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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
KIMBERLY REED, PRODIGAL SONS 


As a theme in Western art, sibling rivalry is as ancient as the Hebrew Bible or the internecine blood feud that shapes the destinies of two sisters in Sophocles’ Antigone. In her utterly absorbing family portrait Prodigal Sons, which won the FIPRESCI prize at the 2009 Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Kimberly Reed (“25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Summer 2007) revisits this archetype with honesty and courage, grappling with questions of identity as she details how life-changing transformations have affected her relationship with adopted brother Marc McKerrow, a soulful hard-luck character who has long felt he was living in her shadow. The wheels are set in motion with Reed’s decision to attend a high-school reunion in her hometown of Helena, Montana, with Marc, from whom she’s been estranged for over a decade. Then comes the first big reveal: Kim is transgender and used to be Paul, a popular, all-American high-school quarterback and model student, evidenced by a quick shuffle of old family photos and degraded home-video footage. Marc’s own transformation hinges on the head injury he suffered in a car accident on his 21st birthday, which has resulted in seizures, wild mood swings, and explosive outbursts that a cocktail of meds keeps only partly under wraps. As Reed (who narrates) tries to reconcile the past she’s labored so long to forget, Marc—a beautifully expressive, entirely self-taught pianist—decides to seek out his birth legacy and turns up a rather startling connection to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. Full of surprising revelations and agonized turnabouts, Reed's film is impressive as a personal document about self-definition and as a uniquely intimate tale of searching compassion.

Filmmaker spoke with Reed about past selves, gender transition, and the ethical challenge of representing family members on film.

Prodigal Sons opens Friday in New York City.

DIRECTOR KIMBERLY REED. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.

Filmmaker: I read that, initially, you wanted to make a film about your adopted brother Marc’s search for family ties. How far along were you in the filmmaking process before you became part of the story?

Reed: It was really from the outset that we were focusing on both stories. Probably the biggest turning point was me getting the nerve to go to my high school reunion. We actually knew who Marc’s grandparents were shortly before the reunion. So it all came together really quickly. But I think given our really complicated past, and the resentment and rivalry that was there, [with him] resenting this perfect guy from high school who no longer exists, it was clear there was a story about identity, mine and my brother’s. Which for me was very important. We were going to have a chance to start over. And I think a lot of family members can relate to that. We all grow up and leave home. And then you come back and have to figure out how you’re going to renegotiate your relationship with this place that remembers you one way, but you’re different.

Filmmaker: How did you introduce the idea to your family that you wanted to film them?

Reed: When I was young, I was always running around with a camera, and they were used to that. My dad built me a darkroom in the attic. He was an ophthalmologist and he was fascinated with these visual systems—still cameras and video cameras—and I was too. My dad was the first guy on the block with one of those massive VCRs. That’s where all the football video [in the film] comes from. So our family is used to cameras, which is not to say it was easy to adjust to the process. But I think they gave me a lot of leeway and trust and faith, and that’s immensely important and very courageous. The DP, John Keitel, was an important factor because he melted into the shooting well and could be unobtrusive, so that kind of started off the film on a pretty intimate basis. I think what a lot of people wonder about is my brother Marc and how he felt about it. And the thing you really have to understand about Marc is he wants his story told. He always has. The story gets really rocky along the way, and you have to ask yourself, as I did in many dark hours, is it okay to show this? Is it okay to show our family coming apart at the seams like this? And one of my strongest guiding lights during those dark hours was Marc, and knowing that if we focused on all this hardship, we would also find a much more poignant and beautiful love in my family.

Filmmaker: When you were editing together some of the more difficult moments, especially with Marc’s meltdowns, did you ever feel the need create a cushion of protection around him?

Reed: I think when you work in any art, especially nonfiction, there’s a big difference between reality and truth. If your job is to condense reality, whether it’s a magazine story or a documentary film, you’re never going to be able to present reality as it appeared right then in the same way that life happens to us. You have to make choices [about] what you think the truth of that scene is, that moment, that month you spent with your family. When you’re trying to represent people that you know and love so well, there’s a lot of conflict. But Marc’s someone I’m immensely close to and always have been. We were in the same grade, we had the same friends and rode to school together every morning. We were kind of twins, in a way.

Filmmaker: And this is one of the reasons he won’t let you let go of your past.

Reed: Exactly. Because in doing so, I’m taking part of his past. It was difficult for him and he’s still wrestling with it. For me to erase that past and take it away from him becomes a major theme in the film. As well as the debate about that, about who owns that past—is it mine or yours? If I want to forget this photo, can I make you forget that photo? So you’re absolutely right. I at least feel like I am constantly trying to cushion Marc from the world and protect him. He wanted me to go to Croatia for that reason, because I would help him figure out what gate the next flight was leaving from or how to order something from a menu. Despite all of these things that are different about us, I think he knew I would be there to help him through stuff that could be jarring or uncomfortable. So I think there is some of that going on but—and this is my whole philosophical rant about truth and reality—the guide for that is trying to let some of what goes on constantly in our family come through in the film. Sometimes that means showing the cracks in Marc. And it means showing the cracks in me too.

Filmmaker: It seems the process of making this film was one of self-discovery for you as well.

Reed: Absolutely. The film becomes almost this archaeological record of me becoming more comfortable documenting my past. [Laughs] It’s full of me being uncomfortable with these images, and so much of the plot turns on that. What I really like is that one all-important image—the tuxedoes, right? The first time you see it, it upsets me. It actually inspired a very beautiful, kind of philosophical response from Marc, where he says, “I don’t know about you, but the truth is the truth.” For me, the film is very much about that delta, between where I was when that first happened and was uncomfortable, versus where the film [closes], basically presenting this image unabashedly and saying okay, this is where we can end up.

Filmmaker: When you went to your high school reunion, were you surprised by how accepting your former classmates were of your new identity?

