By: Christopher Wilbur

Ted Bogosian takes us on an inside journey in Anatomy of a Homicide: Life on the Streets, through the nearly decade long running television show, and through the particularly poignant episode, “Subway.” Homicide: Life on the Streets aired for most of the nineties from 1993 to 1999, breaking the iconic one hundred episode mark, reaching one hundred and twenty two. The show featured the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit and had an unusual realism for broadcast television that for all it’s art and integrity, relegated it to the 10:00pm, a post-prime-time position. However, one episode designed as an arrow to vault over mediocre ratings, the bane of art on broadcast television, was the subway, whereas rather than remitting realism in order to reach median audiences with a softer message and fluff, the show dipped deeper into it’s existential origins and illustrated a picture of life, and death, not usually dealt to wide-network televisions.

“Subway” is a story about John Lang (Vincent D’Onofrio), who on a usual morning’s commute through the newly installed Baltimore subway system, has an unusual encounter with life and death. While moving toward the train, in a flash of camera shots and angles, Lang stumbles and falls to the horn blast of an oncoming train. Next scene, he is caught between the station and steel of the train. The strangeness is that he is aware, intelligible, lucid. Detective Pembleton, a Homicide staple, and begins asking the trapped man traditional questions, “Mr. Lang, can you tell me what happened?” “You were pushed? Did you see who pushed you?” “Is there someone we can get ahold of for you?” Belligerent Lang, seemingly unaware of his mortality, though perhaps panicked subconsciously, berates Pembleton, “I’ve talked to you cops already, lemme talk to whoever’s getting me the hell outta this.”

Confused witnesses say he was pushed, but then “no, he wasn’t pushed, he fell” and “I was jostled, and then he fell,” but one witness arouses the suspicion of second detective, Mike Kellerman. Witness Larry Biedron tells a changing tale of the incident and remains in questioning for the rest of the episode. Lang, however, is coming to realize the severity of his injury. “He got twisted from the waste down like a rubber band,” says an EMT beneath the train to Detective Pembleton, “his spinal cord is probably severed, so he isn’t in much pain.” Above the train, Lang is asking repeated questions, “I am going to be ok right?” “She said I am going to be ok!” But doubt is creeping into his voice, fueling the rage of being trapped by the train.

Pembleton rests on his investigative questions and realizes instead, bonding is the victim is the best he can do. They form an easy alliance against the nurse, whose professionalism seems out of place under the conditions of life and death, and Pembleton argues on Lang’s behalf that she provide him pain medication.

That atmosphere is really profound here, the audience is unwittingly transported to the trapped man’s body. The reality of life, so full and vigorous and perhaps rich, is present in one man, bottled up in his body by the precarious impingement of his torso to the train station’s platform, as soon as the rescue team pushes the train away with pressurized bags, that life will slip out as the “elastic band” lets loose. The immediate fragility is so palpable, so accessible, so unusual for broadcast television. And elements of philosophy are interwoven, with additional darkness.

Detective Kellerman learns suspicious witness Biedron is found to have a history of people pushing into oncoming trains, and to have been committed for mental illness. Indeed, in the final scene Pembleton dips his head into the police car with confiscated Biedron, but Biedron quite unwittingly says, “Hey, you still got my ID, I need that back,” illustrating his disconnectedness and adding an ambiguous meaninglessness to the scene, playing quite an untraditional villain.

However there is a strange band of beauty in the sunset of Lang’s life. He opens his eyes wide as the machines pry his body from the platform and says something in a trance. His eyes wide and glaring, he seems oddly solitary amidst the chaos about him, and emits an uncanny tranquility. “Have you ever seen the leaves on a sugar maple tree, when a storm is coming, will turn over to take in the rain.”

The words wear heavily on Pembleton and indeed seem to reverberate as an abstraction from all that has been happening on the deck. They seem transcendentally elegant, especially amidst the scene of darkness and death. The episode ends with Lang’s girlfriend running past the subway unknowing of the passing of her lover and the scene seems to imply that the world goes on despite the pain and beauty taking place continuously, and often does ignorantly, perhaps blissfully.

Ted Bogosian captures the action behind the scenes in the PBS documentary Anatomy of a Homicide: Life on the Streets. In traditional documentarian style an authoritatively voiced narrator takes the viewer through the experience of being on the set. The journey from inception to production is documented. Writer James Yoshimura is inspired by a Taxicab Confessions episode where a New York detective responds to the drivers question “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen?” The detective candidly describes reoccurring incidents of victims being stuck between subway platforms and subway trains. He uses a plastic bag filled with water to illustrate the twisting effect the lower body undergoes that serves as a tourniquet to the torso. Yoshimura, intrigued, pitches the idea to the Homicide’s creating team in a comfy, living room like scene on couches. All find the idea interesting and Yosimura gets to work. Bogosian’s camera then follows the writer through creation and illustrates the organization of the organization.

Humor is woven in by Bogosian as Yosimura attempts to get permission for profanity in the script. Censorship replies, look “I can give you a dump or a crap, but not a dump and a crap.” “But don’t you need to take a dump to have crap?” Yosimura fires back. The negotiation doesn’t stop there. Organizationally, above the creators are administrators, who must deal with logistics. They provide the stark reality of bottom line and possibility. Yosimura argues with a manager over the use of the Baltimore subway for the scene, the manager, dubious about cost and complication, retorts it’s unfeasibility. Yet finally his manager agrees and the team manages to secure the subway, provided they shoot from dusk to dawn, in a single night.

The documentary then demonstrates the show’s requirement for innovation. There is no adequate shot for the actor wedged between the train and the platform, the train is simply too close. So they contract out an aluminum sheath so that adjoining train-cars can be connected, providing the illusion that they are one. Actor D’Onofrio is then able to perform mid-platform, while both the Homicide crew and Bogosian’s camera capture the action.

The episode from start to finish is filmed over a week, requiring intense collaboration and orchestration. A single camera is used to reduce cutting and editing. Scenes are shot back-to-back in absence of repose. Everything is on the fly, the staff operates like clock-work, well conditioned and ready for the stress. Weekly, a new director is brought in to give a fresh touch to every episode. Ironically, the creative input of the director, is often marginalized as the organizational production machine proves enormously resistant to change. This induces successful directors to use a sort of finesse, to convince rather than direct, influence rather than impel.

Finally, production is completed, it was a whirlwind of cameras, typewriters, negotiations, laughs and arguments, but it is over. Everyone celebrates at a local bar where the episode in full form airs for the first time. Bogosian’s camera then sets on the bar-room television for the opening scene of Homicide. The pictures then blend so that Bogosian’s audience is watching the Subway episode as if it were aired directly to their televisions. All of the spectacular magic of production disappears and what is left is a final product quite seamless and authentic. The plot unfolds as a complete narrative, with additional audience impact as this audience was privy to the production process.

When Lang’s girlfriend again passes the subway on her run, closing the episode, Bogosian’s camera pans out and the bar-room audience is revealed once more. There is a breathing out and it is all cheers to another exhausting episode completed, one that would put Homicide: Life on the Streets back in nearly the number one television ratings slot. An anatomical dissection of a television program’s production process took place in Bogosian’s traditionally sound yet slightly avant-garde documentary Anatomy of a Homicide: Life on the Streets.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (990)

Ian Slater
Documentary Review
December 3rd, 2012

Ted Bogosian’s An Armenian Journey: Documentary Review and Further Thoughts

A courageous foray into documentary filmmaking, Ted Bogosian’s An Armenian Journey is a mixture of a hunt to report information and a daring emotional investigation “behind enemy lines.” The film addresses the Armenian genocide and annihilation in 1915 by the Young Turk leadership, an event that remains to this day without an official perpetrator or guilty party in the eyes of the international community. This is because the Turkish government has taken careful steps to remain guiltless in the matter and, as a result of the genocide, Armenians have virtually exploded geographically all over the world and their international power to gain recognition is weak. As a filmmaker of Armenian descent, Bogosian’s approach is an entirely personal one; the filmmaker constructs the film as a quest to finally put a lid on the terrible event haunting the history of Armenians. Bogosian sets out to not only understand the Armenian genocide on a personal level but also concretize the guilty party through the uncovering of Soviet documents implicating a guilty party. The result is a passionate film that draws the viewer into the intensity and sentimentality of genocide.

Style
The film is presented as a feat of production. Bogosian makes it known that the Turkish government has been trying to distance itself from the Armenian genocide since 1915, and has successfully lobbied in the United States against having America recognize the event as a genocide. Further, it is said that millions of dollars of Turkish money are spent to prevent the spread of knowledge about the Armenian genocide, and that this film is the first primetime investigation of the truth. It is as though the viewer is not actually “supposed” to be seeing what they are about to see.
This draws the audience in from the outset of the film, letting us know that we will be in on an age-old international secret that has been uncovered by Bogosian. This intriguing commencement of the film is enough to pique the interest of the viewer on the matter, but the filmmaker seeks to dive deeper into his investigation to keep this interest high. Bogosian efficiently keeps the audience engaged throughout the film, pulling in highly emotional stories along with academic and political evidence to implicate the Young Turks in the genocide of his native Armenians.
Bogosian’s film ends up pursuing two stories deeply: the story of Mariam Davis, a witness of the genocide, and Bogosian’s own story of trying to track down a Soviet document that clearly states the guilt of the Young Turks in the war crimes against the Armenians. The filmmaker not only interviews Davis but follows her back to Eastern Turkey, where the two must hide their Armenian heritage and act like American tourists, to return to the spots where her mother and brothers were taken from her and killed by the Turks. Simultaneously to this plotline, Bogosian is in Soviet Russia, attempting to uncover and translate an old Turkish document that has information on the court proceedings following the genocide. Upon finally being granted access to the documents and with the help of Turkish professor Kevork Bardakijan, Bogosian leads the audience in the discovery that the Young Turk leadership was found guilty of war crimes in the Armenian genocide. It is obvious that the viewer has not only been let in on an international secret at this point, but has also been let in on the meaning of such a discovery for people like Bogosian and Davis.

Emotional Approach

Bogosian by no means attempts to detach himself and his emotions from the investigation into the Armenian genocide. From the beginning, it is known that he is the one going out to find the information, engaging in conversations with those who suffered in the genocide, and speaking with academics about the genocide. He wants to know the anecdotal evidence as well as the historical evidence on the subject, getting to the essence of how genocide changes not only a people, but also a person. The viewer comes to understand the effects an event such as this catastrophe can change a person through the eyes of Mariam Davis, but also how it can change a culture through the eyes of the academics and Bogosian.
Does this “personal journey” approach leave more of a mark on the viewer? I want to ponder this emotional approach in juxtaposition with another film on genocide, Night and Fog by Alain Resnais (watch free here). This is a short film made about concentration camps during World War II comprised of shocking archival footage and modern day shots of the overgrown camps. It is not a personal journey but rather contrarily a presentation of facts and footage that alone stand to tell the story of the Holocaust. By nature of Holocaust archival footage, the thirty-minute film is one of the most horror inducing and emotionally heavy films ever created in my opinion. The factual approach is more shocking for the viewer because it gives the audience a full grasp on the breadth of the genocide rather than just a few small stories related to it. Bogosian himself states in his film that the story of Mariam Davis, that so much time of An Armenian Journey is dedicated to, is simply anecdotal and pales in comparison to the scope of the actual genocide.
Does this mean that Resnais’ approach is stronger than Bogosian’s? Absolutely not. They are simply two vastly different ways of going about telling the story of genocide. Both leave the viewer feeling passionate on the subject yet one presents a more macro view than the other. Perhaps this is what Bogosian was going for; his main feat in An Armenian Journey is making the viewer care deeply about the plight of the Armenian people through a few personal stories, and then bringing the viewer to salvation through the discovery and translation of the Soviet document.

