Dec 22, 2013

DONT LOOK BACK only rates #10

from Facebook . . . .

Ondi Timoner

Options for this story

"The Guardian calls DIG! the #1 Music Film of All Time. Wow. It's a fun list too. Good ideas in here for your holiday

viewing:)

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/20/top-10-music-movies

Dec 21, 2013

Bruno on Timoner (and Timoner on Bruno!)

A very nice turn: the author of the previous post, our own Mr. Christopher Bruno, published this new and in-depth piece

THE FILMMAKER IS PRESENT: AUTHORIAL IMMERSION AND INTERVENTION IN THE FILMS OF ONDI TIMONER

on his website, Considering Film: http://consideringfilm.com/2013/12/19/ondi-timoner/

And then Ms. Timoner put it on her Facebook page.

And her friends like it. And not just with thumbs-up icons. But with Comments: "amazing," "lovely," "good shit."

Congratulations, C.B.

Dec 19, 2013

Among the very first packet of readings we were assigned were two pieces written by Terry Ramsaye for the Christian Science Monitor in 1922, "The Status of Non-Fiction Films" and "Non-Fiction Film as Propoganda." These pieces -- or, rather, my copies of them -- are unique among my Nonfiction Film History readings in that they are relatively littered with marginalia. I usually content myself with a highlighter, but in the case of these readings, I was equally liberal with a red pen. Part of it, no doubt, was that classes hadn't even begun yet and I was chomping on the bit to return to academia with fervor, having allowed seven years to pass between by undergraduate and graduate studies. But a bigger part of it was that I had found gaping holes in Ramsaye's argument and leaps of logic that I couldn't abide. If ten percent of my final grade was to be participation, my socially anxious and normally silent self could easily earn most of it discussing these two pieces alone.

Among my hastily scribbled notes were documentation? alongside Ramsaye's unsupported -- yet, surely, not entirely false -- assertion that "there are in most audiences patrons whose major interest is in the non-fiction subjects." Regarding Ramsaye's dismissal of the "star system" as "the simplest tool in the hands of the film salesman," I wrote presumptive and judgmental. And when Ramsaye surmised that "This preponderance of the dramatic picture is undoubtedly out of any proportion to the real taste of the public [as] indicated by the increasingly wide circulation of non-fiction book and periodicals," I wondered, Can such deductions be made across art forms? I took great umbrage with Ramsaye's dismissal of dramatic pictures as mere products of the star-based system of selling movies not only because of its bias and reductivism, but also because he neglected to posit what was to me and my red pen an obvious potential solution: What if stars were then involved in the producing and promotion of non-fiction works?

Ramsaye went on to make generalizations about the scant budget theaters allotted for nonfiction works ("usually less than 7 per cent... frequently less than 5 per cent") in relation to the screen time they occupied ("25 per cent") but made no concessions or considerations for the relative costs incurred in the production of a dramatic feature versus those of a nonfiction feature. Ramsaye is also presumptive about audience tastes, insisting that the preponderance of "dramatic features and 'comedies'" in many theaters is a product solely of the curatorial discretion of theater owners without any statistics to support his argument or consideration given to the tenets of supply-and-demand.

At the bottom of the page, I wrote, The last paragraph opens the issue up from distribution to production, however the author neither synthesizes the two, nor offers any elaboration upon the effect of a presumed overhaul of the non-fiction film production industry. While Ramsaye gently poked at these concerns in his next essay, he did so only through the rubric of "special interests seeking propaganda media." He asserts, with implied consternation, that "To a remarkable extent scenic, travel, and 'educational' pictures are vehicles for propaganda," to which my marginalia countered, Is this good or bad? Connotative vs. Denotative. And indeed, though he uses it frequently throughout the piece, "films of fact" remains a loose term, and the use of word "wholesome" implies a propagandistic intent on the author's behalf as well.

