Polish documentaries in Los Angeles

Last September I received a lovely invitation to review the documentary submissions to the 15^th Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles, held for a week in October.   It was a group of solid films, funded by a variety of public state and regional organizations, such as Polish Television, the National Audiovisual Institute, including other Polish and European funds.  These documentaries show the healthy state of documentary filmmaking, made possible by programs promoting quality, and relying on a rich tradition of cultivating documentary cinema.  I am very thankful to Vladek Juszkiewicz, the founder and director of the festival, for this opportunity to savor the moving humanism of Polish cinema. (My first film viewing experiences in Buenos Aires in the seventies were deeply shaped by the films of Wajda and Zanussi).

As John Grierson, the father of documentary, observed many years ago, good documentaries both educate and entertain. And I found that to be the case of the films I had the pleasure to review.

Children Calling is an observational piece on a helpline for children and teenagers, staffed with sympathetic listeners, who provide common sense but not professional advice.  It is done in a strict verité style, with an emphasis on close-ups and extreme close-ups of the young women answering the phones.  The viewer hears snippets of life stories  – some quite dramatic – over a year. The passing of seasons is nicely recorded, and adequately conveys the flow of time. The film is framed by shots of home-made toys, and at regular intervals, the antics of a dog.

   The 30 minute-length matches adequately the scope of the film: to catch without any editorial comment, voice-over or preliminary text, the everyday activities of a small institution, peopled by caring individuals.  The joys and limitations of the cinéma vérité style are well exemplified in this professionally executed short film.

Albert Cinema (2013) by Agniezka Zwiefka, also chooses a mostly cinéma verité approach to tackle its subject matter: to record the making of an amateur film by a motley group of homeless men living in a shelter. 

   Eschewing a narrator or any explanation about these characters, except for what they reveal to the camera, the film slowly builds a very moving portrait of broken lives held together by dreams and hopes.  The protagonist of this group effort is a rugged man, a former alcoholic hippie, eloquent in front of an unflinching camera/confessional, who finds redemption and a renewed relationship with his estranged son, after premiering the film.

   There is a nice fit between the length of the film (to fit an hour-long television slot) and the leisurely pace in which the story unfolds, expertly edited to build a climax and a resolution.

In A Diary of a Journey (2013), directed by Piotr Stasik, cinéma vérité is again the style of choice to record the summer-long journey through the Polish countryside of a classically trained photographer, now in his seventies, who takes a young high-school student as his apprentice. 

   The charm of this documentary is two-fold: the geographical journey in search of interesting faces, seeped in the everyday of rural life, and also the mentoring process involving an old artist with an adventuresome life and a young man getting ready to live. 

   Like Children Calling and Albert Cinema, there is no narrator explaining the context or who these characters are – just a few shots of 1960s fashion photographs introduce the older professional as an established figure – and what pushes them to take this trip.  The beauty of the rural landscape is lovingly captured, as are the tough and warm inhabitants of the small places they visit.

   A portrait of the artist as an old man and a record of a satisfying artistic experience, A Diary of a Journey is skillfully edited to make the mundane details of traveling an exhilarating experience (a fender-bender, a swim, cooking), culminating in a moving revelation of a man assessing his life when most of it has already been lived.

Joanna (2013), director by Aneta Kopacz, is another remarkable observational portrait, in this case that of a young mother and wife dying of cancer.  Doing it in a strict verité style was a bold choice, one that both benefited the narrative structure and facilitated the non-intrusive relationship between the camera and the titular protagonist. It also avoided the pitfalls of melodrama in the building of a story that ends in death and sorrow.

   In a feat of editing bravura, Joanna ends up being a contemplative take on youth and death, motherhood and marriage, love, nature and the tangible world.  Tweaking the chronology and trusting the viewer to figure out the emotional direction of the story, Joanna culminates in a celebration of love conquering death, by showing the protagonist’s young son learning to ride his bike with the help of his mother.  The humanity of the portrait, movingly built over the 50 minutes of a television slot, is accomplished with grace and technical skill.

   (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this notable documentary was produced by the Wajda Studio).

