Category: Documentary

By Joe Bendel. How can folks get up every day and go to work in book publishing? I ask myself that very question about five times a week. Yet despite frequent doomsday forecasts, the industry lumbers on. Perhaps e-books will be either the deliverance or the destruction of the business, but for now they are a mid-sized Schumpeterian disruption. Vivienne Roumani takes stock of what it all means in her documentary Out of Print, which screened as part of the Tribeca Talks post-screening discussion series at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.

At the heart of OOP and Ben Lewis’s thematically related Google and the World Brain lies the question whether the digitization of knowledge is a democratizing or monopolistic endeavor. The jury is still out, but in the case of the big G, you really have to wonder. Roumani touches on the Google settlement, but if there is a corporate bogeyman in OOP, it is Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, at least when she talks to Authors’ Guild president Scott Turow.

Is the giant e-tailer cheapening the value of e-books through its pricing and merchandizing? Turow certainly has thoughts on the matter. As an interview subject, Turow is an intelligent and authoritative figure. For his part, Bezos seems to be trying to humanize his image, which is a shrewd long-term strategy, in marked contrast to the deafening silence from Google in Lewis’s doc. Indeed, Roumani gained entrée to a number of highly influential market leaders and thinkers, even including the late great Ray Bradbury (appearing primarily as an expert on libraries, but adding unspoken significance to the discussion as the author of Fahrenheit 451).

There are a number of issues raised by the film that were largely glossed over by the post-screening experts, such as the fundamental issue of storage. As Roumani points out, DVDs and hard drives have a life expectancy that can be measured in years, not decades. Simply assuming someone will figure out something more lasting is not a great strategy. Yet for the filmmaker and at least  a few of her fellow panelists, the effect of the digital revolution on reading habits is even more significant. Some seriously wonder whether the majority of kids today will have sufficient interest and attention to read a full book from the beginning to the end.

Roumani nicely balances prognostications of doom and gloom with optimism for the shape of things to come. At fifty-five minutes, Out of Print is a well paced and organized overview of an industry in flux and the wider resulting social and cultural implications. It is a handy primer, but Google and the World Brain remains a more in-depth and pointed examination of the same fundamental issues. Given its timeliness, it should draw considerable interest on the festival circuit and merits public broadcast consideration.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on April 30th, 2013 at 1:18pm.

By Joe Bendel. To the lazy news media, the sight of damaged photographs randomly scattered by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami merely functioned as convenient visual shorthand for the enormity of it all. However, some Japanese photographers and volunteers recognized in them an opportunity to serve and comfort instead. Nathanael Carton documents the efforts of Project Salvage Memory to find, restore, and return lost family photos in the short film Recollections, which screens this Thursday at the San Francisco International Film Festival, following hard on the heels of its run at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.

The images say it all. The scarred remembrances of once vibrant family lives are heartbreaking to behold. Carton nimbly walks a fine line, capturing their devastating emotional resonance without feeling ghoulishly exploitative. Indeed, the real heart of the film involves the (primarily young) volunteers who set out to console those grieving loved ones. It might have started as a simple gesture, but the Project has since recovered over 75,000 photos.

Clearly the restitution process has tremendous significance for the survivors. Obviously the photographs facilitate closure, particularly as the focal point for funerals and subsequent memorial services. Yet not surprisingly, the Project founder Carton interviews is unflaggingly modest when speaking of his work.

At just under thirteen minutes, Recollections is an informative but moving quietly film. Highly recommended, Carton’s acutely sensitive documentary was one of the best shorts at this year’s Tribeca. For those in the Bay Area, it also screens this Thursday (5/2) as part of the Shorts 1 programming block at the 2013 SFIFF.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on April 30th, 2013 at 1:17pm.

