Resisting Paradise
2003
Director: Barbara Hammer
Cast: Marie-Ange Allibert Rodriguez, Marguerite Matisse, Henri Matisse

By Nancy Keefe Rhodes


It was a case of being in the right place at the right time. When filmmaker Barbara Hammer went to France in the spring of 1999 to Cassis, a few miles east of the port city of Marseilles, famous for its limestone cliffs and its wine, she intended to investigate the unique quality of light that had drawn painters to that region. For example, the painter Pierre Bonnard left Paris for good in 1910 for the southern coast, and Henri Matisse had moved south in 1917, settling near Nice. They carried on a lively correspondence into their later years – living until 1947 and 1954 respectively – about the light and landscape that so nurtured their palettes, and both refused to budge during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. We have all probably seen light a little differently since the Impressionists, whether we realize it or not. And for Hammer, this project would be a natural investigation. A painter once herself, she’s engaged in experiments with light, editing, format, film emulsions, and approaches to subject matter in 80-some videos and films over the last four decades. She even notes Matisse’s remark that cinema “has advantages” over painting.


Once there, Hammer discovered others had moved through Cassis and the southern coast during World War II besides painters hunting perfect light – refugees fleeing the Nazis, and resisters, both in the thousands. While Matisse painted, his estranged wife Amélie, his son Jean and his daughter Marguerite were part of the French Resistance. The Gestapo caught and tortured Marguerite, who drove to Paris three times a week with messages, and shipped her to Ravensbrück concentration camp.


As Hammer uncovered an aging network of survivors from those years – Lisa Fittko took Jewish refugees on foot through the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, Marie-Ange Allibert Rodriguez supplied identity papers and food stamps from her City Hall office – another convergence de-railed her film plans.


In March 1999, NATO began bombing the break-away Serbian province of Kosovo, intending to drive out the Serbian police and paramilitaries engaged in atrocities against the majority Albanian population, the latest convulsion in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia that had stretched across the 1990s.


Every night in Cassis, Hammer says, she watched Kosovar refugees on French TV as they fled “ethnic cleansing.” When they streamed home again in June, revenge killings against the Serbs started, even as the UN tried to organize elections. So the film that Hammer finished in 2003 – and is bringing to Syracuse next week for two guest screenings – is not what she set out to make. Instead she decided to investigate these questions: What are our responsibilities during war? How can art exist during political crisis?


Convincingly gorgeous, Resisting Paradise captures what could so visually intoxicate Bonnard that he could “drown” in the landscape there. Hammer’s capacity to recreate this on-screen endows her questions with a power that carries this film well past the standard educational documentary. To address those questions, she creates a kind of dialogue between the painters, with snatches read from their correspondence, and “ordinary people,” made up of re-enactments, readings and voice-overs, archival footage, new interviews and footage that imagines the transformation of what’s seen to what’s painted.


The comparison is unsettling and challenging. Matisse writes to Bonnard that “a little painting no bigger than your hand sold for 100,000 francs – this is a golden age for artists!” His grandson follows, describing his mother’s torture (and it sounds like water-boarding to me). Lisa Fittko describes the seemingly failed escape and suicide by morphine tablets of philosopher Walter Benjamin, whom she guided to Spain’s border, where the Spanish police stopped his party and held them overnight in order to send them back. Forger of identity papers and food stamps Marie-Ange Rodriguez, who says she is “87 ½” and in fact died shortly after Hammer’s interview, recalls, “I was never afraid. Everyone knew and no one betrayed me, never, even those on the side of the Germans.”


That comparison also made some artists at Harvard, to whom she showed the film while it was still a work in progress, feel “attacked.” In order to soften Matisse, she added more footage of his grandchildren. Though Jacqueline Matisse Monnier and Claude Duthuit provide the details of their mother’s and grandmother’s treatment at the hands of the Gestapo, they also insist that Matisse – given his health – could do nothing other than he did.


Now we can hardly miss more synchronicity in Hammer’s bringing this film to Syracuse at this point. After years under UN administration, Kosovo finally declared independence on February 17th. Within days, 150, 000 Serbs protested in their capital’s streets, burned and looted foreign shops, and fire-bombed embassies of nations supporting Kosovo (ours included).