A Dream of Warsaw (2014), direted by Krzysztof Magowski, is an accomplished example of the modern music documentary, like the ones pioneered by Martin Scorsese (Shine a Light, No Direction Home). If it must be fascinating for a Polish audience to see the multilayered relationship between a well-known rock singer and his times – the 60s to the 90s – unfold through archival materials and interviews, much more so to an international audience who is not familiar with the iconic figure of Czeslaw Niemen.  What bursts on the screen is the view of a parallel world, one behind the Iron Curtain until the collapse of Communism

, with a musical figure as iconic as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, tangled up with politics since his beginnings as the popular singer who became the king of Polish rock

Thoroughly researched and skillfully edited, with talking heads, including family members and pop music experts serving as de facto narrators, this documentary is a solid example of the classic expository approach: the thorough examination of a topic.  Just the archival work to dig photos, newsreels, publicity materials, interviews, film clips and a verité documentary about Niemen, not just in Poland but in Europe and the US, makes this a worthy piece of filmmaking.

   Like Citizen Kane, the documentary is built around a question: Who was Czeslaw Niemen?  Through multiple perspectives, the viewer is treated to an examination of the  many facets displayed by the singer/composer over a long career, spanning crucial decades of Polish history and politics.  It makes for a fascinating portrait, where the threads of the private and the public, the personal and the political are inextricably woven. 

 

Cabaret of Death (2014), directd by Andrzej Celinski, is a multi-layered film dealing with a straightforward subject: the cabaret acts staged by German and Polish Jewish performers in the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps during WWII.  It has been the topic of various documentaries, most effectively Ilona Ziok’s Kurt Gerron’s Karussell (1999) about the Weimar era German actor and director imprisoned in Therensienstadt.

  Walking on a well-trodden path, this feature length documentary stakes, however, a bold claim in a territory often dismissed by purists of the genre: reenactments of anecdotes and commentaries offered by witnesses and experts, who vividly illustrate the difficulties, perils and joys of staging theatrical sketches in extreme situations. But unlike the titillating self-contained formula perfected by the History Channel, the film keeps the various dramatizations at the service of what I believe is the film’s ultimate objective: a historical essay about the persistence of a cultural legacy in the face of ethnic catastrophe. By bookending the loosely connected stories of these cabaret performers – including Gerron’s - with the graceful opening shot of a holy fool (I wish I knew the Yiddish word) on the slabs of the Shoah memorial in Berlin and his final appearance walking through a verdant Jewish cemetery, Cabaret of Death goes beyond the expository approach to become a work of mourning.  In that sense, I also believe, it becomes part of the difficult conversation among Poles of different traditions – like the recent Ida so intelligently does as a fiction film.

   Cabaret of death is not only an excellent contribution to the historical documentary but also a solid example of how film technique can be used to teach and entertain. 

These fine works attest to the variety and quality of a film genre that matters to cultural organizations in Poland, thus ensuring the healthy state of a type of cinema born with the invention of the Lumière’s cinématographe.

The best documentary award of this 15^th edition went to A Diary of Journey, with its young director Pitr Stasik on hand to receive the prize during the gala opening of the festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.

Buñuel in Mexico: El gran calavera (1949)

The following are the program notes I wrote for the screening of El Gran Calavera (1949) organized by the Latin American Cinemateca.  It is part of the Los Angeles Conservancy series "Last Remaining Seats", to unfold next June in historic downtown theaters.  This film, directed by Luis Buñuel, will screen at the Palace Theatre on June 25, 2014.

Among the thirty-two films directed by the Spanish-born iconoclast Luis Buñuel between 1929 and 1977, in France, Mexico and Spain, El gran calavera is perhaps the most undiluted comedy of his career. The filmmaker called películas alimenticias (bread-and-butter films) those projects he directed from the late forties throughout the fifties, as an exile after the Spanish Civil War, first in the U.S. and then in Mexico, in need to feed his family.  The adjective in Spanish is used both ironically and seriously, because these pictures allowed for his filmmaking career to resume after a long hiatus, started by two still shocking Surrealist films in France, Un chien andalou (1929) and L’age d’or (1930) and the no less disturbing documentary Las Hurdes - Land without Bread (1933).  The huge commercial success of El gran calavera made possible Los olvidados (1950), an unsentimental and brutal chronicle about children in the slums of Mexico City. (Amores perros (2000) is, in part, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s conversation with Buñuel fifty years later about those in the fringes of society).