Reed: I was, yeah. I was expecting some bumps in the road. You know, so much of that stuff is what you bring to it, and I was bringing a lot of anxiety and nervousness. And it was just fine. [Laughs] It’s such an interesting lesson, too. Early on, I had to drop the bomb and tell people, Guess what? This is where I’m heading, this other gender. And then for a while, I had to drop the bomb where I’d say, Guess who I used to be? Hopefully I learned a lot from that. Because if you walk into that all messed up, apologetic for who you are and guilty and full of shame, of course people are going to respond like this is a horrible mess you got them into. How you approach things has so much to do with what the outcome is. I was walking into with a bit of anxiety, but at the same time, a lot of that had been diffused a few years earlier when all of a sudden, boom, my father dies, and I was back in my hometown.

Filmmaker: You spoke in the film about the tortuous phase in your life when you took the field every week in football gear, and how this went against the grain of who you felt you were. But did you ever experience a sense of satisfaction at the sports you practiced in your youth? Because you didn’t just go through the motions as a quarterback, you actually excelled at it.

Reed: You know, I didn’t. And I think that’s pretty sad. If it was something I really loved, it would have been more rewarding. We had a beautiful interview with [high school friend] Tim where he was talking about football when we were young and how we kind of sucked, actually. [Laughs] He said football is so much fun, even when you’re losing, and then he moved on to something else. And that just floored me. I didn’t get it. I was like, You mean you were having fun all of those years? That’s really not a word that I associate with what we were doing out there. For me, it was some kind of testing ground. Or a way to prove to other people and hopefully yourself that this is who you are. If I’d been having fun, it would have been rewarding in the way it was for Tim. But for me, I’d just move on and think about the next thing.

Filmmaker: At what point did you realize that changing your gender was an option for you, a life choice you could make?

Reed: It’s been there for as long as I can remember, as this unnamed weird thing about me. It was, like, how can I repress this or keep people from finding about this horrible thing? But when I realized it was a choice and I could kind of wrap my head around it was when I was 6 or 7, maybe. Renée Richards was on the Today show or something. It was like, whoa, that’s it—now I get it. Then imagine trying to find as much information as you can about transvestism, as it was called at the time, or transsexualism, in the Helena public library, which had several books on [the subject]. I read all of them cover to cover like nine times. There was no Internet, and I would pull the books out and hide them behind other, bigger magazines so no one would see what I was reading. So it was tough to put a name to it and not attach a lot of embarrassment and shame. That’s why you have to come out and make films about it. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: As a creative person, you have to be faithful to your own vision, to art and self-expression. Did you also feel a responsibility to the LGBT community when you were making Prodigal Sons?

Reed: My way of dealing with that is not to think about it and just try to tell a story that anyone can relate to, because that’s how acceptance happens. That’s how the film is structured. You enter into the point of view of somebody whose position you probably haven’t considered or thought about. And to me, there’s something very powerful about letting people forget that they are seeing the world through the eyes of somebody they never thought they would see the world through. That’s where compassion comes from. That’s going to make the point more than any kind of hard sell or wagging your finger and saying, Now, be nice to transgendered people because they’re just like you!

Filmmaker: Is Orson Welles’s longtime partner Oja Kodar still in touch with Marc or your family?

Reed: Oja is as lovely as she appears in the film. And she really tried, and still tries, to stay in touch. But [the family] didn’t reciprocate all that much. There’s a line of voiceover in the film that says, “Marc seemed to forget about Orson Welles.” And there are a number of reasons for that. It was not an easy journey for him to go on. He was more interested in trying to figure out, Where does my piano ability come from? Where do my varicose veins come from? Am I going to lose my hair? Very practical, very basic stuff.

Filmmaker: It was a nice touch to use his piano music in the film. His playing is so naturally poignant.

Reed: I remember him getting upset when he was younger, and he used to go play the piano. I used to think of it as a lullaby he’d sing to himself, and I think it still functions that way. You know, Marc is a very complicated character. As a filmmaker, how can you not use this unadulterated expression that’s pouring out of him? It really lets you tap into him, it really lets you feel him.

Filmmaker: You went into publishing after studying cinema at San Francisco State University. What gave you the confidence and desire to move directly into filmmaking after you’d moved to New York?

Reed: Basically, I went to film in San Francisco in the early nineties and everybody was talking about this crazy idea of editing a film on your computer. I was in the right place at the right time and on the cutting edge of that, doing some of the early multimedia stuff. I had amassed this specialized knowledge about it at the time I was transitioning. So it worked out very well for me, being a recent film-school graduate trying to freelance as an editor. It’s hard enough to do that, but I was trying to do it with two different client bases, one as male, one as female. [Laughs] And it’s expensive to transition—you need health care, everything you spend is going toward [it]. I basically found this career in publishing that let me use this knowledge that not a lot of people were doing at the time and apply that in a group comprised of a totally different set of people. Moving to New York wasn’t really the kicker, because I’d transitioned in San Francisco. What’s really behind me coming out was just this sneaking suspicion about what did I leave behind? A big part of that is, I’m from Montana, and we’re pretty proud of our state. My great-grandparents homesteaded at the farm you see in the film. So kind of feeling banished or exiled, whether or not it was self-imposed, was this growing feeling. I was trying to work it out in narrative form; I was confronting whether or not I could talk about this stuff myself. But frankly, unless my father had died, I don’t know how long it would have taken me.

Filmmaker: You made a conscious choice not to dwell on the specifics of transitioning in this film. Why is that?

Reed: I think other people have made films that focus on that stage. There aren’t as many films that focus on what happens after, especially ten years after, when nobody really knows [about it]. And who are you then? I thought it was more important to tell that story.

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# posted by Damon Smith @ 2/24/2010 08:03:00 AM Comments (0)
Monday, February 22, 2010
JACQUES AUDIARD AND TAHAR RAHIM, A PROPHET 



A often stunning and certainly never less than riveting meditation on the coming of age of an Arab/Corsican criminal in the unforgiving French penal system, Jacques Audiard's A Prophet is that rare bird that feels utterly at home as an art house blockbuster (its pedigree includes the Grand Prix in Cannes, multiple European Film Awards and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film) and as a potential crossover hit. It follows a young prisoner named Malik (a terrific Tahar Rahim), who enters jail as little more than a homeless petty thief, but after being taken under the wing of a ruthless Corisican gangster (Neils Aerup), slowly builds an empire of his own. While drawing comparisons to classics of the genre such as Goodfellas, it is an expertly observed, deeply humane piece of crime cinema than has few antecedents.

