Zoot Suit - agitprop esthetics thirty years later

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Zoot Suit, the seminal film written and directed by Luis Valdez about the Mexican American experience in Los Angeles, the Latin American Cinemateca has teamed with the Los Angeles Conservancy’s “Last Remaining Seats” series for a special screening of this picture at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, on Wednesday June 22, 2011. Created in 1987 by the Los Angeles Conservancy to showcase historic movie palaces, “The Last Remaining Seats” offers a window into a vanished era, glimpsed through the faded splendor of impressive theaters built in the teens and twenties, some of which have been beautifully restored.

Below are the program notes I wrote for this screening.

In 1979, the Mexican American theater collective Teatro Campesino, founded by actor/playwright/activist Luis Valdez in 1965 to support the farm workers union’s Delano grape strike organized by César Chávez, staged a bilingual musical play about the experience of Mexican Americans in the United States in the 1940s: Zoot Suit. It had a very successful run in Los Angeles and later moved to Broadway, the first Chicano play to open in New York.

Imaginatively mixing Brechtian agitprop techniques with melodrama, allegorical dialogue, Aztec myth and song and dance numbers, Zoot Suit hinged on El Pachuco, a narrator/chorus and alter ego of the protagonist, used to explore issues of ethnic, cultural and political identity. Zoot Suit tells the story of the racially-charged trial of a group of Mexican-Americans sentenced for a murder in Baldwin Park in 1942, and the related riots of the following year. For the Chicano Movement of the 1960s both episodes were landmarks in the oppositional narrative developed to critique the Anglo treatment of Hispanics. In this sense Zoot Suit offers a counter version of the events that became known as The Sleepy Lagoon Murder case and its aftermath, the Zoot Suit Riots.

Looking to break into the Hispanic market, Universal Studios struck a deal with Luis Valdez for a film version of the play. Shot in less than two weeks, with a budget of 2.5 million, and using the same non conventional narrative structure, and preserving the politics of contestation at the heart of the play, Zoot Suit was released in 1981 – 30 years ago – and became the first Chicano feature film made by a Hollywood studio. It paved the way for subsequent more mainstream Mexican American productions such as El Norte (1983), La Bamba (1987), Born in East L.A. (1987), Stand and Deliver (1988), American Me (1992) and Mi familia (1995).

Edward James Olmos plays the pivotal role of El Pachuco, an unconventional character and emblem of the urban Mexican American youth of the 1940s, clad in a flashy “zoot suit” - baggy pants, oversize jacket, chain, cross and big black hat. (The zoot suit is still with us, morphed into the attention-grabbing attire of today, low-cut jeans, ample t-shirts, baseball caps, chains and crosses).

El Pachuco is in charge of making the story move forward, literally at the snap of his fingers. A sassy, street-savvy truth-teller, he can be seen only by the protagonist Henry “Hank” Reyna (played by the director’s brother Daniel, and based on Henry Leyva, one of the original Zoot suiters jailed and later released for lack of evidence) and the audience. In the heated conversations between El Pachuco and Reyna, Valdez passionately explores what it means to be a Mexican American immigrant in the U.S., an ethnic community that suffers discrimination and racism. In the film’s climax, a mythical Aztec is used to symbolize the Chicano experience – an Indian in a loincloth, in a fetal position savagely beaten up by white men. The anger cannot get more explicit than that.

Seen 30 years after its release, this cri de coeur has not abated, but the context to understand the play and the film has seismically changed, as has the Latino-immigrant experience in the U.S. Films that explore it in mainstream Hollywood cinema are: Maid in Manhattan (2002), Spanglish (2004) and Under the Same Moon (2007). The world has moved on: none of these films would even remotely qualify as Chicano cinema today, following the parameters set by the first films to voice a radical, anti-establishment perspective - The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) is a case in point. None of them, either, pack the brutal punch of American Me (1992), Edward James Olmos' unflinching look at Latino gangs and incarceration.

Zoot Suit offers the audience the pleasure of listening to composer Lalo Guerrero’s wonderful boogie-woogie-influenced songs. The striking images of ace cinematographer David Myers give this combination of ideology, melodrama and music a sharp flavor.