By Joe Bendel. Considering China’s rapid economic expansion, is it any wonder that its contemporary arts scene shares the same global ambitions of its manufacturing sector? In fact, multi-millionaire artist Wang Guangyi is already an industry unto himself. For his part, Liu Gang has high hopes and heaps of potential. Documentary filmmaker Mika Mattila follows the two artists and their shows over a three year period in Chimeras, which screens during both this year’s Hot Docs and San Francisco International Film Festivals.

Wang Guangyi does not have Ai Weiwei’s name recognition outside China, but he sells like Gerhard Richter to his nouveau riche countrymen. Yet, there are still opportunities for an unknown like Liu Gang to mount his first one-man show in a prestigious gallery space. It seems the former art student is well on his to joining the elite, until his follow-up show is less enthusiastically received.

Not surprisingly, both artists wrestle with the baggage of China’s recent history and issues of globalization. Wang Guangyi freely mixes Communist iconography with consumerist imagery for an ambiguously ironic effect. When it comes to ideology, the senior artist seems deliberately cagey, aside from his explicit rejection of western aesthetic standards. Frankly, he remembers the Cultural Revolution fondly, because school was canceled. Still, he readily admits in retrospect great atrocities were also committed at the time (which to his credit, Mattila forthrightly illustrates with dramatic archival stills).

Young Liu Gang also clearly criticizes commercial impulses in his work, noting with some regret how China’s gallery system is almost entirely based on the Western model. Yet, it is when he proposes a series of works inspired by China’s One Child policy, the once welcoming establishment sort of freaks.

Mattila captures this dichotomy reflected in contemporary Chinese culture and commerce solely through direct observation. There is a lot of messy reality in the film, as well as some intriguing art. While ostensibly focused on the two artists and their oeuvre, the ghosts of history haunt the margins of the film in strange and unexpected ways.

Intelligently assembled by Mattila and his editor Mikko Sippola, Chimeras (not a great title, but so be it) opens a fascinating window into an underreported sector of China. Recommended for China watchers and for those who follow the international art scene, Chimeras screens Thursday (5/2) up north at Hot Docs and Saturday (5/4), Sunday (5/5), and the following Tuesday (5/7) out west at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on April 29th, 2013 at 3:18pm.

By Joe Bendel. In the 1930’s, Walter Duranty, The New York Times man in Moscow, systemically misreported or ignored Stalin’s crimes, including the notorious show trials and the Ukrainian famine. He is considered an unfortunate but isolated case. Yet, throughout the war, the Times consistently buried stories about the Holocaust. Emily Harrald examines the “Paper of Record’s” questionable coverage (again as a discrete phenomenon) in the documentary short Reporting on the Times, which screens as part of the History Lessons short film program at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.

Harrald’s opening graphics speak volumes. From 1939 to 1945, the Times ran 23,000 front page stories—11,500 of which were about World War II. 26 were about the Holocaust. What is most disturbing is the nature of the coverage that did run, typically relegated to the middle of the paper. Midway through European round-up pieces, the Times would matter-of-factly report on the “liquidation” of the ghettoes, with no illusions regarding what that euphemism meant.

Rather bizarrely, Harrald spends a good portion of Reporting excusing the Times’ dubious Holocaust reportage. Viewers will never forget publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was himself Jewish, but presented a fully Americanized and secularized image to readers and the press, partly out of concern over the rise of anti-Semitism. Perhaps this explains why he would be personally reluctant to run front page stories on the plight of European Jewry. However, he employed a full editorial staff to make sure the paper did not bury its lede.

Throughout Reporting, moral clarity is provided by a Holocaust survivor whose mother was convinced the world would come to their aid once they knew the magnitude of the National Socialists’ crimes. For whatever reason, the Times obviously did not do its part. Yet, when considered in light of Duranty’s Moscow dispatches, the under-reporting of the Holocaust appears more systemic than Reporting would like to consider. Harrald’s film earns credit for beginning the conversation, but its interpretations of media history are far from definitive. It screens again today (4/23), Friday (4/26), and Sunday (4/28) as part of the History Lessons short film block at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: C

Posted on April 23rd, 2013 at 1:42pm.