Compared to Buñuel’s Mexican masterpieces Él (1953), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), Nazarín (1959), The Exterminating Angel (1962), and other melodramas and satirical comedies like Mexican Bus Ride (1952), El bruto (1953) and La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954), El gran calavera can be dismissed as a hackneyed job, a white telephone comedy of errors with a by-the-numbers plot involving the downfall of a rich and selfish family, through layers of deception and intrigue.  A world made topsy-turvy by a widowed drunkard patriarch Don Ramiro (Fernando Soler) wishing to teach a lesson to his family, becomes absurdly restored at the end, with everybody learning a lesson about the value of work and responsibility.  The wealthy are ironized and the poor idealized – broad strokes that would be refined in his next films, showing that in this imperfect world, good and evil are intertwined.

Shot in less than three weeks, this nonsensical comedy, the second of his Mexican period, shows that the seeds of a Surrealist universe shaped by irony and absurdity have been transplanted in new soil:  the satirical critique of the bourgeois family, the clash between desire and social conventions, and a counterpointing style that combines a popular film genre with a Spanish realism and acerbic wit. No idealized indigenous exaltation in the leading style of Emilio Fernández, singing charros or exuberant melodramas.

Two funny scenes stand out for their wonderful use of sound counterpoint.  In the first one, the enterprising working-class Pablo (Rubén Rojo) courts Virginia (Rosario Granados), the millionaire’s spoiled daughter, now barely making ends meet as a laundress. The courtship takes place in his van, fitted with loudspeakers for making commercial announcements.  The private conversation, full of advances, retreats and innuendos, is heard by the neighborhood because the loudspeaker has been accidentally left on.  This foreshadows the film’s climax, a perfectly timed duel between the words of a priest in a fancy church marrying Virginia and the aristocratic bum vying for her recovered fortune, and Pablo, announcing ham and female underwear outside of the church.  This juxtaposition of the wedding vows with an over the top commercial speech yields pearls such as: “the chastity of marriage … is only possible with stockings Sigh of Venus …”

A wonderful gallery of sharply observed types – the hypochondriac aunt, the gambling uncle, the good-for-nothing son, a no-nonsense physician uncle, the conniving suitor and his over-bearing mother – give the story spice and flair. 

Lightweight and fanciful, El gran calavera is still a pleasure to watch.  The proof is in the pudding:  last year Mexican director Gary Alazraki, from a well-known filmmaking dynasty, made Nosotros los Nobles, an updated version of Buñuel’s comedy.  Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery. 

Essential bibliography

Francisco Aranda, Luis Buñuel, A Critical Biography (1985)

Luis Buñuel, Mi último suspiro (1982)

Peter William Evans and Isabel Santaolalla, editors, Luis Buñuel, New Readings (2004)

José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire, Conversations with Luis Buñuel (1992)

Who is God in Derron Aronofsky's "Noah"?

Noah makes a grand impression, for its visual scope, relentless bleakness and the ideas it puts forth to describe the protagonist’s relationship with God.  Ultimately, it is a profoundly unsettling film, one that will surprise the viewer because it locates the meaning of this relationship outside of the Bible.  It works as a myth of creation, like Peter Jackson’s visual rendering of his Middle Earth mythology, but one twisting the original source in ways that subverts it.

At the core of this fable for the modern times about nature – both human and the physical world – is an inversion of the Jewish/Christian proposition about a God that creates the cosmos out of chaos (in the Greek translation of the Hebrew “at the beginning God created Heaven and Earth”), and man as his image and resemblance. 

 The sparse, yet dramatic and colorful, recounting of the Noah story in Genesis 5-10, provides, quite literately, the backbone of the story as reworked by Aronofsky and his longtime writer/producer Ari Handel.  Dealing with a work of imagination, the director and writer fill in the interstices of the biblical narrative with powerful imagery, well-developed characters, sharp and sometimes ponderous dialogue about good, evil and the value of life, and tragic conflicts played out in an apocalyptic world.  Artistic licenses and creative decisions make this a superb piece of filmmaking as well as special effects ingenuity.  A much discussed example in reviews, and a subject of conversation especially among the youth quadrant, is the rendering of the mysterious creatures the Bible calls the Nephilim (Genesis 6-4): ‘these were the heroes of days gone by, men of renown’.  They are here lava monsters, fallen angels trapped in bodies of stone, who help Noah build the ark.  Giants reminiscent of Tolkien’s Ents as materialized in The Lord of the Rings, they look like Transformers brought over from a science-fiction film.  The handling of the CGI menagerie – how to get the creatures to the ark and keep them quiet on board for the duration of the spectacularly rendered flood – is imaginatively solved.  Sets, costumes and the magnificent vessel – realistically designed to float not to sail – are conceived as part of a nitty-gritty primitive yet post-industrial world; its natural beauty (the austere landscape of Iceland), ravaged by wicked human race, functions as a modern alert of ecological disaster and climate-change.