For those wishing to further explore this film, U.C. Santa Cruz professor Rosa Linda Fregoso offers an intelligent and accessible analysis of the play and the film, in The Bronze Screen (1993). It is an indispensable text to understand not only the beginnings of Chicano cinema but also the role played by Luis Valdez and Edward James Olmos in cementing a Hispanic film culture open to mainstream audiences, blending activism and art.

Deutsche Geschichte - German stories in film

Documentary and fiction films dealing with an aspect, an era, or historical figures in German history are staples of the Berlinale. They allow a critic to gauge how a domestic audience interacts with controversial or complicated subjects.

The crowd-pleaser Goethe!, directed by Philipp Stolzl and starring Alexander Fehling, a fresh face and rising Teuton star, will have an international distribution under the title Goethe in Love. Unabashedly modern in sensibility and narrative structure, the film is out to emulate the international art-house sucess of Shakespeare in Love. Beautiful people in period costumes (although fashionably dishevelled), the story closely follows the emotional and creative process leading to Goethe's first success, the novella "Werther" about a young writer whose passionate first love is doomed by the lack of economic prospect. Even though no scandalous new ground is broken about this beloved literary figure, the film manges to remain engaging through its Masterpiece Theater approach. (If you are riveted by Downton Abbey recently shown on PBS, Goethe! will be your cup of tea).

The success of Inglourious Basterds was obviously responsible for the green light given to My Best Enemy, an Austrian Nazi-era revenge fantasy, based on a novel by an Holocaust survivor, about a Jewish gallery owner in Vienna who beats the Nazis at their game. Lavishly produced, starring the ubiquitous Moritz Bleibtreu as a dashing Viennese who gets the last laugh, the film does not have the hysterical absurdities and unbearable suspense of the Tarantino opus, but packs a punch or two, especially among those familiar with the 'degenerate art' topic, which gets a funny twist. The caricature of German military efficiency gone awry has its roots in Chaplin, even though here it borders on the cliche.

The origins of the Baader-Meinhoff terrorist group of the 1960s and 70s is approached by filmmaker Andres Veiel from a fresh angle - very different from sound and fury of the 2008 The Baader-Meinhoof Complex. Based on a non-fiction book about the romantic and intellectual entanglements of Gudrun Esslin - one of the founders of the Red Army - with left-wing writer Bernward Vesper, the son of a Nazi writer, If Not Us, Who probes in the personal aspects of their no-strings-attached love affair, leaving the ideological as a looming background. Like the recent French biopic Carlos, by Olivier Assayas, the film is not about left-wing terrorism emerging in a materialistic post-war Europe, as much as a probe into a complicated couple's interpersonal dynamics as they become radicalized and part ways. By concentrating in the early 1960s the film dissects the roots of youthful discontent leading to the revolts later in the decade. Unsentimental and unflinching, If Not Us, Who eschews the hagiography relished by Motorcycle Diaries as well as the frantic pace of Carlos, to place the life of these emblematic self-destructive rebels in light and shadow, without an editorial comment.

The DDR, the acronym for the Communist German Democratic Republic, is the subject of the intriguing and aptly title The Price, directed by Elke Hauck. The story alternates between the present tense and the last days of the DDR, with the sympathy on the side of the characters that understand, and also miss, a country that no longer exists. The Price distills the Ossie perspective, that is the East German view of life and historical experience, minus the virulent ideological component. A subdued drama about three friends in the last year of high school and the different paths they take (one tragic) when Communism imploded, the picture assesses the results of the political changes without the hilarity of Good-bye, Lenin, although inserting a good dose of old-fashioned realism and a touch of irony. The "Preis" of the German title can mean both 'price' and 'prize'. Made twenty years after the German reunification, the film can be taken as a piece of fiction documenting an East German perspective with a distinctive voice.

Such is the case, also, of the fascinating documentary Vaterlandsverrater (Traitor to the Motherland, translated as Enemy of the State), directed by Annekristin Hendel - like Elke Hauck, a filmmaker born and raised in the former DDR. It is centered on a 75-year-old writer, Paul Gratzik, who was a Stasi informer. A fervent Communist and a womanizer with a flair for words, the protagonist puts on a show for the viewer, with the filmmaker probing the armor for weak spots and not findng many. From the onset, asked about how he feels about his decision to inform on colleagues in East Berlin's cultural scene, Gratzik turns the table on the director by aserting with dith-Piaf-defiance that he doesn't regret anything. Without archival footage, and relying solely on interviews, and some exquisite drawings illustrating people and events, the director builds the portrait of a complicated man, and by extension offers a layered view about the symbiotic relationship between the DDR surveillance system and its informers (An excellent complement to this documetary is "The File", the autobiographical account by Timothy Garton Ash about his own Stasi file and those who informed on him in the early 1980s).

