Ongoing New York Film Festival Coverage

You can read my New York Film Festival coverage in several places this year, including this website. Links to the newest posts on Film Journal International are below. Please check back again in a few days. 

Haskell Wexler and Pamela Yates in Nicaragua on the set of Latino (1986). (Photo courtesy of Skylight Pictures.)

I spoke with Pamela Yates about Rebel Citizen, a documentary that is actually a candid, extended interview with Haskell Wexler, the two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer and director (Medium Cool, 1969). Yates (Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, 2011) speaks to Wexler about his little-known passion for making documentaries. Rebel Citizen will screen at NYFF on October 6th and 11th. Film Journal International’s Screener Blog: http://www.filmjournal.com/rebel-citizen-haskell-wexler-receives-documentary-tribute-new-york-film-festival

Filmmaker Laura Israel whose Don't Blink: Robert Frank screens at NYFF next week.(Photo courtesy of NYFF)

The second interview is with Laura Israel (Windfall, 2010) whose new documentary, Don’t Blink: Robert Frank, is about that Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker. Frank is best-known for his book of photos from 1955, The Americans. Israel has worked with him for many years, so her documentary is an intimate portrait of the artist, but it is also a skillfully rendered interpretation of his work. Don't Blink will screen at NYFF on October 4th and 6th. Film Journal International’s Screener Blog: http://www.filmjournal.com/dont-blink-new-york-film-festival-interview-director-laura-israel

My NYU Bookstore Reading

I hope you will take a look at clips of my recent presentation on Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the Lambs" at NYU Bookstore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEnhvA10x7k&feature=em-upload_owner

Also, snippets of the question and answer session are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spEWFMU8h38&feature=em-upload_owner

New York Film Festival Screens a New Documentary about Ingrid Bergman (First in a Series about NYFF)

Ingrid Bergman was an avid photographer and maker of "home" movies, footage of which appears in Stig Björkman's documentary. (Photo courtesy of the New York Film Festival.)

In Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words, which will screen at The New York Film Festival, an archivist observes that the radiant star of so many memorable films saved her photographs and “home” movies, as well as her school assignments, and her children’s school papers, because early in her life she had learned the value of such mementos. Orphaned as a young adult, Bergman went to live with relatives who died three months after her arrival.

Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words is organized chronologically, moving from the actress's girlhood to her early work in Swedish theater, to her triumph in Hollywood, which began when Bergman was brought to the U.S. by David O. Selznick to make Intermezzo (1939). After working with Victor Fleming and Alfred Hitchcock, she went to Italy to realize her dream of working with Roberto Rossellini. Her affair with the director resulted in a swift and stinging rejection by the American public.

At first puzzled and then deeply wounded by this sudden withdrawal of admiration, Bergman would not return to Hollywood until 1956 when she appeared in Anatole Litvak’s Anastasia. Her final theatrical film, before her death from cancer, is also discussed in the documentary. It marked Bergman's return to Sweden to appear in Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978).

My Reading at NYU Bookstore

My first reading for Cinematic Quests for Identity: The Hero’s Encounter with the Beast took place at New York University Bookstore last night. No author could ask for a better audience. Friends, family, colleagues and former students from CUNY/Baruch and CUNY/City Tech attended. I read briefly from my first chapter, which is about Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946), and then did a presentation on the conventions of the quest in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the subject of my second chapter.

Afterward, we had a terrific question and answer session and a book signing. Check back in a few days for video clips from the presentation.

My Interview with Filmmaker Stanley Nelson, Jr.

A still from the documentary, "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution," opening in September in New York City.

I have just posted links to my video interview with Stanley Nelson, Jr. whose documentary, "The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution," is a history of that political party. In the interview, Mr. Nelson speaks about the genesis of the film project, his choice of interviewees for the documentary, and the influence of the Black Panther Party on the civil rights movement, among many other topical issues. Mr. Nelson was gracious enough to grant me about 30 minutes; for easier viewing, our interview is divided into two parts. Check back soon for a link to my feature article on the documentary, which will appear in Film Journal International.

Relief From Summer Blockbusters

A still from Christian Petzold's Phoenix depicts Nelly (Nina Hoss), an Auschwitz survivor. 

For those who want to escape the usual summer fare, and see films intended for adults, Christian Petzold's Phoenix (in German with English subtitles) and Stevan Riley's Listen to Me Marlon are both terrific choices, as is Nadav Lapid's The Kindergarten Teacher, (See my FB page, March 9th: https://facebook.com/Maria GarciaNYC).

