By Joe Bendel. Was it possible to thrive under Communism? Yes, for a short while, if you happened to be a rabbit in East Berlin. But their salad days did not last forever. In a story too strange not to be true, a population of rabbits temporarily flourished in the green belt running down the center of the despised Berlin Wall. Part nature documentary and part parable, directors Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosolowski offer a truly original perspective on the Communist experience through the eyes of those East German bunnies in Rabbit à la Berlin (trailer above), a 2009 Academy Award nominee for best documentary short, which opens today in New York as part of a double bill of short docs examining Twentieth Century German history.
During the immediate post-war years, a hearty band of rabbits survived by raiding the garden patches on Potsdamer Platz. Much to their supposed surprise, sheltering walls were suddenly erected around them in 1961. With a nice grassy run, plenty of shade, and precious little human contact the whiskered critters made like rabbits and multiplied. The East German guards even began adopting them to help pass the time.
However, for many West Berliners, especially artists, the rabbits’ ability to burrow beneath the walls made them symbols of something greater—coyote tricksters for their divided age. Then, as escape attempts became more frequent and daring, the rabbits’ peaceful lives were upturned. Their lush grass was destroyed so that fugitive footsteps would be easier to track in the dirt beneath. Formerly their protectors, the guards declared open season on the rabbits, like a red army of Elmer Fudds.
One of Rabbit’s many surprises is the extent and quality of archival film capturing Berlin rabbits in their former environment. Credible simply as a wildlife film (even featuring the smoothly placid narration of Krystyna Czubówna, a well-known Polish voice-over artist for nature docs), it also has a slyly subversive sensibility, particularly when it incorporates news footage of the likes of Fidel Castro and Yassir Arafat come to gawk approvingly at the Wall. Wistful without being nostalgic, it is one of the more inventive and entertaining documentaries to reach theaters this year.
A meditation on the Holocaust.
While the fate of the Berlin Wall rabbit warren is not widely known outside of Germany, the Holocaust and its implications are certainly well established terrain for documentarians. Yet, French-Israeli filmmaker Nurith Aviv finds fresh insights in Loss. Returning to her father’s ancestral home of Berlin, Aviv explores the cultural and scientific losses Germany imposed on itself through the Holocaust.
While relatively conventional in her approach, Aviv superimposes interviews with four prominent Berliners and a vintage television appearance by Hannah Arrendt over sights seen from the S-Bahn train as it makes its way through the city. It makes the talking heads more visually dynamic, and also gives viewers a good feeling for the still-grim looking city.
Frankly, the fifty minute Rabbit was robbed at last year’s Oscars. Highly recommended, it is unquestionably the main event of Film Forum’s Berlin documentary double feature. That said, the thirty minute Loss is also a thoughtful film worth seeing in tandem with Rabbit. Both screen together at New York’s Film Forum, beginning today (12/8).
By David Ross. Is Disney finally laying the ghost of its lost decades? To some extent it is. Its last, The Princess and the Frog (2009), laudably reprised the look and feel of the Disney Golden Age (see my comments here), while its latest, Tangled, builds on the example of Bolt (2008) and does its best to mime Pixar. Disney has not mastered what it takes to be the Pixar formula (which it never will because Pixar’s only formula is the rejection of formula), but even so Disney was wise to place itself under the supervision of Pixar chief John Lasseter, who is now chief creative officer of both companies. Disney’s recent films may not be the deepest or most poignant, but they are at least energetic and entertaining.
Tangled is the story of Rapunzel with a revamped plot for an age of campy glitter. In Disney’s telling, Rapunzel is not a peasant but a princess (inevitably), and her hair, which seems to be about fifty feet long, is both magical (cures wounds, reverses aging, etc.) and handy (recollect Indiana Jones with his whip). The old crone Gothel pilfers the golden-haired infant from the castle of her parents and sets her up in a tower as an all-purpose Botox substitute. She is eventually rescued, not by a prince, but by Flynn Rider, a charming rogue supposedly in the Errol Flynn vein but actually in the mugging mode of Brendan Fraser.
There’s no denying that the film is fast paced, action packed, and funny, and that Rapunzel’s hair makes a clever and innovative prop. My five-year-old daughter writhed in laughter throughout, especially enjoying the scene in which Rapunzel beats the crap out of Flynn with a frying pan and tries to stuff him in a closet (an axiom of kiddy humor: traumatic brain injury is always good for a giggle). In a just world, the horse Maximilian – a hilarious version of Hugo’s inexorable Javert – would be standing on four legs at the podium in March receiving the Oscar for best actor while Sean Penn restrains the impulse to clutch the throat of whoever happens to be sitting in front of him and to shake until certain silicone parts pop out of alignment.