In this context, one should argue that The Enemy of the State can be placed squarely opposite The Life of Others (2006), a fictionalized account of a Stasi informer's job by a West German director. Filmmakers from East Germany, like Annekristin Hendel (with whom I had a very interesting one-hour talk, together with my friend and colleague Silvia Kratzer, who filled in my German lacunae), argue that by virtue of having lived the horrors and absurdities of the system, they are in a position to show it in a more accurate and realistic way. These Ossie directors don't favor the polished looks and narratives of the Hollywood-style of cinema (think Run, Lola, Run) but a more truthful look at how life is. This is an ongoing subject of debate, and one to which contribute the many East German filmmakers in the Berlinale every year.

The last film shown in the competition was Unknown, a German-British-French thriller set in present day Berlin about an American, Liam Neeson, who loses his identity as a result of an accident, and wakes up from a coma to discover that he is pursued by ruthless killers. A Hitchcock rip-off (Torn Curtain with a twist) and with a Bourne Identity complex, the film is nevertheless quite entertaining (the Berlin locations are fun to spot). Bruno Ganz steals the show in a few scenes as a man who has had to reinvent himself: formerly a Stasi officer, he is now a detective impeccably positioned to unlock Neeson's dark past. Ganz played the role with over the top gusto, and his last scene had the public roaring with laughter, with its tragicomic overtones.

German history ... always good stuff to work from ...

The Berlinale at 61

There is no better place to meet old friends and make new ones - filmically speaking - than the terrific Berlin film festival. I came here for the first time in 1985, and except for a handful of times, I have been a regular visitor ever since.
For a film professor it's the most efficient - and fun - way to get a grip on the world scene and pursue guilty pleasures that Netflix or VOD services like Mubi cannot fulfill. The electronic library of Alexandria does not exist yet in one virtual place.

The Berlinale - and of course the same holds true for any well-put together festival - opens vistas on the old and the new, and thus becomes a necessary tool to perfect an understanding of the status of cinema and how to teach it better. In the Berlinale I first became acquainted with the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers; with the works of a then unknown Polish director of television and documentaries, Krzystof Kieslowski; here I first enjoyed the hyperkinetic Hong Kong cinema - Johnnie To being one of its most exciting representatives - and learned to appreciate the Bollywood baroque. The imaginative Latin American cinema, whether magical realist, purely political or minimalist always finds a home in Berlin. Attuned to the political, the Berlinale winked a serious eye to filmmakers in the Soviet sphere and featured the cinema of Glasnost - Marina Goldovskaya's ground-breaking documentary Solovki Power, and a flood of works undermining Soviet ideological rigidity were generously showcased by the Berlinale. Often at the Berlinale I see the birth of a critical reputation, or the recognition of a long trajectory in a national cinema - like the fiercely independent Israeli Eran Riklis (Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree)and Hayao Miyazaki.

The wares have been so far a delight, a basket of very funny comedies about cultural and linguistic clashes (the French Les femmes du 6eme etage and the German Almanya, where traditional assumptions about host countries are turned upside down by sharp immigrants), mixed with a powerful contemporary reading of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and the role of warriors outside of the battlefield, directing debut of Ralph Fiennes; and tightly woven thrillers of sorts about meltdowns - the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the Ukranian A Saturday, and Wall Street in 2008, Margin Call, first film by an NYU graduate. How will the jury graciously presided by Isabella Rossellini decide on a winner is anybody's guess. The stars may smile on an Iranian film coming from left field, Nader and Simin, A Separation, the multilayered probe into a couple's impending divorce in present day Tehran, based on a screenplay worth dissection in film school.