Some readers may have seen Petzold's previous film Barbara (2014), set in East Germany, which is about a medical doctor hounded by the secret police. It starred Nina Hoss, the German writer-director's frequent collaborator. In Phoenix Hoss plays Nelly, a Jewish singer who survives Auschwitz only to find that her German husband may have betrayed her. My Film Journal International review is here: http://www.filmjournal.com/reviews/film-review-phoenix.

Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary based on two hundred hours of audiotapes Marlon Brando recorded, in part because he was engaging in what he called "self-therapy." Having given up on psychotherapy, the iconic actor just started talking to himself. Because these recordings constitute the entire narrative track, it feels as though Brando is telling his own story. Riley's stills and archival footage are as skillfully edited as the soundtrack. Read my Film Journal International here: http://www.filmjournal.com/reviews/film-review-listen-me-marlon.

"Caffeinated": A New Documentary for Coffee Lovers

In Caffeinated, a young woman harvests the fruit that contains the seed or coffee bean.
(Still courtesy of Filmbuff.)

The coffee farmer, the bean, the roaster, the taster, as well as the espresso machine-maker and barista, all from different parts of the world, appear in a new documentary, Caffeinated, directed by Vishal Solanki and Hanh Nguyen. (It opens in theaters on July 14th.) Driven by an appreciation for coffee and American coffee consumption and culture—coffee is our most imported commodity—this feature-length debut is an entertaining look at one of the few handmade products in the world.

Coffee production has always been and still is a male-dominated enterprise, yet Caffeinated features the voices of many women, including the farmers of Las Hermanas (The Sisters) in Jinotega, Nicaragua, an Indian “taster”—just like a wine taster, she grades the product—and women entrepreneurs who have founded companies that support the sustainable development of coffee. In their interviews, it appears that Solanki and Nguyen also encouraged male farmers to emphasize the role played by female members of their family. This is most apparent in sequences shot in Central America in which farmers point to wives and daughters who are harvesting and sorting the cherry-like fruit from which the coffee bean is derived. Special attention is also paid, in the course of the documentary, to representing racial diversity.

Caffeinated is distinguished as well by the filmmaker’s visual sensibilities: Thoughtful use of light and camera angles to emphasize the beauty and color of the landscapes where coffee is grown, is also apparent in the sensuality with which the faces of farmers and their workers are photographed. Solanki and Nguyen also possess an eye for the symmetry of machines that roast, grind and steam coffee. While the documentary is beautiful to look at, and the co-directors are objective and journalistic, the editing is uneven. A sequence on the use of pesticides and its damaging effect on women’s health, for instance, draws no coherent conclusions, and often in the documentary, the narrator’s identity is unclear. Caffeinated is nevertheless impressive in its scope, and for the fact that it does not use music to manipulate the viewer’s emotions.

Those who enjoy Caffeinated will also appreciate Nick and Marc Francis’s Black Gold (2006), a fascinating study of the economics of the coffee trade. See the link to my interview with the filmmakers in “From My Archives: Interviews” (to the left of this column.) Thanks to Dropbox dropping the ball, you will need a log-in to access it.

Bree Newsome Takes it Down

An AP photo of Bree Newsome's arrest after she removed the Dixie flag from the South Carolina State House.

By now, the video of Bree Nelson removing the Dixie flag from the South Carolina State House has surely gone viral. (If you have not seen it, go to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr-mt1P94cQ.) Shortly after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the state of Georgia began flying that flag, and in a celebration to mark the beginning of the Civil War, South Carolina did the same in April of 1961, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. During last week's "Meet the Press," Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson, referring to that 1961 incident, said the Dixie flag "was flown as a symbol of massive resistance to racial desegregation."

Ms. Newsome's actions this morning reversed the battle cry of the Dixie flag: Now it is a call to action for all Americans, the beginning of a new fight in the longest running war in our country. It began before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, with our genocide of American Indians in one of the biggest land grabs in history, and our trafficking of Africans in the slave trade that established the fortunes of many Northern and Southern families. Our ownership of those slaves furthered the growth of our capitalist economy. Institutionalized racism, the cause of economic disparities in America, continue to benefit the enfranchised among us, most of whom are white. But Ms. Newsome's actions are not intended to divide us.