The fifty-eight year old Audiard, who's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, a touchingly sincere remake of James Toback's Fingers, was a success in Europe and on these shores, has quickly joined the ranks of France's most acclaimed directors. We caught up with him and Rahim at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where A Prophet made its final fest circuit victory lap before opening in the states later this month.


WRITER-DIRECTOR JACQUES AUDIARD.




Filmmaker: When did you come across the material that became A Prophet? What drew you to it?

Audiard: We got a script from a producer friend of ours in the beginning, by Nicholas Peufaillit. It took place somewhere else, somewhere different, with people I didn't know. I didn't know anything prisons, about Arabs, about Blacks. So I was interested in it.

Filmmaker: This is not the typical circumstance that French cinema spends much time in.

Audiard: typical circumstance in which way?

Filmmaker: At least in America, we don't often associate French cinema with crime dramas, with depictions of minorities or prisons.

Audiard: It's true, but its odd in a way. It was only after the fact, after writing the script, that we realized, "we don't make movies about prisons in France". It was really kind of innocent in a way. How strange, we've been working on this topic that doesn't interest anyone else, no one pays attention to this. Its all the more surprising because in France we have a lot of problems with prisons.

Filmmaker: What kind of research did you do?

Audiard: I saw a few documentaries. When went to some prisons to see them for ourselves. So I went out fact finding for myself, but only to a certain extent. I didn't want to take it too far because I didn't want to make a documentary.

Filmmaker: Did you go with him?

Rahim: No.

Filmmaker: What preparation did you do?

Rahim: I prepared in my own way. I did my research. I was trying to find a way to create this character as it was originally written, but we ultimately had to change everything. I had to stop that process. It was still very helpful in creating somebody new, this virgin character who goes to prison and then a lot of questions… its very strange really. When I started feeling more free it all made sense, it became more clear.

Filmmaker: You play a character who's haunted by what he has to do to survive. You're literally haunted. You rarely see that kind of magic realism and visual audacity in this kind of filmmaking. How does that device tie into what you want to audience to get out of the film.

Audiard: It was a solution to a problem with the script. We realized the character was limited, we were unhappy with it. The character was just a little, hardened, young, criminal, a businessman, a dealer. it was too narrow a concept. What was missing was his inner life. We could have explored his inner life by letting Malik have a friendship with another inmate, but we didn't think that brought much drama to the narrative. So that where we got the idea of the ghost. If the ghost of the person he murdered came and spent this time with him, it shows Malik's inner life in an impressive way and at the very least conveys that this person has a sense of guilt.

Filmmaker: What of the relationship between Neils Aerup's character Cesare and Malik? It has a paternal quality. Yet he's such a hardened criminal, he's never able to develop real affection.

Audiard: I never saw it that way. I always saw it as a master/slave relationship. That how we addressed it. The relationship between Cesare and Malik could only exist to a certain point in time. Eventually Cesare would have gotten rid of Malik, because he knew too much, had to much power, or he felt threatened by him. Or the other way around.

Filmmaker: Yet you set up for the audience a dynamic where you want Cesare to embrace Malik in a way he seems incapable of. Yet, by then end of the film, we sense that Malik, now having the power Cesare once had, may have learned from that experience and have relationships in a way Cesare is not. Are we to read genuine growth into the ending?

Audiard: This is where the title comes into play, A Prophet. I think he could be the prototype for a new kind of person. Someone who could have an almost virtuous relationship with evil, which of course is a paradoxical thing to say. He can be capable of both. Malik is a criminal who doesn't like criminals. He's often called upon to be violent, but he doesn't like violence. He has a very unique relationship with money and power. For me, the most important thing as a director and screenwriter was, the end wasn't business. Business was behind him in the other cars. What was in the foreground was the promise of a new future with this woman and this child.

Filmmaker: How did you approach playing a character that's not fully Arab and not fully Corsican, not fully Muslim and not fully French?

Rahim: There's an easier way to look at it. He's a homeless person. What does it mean to be on the streets, what does it mean to be homeless.

Filmmaker: His most unique and interesting dramatic situation is that he can't identify with anyone.

Audiard: That's why he's A Prophet. He amasses this knowledge, forges this intelligence and it's a knowledge of the world around him that can't be restricted or identified with any of those identities. In the end he seems to identify more with the Muslim community. Nevertheless, I think his position will always be one of withdrawal, there will always be a distance between him and these groups. It's not one of disdain. It's simply that if I take this entire culture, its not something I'll give 100% of myself too. It's not so much a choice of identities and allegiances as it is of circumstances.

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# posted by Brandon Harris @ 2/22/2010 11:24:00 AM Comments (0)
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
ERIK GANDINI, VIDEOCRACY 


Television has been blamed for the dumbing down of the American public since the ascendance of the boob tube in the 1950s. But in Italy, where scandal-plagued prime minister Silvio Berlusconi controls the flow of information through his monopolistic holdings in that nation’s biggest media conglomerates, there is a more insidious aspect to the chronic press muzzling at RAI and trashy tits-and-ass programming that predominate on his Mediaset channels. If you want to get a sense of how the billionaire entrepreneur’s televisual imagination has transformed the political and mass-media landscape in Italy, Erik Gandini’s cunningly choreographed documentary Videocracy provides plenty of food for thought, taking a gimlet-eyed view of the Berlusconi phenomenon. But instead of stampeding into this tangle of cultural conflict with rhetorical guns a-blazing, Gandini, an Italian-born filmmaker based in Sweden (Gitmo: The New Rules of War), adopts a far subtler, more intriguingly first-person approach.

