Capturing the experience of a nation: the documentaries of Wang Bing

On November 11, 2018, the UCLA Film & Television Archive showed Wang Bing’s 8-hour long documentary Dead Souls about Mao’s forced labor camps in the late 1950s. A few days ago, on January 14, 2024, the American Cinematheque screened Youth (Spring) – a three-plus hours documentary on young people from impoverished backgrounds working in privately-owned textile factories in the industrialized Yangtze basin.  In both instances, the Paris-based Chinese director Wang Bing came to Los Angeles to discuss with audiences these two remarkable documentaries, whose implicit goal is to record and preserve a state of affairs at odds with the Communist Party’s view of history and politics.  That these documentaries got made at all is a remarkable story – Wang Bing’s non-commercial projects are shot independently with small crews, European funding, niche distribution companies, and circulation in China outside of the state apparatus.

A retrospective organized by Film at Lincoln Center in 2018 assessed Wang’s career: “One of the great documentarians working today and an intrepid chronicler of the human tribulations underlying modern China’s social and economic transformation, Wang Bing makes films that are epic in duration yet precise in scope. Forging intimate bonds with his subjects, he captures the plights of individuals and communities in factory towns and rural villages and demands that we behold the political complexity and moral weight of their struggles”.

I had the opportunity (the honor, really) of watching Dead Souls and Youth (Spring) and the Q&As with Wang Bing, speaking in Mandarin and translated by excellent interpreters.  I keep marveling at how documentary cinema – in its infinite flexibility – is a remarkable tool to capture the human experience as it happens and is archived for the future.  Documentary can do two things very well, and the work of Wang Bing is a testimony to this: on the one hand, as in Dead Souls, it is an instrument for oral  histories, giving voice to the survivors of ideological purges, whose testimonies had been hitherto unrecorded; on the other, documentary can observe people’s lives over a long period, and by seeing how they function in their surroundings, yield deep insights into circumstances beyond their individuality. Youth (Spring), shot between 2014 and 2019, is a brilliant case.

 

These two films are also good examples to describe the matrix that contains the director’s work: a chronicle of ordinary lives in post-Mao China; and a counternarrative - rooted in the rescue of historical memory - to the Communist view of China, shaped by ideology, repression and mythmaking. The question undergirding this matrix is left unstated but comes through clearly: can the experience of a nation be captured by cinema?  Wang Bing’s body of work shows that it is, in all its messiness and without Manicheism.  The films of Theo Angelopoulos, shown in a 2022 retrospective of the UCLA Film Archive, ask the same question and give a similar answer, even though the director uses fiction film to do so.  Seeing all the key films by the Greek director over two months, one observes a direct and passionate engagement with the historical, political, and cultural fabric of Greece and its place in the development of a civilization.  Wang Bing’s work comes from a different impulse – to leave the record of a people, the humble of the earth, the unseen and unheard – but he is preoccupied by the same underlying subject.

 

While Angelopoulos emphasizes ideas and their relationship to political praxis, in early films such as Days of 36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975), The Hunters (1977) and Alexander the Great (1980), Wang Bing’s commitment is to the preservation of historical truth, via oral histories, and in the presentation of workers, using a Direct Cinema approach.  

 

Both auteurs share an ardent attachment to their nation and their people. That Wang Bing’s affection is rendered by a fly-on-the wall camera and a narrative strategy designed to create a respectful distance between the filmmaker and his subjects should not obscure the director’s moral commitment to show things as they are. When all is said and done, Wang Bing’s vérité techniques are at the service of freeing his characters and their stories from any external constraints, whether ideological or commercial.  Documentaries like Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), Three Sisters (2012), Fathers and Sons (2014), ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (2013) and Bitter Money (2016) are examples of this style. Like Frederick Wiseman, Wang Bing, time and again, captures individuals while revealing the larger human and economic landscape in which they are inserted.

 

His approach – the rescue of a person’s voice and uniqueness, “I try to maintain the integrity of each person”, he has noted in interviews – is in the antipodes of the government-sanctioned Chinese cinema of propaganda. The viewing of feature films like Confucius (2010), Beginning of the Great Revival (2011), Wolf Warrior (2015), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), The Founding of an Army (2017) easily illustrates the point. 

The cinema of the celebrated Jia Zhangke – Wang Bing’s contemporary at the Beijing Film Academy in the 1990s – functions the same way: it has made available to Chinese and international audiences a portrait of contemporary China that foregrounds with great sympathy the plight of the rural population, the migrants to cities, the alienated workers, the left behind. Titles like The World (2004), Still Life (2006), 24 City (2008) and A Touch of Sin (2013), showcased by major film festival and the ones that cemented his reputation, are in conversation with the documentaries of Wang Bing.