Hammer hasn’t been to Kosovo, but last May she was in Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro, where traveling in a car with Serbian plates meant hurled eggs and angry shouts. Speaking by phone on Monday from Woodstock, where she lives when not in Manhattan, Hammer said these events of recent weeks “really bring this full circle and may lead to a situation similar to 1999.”


Hammer visits Onondaga Community College in Syracuse on March 6th as the guest of the Reel World documentary series, part of Art Across Campus. Reel World brings indie documentaries with limited release to campus with screenings that welcome the wider community; this year’s Art Across Campus explores how artistic expression documents wartime experience. Faculty organizer Linda Herbert says Hammer’s vast body of work – experimental documentaries and queer cinema landmarks like Nitrate Kisses (1992) – and the start of Women’s History Month all make this “a perfect fit.”


Renting Hammer’s films is hard – netflix.com only offers History Lessons (2000), the third in her trilogy of experimental documentaries about lesbian and gay history (besides Nitrate Kisses, 1995’s Tender Fictions) – but Women Make Movies carries her earlier films, some are for sale on her website (barbarahammerfilms.com), and she’s considering other commercial DVD distribution. She’s also represented in the landmark WACK! international exhibition of 1970’s Feminist art, on view now until May at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, where she’ll speak on a panel of experimental filmmakers this Saturday.


Hammer has also just finished two films about the dying tradition of women deep-sea divers of the matriarchal Korean island of Jen-Ju Do. Like Resisting Paradise itself and My Babushka (2001), which documents her search for her Ukrainian roots, the two Jen-Ju Do films address concerns ranging wider than queer history. On Monday Hammer commented that Lover Other, her 2006 film about two women who were both artists and lovers and resisted the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey during World War II, is “really a coda” to Resisting Paradise, which had no lesbian or gay figures in it. “I went as far as I could go with lesbian history,” Hammer says. “I’m also an artist, a resister myself.”


A shorter version of this review appears in the 2/28/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.

The Gates: HBO documentary

The Gates

Antonio Ferrera

Albert Maysles

 

HBO: The Gates:

"In 1979, the provocative artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude approached New York City officials with a proposal to create a temporary, large-scale work of art in Central Park.
The city turned them down. Twenty-four years and several administrations later, following dozens of high-concept, high-profile works of landscape art in numerous urban and rural locations around the globe, they finally got the city's approval to complete their vision. THE GATES chronicles the decades-long struggle of Christo and Jeanne-Claude to bring their most ambitious work of art to life.
Video Premieres HBO Tuesday, February 26 at 10pm ET/PT."

 

 

This epic HBO documentary has some interesting moments that go beyond the endless scenes of flapping  orange material blowing in the wind.  The cold, which can be inferred and the two creators, Christo and his companion Jeanne-Claude talking with the same theme of, this work of art is like our children, the child we never had, becomes an enigmatic signifier at the beginning of the documentary. But as the documentary moves on the meaning of the comparision between orange material and my child now grown, becomes clear.

What is noteworthy in the documentary is how this couple has changed in appearance over the years in the making of the Gates, although their spirit and their love for each other does not appear to have waned.

The magnificent, the extraordinary effort involved in putting the Gates up, in assisting the final product is truly awesome.

But for me, beyond the process of the creation and implementation, beyond the documentary’s lack of over all voice which I applaud (done in the Fred Weissman  method of the silent camera),  is the concept of change that this work of art brings to our conscious minds.

When asked if the Gates were in response to the 911 devastation  downtown the artist immediately said, no no.  We planned all this before the plans crashed.

 But the reporter asked a question that I have thought of and without perhaps realizing it, many others have spent time either in conscious or unarticulated reaction to an   everyday experience in New York City.  . Destruction, construction is everywhere and one can not help but react.

Human Beings are not comfortable with change.

What  the Gates did, whether good or bad. is to introduce into nature a man made element that dominated what nature was and is today. Of course there  are no Gates in nature.  There is an open sweeping unending flow and orange is a color seldom seen in pastoral setting. In Central Park, mid day, it is abrasive

 Whenever we go outside and see a tree, that is now missing, flowers that have died or a plot of land once a vacant lot now the home of more condos there is a reaction to the change as if it is death.  A moment that requires us to reflect upon, to exclaim, "What happened?"

The alteration brought about by the Gates in Center Park does mirror the destruction of the world trade center buildings because it is a moment in which the feeling of annihilation posed by the crashing plans  is revisited .  Nature never asked to be so adorned and the pit in downtown Manhattan is equally out of sync with what we know and expect.