The film, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival, opens with grainy, black-and-white footage of a popular, late-night cable-access quiz show Berlusconi produced in the '70s, in which slinky housewives disrobed every time a call-in contestant answered a softball question correctly. This montage melds into the present day, when thousands of young women aspire to be veline: silent, scantily clad Vanna White–type showgirls who populate the airwaves, often becoming the wives of footballers or assistants to heads of state. Narrating in English with a voice that’s part spook-house docent, part Grand Inquisitor, Gandini burrows into the sleazy superficiality of this celeb-obsessed, gossip-fueled playworld by profiling four of its most embedded denizens: white-clad, Mussolini-adoring TV agent Lele Mora, who lives in a luxurious villa surrounded by all the young talent he's cultivated; Fabio, manager of a TV control room ("the secret aquarium") where an Italian version of Big Brother is produced; Fabrizio Corona, a rogue paparazzi-turned-felon, now a huge celebrity himself in Italy; and Ricky, a Bergamo factory worker obsessed with landing a spot on television as a Jean-Claude Van Damme-meets-Ricky Martin star performer. Then there's Berlusconi himself, gloating at press conferences and flashing a million-dollar smile that never seems to end. Gandini's film is provocative (the trailer was banned from RAI state-owned television) but coolly personal, too, an exile's view of a national culture's puzzling decline.

Filmmaker spoke with Gandini about Berlusconismo, the society of spectacle, and why people with no ideology are scarier than dictators.

Videocracy opens Friday at the IFC Center in New York City.

DIRECTOR ERIK GANDINI. COURTESY LORBER FILMS.

Filmmaker: You moved to Sweden from Italy to study filmmaking. Did you have an interest in documentary from an early age or did it spark after you landed there?

Gandini: My mother is Swedish. It was a tradition at home that we should go to Sweden to learn the language and it was also a great reason for leaving Bergamo, a very small town, very provincial. In the ’80s, Italy was really under the boom of Berlusconi television. When I came to Sweden, the situation was bizarre because there was no commercial television until ’89 or ’90, so it was like going back ten years. And Swedish TV had this very strong tradition of documentary which the school I went to was following big time. There was a huge enthusiasm about it. I remember a couple of months after I came to Sweden, they were showing Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah on prime time television. Coming from Italy, it was like science fiction. So yes, it was encountering a whole way of working that for me was very inspiring.

Filmmaker: You mention in your director’s note that your exposure to the cultural climate in Sweden made an impact, and that you were drawn in part to a genre that is regarded there as a cinematic artform, “creative documentary.” Can you explain what that means to you?

Gandini: I like the idea that docs really are not a neutral portrayal of reality. That’s such an old idea. When I was going to film school, we were taught “take off your questions, never manipulate with music” or whatever. I remember when I saw Let’s Get Lost, the Bruce Weber movie; it was so personal, and that was exactly what inspired me, the idea that documentary is really a subjective view. Then of course you have the political Michael Moore genre that is very explicit. All that for me has been a very welcome tendency that also underlines the fact that documentary is probably the freest, cheapest way for a person to express themselves cinematically.

Filmmaker: And giving up the pretense to objectivity must be part of that sense of freedom.

Gandini: Yeah, I like not knowing exactly what your film is going to be in the end, because the scriptwriting for me is the editing. If you work with television only, you will pressure yourself to guarantee how the drama and the plot will develop. It’s the opposite of what I’m looking for. Even aesthetically, I like the idea that you can show reality as it feels, more than as it is. And this opens up a huge range of storytelling options, even aesthetically and musically, for film language.

Filmmaker: The most obvious form that a film about the Berlusconi media empire could have taken would have been an exposé. Your approach in Videocracy is much more personal, and also, I felt, almost mournful. There’s something elegiac about your tone here.

Gandini: It’s a choice, of course. I am not Michael Moore. I’m not very confrontational. I’m more of an observer. It was really inspiring for me to be among these people who are very different from me and my friends, [who have] different values. They made me understand the whole logic, the whole system of values of what I call "Berlusconismo." For instance, I don’t think Lele Mora’s really a fascist, it’s more like [he has] a lack of ideology, which is scarier to me. In Italy, there is a tradition among the left of criticizing and attacking Berlusconi in a way that has become predictable and even boring. People are tired of that. Oh, the conflict of interest! Ironically, [when it comes to] talking rhetoric and good arguments, he wins all the time, because he’s a TV guy. He makes his point in a much more emotional way, through images and feelings. For example, he always presents himself as a martyr, as a victim, which is incredible because he is the man with the highest privileges in this country. When he was hit in the face a couple of months ago, that was the best Christmas present because he had been struggling for some time to really look like a martyr but now he really was, with blood on his face.

Filmmaker: Let’s talk about this idea in the film about the flow of images and the flow of power. On one hand, there’s the force of Berlusconi’s personality literally channeling itself to a viewing public, and on the other side there’s the shaping of a mass sensibility and the dreams of everyday people, like Ricky and the girls who want to be veline. I’m interested in how you arrived at that concept as the driving force for what you wanted to accomplish here.

Gandini: If you ask Ricky who has power, I don’t think he would say politicians, he would say the VIPs, the celebrities. In the same way, there’s a great tension in Italy now, it’s like a war being fought in the arena of television and pictures and gossip magazines. There’s a number of stories, like this prostitute who Berlusconi had an affair with recently. She recorded everything on her mobile phone and even took pictures of the toilet inside [his house]. You have a feeling that a character like Ricky wants to get inside television, he wants to empower himself that way. Berlusconi made his power on television, and it’s the only country where TV and politics are so enmeshed—in that sense he’s an icon now—so if you live in Italy, the word “television” has different connotations.

Filmmaker: Fabrizio Corona, the self-fashioned rebel paparazzi, identifies with Scarface and has empowered himself in a completely different way.

Gandini: The reason why Corona could promote himself as a rebel is because of what he said when he came out of prison: “Look, all these people smiling on your TV set, they have the power, so I take this camera and I get something back from them. I extort money from them.” And that’s his definition of a modern Robin Hood. So he became in the eyes of these people a rebel. And he’s not a rebel at all. As you see in the film, he is a big Berlusconi fan, he’s a reactionary, there’s nothing new in his ideology. What really interested me with Corona is that he plays a lot on the idea of the truth. First, he took these pictures of celebrities, showing how immoral they are. His idea was basically they are smiling, they’re false on TV, look how they behave in the nights—they have mistresses, they do bad things. Gossip is an offspring of Italian television, it’s a project of diversion where people are interested in truths that are totally irrelevant.