In the summer of 1964, the racism and hatred that the Dixie flag represents killed two Jewish men, Andrew Goodman and Michael Shwerner, and their colleague, a Black man named James Earl Chaney, right before the start of the Congress of Racial Equality's voting registration campaign in Mississippi. I was a school-girl at the time, and my family had just moved to the suburbs. We were the first with a Spanish name to live in that neighborhood. A Black family with two children arrived shortly afterward. The father was an anesthesiologist and the mother a nurse. One night, shortly after the bodies of the three activists were found, we were awakened by the siren that called our volunteer fireman to work. A cross was burning on the lawn of the Black family's home.

Memories of Orson Welles

A still from The Third Man of Orson Welles (Courtesy of Rialto Pictures/Studio Canal).

New York City's Film Forum will be screening a restored print of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) later this month. The script was by Graham Greene, and the movie stars Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli and the incomparable Orson Welles. While I am hard-pressed to pick my favorite Orson Welles movie, in this one he makes his best grand entrance. And, The Third Man is a terrific example of British noir. Thinking about Welles led me to recall our trip to Morocco . . .

. . . where my husband and I embarked on a long drive to El Jadida in order to see the locations used in his Othello (1952), namely the Portuguese Cistern and the Fortress of Mazagan. Welles's version of the Shakespeare tragedy, which he adapted and directed, and in which he played the title role, is one of the best film adaptations of that play. (Those who like the play and Welles's portrayal should screen Laurence Fishburne's performance in Oliver Parker's Othello, 1995.) Here are a few photos that will illustrate Welles's wonderful choice of location for Othello.

Dropbox and the Snake Oil Sales Model of Tech Firms

I hope you will all indulge me in one last rant about Dropbox that seems to have nothing at all to do with film or art, but with capitalism, and the pernicious form of that economic system that has been allowed to grow with the advent of technology and the Internet.

Dropbox followed the "get rich" technology growth model, what I think of as the Snake Oil Sales Model, that leaves behind those of us who are not in marketing or business. Dropbox began with the offer of a free product, one that many writers and artists and photographers need—a digital storage room. Since most blogs do not support PDF files for print articles, writers use Dropbox to give their readers (and editors who may want to pay them to write) access to print articles they have written that are not on the Internet. We all know, when we sign up for a service like Dropbox that, in a few years, when the company has built a user base of a few hundred thousand people, we will have to pay a fee in order to continue using it. That is the Snake Oil Sales Model: Take it for free, try it, and get hooked. (Drug dealers apparently use the same model.)

If you are under 40, you are so accustomed to this model that you do not even give it a second thought. But Dropbox has done something even worse that is generally reserved for companies like Microsoft and Apple. They have discontinued the service—read as "app" or "program"—they originally offered, that of a free storage room to which anyone can gain access. Now they have a fee-based "share" model for businesses. That's it. So, users like me who have depended upon the service, and expected at some point to be asked to pay, are being harassed so that they will drop out and leave gig space for the businesses. If you are snickering at this point, pause for a moment and think: Do you want a fee-based Internet for the 1% or the Wiki model—and the Blogspot model that you are reading right now, neither of which charges a dime?

Here is Dropbox's response to my e-mail about my pre-2012 account which should allow completely free access to my Public Folder, and has for the last three years. That means the many links that exist on this page to PDFs stored in my Dropbox Public Folder should work without you having to use your Dropbox log-in to read them. Below is what a response looks like in the Snake Oil Sales Model, a "fix it yourself" for something that cannot be fixed—unless you are a hacker.

Dropbox Support, Jun 12, 12:03 AM:
Hi,
Thanks for writing in. While we'd love to answer every question we get, we unfortunately can't respond to your inquiry due to a large volume of support requests. Here are some resources for resolving the most common issues:

Restore files or folders - https://www.dropbox.com/help/969
Reset your Dropbox password - https://www.dropbox.com/forgot
Reset/Disable two-step verification - https://www.dropbox.com/help/364
Learn about sharing files or folders - https://www.dropbox.com/help/category/Sharing
Learn about Dropbox's desktop app - https://www.dropbox.com/help/category/Desktop
Learn about Dropbox's mobile apps - https://www.dropbox.com/help/category/Mobile
Ask a Community expert on our Forum - https://www.dropboxforum.com
For all other issues, please check out our Help Center - https://www.dropbox.com/help
We're sorry for the inconvenience,
The Dropbox Team

Needless to say, none of these links have anything to do with the recurring problem, which is that readers of this website must now use their own Dropbox log-in to get to my public folder.

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Dropbox Dropping the Ball, AGAIN

For the second time in a month, Dropbox is not working. If there are broken links to any articles you wish to read, please send me an e-mail. Thank you.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2015

The Wanted 18 is a film about a herd of cows that provided "Infitada milk" for a West Bank town. (Photo courtesy of HRWFF.)