The “shock” film in the time of global media
Finally, this film piqued another thought that is addressable within the themes of this course. This film was made in 1988, before the time of true media globalization. The stylistic approach that Bogosian takes is one of almost a “shock” film, telling the viewer that what they are about to see has never been seen before. In the era that this was made, this approach was a novel idea; most of the information that people received had already been filtered by the government or media channels and had been censored down. Thus, getting in on an international secret was something quite special for a viewer.
However, in the time of Julian Assange, Twitter, YouTube, and immediate news, does this stylistic approach still carry the same weight? Does it still really mean anything if the Turkish government has spent millions of dollars trying to stop the information flow about the Armenian genocide when a document such as the one uncovered by Bogosian in the film could be translated by a computer and uploaded to Wikileaks within seconds for the world to see? I fear that the globalization of media has thrown a hitch into Bogosian’s approach. Films that construct themselves as his does- as a quest for information uncovering- do not come off quite as shocking in this era as they did just twenty short years ago. Perhaps there is no such thing as an international secret anymore.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (730)

Documentary Review
Global Media
Roberto Gedeon and Zainab Syed

Technically, Ted Bogosian’s The Press Secretary and Access, (Season 5, episode 18) of The West Wing, are two sides of the same coin. The Press Secretary is the result of a three day journey, commissioned by PBS, into the life of Joseph Lockhart - the Press Secretary to the Clinton Administration. Lockhart, a former news reporter himself, knows the trade well and is in a constant balancing act, between his loyalty to the President’s administration, and his fellow citizens. The same could be said of Access, where a crew from NBC gains access into the office of press secretary C.J. Cregg and reveals to the public, after the administration has come out of office, how she struggles to gain knowledge of what is happening in the White House in order to communicate it to the public without generating panic.

Appropriation and Reaching an Audience.
Traditionally, appropriations of this type (documentary to prime time) tend get lost in translation. However, the writing and directing of Access provided for a very loyal conversion of Bogosian’s documentary. The role of the press secretary stayed much the same in that s/he tried to get information out to the public but at the same time had to be very careful of what was said to reporters. The same goes for the role of reporters, who were presented akin to vultures, waiting to pounce on any slip as prey. Formally, the narrator acted similarly – in a more factual rather than opinionated role. The overall feel of both productions, in its extremely high quality, was very similar. The well-lit interviews, proper framing, impeccable sound mixing and editing and seamless intermixing of filming and archival video were key elements to providing a trustworthy source in both productions.

Nevertheless, the nature of these two productions, as a documentary and as a prime-time episode, give way to key differences between them and the functions they perform. As a documentary, Bogosian’s film is much longer than Access and of course provides a much more detailed look into the Press Secretary’s office. However, Access has a different advantage in informing audiences about the White House Press Office. As an episode of the hit drama: The West Wing, it reaches an audience that far surpasses the audience reached by Bogosian’s very specific documentary, in spite of it being commissioned by NBC.

Bogosian’s documentary is obviously tailored for a more customized audience of highly curious, more intellectual viewers. It presents to whomever wants to watch it a thorough look into the workings of the information they consume and of official media outlets. This type of insight is key to maintaining an educated, level-headed, well-discerning public. In translating the documentary into a TV show the producers of the West Wing did the American public a similar service to Bogosian’s documentary. Easy to watch, highly entertaining, very polished and short in length, the episode condenses Bogosian’s long and more thorough look into the White House Press Corps. In reaching a wider, more varied audience with general interests, Access performs a function that is more like a good to the public, in the sense that it teaches this public of something it otherwise would not be taught about. Not everyone would sign up to watch a documentary about the Press Secretary, while a very wide audience will sit down to watch an hour-long episode of their favorite prime-time TV show that happens to feature a portrait of the press secretary.

Obviously, changing the audience to which a production caters changes its intentionality. A documentary has the purpose of doing exactly that, documenting, and informing. A prime-time episode has the purpose of acquiring ratings and selling advertising slots. However, the producers of The West Wing remained very loyal to what Bogosian presented as a portrait of the press secretary. By doing that they managed to get a prime-time episode to perform the aforementioned function: a good public deed.

Is it true, if certain elements are left out?
In spite of being masterfully made and extremely well-tailored, both productions leave the educated viewer with a sense of lack. There seems to be something missing in the portrait painted of the press secretary. Can someone really be that well-intentioned? Although Lockhart is quick to acknowledge that there is “an incredible temptation to shave truth here and there” he also asserts that the “simple most important thing is that every time your mouth opens, truth comes out. If you just can’t find a way to articulate the truth then keep your mouth shut.” Although this gives him a moral high-ground to stand on, the important thing here is the ability to articulate the truth. The job of the press secretary is to hand out the truth to hungry reporters, but more importantly, it is to hand out a truth that will merely satisfy their appetite. The truth comes in many forms, in different portions, and at different times. As a White House attaché the truth that comes from the press secretary is naturally in line with the agenda of the White House.

The job cannot be defined in binaries. The Press Secretary highlights the everyday struggle of trying to balance between two opposing agendas “we have an agenda [and the reporters have an agenda] and it is a battle everyday over who wins.” Although the documentary and the episode seem to be filmed through more rose-tinted lenses, reality is a little blurrier. It is for that reason, that a good Press Secretary knows how to tread that line well. While it is easy to call him a shark, a character there to spin, twist, and deceive the reporters, and by that, the citizenry of the country, there is another side present in the documentary and its appropriation. The Press Secretary comes off as the champion of balance between ensuring the reporters are given the truth, but essential elements are contained inside the White House walls. His position is, and will remain, a little murky. It cannot be denied that he is the champion, but one in a game of manipulation. A shrewd cleverness becomes an innate part of his role as Press Secretary. While he will not lie to the reporters, there can be no denial that he will strive to maintain an upper hand in hopes of coming out victorious should disaster strike.

The question is, are we, as consumers of this information, content with someone whose rule of thumb is at best, being vague? Especially if this person is someone we have entrusted with giving us the truth. Lockhart knows he has done his job well when, he says, “[I am most satisfied when] everyone is a bit dissatisfied. Essence is vagueness.” The news media has caught onto this, and continues to provoke. More so because they believe they have been given the responsibility of standing in for the public. They too, have marshaled themselves as heroic, in spite of both The Press Secretary and Access portraying the media in a negative light. They seem to be constant naggers who are snooping through holes for the next big headline.

Ultimately, it comes down to, do we, as the general public trust the administration to provide us with necessary information? Do we think that they may keep certain information, important information, from us because it may do us more harm to be exposed to it? If we believe that the administration is working in our favor, then we should be satisfied with the information we get. However, we live in a world where satisfaction is not the fashionable norm. In a world now governed by media, there is constant curiosity. No matter what information we get, we want more. We need more. The administration must work with this insatiable appetite of the consumer, more so with the advent of the digital age than ever before.

Critical Agents in a digitized world.
Today’s uncensored, real-time, multi-source circulation of news and information holds the White House, and for that matter any government agency in a territory where free speech and freedom of press are constitutional, accountable for its actions. Accountability has become increasingly important, and with it so has transparency. The documentary and the episode both showcase the very delicate and artful dance between transparency, accountability, and information that one person has to perform for the entire country daily – with many trying to sabotage the performance. The press secretary’s duties, aside from informative, are very much performative. There’s an active drawing of reality as the administration strives to keep the American public abreast with what is happening.

By exposing the channels that news goes through to get to the media-consumer, we, as the general public become better informed and hopefully, more vigilant in what information we choose to believe. In an age when we have perhaps too many options to choose from, the responsibility no longer lies with just one man, or an administration. We, as the general public play as important a role in ensuring that the information we choose to believe is authentic. This age has changed us from passive consumers into critical agents. The luxury of fast-paced, real time news and perhaps the ability to have as much access to transparency as we do today, is a relatively new development. Eisenhower was the first President to allow Press Conferences to be recorded, edited and then released later. It was under Kennedy that live broadcasts of Press Conferences were allowed. The transformation becomes even more apparent when we compare the media hype that followed the Indian PM’s visit to Clinton to Nehru’s visit to Kennedy which was shot only in silent film.

This live information we are getting both creates, and feeds our insatiable curiosities. It is important to note that while we may have become more informed and government agents increasingly transparent, it doesn’t mean that all the information we get is accurate. With pressure to provide news stories round the clock, there is less time for thought. As a reporter reflects in The Press Secretary, there isn’t the luxury of waiting to dissect a story anymore. Reporters have less time to think between getting information, writing, and reporting. As C.J. Cregg asks in Access, “how do we reflect? get perspective?” Information has become more speculative and less thoughtful.

The documentary also highlights what we sometimes forget: in preparing for press conferences, everything is incredibly calculated. The President is briefed on the questions that are anticipated, and the right responses to those answers. The calculative method is important to ensure he is not stumped. More importantly, it is a good way to ensure that the answer that is provided does not contradict a previous White House statement. While it is easy to lay blame on not getting the whole truth from the White House, it is harder to acknowledge that we may be accomplices in creating the half-truths that we complain about. In trying to satiate our curiosities, the news agencies are thrust into a race to provide us with current information, for “the White House press office feeds a media machine with a round-the-clock appetite.” (Access).

If what is fed to the reporters is not necessarily the whole truth, if they have no time to process it, and if we require constant information but don’t assume a role as critical consumers of media we are condemned to live in a world of half-truths. This brings forth the dilemma C.J. Cregg pronounces in Access: “This breakneck pace we live at, the 24-hour news cycle… is this good for the country?

Is it inescapable?”

Posted by Emily Kassie at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (354)

Documentary Review
Alisa Schubert Yuasa
Intl1800N – Global Media
The Press Secretary

Theodore Bogosian’s The Press Secretary is an intimate eye-witness account of the west wing of the White House, where the press secretary and his staff work every day to control the influx and outflow of news and what information the press receives from the White House. The film follows the press secretary and his staff for several days. During that time a variety of issues emerge, such as the release of Wen Ho Lee and the failing health of the Indian Prime Minister, which ultimately leads to the cancellation of the press conference in exchange for a smaller, more informal pool spray. The film documents the organized, well-managed office of the press secretary. Throughout the film the pacing retains a sense of mystery, even though technically the audience would be aware that the press conference that Bogosian had gone to film would be cancelled. It deals with a variety of issues: the acceleration of the news cycle in the budding internet age; the clash between the press and the press secretary; and the need to be vigilant to any change in politics, legislation, or news in order to be prepared for press questions.

In reflection to how the press secretary’s office saw Bogosian and his crew, he reflects that “I think they realized that what I was trying to do was an honest effort to show how organized… they could be”, and The Press Secretary does reflect his goal. The documentary is very successful in giving a real-life feeling of how it would be to work as and for the press secretary. In the shots, there is usually constant office noise in the background (opposed to music or sound affects), snippets of brief personal interaction between staff members, and cut back camera shots. These aspects give a sense of authenticity and simplicity to the film. Opting out of fancy video editing and heavy sound effects allows the documentary to be presented as a factual and neutral representation of the west wing.

Short conversations and joke exchanges between the press secretary and his fellow staff or between press veterans give a paradoxical sense of amicability and warmth while at the same time showing a constant weariness between the two sides – one slip of the tongue on the side of the press secretary can be used immediately in the next news cycle as a headline. The documentary is excellent at showing the strain of job through a mix of close shots, pacing, constant movement of people, and jumping from the issue of news cycles to overzealous press members to other issues. It can be seen as an unbiased representation of how things work in the White House, as well as showing the difficulties that the people working in the White House have with fast paced information input and output.

The Press Secretary makes an insightful comment on the acceleration of media. Watching the film more than a decade after it was released, it is impossible to not associate news and media with the internet. However, it is stated early on in the documentary that there were 50 websites on the world wide web when Clinton was elected President, but 25 million by 2000. The Clinton administration had to deal with the technological change which began to “transform the entire culture of White House journalism”. It is explained that the news cycle, which used to take a couple of days, was suddenly being compressed into a single day.

One staff member of the press secretary says that “there isn’t the luxury of waiting until Sunday to dissect it, so it all happens immediately and it makes it less thoughtful and more speculative”. In the film Bogosian reveals how the press secretary was trying to deal with social networking. Through interviews with press and the press secretary alike, the film hints that there is great unease and worry about the acceleration of the news cycle. Bogosian almost seems to represent the accelerating news cycle as a vehicle out of control by both the press and the press secretary. It is associated with words like “less thoughtful”, “speculative”, and “immediate” which leads to the question: when is it too much? Will there come a point where news will be so quickly sped through the system that it loses any sense of truth? The film is a subtle criticism to the speeding new cycle. News has become a two way street, and it’s difficult to keep up with information or keep track of it. Bogosian’s message that is hinted throughout the film is that the accelerating news cycle is dangerous and has lead to a standardization of the news.