Filmmaker: One of your films, Surplus, was centered around the ideas of John Zerzan. And this film made me think of people like McLuhan, Debord, and Baudrillard, not only because of the coinage in your film’s title, but because of the banality of image consumption as it pertains in their work. Were your thoughts at all informed by theories of mass media?

Gandini: Yeah, of course. I’ve always been interested in the society of spectacle. But in the end, I’m much more interested in confronting the reality of videocracy. The director of the Big Brother show—he’s an old friend of mine—was telling me that here, in this business, they have a saying that “television is fun to do, but not to watch.” [Laughs] And his idea that Berlusconi’s television is like mirror of his own personality made me think a lot. We have become like Berlusconi because we’ve been exposed to his subconscious. It’s ironic that this country which has such a traditional culture and superior qualities in culture now has reduced itself to this. It is bizarre.

Filmmaker: I thought it was an interesting choice for you to profile a male performer, Ricky, as opposed to one of the velina wanna-bes. Why did you make that choice?

Gandini: I really liked him. And the logic of his own thinking was for me totally revealing of the power of the system, like when he says that on TV, you get ten times bigger, you become immortal. I think to me that was much more unpredictable than having a poor velina who is of course the symbol of the biggest group of discriminated human beings in Italy: women. The idea of being willing to, as he says, sacrifice a part of his body for a career, you could easily translate that to a whole generation. It’s a question of how much you’re prepared to sacrifice to get inside television. When you make a film, it’s easy to think Oh, I should have someone who’s against all this, an expert in Italian politics. I’m trying not to be ruled by fear when I do these films and try instead to just portray what I find in my journey. And I found a very male-dominated world where women are in the background and that’s what I end up showing.

Filmmaker: There’s an old adage among literary authors and people who teach creative writing, which is "Show, don’t tell." You’re giving viewers the Berlusconi experience by immersing us in the world he lives in and that he’s created, rather than having talking-head experts explain it all.

Gandini: Exactly. I had huge pressure from the BBC, which was involved in this project. We had an argument exactly about those things. And I know it’s risky because in some countries and probably in the U.S., too, where people don’t know much about Berlusconi, certainly they’d like to have some hard facts. But it’s something you can easily find, you know? [Laughs] The BBC were really trying to push the film in that direction. They wanted a lot of irony. You know, there’s a debate going on in the documentary community. Some people argue that you can get a lot of emotion through facts. Doing the research, I’m really interested in facts and numbers. As a matter of fact, in Italy, a lot of things you can now measure. Like mamismo: I read this number that Italian youngsters are really the ones who statistically move less from home in Europe. When I make film, it’s different; [I use] all the elements, like music and editing.

Filmmaker: You mention that Fabio was an old friend of yours. For the rest of the dramatis personae here—Marella, Mora, Fabrizio—these are people who are very sophisticated about image control and representing the way their clients are depicted in the media. They’re grooming themselves as well. I found it surprising how nakedly honest they were with you. How did you peel the skin back of this media world and find your way in?

Gandini: I was really interested in Corona and Ricky, who I got close to. I made other interviews with people who can talk for hours without telling you anything. That’s how they work. They found it unusual that I was so interested in them. I was not there for ten minutes and then [gone]. And they are very used to that—the fact that I was working for Swedish television was sort of a guarantee. I was very open about what I was doing. Essentially, they don’t know what documentary is and they don’t care. They live in a world where documentary doesn’t exist, it’s an abstraction for them. Especially Lele Mora, there’s a clash of different media realities. In his world, there is no such thing as an independent filmmaker. He would think I was sent by someone else, because that’s how it works in Italy. But then he got very angry with me because he went on TV several times and said I told him this film was only going to be in Sweden, which is bullshit. I don’t understand why he showed [off] his swastikas like that. He knows very well that it’s not a good symbol, but it says more about Italy that it’s not been a problem for him.

Filmmaker: Fabrizio Corona was literally naked for your cameras in one scene. That was an incredible show of self-preening machismo.

Gandini: I love that scene. For me, that’s exactly what you said: show, don’t tell. And I really think that this kind of behavior—super-powerful, alpha-male behavior—works much better in a country ruled by television, where there’s a whole culture of drama and strong emotions, strong gestures, et cetera. It’s very scary when you realize people are buying this image. That’s scarier than a dictator who looks nice. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: Can you talk about the sound design, which added so much to the subjective aspect of what you were doing, and all the work that went into editing all the trash-TV imagery and footage of Berlusconi at press conferences?

Gandini: During the first three or four months of editing, we had a friend who composed a lot of music for the film which was very moody, electronic music that was also very depressive. It was more a reflection of our feelings toward the characters, their stories, and it really didn’t work. The film became too depressive and dull. And then we realized that musically, we had to go with the characters, not against them with emotions they didn’t have. Lele Mora, for instance—he’s happy about his life, he’s a calm person, so we have this harp [for him]. It’s all music from an archivist we discovered who had a lot of music from postwar East Germany, so it’s basically old film music that we rearranged. The idea of having ironic narration absolutely wasn’t necessary, because you can make a lot of points with music, which is more subtle and more interesting to work with. There is I hope a sense of an external observer, like Alice in Wonderland, that’s you’re looking around this world where things seem normal, but they’re not.

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# posted by Damon Smith @ 2/10/2010 07:44:00 AM Comments (0)
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
MARTINA EGI, BAREFOOT TO TIMBUKTU 



Ernst Aebi, the subject of Martina Egi's keenly observed new documentary Barefoot to Timbuktu, is something of a renaissance man. Artist, SoHo real estate pioneer and social activist, he is full of paradoxes: easy going yet driven, humble yet self-assured, a man of much wealth who nonetheless spends his leisure time among the dispossessed. Egi profiles Ernst with affection, but she doesn't shy away from examining the effects of his restless nature on his family and friends. His often rocky family life, along as his many guises and activities, are only the preamble to Egi's portrait of the subjects very real and lasting manifestations of his humanitarian commitment,

While on a trip to the Sahara in the late 80s, Aebi came across the destitute settlement of Araouane, a barren collection of buildings that is a long camelback ride away from Timbuktu in central Mali. Without any infrastructure, agricultural tradition or reliable source of water, this was an endangered community. Aebi dropped everything and settled there, using his expertise to help the town's people make their settlement a viable one. A new vegetable garden, school and hotel rose from the barren Sahara sands in the three years Aebi spent there. As Egi's film deftly explains, a civil war broke out in the country that forced Aebi to leavea place that had truly become a second home. When she picks up his story, he's on the verge of returning for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Barefoot to Timbuktu opens at Manhattan's Quad Cinema on February 12th.