 

Regarding the place of Wang Bing in China’s contemporary culture, I find it important to connect the director’s overarching film project – regardless of how modest or soft-spoken he may be about it – to Ian Johnson’s recent book Sparks, China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future; it is a study of Chinese historians who challenge the misuse of history by the Communist Party.  Foreign Affairs just published an essay by Johnson himself, that summarizes the book, “Who Gets to Tell China’s Story” (December 19, 2023). One can easily make the case, mutatis mutandis, that Wang Bing, as well as Jia Zhangke, belong to this group.  

 

The 1990 essay The Chinese Amnesia by the dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi is the point of departure for Johnson’s piece: it describes the strategy implemented by the Goliath Communist Party to control history, via the monopoly on film, broadcasting, publishing and education. Thus, Fang Lizhi wrote, “the vast majority of people remained unaware of its endless cycles of violence”.  Johnson argues that the CCP approach has been seriously challenged since the coming of the digital revolution, where cheap tools like PDFs and digital cameras are used by citizen historians to “defy the state during the rule of President Xi Jinping, who has made the control of history one of his signature policies”.  It is in this chink in the armor that we can locate the mode of production of Wang Bing’s documentaries. Digital cameras are cheap, less obtrusive and more versatile than celluloid technology, and Wang Bing has mentioned on many occasions how DV equipment made his independent film career feasible, in cost and choice of subjects. 

 

Johnson also discusses the case of novelist Wang Xiabo, which allows for another important connection. Scarred by the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the student protests that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the novelist was looking for a way to depict a society fractured in myriad silent groups, “too weak to oppose the overwhelming power of the one-party state”. He realized his mission was to give them a voice: “I have a duty to speak of what I have seen and heard”, he wrote. It is not surprising that Johnson adds that “one of China’s greatest filmmakers, Jia Zhangke, often mentions Wang as the writer who inspired him to tell individual stories rather than the collective narratives favored by the state”. This is the mantle taken up by Wang Bing since his first film, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), about the decline of state-run factories.

 

When viewing Youth (Spring), a documentary about laborers in small textile factories that could have been 19^th century Manchester, Pawtucket, R.I., or Lowell, MA, a question popped up: What would Marx, Engels and Gramsci have said about this portrait of capitalist abuse, alienation and false consciousness? Had they lived the 21^st century, they would have been befuddled and horrified, to see that the People’s Republic of China, founded to be a workers’ paradise has become what they critiqued of the Industrial Revolution; they would see the triumph of the proletariat nowhere, ever, in sight. In the digital era, with China fully in the market economy, these textile workers are fully connected to the modern world, through smart phones and computers.

 

At the heart of the film is a visual and sound counterpoint between the collective and the mechanical – echoes, one may say, of 1920s experimental documentaries - and the warm portrait of earthy, vital individuals, captured in their lived experience.

 

The funny moments, tinged with foreboding and a touch of Chaplin’s Modern Times, involve shots of serger machines – they stitch, finish and trim a seam – that may slice the fingers off workers too distracted, chatting, flirting, joking and smoking.  In one sequence, the boss reprimands an embarrassed employee for a garment with crooked stitches. In a post-film “field trip” to Walmart to check clothing made in China, I chuckled when I noticed a jacket with sewing issues  – photo attached.

 

In a lively exchange with the Cinematheque audience in the newly restored Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, Wang Bing said he had shot 2,700 hours of film for this project, over five years. Asked about his approach to gaining the trust of his subjects, he answered that he tries “to capture people in a free, open environment, in the natural unfolding of things”. In this paradox – life bursting open from crammed neon-lit workshops and dingy dorms – lies the art of Wang Bing.

 

Youth (Spring) is the first of a trilogy set in this area of eastern China.  Before travelling to Los Angeles, he finished editing the second and third parts, to be released in 2024, titled Bitter and Return.
 

BIOGRAPHY

Wang Bing has been a leading documentary filmmaker of the burgeoning independent documentary scene in China for the past decade. Acclaimed by critics and recognized as one of the most important Chinese artists and filmmakers of his time, his work has garnered awards and international praise at major film festivals. 
   Born in Shaanxi, a province in central China in 1967, Wang first studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art before studying cinematography at Beijing Film Academy. He began his career as an independent filmmaker in 1999. Released in 2003, his directorial debut Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) is a monumental documentary work, exceeding 9 hours in length, that was a great success internationally. Filmed in the northern Chinese district of Tiexi, it is a strikingly profound contemplation on the lives of workers in the decaying industrial district. Since 2003, he has made 10 documentaries, many of which have been released in theaters, with Three Sisters receiving more than 45,000 viewers in France.
   Retrospectives of his oeuvre have been presented at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique.  In addition to documentaries, Wang has also created fiction films (Brutality Factory, The Ditch) and installations (including Crude Oil, Beauty Lives in Freedom), and photographic series.
https://icarusfilms.com/other/filmmaker/wangbing.html
 