My son held his marriage in the middle of the Gates, under a bridge with the weather so cold , the ceremony so long that my feet froze almost to gang green.  So I understand that for Christo and Jeanne-Claude the love of art, as does the love of children, brings us change regardless of the personal expense but it isn’t done without nostalgic moments of “I remember when”.

Linda Z

WBAI Women’s Collective

 

 

 

 

The Closet

Francis Veber

 French with English subtittles

DVD 2001

 

This delightful, poignant comedy brings humor to a serious issue, homophobia. with such great love, warm and even significant depth to remind the viewer of Charlie Chaplin at his best.

I would have written a scathing review due to the ill treatment of the women in this film except that upon closer examination I realized that all the characters (including the kitten) were stick figure types without a shred of depth and that in essence is what makes this film all the more enjoyable and profound.

The one dementional character sketch brings out the viewer’s seemingly inherent prejudice against the homosexual even when the viewer feels safe from such ugly, knee jerk type thoughts.

Plot:

François Pignon (Daniel Auteuil) is a non-entity accountant, divorced two years but still in love with his wife and wanting a better relationship with their 17 year old son. Then, he is the last in his company to hear that he is to be fired.

A neighbour, Belone (Michael Aumont) suggests that Pignon create the impression that he is gay, so that the company executives will find it difficult to fire him or else be thought homophobic. The plan works. 

Although this film received only one award, from the 2001  Shanghai International Film Festival I found the experience of watching the ins and outs of this simple yet succinct plot totally delightful

A must see film for those moments when life seems dull and in serious need of a “pick me up”.

LindaZ

WBAI women’s collective

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hard Road Home: Surviving Life After Prison

By Logan Nakyanzi Pollard

Macky Alston has made a smart film, Hard Road Home, about a tough subject: ex-convicts. While it’s often the subject of entertainment – subplots of cop shows and law and order court dramas – we don’t frequently see the lives of ex-cons in a non-fictionalized, non-sensational way. The film follows men and women who try to start their lives over after serving time.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “from 1995 to 2005, the number of jail inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents rose from 193 to 256,” so ex-convicts are among us and growing. Up against that bleak reality is Hard Road, which tells the story of Julio Medina, jailed for selling drugs and transformed by his incarceration. He served twelve years and founded a group called Exodus Transitional Community upon his release. His goal - to aid others like himself get back into the world: find jobs, resolve their addictions, support their families, be productive, and hopefully never go back to jail.

Unfortunately, everyday stresses - a broken-down car, partner drama, bills to pay - can lead to major setbacks for the men and women in the program, throwing their lives into complete chaos,. Like the story of Alberto Lopez, who struggles to keep his family together, despite a resurgent drug addition.

The men and women in the film battle each day to help each other stay away from their own self-destructivity. I saw myself there; I’ve fought to change something in myself, to do better than I have done in the past. I found myself thinking something many people are told growing up, just hang on a little longer, things will work out.

Hard Road is a poignant view of our universal frailty and strength – how hard it is to find your way out of a box, even when the top is open. Just looking up, is not always so easy.

Hard Road Home is airing on PBS Independent Lens. Check local listings.
More information is at: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/hardroadhome.

Logan Nakyanzi Pollard is a producer at Air America and Go Left TV. She writes articles and film reviews online at The Huffington Post, at huffingtonpost.com. Logan is also a member of the Women Film Critics Circle.

Billy Elliot
2000/DVD 2001
Director: Stephen Daldry
Cast: Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, Gary Lewis

Reviewed by Nancy Keefe Rhodes


Stephen Daldry, who switched from stage directing to movies with the Oscar-nominated Billy Elliot and went on to literary cinema like The Hours (2002), says that Billy Elliot is “not really a dance film.” Something like the 1935 Fred Astaire vehicle, Top Hat, is his idea of a dance film. There are clips from Top Hat inserted into this gritty tale of an 11-year-old miner’s son who secretly leaves Saturday boxing lessons to learn ballet, pirouetting in and out the white-tutus in the midst of the UK’s worst labor strike since World War II. Set in northeast England in 1984-85, this story does not employ clips of classic Hollywood fantasy about tuxedo-clad high society to embody Billy’s aspirations. No, they appear only as remote, grainy images flickering on the tiny TV of Billy’s addled old grandmother, whose recurrent line, regretful and longing, is, “They always said I could’ve danced professionally if I’d only had the training.”