Sunday was a day devoted to 3D, as used for the first time by two longtime German auteurs - my 'friends' of so many years and teaching staples in many classes: Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. Courtesy of a German newspaper, I post a lovely photo of Wenders and German president Angela Merkel watching in the Berlinale Palast the Pina, the knockout documentary Wenders devoted to the work of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. By analogy, Wenders uses the 3D camera - elegantly, unobstrusively - the way Bausch created her muscular, soul-baring performances, Wenders noted in the press conference that he wanted to show "what the soul tells through our body" (a recurrent Wenders theme, beautifully rendered in Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire). The director does not 'film' the company's numbers, he stages them for the camera,in theaters, parks, factories, even public transportation in Wuppertal, where the company is based, exploring the esthetic possibilities allowed by the new technology. Editing and music, combined with finely stylized interviews with dancers and footage of Bausch, who died unexpectedly in 2009 (and forced Wenders to rethink the project) create a fascinating spectacle. Warner Bros will distribute the film in the US; in the meantime, its trailer is available online to give a taste of the riches to come.

Werner Herzog seems to have had the same enthusiasm of Wenders, even though his nature documentary "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" has the limitations of works commissioned by television channels. The subject matter is intriguing: a cave discovered in Southern France n 1994 contains stunning paleolithic paintings. What begins as a run-of-the-mill Discovery Channel type of film interspersing talking heads with scenes dimly lit by flashlight, very quickly becomes something else. As narrated by Herzog, it is not only the record of himself in the filming process (with the 3D technology featured prominently)but also a probe into what makes us human; as one of the anthropologists notes, the link with the Cromagnon man and us, Homo Sapiens, throught history and memory. This is a variation of a recurring Herzog theme, since his features like Aguirre, the Wrath of God to the disturbing documentary Grizzly Man: the relationship between man and nature, and man's proneness to stumble into the abyss pushed by his own folly. The abyss, in this Berlinale offering, is made explicit in the final scene. Not far from the cave, and as a side-effect of a nuclear plant, a man-made cooling swamp is teeming with albino aligators. An extreme close up of an aligator's bloated eye is superimposed on a gracefully painted hand in the cave. Film esthetics is used to capture a collective descent into madness.

There are many other friends waiting for us in the dark - echoes of Norma Desmond - in these next days. First and foremost, a gentleman from Sweden, for whom the Deutsche Kinematek has organized a very complete retrospective. It is supplemented by an exhibit in the adjoining Film Museum. The poster movingly embodies what this gentleman thought of theater and film - his love and his mistresses, as he once famously quipped: a world of enchantment, refected in the eyes of a boy, looking up, outside of the frame. The exhibition is called "Bergman, truth and lies".

The dreams of a Costa Rican family

“Being in two places at once … like walking in between …” A US documentary observes the dreams of a Costa Rican family.

Not Here, Not There [Ni aquí, ni allá] (2009) written, directed and produced by Betsy Haley Hershey 63 minutos

Like many recent films on the subject, Betsy Haley Hershey’s debut documentary feature Not Here, Not There succeeds in painting the large picture of Latin American illegal immigration to the United States through a small-scale family story. The director met them in rural Costa Rica several years ago in an exchange program. Making a meager living in a coffee plantation, four of the six siblings trekked to the US and landed restaurant jobs in the East Coast, where other people from their small mountain village had settled. The parents stayed behind with the two youngest, a boy and a girl, Salomé. It is a middle class family, aspiring to higher education and understanding the realities of an interconnected world.

Between 2006 and 2008, the director observed how the family dynamics was shaped by two geographical locations, two languages and wildly contrasting cultures - split between the “here” and “there” of the title. Half-way through the shooting, the family is struck by tragedy. Astutely, the filmmaker combined the techniques of direct cinema – requiring long hours of shooting and remarkable editing skills – with the abundant visual materials supplied by the family members themselves: home videos, photographs and letters.

What emerges in Not Here, Not There is a beautiful and poignant family portrait built as a counterpoint between life in the United States – access to material goods but the looming threat of deportation– and the rural scenes of a emotionally fulfilling Costa Rican home, where progress is limited. This pendulum is at first somewhat disconcerting to the audience; we are lost about the exact physical and psychological whereabouts of the six siblings and their parents, since there is no objective narrator or chronological timeline to explain the sequence of events. It is a crosscutting technique, however, that will pay good dividends: it not only provides the pendular structure of the documentary, but also reflects its very meaning, nicely encapsulated in the title. “Your body is in one place, your heart in another”, the Costa Rican wife of the older brother explains to the director, thus providing a rationale to the open-ended story unfolding on the screen.