The documentary also subtly illustrates a tension between the press and the press Secretary and his staff. Joe Lockhart states that he has done his job when he has given away the minimum of information. The press, on the other hand, wish to glean as much information as possible. Joe Lockhart puts it very plainly: “we have an agenda, the press has their own agenda, and it’s a battle every day over who wins” Thus, there are conflicting goals which leads to an underlying tension throughout the film. Although very neutral, Bogosian does use negative imagery when describing the press, saying for example how the “stills have thirty seconds to capture their prey”. The press are presented as pushy, obstinate, and aggressive, but that is their job because “ultimately they want to get news”.

Bogosian also notes, however, how “the messages coming out of the White House are so controlled, so finely honed – they just don’t want to tell the truth about stuff”. The documentary itself was not allowed to be screened until after the Clinton administration, and before that Bogosian had received an email stating that the footage belonged to the Clinton Administration library and not to him. This tight control of information is presented in the documentary at the same time as the dogged obstinacy of the press to get their news. Hence, The Press Secretary successfully portrays the conflicting goals of both sides using battle imagery and language – which also gives a sense of excitement and tension to the audience.

The main and most important role of the press secretary is to arm the president to be able to tackle the press. Bogosian highlights how significant and difficult the role of the press secretary is by showing footage of press conferences with President Eisenhower and later President Kennedy. In comparison to the silent, wind up film of Kennedy’s meeting with the Indian Prime Minister, current media demands non-stop coverage, immediate news for the every accelerating news cycle, and a need to be constantly vigilant because everything the president or the press secretary says is being recorded and could be used to give the wrong message about US policy.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1115)

By: Addie Thompson

Overview of Film

Eugene Jarecki has done it again. He’s tackled one of the largest and most pressing subjects of our time with an unyielding appetite and a mission to expose horrendous, widespread atrocities, causing his audience to feel more than a bit clueless to our surrounding situation. Jarecki’s newest film, The House I Live In, explores the landscape of the War on Drugs through a variety of lenses. Using personal narratives, talking heads, archival footage, B-roll, public and private media, and characters from a multitude of backgrounds, the filmmaker leaves no stone unturned. He goes even further to reveal more than usual: his own personal background and connection to the topic. As the audience is invited into the film, we learn that it is as much a personal journey of realization and truth-seeking as it is a commentary on the greater national crisis.

Why did Jarecki include such a personal bent in a film of extraordinary proportions? One possibility is to act as a grounding force in such a richly hierarchical film. But then there is the aspect of its richness – why the need for so many stories, especially personal narratives? I believe Jarecki may have slightly missed his mark, due mainly to the style and approach he took in conveying a message to his audience. I will discuss this claim further in a bit.

Major Themes

How do you convey the discrepancy between political thoughts and actions against drugs, and the realities of the drug war? Jarecki nicely populates his film with an arrayed cast of characters, ranging from prisoners to cops to academics. With these characters he is able to touch on many contextual, surrounding issues, enabling his audience to learn that in fact “the War on Drugs has never been about drugs.” The causes, as we see throughout the film, are at the root of society: economic (portrayed through the story of Jarecki’s nanny), familial/circumstantial (children with parents who abuse drugs are more likely to also end up involved with drugs in some way) and/or health-related (drugs are used for relieving anxiety, stress, emotions, mental disorders, etc). At a basic level, drugs alleviate pain. A surrounding “corrosive culture of hopelessness” not only exacerbates but also causes a drug problem.

An interesting addition to this film that wasn’t given ample screen time was the connection to the drug economy. This is not simply related to personal or group income gained from a deal. This refers more to the idea that there is a global business of drugs, that jobs are created due to the War on Drugs – prison guard positions are staffed, more cops are put on the streets, even the manufacturing and production process of drugs gives people jobs. The film works to put a face on these people, to give them a voice amidst the outcry against the issue. Another aspect of this business is the production of weapons, punishment devices and general safety measures that help fight drug abuse. While the film never explicitly states that these are positive side effects of the drug war, the film hints at a humanistic quality to the more evil forces involved, and may be working to illuminate why the drug landscape remains so stuck. Nevertheless, Jarecki makes the point loud and clear that no one is happy with the situation.

Style and Comparative Execution

Besides the strongly personal connection to the director, there are several stylistic choices that Jarecki makes in this film that convey and elicit different feelings than those present in his other work, such as Why We Fight. Though the beginning of the movie includes a fast-paced sequence with quick cuts and dramatic music – similar to the trailer – the rest of the film is less consistent in pacing. At times, the film speeds forward, juiced up with media clips, music, B-Roll and other archival footage. Other times the film slows down, allowing space for audience thought and absorption. This sort of interval speed training keeps the audience’s heart rate rising and falling, but it also does the same to their attention spans. There were points during the film when I felt disengaged, that there was too much space to think and not enough of Jarecki feeding me new material. I wanted more of the drama of the trailer, and couldn’t wrap my head around another personal story. I lost track of the many narratives quickly.

Past pacing, Jarecki includes shots sans-tripod which give the film a gritty, on-the-ground feel. Shots of the prisoners, B-Roll/interview of families, and cops scenes provide good examples of this. Some shots become almost too contrived, however, such as when he captures the weepy father walking on the beach. These shots where one can literally hear the documentarian directing his/her subjects run the risk of losing audience interest once elements of the film become overly cliché.

Overall, the film lacked the music-driven, archival media-centricity of Why We Fight, and there were fewer moments where I outwardly whispered, “Wow.” But I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. There was less hand-holding in this film than in WWF (although this is arguable, and Jarecki would likely cringe at the mention of any hand-holding at all), and the film gave more space for the audience to choose to be engaged if and when they wanted to. Personally, as an observer, I fall for the more dramatic, breathtaking cinema that makes me think while making my adrenaline soar (I won’t lie, as fill-in-the-blank as Under Seige 2 may have been, my blood was pumping and I made some audible comments). While this movie didn’t captivate me as much with an overarching message, it challenged my notions on the space, and left me with an even hazier view of the problem and few answers.

Critiques/Questions

My main critiques of the film are not sourced from stylistic discrepancies between it and WWF. Rather, I want to piece apart some of the choices the director made in regards to personal connection and multitude of narratives, and offer my opinion that both went too far over the line to be called a true success. Not at all a total failure, but a tactic that missed its intended mark.

I’m not sure exactly what Jarecki was trying to accomplish by putting himself in the film, but I have some hypotheses, mainly that it was a way to make the topic accessible to a wide audience. Maybe the audience members are Jewish or have Holocaust survivors in their family, maybe they grew up in a quaint town with a housekeeper. Whatever the background, Jarecki’s almost self-deprecating inclusion of his connections to this topic worked to pull in a larger audience and give us the “what’s in it for me” personal benefits. The Holocaust connection seemed slightly stretched; while I’m not doubting the connections, it seemed as if this was an introduction screaming “this is why you should care” at the audience. I also would have liked for Jarecki to be more consistently in the film, or not at all. When we hear him ask a question, we should be hearing that ten more times throughout the movie to develop him as a character. Jarecki himself thus became a half-developed character I wanted to know more about.

This brings about the topic of characters, and the plethora of them in this film. In order for an audience to fully invest in characters, common discourse in documentary theory says to limit characters in order to gain greater impact with the select few chosen. This aligns well with what guest and esteemed journalist Nicholas Kristof mentioned earlier in the month; the level of human empathy experienced by an audience actually decreases when a second character narrative or storyline is introduced. Humans can only feel so much empathy - not just sympathy or understanding - at once. Jarecki’s inclusion of too many narratives to name made it hard to viscerally latch onto any one of them, though my natural instinct was to do so. I wanted to know more about the mother and her son who was in prison; I wanted to see the development of the new father-son relationship over time. While the filmmaker used multiple stories to help illustrate a larger picture of pain, suffering and stagnation around the War on Drugs, he prevented me from becoming invested in any of his characters, and thus ran the risk of disengaging me as an audience member from the film.

The Global Picture

No one knows what is fully going on. This was a theme in Why We Fight, and it is yet again stressed in this film. Very few know the extent of the War on Drugs. As cleverly displayed during Jarecki’s signature street interviews, few actually know what the current War on Drugs even is. Much like WWF, this film illuminated the ways in which dominant political discourses shape the way we receive our information. When Nixon cracked down on drugs during his time in office, drugs were actually on the decline (before cocaine hit the streets), but his adamant and forceful approach to fighting drug use colored popular discourse and public knowledge. Media channels continue to be not only a source of news, but also a source of global conversation topics that determines what we spend our time talking about. With so much free, open-sourced media in the world, one might assume there would be more questions than answers. But ignorance, as has been shown through Jarecki’s films, does not always mean curiosity and refusal to accept answers. It can also mean complacency, contentment. Classically: bliss. But is it really ignorance in this case that we are experiencing? It seems to fall more under the category of a sort of hazy understanding of the world, in which the public knows things are bad but doesn’t really delve any deeper to figure out why. This form of submission to media power generates taboo subjects, which can in turn cause social suffering and the “hopelessness” touched on earlier. By opening channels not only of news but also of public dialogue, issues like the drug war and drug abuse may stop being so stigmatized and start being solved. And how do we open healthy public dialogue across the world? We have to start with changing the way society participates in global conversations.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (291)

By: Lily Ricci

In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood atop the steps of the Capitol and issued a prescient warning. As he bid farewell to the American people, he exhorted them to " guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Using this warning as his point of inquiry, writer and director Eugene Jarecki chronicles the rise of the American military industrial complex (MIC) in his 2005 documentary Why We Fight.

Borrowing the title from Frank Capra’s World War II propaganda films, Why We Fight is a nuanced look at the veiled relationship behind purported American foreign policy interests and their underlying economic incentives. Initially, the film focuses on how the military industrial complex came into being, beginning with the coining of the phrase military industrial complex by Eisenhower as in allusion to the inextricable linkage of the economy with military efforts. It then weaves its way through the Cold War, touching briefly upon Vietnam to cite the implication it had on the American psyche. The film is bookended by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the bombing of Baghdad on March 19th, 2003, showcasing the modern implications of the MIC. But before Jarecki shows the early morning skies of Baghdad filled with coiling black smoke, he takes us back to where it all began: World War II.

We are all taught at any early age that World War II brought America out of the Great Depression, that if it weren’t for booming wartime industry, America wouldn’t enjoy its (now questionable) status of hegemon. By the close of World War II, the consensus came about that the United States needed a standing military to defend against the ever-present threat of communism. This would entail a constant outlay of federal expenditure to make sure that our military would be ready to strike at a moments notice, outfitted with the most up-to-date technology. This peace time army would also include the continual need to develop and produce new technology, an ethos entrenched by the race to build the first nuclear bomb and the ensuing arms race it spurred.

Cut to Donald Rumsfeld, 50 years later, asking Congress to sign off on a $401.7 billion dollar defense budget.

It is Jarecki’s view that budgets of this size are in direct correlation to our propensity as a nation to make war. Since WWII, America’s choice to enter into armed conflicts has not been about protecting countries right to self-determination or saving an oppressed people from the heavy hands of dictatorships. It has been about protecting American economic interest, by both laying claim to the natural resources of other countries (i.e. oil) and by buoying the armaments industry here at home. But while the later was a boon in the WWII era, lifting the United States out of depression, Jarecki shows that our military industrial complex has now become, well, much more of a complex.

In perhaps one of the most sobering moments of the film, Dick Cheney is shown talking to Tim Russert on Meet the Press in 2003. He proclaims to have no connection whatsoever to the billions of dollars of contracts that were awarded to the military contracting giant Halliburton during his time as Vice President (a statement which the pious Richard Perle goes on to reinforce with outright certainty). Jarecki highlights Halliburton KBR as one of the most audacious and perhaps dangerous instigators of the military industrial complex not for their propensity to lie about their doings, but their ability to speak about them with staggering confidence.

This point is further bolstered as Jarecki cuts to an armaments industry showcase as salesman from KBR states to a crowd full of onlookers “Collusion is our business. Collusion with the government is our business”. If this is true (which Jarecki holds that is), then the cost benefit analysis of going to war is no longer about human life. It is about which elected officials can secure contracts for their cronies at companies such as Halliburton. This is not to say that wars are started for the sole purpose of making money, but that there are deceitful underpinnings to why the American military chooses to do what it does.

