In Praise of Pina

In spite of the company's yearly season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Pina Bausch's Wuppertal Tanztheater was largely ignored by the US dance community. Every time I tried to bring her name up in conversation I was met with uncomprehending stares. Here we talk Balanchine, Mark Morris and Martha Graham.

However Pina Bausch has developed a large following in Europe and Asia during her  twenty-five years of tenure in Wuppertal. In May 2008 she was diagnosed with lung cancer and died a month later. Many of her works have been available as cult classics on You Tube and are still performed by her company in extensive international tours.

My first contact with Pina's work was at the beginning of Almodovar's film "Talk to her". Two men sit side by side in a theater watching a performance of "Café Müller", a parable of longing, search and disappointment, that brings both to tears and into closer acquaintance. The film ends with another Pina piece, "Botafogo", a nostalgic and sensual danzón.

Pina Bausch has often seen her performances quoted and included in films. In 2009, at the Cinemathèque Française I watched a two hour draft of a film by Jérome Cassou, a French filmmaker who had worked with her, mingling his steadycam with her dancers during performances at the Théatre du Chatelet. I was dazzled by the unedited sequences that Cassou hoped would open him to authoring a biopic or anthological film on her life. It was not to be; Wim Wenders, her compatriot, has finally produced a magnificent remembrance of what she accomplished, a homage titled "Pina", nominated at the 84th Academy Awards for best live documentary.

Pina is not identifiable with any of the well-known ballet schools in use in the USA. She stems directly from the German Expressionist school, with flavors taken from Martha Graham. Born in 1940, she studied under Joost, a survivor of the Weimar era, and landed at age 19 in New York, where she studied at the Juilliard School, and danced with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and the Paul Taylor Company. Those two years, she has said, made her free.

She then returned to Germany, to study under Günther Folkwang. She started to choreograph for him and later, after his death, formed the Folkwang Ballet. In 1973 she went on to form her own company, the Tanztheater, in Wuppertal, a heavily industrial city in the metallurgical Ruhr basin, explicitly moving away from the denomination "ballet". "Tanztheater" literally means "theater of dance", giving her the freedom to express her distance from traditional ballet.

In the twenty-five years of her tenure she has produced some thirty works, and gathered around her a devoted body of dancers from around the world. Many of them have been with her for most of their careers, and she has always found material in people of all ages. Wim Wenders centers his just opened film around some of them, young and old, to illustrate her working style. She looks for the inner resources of her dancers to produce the deeper landscape that the dance aims to express. Wenders includes an old clip of hers, explaining why she will not work with words "...they are only symbols, stand-ins for  emotions."  Her most frequent admonition to the people around her is to keep on looking for that deep-felt motivation.

The interviewed dancers recognize Pina's talent in unleashing their own potential, to examine and understand themselves, to bring out the most recondite feelings in them, and to shape that material into powerful messages of humanity. An Argentinian dancer recalls the day when Pina asked him to come up with a movement expressing joy. When he did so, she developed around it a whole sequence for the ensemble.

Pina addresses human longings, loneliness, its vices and sequels, and the drives and aspirations of men and women in their isolation.

She is known for bringing onto the stage natural elements, water, peat, rocks, flowers and shape the dance around them. One of her best known works, "Vollmond" (Full moon), is centered around a huge, metallic-grey boulder, sitting in a pool of water, in which the dancers swim, slither, pursue  each other, splash and cavort throwing elegant semicircular silver plumes of water.

Her most dramatic work, to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring", is danced on a stage covered with dirt. A sacrificial maiden is chosen by the tribe to be offered to the gods. Men do the choosing from a tight cluster of terrified girls, dancing in unison in short and staccato gestures, in their togetherness, visual echoes of Rodin's "Citizens of Calais" and Käthe Kollwitz's workers and peasants, towards submission and death.

--Thilo Ullmann

Academia Nuts

This week, the Saratoga Film Forum screens the Israeli film Footnote, which could perhaps be subtitled “Ibid., therefore I am.” This wry comedic-drama pits father-and-son professors against each other as they vie to win a prestigious scholarship prize.

The lowly footnote is one of the most contentious stylistic objects in academia as well as elsewhere in researchland. NASA, for example, goes to great lengths to explain best practices for footnote usage, while the U.S. Government Printing Office style book devotes several pages to footnotes (and, for the record, only features one footnote). Most stylistic authorities recommend minimizing the use of footnotes (although they are preferable to parenthetical asides—see?).

Anyway, back to the film. Although the characters and plot are purely fictional (“any resemblance to persons living or dead...” and all that), writer/director Joseph Cedar was inspired by the very real department of Talmudic Studies at the real Hebrew University:

The Talmud department at the Hebrew University is a remarkable place. It is the smallest department in the university, but it is famous worldwide for its uncompromising methods, and its unforgiving attitude toward the notion of “mistake.”

Once I started hearing stories from within this department, about mythological rivalries between scholars, stubbornness on an epic scale, eccentric professors who live with an academic mission that is bigger than life itself, even if its topic is radically esoteric, I fell in love with them all, and they became the centre of this story.

As for the origin of the title, says Cedar:

One Talmud researcher, who is known to be very sparse and dry in his writing, once explained to me his use of a footnote like this: “it is a piece of information, sometimes an anecdote, that is not necessarily verifiable, sometimes even outrageous, or silly, often only remotely relevant to the main text, but at the same time it is just too irresistible and juicy to leave out entirely...”

I heartily concur!*

And as befits the academic milieu, the actors did their, um, homework. Stage comedian Shlomo Bar Aba, who plays Eliezer (the father), returns to films after a 20-year hiatus, and spent six months preparing his character. Lior Ashkenazi, who plays Uriel (the son), took actual Talmud classes at the Hebrew University and spent six months letting his beard grow.

