Film for Thought

Political Corruption, the American Way

Jesse Ashlock — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:44:00 PDT

Gadfly documentarian Alex Gibney continues to crusade against abuses of power with his new film about fallen superlobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Alex Gibney has been called a moralist, but it’s unlikely anybody would be calling him anything if he didn’t also have a knack for a rip-roaring story. The 56-year-old documentary filmmaker has long been fascinated by abuses of power, and what those abuses say about us as a society. But he also loves a good yarn—preferably one that features a spectacular rise followed by an equally spectacular, Icarus-like fall. These twin predilections often draw him to evildoers. Esquire recently called him a “biographer of bad guys,” a characterization Gibney says he doesn’t mind. “I’m more interested in the perps than the victims,” he admits, sitting in a cheerful, light-drenched office on the far west side of Manhattan, which seems curiously at odds with the shadowy netherworlds his films explore.

Gibney’s interest in perps has led to Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, which explores the consequences of the Defense Department's revised torture policy. He also has an upcoming, untitled project about New York’s former “Luv Guv” Eliot Spitzer, which screened as a work in progress at the Tribeca Film Festival. These urgent, topical documentaries are presented almost like thrillers, full of plot twists, zany peripheral characters, and loaded musical interludes. Each charts how powerful men can get away with murder (sometimes literally) with an often playful subtext that seems to say, “Can you fucking be-lieve these guys?”

These qualities are also present in Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Gibney’s new film which just opened in theaters. (GOOD founder Ben Goldhirsh is an executive producer on the film.) It explores the career of superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who went to jail in 2006 for corruption of public officials and defrauding Indian tribes of millions of dollars. But there’s so much more to the Abramoff story, it turns out—including alleged connections to an apparent mob hit and secret Chinese sweatshops on a paradisical island in the western Pacific.

Gibney devotes ample time to Abramoff's earlier years, specifically his tenure as Chairman of the College Republicans at the beginning of the Reagan revolution. There, Abramoff met fellow free-market extremists Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, with whom he forged lucrative lifelong relationships rooted in shared a belief that the market should regulate government, not the other way around. When Abramoff became a lobbyist after the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress made pay-to-play politics the norm, both would benefit enormously.

Abramoff declined to participate in the film; according to Gibney, he reneged under pressure from the Department of Justice. But as Casino Jack tracks Abramoff’s efforts to direct money between Capitol Hill, Indian casinos in the South, the American commonwealth of the Marianas Islands in the western Pacific, and his own bank account, a consensus portrait emerges of a brilliant huckster and propagandist who is uniquely adept at speaking out of both sides of his mouth—and who is ultimately done in by his own hubris. He is such a classic American charater, says Gibney, that “it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a musical about Jack Abramoff in a few years. It would be a great musical!”

Gibney brightens when I suggest that Abramoff’s character arc is like something out of Fitzgerald. “My favorite American novel is Gatsby,” he says. “It’s about how great we are, and how horrible we are, all at the same time. Gatsby takes the fall—he was a gangster, we can’t forget that—but he takes the fall, and the really evil people, like Tom Buchanan, get away with it.”

In other words, Abramoff may be a perp, but the question Gibney wants us to ponder is is this: Is Abramoff a villain? Is he even really that different from the rest of us? “I’m fascinated with the American dream,” Gibney says. “Both because of its sense of possibility, but also because when people climb the ladder, they make sure to kick the faces of everyone who tries to climb the ladder after them. There’s a sense that we’re willing to let people act like gangsters because we think maybe we’ll get there too some day.”

Gibney thinks that’s why there wasn’t more outcry over the system of legal bribery that Abramoff so expertly exploited. It’s too easy to just brand Abramoff a crook, Gibney says, and ignore ignore the larger, systemic problems: “Jack is a zealot. That means you have to look not only at the messianic figure, but also the religion. And what was the religion that Jack was promoting? The law of the jungle.”

And the jungle is getting even wilder, thanks to the Supreme Court’s January decision that campaign-finance limits violate free speech. Like President Obama, Gibney believes that this will make politicians more vulnerable than ever to extortion by corporate interests. Forget about free speech—what’s being protected is the free market, with politicians as commodities to be bought and sold. It’s everything Abramoff and his fellow Young Republicans could have hoped for a generation ago, and Gibney thinks it has America headed for catastrophe.

“I don’t want to make films that are like slot machines—you put in your money and you get back some predictable policy prescription. But in this particular case, if you don’t come out thinking we’ve got a problem and we’ve gotta fix it, then something’s wrong.”