What’s subtly wrong with the film is what’s wrong with so many post-Shrek kid movies. Filmmakers insist on a winking referentiality, as if fairy tales are dusty old irrelevancies that must be rescued by pop cultural in-jokes and Lettermanesque (now Stewartesque) insouciance. These Generation X artistes are aware enough to recognize clichés but not inventive enough to transcend them. In the end, the clichés appear in horn-rimmed quotation marks, but they are clichés all the same. In Tangled, every last facial expression and turn of idiom has an antecedent in some movie or TV show or music video. It would take a team of hyper-caffeinated Tarantinos to trace them all, but the aura of tedious familiarity is unmistakable. The tune “Mother Knows Best,” a pastiche of the controlling (Jewish? Italian?) mother delivered in belting Broadway style, gives the tenor:
Go ahead, get trampled by a rhino
Go ahead, get mugged and left for dead
Me, I’m just your mother, what do I know?
I only bathed and changed and nursed you
Go ahead and leave me, I deserve it
Let me die alone here, be my guest
When it’s too late
You’ll see, just wait
Mother knows best
Mother knows best
Take it from your mumsy
On your own, you won’t survive
Sloppy, underdressed
Immature, clumsy
Please, they’ll eat you up alive
Gullible, naive
Positively grubby
Ditzy and a bit, well, hmm vague
Plus, I believe
Getting kinda chubby
I’m just saying ’cause I wuv you
Mandy Moore, who plays Rapunzel, is the perfect pawn of this approach. Her medieval princess is a perky cheerleader type: a young Kelly Ripa in medieval drag. I can picture her wielding an iPhone, but not wielding a scepter.
Tangled is less heavy-handed than Shrek in this regard, and its jokes are somewhat less stupid, but its general approach is so unnecessary and evinces so little faith in the enduring power of mythic narratives. Movies like this entertain in the superficial sense, but at the cost of initiating young people in the traditions of Western imagination. The great Disney fairy tales of yore – Snow White and Sleeping Beauty especially – were unforgettable in their vivid realization of dim pasts and mythic destinies. They belong to the worlds of Grimm and Perrault, but also to the neo-medieval fantasy tradition of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, with Keats and Malory lurking in the remote recesses. Tangled, by contrast, is like a Steve Madden ad set in motion: encephalitic dolls bounce in a color-saturated wonderland that connects to nothing in our collective unconscious.
These objections, admittedly, are unlikely to be shared by anybody who is not on the lookout for signs of cultural demise. The average moviegoer will have no complaints, and the average little girl will resist her next haircut with tears and threats. By its own standards, Tangled is a success; it delivers the promised ‘fun.’
From "The Secret of Kells" (2009).
Tangled has its precise opposite – its anti-self – in the The Secret of Kells (2009), a masterful Irish cartoon that gives an fanciful account of the creation of the Book of Kells, one of the greatest medieval illuminated manuscripts (now housed at Trinity College, Dublin). Under constant threat from the invading northmen, the monks of Kells labor to complete their great book. Brendan, the young nephew of the abbot, is wonder-stricken by this labor and becomes a secret apprentice. He ventures into the forest to locate the necessary berries and there meets the streaming, gliding, shape-shifting Aisling, at fairy at once unsettlingly inhuman and lovable. Even more terrible, Brendan must venture into the cavernous depths to find a prismatic crystal upon which the monks’ work depends; the crystal turns out to be the eye of the snake-demon Crom Cruach, whom Brendan must defeat. In the end, the northmen ravage and burn the monastery and Brendan flees with the manuscript to continue the monks’ labor on his own, in a hut by the sea.
The Secret of Kells ponders the selflessness of the monks who toiled for decades in fire-lit scriptoriums to create their monuments of faith. In this sense, the film stands at the farthest possible remove from our own ethic of not particularly bothering. Beautifully and intricately rendered in the flat stylized manner of the Book of Kells itself, the film is full of dreamlike beauty and horror, evoking a world that has the fluidity and mystery of living imagination.
Tangled is a mirror held up to our silliness; The Secret of Kells is a looking glass in which we may for a time disappear.