* I once co-authored a book that boasted no fewer than 160 footnotes, many of them jokes. When the printed book was converted to a Kindle e-book, the footnotes were converted to end notes (since the idea of a “page” is a fluid concept in an e-book), which is far less effective. This is my attempt at adding a footnote to a blog post. Meh. Score 1 for print!

Wake Up, Little Sushi

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word sushi first entered the English language in 1893, thanks to the book A Japanese Interior by Alice Mabel Bacon. (However, the word “bacon” did not enter the lexicon thanks to a book by Alice Mabel Sushi.) Oxford defines sushi as “a Japanese dish consisting of small balls or rolls of vinegar-flavoured cold rice served with a garnish of vegetables, egg, or raw seafood.” It’s interesting that the primary ingredient in sushi is the rice, not the fish. Sushi is not to be confused with sashimi, which are thin slices of raw fish, sans rice. (The word sashimi literally means “pierced flesh,” and entered the language in 1880.) I strongly recommend a trip to Sushi Thai on Phila Street to closely examine the difference between the two. In fact, I’ll meet you there in 10 minutes...

If the previous paragraph is making you a bit peckish, just wait until you see the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which the Saratoga Film Forum will be screening this Thursday, Friday, and Sunday.

Sukiyabashi Jiro is a tiny restaurant located in a subway station in Tokyo’s Ginza district. A bit unprepossessing, and here in the States we would probably look askance at a sushi restaurant—or any restaurant—located in a subway station, but Sukiyabashi Jiro has been acclaimed as one of the best sushi restaurants in the world—if not the best—and owner and sushi chef Jiro Ono has been recognized by the Japanese government as a national treasure.

Sushi is a relatively recent culinary import to the United States, with the first sushi bars only cropping up in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo in the mid-1960s. The first is believed to be Kawafuku Restaurant, which opened in 1966. Originally catering to expatriate Japanese who were immigrating to the U.S. at the time, as well as traveling Japanese businessmen, a few intrepid Americans were intrigued by the idea of raw fish and the idea gradually began to spread, becoming somewhat popular by the latter half of the 1970s. The California roll—rice and raw fish and/or vegetables, although a traditional California roll featured avocado, wrapped in seaweed—was invented by a chef at LA’s Tokyo Kaikan restaurant in the mid-1970s, and it is the California roll-style that is commonly, though not entirely correctly, thought of as “sushi” today. The cuisine prospered in the 1980s and 1990s, with the number of sushi restaurants quintupling between 1988 and 1998.

(Historically speaking, sushi is not a centuries-old Japanese cuisine, either, as it dates only from 19th-century Edo which, as historians and crossword puzzlers know, was the original name of Tokyo.)

Along with the number of restaurants, the variety of sushi also increased, such that it was subject to much experimentation, to the extent that—like many ethnic foods in the U.S.—much American sushi is unrecognizable to the Japanese back home, and in fact American-style sushi has been exported back to Japan. Apparently, in Tokyo, you can order a Nixon roll (insert own joke here). 

Sushi chefs think of themselves as artists, and sushi and sashimi dishes are prepared with not only taste but also appearance in mind. And remember: only dip the fish, not the rice, in soy sauce. As for mixing wasabi into the soy sauce...once an insult, it is becoming acceptable, but still may be frowned upon. Oh, and never rub your chopsticks together to ostensibly remove splinters. (If you are interested in the past and present of sushi in America, I strongly recommend The Zen of Fish by Trevor Corson.)

Keep all this in mind as you watch Jiro Ono at work—and don’t be surprised if you end up dreaming of sushi.

Meet the Film Composer: Matthew Carefully

This Sunday, April 1, the Saratoga Film Forum will screen the documentary Brunswick. Joining us will be both director Nate Simms, as well as Matthew Carefully, a local multi-instrumentalist who composed the music for the film. He will be playing selections from the soundtrack on Sunday. The Film Forum spoke with Mr. Carefully via e-mail about his participation in the film.

What is your background? Have you scored other films?

Music has been my main focus my entire life. The creation of, the listening to, the complete immersion in, the dependence on music. I’ve done everything from touring Russia playing drums in a jazz band to sleeping on couches across the U.S. as a mandolinist with The Kamikaze Hearts. Brunswick is my first full-movie soundtrack, though I have made music for trailers, Web series, and more. I had a great time making this soundtrack, am very proud of it and look forward to making more music for film in the future.

What are some of your other projects?

Currently, I’m working on a debut album for this instrumental acoustic guitar duo with Hunter Sagehorn (from the band Alta Mira) called Rosary Beard. This album should be out in early May and I am very excited about it. We’ve been working on the music for a few years now and are happy to finally be sharing our songs in recorded form.

I’m also working on recordings and some possible live performances with David Greenberger. He’s the wily gent behind the Duplex Planet zine and culture series over the past few decades. Our project is a band called “David Greenberger & A Strong Dog” which features local musicians Kevin Maul on guitars and Mitch Throop on guitars as well. I’m playing a floor tom and a garage sale Casio keyboard. Our first local performance will be at the Saratoga Arts Fest this June.

How would you describe your music?

I call my music “bedroom pop” primarily because most of my recording occurs in what could be used as a bedroom. There are more layers to that—many of my best ideas come from that half-asleep/half-awake time before and after drifting off; “pop” used as a reference to memorable, repeatable sections of music.

How did you get involved with Nate Simms and the film?

Nate and I found each other five years ago; he was already engaged with this movie project and I was eager to work on a project like this. Even just a one sentence description of the project was enough to get me signed up. The subject matter and the imagery easily evoked sounds and music for me—a great match. The editing and finishing of the film took quite a long time, so as it went, I’d share bits of music I was working on as Nate would show me sections of cuts he had been working on. I think we worked well together and I look forward to seeing where this project flies off to.

The theme of the film is that Brunswick is trying to balance economic development with retaining its essential rural character. Is there anything you’d add to that?