Director Martina Egi and Ernst Aebi. Courtesy of A Mesch and Ugge productions.


Filmmaker: When did you first encounter the work of Ernst Aebi?

Egi: I was first struck by Ernst's work when I notced an attractive book cover. It was an image of a village drowning in sand. I picked up Seasons of Sand. It a book by Ernst Aebi that Simon & Schuster put out in 1993. I was in a Greenwich Village second hand bookstore when I found it. While reading it, and with my old fascination for the Sahara, it became almost an obsession trying to bring the story to film.

I contacted the author, Ernst Aebi, in New York. Already from that first conversation on it seemed filming his story would be made easy by his gung ho attitude. “Can’t be done” is missing from his vocabulary. Beat Hirt, my boss at Mesch & Ugge AG, the film production company I work for in Zurich, Switzerland, liked the idea of creating Barefoot to Timbuktu. Off we went.

Among many other things, Ernst Aebi told me how in the early nineties an American film company, MPI, had filmed extensive footage about his Sahara project. Apparently that footage had never been used. Once I knew that, I was even more convinced that his story was a perfect match for the needs of a documentary. Aebi's biography reads like a filmscript. The difficult thing was to find the right focus.mSo I decided to zoom in on the Sahara aspect.

Filmmaker: What are the primary means of financing projects such as this in Switzerland?

Egi: Switzerland is small. 7.7 Million people, four different languages - German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romanic. Films are usually financed with the support of the National Broadcasting Enterprise and also with some help from cultural institutions. The road of financing is long and rocky. Fortunately documentaries are very popular. I think, Switzerland is the country where you can see more documentaries in the cinemas than anywhere else in the world. So I was in an advantageous position to complete this project, being a Swiss documentarian making about a Swiss personality.

Filmmaker: Do you think you discovered what informs Ernst's impulse to selflessly serve the people of Araouane?

Egi: I think, the film shows Aebi's character quite well. There are things I never understood. For exemple, his impatience. His restlessness was quite a challenge for the whole film crew. His children and also his friends describe his character better than he does. There's an essential lack of self-consciousness. There is one part in his personality, that I couldn't reveal and which only apears in the things he does.

At first it's difficult to understand, why he spent tree years in the middle of the Sahara in a village, whith no vegetation, no shade, just sand and rubber and swarms of black flies. Even the governor of Timbuktu said that there was no hope for that place. They had given up on the village because it's so far away from anything. This is probably exactly the reason why Aebi did it. He's like that. Nobody believed, that anything could be done in Araouane and nobody really cared, so he took up the cause and made it his mission. Aebi was looking for a challenge in his life. I think he needed a project like this. He wanted to do something "impossible". It's not only some "selfless" impulse. Each moviegoer should discover for himself, who the real Ernst Aebi is, but I this is at the heart of what I discovered about him. I think different answers are possible and that makes his personality so interesting.

Filmmaker: There's archival footage from Ernst's first trip to the area, but had anyone ever made a film before in Araouane before your arrival?

Egi: I don't know if there is any other footage of Araouane prior to Aebi's arrival. I don't think that the place ever looked different or had any other history of development in the immediate period before he arrived. However, we know from the history of the region that Araouane once was an important meeting place for the salt-caravans and even bigger than Timbuktu. When Aebi arrived, there were only a few people and houses left. After 40 years of drought, most of the wells had dried out and the caravans had taken different routes. The inhabitants were about to abandon the place. Aebi took some pictures with his videocamera at the very beginning of the project. We could use very few of them. They were too shaky. Although he is many things, he isn't a cinematographer! The footage that was provided by Bob Marty, who visited Araouane after Aebi had been working there for three years, is the primary archival footage source. Without that footage, we would never know how the garden in Araouane looked like and it would be very hard to imagine.

Filmmaker: How did the local people react to your presence as a filmmaker?

Egi: The poeple in Araouane didn't know, that Aebi would visit their village after 20 years. So they were just surprised to see Aebi and also our guides from Timbuktu, who grew up in Araouane and are rarley able to visite their hometown and families.The local people in Araouane were very friendly. It took a while, until the women dared to come out of their houses. Conversation was nearly impossible. The people in Araouane have their own language. The men brought us tea and the children followed us in groups to all the places where we were filming. For me, arriving in Araouane was quite a shock. I had studied the footage and had heard a lot of stories beforehand, but as Araouane emerged out of the dunes after 2 days driving in the sand, I probably had similar feelings to what Ernst had 22 years ago. He wrote then in his diary: This is hell on earth. I'm glad that this was only the first impression and things have improved since he left.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult aspect of your journeys with Ernst?

Egi: Ernst is probably the easiest protagonist I ever worked with. He made everything possible, even certain things he was not very happy about. For example was he totally against a military troop, who accompanied us from Timbuktu to Araouane. The armed troop for the protection of the film crew was a set term by the governor of Timbuktu. Ernst had some bad experiences with those troops who "prefer to shoot befor they think" as he said. So we had to persuade him on that point. I'm very happy that I had the chance to meet Ernst. He is a very creative person and his view of life gave me new inputs and power for further projects.

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# posted by Brandon Harris @ 2/03/2010 01:30:00 PM Comments (0)
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA 



As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, tart excerpts from the Nixon White House tapes, and noirish recreations into riveting, revelatory political drama. The name “Daniel Ellsberg” probably doesn’t trigger the same flurry of associations as Deep Throat, the shadowy antihero of the Watergate scandal, but it should: An ex-Marine, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and highly respected analyst at the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg leaked a 7,000-page study detailing the top-secret Southeast Asia policies of five presidential administrations to the New York Times, resulting in a landmark court case, attempted cover-ups, and a nasty smear campaign, all culminating in the ignominious resignation of President Nixon. To be sure, the spy-grade story of the Pentagon Papers controversy has a lot of rich angles, including government secrecy, first-amendment rights versus executive privilege, and the rise of the national security state. But it’s also a conversion tale deeply concerned with the burden of conscience that Ellsberg felt as a government insider to tell the public what he believed they had a right to know, and his desire as a newly minted dove to change the course of the Vietnam War.