Actress Mona Zaki in "Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story."
By Joe Bendel. Hebba Younis wants to be Chris Wallace. Her husband wants her to be Oprah Winfrey. However, when at his behest she temporarily forgoes her hard-hitting newsmaker interviews in favor of women’s interest features, it winds up antagonizing the Egyptian government even more in Yousry Nasrallah’s Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (trailer below), a recent selection of the Venice Film Festival which has its New York premiere during this year’s African Diaspora International Film Festival.
They should be Cairo’s most fearsome media couple. Younis is the formidable host of a morning talk show. Karim Hassan is an up-and-coming journalist in line to become editor-in-chief of one of Egypt’s state-owned newspapers. Unlike Younis though, Hassan never met a government official he wouldn’t suck up to. Reluctantly, she agrees to lay low during the upcoming editor selection process. Yet, as she invites average Egyptian women on her show to tell their stories, a portrait of a corrupt and misogynist Islamic society emerges that hardly thrills Hassan. When cabinet ministers start to be implicated in her guests’ stories of victimization, we know there will be trouble.
Hebba Younis with her husband, played by Hassan El Raddad.
Essentially, Scheherazade is four films in one, telling three discrete story arcs in flashbacks within the framework of Younis’ show. As the least controversial (and therefore least memorable), her first interview with a late middle-aged volunteer social worker gives Hassan reason for hope. While it runs a bit long, the second woman’s story is a much different matter. Convicted of murdering the man who was playing her and her two spinster sisters, it raises hot button questions about women’s legal rights in Egypt specifically and under Islamic law in general—not exactly territory Hassan and his political masters are eager to explore. When Younis’ third guest Nahed, a dentist from a prominent family, accuses a sitting minister of sexually and financial preying on mature unmarried women, all bets are off.
While cinematographer Samir Bahsan gives Scheherazade a lush, sophisticated look, it is a surprisingly tough film. Though Hassan might appear to be a modern dope-smoking yuppie, it becomes clear he would prefer his wife veiled and cloistered rather than more famous than him. Evidently, Mona Zaki has been the target of some heated disparagement from Egypt’s medieval quarters for her portrayal of the relatively liberated and assertive Younis. While she is a smart and attractive lead, Sanaa Akroud really steals the picture as Nahed, an older but still striking and all too vulnerable woman. Akroud brings out her intelligence and resoluteness, making her not-so uncommon circumstances a particularly effective indictment of Islamist Egypt.
Scheherazade would be bold for any Islamic country and is especially so in an Egypt where most media is wholly owned by the Soviet-sounding State Information Service. A feminist film in the best sense of the term, Scheherazade is a surprisingly forthright look at the status of Egyptian women today. Timely and recommended, it screens as part of the 2010 ADIFF at the Anthology Film Archives on Sunday (12/12) and next Tuesday (12/14, the concluding night of the festival) at Symphony Space’s Thalia Theater.
By Joe Bendel. Nothing brings back the terrible memories of 9/11 like the sight of home-made missing person posters. Evidently they were a common sight in London as well during the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings of 2005. One desperate mother hopes against hope that they will help her find her missing daughter in Rachid Bouchareb’s London River, which screens currently as part of the 2010 African Diaspora International Film Festival in New York.
Elisabeth Sommers lives a quiet life tending her farm on the island of Guernsey. Estranged from his family in Africa, Monsieur Ousmane works as a forester in France. She is a Protestant, while he is a Muslim, but they soon discover they are linked by the 7/7 bombing. Neither her daughter Jamie nor his son Ali has been heard from since that tragic day. Much to their surprise, it turns out their missing adult children were involved in a serious relationship. They were even learning Arabic together—a revelation Sommers has difficulty processing.
Eventually, the nervous Sommers and the stoic Ousmane form an uneasy truce that slowly evolves into something like friendship. Yet the nagging uncertainty of their children’s fate looms over their time spent together.
River is a quiet film about every mother and father’s greatest nightmare. Bouchareb largely eschews the political in favor of the starkly intimate. Still, some realities are impossible to avoid. Does it give pause to any of River’s many Muslim characters that their co-religionists just murdered 52 innocent people? Perhaps the ever taciturn Ousmane hints at such misgivings when he confides in Sommers his own failings as a father. It is hardly a transcendent epiphany, but it is an honest, sensitively turned scene.