The geographical universe this Noah inhabits in the fringes, as a family man intent on protecting it from unnecessary damage, is one unhinged as a result of physical and moral depredations.  One senses that the visionary, metaphorical worlds of Hieronymus Bosch must have inspired the production designers.  The debaucherie in the woods did not need to look further than the Flemish painter's scenes of chaos, devils, half-humans, half-creatures, to graft the wickedness of mankind to the film's apocalyptic landscape.

I have spent a few days thinking about the film, and reading reviews, interviews and other materials. And I have come to see that by redefining the terms of the relationship between God and Noah, the film subverts its biblical understanding. I would even argue that, in an extreme feat of interpretation, it throws overboard the canonical Judeo-Christian frame of reference, bringing in a mishmash of esoteric interpretations. I haven’t quite figured out the purpose of such a Copernican turn.

The opening and closing lines point inexorably to that puzzling direction: “At the beginning, there was nothing”, intones the narrator; the command to “be fruitful and multiply” in the final scene are now Noah’s words to his children, not Yahweh’s to Adam and Eve in the Garden (Genesis 1-28).  This arc from an initial nothingness to a man and his family alone in the closing scene has written God out of the human equation: the Almighty is an entity, unnamed (the word “God” is never mentioned), remote and silent, and in his requirement, through a nightmarish dream, that Noah sacrifice his newly born grandchildren, malevolent.   By refusing to do so –the reverse of Abraham’s obedience – Noah breaks with a deity that has driven him to a state of semi-madness by participating in the extermination of the world, and begins his self-given mission of re-populating the earth after the ecological cataclysm. In this final scene, the coup de grâce is given by the serpent: surviving the expulsion from paradise by becoming a sacred relic worn wrapped around the arm by Noah’s descendants, like sacramental tefillin, it becomes the real divinity, tying Noah and lineage into a covenant to last through time. 

This svolta theologica has been discussed in terms of gnostic and Kabbalah influences shaping Aronofsky and Handel’s re-imagining of the story, a project in the works for more than ten years.  In his blog, theologian Brian Mattson tracks the use of these sources in a clear, straightforward manner, and it makes for a fascinating read (drbrianmattson.com).

The film suggests to me that while we can explore these other roots – non canonical, esoteric, fringy – what happens in Noah is an instance of bringing a secularizing, post-modern spirit to the Bible: the film reads the story traditionally, as a record of a covenant between the Lord and his chosen people, but simultaneously lays on it a mutually exclusive interpretation.  Through the dialogues, the design of the characters, the mise-en-scène, and in the subversion of the serpent’s meaning in the last scene, the second one has pushed out the first one egregiously.  The God of the Hebrew Scriptures exits through the giftshop, an act that goes beyond the traditional Hollywood epics specifically dealing with Noah and the flood, like Michael Curtiz’ Noah’s Ark (1928), Warner Bros. response to MGM’s Ben-Hur (1924), or John Huston’s The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), now kitschy beyond repair.

Perhaps one could view this film in a more sanguine way, disregard the theological svolta, and compare Noah with the director’s other films: Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010).  They all have protagonists on quests for absolutes, going down paths of madness and self-destruction, looking into the abyss, and finding, somehow, the will to survive, physically or spiritually. 

This Jewish narrative of survival in the face of catastrophes is the thread that connects the films of Darren Aronofsky. A similar impulse animates the powerful and moving five-part documentary series The Story of the Jews, written and directed by British historian Simon Schama, just shown on PBS, in anticipation of Pesah.  This first-person documentary is primarily a historical, rational, enlightened account by a Jewish intellectual bonded to his people, who have survived for their fidelity to a book and a law.  On a complementing note, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’1913 Erasmus Lecture in NYC, “Creative minorities" fleshes out the same narrative survival, locating it firmly in the Jewish faith and the Covenant.  The Documentary series and the lecture are an excellent way to revisit the issues brought up by Noah … but the serpent and its implications will give you the creeps.

