Thursday, September 24, 2015

"Personal Documentary"



Diary filmmaker Jonas Mekas with trusty hand-cranked Bolex 16mm

Jonas Mekas:

Selfies Won!

by Jamie Jobb


According to the 1999 documentary “Magnum Photos – The Changing of a Myth,” photojournalism will become an archaic practice in the 21st Century. Renegade Magnum photographer Martin Parr calls his reinvention of the craft "personal documentary" rather than “photojournalism”. Other photographers have moved away from straight “reportage” into more self-expressive photographic styles. Some are exploring video or “filmmaking” as well as photos that don’t move or talk. 

Helping explain this trend is the fact that most modern cameras are actually computers that think for themselves, know how to talk back, and transform the reality in front of any digital photographer into a premeditated post-production “live-shoot” smorgasbord of “creative choice” … In other words, the reality gets altered before the photo is ever taken! And because the images are embedded into a digital chip and photosensitive film is nowhere involved in the process, the camera doesn’t care if you want movies or stills or something quite in between! 

And that’s just for cameras. It doesn’t account for cell phones that shoot photos and video! Nor does it consider that odd beast called “Light Field Photography” where the camera has no single point of view and “photos” are reconstructed from light data collected at a scene.. 

Magnum’s self-reflective re-examination among professional journalistic photographers is quite telling for the group started by war photographers Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour. They were black-and-white still photographers looking for “the decisive moment” as Cartier-Bresson called it. 

Now Magnum’s hallowed halls of photojournalism are abandoned or made irrelevant as members drift into territory that for half a century was only ambled by Jonas Mekas, Lionel Rogosin, Alan Berliner and other diary filmmakers who sought some other kind of autobiographical “decisive moment”.

Let's recall that the heyday of "personal journalism" also was half a century ago.  Reporters like Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe, Nat Hentoff were trying on first-person writing styles for New York newspapers at the same time Mekas was projecting his very personal public home movies for audiences in The Village. These “personal” styles recognized the prime significance of the observer’s point of view, and the writers did not hide behind any veil of “objective” truth-telling. Their dispatches read like diaries.

* * *

I met Jonas Mekas in Gainesville Florida right before we moved to California in the spring of 1970. My friend Larry Robinson ran a local theater group which had invited Jonas to town to lecture. Now Larry was calling me the night before the lecture ... at 1 a.m.!

Larry asked straight away: “Can you get a Bolex?” 

What?!? A Bolex is a hand-cranked 16mm camera used at that time to make short motion pictures. Or for news reporting. Or by auteurs of the French Nouvelle Vague. It also was the trusty rugged hand-held portable camera we used at school when we studied filmmaking as a short unit within our photojournalism course. That’s where I learned to “edit-in-camera” and to work fast at the scene of a story. And how to hand-crank the dang thing all the time, it had no battery!  Ah, The Bolex, yes ... But, Larry: it’s 1 a.m.!

“Jonas Mekas wants a Bolex,” Larry insisted.  “He left his in New York!”

Oh no! Mekas was renowned at the time as an underground filmmaker who wrote a weekly column for The Village Voice that spoke for avant-garde filmmakers all across America. We felt honored that he’d come to Florida to talk to our small group of campus filmmakers and theater folk. 

He founded Film Culture magazine and was director of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. A Lithuanian war refugee, Mekas also helped develop the Film-Makers’ Cooperative when everyone really worked in actual “film” and video wasn’t an option because the gear was too big and costly.

Now Jonas is called “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema”.

* * *

Mekas wanted a Bolex in Gainesville and the only available one I knew about was locked in the library stacks on the University of Florida campus. We didn’t have a way to get it on a weekend. This was late Saturday and he was lecturing Sunday. Film cameras were not ubiquitous in those days long before people had constant cell phone video capability. 

Instead Larry and I took Mekas without a camera to Devil’s Millhopper State Park. No “diary” film of that February day in 1970 exists, just a dim memory. I recall it because I wrote about it for the local paper. I doubt Mekas, at 93, recalls much of it. I wrote:

“The Millhopper – that Scenic Sinkhole – was quite busy, but we found a place to park. Water from the previous week’s heavy rains had inundated the bottom and Mekas was impressed. He swung on a long vine and yelled something about ‘Tarzan’. Later he lamented his lack of a camera.” 