The Tribeca Film Festival Is a Community Affair

Jesse Ashlock — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:30:00 PDT

The Lower Manhattan festival founded in the wake of September 11 makes a point of exploring neighborhoods both near and far.

Let me begin with the requisite disclosure: I was an employee of the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007 and early 2008. And at that time, the festival was evolving in response to a wide array of criticisms. It had grown too large too fast, observers said, and it lacked clear focus or a physical center. It didn’t have enough entry points for the average New York filmgoer.

There was truth to those claims, but the festival’s unruliness sprang from the best of intentions. Unlike the New York Film Festival, its snootier older cousin uptown, Tribeca sought from the get-go to have an “inclusive, populist nature,” says director of programming David Kwok, who has been with the festival since its inception. “We’re an international city and an international film festival, and we have a range of films that serve the multitude of tastes in New York.”

That was true then and it’s true of this year’s festival, running April 21 through May 2—which explains why Tribeca can include both Shrek Forever After in 3D (its opening night screening) and Earth Made of Glass, a searing documentary about the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.

But Tribeca’s tagline used to be “It’s movies. It’s New York.” Now it’s “Here Comes the Neighborhood.” The programmers have reined in the chaos, reducing the slate to a relatively manageable 85 features, a little over half the number the festival was showing at its mid-decade peak. At the same time, Tribeca has aggressively broadened access the festival—most notably with new distribution initiatives TFF Virtual and Tribeca Film, which offer select content via streaming video and cable on demand. Those moves are consistent with Tribeca’s continuing emphasis on spotlighting communities and, in particular, the Lower Manhattan community the festival was founded to serve. “It’s still connected at its heart and core to 9/11 and New York City,” says Kwok. “So no matter what we do, it’s going to have that vibe.”

Undoubtedly, the film in this year’s festival that most exemplifes the 9/11-and-New York vibe is My Trip to Al-Qaeda. It’s an adaptation of New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s one-man play of the same title that documents his experience of writing The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller about the history of Al-Quaeda, and his accompanying struggle not to let private emotions overtake journalistic objectivity. The film is one of three contributions to this year’s festival by gadfly documentarian Alex Gibney, who connected the festival’s values with September 11th at this year’s opening press conference, saying: “The antidote to terror and tyranny is a vital culture.” Gibney is also presenting an as-of-yet-untitled work in progress about the downfall of Eliot Spitzer (“No place could be better for that film than this festival,” he said) and is one of six A-list doc directors to contribute to this year’s closing-night film, Freakonomics, an adaptation of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s book.

Gibney, whose Oscar winner Taxi to the Dark Side had its premiere at the 2007 festival, is one of the more prominent members of a community of filmmakers which Tribeca has consciously sought to cultivate (others include romantic dramedy filmmaker Ed Burns, as well as Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, who shocked audiences in 2007 with their Darfur documentary The Devil Came on Horseback and return this year with Joan Rivers—A Piece of Work.)

As always, community is the subject, explicitly or not, of many of the other films in this year’s festival—particularly an ample selection of documentaries. “It’s just part of the fabric of so many documentaries,” says senior programmer Genna Terranova, adding, “I think they draw attention to stories that need to be told, which you won’t see on the evening news.” She points to films like Budrus, about a small village that is a flashpoint in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and domestic docs like Sons of Perdition, which is a kind of real life Big Love that examines what happens to the sons of a polygamist community. Then there is Buried Land, one of a surprising number of documentary-fiction hybrids in this year’s festival, which examines the question of Bosnian identity after the war.

As Tribeca looks ahead to its 10th anniversary next year, its approach appears to be as clear as it’s ever been: To bring people to the festival, it needs to be the people’s festival. “We’re sticking to our core," Terranova says, "while being mindful of where everything is going in the world."

Can Animation Help Stop Climate Change?

Jesse Ashlock — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:00:17 PDT

British filmmaker Simon Robson has assembled a crack international team of animators to make a collaborative, web-based film that advocates for collective online action as a way to solve the climate crisis.

The British animator Simon Robson, who works under the nom de filme Knife Party, specializes in what he calls "issue animation"-short-form polemics and parables that marry the perspectives of thinkers he admires, like Naomi Klein and George Mombiot, with evocative moving imagery. He came to the approach early in the last decade, after several years of developing his animation skills on behalf of big corporations with ethical credentials he found problematic ("including, to my eternal shame, some cigarette brands," he says). After listening to a neighbor named Barry McNamara-"a firebrand blessed with a really great speaking voice"-expatiate on the recent U.S. invasion of Iraq, Robson, who was also upset about the war, created the 2004 visual essay "What Barry Says," which sets a McNamara tirade about the Project for the New American Century and "war corporatism" to propulsive motion graphics that illustrate and expand on the narrator's talking points.