Who can be familiar with the many documentaries exploring the immigration conundrum with ethnographic zeal? So Ms. Hershey may not know that her film, much like Zulay, Facing the 21st Century (1989), by renowned documentarian Jorge Preloran, ends ups giving the subjects of her picture a strong directorial role. Many years in the making, the Los Angeles-based Argentine filmmaker and UCLA professor documented with his anthropologist wife Mabel, the process of uprooting undergone by a young Otavalo Indian from Ecuador, who came to live with them in Los Angeles. Such was the involvement of Zulay Saravino in the filmic recording of her cultural and emotional changes – including a strong presence in the editing choices – that Preloran gave her a directing credit. A similar process seems to be at work in Not Here, Not There: the documentary is firmly held by the candid narration provided by Salomé, a naturally eloquent young voice, and the home movies supplied by her older brothers.

Also, like the heart-warming, heart-wrenching and equally open-ended Mexican feature by Patricia Riggen, La misma luna (Under the Same Moon, 2007), Not Here, Not There cannot have a resolution. For the illegal immigrants of this family, struggling in the “Here” of the United States, the American Dream is intangible; from the “There” of Costa Rica, the American Dream becomes a Rorschach inkblot into which they see their many aspirations. The film chooses to end with two of the brothers retracing the steps of their dangerous first journey from Costa Rica to the United States. Where is their home …?

What will captivate the viewers of this topnotch documentary is the delicate touch with which Ms. Hershey reveals the all too human and universal longings of a family like us.


Not Here, Not There has been seen in a few festivals and collected several awards over the past year. More information is available at http://www.notherenotthere.com/
I hope the documentary receives the exposure and recognition it deserves.

Flor silvestre - The Hollywood style in Revolutionary Mexico

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles, a cultural organization sponsoring the screening of classic and contemporary Latin American cinema since the late 1990s, will be doing one of their programs as part of the Los Angeles Conservancy long-standing series “Last Remaining Seats”. On June 23, 2010, it will screen Flor silvestre (Wild Flower, 1943) in the lovingly restored Million Dollar Theatre.

This is the deluxe theater where Sid Grauman launched his Los Angeles operations in 1918. Designed by Albert C. Martin and adorned with sculptures by Joseph Mora, the building’s ornamentation is Churrigueresque, Spain’s idiosyncratic rendition of the Baroque style. The theater’s pièce de résistence is the auditorium designed by William Woollett, with a beautiful coffered dome and ornate organ grilles. From 1950 until the late 1980s, the theater presented Spanish-language films and variety performances, or “variedades”, imported from Mexico. After renovations and upgrades, the theater reopened in 2008.

I have been writing some of Cinemateca bilingual program notes for these events since 2005. Michael Díaz, the founder and motor behind this lovely institution, asked me to prepare some comments on their summer screening, Flor silvestre.

I transcribe below the short text I wrote – more academic than conversational, as a blog would require. It is, however, a good point of entry to ponder the influence of the Hollywood visual and directing style on a team that formed the style and content of Mexican cinema, national and patriotic, for over two decades.

A period melodrama set during the 1910 Revolution, Flor silvestre is considered a classic work of Mexico’s Golden Era. This intimate yet universal love story fatefully shaped by the turmoil of social and political change resonates today.

The plot is anchored in the class and ideological divisions boiling under the surface of the iron stability brought by the Porfirio Díaz regime: A young peasant, Esperanza (Dolores del Río), marries José Luis Castro (Pedro Armendáriz), the son of the region’s powerful landowner. His parents coldly reject Esmeralda: “We all occupy a place in life, and those at the bottom (“los de abajo”), no matter how much they dream, will always remain below”, warns his mother. Soon the winds of the Revolution – in which José Luis participates – sweep over the valley, a tumultuous mix of idealists, reformers, opportunists and thieves. The murder of the patriarch by bandits pretending to be revolutionaries forces José Luis – now the father of a newborn – to honor an ancestral code of revenge, with tragic results. The story unfolds as a flashback, recounted by Esperanza to her now adult son, reflecting that modern Mexico has been built on its past, the land and the dead.

Flor silvestre made beautiful Dolores del Río a star of the Mexican cinema. She was already in her late thirties, and this was her first Spanish-language production. Her Hollywood career in the 20s and 30s playing exotic women had petered out. Paradoxically, the opportunity offered by Emilio Fernández, a director working in the classic studio style, to play a young naive character (the reverse of her Hollywood persona) became the first of their many notable collaborations, most famously María Candelaria (1944).