Me too. It would be great to have a film clip of what I saw there in the Florida jungle sinkhole full of rushing water: a small middle-aged man flying through the trees yelling like Tarzan on a vine in bellbottom pants! Instead I’m left with the diary filmmaker’s paradox regarding “decisive moments” – Why do some moments get captured, but most do not? 

Mekas, who had been quite silent during our day together, got downright loquacious when the crowd assembled for his talk that night. I covered his lecture for The Gainesville Sun. 

“Non-narrative film is the only significant development in cinema in the last ten years,”  he said, also pointing out that the films we had been showing on campus to represent ‘New Cinema’ did not represent avant-garde film at all!  “They are selected by businessmen who think Europe is the only place short films are being made. Their films are lousy, boring, stupid, banal.”

He then showed us several of his “diary films” which were none of the above – lousy, boring, stupid, or banal. The first time we’d ever seen such things, except perhaps for our families’ own home-movies. I wrote, in summary:

“It flowed. It also jumped quite a bit (due mostly to the single-framing). And it was hard on the eyes after a while. However the films changed pace at most of the right moments, and the images were more recognizable – more ‘realistic’ -- than most experimental films I’ve seen. Content was another matter – obscure things like ‘Wendy’s Wedding’, New York winter scenes, a circus. Mekas called them ‘diary films’ but it wasn’t that simple. It must be edited to make any sense, he said. The films continued. I understood why he wanted a Bolex.”

When you look at his prolific output, you’ll see the long life of Jonas Mekas has been one recorded film recollection after another. That’s why he puts the day’s date on each of his films. Diary, indeed!

Historically speaking, Mekas works at the other end of the spectrum from Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers, men who made the movies move … Jonas Mekas rendered their money-making machines mundane, like a notebook or a sketch pencil.  He was producing “selfies” long before anyone knew what that meant. 

Spending just one day with that famous cinematic diarist was enough to change my approach to filmmaking forever. I realize now that Mekas introduced me to non-narrated storytelling. And that approach has carried over, naturally, into my video work whether I’m dealing with fact or fiction subjects. Also, a quick gander at “reality tv” or “You Tube” proves the world has been following Mekas’ lead without really knowing it. Filmmakers are still trying out ways to get stories to tell themselves.

* * *

Recently I got an email from my friend Ben Howell Davis (http://benhowelldavis.com/) who was responding to an article I’d sent about how “selfies” are putting portrait photographers out of business. Ben said he’d recently quit teaching a photography class at an Art and Design school, although at first he was excited to take the job because the class required students to use film, 35mm cameras, chemicals and a darkroom like we had in college. He built a syllabus for the class as well as a website for students to find assignments, receive explicit instructions, and chat about their projects.

But he wrote “ … as the semester went on I was more and more disappointed that the students were most concerned about their grades, and not the photos. When we had teacher evaluations, a lot of them complained that I didn't give them explicit directions for assignments which of course was untrue. It was all very disillusioning and I decided that I would not venture into academia ever again … “Selfies won!”

Apparently Jonas Mekas knew that was going to happen all along.


The author in sleeve-face as Clint Eastwood’s son Scott (photo by Dena Zachariah)

FURTHERMORE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Mekas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Mekas_Visual_Arts_Center

http://jonasmekas.com/diary/

http://jonasmekas.com/jokes/

http://www.artnews.com/2016/07/08/douglas-gordon-film-about-jonas-mekas-to-premiere-at-locarno-festival/

http://jonasmekasfilms.com/books/index.php?book=I_had_nowhere_to_go

http://camstl.org/exhibitions/front-room/jonas-mekas-walden-diaries-notes-and-sketches-part-6-1969-/

https://archive.org/details/commencementaddr00meka/page/n5/mode/2up

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/movies/sleepless-nights-stories-by-jonas-mekas-review.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/jonas-mekas-refuses-to-fade.html?_r=0