When it came time to discuss these pieces in class, however, I remained silent. Historically, anything I was assigned to read by a professor carried with it an air of authority; though we were asked to question and to engage with the material, what we were given was ultimately fact. One of the reasons I left my job as a high school teacher and abandoned my initial undergraduate pursuit of teacher certification was that I, to a great degree, believe in the lecture format and in the authority of the professor. A great deal of reform has gone on in the education field as of late which favors group and hands-on learning, and the adoption of these techniques was, in my estimation, detrimental to my efficacy as an educator. I, for better or for worse, still steadfastly believe that rote learning is in many cases the best way to receive and retain information. In a recent piece for The Atlantic ("Don't Give Up on the Lecture"), Abigail Walthausen argues that too much student-led discussion can be distracting and lead to misinformed dissemination of content. I've always liked a professor who tells me explicitly what they want and who exhibits authority through both lecture and through the readings he or she assigns.

One of the biggest steps in shifting my manner of academic application from undergraduate to graduate level has been in learning to process the meta-textual signifiers of any work under discussion. I remained silent about Ramsaye's works not because I suddenly thought my points were wrong, but because it was immediately apparent that the limitations and the perspectives of the time in which the articles were written was under observation as much, if not more so, than the articles themselves. It seemed superfluous and misguided to perseverate upon these textual errors once they were exposed as being endemic of the surrounding cultural climate. I was already accustomed to accounting for these kinds of qualifiers within films, but I had learned to do so through critical written work; it required an exponential expansion of my focus to accommodate critiquing the critique in such a manner.

This has been my greatest takeaway from this class: that fully contextualizing these works is a Sisyphean task that continually raises as many questions as it answers, if not more. Even when arguments and observations seemed self-evident to the point of obviousness -- as, I often felt, much of Jennifer Lynn Peterson's introduction to her book Education in the School of Dreams was, for example -- it became ultimately apparent that nothing about these works or their study can be taken for granted. A retrospective review of the syllabus yields a litany of roads not taken, of works both great and small, each with more to say than can ever be told.

Dec 18, 2013

CICERO MARCH (1966) named to the National Film Registry today

Timely as today's headlines....

We watched Cicero March as part of the Nonfiction Film History course quite recently. Today the Librarian of Congress announced it has been added to the National Film Registry, along with Men and Dust (1940, which we also watched;

http://www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/orphans8/mov8/Men_and_Dust.mov) and Roger and Me (1989, which is kinda where we began the discussion, with the essay Matthew Bernstein -- also a National Film Preservation Board member, by the way).

By some definitions, these 3 titles are only documentaries on this year's list of 25 films (unless you count Mary Poppins). Frank Stauffacher's Notes on the Port of St. Francis (1951) might be pigeonholed as an "experimental" film, but it is certainly in the nonfiction mode, an impressionistic portrait of San Francisco (narrated by Vincent Price!) and somewhat related to the city symphony tradition. The list also includes the entry Martha Graham Early Dance Films (1931-1944), which are four silent film recording of the dancer in performance.

And friend of the show Bill Morrison in on the list with his "found footage film" Decasia (2002). What do you think of this blurb from the LOC.gov news release?

Cicero March (1966)
During the summer of 1966, the Chicago Freedom Movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., targeted Chicago in a drive to end de facto segregation in northern cities and ensure better housing, education and job opportunities for African Americans. After violent rioting and a month of demonstrations, the city reached an agreement with King, in part to avoid a threatened march for open housing in the neighboring all-white town of Cicero, Ill., the scene of a riot 15 years earlier when a black couple tried to move into an apartment there. King called off further demonstrations, but other activists marched in Cicero on Sept. 4, an event preserved on film in this eight-minute, cinema-vérité-styled documentary. Using lightweight, handheld equipment, the Chicago-based Film Group, Inc. filmmakers situated themselves in the midst of confrontations and captured for posterity the viciousness of northern reactions to civil-rights reforms.

Is it an apt characterization of what you saw and heard in the film?