ESSENTIAL FILMOGRAPHY

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002)
Fenming, A Chinese Memoir (2007)
Coal Money (2009)
The Ditch (2010)
Three Sisters (2012)
‘Til Madness Do Us Part (2013)
Fathers and Sons (2014)
Ta’ang (2016)
Bitter Money (2016)
Dead Souls (2018)
Man in Black (2023)
Youth (Spring) (2023)
 

SOURCES FOR FILMS

 

Icarus Films distributes several Wang Bing films: https://icarusfilms.com/other/filmmaker/wangbing.html

The Ovid streaming platform offers a handful of them: Bitter Money, Dead Souls, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, Three Sisters, Ta’ang, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 
https://www.ovid.tv/wang-bing
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balaga, Marta, "Wang Bing talks continuing Youth, finally feeling 'satisfied' with his films: 'You learn to respect them". Variety, November 13, 2023.

Cracken, Matt, "Man in Black. Wang Bing. Cannes '23 Review". In Review Online website, June 3, 2023.

Cutler, Aaron, “Simple Stories: An Interview with Wang Bing”. Cineaste, 2015, Vol. XL, No. 4.

 
Fang Lizhi, “The Chinese Amnesia”. New York Review of Books, September 27, 1990.
 
Film at Lincoln Center, “Wang Bing: The Weight of Experience”.  Film series, November 16-18, 2018.
 
Garson, Charlotte, “Wang Bing, Man in Black et Jeunesse”. Cahiers du Cinéma, May 17, 2023.
 
Hoberman, J., “Wang Bing, the World’s Hardest-Working Director”. The Nation, December 9, 2023.
 
Hudson, David, "Two by Wang Bing". Criterion website, September 20, 2023.

Johnson, Ian, Sparks. China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (2023). Oxford University Press.
 
Johnson, Ian, “Who Gets to Tell China’s Story?”. Foreign Affairs, December 19, 2023.

Lessard, Bruno, The Cinema of Wang Bing. Chinese Documentary between History and Labor.
Published by Hong Kong University Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2023.

 

Lim, Dennis, "Interview: Wang Bing on Youth (Spring)". Film Comment newsletter, June 1, 2023.

Lin, Wood, “Wang Bing’s Top 10: Unveiling the beauty and the sorrow of China”. Program Notes, IDFA website, November 9, 2023.
 
Petkovic, Vladan, “IDFA's Guest of Honor Wang Bing on his journey into documentary film”. IDFA website, November 13, 2023.
 
Quandt, James, “China’s Lower Depths”. New York Review of Books, November 22, 2018.

Rapold, Nicholas, "Wang Bing gives voice to 're-education' camp survivors". New York Times, May 5, 2018.

Sales Ross, Rafa, “IDFA Guest of Honor Wang Bing Discusses Chinese Censorship, Upcoming Trilogy and Politics: ‘I Don’t Want My Films to Become a Political Tool’”. Variety, November 11, 2023.
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Holdovers (2023): a deep and subtle meditation on Christmas

In The Holdovers, Alexander Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson pay quiet homage to the revolutionary spirit of Christmas. They show its impact – acknowledged or unrecognized - through three people haunted by grief and despair. The externalities of Christmas rather a newborn in a manger at the fringes of the Roman Empire, trigger a healing process from brokenness to hope.
 
The film sketches out two different responses to these existential crises, one Christian, the other, rooted in classical culture. They share two transformative traits: love and communion, free to grow when they break out of their wounded selves.  The two responses converge at the end, when the choices made by the three protagonists point to cautious hope.

The first road sign of the journey is in plain sight, written in Greek and Latin on the blackboard in the classroom where the classics professor Paul Hunham, played by Paul Giamatti, conducts a contentious relationship with his students. “Nosce te ipsum”, the Latin translation of the Greek original,“Know thyself”.

The relationship between the teacher and Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), the angry student left behind by his parents at the prep school for the Christmas vacation, evolves from adversarial to a negotiated truce, until a series of dramatic events pushes it to that of a master and disciple. It is a form of love, as Andrei Tarkovsky has beautifully described the friendship between teacher and student.  

The parallel trajectories of teacher and student are variations of the same process: first, a painful peeling off of obfuscation and hardened perceptions, then a struggle for sincerity, from where love - emotional and spiritual - can begin to operate. It is also a battle against pride and anger; if unrestrained, the process is derailed. 