Part journalistic exposé, part overdue homage to one of the last century’s most notorious whistleblowers, Most Dangerous Man is a pressurized piece of filmmaking, resonating with issues (civil rights, the press, the conduct of war) still worrying the national conscience. With considerable flair backed by exhaustive research, Ehrlich (The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, 2001) and Goldsmith (Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press, 1996) guide us through the corridors of power where the Vietnam war was seeded and then bloomed, often against the private advice of military analysts. Ellsberg himself provided McNamara with evidence of “atrocities” that helped push the war along, then reversed course after a two-year stint in Saigon with the State Department convinced him it was not only a lost cause, but a moral travesty based on years of prevarication. Seen then and now, he emerges as a man of principle, sincere and articulate. His fascinating chronicle of that time is augmented by a carousel of outspoken interviewees, including old colleagues like Anthony Russo (the Rand associate who persuaded him to Xerox the papers), Nixon officials John Dean and Bud Krogh (who authorized the break-in at Ellsberg’s doctor’s office), and general counsel James Goodale, who soothed the nerves of the Times’ top brass. Winner of the Special Jury Award at IDFA, and recently shortlisted for the Oscar, Most Dangerous Man is able-bodied and slyly entertaining, and has plenty to teach us, especially in these times, about the power of dissent.

Filmmaker spoke with Ehrlich and Goldsmith about crises of conscience, fair-use issues, and why you won’t be seeing Dan Ellsberg on any talking-head news programs.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers opens Friday at Cinema Village.

DIRECTORS JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.


Filmmaker: How and why did you decide to anchor the film around Daniel Ellsberg’s narrative and personal voice as opposed to approaching the story of the Pentagon Papers leak from a more general point of view?

Ehrlich: It was something we struggled with a lot. I always wanted it to be more character-driven and more biographical, not just a generic story about the events. The idea of whether it would be Dan’s voice or not was still up in the air until very late. I think Rick wanted it to be more journalistic and objective, but we compromised. I always felt [his voice] would make it a stronger narrative. For one thing, Dan lives right near us, he’s extremely articulate, his writing is wonderful, and most of the narration is adapted from his [book]. To me it seemed a no-brainer not to use him—it would give it that much more authenticity. But I think Rick’s points were legitimate, so that was a complicated decision.

Goldsmith: I’d actually approached him with a film about the Pentagon Papers and it didn’t get off the ground. Then Judy came to me about a year later with a film about Dan Ellsberg. Some of the initial questions were, Do we have a film about him or do we zero in on the Pentagon Papers? The personal transformation story, obviously, was the kickoff for the whole event, and we spent over a third of the film on that, and then got into the event itself. I don’t know if “morality play” is the right word, but it triggers questions of conscience, not only in Dan Ellsberg, but in so many of the characters that we have onscreen, starting with Randy Kehler and then leading to the newspapersmen, Hedrick Smith and Max Frankel, the Times lawyer, and the congressman. They all had crises of conscience. The Nixon administration, people like John Dean and Egil Krogh, all had to face very big questions that hopefully we all face on some level.

Filmmaker: Was Ellsberg amenable to participating when you first presented the idea, or were there negotiating points in terms of how his story would be told?

Goldsmith: It was a process. We approached Dan when he appeared onstage before a local high school in Oakland with his wife Patricia, where they talked about their remembrances of that time. That was the first time we talked face to face with him about it. He had had other filmmakers approach him about the subject matter, [but] he had not wanted to do anything until he wrote his own account [Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers], which he did in 2002. This was late 2004, when we spoke. He was protective of his story, for sure, and wanted to know what we would do with it, so it was not a slam dunk that he was going to go with us.

Ehrlich: Also, I think there was an intervention by some mutual friends too, who made them feel like we would do a fair job. But I think they had reason to be nervous, because Dan had had a hatchet job done on him by an author. F/X had done a made-for-TV version of the Pentagon Papers, with James Spader playing Dan, except [the producers] never talked to them, they cut them entirely out of the process. I don’t think they felt burned by that, but they certainly were cautious. We were lucky they chose us.

Filmmaker: There’s a confessional aspect to the film that calls to mind The Fog of War. Was this another opportunity for Ellsberg to set the record straight in a different medium?

Ehrlich: Dan’s very quick to accept guilt. That was his motivation for doing what he did. There were moments when we had to be sure we didn’t look too much like Fog of War, because it was the same period, with similar characters. There’s a lot of resonance here between the two films, and we wanted it to feel different.

Goldsmith: I don’t think Dan needed to unburden himself. I think he felt deeply about what he had done, planning the war and helping it along, and he felt very passionately [that leaking the papers] was the right thing. I think he was intrigued with the idea of somebody other than himself telling the story, and was ultimately convinced we would do it justice.

Filmmaker: How long did it take you to gather all the archival footage, as well as selections from the Nixon tapes that were used in the film? Did you have issues with clearances?

Goldsmith: It took four years. The archival stuff started with articles from the time period, and then we went to D.C. to do some filming in 2007. All that broadcast material of Howard K. Smith and Walter Cronkite is in the National Archives, because somebody in the Nixon administration was given the job to tape the nightly news and every public-affairs program. The Nixon tapes were also there, and it took a lot of digging and research by our team to get them. Those were free, but with a lot of the broadcast material, it was kind of an unknown whether we could claim fair use. Often we did, and used that as a way to not break our budget. We also spent a lot for CBS News, which was probably our biggest check, for their footage on the war and everything else.