-- Dan Streible

___________________

p.s. e-mail today from Matthew Bernstein, re: Roger and Michael:
" As I am on Michael Moore’s email list, I received this. Good work, everyone, on this year’s registry additions and best wishes for the holidays! Matthew"

Thank You, Library of Congress: 'Roger & Me' to Be Added to National Film Registry

…a note from Michael Moore

Wednesday, December 18th, 2013

Friends,

This morning it was announced by the Library of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board that my first film, 'Roger & Me', has been placed on the National Film Registry -- the official list of films that are, according to an act of Congress, to be preserved and protected for all time because of their "cultural and historical significance" to the art of cinema. It is, to say the least, a huge honor that for me ranks right up there with the Oscar and the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The National Film Registry is a slightly rarefied list of movies in the history of cinema. Of the tens of thousands of films that have been made since the 1890s, only 600 are on the preservation list. Today, in addition to 'Roger & Me', the films that were announced selection to the preservation list include 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', 'Mary Poppins', 'Pulp Fiction', 'Forbidden Planet', 'The Quiet Man', 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'Judgment at Nuremberg'. These films plus 'Roger & Me' now join 'Citizen Kane', 'The Graduate', 'Dr. Strangelove' and a host of other classics that make up the National Film Registry.

The news comes at just the right moment for 'Roger & Me'. The upcoming year, 2014, is the 25th anniversary of the film's debut.

But last year I learned that there was not a single print of 'Roger & Me' in existence. [emphasis added. -- DGS] Anywhere. I was stunned. I had received a call from the New York Film Festival asking if I knew where they could find a 35mm copy of the film. They were told there were no usable prints in North America -- all of them had been damaged or destroyed or had faded in color. How could the largest grossing documentary of all time in 1989 just have vanished? Poof. Gone.

And if this could happen to 'Roger & Me', what kind of shape are other films -- especially documentaries -- in? I called up the good people of Warner Bros. to help me fix the problem -- and they did. In the end ten new prints were made and are now being donated to archival vaults at UCLA, the Motion Picture Academy, the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House.

But now, with the protection offered by the Library of Congress, 'Roger & Me' will be in good hands and around for a long time to come.

You should know that there is a serious film preservation crisis afoot and I've volunteered to help do something about it. I often hear of other films whose prints are all gone. I have personally paid to have new prints made for a number of films ('Hair' by Milos Forman, the old Roy Rogers classic 'Don't Fence Me In', etc.) where not a single print exists. I have donated them to one of the above archival houses and I plan to keep doing this for other movies (Next up: Dalton Trumbo's 'Johnny Got His Gun').

As for 'Roger & Me', if you haven't seen it, check it out on iTunes or Amazon or (for a few hours for free) here. This movie, as most of you know, was my first chapter in a series of eight films that, in part, explore (often satirically) the crazy stupid thing we call "capitalism" -- a never-ending quest by the wealthy to take as much as they can, while leaving the crumbs for everyone else to fight over. Today, according to the polls, more young people say they favor the ideals of socialism over capitalism. I hope to God I played a small role in making that happen, and I look forward to the day when the rich are forced to share the wealth created by their employees. It will happen. In our lifetime.

I thank the Library of Congress and the National Film Preservation Board for this honor. And I encourage all of you to watch my film, a film that, sadly, is every bit as relevant today as when I made it 25 years ago.

I hope all of you are well and enjoying this holiday season.

There is much work to do in 2014!

Yours,
Michael Moore

MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com

@MMFlint MichaelMoore.com

Dec 15, 2013

Folk, Verite, and the Failure of the Word

by Christopher Bruno

In her essay on D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, Jeanne Hall makes the argument that Pennebaker's 1967 film -- and, in fact, much of cinema verite in general -- confirms the assumption that what documentarian Robert Drew referred to as "picture logic", exemplified by the observational forms of direct cinema, is inherently more truthful, and thus better, than "word logic", the attempt to explicate through spoken or written language. Citing Drew's 1960 film Primary as a landmark work which helped to usher in the verite movement in America, Hall makes the case that Pennebaker, despite claiming ambivalence towards any sort of message or intentionality in his filmmaking, uses a number of editorial strategies to allow his subject, a young yet already famous Bob Dylan, to make Pennebaker's point for him.