Like Payne in The Holdovers, Paul Schrader explores brokenness in First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021). Both filmmakers come close to the mystery of the human person – a soul incarnated in a body – but stop short of plunging in. They touch the edges of a redemption that is only hinted at the end of each film. Schrader follows the steps of austere Robert Bresson, as he has noted, while Payne finds a place in the sunny world of Marcel Pagnol. All three films can of course be seen through the “transcendental” lens, observed by Schrader himself in Carl Dreyer, Paul Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu: works that reveal through the physicality of film a spiritual dimension – the sacramental impulse of Christian art.  The stories show the workings of hope and mercy in the economy of salvation, after an anguished  stay in the dark night of the soul.
 

The third protagonist in The Holdovers is the cook, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She offers a subtle but straightforward rendition of Christian love. Mary Lamb – a name that could not be more explicit - represents the practical way of loving, more intuitive than rational. From a place of darkness and despair for the recent loss of her only son in Vietnam, her gruff exterior hides a soul in the Christian African American spiritual tradition ready to continue her life’s journey. The baby her sister is expecting will repurpose her life as will the love of a good man.
 
The Holdovers can be seen as a work of Catholic imagination, showing how hard hearts, intellectual animosity and emotional blockage can be transformed by grace and beauty.
 
 
 
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Malpaso (2019): Chronicle of a death announced in black and white, from the Dominican Republic

Below are the program notes that I wrote for the feature debut of Héctor Velez, a filmmaker from the Dominican Republic, featured in the Cine Nepantla presentation of the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles last September (*)

 

The Nueva Onda and Nepantla sections of the Latin American Cinemateca showcase the works of emerging and experimental directors, worth gaining critical attention beyond their countries and the specialized festival circuit. It may not be an easy task for programmer Guido Segal to find pearls for the Cinemateca screenings, but the quality of the films presented is a reward by itself.  Mexican filmmaker Andrés Kaiser's Feral (2018), was a self assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style.  Como el cielo después de llover (2020), screened earlier this year, was the debut film of Colombian director Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, a remarkable first-person autobiographical documentary about the art and craft of filmmaking. 

 

It is now the turn of Malpaso, the first feature of Héctor Valdez, a director and producer from the Dominican Republic, a country well set up for location shooting of big budget productions requiring exotic locales. Valdez, who graduated from McGill University in Canada and returned to his country to work in film, has been active since the 2010s, directing and producing movies for television and documentaries. This training serves him well in Malpaso, the work of a filmmaker trusting his talents and gathering a top notch team of collaborators.

 

“Malpaso” is the name of a small town located in the Dominican Republic border with Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. In Spanish, it means “bad step”, physically and metaphorically, ominous denotations that the film subtly absorbs as the story develops. 

Based on a story by Valdez, with four writers listed in the credits and exquisitely shot in black and white by Juan Carlos Gómez, Malpaso follows twin brothers, Cándido (Ariel Díaz), who is albino, and Braulio (Luis Bryan Mesa), very black.  Their birth in a desolate rural shack, seen from the point of view of their black grandfather who brings them up, is s shocking yet restrained set up for the plot: the whiteness of Cándido is a disruptive factor – truly a bad omen - when, orphans at 15, the boys need to survive in near Malpaso, selling their only possession, a donkey. 

 

The first words of the film explain the whiteness / blackness purely in magical realist terms.  The black twin – from whose point of view the story is told in a flashback – says: “This is the story of how we were born. You are white as the moon, and I am black as the night. Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with the moon but he was also in love with the night”. So, at one level this dichotomy works by complementing, not opposing, the black and the white; but at a more pedestrian level, the albino’s whiteness and his strange facial features scare the black people of Malpaso, with the exception of an Haitian old healer who believes in curses and zombies. The “different”, “the other” will find no place in Malpaso.

 

In his portrait of a small rural town, overtaken by a petty crime lord, La Cherna (Pepe Sierra) dictating its social and business dynamics, Valdez imaginatively reworks the tropes of Cinema Novo – the Brazilian innovative response to Neorealism and New Wave in the 1960s: black and white cinematography, non-professional actors, a searing portrait of poverty and despair.  The film lands also in the brutal territory of urban violence and squalor later captured by Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1980) and City of God (2002, Fernando Meirelles), but it does so astutely observing the dynamics of exploitation and misery in a smaller scale. 

The creative voices of Valdez and collaborators, however, go beyond these Latin American models to locate the film in a place that is both poetic and realistic, drained of fast-paced action, and understated as well as moving in its emotional impact. Nothing is on your face in Malpaso, so the unimaginable future of the albino twin, when his brother is no longer there to protect him, is fully rendered by the cinematography and the evocative music of Pascal Gaigne. It’s a fantastic use of two film techniques approached with restraint. The film may keep the story cryptic and elusive, but the full extent of the horror, the horror, and the resilience of the fraternal bond are made explicit by a confident use of cinematographic language.