I’d add a dose of community/family drama to the mix as the issues you mention are illustrated in the movie by the story of farmer Sanford Bonesteel and the fate of his farmland in Brunswick. I think the movie begs you to ask these exact questions to yourself and your community members and families. What kind of growth is “healthy”? What is the best use for the land around us? Do we need another parking garage? These kinds of questions need to be asked and answered by everyone in every city.

Is Brunswick the only town you know of that is dealing with these issues?

It feels like there’s no way Brunswick could  be the only town dealing with issues like these! This is what’s most important about the movie to me; we need to be aware that a very large generation of farmers are beginning to pass on and while it is tempting to want to put something there in its place, perhaps there should be more talk of sustaining that land and nurturing that land to remain something vital and sustainable for future generations instead of locked in some failed development project idea.

What would you like viewers to come away with after watching Brunswick?

I would hope that viewers will be inspired to talk to their neighbors, go to their town board meetings, be involved in community government and simply be available to know more about what kind of decisions are being made about their surroundings. These decisions should be made by everyone in a community, not just a select few. 

Iron-y

There is a danger in producing biopics about political figures, especially political figures that remain in the public memory, and especially especially political figures who were polarizing and controversial to begin with. Many of the same mixed comments and reviews that were made about Oliver Stone’s 2008 film W. are again being made about this year’s The Iron Lady, which the Saratoga Film Forum will be screening this evening (Thursday, March 29) and tomorrow (Friday, March 30) at 7:30 p.m., and on Sunday at 3 p.m.

The makers of such docudramas likely go into these projects knowing that they just can’t win: half the audience will think it’s celebrating the ideology of the subject of the biopic, and the other half will think it’s a snide satire. As for the third half...well, perhaps they’re the only ones who go in with an open mind.

Still, audiences inevitably bring their own remembrances and political leanings to these types of films, something that normally does not happen if someone were to make a biopic about, say, President Martin Van Buren.

All of which serves to distract attention away from the film as a film and the story as a story. Meryl Streep of course won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Maggie, and as part of her research for the role, she attended Prime Minister’s Questions at the British Parliament, watching current PM David Cameron spar with Labour leader Ed Miliband. She also obviously studied every frame of archival footage of Thatcher, because she gets every nuance dead accurate. 

At heart, the movie is not about adoring or reviling Thatcher, but is rather more interested in looking at how she transcended race and class to become one of the leading figures on the world stage. Thatcher was a grocer’s daughter, a fairly humble origin, and in her early years addressing the House of Commons, you can feel the male condescension. Visually, in the film, she stands out as the lone female in a sea of blue suits, the only pair of high heeled shoes amongst the wingtips.

With a screenplay by Abi Morgan (who also wrote Shame, starring Michael Fassbender, a, um, slightly different movie...) and drawing on John Campbell’s definitive biography, The Iron Lady careens back and forth in time to show how Thatcher crashed the Old Boys’ Club.

Meet the Filmmaker: Nate Simms

This Sunday, April 1, at 7:30 p.m., the Saratoga Film Forum welcomes local photographer and filmmaker Nate Simms to screen and discuss his documentary Brunswick. The Film Forum spoke with Mr. Simms via e-mail about the film.

What is your background as a filmmaker?

I was an amateur still photographer for a few years, but always with the goal of trying to do something useful with the images. Those thoughts just shifted over into video when I first started working on this project [Brunswick], but I never had any formal training at all. This was really just a “figure it out as you go” type of thing. I guess the first time I ever filmed anything was the first day of working on this.

Tell us about the film and the issues it deals with.

To me it’s a few different stories being told at once. There is a personal story of a farmer and his relationship to his land and to another family he had known his whole life, but there is also a larger cultural and political story of how and why we collectively do things in America. That sounds pretty grandiose, but basically the root issues and topics to me would be things like farming, development, local politics, connection to place and land, trust, betrayal, and so forth.

As I understand it, the theme of the film is that Brunswick is trying to balance economic development with retaining its essential rural character. What are the tradeoffs? What are the challenges? Are there any solutions?

Well, that could be a really long answer, but any talk of economic growth assumes that we believe we should be living in an economy where “growth,” as it is commonly understood, is the goal. I guess I don’t buy into that entirely, so I am starting from a different place in that discussion. Despite the fact that towns like Brunswick talk a lot about how they value their rural character, it seems to me that they are not exactly being proactive in figuring out ways to actually help farmers make a better living (or to make a living, period), or encourage smarter building practices, or whatever. Although “solutions” is not a word I would want to use, I think the first step in progressing away from the current mess is to reject a few commonly held ideas (like what an economy should look like, or what constitutes success, etc.). That, of course, might not be possible.

Is Brunswick the only town you know of that is dealing with these issues?

I would guess that most towns are dealing with these issues everyday. Conflicts of interest in local government, farmers or land-owners facing tough decisions about what to do with their land, etc...Brunswick is just an example in my mind of what’s happening everywhere and a lot of people who have seen the film have said that their town was experiencing the same or similar problems.

What would you like viewers to come away with after watching Brunswick?

It would be great if people who maybe didn’t know what was going on in their town checked into it a little. When I started filming this, I knew nothing at all about what was happening in the area on that level and it was interesting to watch things unfold. Ultimately, even if someone doesn’t like the film, they might find themselves in a discussion about the issues raised and that would be cool.

A Tolkein of His Esteem

The perennial challenge for anyone attempting to adapt a novel to the screen is to get all the important plot aspects in and have it all make sense—all without losing a lot of the details that made a novel worth adapting in the first place, or having the movie end up being eight hours long. Such was the challenge of adapting the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and such was the challenge of adapting the author who could perhaps be considered the Tolkein of espionage fiction: John le Carré. (It is also the challenge of the movie blogger to succinctly summarize an author’s rather eventful early life.)

