cities in prose and justice on celluloid
Because although I've been to busy to blog, I'm still reading, and watching:
I've been thinking about cities, and how we experience and describe them, a great deal these days. So read thariel's "Berlin fragments," which bring together Libeskind's architecture at the Holocaust museum, a joyful climber illicitly scaling the Reichstag, an artists' squat with an ancient helicopter outside: tales of the "quintissential postmodern city, city of the fragment."
And Teju's been at it again, with a long stream of extraordinary posts that I still intend to go back and comment belatedly upon: here's a poem (cities again) and the story of a song, the kind that gets around.
Plus: a review of a book about London, "a city that forgets; a city of the forgotten," from its Times.
Finally, my subway reading this week is Mark Mazower's masterful Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews 1430-1950, a history that's both respectably erudite and complusively readable. For anyone transfixed by the stories of the great polyglot bastard cities of the Ottoman empire--İstanbul, Salonica, Smyrna, Aleppo, Damascus, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem--and their heartbreaking twentieth-century trajectories, this is a must-read (and not a very expensive one, since it's on sale at The Strand!) Excerpts shall be posted later.
On to films watched: I took several friends to screenings at the Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund Festival last week, and meant to write about it here ahead of time but forgot. The four-day festival at Film Forum was a retrospective of the ten-year history of the Fund, started by George Soros in 1996 and administered by the Open Society Institute until 2001, when it moved to the Sundance Institute. The Fund has provided finanical support to hundreds of filmmakers making documentaries about human rights and social justice issues. I'd already seen several of the films playing so I picked three (but most of these films are easily available on DVD, and I recommend them all to anyone interested in the genre).
Long Night's Journey Into Day is a searing collection of stories from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation commission, through which perpetrators and victims of apartheid's abuses voiced their stories in public amnesty hearings. The film is simply told--mostly by the families of those killed, and sometimes by their killers, and their families as well. The film doesn't present a trite or overly rosy view of the TRC, showing those who garner no relief or reconciliation from the process as well as those who find something I can only call redemption. The film isn't visually fussy; it lets the power of the images and interviews speak for themselves. At one point--a series of scenes baring the anguish of the mothers of the 'Guguletu 7' (teenagers from a township murdered by the security police)--I realised every single person in the small theatre was weeping, myself included. Afterwards, there was a very throughtful discussion of the TRC and other truth commissions and their pitfalls--that is, of the need to struggle for both truth, but also justice--with Aryeh Neier (former head of the ACLU and HRW, now president of OSI) and Paul van Zyl (former Executive Secretary of the TRC and now a Program Director at the International Center for Transitional Justice). The talk was apparently going to be podcast; if I can find it I'll link to it here.
More crying the next day, for Southern Comfort, a warm, funny, angry portrait of Robert Eads-- a FtM transgender man from Georgia who died of ovarian cancer, partly because twelve different doctors refused to treat him upon discovery of his transgender status. The film shows Eads--a fascinating, deeply charismatic person-- and Lola, the MtF woman with whom he's slowly falling in love, and their motley band of transgender and queer friends, as they come together for one last Southern Comfort (an annual convention of transgender people from the South). What makes the film so good is that (for the most part) it refuses to play up any "freak show" angle and lets these people tell their story--at root, the story of people who've never fit in before finding a place where they do, and building a tenuous and caring family from that discovery.
The last film we saw was not tearful--instead, it was unexpectedly, if bitterly, funny. Persons of Interest is about several Muslim men (mostly immigrants of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African background) detained without charge by the US government after 9/11. The men and/or their families appear in a blank, empty room, talking to and with the filmmakers behind the camera. The humor is a function of the setup--the eloquent rise and fall of a wife's eyebrows while her gregarious husband speaks, or the mischief wreaked onscreen by three young boys whose mother rolls her eyes at their antics--she's been left caring for them alone since her husband's deportation to Jordan. The reasons some of these men were targeted, moreover, are so simply ludicrous that it's all they--and we--can do to laugh. But at the film's end, the photos from a Ramadan iftar make clear the sadder punchline, as many of the subjects have since left the US in exasperated defeat, or suffered deportation to their countries of origin.
I've been thinking about cities, and how we experience and describe them, a great deal these days. So read thariel's "Berlin fragments," which bring together Libeskind's architecture at the Holocaust museum, a joyful climber illicitly scaling the Reichstag, an artists' squat with an ancient helicopter outside: tales of the "quintissential postmodern city, city of the fragment."
And Teju's been at it again, with a long stream of extraordinary posts that I still intend to go back and comment belatedly upon: here's a poem (cities again) and the story of a song, the kind that gets around.