It also marked the first time Gabriel Figueroa, a cinematographer trained by Gregg Toland in ground-breaking photographic techniques and powerfully influenced by the Mexican muralists, European painting and Sergei Eisenstein, worked with Fernández. Screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno was brought on board, for the first also of many projects together. Established star Pedro Armendáriz would be paired again with Dolores del Río in María Candelaria and other Mexican classics.

In Flor silvestre Fernández and Figueroa began to develop a highly pictorial visual style, including a type of narrative and characters that defined Mexican cinema and “Mexicanness” in the 1940s. These films were lyrical and patriotic, and they celebrated not only the country’s geographical beauty but also idealized its indigenous population, showcasing them as archetypal figures steeped in tragedy and fatalism. Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz are the first of many ill-fated couples: in Flor silvestre they embody the tragedy of lovers destroyed by social prejudice and incomprehension.

The film is a visual delight. The audience will appreciate the beautiful way Figueroa’s camera sculpts the human figures and a landscape of clouds and maguey using chiaroscuro techniques and curvilinear perspective with expressionistic effects. Many scenes come to mind: the murdered father’s wake, staged like the painting El requiem by Orozco; the singers on horseback playing their guitars, their song commenting on the story; the agitated crows in the climax of the film.

The handling of Dolores del Río is also very interesting: while her delicate features are enhanced by classic Hollywood lighting, the director guides her performance in a way that keeps her sensuality but obliterates the exoticism of her American career. The strong inner beauty the actress showed in Flor silvestre would become part of her screen persona from then on. (A case in point, Don Siegel’s Flaming Star (1960), where the actress is the feminine and resilient Kiowa mother of a brown-skinned Elvis Presley).

Oscars ephemera

A quick e-mail yesterday from the web commentary editor of the New York Times led to a 300-word piece on the connection between artistry and the Academy Awards.

Los Angeles has been buzzing these past days – print, radio, television – with Oscar talk. Everybody has an opinion … democracy at work, as the said NYT forum shows.

Since I jotted down a few comments about international cinema and the Oscars, the editor titled my paragraphs … "Kurosawa in Hollywood".

Below is what I wrote.

French writer and cultural minister André Malraux once noted that cinema is an industry that sometimes disguises itself as art. The paradox at the heart of film — an object manufactured for mass consumption as well as a thing of beauty capturing the human experience — is also one embedded in the Academy itself.

The Oscars have always helped familiarize American audiences with foreign cinema.
It is after all a trade organization founded in 1927 to counter the notion that Hollywood was a purely business proposition.

There is no mathematical formula to gauge the economic impact of an Oscar nomination or win on a given film. Similarly, it is difficult to argue that the Academy Awards promote artistry and experimentation, since there are so many other factors at play when a member casts his vote.


In the case of foreign cinema, the Oscars have always helped familiarize American audiences with films and directors embraced by critics — Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Buñuel and an illustrious list of contemporary artists. If anything, Oscars for foreign films show that Hollywood is not provincial.

Foreign film winners tend to show a balance between the tried-and-true approach and the innovative, both in subject matter and style. And this becomes evident if you quickly peruse the list of winners since the category began in 1947.

However, who can predict if on Sunday the more “standard” Argentine nominee, El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), a TV-style crime narrative with a twist, will win over two visually innovative, stark dramas laced with social and political commentary — Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) and Un Prophète(The Prophet) — which are artistic nuts more difficult to crack?

Maria Elena de las Carreras, a Fulbright scholar from Argentina, is a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles and Cal State Northridge. She is a regular collaborator of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles.



The link for the NYT Room for Debate forum:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/do-the-oscars-undermine-artistry/

The UCLA connection

The six degrees of separation work in unexpected, whimsical ways. What do two beautifully crafted Japanese films – Ototo and Kyoto Story, by veteran Yoji Yamada – have in common with Zona Sur, the no-holds barred metaphorical critique of upper class Bolivians, directed by US-trained Juan Carlos Valdivia? Nothing at all, if one looks at how film technique, storytelling and human emotions are handled. There is no connection either between a filmmaker in his eighties, who looks at people and cities with affection and nostalgia, and a young director from Latin America with a knack for casting and an ax to grind at his social milieu. To use a quick film history shortcut, both are as far apart as John Ford and Luis Buñuel.