While River boasts a large cast, it is essentially a two-hander for two vastly different parents. The Oscar-worthy Brenda Blethyn is agonizingly convincing as the distraught Sommers, perfectly counterbalanced by the deliberate Sotigui Kouyaté as Ousmane. Chronically ill during the shoot, Kouyaté passed away earlier this year, but his Silver Bear at the 2009 for River was well-deserved. Though quiet and reserved, he brings Ousmane to life – not merely as a stereotypical symbol of non-western wisdom. Instead, he is a flawed individual, whose character arc is just as heavy as that of Sommers.
Though often a political filmmaker, the French-Algerian Bouchareb’s greater loyalties clearly lie with his story and characters. That is why his most recent film, Outside the Law, is such an interesting take on the Algerian independence movement, in which it is devilishly difficult to differentiate the rebels from the gangsters. With River, he focuses like a laser on the pain and fear of his primary leads. Bouchareb also gets a nice assist from composer Armand Amar, whose jazz-inflected score adds a wistful air to proceedings. A simple, moving film that deftly sidesteps polemics, River is a good way to start the 2010 ADIFF. It screens this Sunday (12/5) at Symphony Space’s Thalia Theater.
By David Ross. I finally saw Paul Haggis’ Crash. I laughed (at it), I cried (out in disgust!). Here is the liberal imagination crazed by its own clichés: a vision of American life in which each of us ceaselessly ricochets between mindless acts of racism and violence with barely enough time to catch our breaths and reload our guns. The question is whether the film is a searing expose (prostrate thyself, Oscar!) or a ludicrous caricature. I can comment only on my own experience. In forty years spent in five states, northern, southern, and mid-western, I have never heard a racist peep much less witnessed a racist tirade of the kind Matt Dillon’s character specializes in, and I have entirely evaded the kind of Wild West crossfire that Crash takes for the norm.
I have a dear lifelong friend who is black (raised on the campus of a small Bible college, now a hedge fund manager living in North Carolina). I once asked him whether he had ever encountered the racism that the media infallibly describes as omnipresent. He said, “Honestly, I haven’t.” “Nobody ever called you a nasty name or demeaned you in some way?” “Nope.” He then asked me whether I had ever encountered anti-Semitism. I said, “Honestly, I haven’t.” Later, in Europe, I did experience the electric shock of authentic Jew hatred, but to this day I have never suffered so much as an American raised eyebrow or skeptical sidelong glance. Americans, as far as I can tell, are the most Judeo-tolerant people in the history of the Western world. Racism and anti-Semitism undoubtedly exist, but they do not dominate every interaction and waking moment, and they are nothing like the essence of our daily or national experience. Crash wants us to see ourselves in its mirror, but I see nothing I recognize.
Matt Dillon in "Crash."
What I witness from my seat on the city bus is an astonishingly successful experiment in pluralism, in which people are consistently polite and deferential and not infrequently cross racial and religious lines to become friends and more than friends. I am a Jewish-American married to a Taiwanese. Our little girl is a red-headed Chinese-Jewish daughter of the South. Her best friend is half North Dakotan, half Indian. Dr. Apuzzo is an Italian-American married to an Indian-Canadian, our own glamorous Govindini Murty. They are residents of the very city that Crash demonizes as a strip-mall Yugoslavia simmering with civil war, and yet they seem hardly torn apart by its supposedly vicious cross-currents. Is Libertas or Crash the true American microcosm?
The antidote to Crash is The Wire: an urban vision no less dark, but infinitely subtler, truer, and smarter, and far less given to hysterical generalization. Crash is cheap farce camouflaged by a self-important grimace of hate. The Wire is tragedy of the old kind, in which social and economic forces function as ineluctably as the Greek fates.
The contemporary definition of ‘serious’ art: that which confirms and dignifies liberal cliché.
By Jennifer Baldwin. Watching old movies has been a spotty pastime for me these last few months. Working full-time as a high school English teacher leaves me with less free time than I’d like to work on my “Classic Cinema Obsession” articles, so that’s why I’ve been pretty much absent from Libertas since Mad Men ended.
I also began writing for a new film website called Fandor, an amazing new site that allows subscribers to watch a wide variety of classic, foreign, and indie films directly on their computers. No downloads, everything is streamed on the site. And first-time subscribers get a one-month free trial, which is a great incentive to join.