Born David John Moore Cornwell in 1931, he went to school at Oxford and it was during this time that he started working undercover for the MI5, the British Security Service, spying on lefty organizations (or organisations, if you prefer) and searching for possible Soviet agents (this was the 1950s, after all). He became an MI5 officer in 1958, and two years later transferred to MI6, the foreign intelligence service. It was at this time that he began writing novels. An MI6 rule at the time barred Cornwall from publishing stories and novels under his own name, so he was required to adopt a pseudonym: John le Carré (French for “John the Square,” apparently). It took a few tries, but the third novel was the charm: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) was his international breakthrough. Just as well, too: he had to leave the service in 1964 (he could work full-time as a novelist by then) after his cover was blown to the KGB by a double agent. If this sounds like a plot from one of le Carré’s books, it kind of is: the British double agent who outed him—Kim Philby—inspired the character who turns out to be the mole George Smiley pursues in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. (Like Cornwall, Smiley was forced into retirement prior to the events of the novel.)

The book was published in 1974 and was a bestseller, and was volume one of what would become known as le Carré’s “Karla Trilogy” (back to a Tolkein comparison), the subsequent volumes being The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979).

The current movie tie-in paperback edition of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy runs to 400 pages, and fairly dense pages at that, so you can see the challenge for a screenwriter. The BBC solved this problem when it first adapted the book in 1979—they did it as a seven-part miniseries (starring Alec Guinness as Smiley).

The latest adaptation, which the Saratoga Film Forum is screening this weekend—Thursday and Friday, March 22nd and 23rd at 7:30, and Sunday, March 25th at 3:00—is a “mere” 127 minutes. Look for a cameo by Cornwall/le Carré himself as an extra during one of the flashback “Christmas party” scenes.

And at 80, le Carré is still writing. His most recent novel, Our Kind of Traitor, was published in 2010. And it’s only 320 pages.

Note that the Saratoga Film Forum will also be screening the 1965 adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (starring Richard Burton) on Monday, March 26th, at 7:30 p.m. at the Spring Street Gallery at 110 Spring Street in Saratoga.

Imagine There's No Kevin...

Lionel Shriver’s 2003 book We Need To Talk About Kevin is a somewhat unconventional thriller, in that it’s an epistolary novel, or written as a series of letters from Eva Khatchadourian, the titular Kevin’s mother, to her estranged husband Franklin. (I’ve always wanted to write an epistolary novel but I could never afford the postage.) The book, Shriver’s seventh, was adapted for radio by the BBC in 2008, and ran as a series of 10 15-minute episodes that ran every day as part of the Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour drama series. (For those wondering, Lionel Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver.)

BBC Films acquired the rights to a film adaptation as long ago as 2005, but various financing snafus and development staved off the start of actual production until 2010. Autor Shriver was offered a consultative role, but declined, stating that she “had it up to [her] eyeballs with that book.”

The Saratoga Film Forum is showing We Need to Talk About Kevin this weekend, with screenings last night (sorry for the late post; it’s been “one of those weeks”...), tonight at 7:30, and Sunday at 3:00.

Without giving away too much—no “spoiler alerts” here—I suspect bits of this film will be rough viewing in light of certain recent events, and the film will likely stimulate no small amount of discussion (which we like; that’s what we’re here for!). An interesting review I came across on Busted Halo, “an online magazine for spiritual seekers,” written by Jake Martin, a Jesuit priest and movie critic, said:

Kevin is a story of hope for a new millennium, an It’s a Wonderful Life in the age of school shootings and planes crashing into buildings — a world-weary world that has been bombarded by nihilistic themes in their narratives for the better part of a century. It is a world where any attempts to offer a message of mercy, conversion and redemption must be done deftly and authentically, because at the end of the day, sometimes the community won’t rally around you and more often than not Mr. Potter carries the day.

The reviewer concludes:

We Need to Talk about Kevin in fact needs to be talked about, as what it is attempting to do by marrying the darkest, most nihilistic components of contemporary cinema with a redemptive message is groundbreaking.

It bears mentioning that, despite the title, the film is not about Kevin so much as it is about Eva and her deteriorating state of mind. 

Art Carnage

This week’s Film Forum screening, Roman Polanski’s dark comedy Carnage, features a screenplay adapted from French playwright Yasmina Reza’s Le Dieu du Carnage, or The God of Carnage. Its English-language adaptation, translated by Christopher Hampton, whom you may recall as the screenwriter for A Dangerous Method, was originally Lay Waste to England for Me. Or, in other words, “carnage.” Interestingly, the setting for the film adaptation was moved to Brooklyn, but was actually shot in Paris because of Polanski’s fugitive status. The God of Carnage won a 2009 Olivier Award for Best New Play, and three 2009 Tonys (Best Play, Best Leading Actress, and Best Direction). It had also been nominated for a slew of other Tonys.

Theatergoers in the 1990s may recall Reza’s previous theatrical triumph, the 1994 play Art. (Art had also been translated into English by Christopher Hampton.) Art played on Broadway from February 12, 1998, until August 8, 1999, and won the Tony for Best Play. It would run for more than 600 performances.

Art has many things in common with Carnage, most notably the veneer of civility being quickly eroded and characters’ flaws making themselves manifest through cutting barbs. In Art, it’s slightly more absurd and almost Seinfeld-esque; Serge (played in the original cast by Victor Garber) buys a phenomenally expensive, completely white painting, perhaps the most emblematic example of “modern art.” His friend of 15 years Marc (originally played by Alan Alda) is aghast, and their friendship fractures because Marc can’t believe what his friend considers “art.” A third friend, Yvan (Alfred Molina), is stuck in the middle and doesn’t really want to take sides. But soon, the three of them are engaged in a bitter war of words that, when you get right down to it, is not really about the painting or art. Just like the escalating battle in Carnage is not really about two kids fighting in a park.

The juxtaposition of the kids at the beginning of Carnage with the subsequent behavior of their parents suggests that we never really grow up as much as we think we do, and that the playground is just a rehearsal for the so-called “real world.” And the twist ending of Carnage suggests, perhaps, that children are far wiser than their elders.