Plus: a review of a book about London, "a city that forgets; a city of the forgotten," from its Times.
Finally, my subway reading this week is Mark Mazower's masterful Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews 1430-1950, a history that's both respectably erudite and complusively readable. For anyone transfixed by the stories of the great polyglot bastard cities of the Ottoman empire--İstanbul, Salonica, Smyrna, Aleppo, Damascus, Alexandria, Cairo, Jerusalem--and their heartbreaking twentieth-century trajectories, this is a must-read (and not a very expensive one, since it's on sale at The Strand!) Excerpts shall be posted later.
On to films watched: I took several friends to screenings at the Soros/Sundance Documentary Fund Festival last week, and meant to write about it here ahead of time but forgot. The four-day festival at Film Forum was a retrospective of the ten-year history of the Fund, started by George Soros in 1996 and administered by the Open Society Institute until 2001, when it moved to the Sundance Institute. The Fund has provided finanical support to hundreds of filmmakers making documentaries about human rights and social justice issues. I'd already seen several of the films playing so I picked three (but most of these films are easily available on DVD, and I recommend them all to anyone interested in the genre).
Long Night's Journey Into Day is a searing collection of stories from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation commission, through which perpetrators and victims of apartheid's abuses voiced their stories in public amnesty hearings. The film is simply told--mostly by the families of those killed, and sometimes by their killers, and their families as well. The film doesn't present a trite or overly rosy view of the TRC, showing those who garner no relief or reconciliation from the process as well as those who find something I can only call redemption. The film isn't visually fussy; it lets the power of the images and interviews speak for themselves. At one point--a series of scenes baring the anguish of the mothers of the 'Guguletu 7' (teenagers from a township murdered by the security police)--I realised every single person in the small theatre was weeping, myself included. Afterwards, there was a very throughtful discussion of the TRC and other truth commissions and their pitfalls--that is, of the need to struggle for both truth, but also justice--with Aryeh Neier (former head of the ACLU and HRW, now president of OSI) and Paul van Zyl (former Executive Secretary of the TRC and now a Program Director at the International Center for Transitional Justice). The talk was apparently going to be podcast; if I can find it I'll link to it here.
More crying the next day, for Southern Comfort, a warm, funny, angry portrait of Robert Eads-- a FtM transgender man from Georgia who died of ovarian cancer, partly because twelve different doctors refused to treat him upon discovery of his transgender status. The film shows Eads--a fascinating, deeply charismatic person-- and Lola, the MtF woman with whom he's slowly falling in love, and their motley band of transgender and queer friends, as they come together for one last Southern Comfort (an annual convention of transgender people from the South). What makes the film so good is that (for the most part) it refuses to play up any "freak show" angle and lets these people tell their story--at root, the story of people who've never fit in before finding a place where they do, and building a tenuous and caring family from that discovery.
The last film we saw was not tearful--instead, it was unexpectedly, if bitterly, funny. Persons of Interest is about several Muslim men (mostly immigrants of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African background) detained without charge by the US government after 9/11. The men and/or their families appear in a blank, empty room, talking to and with the filmmakers behind the camera. The humor is a function of the setup--the eloquent rise and fall of a wife's eyebrows while her gregarious husband speaks, or the mischief wreaked onscreen by three young boys whose mother rolls her eyes at their antics--she's been left caring for them alone since her husband's deportation to Jordan. The reasons some of these men were targeted, moreover, are so simply ludicrous that it's all they--and we--can do to laugh. But at the film's end, the photos from a Ramadan iftar make clear the sadder punchline, as many of the subjects have since left the US in exasperated defeat, or suffered deportation to their countries of origin.
posted by kitabet at 5:57 PM
1 Comments:
re: 'persons of interest'
good premise, terrible execution.
the attempt of the filmmakers to perhaps exert a kind of creative license by framing the people in weird set-ups was ludicrous (there was no cinematic and, most importantly, narrative value in having family members stand in the background looking like misplaced wallpaper while the protagonist speaks).
failing to craft a coherent narrative by relying on nothing but talking heads is just plain lazy.
an excellent story is always character-driven but film, being the audio-visual medium that it is, provides more room to play with. each shot, each cam movement, each cut, must mean something individually and collectively. 'persons of interest' simply failed to do that. half of the time, i don't even know who was speaking as they are not properly introduced and their stories not dissected enough for me to completely empathize and sympathize.
what happened to them is glossed over too quickly. too much of the story is missing. the way it was, it was simply anecdotal and doesn't go far enough.
a sad story is just isn't enough.
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