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/03/a-raving-maniac-of-the-cinema/

http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about/history


“The Story of Janas Mekas” (studio interview)
(20:38)

Jonas on Paris Hilton and celebrity - Sunday June 17, 2007:

Full Magnum documentary (Martin Parr comment at 39:40): 

(58:38)

http://www.martinparr.com/

More about The New Bolex:  http://www.bolex.ch/NEW/?p=2


The Newer D16 Digital Cinema Bolex:

Lionel Rogosin, with Mekas, founded New American Cinema:

http://www.documentary.org/feature/american-neorealism-lionel-rogosin’s-docs-reconsidered

https://www.fandor.com/films/black_roots

https://www.fandor.com/films/on_the_bowery

https://www.fandor.com/films/come_back_africa

Also see Alan Berliner another autobiographical filmmaker:

http://www.alanberliner.com/about.php?pag_id=61

https://www.youtube.com/user/alanjayberliner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdUvpEZvoEw


JP Sears on the Psychology of the Selfie:


TAGS:DID NOT FIT:

Nouvelle Vague, edit-in-camera, Village Voice, Film Culture, Film-Makers' Cinematheque, avant-garde cinema, University of Florida, Devil's Millhopper, sinkhole, Tarzan, The Gainesville Sun, non-narrative film, Thomas Edison, Lumiere Brothers, photography class


“Selfies Won” - photo by Martin Parr (Magnum)

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Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Circus Run Away

Unknown French film master Pierre Étaix tickled funny bones long before his time.

The Long Lost Genius

of France’s Pierre Étaix

by Jamie Jobb

" ... one of those cinematic marvels that leaves me

shaking my head and wondering where it has been all my life."
- Richard Brody

A well-respected cinema authority who wrote “Everything is Cinema”, Richard Brody is referring to the long-lost films of Pierre Étaix.  Writing in The New Yorker, Brody's wonderment is not unique to those of us who also finally got to see those very same “cinematic marvels” of an original French auteur who left a circus career in the 1960s to create several would-be classic motion pictures.  

They would be classics but unfortunately Étaix (AY-tax) films were not widely distributed at the time and an international legal dispute -- only recently resolved -- kept his work out of circulation.  What a sorry shame!  Two years after his last feature in 1969, he quit filmmaking and ran away to join the circus again!

For half a century, the truncated filmmaking genius of Étaix was unknown even to avid cinema students outside France.  Certainly we didn’t hear about him here in the USA.  The great critic Roger Ebert -- who died in 2013, the year Étaix films appeared on screens worldwide -- never had a chance to review any of the Frenchman’s work.

Anyone familiar with French film will note the stylistic resemblance between Étaix and French comic master Jacques Tati.  Étaix and Tati met early in their performance careers while both were making a living around Europe as mime clowns.

Étaix served as assistant director for Tati's classic "Mon Oncle" (1958) before moving on to create his own pictures. Étaix, like Tati, was an active participant in all aspects of filmmaking -- not unexpected given the man's roustabout circus career where performers also functioned as crew.

In 1963, the year I graduated high school in Miami, both Étaix and Federico Fellini were exhibiting their films in Europe.  The Frenchman co-wrote, directed and acted in his first feature, “The Suitor”. Fellini, from Italy, was concocting his eighth-and-a-half feature film, unsurprisingly called "Fellini's 8 1/2".

Right after we finished high school, a friend who went on to manage the East Village’s legendary Cafe La MaMa dragged me to see "8 1/2" and that “foreign film” changed my life. Up to that point, I'd only seen Hollywood movies -- quite a lot of them. I worked as an usher at a large Lowe’s theater, that featured first-run Hollywood fare which often sold out the 1,500-seat house.  

Our “pay package” each weekend included four comp tickets to other movie houses around Miami, none of which featured foreign films.  My friend wanted to expand my cultural horizons and she certainly did.  I went on to run a college cinema group which offered foreign films and classics to student audiences.  At the time nobody knew about Étaix, and we wouldn’t know anything about him until we were retirees half a century later.