While Hall's arguments are, for the most part, both thorough and sound, there is additionally a greater narrative to be drawn regarding Dylan's own thorny relationship with the written (and henceforth sung) word, and there is perhaps no more appropriate phase of Dylan's long and storied career than that depicted in the film to illustrate it. 1965 saw Dylan's fame continuing to grow even as many of his earliest fans criticized him for abandoning the earnest folk of his earlier years in favor of a raw, electrified sound which carried with it increasingly fractured, impressionistic lyrics. Dylan was always known for ripping a song or two straight from the headlines (even if those headlines were a few decades old); but where once he was literal, carefully delineating character, cause, and event, now he was oblique, preferring to obfuscate his meaning through free association, non-sequiturs, and abstract poetical devices.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues", being the first track from his first album in this vein, is as good a candidate as any for the exemplar of this style, and it remains not only one of his most loved songs, but also emblematic of the first of what would ultimately be many stylistic shifts and evolutions. Pennebaker was no doubt cognizant of this when he chose to open his film with the iconic sequence of Dylan flipping cue cards of the song's lyrics in time to the recording. Dylan, the cipher, remains tight-lipped as he presents his lyrics to the audience, as though his art were a barrier rather than a window into the artist. And as the song progresses, the cards play fast and loose with the lyrics, intentionally misspelling or paraphrasing the words -- a sacrilege to a Dylan adherent -- while no less a wordsmith than Allen Ginsberg hangs in the background, speaking inaudibly to Bob Neuwirth, himself a noted singer-songwriter.

Gone is the young, hungry troubadour who championed the literalism and didacticism of Woody Guthrie, and one need look no further than the film itself to see so. Pennebaker appropriates footage of a younger Dylan concertedly singing his composition "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at a voters' registration rally in 1963 as though his life depended upon it before cutting to a contemporaneous performance of "The Times They Are A-Changin'" from the Royal Albert Hall that is rote and noticeably lacking in passion by comparison. Hall quotes Joe Morgenstern's Newsweek review of the film, which states, "Dont Look Back is really about fame and how it menaces art," a summation which is borne out in the juxtaposition of these two performances. Dylan did not wear his fame comfortably, often reacting antagonistically to corporations, the press, and to individuals who did not follow his whims as mercurially as he himself did. Aside from the many instances of Dylan baiting and battling with reporters, humoring his teeny-bopper fans, and ignoring the company of his compatriots which Hall enumerates, viewers can see this attitude in Dylan's changing relationship to his own words; as the stakes and the stages alike grew, the connection between his words and his fans stretched to the point of tenuousness, and Dylan would react by tossing off any and all sense of political responsibility -- and lyrical clarity.

Throughout the sixties, Greenwich Village was host to a multifaceted folk revival that would nurture and present to the world such disparate acts as Simon & Garfunkel, Dave Van Ronk, The Fugs, Peter Paul & Mary, and of course Dylan; and in April of 1961 -- only a few short months after Dylan himself had arrived in New York City -- Washington Square, long known as a haven for folksingers to congregate and perform, became the setting of a epochal showdown between the police and the peaceful protestors of the Village folk scene. Following an injunction to ban folk singing from Washington Square, Israel Young encouraged all local folk musicians to come down to the park on April 9 to sing songs in defiance of the town's orders, an act, he insisted, was protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Dan Drasin, who was himself only 18 at the time, captured the protest and the subsequent riots on film. Painstakingly compiling and synching audio recordings from the day to his footage, he compiled the film Sunday, which in its own way addresses the issue of "picture logic" versus "word logic" and finds the former lacking.

[Note: Dan Drasin himself posted the full documentary to his YouTube channel on May 1, 2013.]

Drasin opens the film with shots of children playing in the park before slowly introducing footage of the young adults who will be taking part in the protests, establishing a sort of universal innocence and inherent right to be present, underscored by the use of Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" on the soundtrack. Drasin emphasizes the point by ending the film with a shot of a child playfully running around the park wearing a sign that reads "I want to sing too!" In between, however, he fills Sunday with a stream of law enforcement officials and folk musicians who talk in circles at one another, reiterating the same rhetoric without getting anywhere or solving anything.

There is, furthermore, a sort of self-reflexive, Ouroboros-like overtone to the entire protest, which exists solely to assert its own right to exist. Folk music has a history of being by and of the people, concerned more so than any other musical idiom with the plight of the underprivileged, yet you wouldn't know it from the crowd assembled in Washington Square Park on this particular Sunday. Most of those gathered are well dressed collegiate sorts, indicative not so much of the beatniks as of those who studious read and attempted to emulate them. The folk music depicted in Sunday is by and large toothless, and while all the other jam sessions in the park before and after may well have been about something, the narrow focus of Drasin's film can't help but depict a scene that is both earnest and empty. One protestor, when asked if he is the leader of the group, sums it up: "No, I just happen to be first."

