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AMPAS in Africa, Part Two: Nairobi

September 12, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Nairobi skyline at dawn.

What may be the only 35mm motion picture camera in Nairobi is, at dawn this past July 15, mounted  on a tripod on the roof of a downtown office building. Eight young cinematographers from several African countries are waiting to operate their first scene ever with a  film camera: a shot of the magic hour Nairobi skyline, an establishing shot for a feature length motion picture titled Nairobi Half-Life. The director, “Tosh” Gitonga, must be overwhelmed by his eager African camera crew and its two Anglo mentors, an outsized group if ever there were one—for a simple second unit setup. Jacub Bejnarowicz, a young Polish cinematographer working in Berlin, and I have spent much of the week in intensive workshops with seven young men and one young woman from half a dozen African countries. Like virtually all movie production in Nairobi, we have been using only digital video cameras. There is no film lab in Kenya, and no major film camera rental facilitity. Jacub had brought an Arriflex 235 and six 400′ rolls of Kodak film with him from Berlin, the exposed film to be developed back in Germany.

After the magic hour shot is made, the camera crew poses for a crew photo on the rooftop.

Nairobi workshop cinematographers, Lily Wanjira holding the slate.

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AMPAS in Africa, Part One—Kakuma

September 5, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Early on the morning of July 13, a United Nations World Food Program turbojet takes off from Nairobi  airport. The twice a week flight ferries supplies and passengers to the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya. A group of eight filmmakers from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ International Outreach program is on board, headed by Phil Alden Robinson and Academy Director of Exhibitions and Special Events, Ellen Harrington. Actress Alfre Woodard is in the group, as are Carol and me. We are already midway through the first week of  film workshops and seminars in Nairobi sponsored by “Ginger Ink” and Tom Tykwer’s “One Fine Day.” Today, we are visiting this remote camp of more than 70,000 refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia, sited on an arid plain near the Sudan/Ethiopia border. We have come at the invitation of Liz Manne, executive director of FilmAid, an NGO that, among many programs, provides outdoor mobile screenings to East African refugee camp residents in Kenya and other communities in need around the world.

After landing on the unpaved runway, a jeep drive through the township of Kakuma leads to the entrance of the refugee camp, the gates of the UN compound and the offices of FilmAid.

Kakuma township, outside the camp perimeter.

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In Search of a Cinema Canon

August 22, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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New York City opening of “Citizen Kane.”

The September/October 2006 issue of Film Comment magazine featured what it calls its longest ever article: an exploration of a proposed “cinema canon” of the 60 greatest feature films as proposed by director/writer Paul Schrader. Even I, who have known and worked with Paul on five of his films since 1980, was surprised, and in complete accord, with his choice of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game. He concludes his essay with this thought,”For me the artist without whom there could not be a film canon is Jean Renoir, and the film without which a canon is inconceivable is The Rules of the Game.”

Schrader begins the article with an interesting anecdote:

In March 2003, I was having dinner in London with Faber and Faber’s editor of film books, Walter Donohue, and several others when the conversation turned to the current state of film criticism and lack of knowledge of film history in general. I remarked on a former assistant who, when told to look up Montgomery Clift, returned some minutes later asking, “Where is that?” I replied that I thought it was in the Hollywood Hills, and he returned to his search engine.

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Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part Three

August 15, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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“The best films about Los Angeles are, at least partly, about modes of transportation. Getting from place to place isn’t a given. Cars break down; they get flat tires; they get towed.” Thom Andersen’s narration of the trials of Chinatown’s Jake Gittes, a man without wheels after his car crashes head-on into a tree while being shot at by San Fernando Valley farmers, demonstrates how diminished even a cynical detective can become when deprived of a vital Los Angeles badge of identity: “ The loss of a car is a form of symbolic castration, in the movies and in life.” Gittes’ dependency on other drivers is more disturbing to him through the rest of the film than his sliced nostril that slowly heals from scene to scene.

Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, "Chinatown."

In Sunset Blvd. Joe Gillis (sounds a bit like Jake Gittis) is jumpstarted into the nightmare delusions of silent film queen Norma Desmond when his car, about to be re-possessed by pursuing goons, blows a tire on Sunset Blvd. and he screeches into her driveway.

Michael Douglas abandons his car in Falling Down when he faces traffic gridlock and begins an ever more violent odyssey across an urban Los Angeles wasteland. In many of these films, it is our car that keeps us insulated from the chaos seeping out of the mean sidewalks. Continue reading ‘Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part Three’

Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself, Part Two

August 8, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Edendale (now Echo Park) circa 1920—where the studios began.

America’s greatest cities often have monikers: “The Big Apple,” “Mile High City,” “Baghdad by the Bay,” “Big D,” “The Windy City,” “Gateway to the West,” “The Big Easy.” Most of these are booster-ish. And what about Los Angeles? “LaLa Land,” “Lotus Land,” “Tinseltown,”(allowing for the city’s conflation with its dominant industry). Only one such name for Los Angeles, which casts a nod toward its Hispanic origins, “The City of the Angels,” seems exempt from condescension; but in the movies, the pervasive attitude toward Los Angeles is one of  sour self-loathing.