However, a connection, both geographical and academic can be established, when one realizes that Ichiro Yamamoto, the producer of the Japanese films, and Zona Sur cinematographer Paul de Lumen coincided at the Department of Film, TV and Digital Media between 2006 and 2007. They probably never met, but both certainly benefited from the talents and possibilities offered by our film school and the UCLA infrastructure.


A veteran producer at Shochiku – one of the major Japanese studios, already a hundred years old, and the home of Yazujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, among others – Mr. Yamamoto came to Los Angeles in 2006 on a sabbatical of sorts to learn in situ about the workings of contemporary Hollywood and imbibe the history of American cinema through classes and screenings – moving around the city by bus. Friendly to professors and students, and enthusiastic about the possibility to learn, he also had much to give. I invited him to talk about the state of Japanese production to my students in a class on the history of Asian, African and Latin American cinema in the summer of 2007. He used as an example Yamada’s Love and Honor (2006), which he co-wrote and produced. Ichiro expanded on the connections between Ozu, Kurosawa and Yamada, and their links to Shochiku studios. For one hour, the masters came to life and Japanese culture and values – as embodied in these directors – were lovingly discussed.

Mr. Yamada is in Berlin to showcase the latest work by Yamada: Ototo is the closing film of the Berlinale, and Kyoto Story was selected for the Forum. In a visual style reminiscent of Ozu and broaching a similar subject matter – six decades later – the films are delicate explorations of family and social relations, among ordinary people caught in situations of change and upheaval. They celebrate traditional values, much in the John Ford style, with a scent of nostalgia and a love for goodness. Paul Schrader might look at these pictures of Yamada as examples of ‘transcendental style. These two films, as well as the samurai trilogy preceding them – The Twilight Samurai (2002), The Hidden Blade (2004) and Love and Honor (2006) – would be a programming coup for the Billy Wilder Theater.

I had read about the successful career of Zona Sur – recent awards at Sundance for writing and directing, and the cinematography prize at Huelva, a Spanish festival devoted to Hispanic cinemas. Shown to a packed audience at the Berlinale – unfortunately minus the director and other cast and crew members, who had already left the city – the film is an impressive work, by itself and also as an example of social critique in the grand Latin American tradition.

Zona Sur is centered on a patrician and seemingly wealthy family of La Paz, headed by an elegant and tough matriarch. Not unlike Y tu mamá también in its portrait of a self-centered privileged milieu, the film subtly becomes a metaphor for Bolivia’s contemporary social and political dynamics. It avoids the trite left-wing clichés of established Latin American political cinema – and even the magical realism attached to it in the 1980s and 90s – to provide a ferocious critique of present day Bolivia, where both the Spanish-descent ruling class and the Indian masses in the Evo Morales era are reassessing themselves. This state of turmoil is stunningly captured by the sophisticated use of the camera: 360-degree pan shots, mostly of interior scenes in a beautiful home perched on the hills. At first, one wonders about this bravura camera work until it becomes evident that the meaning of Zona Sur is visually embedded in this graceful but implacable movement: the family, and by extension, the Bolivian upper echelon, is trapped in a circle of false appearances and hypocrisy. Only at the end, the camera leaves ground and literally flies unbound into the sky. In the last scene, it returns to its graceful movement to present a sweetly ironic portrait of (wishful) racial and social harmony.

Carl Laemmle – “Der Pionier von Hollywood” - at the UFA Fabrik
The UFA Fabrik is a vast cultural and ecological center in Tempelhof, a neighborhood in southern Berlin. Its oldest buildings date from the 1920s, and they were used by the UFA studio after it moved to suburban Potsdam as its post-production center. Its state-of-the art theater at the time, is still in use today. There, Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, received a lovely homage, on the occasion of the centennial of his first feature film Hiawatha – recently shown at the Academy as part of its 1909 program. The print came from the UCLA Archive, and before its screening, Dr. Udo Bayer, director of the Laupheim Museum, in Laemmle’s hometown, gave a short talk about the pioneer’s early years in southern Germany and his life in the US, illustrated by photos.

UCLA was greatly thanked for loaning the print – that looked lovely in that historical theater – and its charming director Siegrid Niemer and associates hoped that this would be the beginning of a steady collaboration in film programming.

The UFA Fabrik has an informative website, in German and English, found at www.ufafabrik.de, with interesting historical facts and a detailed account of its multiple activities.