 

Malpaso may not target a large audience looking for thrills. But as an impressionistic and tender portrait of two barely literate brothers separated by social and economic circumstances outside of their control, understood by all but not explained or denounced, is worth a dedicated viewing.  This beautiful film may be short on action and dialogue but packs an emotional punch. The ending leads to a catharsis that Aristotle would have been pleased to recognize as the true function of tragedy.  

(*) https://www.lacla.org/lacla-latest-blog/2023/9/7/malpaso 

 

 

"Como el cielo después de llover" (2020): A first-person documentary with a Latin American twist

Below are the program notes I wrote about Como el cielo después de llover (2020, Colombia) directed Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo. The film was screened by the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles in June of 2023. 

The Nueva Onda selection of the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles Como el cielo después de llover, the debut film of Colombian director Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, is a remarkable documentary. It is also an interesting complement to last year’s screening of the excellent Feral, the debut feature by Mexican director Andrés Kaiser, a self-assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style.
 
Como el cielo después de llover, distributed internationally as The Calm after the Storm, falls in the category of the first-person documentary essay. This type of nonfiction work has gained recognition as a specific and very plastic mode of film practice.  It combines the documenting of a reality – in this case, the making of a fiction film in Medellín, Colombia - with an impulse to shape it also as an essay about the nature of cinema and the director’s approach to it.
 

This description may seem very abstract and removed from the experience of going to the movies for fun. Far from it. The film is fascinating at several levels, and it’s really entertaining. It is made of several pieces, that quickly begin to fit into a larger project that is fully laid out by the end of the film. First, Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo (she uses her father and mother’s last names) is the daughter of the famed Colombian writer and director Victor Gaviria, well known for his sociopolitical chronicles of the underprivileged: Rodrigo D. No Future (1990) and The Rose Seller (1998). Born in 1992, Mercedes studied filmmaking, with a specialty in sound design, at the prestigious Universidad del Cine, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While in film school, she directed shorts and collaborated in other projects, in tune with the small-scale, first-person hybrid projects of a generation of Argentine filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel, Mariano Llinás and Rodrigo Moreno. In their works, less is more, silence and the unsaid have a symbolic dimension, and social and political issues emerge ambiguously.  In other words, the daughter’s cinema is in the antipodes of the “pornomiseria” cinema of her father, as some critics have described Gaviria’s work and that of another key representative, Héctor Babenco and his seminal Pixote (1980). They are blunt critiques of Latin American social problems.
 

The core of Gaviria Jaramillo’s documentary is herself participating in the shoot of her father’s latest film The Animal’s Wife (2016), based on a true story of gender violence, machismo and silence among the lumpen class in Medellín. Though we never see Mercedes on screen since she is the one operating the camera, the filmmaker is the voiceover documenting the experience. The shoot Mercedes records is, however, part of a larger project: making a diary of her personal and professional life, beginning and ending in Buenos Aires, where she now works, with Medellín as the long dramatic interlude.  
 
The record of Mercedes’ life interweaves two other key elements: the home movies her father made in the 1990s when she was growing up in Colombia (not edited chronologically) and the diary her mother wrote as an anxious young woman expecting her first child. What slowly emerges is the portrait of a family, including a younger brother, who may or may not be a rebel. It is a subtle domestic depiction, sightly unsettling. It combines her insights and memories while viewing the footage, with a selection of images and sound design, shaped by Mercedes “interrogating” the past. A short interview with her maternal grandmother provides an intriguing twist and a socioeconomic comment. 
 

This documentary essay functions as a Rorschach test, open to as many interpretations as there are viewers. For some, Como el cielo después de llover can be a feminist take on patriarchy, deploring machismo at the level of the story and the storyteller; for others, it is the record of a young filmmaker finding herself, as a woman and an artist. Other viewers may appreciate it as an open-ended meditation on the role and responsibility of cinema in a violent society.  
 
But what will come through in all the viewing experiences is the quiet, self-assured voice of a young woman observing the dynamics of a Hispanic family, the role of women with professional aspirations, and ultimately, the question of how she should live her life.  
 