Robson's latest project, "Coalition of the Willing," started in a similar way. In 2008, his wife introduced him to Australian philosopher Tim Rayner, whose Philosophy of Change class she took during a short stay in Sydney. "My wife gets the full brunt of my ranting," Robson says. "She was trying to find someone else for me to rant with." After ranting back and forth a bit, the two men struck upon the idea of a project about climate change, though they had different ideas about what that should mean. Neither had any faith in government to provide real solutions, but while Robson leaned toward a "What Barry Says"–style polemic about how government had failed its citizens, Rayner wanted to propose something more proactive and hopeful: a global online change network based on 1960s collective action, swarm politics, and open-source culture, which could empower people to take the reins in fighting global warming. Rayner's approach won out as the duo developed the script-although their disappointment at the outcome of last December's Copenhagen climate summit prompted them to add a preface critiquing government irresoluteness.

Well before Copenhagen, however, "A Coalition of the Willing" had already gone into production, with animation houses throughout the United States and Europe donating their time to create imagery to accompany each paragraph of the script. The decision to make "A Coalition of the Willing" a group project was partly practical, partly philosophical. Robson had begun filming a few sections with in-camera animation techniques he'd never used before, and quickly realized that it would take him years to shoot the whole script, which runs around 12 minutes, by himself. Besides, the underlying message of "A Coalition of the Willing" cried out for a coalition of willing filmmakers to tackle the project together.

So last April at F5, a creativity festival in New York City, the duo put out a call for collaborators. After culling the responses and seeking out other creators he specifically wanted to work with, Robson wound up involving more than 20 different groups in the project. The styles range from stop-motion animation using potatoes, melons, and cauliflowers by New York's Loyalkaspar (working under the name Betterment Bureau) to 3-D animation based on a live-action shoot by Portland's Decoy to impressionistic watercolor-style animation by Knife Party. Though Robson prohibited contributors from changing the script, little other direction was given. "It was about taking off the brakes and seeing what happened," he says, comparing the results to "PSST Pass It On," an ongoing collaborative filmmaking experiment modeled on the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, which was conceived a few years ago by "Coalition" contributor Bran Dougherty-Johnson. Unlike that project, however, no effort has been made to visually connect the different sections-"sometimes a clean cut is what you need," says Robson. Instead, the script is the connector, bringing together a wildly disparate set of individual aesthetics in the service of a common cause.

Viewers will be able to see the finished film in festivals, including this June's OFFF in Paris, and it's also slated to become a part of the global environmental network 350.org's activist toolkit. But "Coalition of the Willing"'s primary platform, now and in the future, will be its own website, where segments of the film have been appearing, in small clusters out of sequence, since early February. There's no rhyme or reason to the order of release-"what you see on the website is just what's ready now," Robson says-but the effect is that the viewer who checks back often gets to watch the assembly of a visual manifesto over time (or "a box of chocolates filling itself up," to use Robson's more poetic construction).

Of course, the script is posted online too, for anyone who wants the whole story. But the 1,364-word text is, as Robson is the first to admit, less a comprehensive action plan for fighting climate change than it is a passionate call to arms. "You'll always be able to get more detail from a written article, a Naomi Klein book or George Mombiot newspaper column," says Robson. His point, however, is that getting the whole story does not necessarily mean getting the whole picture-that pairing a rhetorical argument with visual poetry can produce unexpected results. "We can go further in evoking a response in the audience," he says. "We can pair provocative visual sequences with the spoken polemic. We can spend a long time thinking about the voice we want to deliver our message. We can play with witticisms that work between the visual and the spoken. We can offer a second level of meaning."

How China’s Big Quake Shook Out

Jesse Ashlock — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:00:50 PDT

A documentary surveying the aftermath of the catastrophic 2008 temblor in China's Sichuan province offers insight into the fates of Chile and Haiti.

Early on in the Chinese documentary 1428, a teenage boy is shown wandering through the debris-strewn hallway of an abandoned school. "Are you a student at this school?" the cameraman asks.

"No," the boy replies. "My younger brother is."

"How is your younger brother?"

There's a pause, then off-camera, the boy's mother says, "We haven't found him yet." Moments later the boy, his mother, and his father dissolve into tears after locating the missing child's belongings in the school dormitory.