This is not to say that Why We Fight is some left-wing diatribe about the US military. It is a carefully researched and artfully pieced together work that sheds a light on the growing role of the extra-congressional activities in deciding international governmental affairs. Think tanks such as William Kristol’s “Project for the New American Century” are responsible for the Bush Doctrine, and yet their members are absolved of all accountability because they’re not elected officials. This is precisely what Eisenhower was speaking to in his address, unwarranted influence.

The films argument is greatly strengthened by Jarecki’s concerted effort to bridge the ideological aisle. Lefty intellectuals like Gore Vidal and Chalmers Johnson balance conservative think-tank figures like Richard Perle and William Kristol. These four men, plus numerous others converge on a consensus, knowingly or not: the MIC is no longer composed of just military professionals, the defense industry and members of congress, but it is now being infiltrated by the growing contingency of think-tanks.

Jarecki arrives at his conclusions through employing a wide array of techniques, most powerful of which are interviews juxtaposed with snippets from current news media. His list of interviewees runs the gamut from the Eisenhower’s granddaughter to Senator John McCain, from a 26-year-old newly enlisted service man to a father who lost his son in 9/11. While the bulk of his subjects are (ex) government officials, it is the later of these two examples that strikes an emotional chord with audience in an attempt to delve deeper into the ramifications of the military industrial complex on individual lives.

Throughout the film, Jarecki features Wilton Sekzer, a Vietnam Vet and a retired NYPD officer. His son was killed on 9/11, which left him with a want of revenge, he himself states “someone has to pay for this”. Initially an ardent supporter of President Bush’s choice to invade Iraq (he even had his son’s name placed on a 2-ton bunker buster), he became disillusioned when he heard Bush announce “we have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11”. In a direct contradiction to himself and his administration, Bush was able to use the fear and anger that came from 9/11 to advance his own military and economic policy. But while Bush’s war would distantly impact people like Wilton Sekzer, people like William Solomon lives would quite literally be changed.

William Solomon says he enlisted in the army for 3 reasons: the death of his last remaining family member (his mother), his inability to complete his education, and his financial hardships. Volunteering for the armed forces was the only foreseeable solution, a reality that so many lower-middle class Americans are faced with. Frank Spinney, a former military analysis at the Pentagon tells Jarecki the subjugation of the lower-class by the military for its own ends is nothing new - it’s been around since Vietnam. The inequity of the draft system allowed middle-class kids to evade being shipped off to war, leaving the poor and unrepresented to die in the jungles of South East Asia. Once the lottery system was put into place that changed. Middle-class kids were getting killed, and that didn’t sit well Americans who had the ability to do something about it. Combined with the unfiltered news media, there was nothing to do put admit defeat and pull out of Vietnam.

Jarecki’s brief but important focus on the impact of Vietnam through the use of Sekzer and Solomon sets the stage for what he frames as 60 years of lies regarding American military involvement abroad. Mistrust of government officials has become an unsettling norm, a norm rarely challenged for fear of being ousted from the inner circles of Washington or by disenchantment on the part of the American voter. Aiding in this disenchantment is the 24-hour news media who all too often mix opinion with fact and call it news. It is this inundation that has left us numb to question the powers at be. But we must if we ever hope to bring down the entrenched powers that be, a point which Jarecki makes with the production of a film such at this one.

In the end, I feel it was Jarecki’s deft choice to open with Eisenhower’s farewell address, letting a respected republican president make his liberal argument for him 43 years before it was even a discussion being had. In choosing to do so, he not only legitimizes his own argument, but the film itself. And so after the mélange of talking heads and sound bites fade and the quiet crooning of Belle & Sebastian melts into the ephemeral cinematic abyss, Why We Fight leaves it’s audience pondering the title itself. Why do we fight?

Posted by Emily Kassie at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (337)

Anna Lillkung
INTL1800
Documentary Review
October 22, 2012

“We do not remember, we rewrite memories much as history is rewritten”, fictive protagonist Sandor Krasna writes to the female narrator in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, a sentence capturing much of what Marker touches upon in his films. The impossibility of memory, objectivity, and the importance of images stand at the centre of the films La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983). Marker first and foremost produces images in the form of still photos in La Jetée and in the form of motion picture in Sans Soleil. Moreover, through his choice of form, he creates a commentary on the entire existence and significance of photography and cinematic art in relation to memory and history. The two films were released on the same DVD in 2007, even though they were made twenty years apart. They greatly diverge in terms of narrative, form, and purpose. However, both films engage with questions relating to the function of memory, authenticity and continuity.

Marker looks at the development of digital technology and image media. Sans Soleil, for example, demonstrates a continuous interest for new media forms as Marker includes a lot of footage of commercials, television, and synthesized pictures in Japan, media forms that rapidly had infiltrated society in the 1980s. Marker does not necessarily show the world as it is but presents it in a way that will make the audience think about how they view it. His work is moreover a result of his memories and his history, though these remain largely unknown to the public due to Marker's unwillingness to participate in interviews during his lifetime. Consequently, Marker drags the audience into his own science fiction world but conveys the feeling that he has not greatly manipulated what we see. He plays with the boundaries of time, the extent of memory, and the illusion of truthful cinema, and the result is two movies that in some way inspire thoughts and reactions to how the surrounding world is perceived.

In La Jetée, Marker tells a fictive story in the form of still photographs about a man “marked by an image of his childhood” at Orly airport, an image that in the end proves to be of his own death. The images are linked by a disembodied narrative voice that directs the story. The protagonist of the film finds himself to be a survivor in a post-nuclear war world that Marker displays in a series of pictures accompanied by dramatic choral music that emphasizes the complete destruction of the world. The surviving humans stay underground where prisoners are subjected to experiments in time traveling by the unnamed victors of the war. The protagonist is specifically chosen for the experiment because he is stuck on the image of his past. He is sent back in time, in an attempt by the scientists to figure out how to save the present, and he travels to the woman whose face he remembered from Orly. Marker varies the pictures of the man in his past with pictures of him in the room with the evil-looking scientist. The man is later sent to the future but asks to be sent back to the past. The film ends with the unavoidable; as the experiment is over, the scientists will execute the man. Thus he goes back to his memory at Orly only to realize that the man he remembered dying there is himself because, as the narrator explains, “there is no way out of time”, no way to escape death.

Marker uses the still photographs to play around with the concept of memory, continuity, and discontinuity. By using separate photographs, Marker alludes to the fragmented nature of our memories. We never choose what to remember and yet certain events remain in our consciousness. These memories make up the story of an individual, just like the photographs make up Marker's story, but the history is never total and one only remembers the pieces. These pieces might at times seem connected, demonstrated in the film by the one scene of motion picture where the woman opens her eyes. However, it is the darkness in between the pictures, like the gaps in memory, that explains why we remember at all. The use of still photos, the movement from one photo to another serves the purpose of pointing out what the film's scientists are attempting to do: move between chosen memories. When the protagonist at first is sent back in time, Marker has chosen a series of seemingly random photographies that fade out, just like protagonist's memories fade out. The discontinuity of the photos, in contrast to motion picture, emphasizes the time-traveling that the protagonist is doing, jumping from one memory to another. However, as time in reality is continuous and will always keep going, the death of the protagonist is inevitable. Even if the photos are only snippets of a whole story, the story itself exists in a stream of time that cannot be stopped.

La Jetée is not only a commentary on memory but also on the art of cinema. Still photographs, or motion picture, capture a specific moment that someone wants to keep forever. Like the protagonist in the film wants to remain in the past with the woman that he cannot forget, cinema is used by humans to remain in a moment and eternally keep it as it was. The point that Marker makes is that it is never possible to immobilize that which is always moving, time, and that not even cinema can be an ultimate time machine that represents the Truth. A cinematic experience will always be different based on the historical and cultural context, just like the protagonist's memory changed as a result of his present. The still pictures in the film would additionally have little to no meaning if they would not be projected together, and even more so if there was no narrator. Through the use of a classic narrative structure, Marker emphasizes the history of cinema: series of pictures that are put together to make a story. Marker thus explores the origins of cinema by using still photos, and points out how manipulation of the images can create a plot, a visual experience and provoke sentiments.

La Jetée is a result of its own time and context. Marker shot the pictures for the film at the beginning of the 1960s in the midst of the Cold War and around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the fear of a new world war was constantly present. In the film, the scientists’ mumbling in German reminds the audience of World War II and the experiments the Nazis conducted on the Jews. Marker therefore reminds the audience of its own recent history, its present and the threat of a future resembling the post-nuclear war world in the film. The audience becomes aware of its own time and therefore the film succeeds in becoming more than a narrative, but rather a visual experience. The point that the film raises is that its own story would not and will not be perceived the same way in a different time. Its spectators in the 2000s will not have the same associations to the film as its audience in the 1960s. Perception is always a product of context and the spectator's experience of the film is unique.

Sans Soleil, filmed 20 years after La Jetée, was certainly produced in a very different context. Sans Soleil is about the thoughts and observations of the world by the fictive traveller Sandor Krasna. The female narrator of the film receives letters from Krasna and she reads what he has written but also comments on the letters at times. The film is particularly focused on Japan, a place that seems to have intrigued Krasna. However, footage from Cape Verde, ile-de-France, Iceland and San Francisco is also used and every image is portrayed as originating from Krasna's camera. Throughout the film, the audience follows Krasna's travels and gets an insight into his mind and his opinions about memory, cultures and his images. Sans Soleil could therefore be a documentary, but as Krasna is a fictive protagonist, as is the narrator, the film has more often been called an essay film. Marker creates a world as it is seen through the eyes of Krasna and therein lies its strength. This is not Marker's views on Japan, it is Krasna's. Marker therefore both makes it apparent that he is not attempting to recreate reality in his film and points out that stories can be retold but also altered on the way and change as a result of the person who tells it next and the person who hears it.

Sans Soleil differs from La Jetée in many respects. Firstly, it does not have a clear, fictive narrative, but rather it initially seems like a travelogue portraying cultures and people as they are, allowing the audience to create the connections and the narrative. Secondly, Sans Soleil is a 90 minute long film that ventures into slowness in contrast to the short and more intense La Jetée. It also uses colored film instead of still photos and Marker's choice to include images from TV and new forms of media indicates the different time context in which this movie takes place. On the other hand, both films handle the theme of memory, which is clearly demonstrated through the references to Hitchcock's Vertigo in which a man becomes obsessed with his memory of a woman. Moreover, both films are visually compelling and original. Marker plays with imagery and despite that Sans Soleil at times feels repetitive and even boring, it serves the purpose of showing how each series of pictures make sense to different people in varying ways. There is no concrete argument, no one way to see the world. Memory only gives glimpses into the past, like in La Jetée, and this will be interpreted differently depending on where we stand in the present.

Marker goes back to using darkness and the nocturnal, also used in La Jetée, to point out how memory is selective. The footage disrupted by black leader at the beginning of Sans Soleil accentuates that certain images only become clear or meaningful in a specific context, or contrasted to the black. Marker develops this train of thought with the footage of the three Icelandic children. At the end of the film, it was only in the context of the volcanic eruption and consequent destruction of the village that made Krasna appreciate this footage of the children. The images once again tell the truth about our memory more than the truth about what we see. Media can only to some extent represent the real or true because humans are subjective in choosing what to remember and see. Marker switches between ideas, images, and associations, indicating Krasna's own recollection process of places and people he genuinely seems to cherish. However, Krasna's original recollection in the film is then diluted due to the voice of the narrator, the disrupting music, and the changing historical context. The impossibility of memory lies in attempting to regenerate that which is already gone. The film provokes thoughts in its viewers, but these thoughts will also be results of the spectators' histories and memories. The film will be interpreted differently in another context, a reason why truthful cinema seems unattainable.