Certainly as a circus acrobat/clown and mime, Étaix understood Fellini's bombastic expansion of cinema's visual and sonic horizons, so the Frenchman paid homage to "8 1/2" as well as Fellini's "La Strada" (1954) in his feature "Yoyo" (1965).

Not coincidentally, Fellini also shared Étaix's high esteem for physical comedy. Fellini devotes an entire segment of “The Clowns” (1970) to Étaix and his wife Gustave Fratellini.

Fortunately all of Étaix funny film work is available now in one boxed set of DVDs (see sidebar below), including his shorts: “Insomnie” (1963). “Happy Anniversary” (1962) and “Rupture” (1961) as well as his four main features:

“The Suitor” (1963) - Étaix’s first feature as a solo director.  A virtual silent comedy … with sound effects  Live-at-home Pierre, the Suitor, puts down his star charts and his telescope to dedicate himself to growing up and finding himself a bride.  He seems to have seven chances like Buster Keaton, but inexperienced Pierre’s first fantasy woman turns out to scare the heck out of him, so his chances are reduced to three and he ends up with the Swedish au pair who works for his folks.

“Yoyo” (1965) - A nameless millionaire lives alone in his mansion with his army of servants who seem to work in pairs.  One day he invites a passing circus to park at his home for a few days.  There he again falls in love with the artiste and her small son (their child?) … The circus leaves and the Depression hits, destroying his wealth and forcing him onto the road.  He runs away from home to join the circus and rejoin his true home (which would mirror Étaix's real life circumstance six years later).

“As Long As You Have Your Health” (1966) - A four-part comedy of pain and suffering.  Four episodes full of visual puns, slapstick and silent comedy gags.  “Insomnia” (or “Stress”) where Étaix plays a double role, a sleepless man reading a horror book and a dream vampire spooking him from the book.  “In the Movies” (or “Frustration”) finds Étaix looking for a seat in a crowded movie theater.  “As Long As You Have Your Health” (or “Fatigue”) is Étaix trying to stay healthy before the final fateful chapter “Into the Woods No More” (or “Disaster”) which should say enough about that.

“The Great Love” (1969) - Étaix's first color film and his final feature, can be reduced to his line: “Life is a story we tell ourselves.”  Here Étaix has the narrative freedom to jump his narrative forward and back, to skip from dreams to imagination in broad daylight.  The main gag of the film is the great autobed sequence which was inspired by a friend's joke about living on a noisy avenue off the Arc de Triomphe and his dreaming of driving in bed.  Note this difficult sequence was done with pure mechanics and not any sort of CGI, which did not exist in 1969.

Half a century is a long time to wait for anything -- particularly movies which were made to be distributed as soon as possible, so money spent could be repaid.  It was a harsh business and without any worldwide distribution, it’s a total wonder that anyone could continue such an unrewarded output for a whole decade.  Étaix did it without a smile on his face!

Pierre Étaix as seen from the front in “Yoyo” (1965)

Saving Étaix

We would not be seeing any of these films were it not for the dedication collaboration among Technicolor Foundation for Cinema Heritage, Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema and Studio 37 which combined to restore the films of Pierre Étaix.

For more information regarding their efforts, see:

Étaix on DVD

Complete Étaix features and shorts on DVD:

For a great overview of Étaix:

New York Times article:

Jacques Tati's major works:

Étaix Remix
On You Tube:

My Recovery Channel on You Tube has the three intercut clips of Étaix films remixed with scenes from Fellini and Tati films.  

Fellini Yo Yo Étaix (15:24)
Route Tati Étaix (12:19)

Étaix and a Half (14:43)

For Further Review …
Fellini, Keaton and Étaix

Federico Fellini clearly understood the connection between the films of French clown genius Pierre Étaix and Buster Keaton. When Fellini interviewed Étaix for Fellini's "The Clowns", Fellini placed Keaton's photo in the background. And while Étaix obviously pays homage to Keaton's work, he also holds Fellini in high esteem as well.