The wrenching scene was filmed in the Sichuan province of central China, 10 days after the 8.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated the region in May of 2008, killing 70,000 and leaving nearly 15 million displaced; the missing boy was a student at one of the 7,000 schools said to have collapsed in the quake. Similar scenes have undoubtedly played out in Haiti and Chile during the last few months, and in light of those more recent catastrophes, 1428-which won Best Documentary at last year's Venice Film Festival and takes its name from moment time the earthquake struck, at 2:28 in the afternoon-offers a revealing look at how both citizens and government respond to humanitarian tragedies.

Director Du Haibin says he set out to document life as it was being lived in the wake of the earthquake, and by doing so, to create an antidote to the official account of events that was broadcast on China's state-controlled television. He makes his intentions clear at the outset, showing a Chinese propaganda film playing over a tent city populated by people displaced by the earthquake. A visiting government official brags about how much the government is doing for refugees, but from the footage it's hard to see what that really entails. There are meager rations of instant noodles, and soldiers in camouflage and surgical masks to police the damaged roads, but otherwise people are left to fend for themselves, scavenging steel scraps from fields of rubble and pigs from wrecked farms, complaining bitterly all the while about Premier Wen Jiabao's failure to visit the area and talk to survivors.

There are several other emotional moments like the one in the school, as when a woman weeps before a decimated Buddhist temple while helicopters buzz overhead, leading a wise onlooker to reflect, "Some people say the Buddha can protect people from disaster, but he can't protect himself." But there are many more mundane, weirdly quotidian moments of people cooking, clearing debris, trying to get from one place to another. The mundane and the emotional collide, early on, in a scene where two women matter-of-factly discuss their dead family members while vigorously washing clothes.

Midway through, 1428 jumps from 10 days after the earthquake to 210 days after. Now it's the middle of winter and the Lunar New Year is approaching. Rows of temporary houses, each with its own satellite dish, have been set up. There are some new roads, too, and the government has requisitioned farmland with the intention of building a cement factory in Sichuan province. But many people have slipped through the cracks and are still living in tents and shacks. Banners over the streets of Beichuan, the town where the earthquake hit hardest, claim that the residents there "are grateful to the mother country." But once they spot the camera, those very residents are eager to complain about the mother country. "If the leader is good, I'll praise him in front of everybody, but he didn't give me my share!" an elderly woman exclaims at an open-air market. Conspiracy theories abound: The government lied about the magnitude of the earthquake to keep out international aid workers, and later it relocated parents of children lost at Ying-xiu Primary School so they wouldn't cause a fuss during Wen's long-awaited visit to the province. Over and over, a man says, "The policies of the Communist Party are good, but they're not carried out for ordinary people."

When Wen does arrive, he's just a brief blur in a motorcade. The film concludes after the celebration of the Lunar New Year at a flea market that is almost a shrine to the disaster. In a small park nestled atop a cliff, vendors hock photographs and videos documenting the earthquake to tourists, who look through telescopes at the rubble of Beichuan below. "We have to live in reality, don't we?" asks one merchant, a high-school student who says he lost friends and relatives in the earthquake. "The dead are dead."

But the living are still alive, and they must endure with or without the help their government, which for all its might, looks more like hapless Haiti than competent Chile. (Though China has committed more than $200 billion to rebuilding Sichuan province, it most recently made news for jailing a lead investigator into the school collapses.) One way the living in China have been enduring is by making films like 1428, part of a growing body of independent, activist Chinese filmmaking that aims to distinguish the real China from the government-sanctioned version. Another film in this vein is Ghost Town, a three-hour-long documentary about a remote mountain village left behind by the country's new economy, which screened at last year's New York Film Festival and begins a one-week run at New York's Museum of Modern Art this week, followed by a brief national university tour. 1428, which had its U.S. premiere as part of MoMA's Documentary Fortnight last month, is currently booking American film festival and exhibition dates, with a DVD release to follow.

Neither of these films is going to come anywhere near your local multiplex, but it's not impossible to see them or other original, uncensored filims out of mainland China. Both 1428 and Ghost Town are distributed by dGenerate Films, a two-year-old New York–based company that releases independent Chinese films through educational DVDs, online video-on-demand, public screenings, TV, and other non-theatrical channels. While Google continues to struggle with the Chinese government, the country's contemporary culture keeps leaking out to the rest of the world in subtle yet significant ways.

Two Documentaries Ask: Who Really Lives in Middle America?

Jesse Ashlock — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:00:42 PST

This is the first entry in a new series exploring filmmaking for social good. Still frame above from October Country.

The films October Country and 45365 look at the people living in the middle of the country, not just the statistics and political punchlines they represent.