Sans Soleil is significantly slower than La Jetée. The film takes its time to fully display an excess of footage, return to specific images, and create an illusion that these images show reality. Marker is contrasting this slowness of the film by displaying the speed of society. Sans Soleil observes and analyzes new digital technology and media; the narrator points out how there are “pictures bigger than people” in Japan. Media is developing faster than humans and therefore a futurist city like Tokyo is found. Marker also includes footage of televisions and synthesized pictures, hinting at the fascination with the development of media and how it affects our perception and memories. The kamikaze pilots that are shown in synthesized images indicate for example how new technology can recreate history in a modern format in an attempt to make it matter again. The contrasts of society become evident in his footage: the old statues, temples and rituals versus the new department stores, fast metro lines and commercials and posters. The new media images are platitudinous, as is much of Sans Soleil, because the excess of media makes it all much more meaningless. Nevertheless, we cannot escape the new developments but only embrace how they affect our histories and memories.

Sans Soleil no less than La Jetée provides a commentary on imagery, memory and truth. The films offer thought-provoking, visual experiences rather than answers and arguments. Marker provides a medium, a space, where the audience is allowed to engage with images and cinema.The important thing is not to extract Marker's opinions, but to consider one's own views on perception and the eternalization of a moment. Marker is a mystery to most of the world, a man that created many myths about himself and remained detached from publicity. His films point out that cinema and photography is subjective, results of his memories but also of the spectators'. Photographs can show us something real that happened in the past, encapsulate it, and cinema can in addition provide a narrative that explains the pictures. Fundamentally, however, our perception of the image will be skewed by the subjectivity of memory and impossibility to stop time.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (399)

By Spencer Parsons

Hollywood called it “Movie Magic,” though the concept long precedes the big screen as the 19th English poet, critic, and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is often credited in recognizing the importance of a “willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith.” This is considered a crucial element for any successful story that seeks to transport the viewer and to make fantastical claims. Though Coleridge was working with poetry and novels, his words have long been applied to work on the big screen, and have since then this saying has come to shape our understanding of how the viewer interacts with a movie.

The film Under Siege 2: Into Dark Territory directed by Geoff Murphy and written by Richard Hatem and Matt Reeves perhaps requires a little more than a willing suspension of disbelief to swallow the story line, and yet the film successfully manages to transport the viewer into an action packed world not too dissimilar from our on; however one inhabited by crafty criminal masterminds, high-tech futuristic weapons of mass destruction, and one buff action driven hero willing to risk life and limb at a moments notice to save his niece and the world (or the east coast) from total destruction.

The film starts off as our hero and now retired Navy officer, Casey Ryback played by Steven Seagal sets off on a vacation with his niece on the Grand Continental Train making its way from Denver to Los Angeles. Ryback is called into action to once again use his training and skills as an anti-terrorism tactical officer, when somewhat crazy criminal mastermind Travis Dane played by Eric Bogosian, hijacks the train to turn it into the command center to deploy an top-secret government, outer space, seismic super-weapon. Only in this world of “suspended disbelief” could one man – our hero- set out to take down the criminal mastermind and save the world and the trains passengers from seemingly inevitable destruction.

Stylistic
The setting of the film is limited almost exclusively to action contained within, on top of, or as was sometimes the case for several unfortunate characters, underneath the Grand Continental Train as it speeds from Denver to Los Angeles. In this case our visual imagery is quite limited to the scenery of train cars and occasionally of glimpses of an empty wilderness that the train passes through. Yet the unique setting lends itself quite well to action taking place within the movie. Just as the train continues to move inevitably forward to its destination, so too does the action lead towards the inevitable success of our hero Casey Ryback as one by one he moves through the train cars picking off the “bad guys”. Many of the shots consist of Ryback deftly moving through various compartments within the train. We do not question how our hero has suddenly become an expert on the geography or layout of the train’s compartments, but rather we are compelled by the many choreographed scenes of Ryback moving through baggage compartments and heating vents to turn the train itself into a live fighting arena where anything goes – including kitchen knives, homemade bombs, and intense hand-to-hand combat.

Character Tropes:
The disgruntled former CIA computer specialist Travis Dane makes for a convincing if not somewhat atypical movie villain. Though the film displays an incredible amount of physical violence, with an uncountable number of scenes of hand-to-hand combat, and profoundly gruesome displays of death as people have their necks broken or are thrown bodily from the train and sometime even underneath it, Travis Dane played by Eric Bogosian, never once engages in physical violence. In fact, even his ultimate death where he falls to his death into a flaming explosion of gas and train, lacks that physical quality that all the other villains suffer at the hands of the hero Casey Ryback.

This dichotomy between the realm of good and evil is also a divide between the intellect versus the physical. Compared to Travis Dane’s “brainy” capacity to cause mayhem and destruction, our hero Casey Ryback is very much a man of action. Travis Dane prides himself on his cunning and his intelligence clearly asserting his triumph over the people working within the CIA claiming “I was smarter than you before I was there. I was smarter than you while I was there. And I'm smarter than you now. Au revoir." Our hero however, moves with a certain raw physical inclination and lack of intellect that makes him perfectly suited to confront this foe. Hardly portrayed as an intellectual, Steven Seagal’s character is quite limited with words – only ever announcing one line action phrases in comparison to Travis Dane’s rambling monologues. In fact faced with the possibility of having to emotionally connect with his teenage niece and express his feels, Ryback seems to almost relish the thought of taking on the train hijackers – announcing to himself “now this, this is what I was trained for”.

Checking off every possible qualification for the action/thriller genre, including a buff physical hero, a crafty yet ultimately unqualified criminal mastermind, a loyal but clumsy sidekick, and a spunky yet vulnerable damsel in distress, Under Siege 2 still somehow manages to keep the audience entertained. Taking cues from an entertaining soundtrack, the audience is directed to applaud, laugh, and cringe at the appropriate moments, timed with these shots, the whole stylistic effect adds to an “action movie” that tries very hard to be an action movie.

Themes

Yet despite an incredibly predictable plot that could be easily summarized in one sentence, a lot of cheesy one-liners and some questionably overly dramatic acting, the film still hits on some important themes that still resonate with a lot of popular narratives continually used in successful, more contemporary works of film.

Thriller and action movies have long been foils for society where the villain or antagonist within a movie often is portrayed in a way as to depict the enemy of the day. With a clear dichotomy between good verses evil, the viewer is left with little uncertainty as with whom he should be identifying, and as to who is the enemy of the day. In this way, the film with its set cast of heroes and villains stands as a sort of time capsule that is very indicative of its time period. Unlike more recent action films and television series like 24 or Homeland where the the main cast of antagonists consist of “ethnic others” and most often individuals of Arab or Middle Eastern descent, Travis Dane is a home grown criminal mastermind. Perceived to be dead after committing a fake suicide, Travis Dane, a former CIA agent gone rogue, represents the unforeseen danger from within and the fear that we cannot predict such an attack.

In the same way the global danger proposed by the film is another sort of time capsule. In this film the people in Washington DC facing imminent destruction are threatened by a weapon of there own creation, one which has been hacked and taken from there control and turned against them. In this way, we can see that this danger reflects a fear of the power of technology and its ability for it to turn against us as well as this fear of a unseen danger from within. Ironically this is still a theme that captures our attention and more so our imagination more so now than ever in action movies produced much more recently. In the film “Eagle Eye” a young unwitting hero is ultimately pitted against a new form of evil – a supercomputer with artificial intelligence and an uncanny power to tap into all technological devices to either help or hurt the protagonist.

Finally there is the crucial, and time-worthy theme of individual agency as the power to save the day. This resonates strongly with many, if not all action movies that seek to end on a positive note. In the film, our hero Casey Ryback is able to accomplish the impossible and single handedly take down a train full of villains despite being outnumbered and at a certain point getting shot. His efficiency in handling the situation only serves to further highlight the inadequacy of the CIA and larger structural organizations in handling such important issues. The difference in capabilities is overwhelmingly clear, as the CIA is forced to sit back and watch helplessly while relying on one man to do their job for them. As such we can only rely on individual prowess to once again save the day.

Do Action Movies fulfill a Societal Need?

The old adage regarding the “suspension of disbelief”, while commonly used and often referred to as the source of movie magic, wrongly seems to suggest that in order to fully appreciate and to lose oneself in a movie, one must disengage from the work of fiction and simply accept its premises and its story line. This I believe is incorrect, because the most successful movies do not simply leave their audience inactive, but rather they engage the audience by tapping into contemporary issues, fears, and fantasies.

In this way action movies are part of a critical narrative along with other works of art because, as the actor Eric Bogosian said himself, they allow us as the audience or the viewer to collectively fantasize and project those fantasies on the big screen. We the audience create villains that resonate with our fears or perhaps simply our ‘enemy of the day,’ and likewise we create heroes that can triumph and persevere against all odds. Even though Casey Ryback operates with cheesy one liners and perhaps too much hair gel, we the audience want to be able to picture ourselves as the Casey Rybacks of the world, with his same ability to transform into a hero at a moments notice if the situation were to arise. Thus, while it may not make for the most thrilling action film, the fact the story line was so easily predictable in its outcome and its dialogue, is in part evidence of its success in tapping into this collective story telling fantasy.

In this case perhaps, we find fiction more compelling than the truth. We are easily able to dissociate the actions within the film from anything close to reality, and yet we are still compelled by a tale that is being told—of good versus evil, and we still find ourselves rooting for the ‘good guy’ to triumph in the end. In the same way that we can rationally dismiss the possibility of an outer space, seismic weapon of mass destruction threatening our daily lives, the small fear that something that was once in our control could turn against, is a very real fear that resonates with us all at some level, and so nonetheless we are compelled by this ‘real’ danger. Ultimately, even if the film itself produced nothing original in terms of its story line or the acting, it succeeded in the act of story telling itself, and as such could be seen as a success.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (585)

By Kevin Pires

The critical response to Alison Klayman’s documentary Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry, a deft presentation of the cultural and political manifestations that have contributed to making the artist Ai Wei Wei who he is today, has been overwhelmingly positive. This comes as little surprise. Klayman manages to do with 91 minutes what many others have attempted with far more time and resources at their disposition. Klayman’s opportunity to first film the artist came when a friend of hers who was helping to organize an exhibition of Ai Wei Wei’s New York photos asked her to make a 20-minute clip to run at the show. That 20-minute clip was made but was only just the beginning for Klayman. She stayed on with Ai Wei Wei filming him from 2008 to 2010, an incredibly fortuitous timing that gave her access to the artist at a particularly polarizing time in his career. This film is not being dropped into a chasm. Ai Wei Wei may not yet be a true household name but his nearly three month detention and the subsequent international response proliferated his name like a cultural wildfire. Importantly, Klayman parlayed her unparalleled access to the artist’s inner sanctum to negotiate several topics, foremost, transparency and the role of the individual in contemporary Chinese society and how individuation is increasingly possible with the rise of social media technologies.

This is not the typical artist portrait documentary. But then again Ai Wei Wei, as Klayman’s camera captures so eloquently, isn’t a typical artist. Instead of focusing solely on the conception and production of Wei Wei’s art, Klayman utilizes the artist’s work to elucidate the larger trends in his career and how preternaturally coherent his oeuvre proves to be. Every work is a discrete discussion of any one of the topics that Wei Wei finds salient. The photos that detail the destruction of Neolithic vases for example or the same historically significant vases that Wei Wei dips in paint, are as Hung Huang, a Chinese cultural blogger in the film states, proof that Wei Wei knows exactly what he wants to say and knows exactly how to say it. The shock that results from seeing such blatant destruction of cultural patrimony in the work of Wei Wei is an ingenious way of commenting on the piecemeal demolition of Beijing’s historic neighborhoods in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics. A series of events that Wei Wei denounces as a “fake smile”, a gesture that Klayman cleverly mirrors with a well chosen shot of what appear to be governmental workers doing their best at producing a smile. An issue that is complicated by the fact that Wei Wei rose to prominence through his role in designing the Beijing Olympic Stadium or “Bird’s Nest” with the architectural film of Herzog & de Meuron. Klayman handles this discussion competently, interweaving various strains of cultural commentary into a cogent whole.