Salute Our Shorts, Part 3

The Saratoga Film Forum’s weekend Short-Film-o-Rama concludes on Sunday, February 26th, at 3 p.m. with the last of the three short film Oscar categories: Best Documentary (Short Subject).

This category was established at the 1941 Academy Awards. The very first Academy Award winner in the category should give you some idea of the impetus for creating it: “Churchill’s Island,” a document of the Allied defense of Great Britain during World War II. A year later, at the 1942 Academy Awards, the War accounted for all 25 films nominated—and four special awards presented—in the Documentary category that year. The War and its aftermath continued to dominate the Oscars for much of the rest of the decade, and then Korea took over in 1950. So if we find an emphasis on current events among this year’s nominees—“Incident in New Baghdad,” “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom,” e.g.—it’s nothing new.

By the way, as you watch this year’s shorts, you may be wondering what the criteria for short films are. Well, according to the Academy:

A short film is defined as an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits.

This excludes from consideration such works as:

1.  previews and advertising films

2.  sequences from feature-length films such as credit sequences

3.  unaired episodes of established TV series

4.  unsold TV series pilots

Furthermore:

The picture must have been publicly exhibited for paid admission in a commercial motion picture theater in Los Angeles County for a run of at least three consecutive days with at least two screenings a day. Films must be screened in 35mm or 70mm film or in a 24- or 48-frame progressive scan format with a minimum projector resolution of 2048 by 1080 pixels...

OR

The film must have won a qualifying award at a competitive film festival, as specified in the Academy Festival List. Proof of the award must be submitted with the entry....

A student film may also qualify by winning a Gold Medal award in the Academy’s 2011 Student Academy Awards competition in the Animation, Narrative, Alternative, or Foreign Film award category. Winners in the Documentary category are not eligible.

A short film may not be exhibited publicly anywhere in any nontheatrical form, including but not limited to broadcast and cable television, home video, and Internet transmission, until after its Los Angeles theatrical release, or after receiving its festival or Student Academy Award.  Excerpts of the film totaling no more than ten percent of its running time are exempted from this rule.

So there.

If you’re attending any of the Film Forum’s Oscar Comes Home parties or watching all by your lonesome, keep track of the winners—in the three Short Film categories, and/or in any or all of the other categories—this Sunday, February 26, kicking off at 7:00 p.m. on ABC. Visit the official Oscar site for more information than you may require, and even download a special Oscar iPhone and iPad app.

Salute Our Shorts, Part 2

The Saratoga Film Forum’s weekend festival of this year’s Oscar-nominated short films continues tonight (Friday, February 24th) at 7:30 with the 2012 contenders for Short Film, Live Action. The changes in the actual name of this category track the evolution of cinema, in a way. When the category was first established in 1932, there were two categories, “Best Short Subject, Comedy” and “Best Short Subject, Novelty.” This lasted until 1936, when they changed the categories to “Best Short Subject, One-Reel” and “Best Short Subject, Two-Reel” and added a third “Best Short Subject, Color” category. The separate “Color” category was dropped after 1937, but the one-reel/two-reel division continued 1956, after which the category has been known as “Short Film, Live Action.”

Short films rarely if ever get any Oscar buzz, but it’s an important category for filmmakers. Many directors launch their careers with shorts, using the much shorter format and budgetary requirements to hone their cinematic storytelling skills before tackling a feature. The shorter format also lends itself to certain topics that may not be suitable for a feature-length production. Said Stefan Gieren, producer of nominated live action short, “Raju”:

Short film is an art form in itself and there are certain topics that I believe can only find their audience if they’re done well in short film. A feature film is something totally different.

In the dim and distant past, short films used to be shown before features (Pixar’s animated features are routinely preceded by a short, a rare exception these days), but film festivals are one of the only venues left to see some truly creative examples of filmmaking. And, of course, weekend screenings like the Film Forum’s.

Salute Our Shorts!

This weekend, the Saratoga Film Forum is screening this year’s Oscar-nominated short films. They’re divided into three screenings: tonight (7:30 p.m.) are the Animated Short Films, tomorrow (Friday at 7:30 p.m.) are Live Action Short Films, and Sunday (3:00 p.m.) are the Documentary Shorts.

The Academy Awards’ Animated Short Film category dates back to 1932 (the 5th Academy Awards) when it was called Short Subjects (Cartoons). From day one, Disney dominated; the first ever animated short to win an Oscar was one of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies called “Flowers and Trees” which also, as it happened, was the first commercially released film to be produced in full color (two-color Technicolor had been around for a while). Although the poster and titles for “Flowers and Trees” reads “Mickey Mouse Presents,” said rodent does not appear in it. (Disney’s Mickey Mouse shorts were already a successful series in 1932, and remained in back and white for three more years since it was felt that they didn’t need the novelty of color to give them a commercial boost.) You can watch “Flowers and Trees” here—and remember, this was before LSD had been invented. Interestingly, “Flowers and Trees” began production as a black-and-white short.

Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies wasn’t the only successful cartoon series; it is actually tied with Hanna-Barbera’s Tom and Jerry cartoons for winning the most Oscars (seven each) in the Best Short Subject (Cartoons) category. The first Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry short was 1943’s “A Yankee Doodle Mouse.”

The Oscar category Short Subjects (Cartoons) lasted until 1971, when the Academy changed it to Short Subjects, Animated Films in 1971 (“animated films” perhaps having a bit more gravitas than “cartoons”) and, finally, Animated Short Film in 1974. 

So when you watch this year’s nominees, think about the cultural impact of their forebears, and of the legacy to which this year’s shorts are heir.

2B or Not 2B, That Is the Apartment?

The Saratoga Film Forum’s “Countdown to Oscar” Monday night series of past Best Picture winners continues on February 20th, with Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine (in a past life), and Fred MacMurray.