American politicians, our current President included, have long been fond of invoking the residents of the country's vast midsection to push their agendas. The national media is just as fond of fetishizing Middle America, especially since the onset of the recession, which has hit Middle American strongholds like Michigan and Ohio particularly hard. In these tellings, Middle Americans aren't actual people; instead, they're rhetorical constructs meant to communicate abstract ideas about pluck, generosity, and scrappy virtue.

So who really lives in Middle America? The new documentaries October Country and 45365 both seek to put a human face on this quasi-mystical land. Both are the work of native sons who returned home, and had unique access to their subjects. Both are portraits of places, made around the same time, which have gained unexpected resonance in light of the recession: October Country was shot in 2006 and 2007 and chronicles 12 months in the life of the Mohawk Valley region of New York State, while 45365, shot entirely in 2007, captures nine months in the life of Sidney, Ohio, a town about 40 miles north of Dayton. Both are authentic and intimate, eschewing narration and linear narrative in an effort to capture life as it's lived. And, despite all those similarities, they're completely different films, defying the idea of a single, monolithic Middle America.

October Country, which just began a national theatrical release, is the cinematic outgrowth of the writing and still photography Donal Mosher has done about his family for many years. With co-director Michael Palmieri, a veteran of commercials and music videos, Mosher visited his family four times over the course of a year, charting the disappointments, frustrations, and small triumphs of four generations of Moshers. He does not appear in the film, but his presence is implied by the on-screen comfort of his kin, who've clearly become inured to the camera after many years of having their pictures taken. Mosher and Palmieri gave the film the tag line "Every family has its ghosts," and in the year they document the Mosher clan, appropriately bookended by two Halloweens, they find plenty.

There are the ghosts that Don, a retired cop and the family patriarch, still carries from Vietnam, and the ones that his estranged sister Denise, a Wicca practitioner, tries to summon in cemeteries. Then there are the ghosts that torment Don's daughter Donna, and her daughter Daneal, which lead each generation of Mosher women to repeat a near-identical cycle of early pregancy, poverty, and abuse by men-a pattern from which the precocious 11-year-old Desi, Daneal's younger sister, hopes to break free. And there are the ghosts that follow Chris, a juvenile delinquent who Don and his wife Dottie have adopted, who repeatedly makes decisions that conflict with his own self-interest. The Moshers reflect on their trials and tribulations with a mix of gallows humor and surprising self-awareness.

Though the camera never strays far from the Moshers' kitchen table, the family's ghosts are clearly connected to the ghosts of the region-the same region, incidentally, where Spiritualism and seances first became popular in the mid-19th century. The only significant industry that remains in the Mohawk Valley today is a Remington firearms factory, whose continued operation represents a choice between "a thousand people's jobs and supporting the war, to make more guns, and we're caught in the middle," as Donna puts it. That point is hammered home on the Fourth of July. Townsfolk gather in the parking lot of the local Wal-Mart-"the only place we've got left to shop," Donna remarks ruefully-to watch fireworks, but Don can't cope with the bombs bursting in air, thanks to his PTSD.

The filmmakers say they got a ton of great interviews on that Fourth of July with other residents of the Mohawk Valley area, but ultimately chose to leave those scenes out. "The farther we got away from the inner dynamics of the family, the weaker the film got," Mosher explains. "The story demanded we stay close."

By contrast, in 45365, the Best Documentary winner at last year's South by Southwest film festival and part of the Museum of Modern Art's upcoming Documentary Fortnight, the broader community is the story. Directed by brothers Bill and Turner Ross, 45365 (which some have begun referring to as "the zip-code movie") presents a kaleidescopic view of the rhythms of small-town life, at once hallucinatory and banal. Using the broadcasts of the local radio station as a loose framing device, the film follows the air waves from the studio out into bars and barbershops, cop cars and courtrooms, visiting teenage football players roughhousing in a family den, and elderly ladies discussing the nuances of QVC in a nursing-home cafeteria.

Here too, people gather in a parking lot to watch fireworks and kids in costumes go door to door on Halloween. At times, the film offers hints of Norman Rockwell's idealized small-town America, particularly in the loving attention it pays to the high-school football team. But the cycles of despair chronicled by October Country surface here as well, as when a police officer on the night shift comments on how he started out his career arresting the parents, and now he's arresting their kids.

Even though one of 45365's main threads is a local judge's re-election campaign, the closest the film gets to a political statement is when one local, wearing a sweatshirt that says "Walking with God in Tough Times," declares, "I don't vote Democrat or Republican. I vote for the right person." Like October Country, the politics here are implicit, not stated-it's a portrait, not an "issue film." October Country co-director Palmieri could be speaking for either film when he says, "It's not ‘here are three things you can do.' It's more about bearing witness."

Jesse Ashlock is a writer living in Brooklyn.