"There strength is in our numbers" - César Chávez

 This year’s Berlinale showed César Chávez, the four-year endeavor by Mexican production company Canana, directed by one of its founders, actor Diego Luna.  The screening took place in the Special Gala section, showcasing recent films for which a spot was not found in the competition or in the edgier Panorama or Forum.   However, I caught one of the pre-release screenings of the film at U.C.L.A on March 7, in an event organized by the aptly named César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies, with the support of other campus institutions and groups.  It was a well-attended event; the 300-seat James Bridges theater, in the Film and Television Department, could not accommodate the multitude of young people waiting outside.

With Diego Luna in attendance, as well producer Pablo Cruz and Arturo Rodríguez, the current president of the United Farm Works, the union César Chávez and other labor leaders founded in 1962.  The event mixed celebrity and labor politics in an interesting way: at the end of the screening and Q&A, the young students, mostly Hispanic, left both informed about a figure they see on a pantheon, from afar, and with a serviceable understanding of labor politics.  Overall, it seemed to me, they took home the notion of a struggle for human dignity – and one, for this first generation Americans of Mexican and Central American parents - not far from their family experience.

I was very moved by this film, that traces eight key years in the life of Chávez and his collaborators, from 1962 to1970, as labor organizers in the California Central Valley (with the northern Mexican state of Sonora standing for the fields of Delano, California; hats to the set and costume designers for the period look). Against all odds, they succeed after years of struggles, including strikes and boycotts, in bringing the growers to the negotiating table; most importantly, they make the plight of migrant workers a topic in the national conversation.

Before the screening, what most intrigued me were the negotiations – historical, cultural, linguistic, religious – that the Mexican producing team must have had with itself, the U.S. screenwriters who shaped the project as a classical Hollywood narrative, and the realities of the box-office.  Among the various issues on the table, the fact that César Chávez is an American, not a Mexican figure, and yet the film had no studio financial backing; the language spoken in the film is 90% English; the target market, international; and the fact that it had a relatively modest budget of $10 million, provided by various Mexican and foreign investors.

After the screening was over, three things came into sharper focus:  how warmly Mexican this film is in its portrayal of family and community; how American (as in Hollywood American) in making a father/son relationship its dramatic linchpin; and what a beautiful case of the Catholic imagination informing a work of popular culture.   Ideas intrinsic to the Catholic worldview, like mediation, sacramentality and communion are embedded in the narrative and visual fabric of this César Chávez.  Understandably so, given the subject matter and the historical record, but not to be taken for granted. The recent Philomena about the actions of Irish nuns could be an interesting study in contrast, since Stephen Frears has acknowledged his anti-Catholic stance in dealing with a Catholic story.

The dangers of hagiography are quite skillfully skirted, in large part by the terrific performances of Michael Peña, who has the physique du role as Chávez, father of 8 young children, yet pulled away by the demands of his job; America Ferrrera as his no nonsense wife; Rosario Dawson as her legendary strong-willed collaborator Dolores Huerta.  The story moves back and forth between the public and private personas of Chávez, making him a flesh-and-blood hero, and also a Christ-like mediator with the unflinching mission, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, of fighting for the little people. 

The encounter in 1966 between Chávez and Robert Kennedy (Jack Holmes), then senator in a fact-finding agricultural mission in California, is one of the emotional peaks of the film, and one made to carry explicitly its overarching theme: the value of each person, and the dignity of manual work.  In this vein, the 1960 Edward Morrow’s heart-breaking television documentary, Harvest of Shame, that makes an appearance in my documentary class each semester, and the recent Ethel, Rory Kennedy’s valentine to her parents, make moving companions to César Chávez.

John Malkovich, as the self-made grape grower Bogdanovitch (speaking decent Spanish on screen) makes a strong presence as Chávez’ antagonist.  (He is listed as one of the picture’s producers.)  His nuanced character is a notable contrast to the other cartoonish meanies in the film – courtesy of crosscutting editing and the use of television news, Nixon manages to become an archenemy of the people.

For Hispanics, and those sensitive to the Mexican religious traditions of the simple folks, the warm treatment of Catholic iconography is a delight: the Virgen de Guadalupe, first and foremost, the quiet presence of priests, the celebrations of the mass, the pilgrimages. In other words, the fervor with which the teachings of the Gospel translate into action. 

If someone could get Pope Francis to see the film, I have no doubt that he would note that it is a knockout tool for spreading the good news that we are all children of God.  What an endorsement that would be!