Never Sorry pays special attention, rightfully so, to the increasing interconnectedness between Wei Wei’s art and his technological pursuits. It is here that Klayman’s execution is particularly lucid. In one scene Wei Wei says that, "The Internet is the greatest invention of the 20th century…it allows ordinary people a chance to change public opinion." The viewer can’t help but sense that this moment encapsulates the artist more faithfully than anything else. By the end of the film, it seems that while Ai Wei Wei may be wonderfully talented in the plastic arts, that he has hit his real stride in his works that rely on the communicative power of the Internet and the public forums it fosters like blogs and Twitter. When Wei Wei explains that he is attempting to transform things into today’s language, the viewer understands that he is referring to a larger communicative gesture, one that utilizes the universality of technology to transcend the Chinese firewall and resonate far beyond the immediate locus. The viewers here are privy to how Wei Wei has been able to dexterously weave art and activism to create an edifying amalgam. The perceptiveness of his embrace of social media technologies combines with his diary-like camera and a quasi-obsessive recording of his daily life to produce what appears to be a final artistic gesture: life as art or conversely, art as life.

In one of the film’s most arresting moments you have Ai Wei Wei at a restaurant eating with a group of people who were prompted by the artist’s online activity to join him for this meal in Chengdu. Klayman’s camera captures one of Wei Wei’s team members filming someone from the Chinese authorities filming Wei Wei’s meal. This scene is a gift in Meta- and alerts the viewer as to the complicated web of meaning that is being created. The role of technology in the film, the shots of Wei Wei’s Twitter feeds and how technology is brought into perfect collusion with art astutely parallels a moment in Never Sorry’s early scenes where Wei Wei explains that he conceives the ideas for his art but that he doesn’t physically execute them. Just like the team of people in Wei Wei’s studio that produce his art, Wei Wei used the Internet to enlist voices to recite the names of the over 5,000 schoolchildren that died as result of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, a simple but powerful stand against the government’s attempt to obscure the official death toll. This perfect synthesis of art and activism utilizes a brilliant conceptual structure and imposes the simplicity and efficacy of social media and the Internet to bring the project to fruition. This is what Ai Wei Wei does so brilliantly and what Klayman was able to illuminate on screen.

The Sichuan earthquake and Wei Wei’s multi-tiered approach to the resultant destruction marks one of the film’s principal arcs and a constructive lens through which to examine the cultural significance of the artist’s work. The earthquake, which killed more than 80,000 people, was one that the government not only had a hand in aiding with its use of flimsy “tofu” structures for school buildings but then also attempted to whitewash, a stab at erasure that acts in diametric opposition to Wei Wei’s search for transparency and accountability. A quest that as the film tracks takes Wei Wei and his team all over China in an attempt to file a lawsuit against the government for the brutality he suffered at the hands of the police. What happens next and what the film so adroitly chronicles is how the artist’s outspoken response to the earthquake and the attack, brought Wei Wei into direction opposition to the Chinese government and led to a precipitous escalation of the government’s surveillance of his activities. Ai Wei Wei’s art, a form of cultural one-upmanship, has a precise echo in the scene where the artist compares what he does to chess, where one is continually responding to an opponent’s move.

Whether intentionally or not, Never Sorry suggests the malleability in the distinctions between artist and man. The film recognizes this in scenes where Wei Wei tries to avoid having to be on camera with his mother and the obvious tensions that arise when he is questioned about his young son. It is often hard to discern in the film just where the real Wei Wei lies. The cult of personality that has risen around him, one that the artist acknowledges when showing a t-shirt that uses his name in a caricature’s design, blurs the outlines of the real Wei Wei. The viewer enters into a techno-cultural cycle where the Twitter and blog activity precipitates a range of responses unique to themselves and that work to complicate the shifting boundary between artist and man. One cannot overlook the resonance in the fact that Wei Wei’s father was an important victim of the Cultural Revolution and that the artist seems to be a central figure in a new type of revolution, one propagated by the tension between the Chinese government’s repressive societal pressures and the prominence of the Internet and the inherent democracy in its form.

The question remains: who is in control of the filming? Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry in some ways seems to be another of Wei Wei’s works. One of those works that he conceives but then entrusts the power of production onto someone else. Are there moments where Klayman loses her autonomy as a filmmaker? As an artist herself? These are slippery questions, ones that the viewer ultimately must answer for him or herself. There is no doubt though in the proficiency with which Klayman coalesced a complicated set of cultural and political actors into an illuminating discussion of more than just art and more than just politics. The film depicts the distinct coherence in the artist’s work brilliantly. Whether it’s the photos from Wei Wei’s time in New York during the 80s, the Munich backpacks or all the Twitter activity, the very distinct motivations and conceptual underpinnings that characterize his work congeal perfectly. A revealing portrayal of one immensely talented artist’s repertoire and the forces that threaten but thus far have yet to succeed in silencing him.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (291)

By: Mabel Fung

After Ai Weiwei, Chinese artist and social activist, returned to China in 1993, his art has slowly become a channel for him to express his frustrations and feelings for his own country. In the eyes of many others, China has transformed into a prosperous global powerhouse over the last twenty years. But to Ai Weiwei, some things never change. Ai Weiwei said, “China doesn’t change in certain sense and that’s what I value the most, you know, the freedom of speech and the liberation of the mind. All those things …never changed.” Because of this, Ai Wei Wei made a commitment to change China through his art. By viewing Ai Weiwei’s art through a political lens, it is easy to see that art and politics work together in an attempt to influence change in China.

For an artist, freedom of expression is the most important and most precious thing. For Ai Weiwei, art is certainly the vehicle for him to be creative and develop new ideas and the channel to for him to response to ideas, things and people around him. Not all artists are political. But as Ai mentioned in the film, politics and art are the things that interest him. His sensitivity to his socio-political environment allows him to react crisply and clearly to the roots of the problems of China, such as corruption and the lack of transparency in the government. “He is really brilliant, he can take his own response and very naturally turn it into art. Who else in contemporary art does this?” said Artist Chan Danqing.
Ai Weiwei was one of the first generation artists who studied abroad in the United States. Having lived in the United States for thirteen years before returning to Beijing, his views about politics are more liberal than many other people in China and he acts in a more radical way. However, compared to his fellow artists, he is an exception. A lot of artists in China could care less about politics. They don’t want to give up their fame and good lifestyle. But money doesn’t please Ai and this is why the Chinese government does not approve of Ai Weiwei.

The Chinese Government is Powerful but Not Fearless
The idea of Alison Klayman’s documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is very clear: it is about Ai Weiwei, his life, his art and his social activism. Klayman first talked about his life as an artist and his recent work in China, then she focused on talking about his childhood and his time in America and how that influenced him as an artist. She then turned back to talk about his recent social activism in China, his recent arguments with the Chengdu police and his “disappearance” in 2011.

In the eyes of the audience of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Ai Weiwei, despite being in his fifties, has a vibrant inner child in him. He is optimistic about China as he has hopes that China will change and become more democratic in the future. He is rebellious because he is not afraid to publicly boycott the Beijing Olympics. He is brave, energetic and persistent, such that he carried on with the investigation of the Sichuan earthquake and his lawsuit against the Chengdu Police beating accident. “What counts,” Mr. Ai wrote, are “the tens of thousands of lives ruined because of poor construction of schools in Sichuan, because of blood sellers in Henan, because of industrial accidents in Guangdong and because of the death penalty. These are the figures that really tell the tale of our era.” He said he was “fearful”, but he acts braver than his other counterparts in China and is willing to critique the flawed government system. As he said in the documentary, “I act more brave because I know the danger is really there. If you don’t act, the danger becomes stronger.”

Most importantly, he is active in social media, where he uses twitter to document his daily life. Media is highly censored in China. Despite having his Sina microblog shut down after he posted the names of the people who died in the Sichuan earthquake, he was determined to get through the firewall of China and stayed active on Twitter ever since. He once mentioned that social media and the Internet are the greatest inventions of this century. He further added that, “Some photos, at the right moment, completely change the history. Photos always tell the truth, no matter big truth or small truth; it always should be justified.” His active use of social media is shown in the documentary by the occasional clicking sound of cameras and the typing sound on the keyboard along with the main soundtrack of the documentary. This builds the understanding of roles that social media and photography play in Ai Weiwei’s life.

Yet, in the eyes of the Chinese communist government, Ai Weiwei has the worst combination of qualities that the Chinese government wants in the community. All Chinese artists are under the radar of the Chinese government, but Ai Weiwei is not just revolutionary in his artwork or art forms. Ai Weiwei is a representation of Western ideology such as freedom of speech and participatory politics. The worst fear of the Chinese government is that he is extremely socially active on the Internet. He is not just an artist anymore. Under normal circumstances, when people’s blogs are “shut down” in China, nobody dares to start another one. People are scared. They fear the government. But Ai Weiwei, he is fearless. Therefore, a lot of people, turn to Ai Weiwei as an outlet for their own frustrations. He became the public’s voice. What does it mean to the Chinese government to be so socially active? To the Chinese government, it means the ability to mobilize thousands of people to collect names of people who died during the Sichuan earthquake. It means the gathering of one thousand people to commemorate the Sichuan earthquake in the Haus der Kurst in Munich, Germany. It means gathering people to celebrate the demolition of his new studio in Shanghai at a River-Crab Party without his presence. These are mini revolutions against the party power. Being socially active gives him the popularity and the power needed to go against the government. He never directly criticizes the government, but all of these actions are symbolic and yet very literal in a way that it is impossible to dismiss or overlook the meaning behind it. What frightens the government most is that all of these decisions that Ai Weiwei made is only “one second on Twitter on a midnight”. A one-second decision can shatter sixty-three years of the Chinese government’s hardwork.

Ai Weiwei would not be where he is now without the influence of his father and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 but the Chinese government did not expect this when they planned the revolution. In the movie, Klayman worked with a lot of archival materials, but the most striking information is perhaps Ai Weiwei’s connection to his father, Ai Qing. Klayman briefly mentioned that Ai Qing was on exile to be re-educated during the Cultural Revolution. His father, like a lot of other educated youths, was deprived of education at that time. Words used to be the most powerful way to express ideas but at that time, words became the weapon against them, the future of China. Not just Ai Qing was affected, but Ai Weiwei too was affected by the revolution. As a result of the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei never received formal education. Some of his art are reflections and reactions towards his lack of education during the revolution. Words mean nothing to him. When words lost their power to convey critical messages, Ai Weiwei uses his middle finger. Because of this causal gesture of his in front of Tiananmen Square, his art becomes the powerful new “voice” that replaces words. As Hung Huang said, “You cannot mistake a photograph with Tiananmen in the background and this [Ai’s middle finger] in the air. He knows what he wants to say with his art and how to say it extremely accurately.” This is why the Chinese government is afraid of him. He is a product of the Cultural Revolution but he became the symbol of rebellion in the most vulgar manner and the representation of American ideologies such as the freedom of expression in China. He is not what the Chinese government envisioned China’s youth would be like during the Cultural Revolution.

The Chinese government is also scared because Ai Weiwei doesn’t seem to take his art projects very seriously but then his art still generates a lot of attention. In one of his latest projects shown in the documentary, he made people say “Grass Mud Horse, Motherland” (草泥馬，祖國) which is a pun for the vulgar expression “Fuck Your Mother, Motherland” (操你媽，祖國). This vulgar expression and political satire is something he had fun making it but not something that he took so seriously. Yet the message screams loudly at the Chinese government. Ai told Klayman in the documentary that he considered himself more as a chess player than an artist. He added, “My opponent makes a move; I make a move. Now I’m waiting for my opponent to make the next move.” He also commented, “what the hell is art anyways?” Maybe this is the reason why he makes art. He was having fun. But fun is not a word in the Chinese government’s dictionary.

Ai Weiwei Loves his Country
The formula of success in China is very simple, “you deal with your own business and pay your way up the hierarchy. Let the government deal with the rest.” This way, Chinese people get the money, and the Chinese government gains respect from other countries. The government will treat its people well if they do well in what they are supposed to do.

Therefore, for a person to be political in China is a very personal and risky pursuit. It is a secret business. One cannot tell his or her neighbor how he or she feels about the government because his or her life can be on the line any minute after he or she express his or her opinion. People betray others for money. The only way to be political and successful in China is to join the Chinese Communist Party.

But voicing frustrations does not mean a person doesn’t love his or her country. This is exactly what both Ai Weiwei and Chinese youths think. There’s a very popular saying in China’s younger population, which is “we love our country, not our party” (愛國不愛黨). Ai’s art, which also expresses the same message, echoes with the youths and educated people’s opinion. This love-hate relationship Ai has with China is shown through his actions and his art. They are all symbols of his frustration against the communist party. He also shows his love by depicting the ugliest images of the communist party, such as the project for Sichuan Earthquake, hoping that one day, the Party will be willing to admit its flaws. But the Chinese government sees it as a threat to national harmony.