It is ironic then that both Sunday and Dont Look Back make at least some claim to champion the folksinger, he himself the champion of words, for both films systematically attack the established norms of verbal communication as outmoded and incomplete. While Drasin may have unwittingly exposed his subjects, Pennebaker and Dylan seem to be in collusion; for while the well meaning young folkies in Sunday probably arrived with the best of intentions, Dylan stepped in front of his documentarian's "fearsome machinery" primed to dismantle the old guard, and Pennebaker was more than willing to let him. As Pennebaker himself has said, "If I just watch what is happening, it will happen right in front of me."

Dec 14, 2013

Compilation Film, Montage, and Media Commentary

By Diana Bilbao

Upon viewing Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958) in class, I was struck by one particular sequence. As Sjoberg discusses in his introduction to The World in Pieces, compilation films provide a heightened opportunity for examining montage as a technique (32). Because the images are pulled from different sources, the act of juxtaposing them together is more loaded and audacious.

Although Conner’s entire film is an exercise in combining fiction and nonfiction footage to create an incisive, semi-satirical collage, one sequence of shots in particular seemed an excellent example of the potential in compilation film. About midway through the film, there is a shot of a man in a submarine looking through a periscope. Conner then cuts to a shot of a woman in lingerie looking at us and posing, creating an eyeline match between the sailor and the woman. In this way, he makes it appear that the man using the periscope to ogle her. The next shot is of the man again, pulling back from the periscope and yelling to his comrades. Next, there is a closeup of a hand pressing a button. Conner then cuts to a torpedo being fired underwater from a submarine, and the next shot in the sequence is of a mushroom cloud erupting from the ocean. This begins the sequence of mushroom clouds and apocalyptic images, a running motif throughout the rest of the film.

The way Conner edits this sequence exemplifies the potential of compilation film to use montage to create meaning between clips from different sources. By combining the shots in a specific order and rhythm, Conner creates a story in which a man looks through a periscope at a woman, then fires a phallic torpedo at her and causes a mushroom cloud.

There are numerous meanings one can draw from this sequence, but the primary commentary in my view is on the fetishization of violence and weapons technology. The phallic shape of the torpedo and the direct connection Conner creates between the male libido and the firing of the missile can be read as a pointed jab at the masculine martial impulse and the Cold War obsession with nuclear weapons.

This fetishization of military technology is a motif we’ve encountered multiple times in this course. Tanks (1942) centered on the camera and Orson Welles’s prodigious voice describing and admiring the tank manufacturing process. The Battle of the Somme (1916), despite being much longer and more complex, also contains a significant amount of this fetishization. The extended shots of the various cannons firing, combined with the intertitles describing their specifications, create a profound impression of the guns’ phallic nature and of the filmmakers’ obsession with it.

While these two films, as military propaganda, are engaging in this fetishization in earnest, Conner is using the medium of compilation film to ingeniously comment on this trend in our society. His argument, one could interpret, is that such a childish focus on the power of our technology is what directly leads to the proliferation of weapons like the atom bomb. Indeed, in his film, it is what leads to the Dr. Strangelove-like apocalyptic chain of mushroom clouds and destruction. A Movie is a brilliant example of how compilation film can use footage from diverse sources to comment on the media and our society at large. Because of its ability to combine fiction and nonfiction in absurd yet insightful and pointed ways, compilation film has the potential to be one of the most aggressive and incisive forms of media commentary.

Dec 4, 2013

FWD: "This is what makes documentary so great"

Like I'm not going to share with you an email from the Media Burn Independent Video Archive with this subject line?

On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Media Burn Archive <newsletter@mediaburn.org> wrote:

WBEZ looks at "The Other M.J."

View this email in your browser

None of this would be possible without your support. Please donate today.

"This is what makes documentary so great..."

This summer, many of you joined us at South Side Community Art Center, where we reunited documentary subject Michael Johnson with producer Tom Weinberg, 17 years after they first met at the United Center. It was an incredible opportunity to screen and discuss "The Other M.J." (1999), produced with Skip Blumberg, a sensitive and insightful look at the difficult realities of getting by in America.