The parallels among these three motion picture innovators were not lost on The New York Times when it featured Étaix upon the recent release of his lost masterpieces in 2013.  Dave Kehr of The Times writes of the French filmmaker in “The Dark Side of Innocence”:

His wordlessness connects him to the universe of silent comedy, and his somber mien specifically to Buster Keaton, with whom he shares a love of order, symmetry and social ritual. "Yoyo" begins in 1925, in the guise of a silent film (though one filled out by Mr. Étaix's typically careful and creative use of post-dubbed sound effects) centered on a character who could be Rollo Treadway from Keaton's 1924 masterpiece, "The Navigator": he is a nameless millionaire, living with an army of servants in an absurdly overscale chateau.

His staff attends to his needs with a choreographed precision that suggests years of rehearsal and refinement. It is an existence that would be perfect if it were not so perfectly lonely. In the moments by himself, the millionaire sneaks glimpses of the photograph he keeps hidden away in a drawer, his eyes suddenly moist at the memory of the lost love — an itinerant circus performer (Luce Klein) — it portrays.

"Yoyo" finds an antidote to order in the freedom and energy of the circus, a notion on loan from Fellini (complete with a reference to "La Strada") that is itself undercut when the millionaire's son grows up to be a famous clown (again Mr. Étaix) trapped, much as his father was, by his success.


Two Other Silent Comics
Worthy of a Close Look

Max Linder documentary:
and

Charley Bowers:
and


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Friday, September 18, 2015

Cindy Lou Johnson


Seep Sok (Nady Meas) needs a new home in Providence R.I.
“Trusting Beatrice”

Digs Funny, Like a Crab

by Jamie Jobb

Screenwriters try to “make it happen” -- set up their story and all the promise of its premise -- in the first ten pages of the script, which translates into the first ten minutes of the film.  Playwrights, on the other hand, are told to make their magic happen in the first fifteen minutes of their play ... thus indicating a stage audience’s greater patience, induced no doubt by greater monetary stakes in a night out at the theater vs. a night out at the movies.

Either artform, the writer has a short time to get the audience hooked.  

In “Trusting Beatrice”, an outstandingly obscure independent film by playwright Cindy Lou Johnson, this is what happens in the first ten minutes:

A young, impressionistic French woman, Beatrice de Lucio (Irene Jacob), pulls a wagon with her five-year-old Cambodian companion, Seep Sok (Nady Meas).  They are searching Providence, Rhode Island for a room to rent.  Finally they find one in a very large house.

Across town, a small-time landscaper with big-time ambitions, Claude Dewey (Mark Evan Jacobs) digs a large hole for a small tree -- while his Boss (Leonardo Cimino) observes ...

Boss:  “You dig funny.  Sideways, like a crab.”

Back at the office, Claude learns his live-in girlfriend, Emily (Katherine Hiler) has started a new shift at the photo lab where she works, meaning she’s now home in the daytime while he’s working.  Meanwhile his boss, “The most paranoid man on the planet”, gives Claude $5,000 cash to deposit.

On the way to the bank, Claude stops by his house only to find Emily in bed with a stranger.  Dazed and confused, Claude leaves, forgetting to deposit the $5,000.  He later returns home to confront Emily, who “confesses” ...

Emily:  “It’s not my fault, Claude.  It’s you; you’re not happy.  What am I supposed to do, living with an unhappy man?”

She demonstrated by pointing out Claude’s unsmiling face on several photos of them together.  Emily leaves and Claude goes to the kitchen sink to burn his “unhappy” pictures.  

Meanwhile, a Wilderness Girl (Kerin Ann McDermott) is at the door selling cookies.  Distracted and angry, Claude answers the door.  He yells at the girl, then begins to cry.  Claude realizes his callous mistake, and apologizes to the girl.

Claude:  “Have you ever had a very bad day?  I just had a very bad day; it had nothing to do with you.”

However, the Wilderness Girl notices something amiss in the kitchen.

Wilderness Girl:  “Mister … Fire!”

His kitchen is aflame.  Quickly he grabs the girl and runs outside.  As Claude watches his home go up in smoke, he is arrested for “grand larceny” -- for failing to deposit the $5,000 his boss gave him.  After being bailed out by his family, Claude has to put up with his Mother (Charlotte Moore) ranting in the car.

