harder to distinguish between them.  Restrepo has stayed with me the most, but given its life-and-death nature, perhaps that's to be expected.  But I largely devoted my time to my favorite kind of doc - focused on a single, eccentric personality.

Smash His Camera and The Invention of Dr. Nakamats both fit well into this niche,  and took distinctly different approaches.  Smash His Camera broadens its perspective on Paparazzo Ron Galella to include wildly differing critical views of him and his work.  Nakamats never steps back from the portrait the subject paints of himself.  It creates a more unified POV, but made me long for the context of Smash His Camera.

One of the richest experiences when attending a festival is drawing connections between the films - something you simply can't or wouldn't do when watching them separately.  My buddy Travis pointed out as we left Waking Sleeping Beauty that the events it chronicles ended 14 years ago, exactly as had the life of the comedian we saw documented in one of the Secret Screenings the night before.  Is 14 years some kind of magical gestation age for a certain historical perspective?  Maybe, but I never would have wondered if I hadn't seen the two films within hours of each other.

If there was one disappointment from the films I saw, it was that they didn't open up to me more.  The experience I most enjoy when watching a doc is that moment the film goes beyond that quirky hook of its subject and becomes "about" something different.  Smash His Camera had moments of this - questions of the nature of art and celebrity.  Probably more than any other film I saw, Restrepo left much to be discovered between the images and the rationalizations of the soldiers involved.

One day after leaving the festival, I wonder about the films I didn't see.  Two of this year's Best Picture nominees screened at last year's fest - but I only saw one of them.  Critic Karina Longworth Tweeted several films she was impressed with last night.  I had seen none of them.

It's a credit to the festival that it can't be fully digested, even spread over four days.  I spoke to filmmakers and attendees alike whose reaction was the same as mine last year - "how did I not know about this?"

Four Film Saturday at True/False

We planned to see It Felt Like a Kiss first thing in the morning, but some schedule confusion led us into the queue for Waking Sleeping Beauty instead.

The doc follows a renaissance in Disney animation and the overhaul in management that took place between 1984 and 1994.  It feels hard not to damn the film with faint praise.  It is essentially a history, and for anyone interested in Disney or the business of Hollywood, and I count myself as one, it's an interesting history.  One interesting choice, noted before the screening by producer and former Disney Exec. Peter Schneider - the filmmakers chose to only use footage from the era itself.  In Schneider's words, there are no "shots of old men talking."  It's a subtle choice, but keeps the film grounded in the moments it documents.

Disney luminaries like Eisner and Katzenberg appear more or less as expected, but I was surprised and even moved by the creative contributions of lyricist Howard Ashman to the production of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

After a couple beers and a couple sliders at Booches, we began our afternoon at the Blue Note venue with The Red Chapel.  The film follows a Danish filmmaker and two Danish/Korean performers he recruits to travel into North Korea under the guise of a cross-cultural performance.  The ruse of the filmmaker's crew is manipulative and even crass, but it pales in comparison to the group performance of the entire population of Pyongyang.

Every action the crew encounters is choreographed to display an image of perfect unity and loyalty to the Great Leader(s).  The crew plays along, even as their North Korean handlers edit their performance entirely into something more appropriate for North Korean audiences.  But the strain on the faces of the people are clear.  Filmmaker Mads Brugger attributes their every action to fear, and it would be hard to disagree with his assessment.

Some of Brugger's actions set my ethical spider-sense tingling, but the film is worthwhile even if just as a window into this hidden society.  It's an often hilarious piece of absurdism, but the fear and tragedy of North Korea lend weight to the humor.

The Invention of Dr. Nakamats brings humor with much less baggage, as it documents the Japanese inventor with the most registered patents in history.  The Doctor's inventions include legitimate technological breakthroughs such as the floppy disk, but it appears from the film far more oddities, including an underwater pencil/notebook and products to stimulate female arousal.

As the title suggests, Nakamats is also meticulous about sculpting his image and orchestrating the events around him, down to a moment he orders his children to redo a presentation of a birthday gift to him.  It's a funny film about a truly eccentric character, but by the end I wished it could have taken me to some deeper level of understanding of Nakamats.

Restrepo was our final film in the standing-room only Blue Note.  The winner of the Grand Jury Doc prize at Sundance did not disappoint.  It's being sold as a true story version of The Hurt Locker, and that's not an inaccurate description - especially in the opening moments when the camera is inside a vehicle as it is exploded by a land mine.

The bulk of the film follows a team of soldiers as they man the most remote outpost in Afghanistan, under near-constant attack from the remnants of the Taliban.  

I heard several people dismiss the film as "good, but nothing I haven't seen before."  Sure, the war doc isn't a new thing - but I don't remember feeling as much a feeling of actually being there as I did watching Restrepo.  The camera is there with the soldiers as they are taking fire, and in the most harrowing sequence, with them on patrol as fellow soldiers are being killed just a few yards away.

Interviews with the surviving soldiers frame and add poignancy to the footage.  It feels like the filmmakers have been true to the words and intentions of those soldiers as they tell their story, but the end result left me feeling that all their sacrifice was done in tragic futility.

We ended our night, as we did last year, with pizza and pitchers of beer at Shakespeare's Pizza - a classic college town pizza parlor, filled with a vibrant young crowd that makes me feel every one of my 31 years.