The Apartment, a wry comedy-drama, was nominated for 10 Oscars at the 1961 Academy Awards, and ultimately won five of them: Best Picture, Best Director (Billy Wilder), Best Original Screenplay (I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (Black and White) (Edward G. Boyle and Alexandre Trauner), and Best Editing (Daniel Mandell). While Jack Lemmon disappointingly lost out to Burt Lancaster (for Elmer Gantry), when Kevin Spacey won Best Actor in 2000 for American Beauty, he dedicated his award to Lemmon’s performance in The Apartment.

Here’s a piece of film trivia: The Apartment was the last all-black-and-white film to win a Best Picture Academy Award. (Schindler’s List, which won in 1994, had some color scenes.)

Although it was a hit both critically and commercially, the subject matter of The Apartment—Lemmon’s character lets his managers at the insurance company for which he works use his apartment for their extramarital trysts—was considered fairly controversial at the time, with the Saturday Review deeming it “a dirty fairy tale.” It was even more unacceptable 15 years earlier when Wilder first conceived the basic premise, wanting to do an American version of David Lean’s 1945 UK film Brief Encounter (written by Noel Coward), in which married Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) has an affair with doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) in a friend’s apartment. However, the Hays Office at the time—which enforced the Motion Picture Production Code—would not allow anyone to make a film about adultery in the 1940s.

Here’s another bit of film trivia: what other movie opened the same weekend in 1960 as The Apartment? Hitchcock’s Psycho. Those were the days!

Although way down at #80 on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Movies list, The Apartment has been called an “undervalued American classic.” See what you think. The Film Forum will be screening The Apartment Monday night, February 20th, at 7:30 in the Spring Street Gallery (110 Spring Street). 

Forever Jung

“I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss.” —Woody Allen

The “dangerous method” in the title of this week’s Film Forum screening A Dangerous Method is the psychoanalytical method, the so-called “talking cure.” In the days before Prozac and other psychopharmaceuticals and happy pills, psychoanalysis was the preeminent method for dealing with mental illness, and still is in many cases. Imagine, however, if ads for psychoanalysis had to have those lengthy lists of possible side effects like drugs do (many of which sound worse than the things they’re supposedly curing). One of them would almost certainly be “transference.” And maybe dry mouth (from all the talking).

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 

Transference is defined as “a phenomenon in psychoanalysis characterized by unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another.” Transference can take the form of a person redirecting certain feelings from a past (especially a childhood) relationship onto a current one—such as when a person dates someone who is a dead ringer for a parent—or it can involve a patient redirecting his or her feelings toward the therapist. While those feelings are often erotic, other emotions can be transferred to the therapist, such as mistrust, “parentification,” or even a kind of deification. Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, who felt that it was an obstacle to psychoanalysis, but also that understanding the unconscious underpinnings of the transference was the clue to understanding the symptoms that drove the patient to analysis in the first place.

(By the way, a somewhat related phenomenon in psychology is “projection,” or when “a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people.” However, it would be incorrect to say that the Film Forum’s projectionist ascribes her own emotions to others. She does nothing of the kind.)

One of the dangers of transference is that it can give a therapist power over the patient and the therapist’s own counter-transferences (or exploitation of the patient’s transferences) can cause a great deal of damage—and is highly unethical. An unethical analyst can easily manipulate the patient into sexual thoughts and feelings toward the analyst—and, eventually, actual sex. Or, in the case of A Dangerous Method, a patient can use transference to coerce an analyst into crossing that line. 

A Dangerous Method features two of the most important figures in the history of modern psychology: the Big Guy himself (Freud, played by Viggo Mortensen) and his star student Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). The movie is based on Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure, which was in turn based on John Kerr’s 1993 non-fiction book A Most Dangerous Method, which looked at the relationship between Freud, Jung, and a patient named Sabina Spielrein (played by Keira Knightley). (The book was the result of the then-recent unearthing of Spielrein’s diaries, papers, and correspondence with Freud and Jung.) Spielrein was initially a patient (or “analysand,” as they are called) of Jung’s, in fact the “test case” of Freud’s “talking cure,” which at the time (~1908) was still largely theoretical. She later became a student of Jung’s, and eventually became one of the first female psychoanalysts. (She is perhaps best known for her conception of the sex drive as comprising the instincts of both destruction and transformation—she’d have had a heck of a profile on Match.com.) Oh, and speaking of which, she was also Jung’s lover—thanks to our old friend transference, as well as some ideas about pleasure implanted in Jung’s mind by another patient of his (and maybe she tried to seduce him by wearing a Freudian slip?). Spielrein later became Freud’s patient and, when he learned of the affair with Jung, he used it as a weapon in his ideological war with Jung.

What’s interesting is how Jung’s behavior confirms many of The Master’s then-nascent psychological tenets, becoming a textbook case of Freud’s “return of the repressed” (or would have been if there had been any psychological textbooks at that time).

Kind of makes that Zoloft prescription sound a lot less complicated...and have fewer side effects.

The Film Forum will be screening A Dangerous Method Thursday and Friday, February 16th and 17th, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, February 19th at 3:00 p.m.

Picture Me Big Time

Believe it or not (add Jack Palance-esque rasped ellipsis here), there is a whole cinema classification called “age-changing films” (aka “body-swapping”). Because I grew up in the 1970s, the classic of the genre will always be the original Freaky Friday (1976), but the 1980s* brought a slew of young-and-old-switch-bodies movies. There was the magic potion that switched Kirk Cameron and Dudley Moore in Like Father Like Son (1987), the oriental skull that switched Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold in Vice Versa (1988), and the (creaky) George Burns vehicle 18 Again! (1988). There was also Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) in which Kathleen Turner wakes up and is back in high school (a terrifying thought).

One variation on this theme was an Italian film called Da Grande (1987) in which 9-year-old Marco, smitten with his teacher, wishes he could be a grown-up...and, when he wakes up in the morning, finds himself in the body of a 40-year-old.