Those old musicals trafficked in a little vaudeville melodrama, but audiences were after the escapist entertainment when Fred, Ginger and all those supporting extras took flight. Instead, Billy Elliot – though it has three or four wonderful dance sequences – repays a second look eight years later because it’s a surprisingly complex and savvy drama about how men struggle with social constraints – from wildly divergent styles of fatherhood, convictions about men’s aggressive nature that spring from hard times and class friction, and whatever largely consigning the “artistic side of life” to women comes to mean about the sexuality of artistic men.


Daldry’s cast is superior. For the title role, he reportedly combed through some 2,000 auditions to find relative newcomer Jamie Bell (now appearing in Jumper as Griffin), also a native of Billy’s northeast England, who hid the ballet part of this role from his own school mates during filming. Julie Walters – Molly Weasely in the Harry Potter films – plays the prickly, chain-smoking dance teacher Mrs. Wilkinson, who gives Billy private lessons and puts the Royal Ballet in his head. Pitch perfect as the profoundly reticent, still-grieving widower wrenched by disturbing emotion, Gary Lewis (Prime Suspect: The Final Act) is Billy’s dad Jackie.


It was a savage time. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives closed many open pit mines in the nationalized coal industry to increase efficiency and profit. Over 11,000 strikers were arrested. Ten died in the running battles with police that swept through housing projects. Swaths of northeastern England and southern Wales remain virulently anti-police. Billy gets his letter of acceptance from the Royal Ballet the same day – March 3, 1985 – that the forever-after weakened miners’ union “caved in,” as Jackie’s fellows tell him as greeting for his son’s good news, ending the strike.


Daldry takes some care depicting this violence on both sides: police and strikers in ferocious, shouting tugs of war on picket lines, phalanxes of police beating their shields with batons – Billy’s rough hothead older brother Tony (Jamie Draven) is clubbed bloody – and enraged strikers pelting scab-carrying buses with eggs and rocks. The strike also caused extreme privation. Billy’s father Jackie weeps twice during this story, first when he’s forced to smash his late wife’s piano with a sledge hammer to burn the wood for heat on Christmas Eve, the second time from fear when he rides the scabs’ bus to work so he can buy Billy’s bus ticket to London. In this life – nasty, brutish and short – men fight tooth and nail, 11-year-old boys take boxing lessons, and an incensed father who’s never been to London because “they don’t have mines there” equates ballet with “poofs.”


Billy isn’t gay. That’s why Mrs. Wilkinson’s precocious daughter Debbie is in this film, starting a pillow fight with Billy that fills the air with feathers and looks forward to the sexual charge of Billy’s breathtaking leap onto stage years later in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. But his forlorn friend Michael (Stuart Wells), whom we first meet refusing to box, is. At first sharply put off, Billy’s growing comfort with Michael parallels his growing acceptance of his own desire to dance. And one of the film’s pleasures is the increasing physical affection among the Elliot men as their definitions of manliness expand and they start supporting Billy’s dancing.


The role of women in the film is less satisfying. Formerly, all Billy’s support has come from women – from Mrs. Wilkinson, from his mother Jenny’s example, from his grandmother’s love of dance. Even the pivotal question at his Royal Ballet audition, which restores this tongue-tied boy’s voice – “How do you feel when you dance?” – comes from the sole woman on the interview panel. And moved as Jackie Elliot is by how good Billy’s gotten, the deal maker is that “his mother would’ve let him.” Still, Mrs. Wilkinson disappears from the story abruptly and for good after Jackie’s conversion – I would at least have liked to see her in the final scene that gathers many of the principals together ten years later – as if Daldry insists that men must not delegate some matters.


Interestingly, the film delays powerfully muscular, masculine ballet until the end, fast forwarding to Billy at age 25 by splicing in footage of dancer Adam Cooper in Matthew Bourne’s 1995 all-male revival of Swan Lake. This production on Broadway earned Adam Cooper a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical and was extremely popular with teen-age boys, causing a minor surge in dance lessons. Young Billy’s major dance sequences – his sense of self and skill still awkward works in progress – instead rely on dazzling tap work danced not in toe shoes but laced-up boots, especially his raw anguish when his father at first forbids the Royal Ballet audition. We get to watch both men grow up.


*******
This review appeared in the 2/21/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing recent films that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.