Ehrlich: We had a very interesting experience with the fair-use issue. I don’t know how much you’re familiar with Pat Aufderheide and that whole movement, to make that more clear and get filmmakers the right to do it legally. We used a lawyer, Lisa Callif, and she went through every single clip a number of times and confirmed that each one of them was within the “safe harbor” of fair use, as she called it. And the quality was good enough we could go straight into DV-cam. I think that’s a great opportunity for anyone who’s looking at this period, to be able to access that material.

Filmmaker: In terms of visuals, the graphics, animations, and cloak-and-dagger-style recreations add another layer of tension and moody suspense. Were those part of your original plan for the film, or did they come later in the process?

Ehrlich: I think we were a year into editing by the time our assistant editor, Lawrence Lerew, came up with the recreation idea. I jumped on the bandwagon immediately and worked with him. It took a long time for Rick to decide it was going to work. So we did a bunch of rough versions and eventually we all got on board.

Goldsmith: The recreations and animation were the last productions we did. For obvious reasons, you want to to have every piece in place and know what part of the story you can [illustrate]. It’s true, Judy was pushing more on that. I like the idea of recreations, but the extent to which we ended up with them, I was skeptical at the beginning. I was concerned with losing a little bit of credibility [if we made it] too first-person. It was a process. But because there were a lot of creative minds on it, it worked.

Filmmaker: You’ve corralled quite a roster of talking heads in this film. John Dean and Bud Krogh’s participation seems essential, given their role in the Fielding break-in. Were there other key players you sought to interview who didn’t make it onto film?

Goldsmith: The idea from the beginning was to get as many people [as possible] who were really there. You’ll notice there are very few people onscreen who didn’t actually participate in this story. Robert Ellsberg, Daniel’s son, was Xeroxing the Pentagon Papers so we went after him. Mort Halperin was head of the study so we went after him. We wanted to get Kissinger and couldn’t get a call back, and we wanted to get Alexander Haig, who was peripherally involved.

Filmmaker: You did get Kissinger virtually.

Ehrlich: We actually made him look good! [Laughs] That’s the one thing I kind of regretted about the film. He’s the voice of reason compared to his boss.

Goldsmith: One of the people we tried hard on, and I had at least four or five conversations with on the phone, was Harry Rowen, who would have been a very interesting interview. That was Dan’s boss at the Rand Corporation. He got the shit when the leak happened. I’m sorry that we couldn’t win Harry over to agree to be on camera. But we tried really hard.

Filmmaker: Considering that both of you come from television, what was different for you about the experience of making a feature for theatrical release?

Ehrlich: We were funded by ITVS, German and French television, so we always were making a film for [that medium]. When we saw the animal we had, we hoped it might be theatrical, but we certainly didn’t make it primarily for theatrical release. It had to be public television because we had their money.

Goldmsith: What happened along the way was that among ourselves, through Lawrence, we started to branch out and see more of the creative [elements] that could elevate it beyond the standard documentary. In May or June, even though we were very close to a final cut, we learned that Karen Cooper at Film Forum was interested in the film—we had sent her a rough cut—and also the Toronto Film Festival. However, we had already fashioned it as a more dramatic, dynamic show. We sensed down the home stretch that, hey, this thing is bigger than a TV or educational thing, and we need to make the most of it.

Ehrlich: What surprised me is the interest we’ve had with the film internationally. It won the Special Jury Award at IDFA in Amsterdam, which was really exciting and a huge surprise, since that’s the biggest documentary festival in the world. And we also have had amazing sales around the world. We didn’t think this film would really play that well outside the U.S., but it’s really striking a chord.

Filmmaker: What do you think is registering with people internationally?

Ehrlich: I think people want to hear a positive story about American conscience. [Laughs] We get so much bad press and people in Europe at least are crazy about Obama, they aren’t feeling the negative feelings that we’re having here as progressives at the moment.

Goldsmith: It has a universality to it. The crisis of conscience and the historical stage — it’s the Vietnam War, leading up to Watergate. I like to believe that the film’s pretty well made, too, but the story resonates on a lot of levels that transcend borders.

Filmmaker: Another part of the film deals with the power of the press and the conflict with executive privilege that Nixon invoked in trying to halt the Times’ reporting. It seems to have an extraordinarily urgent resonance today, with the folding of so many papers and news organizations struggling to develop new business models to stay alive.

Goldsmith: I think it points to a time when news organizations defied the government and that, too, I think gives people a sense of what can be done. To me, [it’s amazing] that young people don’t know this type of story, when citizens rise up and do something, when newspapers defy their government and print stories that their government not only doesn’t want them to print, but then goes to court to stop them.

Filmmaker: What were the biggest discoveries that you made in researching this film and interviewing the participants?

Ehrlich: For me, it’s the Watergate period, because I thought I knew that. One of the gifts of this film is that we have reinterpreted the history of Watergate in a more accurate way because of John Dean’s testimony, if we’re to believe his interpretation that it was the break-in to Dr. Fielding’s office, rather than the events of Watergate, that really brought down the Nixon administration. When we first started I thought, “Oh yeah, and it kind of has something to with Watergate, too, because the Plumbers started there and then they did the real thing nine months later.” But in fact the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was what brought [Nixon down], because that could be tracked back to the White House.

Goldsmith: For me, it was the extent that Daniel Ellsberg was not only inside the government, but actually took part at the top levels. He has incredible knowledge about how the government works, how the secrecy system works, how organizations like RAND work, and he has an incredible amount to add to the public debate about issues of war. We don’t hear [his voice], we don’t see him on the TV shows. Every time we’re about to go to war, from the first Gulf War to the Iraq war to Afghanistan, you see all these retired admirals and generals, but you don’t see the Daniel Ellsbergs who have as much information about government because they’ve been there. To me, learning that, learning how much he knows, was one revelation, and the other was how much he’s been shut out from public debate. And that’s a loss for all of us.

Filmmaker: So who’s the most dangerous man in America today? Is it still Dan Ellsberg?

Ehrlich: It could be. What he has to say is still pretty scary to the government.

Goldsmith: I think at that time, Dan did do this incredible act, but let’s face it, there was an entire anti-war movement that should not be forgotten. He didn’t exist in a vacuum.

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# posted by Damon Smith @ 1/27/2010 08:21:00 AM Comments (0)

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