If that last film sounds a wee bit familiar, it’s because it was believed to be the inspiration for the mega-hit Big (1988), with Tom Hanks starring as a 13-year-old who wakes up in the body of a 30-year-old.

Big will be screened at the Saratoga Film Forum, Saturday, February 11, at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Film Forum Family Flick series. In keeping (vaguely) with the theme of Big, the Family Flick screenings are run entirely by kids who choose the film, man the projection booth, sell the concessions, and generally run the show. The Family Flick series is sponsored by the Nordlys Foundation and all proceeds will be donated to charity. If you happen to know any kids who might be interested, let us know at films@saratogafilmforum.org.

*The genre was revived in the 2000s.

Film Forum Screening Like Crazy

No, that doesn’t mean that the Saratoga Film Forum is feverishly screening movies 24/7 (or, for that matter, screening its calls). Rather, it means they will be screening the movie Like Crazy this weekend. Sorry for the mix-up.

Like Crazy has earned its share of accolades (74% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and produce doesn’t lie), as well as a brace of Sundance awards (the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic Film as well as a Special Jury Prize for Felicity Jones). Young director Drake Doremus made the most of a small budget (under $250,000)—it was shot on a Canon EOS 7D DSLR digital camera (you can snag one for under $1500 at Amazon). Said Doremus in an interview: “We shot on this consumer camera called the 7D, the Canon 7D. It’s a still camera, but it takes videos, and you put film lenses on it, and it looks great.” The actors also did their own hair and makeup, and the dialogue was improvised. Doremus was clearly influenced by his French New Wave forebears (Godard’s Breathless, e.g.). (More and more “films” today are being shot on consumer or prosumer grade digital cameras. And, yes, in case you’re wondering, the first cinematic feature to be shot on an iPhone has already been released.) 

The story itself, about a love affair forced into transatlanticism by an expired student visa, is based on Doremus’ own experiences when his then-wife was having visa issues and was sent back to Austria.

Even without a lavish budget, the movie has a lot of texture—and texting, as the two young lovers are separated for the bulk of the movie. 

The film is unabashedly romantic—and anyone who has ever endured a long-distance relationship (and/or been in their 20s) can sympathize. By the way, is there anyone you want, need, love, and/or miss like crazy? You can customize the movie poster for Like Crazy using your own photos. Check out the movie’s “poster creator” over on Facebook.

Screening times are Thursday and Friday, February 9 and 10, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, February 12, at 3:00 p.m.

“What we’ve got on our hands...is a dead shark”

1977’s Annie Hall was a turning point for Woody Allen as a filmmaker, marking as it did the transition between his “early funny films” and the more serious (but often no less funny) later “relationship” movies. (Allen’s previous film was 1975’s Love and Death, a broad satire of 19th-century Russian literature that, among other things, involved a plot to assassinate Napoleon. A more jarring juxtaposition of films there has never been.) Annie Hall was also a turning point in that it was Allen’s first Oscar nod, winning Best Picture, as well as Best Screenplay and Best Director.

 

Allen’s original title for Annie Hall had been Anhedonia, a psychoanalytic term that means “the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable.” It’s hard to imagine why United Artists had a hard time coming up with a marketing plan for that! Interestingly, what became Annie Hall was originally planned to be a murder mystery, although that element was jettisoned in favor of a straight romantic comedy. It was revived almost 20 years later for Allen’s 1993 film Manhattan Murder Mystery which re-teamed Allen with Diane Keaton (the titular Annie Hall).

Although Annie Hall would mark a departure for Allen (more fully realized in his next film, 1978’s Bergman homage Interiors), it doesn’t lack for comedy. The Marshall McLuhan cameo, the lobsters, the “spider the size of a Buick,” “a large, vibrating egg”...Annie Hall is still one of the funniest movies ever made. But, like the old joke that ends the film—“two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know; and such small portions’”—there is a more serious message lying below the surface.

See what you think. The Film Forum will be screening Annie Hall Monday night, February 6, at 7:30 in the Spring Street Gallery (110 Spring Street) as part of the Monday night “Countdown to Oscar” Best Picture Winners series. 

Marginal Revolution

There has been no shortage of documentaries about the 2008 financial meltdown and related issues. Inside Job, which the Saratoga Film Forum screened last year, was perhaps the highest-profile of these. 2009’s Collapse was another, and the Enron-collapse doc The Smartest Guys in the Room dates from 2003. But “financial dramas”—let alone financial thrillers—have tended to be few and far between. 2010’s The Company Men was a bit of a flop and got mixed reviews (including only a 67% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer). HBO’s Too Big to Fail, based on the nonfiction book by Andrew Ross Sorkin, has been described as a dramatized version of Inside Job. (Metacritic has a pretty thorough roundup of recession-themed films here.) Speaking of HBO, one of my favorite “finance films” was 1993’s Barbarians at the Gate, which, though not without its suspense, was played more as a black comedy, thanks to a screenplay by the late great Larry Gelbart. There is also Trading Places, speaking of dark financial comedies. (Wall Street and Boiler Room round out the master list of Wall Street flicks.)

The idea of a “financial thriller” may sound somewhat oxymoronic, although in the book world, it is a growing genre. One of the challenges of this genre, is grokking the lingo. Even after reading the explanation of a margin call, it’s still a bit of a mystery. So the challenge of a good financial thriller is to ramp up the suspense while keeping exposition sounding less like an MBA thesis.

About 20 minutes into Margin Call, Peter Sullivan, a fairly junior member of an investment bank (loosely based on Lehman Brothers), begins the initial explanation of what is happening that will end up triggering the financial meltdown. “It’s fairly complicated,” Sullivan begins. “Simplify!” urges trading floor head Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), who no doubt speaks for the viewer. That Sullivan is played by Zachary Quinto, whose most famous role (arguably) is that of Mr. Spock in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, perhaps lends a tone of “technobabble” to the proceedings, but it gives us just enough to let us know what’s happening without offering “too much information.” Emerson then tries to further explain to his boss Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who says, “Just talk to me in English,” a sentiment repeated by the Boss of All Bosses John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) in an early morning meeting. “Speak as you might to a small child or a golden retriever.”