Here's what they had to say about it on WBEZ's The Morning Shift:

"This is what makes documentary so great, finding those really small stories, those small characters at the edges of big events, through which you can see a whole different reality."—Allison Cuddy

"For me it was almost a Studs Terkel video, in the way that Studs was able to find quote-unquote regular people, average people, and really make them the stars—that there are no small people, there are no small stories."--Jason Marck

Listen to more from WBEZ and watch video with Michael below.

As always, you can watch the full version of The Other M.J. at Media Burn Archive

We were remiss in providing this information about last week's video. Please also watch the full version of Ronit Bezalel's excellent Voices of Cabrini.

Every time we send you an email, it is the culmination of dozens of hours of work by many people working to restore and digitize previously unseen and unplayable videotapes. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, we are dependent on your generosity to be able to continue this work. Please contribute today.

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Dec 3, 2013

Fwd: 12.12 / CINE-CONCERT NANOOK OF THE NORTH

The Belgian Cinematek (aka Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, aks the Belgian Royal Film Archive) has the second largest film collection in Europe (after the British Film Institute). As part of its 75th anniversary celebration, the Cinematek is hosting this special screening of . . . you guessed it, Nanook of the North.

An English googlization of the announcement below includes this:

Nanook is the first documentary in the history of cinema. Shot in the early '20s , when the "documentary'"did not exist. Robert Flaherty filmed for fifteen months the daily life of an Inuit family near Hudson Bay . It offers us a vivid portrait of humanity.

So the legacy, canonization, and historiography of the Flaherty film remain firmly planted.

This screening blends both the mythos and the revisionist treatment of Nanook of the North. Although the Cinematek itself casts doubt upon the veracity of the story, legend has it that the print of Nanook in the archive came from Jacques Ledoux (1921-1988), who found it in the attic of an abbey, where he sought refuge during WWII. Ledoux began working at the archive in 1941, but it is not clear whether he was already employed there when he supposedly took Nanook there. In any event, Ledoux went on to serve as head of the Belgian Royal Film Archive from 1948 until his death forty years later. He was also an internationally influential figure in film preservation and archiving, as well as the collector who amassed the archive's large and stellar collection. According to the current director of the archive, Nicola Mazzanti, the holdings are perhaps 80% films not of Belgian origin. With a royal charter, they have the resources to do much that other film archives are unable to do during this era of fiscal austerity. The Cinematek has, for example, its own film laboratory and can do complete preservation and restoration "in house."

The myth of the Belgian recovery of Nanook aside, this special anniversary screening stands out for its participation in the ongoing practice of making the film relevant and more culturally palatable to contemporary audiences. There have been many revisionist exhibitions of Nanook of the North, most involving newly composed music that departs from the kind of score that would have been played (live, of course) by any theater showing Nanook in the 1920s. The tension inherent in the film's ethnographic qualities -- outsider Euro-American shoots indigenous Canadian community for display to commercial movie theaters -- may always remain, at least for any viewer cognizant of the issue. But this new score by Gabriel Thibaudeau (of the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal) goes to great lengths to allow an empathic viewing of the representation of the Inuit community seen in the film. According to this press announcement, the live performance of the music at this screening will be done by an ensemble that includes two Inuit throat singers! How this element might affect one's interpretation or appreciation of Nanook one cannot say; but suffice it to say the presence of Inuit throat singers would affect the experience, no?

In its entry on Inuit throat singing, Wikipedia also notes some new (TV) documentary history involving the phenomenon. The singing, we read, was traditionally done by women, and usually women in pairs. In Wikipedia fashion, the entry ends with a miscellaneous inventory of media references to the subject:

* The British ITV documentary Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World [2009] features Billy Connolly in the Canadian Arctic. In the second episode, he visits a pair of women demonstrating the finer points of throat singing.

* A task in the seventh leg of the first season of The Amazing Race Canada [2013, CTV] required teams to listen to a traditional Inuit throat singing performance.