In the final sequence – a long take of a long shot of Mercedes facing the open-ended pampas - her voiceover encapsulates the film’s topics.  “The family conversations set up the world we share, and give our future a meaning”, she begins. Like the great Colombian writer Guillermo García Márquez building his Macondo from family memories, it is with them, Mercedes notes, that “we can put together a story”.   And then she recites, in slow cadence, single words, phrases, complete sentences:
 

“I remember the crying in the fiction. A woman’s crying. Fear. An outraged body … as if it were a doll. The feminine. To have a brother. Medellín. Usefulness. To leave hours of the past as an inheritance to your children. To smoke some weed on a large stone. The images in the diary. Poetry. Colombian cinema. To confuse sensitivity with being gay. Desire. To be a prostitute. Men and women’s unequal time when raising a child. A little girl’s ideals. Buenos Aires. To record everything on a camera. To choose the right distance. To embrace the unspoken. The other. To think about the victim’s point of view. The hit men. The contradiction of filming a rape scene being the privileged gender. A set full of men. To take years to make a film. To be a sound mixer. Plants that fall asleep when you touch them. Cocaine. Evil’s presence. To write to your daughter before she is born. Uprooting. Testimony. Non actors. To choose silence. The beauty of ambiguity. Humaneness. The inevitable. To talk about gender violence in a country that is suffering war. A first-time mother.  Future “yes”. A family portrait. A stoical woman. To be and not being at the same time. Uncertainty. Conviction. To love contradiction. To wish to go back. To choose the South. To feel determined air”.

 

This litany contains the conundrums and certainties of life, “el oficio de vivir” (the business of living) if I may paraphrase the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías. Como el cielo después de llover is a beautifully accomplished first-person documentary. It feels as innovative a film today as was the New Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 70s.
 
                       List of sources
 
Alter, Nora M. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
 
Ham, Ally. The Calm After the Storm. Video Librarian website, June 6, 2022.
https://videolibrarian.com/reviews/documentary/the-calm-after-the-storm/
 
Lukasievicz, Mauro, “Entrevista a Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, directora de Como el cielo después de llover”. Revista Caligari, n/d.
https://caligari.com.ar/entrevista-a-mercedes-gaviria-jaramillo-directora-de-como-el-cielo-despues-de-llover/
 
Program notes, Harvard Film Archive screening, September 25, 2022.
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/the-devil-never-sleeps-2022-09
 
Interview, “Mercedes Gaviria narra cómo es "convivir con el cine dentro de la casa" en su ópera prima. Télam, March 3, 2022”
https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/202203/585233-mercedes-gaviria-narra-como-es-convivir-con-el-cine-dentro-de-la-casa-en-su-opera-prima.html,
 
Wilson, Rebecca,“Fatherhood, Family and Filmmaking in The Calm After the Storm”. Sounds and Colors website, January 13, 2022.
https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/colombia/fatherhood-family-and-filmmaking-in-the-calm-after-the-storm-64389/
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Library of Congress Film and Sound Festival: "Carne de cabaret" (1931) dir. Christy Cabanne

The Library of Congress organized its first Film and Sound Festival at the AFI Silver theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, from June 15 to 18, 2023.  I received a lovely invitation to introduce three films: Frenchman's Creek (1944, dir. Mitchell Leisen), Craig's Wife (1936, dir. Dorothy Arzner) and Carne de Cabaret (1931, dir. Christy Cabanne).  Here is the last of the three introductions, presented on June 18.

Carne de cabaret (1931) 

Directed by William Cabana [Christy Cabanne]

With Lupita Tovar, Ramón Pereda and René Cardona

 

Ten cents a dance / That's what they pay me

Gosh, how they weigh me down / Ten cents a dance

Pansies and rough guys / Tough guys who tear my gown

Seven to midnight I hear drums / Loudly the saxophone blows

Trumpets are breaking my eardrums / Customers crush my toes

Sometime I think / I've found my hero

But it's a queer romance / All that you need is a ticket

Come on, big boy, ten cents a dance

 

“Ten Cents a Dance”, Lyrics by Lorenz Hart, music by Richard Rodgers

 

Like Drácula, the Spanish-speaking film made by Universal Studios in 1931, Carne de cabaret, released the same year by Columbia Pictures, also in Spanish and starring Lupita Tovar (1910-2016), makes for an illuminating case study of how the Hollywood studios implemented a strategy to keep the foreign-language markets supplied with films, once synched sound became a viable technology. A disruptive innovation, expensive to implement but quickly embraced by audiences worldwide, sound meant that keeping the flow of pictures south of the border required a novel strategy: making Spanish-language versions of English-language originals.  Before dubbing and subtitling became the standard practice by the end of the 1930s, the studios - including later in the decade some independent producers - opened Spanish-language divisions to provide such films. The story of foreign versions goes beyond Spanish, to comprise remakes of original English-language films in French, German and other languages. Paramount’s Joinville studios, in Paris, and Astoria, in New York, implemented this strategy, as did MGM, Fox and Columbia in Los Angeles. The English and German versions of Anna Christie (1930), starring Greta Garbo in both, serves as a perfect illustration of this early 1930s business stratagem.
 