Pre & Post Film Reflections
In the documentary, Ai Weiwei switches back and forth between Chinese and English as he comments on his own life or art. His tone, when he speaks in Chinese, is much more provocative and animated compared to when he speaks in English. This contributes to how Chinese and non-Chinese understand him differently. A viewer fluents in both Mandarin and English can better engage with his comments and understand the different aspects of his personality.

Over the past few years, as Ai Weiwei rose to fame in China and greater Chinese area including Hong Kong and Taiwan, Ai Weiwei was known to be more or less a very fearless person. He is impossible to be ignored. His “voice” is strong, provocative and radical most of the time. He is also more than that just an artist. He is the voice of the Chinese public, the symbol of American ideology in China and the indicator of the Chinese communist party’s tolerance and patience. On the other hand, some non-Chinese think he is a “teddy bear”, because his voice is calm and deceptively gentle when speaking English.

Personally, my first “encounter” with Ai Weiwei dated back to when a Hong Kong newspaper documented his activism and artwork on the Sichuan earthquake. But it was not until a few months before the Beijing Olympics that Ai Weiwei’s fame escalated in Hong Kong. He was one of the first public Chinese figures who fearlessly publicized the plan that the Chinese communist party had in mind about the Beijing Olympics – a show to the world the party’s success in rebuilding China and correcting China’s international image. In Hong Kong, he is heroic. I have to admit my understanding of Ai Weiwei is more similar to the way non-Chinese portrays him in the documentary, but with a more radical edge. In China, only the most politically active people know him but other people just treat him like any other Chinese artist. Many Chinese people don’t really appreciate and understand art. They think art is a waste of time. It is not until the recent wave of Chinese art in the international scene that more people have begun to pay closer attention to Chinese art.
Surprisingly, after watching Alison Klayman’s documentary, my idea and perception of Ai Weiwei shifted a little. Maybe Ai Weiwei is, afterall, just like us. Klayman manages to show her audience the more humanizing side of Ai Weiwei through telling the details of his love for animals, such that he owns forty cats and dogs in his studio, and highlighting his interaction with his son. The ending shot of the documentary was about Ai Weiwei and his son. They were walking on Ai’s Sunflower Seeds installation in London’s Tate Museum. This is certainly not a common imagery of Ai Weiwei in the public. Also, he seemed really vulnerable when he was “disappeared” by the Chinese government in 2011. These little details, in fact, make Ai Weiwei more relatable. To a lot of the Chinese people, Ai Weiwei is different from the rest of the powerful people in China. Due to his provocative art, Chinese people have high hopes in him to promote change in mainland China. His activism on social media also makes him seem very fearless. Sometimes, even Chinese people think that the government is afraid of him because of his international fame. All these expectations generated an image of him that is more powerful than who he really is. The ending quote, “I don’t feel powerful at all. I’m still under this kind of, detention. Maybe being powerful means to be… fragile,” speaks directly to the hearts of the audience that the Chinese government is fearful but powerful.
The clarity of the message of the documentary is certainly what made this documentary a success in portraying of Ai Weiwei’s character. The voice of Alison Klayman echoes with that of Ai Weiwei, such that the message of their artworks is very direct and literal. It is not a simple task to tell Ai Weiwei’s story. His story in itself is dramatic and complicated. But Klayman balanced her narrative with that of Ai Weiwei’s own narrative perfectly without losing their own voices. Despite the lack of appearance of Klayman in actively narrating the story, her voice is felt strongly because of the way she portrays Ai. She inserted certain anecdotes of Ai’s past throughout the documentary to supplement his recent works to show how Ai Weiwei becomes the person he is now. She makes Ai Weiwei alive in the documentary. On the other hand, Ai Weiwei’s own narration is full of wit. The audience can sense his shrewdness through his own comments about ideas and people and his own artwork very clearly. Klayman did not hide away Ai’s voice by speaking for him in the documentary.

Ai Weiwei: Never Story tells the story of a fearless Chinese man who uses art to rebel against the Chinese government and yet, he is just like everybody else. He does things that he cares about – politics and art – and he, through his art and social activism, is creating a movement in China. Nobody, even people who watched this documentary, knows what his next stage of life will be like. But he will keep trying and most importantly, keep us informed, through his twitter about his daily life, art and frustration.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1279)

A Review of Never Sorry
By Rachel Kay

While describing her film Never Sorry to a group of Brown undergraduate students, director Alison Klayman is nonchalant. As her casual narrative suggests, she found herself in the right place at the right time to begin filming Ai Weiwei—the contemporary artist meets activist meets political dissident who shapes the subject of her documentary. By filming his daily activities, dipping into his family history and upbringing, and presenting the opinions of relevant journalists and gallerists, Klayman crafts a thorough portrait of the artist. Investigating Ai Weiwei from all angles helps portray the multi-dimensionality of his character. Yet however embellishing is Klayman’s insider lens, something definitive about Ai Weiwei surfaces with or without her input.

Weiwei’s life on its own is a performance, a constant attempt to freely express and make public his artistic visions. Without affect, he poses for the camera (whether for Klayman’s or the many others that follow his every move). On his own, he Tweets and uploads incessantly, blending private and public openly, and devoting many of his artistic projects to revealing corruption or inequalities within the government. He is a figure advocating and emanating transparency. His life and art and politics are indistinguishable. Thus, little is required for any documentarian to tell his story or convey his influence.

Never Sorry successfully reveals this fact. In one scene of the film, Klayman shoots Ai Weiwei seated at a restaurant in Chengdu with a group of his friends. Within seconds people gather around his table to greet and thank him for his work—projects which include compiling the names of students killed in the Sichuan earthquake, designing the “Birds Nest” for the 2008 Beijing Olympics (then refusing to attend its opening due to the false spirit behind the games), and photographing himself smashing ancient Chinese urns. As Weiwei’s presence continues to cause an innocent stir on the street, the police in Chengdu order him to leave. The implications are that he cannot eat outside; he cannot rouse support from Chinese citizens; he cannot call any more attention to his art. In a strange moment of meta-surveillance, Klayman captures the whole incident, filming one of Weiwei’s videographers filming a policeman filming the entire scenario as well.

By exposing this event in Chengdu, and several other altercations between Ai Weiwei and the government, Never Sorry depicts the deep chasm between art and politics within China. Reaching frequent and unpredictable points of conflict, simply following Ai Weiwei in real time, the film underscores the precariousness of an artist’s life. Klayman almost accidentally records while video cameras are erected around Weiwei’s home, and as a brawl with the Chinese police results in his emergency trip to Germany. Even the moments of reprieve or description in the film are but fleeting.

For instance, Klayman shoots the opening of Weiwei’s 2010 exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. His astonishing work of art, comprised of millions of hand-painted, porcelain sunflower seeds, covers the floor of the Turbine Hall. Crowds of photographers and curators gather eagerly to transmit Weiwei’s amazing project. It is one of the few scenes in Never Sorry that speaks purely of Ai Weiwei the artist, a fundamental side of his figuration that unfortunately gets muddled by China and the political controversy he unavoidably stirs there. The proud scene at the Tate fades out slowly on a shot of Ai Weiwei and his son. Klayman’s audience believes Never Sorry has come to its satisfying end.

But believing so would be incorrect, for as Klayman herself explains, Ai Weiwei’s subsequent disappearance necessitated continued coverage. All of this drama, all of the non-linear, unpredictable evolution of her project, is the most telling feature of Never Sorry. As the film illuminates, Weiwei’s narrative cannot be molded by anyone but himself. However neutral his projects may be, they will always face censure from his home country and result in unexpected conflict. Therefore, Never Sorry as a project and Klayman as a filmmaker take on new purpose. Rather than purely ‘documenting,’ or telling a story about real life (as surely the film accomplishes), they become charged with unveiling and communicating all that Ai Weiwei sadly cannot.

“The film is about communication, expression, and transparency,” says Klayman, themes inexorable in the consistent reporting of Ai Weiwei. He is a force much greater than man or artist, a representation of all that remains shackled in a seemingly free-for-all digital age. Whether realized by Klayman or her subject Ai Weiwei, the goals behind their art forms are one and the same. And in a current moment of silence for Ai Weiwei, Never Sorry carries out his dream.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1263)

The Journey to Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry
By: Emily Kassie

In 2006 Alison Klayman travelled to China and stumbled upon the story of a man who has made an unimaginable impact on his country through his art and refusal to be silenced. Over four years of creation, the narrative of Ai WeiWei morphed into a tale of tenacity and courage, transforming Klayman herself not only into an artist, but arguable a political activist—whether she intended it or not.

Klayman’s Documentary, Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry begins with the image of a single cat, among 60 cats, that is able to open doors at Ai WeiWei’s studio in Beijing. The rest of the cats, Ai WeiWei suggests, merely watch the door and don’t dare attempt to open in. This delicate metaphor sets the stage for Alison Klayman’s nuanced documentary on the life of a Chinese artist and political dissident.

In China today, any criticism of the government or person who is perceived a threat can be imprisoned or even ‘disappear’. Therefore Ai WeiWei’s art, which often depicts him throwing a middle finger at the Chinese parliament—literally—has targeted him as a menace to the government. So, Klayman began making a film about an artist who, through his art, sent messages to the world and to China advocating freedom of speech and transparency in government. However, while Klayman was wrapping up her film in 2011, Ai WeiWei disappeared and was held in secret by the Chinese government for 83 days—changing everything.

Immediately, because of her intimate relationship with Ai, Klayman received attention from the press to speak as a spokesperson for Ai, appearing on the Colbert report and other programs. Suddenly the unfinished documentary Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry and Klayman herself became advocates for Ai’s release. Klayman asserted that it was never her intention to become an activist or take on Ai’s battles, however she also felt she had as duty to him and the message of her film to take on some of this responsibility.

This brings about a crucial question for all documentarians; is there a moral responsibility to take a stance on the subject matter you are relaying? And further, can a documentary ever be objective?

Where does art end and life begin?

This documentary attempts to explore the interactions of life and art and discern between Ai WeiWei’s role as both an artist and activist. Is Ai WeiWei an artist who incorporates social messages in his work, or a political activist who uses art as his weapon?

In Klayman’s documentary, Ai frames himself as a chess player, offering that when an “opponent makes a move, he makes a move.” Yet Ai constantly ascertains that he is primarily an artist. After watching the film, it is clear the Ai wears many hats. His politics go well beyond his art as he took the responsibility to find the names of the thousands of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake. In this scenario, Ai took on the role of an investigator, a journalist and an advocate of justice. Later, Ai also created a mural of 9000 backpacks in 2009 spelling out a message from one of the diseased children’s mother—“She lived happily for seven years in this world.”

A second example of Ai’s artistic dissent is a photograph he took of himself in the hospital with his middle finger up, after being beaten by the police. This piece sends a distinct message to the authorities that were responsible for his head trauma, but the photograph itself is elegant, well framed and a piece of art. Ai took a series of photographs depicting his middle finger in front of government buildings in China as well as the white house and the Eiffel tower. He calls this series of photos ‘study of perspective’ which has a focus on either his hand in front of the camera or the structure in the distance. Here, Ai is experimenting with depth of field and focus, while also making a strong political statement.

Klayman also struggles to make the distinction between her role as an artist and activist. Is Klayman’s documentary a portrait of an artist? Or is it a cry for change in China and support for Ai WeiWei and freedom of speech. Klayman determines that she does not want to be considered an activist. Rather, she wants to present the narrative of an individual with strong political views.

Arguably, Klayman was not able to avoid the politics of her film. When Ai was arrested, Klayman wrote several pieces for major publications, including the Huffington Post, explaining the situation in China and demanding Ai’s release. Because of Ai’s arrest and Klayman’s obvious support of the artist, Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry, exalts Ai WeiWei and in turn comes across as a documentary in support of him and his cause. The film does not provide enough criticism of Ai for it to be considered a balanced examination of the artist. The interviews in the film are of individuals who largely support Ai and the editing of Ai’s day-to-day life presents a positive and heroic image of Ai.