Does the tension between the media makers and those they re-present on screen continue in this new history of nonfiction film and video? It would seem so. But we'll have to examine AR-C to determine why and how contestants were required to listen to the Inuit singing.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: CINEMATEK <newsletter@cinematek.be>
Date: 2013/12/3
Subject: 12.12 / CINE-CONCERT NANOOK OF THE NORTH

Si vous ne parvenez pas à lire ou si les images ne s'affichent pas correctement : cliquez ici.

ciné-concert

NANOOK OF THE NORTH

12.12 - 20:00 / BOZAR

En guise de point d'orgue des festivités, CINEMATEK présente en première européenne une performance du compositeur Gabriel Thibaudeau et de chanteuses de gorge Inuits, qui accompagneront la projection de Nanook l'Esquimau.

Nanook est le premier documentaire de l'histoire du cinéma. Tourné au début des années '20, lorsque le « documentaire » n'existait pas. Robert Flaherty a filmé pendant quinze mois la vie quotidienne d'une famille inuit à proximité de la baie d'Hudson. Il nous en offre un portrait saisissant d'humanité. « Je suis certain, dit-il, qu'on peut découvrir une grâce, une dignité, une culture, un raffinement que nous ignorons chez des peuples placés par les circonstances hors des conditions habituelles. »

En parfait dialogue avec le film, le chef d'orchestre et pianiste Gabriel Thibaudeau, éminent spécialiste de l'accompagnement du cinéma muet, a composé une musique contemporaine dans laquelle il fait intervenir la tradition vocale des Inuits. Le 12 décembre, il dirigera lui-même un ensemble de 9 musiciens, dont deux chanteuses de gorge Inuits exceptionnelles.

Pour l'anecdote, Nanook revêt pour la Cinémathèque une importance particulière : ce film lui fut apporté par Jacques Ledoux, qui la tenait de l'Abbaye de Maredsous où il s'était réfugié pendant la guerre, et tenait à la sauver.

En présence de Sa Majesté La Reine.
En coproduction avec Bozar.
Avec le soutien de l'Ambassade du Canada.

Jeudi 12 décembre 2013 à 20:00
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Bruxelles, Salle Henry LeBœuf
Tickets : www.bozar.be - 02 507 82 00

Vous ne désirez plus recevoir cette newsletter?
Connectez-vous à votre compte CINEMATEK pour éditer vos préférences.

Dec 2, 2013

“Rick Prelinger’s Notes on the Sponsored Film and Les Blank’s 'Chicken Real' as an Addition to the Rules” By Roger Mancusi

Clip: http://www.lesblank.com/?portfolio=chicken-real-1970

In the introductory chapter from Rick Prelinger’s The Field Guide to Sponsored Films, Prelinger provides the shared criteria that he feels are present across sponsored films as well as the decade-by-decade breakdown of the production, exhibition, and reception of the many sponsored films featured in his book. Headlining his criteria is sponsorship, which he describes as “the common thread that links films funded by for-profit and nonprofit entities. Sponsorship also implies the packaging of information from a particular corporate or institutional perspective [and] denotes direct institutional support, generally through funding” (vi). Using this basic criteria as a building block, I would like to examine one sponsored film he does not include an entry on: the surreal look at Holly Chicken Farms captured in Les Blank’s 1970 film Chicken Real, which expands upon Prelinger’s description of sponsored films to incorporate a personal filmmaking style credited to filmmaker. It does incorporate an industrial approach, and was financed by Holly Farms, but the maneuvers Blank makes in depicting the industrial poultry giant allows a subtle critique of the very industry he examines which makes the short film stand out amongst its peers.

Chicken Real, made in the era that Prelinger marked as the beginning of sponsored films’ “obsolescence,” (vi) still exhibits the two main criteria that he believed linked sponsored material and necessitated a closer categorization and appreciation. But as you can see in the short clip provided above, the film goes beyond simply reporting the life-cycle of a chicken and the industrial workings of a hatchery and “dis-assembly line” to incorporate a personal style that Les Blank is known for. Within Chicken Real, Blank was able to take the funding provided by Holly Farms and create a surreal and ironic approach to examine a peculiar facet of the American culinary and musical experience. And much like Le Sang des Bêtes, Blank’s film is able to hold the systematic animal harvesting process in extreme close up to highlight some of the ironies of the industry and present the harsh realities in dry delivery for a heightened effect.