“Look at these people,” says Sullivan, as he and his colleague Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley) drive through the streets of Manhattan, “wandering around with no idea what’s about to happen.”

And that’s the issue with movies like Margin Call, particularly post-Occupy Wall Street. With the effects of the 2008 financial crisis still profoundly affecting many of us, is it too soon to accept moral ambiguity on the part of the folks that helped cause it? Can the bankers be humanized?

Director J.C. Chandor wrote Margin Call in the days after Lehman’s dramatic failure, and, as he told the New York Times, wanted to understand the human side of a financial crisis, or “the decision-making process that got us into this mess....Everything in my gut said don’t lie here.” Chandor’s father was a Merrill Lynch investment banker, and he got to see the human side of the “Wall Street banker” firsthand, the ups and the downs. Thus, Margin Call is not intended to condemn the system, and if nothing else, it aims for a calm, realistic portrait of the industry. From the Times:

“A lot of what our film is really exploring is that it’s easy to vilify, it’s easy to moralize and judge and blame people for what happened,” Mr. Quinto said. “And not inappropriately, completely! But there’s also a whole swath of people who were just doing their jobs, who weren’t complicit in the decision-making process that led to all of this.”

That is, do we paint everyone in a large industry with the same brush?

Oh, Oscar!

This year's Oscar nominees were announced earlier this week. In February, the Film Forum is screening the Oscar-nominated short films. Check out the updated roster here.

As ever, the nominees were not without controversy. Feel free to use the Comments section to share your thoughts—which nomination was deserved? Who got robbed?

Speaking of Oscar, in February, the Saratoga Film Forum is presenting a countdown to Oscar night. Each Monday night the Film Forum will screen a past Best Picture Oscar winning film. See the schedule here. All Monday night screenings are at 7:30 at the Spring Street Gallery, 110 Spring Street, and are free and open to the public.

Milling Around

Calling all art lovers. After the Saratoga Film Forum’s Friday evening screening of The Mill & The Cross, Rachel Seligman, Associate Curator at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, will lead a discussion about the film. “I have taught Bruegel in the past and have always loved his work,” Rachel tells us. “The conceit for this film is such an unusual one that I was very intrigued and curious about it. And the more I’ve read about it, the more excited I am to see it.”

Rachel and the Film Forum go a long ways back—and in fact she was the Film Forum’s first paid employee. Friday’s screening starts at 7:30 p.m. For more information, please visit the Saratoga Film Forum’s Web site or Facebook page.

While You Were Art

Those of you who may have been fans of the old 1960s TV show Wild Wild West no doubt recall the episode where the evil Dr. Loveless invents a device that lets people travel inside paintings. The device is used for nefarious purposes (inhabited paintings placed in royal houses were designed to facilitate the theft of royal jewels, etc.), but having seen the episode at an impressionable age, I have always thought it would be pretty cool to travel inside a painting (of course, this would depend on the painting...). While those of us who require glasses often have the experience of being in an Impressionist painting, generally, though, we can only imagine what the oil-on-canvas-based life would be like.

Now, however, Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski takes moviegoers inside a painting, specifically, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1564 painting The Way to Calvary. The movie is The Mill & The Cross, which will screened at the Saratoga Film Forum this Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. This is not a first for Majewski, who is himself a painter; his 2004 film The Garden of Earthly Delights involved reenactments of scenes from the titular triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, which sounds like it would put the “trip” in “triptych.”

The Mill & The Cross goes even further than simply reenacting a painting—it uses computer graphics and heavy-duty compositing to simulate Bruegel’s visual style and place the actors within extrapolations and interpolations of what is on the canvas, in some ways “finishing” Bruegel’s work. The film brings the 16th-century Flemish master into the 21st century, and this “bringing Bruegel forward” is not just visual, but thematic as well.

Bruegel the Elder (so-called in retrospect to distinguish him from his son, also a painter, who became known, cleverly enough, as Bruegel the Younger) was known for what has been called “genre” painting; his works often featured peasants and the daily life of a fairly typical village. This was quite rare at the time, and Bruegel’s works have been important documents of 16th century Flanders. Part of this “everyday” life also unfortunately involved torture and execution, and the painting—and film—depict victims strapped to Catherine wheels, ravens pecking away at them. At the time, Flanders was occupied by Spain, and by all accounts it was a brutal occupation. As a result, the crucifixion of Christ depicted in the painting is performed not by the Romans, but by the Spanish. Bruegel invented a style of painting perhaps known as “protest art.”

Bruegel's The Way to Calvary

And yet if you look at the painting (click here for a higher-resolution version), you’ll notice the milling crowd (as it were) going about their business blind to many of the horrific events around them, as if they have become immune to them.

Majewski spoke about Bruegel’s attitude toward the subjects of his painting in a recent interview:

[H]e is a realist in looking at human conditions. He is a profound observer. I feel a lot of compassion in his paintings, a softening for Flanders and its people. He is compassionate in his depiction, but realistic…it is the inbred condition of human beings, that’s the way it is…to be cynical you have to be on purpose, so to say.

...

His message is timeless, anything important happens, you most likely won’t see it because you just don’t see beyond your own nose…the foreground is less important…Bruegel’s attitude is truthful, I mean people go after the incidents that catch their eyes, but that’s not necessarily the most important thing happening around them.

Times have changed, but not too much:

People have to be particularly stronger today as we are attacked by many aggressive disruptions, whether we like it or not. Disruptions to our train of thought are constant; if you want to communicate with yourself there will be constant interference – radio, TV etc.

And, above everything, the mill. For Majewski, the mill is the primary symbol of both the painting and the film, representing the divine. There is a scene in the film when the blades stop and the world stands still. What should we make of this?