Perhaps this dark vision of Los Angeles reflects the simple fact that it’s at the end of the highway west, Route 66’s dead end of dreams at Ocean Avenue, overlooking the beach below its cliffs, a psychic terminus kept vibrant by moving toward the retreating rainbow of illusion that finally sinks into the horizon of the Pacific: the palisades of Santa Monica as the cliffs of dashed dreams. What better revenge for filmmakers than to destroy, at least on celluloid, the city that causes such despair? Continue reading ‘Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself, Part Two’

Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part One

August 1, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Thom Andersen

Near the end of Thom Andersen’s three-hour meditation on the cinematic identity of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Plays Itself, we are thrust into the  city aswarm with the real life problems that most working class Americans confront daily. Billy Woodberry’s low-budget, documentary style, black and white drama, Bless Their Little Hearts, along with Charles Burnett’s, Killer of Sheep, affords us a glimpse into the African-American, blue-collar lives that are an antipode to what we have seen in the rest of the film—Andersen’s kaleidoscopic examination of Los Angeles as a journey through our shared cultural and cinematic fantasies on the streets, in the homes, and at the public spaces of a city whose identity is never fixed, but is an always unreeling drama.

In the final scene of Bless Their Little Hearts, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) is driven in his battered pickup truck past the closed Goodyear Tire factory where his fellow South Central workers had once been employed. Andersen’s narration over Woodberry’s final images intones,

Built in 1919 and closed in 1980, the Goodyear factory on south Central Avenue was the first and largest of the four major tire-manufacturing plants once located in the Los Angeles area. Once upon a time, visitors could take a guided tour and see how tires were made, just as today they can take a studio tour and see how movies are made. Continue reading ‘Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part One’

Four-Minute Fame: The Warhol Screen Tests, Part Two

July 25, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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The “Screen Tests” made by Andy Warhol on his 16mm Bolex camera are currently being archived and restored by the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh; a handful of them have been the subject of a recently closed exhibition at MoMA in NYC. A darkened, spacious fifth floor gallery featured more than a dozen large-screen, flat panel displays of the four-minute films.

MoMA Screen Tests exhibition.

The open atrium overlooking the entry lobby several floors below echoes that hermetic, 60s Silver Factory experience in our own contemporary obsession with self-documentation: a high speed digital camera was set up to record a screen test for anyone who wanted the experience of having your face projected onto the museum’s wall, as well as a digital record of it dangling somewhere on MoMA’s website—rather than on almost obsolete 16mm B&W single-perf. reversal film. Continue reading ‘Four-Minute Fame: The Warhol Screen Tests, Part Two’

Four-Minute Fame: The Warhol Screen Tests, Part One

July 18, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Screen Test #ST 349, Andy Warhol, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The catalog essay from a Stockholm museum exhibition in 1968 featured this slogan attributed to Andy Warhol; “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” The single word “world” was soon dropped; the quote then became an aphoristic pop mantra. A decade later, Warhol was so bored hearing it that he wryly morphed it to, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.” Andy needn’t worry about his own fame. His face is one of the most recognized of the 20th century, equal to that of his most iconic subjects: Mao, Marilyn, Liz. The supreme irony is that his own screen test (the photo above) exists in only three 16mm film frames. According to archivists, the “original [is] not found in Collection.”

Warhol’s wry re-phrasing seems even more prophetic in today’s cyber-world of viral, rock music, YouTube postings, cell phone videos of high school hazings, security camera convenience store stabbings, and reality TV stars (often washed-up celebrities trying to extend their brief spotlight time), sliming the screen and each other. The relentless press for narcissistic media fame has even made an oft-bankrupted New York real estate mogul into a reality TV star and thence into a much-discussed and dissed, brief presidential candidate. Somehow, it is hard to imagine this is what the shy Mr. Warhol had in mind when he prophesized, “In the future, everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.” If only… Unfortunately, some of the “stars” of bottom feeding, reality TV shows just won’t go away. And those that fade out are replaced as quickly as you can change a burned out light bulb.

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Our Men in Havana: Walker Evans and Alexey Titarenko

July 4, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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Seventy years separate the American photographer Walker Evans’ images of Cuba from those of the Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko. When Evans went to Havana in 1933 it was on assignment by publisher J.B. Lippincott to provide illustrations for Carleton Beals’ political exposé of the corrupt Machado regime, The Crime of Cuba. Beals was a highly regarded essayist who had written for many left-leaning magazines such as The Nation, The New Republic, and Harper’s. During a more than fifty-year writing career he published more than forty books.

When Alexey Titarenko in 2003 made the first of his two trips to Havana, it was a personal photographic journey into the ethos of a city that, like his native St. Petersburg, bore the scars of its revolution in the hearts and minds of its people, but also in the very foundations of its once beautiful architecture. Continue reading ‘Our Men in Havana: Walker Evans and Alexey Titarenko’

David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy at LACMA

June 27, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
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David Smith with Uppman Cigar, photo by Dan Budnick.

The scudding clouds across the Los Angeles Basin on Sunday morning of Memorial Day weekend seemed to bode rain. The walkways and lawns around the County Museum of Art were damp when I arrived to see the David Smith sculpture exhibition “Cubes and Anarchy” at the new Resnick Pavilion. Hundreds of people were already in queues. They were there not to see the work of America’s greatest sculptor, but were spilling into adjacent galleries to delve into Tim Burton’s elaborate fantasies. Skirting the line, I aimed straight for the doors to the main gallery toward several Smith stainless steel Cubis, implacable attendants facing the throng headed toward the Burton cavalcade.

Two Cubis at LACMA.

Those colorfully costumed, tattooed Burton pilgrims snaked left into the dark bowels of the inner galleries as the Smith Cubis stood mute, silver sentinels under the skylights.

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