Within the film, the narrator will just as quickly state that the chicken farms create thousands of jobs as he will tout the hyper-specific mechanization of a previously human-held position, bringing the viewer to an odd realization. That the processing line can accomplish in one seventh of a second what one “grandma” could accomplish in an hour becomes a point of pride, when in reality, thousands of these grandmas are now out of work due to these machines. And beyond writing the at times hilarious narration himself, Blank is also able to use dramatic close ups to confront the viewer with the ridiculous nature of the chicken processing industry. In between the two earlier claims, the camera dramatically closes in on one chicken [Image 1] headed to the assembly line for evisceration, and we are forced to laugh at the amazingly structured plight of the doomed bird.

A "broiler" awaiting its fate. (Flower Films)

Blank also uses music as another stylistic element that gives the short film an element that stands out from Prelinger’s guidelines. Throughout the film, the action is punctuated, metered, or bridged using a bluegrass string accompaniment, a characteristic seen in Blank’s other works in the United States' southeastern regions including Sprout Wings and Fly and My Old Fiddle: A Visit with Tommy Jarrell in the Blue Ridge among others. In Chicken Real, the music adds a personal touch that bridges the gap between industry and consumers, and emphasizes the communal activities where products like Holly chickens could be enjoyed rather than the destructive process that create them. Blank lays the soundtrack over the film’s diegesis to blur out the din of industrial machinations in favor of alluding to the consumption of the final product, most optimally in a jovial and public setting as seen in the final scene.

Blank, I believe, uses the music associated with barbeques to reflect the consumer’s ability to forget the details of how chickens are actually processed in favor of the joy of consuming the final product. The film goes through painstaking efforts to confront us with the harsh realities of the life and death of the chicken, but the way Blank shoots the final scene in full close up of the sizzling racks of savory chicken makes us forget the earlier, more grotesque shots of disembowelment and evisceration. We, as consumers, are guilty of the same short memory as the people seen eating at the end of the film. And as educated viewers, we are fully aware of the manner in which the chickens were raised and killed, but can’t help but salivate along with the picnickers as they bite into the chicken. The music, as pleasing and beautiful as it is, becomes an underlying critique of the soothing mental factors that aid the consumer’s vain ability to forget how their food makes it to the their table. John Angelico, a film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, embodies my argument: “Despite shots of mechanized chicken evisceration and massive poultry operations, my stomach was thinking mm, mmm, good” (Angelico).

Calling this short film, which has a complete run time of 23 minutes, simply a sponsored film, and only acknowledging the characteristics delineated by Prelinger, is a discredit to the personal influence that Blank has throughout the entire piece, and this film’s ability to stand out explains its recent restoration by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as well as its appearances in many worldwide film festivals. At an Academy event on July 30, 2013, Chicken Real played to a sold out house alongside the other Blank shorts Running around Like a Chicken with its Head Cut Off (1960), Christopher Tree (1968), and Spend it All (1971), and was received exceptionally well by the audience.¹ Scenes where Blank uses time lapse to turn shelves of eggs into bustling boxes of chicks and a processing machine that flings the chicken carcasses into a vat of hot water were specific crowd favorites. In 1995, Chicken Real was included in a ten film Les Blank retrospective at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and the official description of Chicken Real from the website also mentions its industrial background and odd nature: “One of Blank’s industrial films, which follows a Holly Farms ‘broiler’ from factory incubation right to the barbecue pit at a county fair. Hilarious, disturbing but, ultimately, just plain surreal” (SFFS.org).

Blank’s film clearly goes above and beyond Prelinger’s criteria when it comes to the manners that a filmmaker can portray a given sponsored subject matter. Yes, Holly Farms sponsored Blank’s film and his narrator does speak with the industrial tone used to describe the chicken factory’s workings, but the directorial techniques, specifically ironic close up and the use of a specific soundtrack, allows a subtle space for a personal point of view and expression. Using those ironic techniques, Blank calls on his viewer to realize the ridiculousness of the chicken industry and to look beyond the usual depiction of industrial processes that they were accustomed to, and because of its unique characteristics, Chicken Real has become a stand out in the sponsored film genre that is well appreciated and recognized on the film festival circuit.