Along with the films, Fandor also provides written commentary and informative essays about the films and filmmakers, including articles by yours truly. My first article for Fandor was on Tarkovsky’s haunting dream film The Mirror, while my second article was on the Josef Von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich classic, The Blue Angel. I’m also a participant in Fandor’s syndication program, which allows me to embed their films directly on my own personal blog, Dereliction Row. You can watch any of the films anytime you want if you’re a subscriber, or you can watch an individual film for a small rental fee. I’d encourage anyone who is interested in great cinema to check out Fandor.
So even though I have been overly busy with my day job as a teacher, I haven’t completely neglected my passion for classic films. And that’s what this “Classic Movie Journal” is all about. It’s my way to keep writing about old movies for Libertas, but in a more informal, less time intensive manner. Consider these my unvarnished, rambling, and passionate musings on all things old movies. Emphasis on the unvarnished and rambling, please.
So what’s rattling round in my brain this week? Well, as I mentioned above, I have been watching the new TCM documentary series about the history of Hollywood, and I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed. Normally I fall down at the feet of everything TCM does, but this time I’m not feeling it.
I don’t know if my expectations were too high, but the series has not lived up to them. I just finished watching episode four, “Brother Can You Spare a Dream,” which focused on the years 1929 to 1941, and I’ve found that the show doesn’t seem able to get to the essence of its topic each week. This week’s episode was all about Hollywood during the Depression, and how sound technology revolutionized the industry – and yet it never really delved into the cultural impact of the Talkies or the way the movies affected Depression audiences. It gave a little lip service to these topics, but I never felt the grand sweep, the overall impact that the movies had during these years. Through four episodes so far, there’s been nothing epic about this series.
From "The Great Train Robbery," (1903).
Part of the problem is that the show is divided in its attentions right from the start. It’s “Moguls and Movie Stars,” so the focus must be split between the businessmen and the artists. This is a pretty standard approach as far as an appraisal of Hollywood history goes, but the writing of the show has been muddled because of it. It keeps jumping back and forth between the machinations of the moguls and the rise and fall of various stars, but there’s no “through line” that connects everything to something larger. I was expecting a sort of myth-building history of America, as told through the history of Hollywood (something along the lines of Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary). Instead, it’s just a very rote, very surface documentary that breezes through its topic like a Cliffs Notes version of history.
Maybe each episode isn’t long enough? Maybe it was a mistake to break down each episode by decade? I know I would have liked more than an hour to cover the tumultuous and groundbreaking 1920s. I’m not sure how to fix the problem, but I’ve found that each episode is highly disposable and I haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know from my Film Studies 101 class. What’s even more annoying is that I was expecting these earlier episodes to be the strongest of the series, since they would be dealing with the earliest years of Hollywood in which I know very little in comparison to the more popular decades of the ‘30s, ’40, and ‘50s.
Ginger Rogers in "Gold Diggers of 1933."
In last week’s episode, Shirley Temple was given about three minutes of screen time at most. Fred Astaire got maybe a minute. The few clips that we got were brief and usually did not include much dialogue. I mean, this is the 1930s, when dialogue was everything – and snappy, quintessentially American dialogue was the great innovation of the age. Instead, everything was pretty much thrown at the viewer in a helter skelter manner, the only guiding framework being chronology. This series needs more clever montages and filmmaking chops. As it is, it’s kinda boring.
Maybe I’m being too hard. The series is certainly professionally produced and the interviews with the relatives and descendants of the moguls at least provide some new, unique perspectives. Occasionally the documentary will delve into some little known area, such as the career of female director Alice Guy, or the pioneering work of African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. But overall, it’s familiar stuff. And it’s not even presented in a thrilling or heart-swelling way. If a documentary like this can’t even get a classic movie obsessed gal like me to swoon, then there’s something wrong. A series like this should get me all psyched up to go watch the movies that get mentioned in each episode. Instead, I find myself relieved when the episodes are over and not really in the mood to watch any of the movies discussed.
Maybe the final three episodes will surprise me. I haven’t watched the newest one that just aired on November 29, so there’s still time for redemption. As it stands now, though, this series has been a disappointment. Normally I worship at the altar of TCM, but not this time.
During the immediate post-war years, a hearty band of rabbits survived by raiding the garden patches on Potsdamer Platz. Much to their supposed surprise, sheltering walls were suddenly erected around them in 1961. With a nice grassy run, plenty of shade, and precious little human contact the whiskered critters made like rabbits and multiplied. The East German guards even began adopting them to help pass the time.