Film historian Lisa Jarvinen has written the indispensable account of how the Hollywood studios developed, implemented, and ultimately discarded this practice, with an eye to securing the 30% of the international market represented by Latin America and Spain: The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood's Shadow, 1929-1939 (2012).  For a survey of these films aimed at the Hispanic market, the compilation provided by Juan B. Heinink and Robert G. Dixon, Cita en Hollywood, included in the compilation volume Hollywood Goes Latin (2019) is the point of departure.
 

A preferred practice of these remakes was to use the same sets of the English versions, adapting the original screenplay by Spanish writers as a “versión española” - Spanish version.  Since the directors spoke no Spanish, “dialogue directors” handled the performances. However, what was a cost savings strategy soon revealed that literal translations were no guarantee for making appealing Spanish-language films, and that the variety of Spanish accents was an issue for Hispanic audiences.
 
Even though some Spanish-versions of 1930-1931 and then original Spanish pictures showed that Hollywood could make popular films with stars such as singers Carlos Gardel (Paramount) and José Mojica (Fox), Argentine-born Spanish singer and actress Imperio Argentina and newcomer Lupita Tovar, “overall they were not profitable enough to justify their large-scale production once studios began to suffer the effects of the economic depression”, as Jarvinen writes.  Also, the film industries of Mexico and Argentina, patterned after the American studios, had taken off by the mid-1930s and began their golden age.
 

This is the context necessary to understand how Lupita Tovar, a 20-year-old Mexican actress, with no formal training, scouted by Robert Flaherty for Fox Studios, made Drácula and Carne de cabaret, for Universal and Columbia, in 1931 and starred in Santa  the following year. This melodrama was the first major Mexican success of the sound era; it was directed by Antonio Moreno, the Spanish-born Hollywood star of the 1920s, who had co-starred with Tovar in the Spanish-version of The Cat Creeps (1930), La voluntad del muerto, for Universal, a few months before the Dracula Spanish-version. 
 
Lupita Tovar made more than thirty films, playing mostly ingenues and “señoritas” in a career that spanned two decades on both sides of the border. Some of her films are East of Borneo (1931, Universal), Border Law (1931, Columbia), Vidas rotas (1934), Alas sobre el Chaco (1935, Spanish-language version of Storm over the Andes, Universal, El Capitán Tormenta (Grand National) (1935, Spanish-language version of Captain Calamity, Grand National) and María (1938, based on the 19^th century Colombian novel by Jorge Isaac, made in Mexico).
 

In 1932 she married Paul Kohner, a producer at Universal, who headed the foreign language department and who cast Lupita in Drácula. They moved to Berlin when Kohner headed Universal’s European productions but returned to Los Angeles as the political situation deteriorated in Germany with the rise of Nazism. In 1938, Kohner founded the Paul Kohner Talent Agency and managed the careers of many actors and directors, including Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Dolores del Río, Billy Wilder, Henry Fonda and Ingmar Bergman. The couple had two children, Pancho, a director and producer, and Susan, a film and television actress. Their grandchildren, Chris and Paul Weitz, have successful careers in Hollywood as writers and directors. Currently in the works is a project by the Weitz brothers about the courtship of their grandparents while filming the Spanish Dracula.
 

In The Sweetheart of Mexico. A Memoir. As Told to Her Son Pancho Kohner, published in 2011, Tovar gives us an engaging account of her life and times, spanning her Mexican childhood and adolescence, Hollywood and Berlin in the 1930s, and her career in Mexico until she retired in the mid-1940s. 
 
She writes about Carne de cabaret:  “Frank Fouce was an assistant director I had met at Columbia Studios. When they were casting the Spanish version of Lionel Barrymore’s Ten Cents a Dance, with Barbara Stanwyck, Frank suggested me for Barbara’s part. So I went to Columbia Studios to do Carne de cabaret, which was the title of the Spanish version. It was directed by Eduardo Arozamena and W. Christy Cabanne. Ramón Pereda and Rene Cardona starred opposite me. Our Spanish-language version took just two weeks. One “take” was all we were allowed, so we had to get it right the first time. This was one of the last films to get away with sexy innuendos before the studios started censoring their own movies to keep the government from interfering”.

Carnet de cabaret tells the story of Dorothy O’Neil, a dance hall girl in New York, trying to navigate in a man’s world, as the festival catalog aptly summarizes.  The original version is Ten Cents a Dance, inspired by the Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers song of the same title. This English-language original shows the difficulties of finding love in the working-class milieu of taxi dancers, starring 23-year-old Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990), as an innocent young woman called Barbara O’Neill.  Two years later, in Baby Face, Stanwyck is in full pre-Code mode, as a social climber who uses sex to advance in life. 
 