Visual Metaphors

In his art, Ai often plays with symbolism. From his exhibit of 9000 backpacks of the earthquake, to his series of ‘photos in perspective’ mentioned earlier, Ai WeiWei uses images to explain, or pay homage to greater phenomenon. One example is a series of photographs of Ai dropping a Han Dynasty urn on to the ground where it breaks into hundreds of pieces. Ai also paints over a Han Dynasty urn with a ‘cocacola’ label, perhaps suggesting China’s sell-out to consumerism or merely an attempt to devalue Chinese history.

Like Ai WeiWei, Klayman plays with visual metaphors in her documentary. As mentioned earlier, Klayman begins her documentary with shots of Ai WeiWei’s 60 cats living around his studio. Klayman plays with the idea of being the one cat who is clever and persistent enough to learn how to open doors, as a parallel for Ai’s bravery and tenacity in spreading messages of freedom of voice. In 2010, Ai presented his exhibit of millions of porcelain sunflower seeds, each individually painted to signify individuality and diversity in a seemingly monotonous society. In her documentary, Klayman used a shot of Ai and his son walking hand in hand among the seeds. Klayman constructed her own visual metaphor in this scene, showing Ai pass the torch to the next generation while standing on the ‘seeds’ of change. Ai also represents the one in millions that stands out, and his son perhaps will follow suit. Klayman constructed this brilliant metaphor in the same way that Ai constructs his pieces of art—ironically and delicately.

Commercial Success

The success of Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry does not only have to do with its relevant timing and the press concerning Ai’s disappearance. This documentary has received critical acclaim for it’s intimacy, refined structure and nuanced composition. Klayman’s intimate relationship with Ai allowed her to gain an unfiltered and private view of the artist. It was clear that Ai’s relaxed disposition, in front of Klayman’s camera, derived from their strong rapport. In a particularly intimate moment, Klayman asks Ai why he is not scared of the government like so many others in China. Ai replies that he is more afraid than most citing that, “I’m more fearful so I act more brave, but if you don’t act the dangers become stronger.” This vulnerability and honesty that Ai shows on film can be attributed to the trust he had with Klayman.

In many instances in the documentary, Klayman films Ai being interviewed on camera by other journalists. These interviews appear more formal, or Ai appears less interested or distant. Klayman is almost Ai’s personal camera, documenting how he sees the world and interacts with it. The balance between vérité scenes, interviews with Ai’s peers and fans and archival footage of past exhibits and protests paint a complex picture of Ai and allows the audience to see him from myriad vantage points.

Significance

Ai WeiWei: Never sorry, gleans it’s importance from it’s exceptionally reporting and exposing of oppressive conditions in China, it’s additions to social media as a tool of activism, and it’s uniquely intimate story-telling.

Klayman gains an insiders view to the politics of China, using footage of a police attack on Ai as well as capturing the various forms of intimidation the government employs to deter Ai’s work—demolishing his studio, setting up cameras and having him followed. Klayman is fearless in her refusal to put the camera down. In one scene she captures Ai’s cameraman having his camera confiscating by the police while he is being dragged to police cars and arrested. She keeps the camera rolling while Ai explains his complicated family structure and the son he fathered from an affair. Klayman’s determined documenting of Ai’s private and public life allows the audience to understand not only the troubling political and social structures of China, but also the humanity of a man who stands against the grain.

This film is also significant because of the attention it pays to social media both within the film and outside of it. The use of digital and social media plays a large role in Ai’s art and activism. He has a twitter account with hundreds of thousands of followers where he posts updates of his art and life as well as world events. To demonstrate the growing role of social media, not only in Ai’s activism but also globalization at large, Klayman uses shots of twitter statuses being typed out in order to depict the constant flow of information. Social media is also becoming a tool of mobilization and Klayman has created a twitter for Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry that updates followers on different screenings of the film as well as provides commentary on the reactions to the film. This documentary therefore makes headway in the use of social media as vehicle for exposure and change.

Whose Message is it?

From the beginning of the documentary it is clear what Ai’s message is—he is asking for transparency and open dialogue in an oppressive Chinese society. But what is Klayman asking for, or rather, what is she trying to say? One of the most interesting aspects of the documentary is figuring our where Ai’s message ends and Klayman’s begins.

Klayman ultimately presents the story of a complex human being—a man who feels an obligation to stand up on behalf of the silenced and oppressed. Klayman is not necessarily joining the fight against Chinese oppression, but she is rather depicting the tribulations of one man who is. Her story is about courage, humor, modesty and a steadfast fight for freedom and truth.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1308)

By: Madeleine O'Neill

McLuhan’s Wake, made in 2002, is a documentary about Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian literature professor and media theorist who lived from 1911-1980. McLuhan is best known for his ideas about the danger of new media (encapsulated in his “Laws of Media”) and the “global village,” as well as having predicted the invention of the internet back in the 1960’s. While he was something of a culture icon in that decade, he lost much of his influence in the 1970’s, and his ideas have only been retrieved with the advent of the internet. The documentary follows the story of his life in a vaguely linear fashion, exploring his impact on his contemporaries, the controversies he caused, and the application of his ideas to the twenty-first century world.
The film introduces us to its highly stylized mannerisms from the beginning. McLuhan was a “creator of metaphor,” according to one commentator, and the film concretizes his metaphors and engages deeply in the symbolic. Thus, it begins underwater, with an image of the ocean and miscellaneous objects floating in it, upon which an image of McLuhan speaking about Poe’s story “A Descent Into The Maelstrom” is superimposed. As an English professor, McLuhan intertwined his media theory with literature, which he saw as “the highest plane.” This particular story was fundamental to his theory, as a metaphor for the world, wherein we are taken up by the media we create and utterly shaped by them until finally we descend into illiteracy and darkness, tribalism and anarchy. The maelstrom returns again and again as a visual trope in the film, as the danger that McLuhan warned against—a warning we have yet to heed.
The film follows McLuhan from childhood to death, focusing mainly on his role as media theorist and less on his place as professor in Toronto (which was, ostensibly, his actual profession). Most of the film is visualized through B-roll, with many still images (personal and public) as well as footage of his speeches and interviews interspersed. Mainly, though, we hear his distinctive voice as the film seeks to painstakingly show the origins of his thoughts at the most basic levels. There are many additional, unidentified commentators, and in fact only a few of them are ever shown—and only after McLuhan’s death is described. While he lives in the film, it is as if we are immersed entirely in him: his voice, his ideas, his brain. The identities of the people heard, or the representative scenes shown, do not matter: it is on a more mythic, cosmic level that the film is trying to engage us. As such, it is especially bizarrely constructed in the first third or so, going into the primitive symbolic that formed the base of McLuhan’s philosophy. The style is overly dramatic and silly at times, and since the real power of McLuhan’s work lay in his voice, his charisma, and his amazing applicability to today’s concerns, it would seem that the film spends too much time on these origins and not enough on the man himself, whose words are more than enough to captivate and spur the imagination.
Through his wife, we learn that McLuhan’s parents raised him to be an intellectual, and that McLuhan aspired to be a sort of medieval man, studying all aspects of the world at once. He was a self-taught grammarian, deeply religious, and trusted his senses to faithfully relay reality to him. In this vein the film introduces another visual trope: a hunting scene. McLuhan believed that every tool and technology developed by humans is an extension of our physical selves, from glasses and gloves to cars and laws, and so on. The film tries to go to the origin of this idea, just as McLuhan himself went back to the beginnings of ancient philosophy in his efforts to understand literature. In a weirdly primitive scene, complete with tribal music, we are shown how each tool of a hunter is an extension of his body, and from there we expand to the global scene, the metropolis with its mechanical forms that mimic our bodies in unexpected ways.
Another origin that is explored is the alphabet, again with a voiceover recording of McLuhan speaking, this time about phonetic language. We are given a visual, this time of schoolchildren learning the alphabet. To approach McLuhan’s idea that all media are languages, we switch from the alphabet to the printing press to books to libraries and eventually to the individuating, fragmenting nature of literacy. We also see how this tool, the book with its orderly sequences in lines, shapes how we behave, to the extent that we organize everything into such lines (as in shots of factory production). This is the reciprocal action of any technology, and indeed we are taught to think of every tool, everything we make, as a technology, always shaping us, and potentially dangerous.
McLuhan came upon media theory through his status as professor, as he tried to find a way to relate to his young students. Though an English teacher, he spent much of his class time talking about advertising, trying to show the students that what they thought they knew, they were actually oblivious to, and therefore were susceptible to the hidden forces of those images. To the extent that his ideas were radical and his predictions outlandish yet viable, encounters with McLuhan were termed “conversion experiences.” He called advertising “a vast military operation”—the film shows a bombardment of blatantly sexist old ads—and was certain that the ads of the 50’s and 60’s would be studied later on for their influence (as indeed they are, both academically and in pop culture—think Mad Men). He also noted how schools are bureaucratizing, separating forms of knowledge (interdisciplinary studies were not fashionable, which was one reason he was half-rejected by other academics) and teaching us how to behave in a “highly organized global civilization.”
These ideas about the habit-forming aspect of technologies and the “global village” we live in came to define what McLuhan called “the electric age” and its attack on identity and civilization. For this he was called a “bringer of doom,” and another faceless commentator talks about the cruelty of academics, who would never fully accept McLuhan, even as TV and radio programs delighted in his shocking soundbites. In a few interviews (rather than the usual format of voiceovers), we watch him describe the loss of literacy in the “electric age” and even foretell the internet by talking about a phone service that has access to all the texts in all the libraries of the world and collects and sends them to a user personally. Without the very existence of the internet, cell phones, and digital social networks, McLuhan was still able to talk about a society where “everybody gets the message all the time,” knows everything about everyone else, and the consumer is eventually consumed.
All this seems like old hat in 2012, but in the 1960’s these ideas were revolutionary—and rejected as such. A popular topic in some strands of today’s media theory, that of disembodiment by technology, was something McLuhan talked about in the 60’s, saying that being on the phone or on the air turns us into disembodied images. The idea that we need a technology that can place us everywhere ends up reversing and putting us nowhere. Listeners laughed at this idea when McLuhan first suggested it, but in what may be its most powerful scene, the film shows how the accompanying loss of identity has come to rule in our time. McLuhan’s distinctive voice asks, “When everybody’s involved with everybody, how is one to find one’s identity?” and answers that humans only know how to seek identity through violence. As he describes terrorists as “people without identity,” people that “want coverage, to get noticed,” against a soundtrack of pounding drums, we see a flashing montage of protesters, people fighting police in the streets, fiery (presumably anti-American) demonstrations—familiar enough images to Americans after the last decade—and finally everything stops as the second plane hits the Twin Towers. An obvious illustration, perhaps, but particularly powerful in 2002, and still applicable today, with 9/11 seen as the start of so much.
At moments like this, McLuhan and the film’s constant abstractions are subsumed under the power of film and the dazzling rush of connections made, followed by a sinking feeling of inevitability. In another interview, McLuhan had said that he wanted to live in any time but now, as long as it was a time without innovation, without change. We begin to feel what he meant, to see the danger in wanting the newest thing all the time. The “Laws of Media” show us that this is not just an effect of today’s technology, but inherent in every new development. As narrator Laurie Anderson says over the course of the film, there are four questions to ask that comprise these “laws”: What will your new technology enhance? What will it obsolesce? What function will it retrieve that was lost? And, most dangerously, how will it reverse its function, when pushed to the limit? In the film, cars are used as the easiest example of this danger, with their reverse effect comprising everything from traffic and accidents to global warming. However, it is easy to see how less obvious tools can also fit these questions, and while we may perhaps reject McLuhan’s ultimate fear of all innovation, we can take up his call to have caution with new technologies. Currently we embrace new media wholeheartedly, consider it prestigious to have newest model, the most functions. We wonder how anyone lived without Facebook or a smart phone, carried physical books around, went to libraries, and walked everywhere. But as we (finally) see the negative impact of all these developments, we can finally begin to heed Marshall McLuhan, and hopefully save ourselves (and our planet) before we destroy it all. In one of the most pointed moments in the film, he says, “You should know what the stakes are. The stakes are our civilization versus tribalism.” We can open that up now: to all civilization, all life. We have everything to lose, and only through direct engagement with the theories and with our present—not “the nineteenth century man in the rearview mirror”—and all its dangers, can we have any hope of surviving the maelstrom.

Posted by Emily Kassie at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1536)