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival opens tomorrow in New York City, with a slate of 16 feature-length documentaries screening at the IFC and Walter Reade Theaters (http://ff.hrw.org/). From the deserts of Southern Sudan to the Gaza Strip and to our own domestic human rights issues, this year’s slate is outstanding. Among the best documentaries are Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, a comprehensive and balanced chronology of that political party, and Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War, which follows veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as they participate in group therapy sessions at a residence for PTSD sufferers.

My interview with Bécue-Renard appears here: http://www.filmjournal.com/human-rights-watch-festival-men-and-war-examines-psychological-toll-returning-veterans. A review of "The Black Panthers" is here: http://www.filmjournal.com/asserting-power-new-doc-chronicles-history-black-panthers.

Hajooj Kuka’s Beats of the Antonov takes us to Southern Sudan, and depicts the Sudanese government’s racial cleansing campaign there—and the native people’s surprising response to it. Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan’s The Wanted 18, through interviews and stop motion animation sequences, tells the story of a herd of cows in Beit Sahour in the West Bank that were declared a threat to national security by the state of Israel. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence (a follow-up to The Act of Killing) takes us to Indonesia, and follows an optometrist who confronts the men who killed his brother during the Indonesian genocide of 1965-1966.

Ayat Najafi’s No Land’s Song is about Sara Najifi’s efforts to stage a concert in Tehran with solo female singers; women vocalists are prevented from performing as solo artists by Iran’s clerics. Mr. Najafi is this year’s Nestor Almendros award winner, the festival’s cash prize named for one of the founders of HRWFF. My interview with him may be read here: http://www.filmjournal.com/finding-voice-%E2%80%98no-land%E2%80%99s-song%E2%80%99-protests-repression-female-singers-iran.

My Interview With Cristina Comencini for "Latin Lover"

This still from Cristina Comencini's Latin Lover is courtesy of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

My video interview with Italian writer-director Signora Comencini (in English and Italian), for her new film Latin Lover, is now on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHDtKkP5Dug&feature=youtu.be. It is the newest entry in my series on Women Filmmakers. (Links to others are to the upper right of this column.)

Latin Lover screened at The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual festival of Italian films, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema (June 4-11). A delightful comedy, and a wonderful celebration of women, it features Virna Lisi in her final performance as the first wife of the “latin lover,” actor Saverio Crispo. In the movie, she and the other wives and lovers, and their children and grandchildren, gather for the 10th anniversary of Saverio’s death, their memories and rivalries intact. 

Signora Comencini (far left) at FSLC's Open Roads Festival opening night party. (Image is my snapshot.)

Although not well-known in the United States, Signora Comencini has made 16 films, and is an Oscar-nominated writer-director in the Foreign Language category for The Beast in My Heart (2005). That film and When the Night, nominated for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2011, were adapted from her novels. At this writing, the expertly written and directed Latin Lover does not have a U.S. distributor.

The Site of a Perilous Quest

The Stonewall Inn in New York City is finally being recognized for its significance in the struggle for equality. (Photo courtesy of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.)

In the recent news coverage of the Islamist take-over of Palmyra, I felt that too much was being made of the ruin’s significance, and too little of the human suffering that was to follow. There is no doubt that place matters, but no one alive today remembers the life of Palmyra. We rely on historians and archeologists to explain its importance. These thoughts resurfaced today when I received a “breaking news” item from Andrew Berman, an acquaintance of mine who happens to be the director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation.

Andrew was writing to announce that the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee would finally be considering the Stonewall Inn as a site worthy of recognition—due in large part to GVSHP’s efforts. In his statement, Andrew said: “This is a long-overdue move to recognize the incredibly important role this site and the riots connected to it have in the struggle for LGBT rights in this country and worldwide.”

Unlike Palmyra, the bar has not stood for millennia, but it is a symbol that can be understood by any human being who has been cast as an outsider—and everyone engaged in the struggle for equality.  While buildings and monuments should be preserved as important reminders of great suffering, they should also evoke the ongoing quest for identity and acceptance. That long journey in the LGBT community began at Stonewall.

A Postscript on DropBox

A human being from Dropbox responded to my complaints (explained in the post below this one); while the pattern of ascribing wrongdoing to the user remains intact, the instructions I received from Vinny fixed the problem. So, all links to PDFs are now working. Film Journal International links, however, may still not contain my byline. Headlines also remain corrupted.