Mother: “Larceny!?!  We have never had a larcenist in our home.  Never!  And if that’s not enough, poor Emily called me in tears.  Tears!  What in God’s name did you do to that poor girl?  She said you’re not happy, she said she had to leave you because you’re not happy.  Is that why you embezzled and larcened, because she left you?  You know she never would have left if you would just be happy.  That’s all you had to do is … just be happy.”

In court, Claude’s boss drops larceny charges and Claude is released from jail, only to be immediately fired because, as his boss reiterates another more civil complaint …

Boss: “You know you can’t even dig right. There is only one correct way to dig and you don’t dig that way … You dig your own way, which is the wrong way (to the Judge) He digs completely the wrong way.  Sideways, like a crab!”

After leaving court, Claude is again arrested -- this time for arson.  Again his Mother is ranting as she drives him home from jail.

Mother: “You burned your house down!?!  I’ve never heard of anyone burning his own house down!  Is this because Emily left you?  You know she’s such a nice girl, and so understanding.  I’m sure that if you just called her and said that you’re sorry and that from now on you’ll be happy … Why can’t you be happy?  Look at your father and I, we haven’t been happy in years … and we’re happy!”

Dejected, out of work, homeless, unhappy -- Claude meets Beatrice and Seep in the ashes of the house … and thus beings their modern screwball romance.  

Gems like “Trusting Beatrice” (also known as “Claude”) are made with love and care by independent filmmakers.  Cindy Lou Johnson, the playwright who directed and wrote this film, has a breezy writing style that is rooted in screwball comedy classics and continues that tradition set in motion by writer-directors Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder.

Johnson (“The Years” “Brilliant Traces”) writes poignantly funny plays about women on the verge of marriage, one way or the other, although Beatrice isn’t about to get married in this film.  An NEA playwriting fellow, Johnson also has tv writing credits for a series on the California Gold Rush and HBO’s “Vietnam Stories”.  

Now that we know how “Trusting Beatrice” starts, let’s look at the whole picture below in a short review.  Note that the top one-third of this review involves the first ten minutes, which shows how much important exposition happens during that time.  

* * *

“Trusting Beatrice”
The Short Review

“Trusting Beatrice” aka “Claude” (1992) -Written and directed by Cindy Lou Johnson. "Why can’t you be happy?  Look at your father and I, we haven’t been happy in years ... and we're happy!" Providence, Rhode Island landscaper Claude Dewey (Mark Evan Jacobs) has good reason to be glum. He works for the “most paranoid man on the planet" who thinks Claude digs "funny, like a crab".

Certainly Claude is "having a very bad day": He discovers girlfriend in bed with another man, so she suddenly leaves him.  When he ignites their snapshots in kitchen sink, he also burns down their apartment house.  Then he's arrested for grand larceny, loses his job, only to get arrested again for arson. And after all that, his mother (Charlotte Moore) still laments: "Now you've brought home a topless French woman and a foreign child!"

The woman, Beatrice De Lucio (Irene Jacob), may mangle her English but she knows she's "an illegal stranger" and "a refugee from justice" who's convinced she always says and does "the wrong thing". Also, Beatrice doesn't "feel like I’m in my body", believes she's "not crying for the rest of my life" and knows "The minute I tried to kill him, he decides he wants to live!"

Furthermore, she's lost her green card while homeless and caring for mute five-year-old Seep Sok (Nady Meas) who hasn't spoken since her family died in Cambodia's "killing fields".

“You can always marry her. However, considering this knife thing, I'd be awful careful not to irritate her." In first turn behind camera, playwright Cindy Lou Johnson peppers her delightful script with unanswerable questions: "Where are you now in relationship to your body?" and "How do you shoot your toe if you're serious about suicide?"

"Someone who thinks I'm ‘translucent’ gets advice from an 'avocado' and is 'on the sheep' is going to make a very strange simultaneous translator." (USA)

* * *

Finding “Trusting Beatrice” will be a chore for most everyone.  We could find no clips from it on line, nor could we find any DVD sources for this film, now 25 years old.  It is available in VHS format on Amazon:
              
Links:





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