Carne de cabaret uses the same screenplay and dramatic structure. Both versions also utilize the same five or six sets – all interiors, except for one park scene; and mostly the same props. Viewing the films side by side, however, one can notice small variations in dresses, hats and even the order of the scenes. Many of the crowd shots in the dancing hall are the same in both films. There are a couple of short colorful additions in Carne de cabaret, including a sexy scene involving a young messenger watching a dancer undress, as reflected in a mirror.  
 
In another instance, an establishing shot of a busy public space simply lifts a shot from Ten Cents a Dance and shows Barbara Stanwyck instead of Lupita Tovar. One wonders what editor Logan Pearson must have thought looking for the Tovar shot he needed and could not find. He must have hoped no one would notice. 

The Hispanic community of Hollywood in the early 1930s was small but tight, and many of these writers, dialogue directors and actors later brought the American knowhow to the film industries of their home countries, most notably Mexico, Argentina and Spain. In his no-holds-barred memoir My Last Sigh (1984), Luis Buñuel gives a vivid description of the Spanish-language colony during his stay in Los Angeles for a few months in 1930-1931.
 

In Carne de cabaret, Tovar found herself surrounded by several of these interesting Hispanics. Eduardo Arozamena, a Mexican actor who had participated in Drácula, was the dialogue director, while René Borgia, a Venezuelan writer who later settled in New York, adapted the dialogue – colorful and sexy. Ramón Pereda, a Spanish-born Mexican actor, plays Bradley Carleton, the divorced rich man attracted by the innocent Dorothy, and René Cardona, in his first film credit, is Tovar’s husband, Eddie Miller, who turns out to be not what her good heart thought he was. Pereda and Cardona parlayed their stay in 1930s Hollywood into careers in the Mexican film industry.
 

Hispanic audiences in the 1930s – and also today – would have noticed a characteristic feature of the Spanish language (absent in English):  the difference between “tú”, an informal, familiar way of addressing someone, and the formal, respectful “usted”. This distinction plays an important role in presenting the relationship between Dorothy and Carlton, the older divorced man. The use of “usted” until the last line of the film gives a courteous and proper tone to the otherwise immoral proposition Carlton makes to Dorothy earlier in Carne de cabaret.  To the Spanish-speaking audience, their relationship is linguistically respectful but clearly has moved to a more intimate stage when they address each other as “tú” for the first time before “Fin” (The End) appears on the screen. 
 

Two key Americans were involved above the line in Carne de cabaret. One was director Christy Cabanne, listed in the credits as William Cabana, a veteran of the silent era, who had apprenticed under D. W. Griffith, and had the reputation for working efficiently. The other one was Columbia screenwriter Jo Swerling, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant brought up in the Lower East side whose collaboration with Frank Capra included Platinum Blonde (1931) and Forbidden (1932). In Ten Cents a Dance and Carne de cabaret he captured with gritty realism the New York of the 1920s.  Swerling gave strong visuals to the song; he transformed into dramatic scenes the laments and grumbles of the dance hall girl who graphically describes her situation: 
Ten cents a dance / That's what they pay me/ Gosh, how they weigh me down / Ten cents a dance / Pansies and rough guys / Tough guys who tear my gown / Seven to midnight I hear drums / Loudly the saxophone blows / Trumpets are breaking my eardrums / Customers crush my toes.
 

What holds this film together is the performance of Lupita Tovar: her Dorothy is a charming mix of naiveté and resilience … and a Spanish accent that is studiously neutral, to travel well across the Hispanic world. Her dramatic intensity will look more persuasive to many viewers than that of Barbara Stanwyck’s, especially the well-handled bedroom scene that lays out, through facial gestures and body language, the high price she has to pay to keep her husband out of jail.
 
The Library of Congress premieres tonight a digital restoration of this film that has not been seen for decades.  Maybe Lupita Tovar’s performance will be rediscovered, like Drácula’s, by new a generation of cinephiles.
 
 

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List of sources

 
AFI Catalog of Feature Films. The First 100 Years, 1893 - 1993 (2006). "Carne de 

    cabaret" (1931).

  https://catalog.afi.com/Film/1301-CARNE-DECABARET?sid=0384d2b1-26fc-4783-                bcbb-03519b6ad70c&sr=14.095596&cp=1&pos=0

Heinink, Juan B., and Robert G. Dickson, “Cita en Hollywood”, in Hollywood Goes 

    Latin. Spanish-language Cinema in Los Angeles, edited by María Elena de las  

    Carreras and Jan-Christopher Horak (2019).
 
Jarvinen, Lisa. The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking: Out from Hollywood's 

    Shadow, 1929-1939 (2012).
 
Tovar, Lupita. The Sweetheart of Mexico. A Memoir. As Told to Her Son Pancho 

    Kohner (2011).
 
Tovar, Lupita. Obituary, New York Times, November 20, 2016.