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Also this issue: Punch Drunk The Langue Goodbye De-mock-cracy |
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August 22-28, 2002
screen picks
Keeping a Secret Secret Cinema is looking for a new home. Jay Schwartz currently uses an air-conditioned 18-foot by 20-foot warehouse to house SC's extensive collection of rare 16 mm prints, but his landlord recently served him with an eviction notice for the space. Schwartz is looking for a similar or larger space with high ceilings, climate control and 24-hour street loading access, and for a reasonable price. (Trust us, he's not getting rich off this thing.) Film prints need proper storage to last through the ages, and if you're familiar with Secret Cinema's varied catalog, there's no doubt the collection is sizeable. If you can help out this unique exhibitor, drop him a line at jschwart@voicenet.com.
American Standoff (Wed., Aug. 28, 6 p.m., Asian Arts Initiative, 1315 Cherry St., suggested donation $5-10) Produced by Barbara Kopple and directed by Kristi Jacobson, American Standoff fits all too comfortably alongside Kopple's Harlan County, U.S.A. and American Dream in a trilogy about what might be called the death of the American labor movement. That's too strong a phrase, of course, and part of the weakness of Standoff is that it sinks into pessimism without adequately conveying the complexity of the challenges, both internal and external, that face the film's striking Teamsters. There are plenty of reasons to bemoan the state of organized labor in these here United States, but bemoaning isn't enough.
Standoff is preoccupied, almost obsessed, with comparing the Teamsters' current president, James Hoffa Jr., and his father, often inserting footage of the elder (and presumably late) Hoffa marshalling the rank and file or cockily brushing off a Senate subcommittee. There are few who would argue that Hoffa Jr. is the man his father was, but for all the fond remembrances of the days when labor was king, there's the specter of strikers enforcing picket lines with baseball bats and surreptitiously cutting brake lines, the shadowy ties to organized crime, the image that haunts the Teamsters to this day. The perception, and reality, of corrupt unions is a large part of what's weakened public support for labor, along with the lamentable shortsightedness that values cheap goods over a society where people can, literally and figuratively, look their employers in the eye.
In large part, Standoff is about the struggle to redefine, and re-energize, the Teamster. Hoffa ran for election -- against the now-disgraced Ron Carey, at a convention held in Philadelphia in 1996 -- on a platform that included a high-priority pledge to organize Overnite, the nation's sixth-largest trucking company. The promise clearly harks back to the Teamsters' glory days, when interstate commerce was their bread and butter. But a lot has changed since then, including a progression of laws designed to protect corporations and emasculate unions. The National Labor Relations Board, which ostensibly adjudicates violations of federal labor law, is a lumbering beast with little real power; one Overnite striker calls it "a watchdog with no teeth."
Forced to organize Overnite terminal by terminal, rather than call for a company-wide vote, the Teamsters have managed to certify only 37 of 166 terminals before the strike begins, and that over a five-year period. Standoff never gets around to laying out the particular grievances behind the strike, although cutbacks in the wake of Overnite's acquisition by Union Pacific play a major part. It's clear that at least some of the strikers are committed as much to the ideals of trade unionism as to this particular action, just as it's clear that the scabs who replace them can't see any further than their next paycheck. Though today's Teamsters ostensibly refrain from violence -- one Overnite employee eventually testifies that he was paid by the company to sabotage their own trucks to cast a bad light on the union -- the verbal confrontations between strikers and scabs are as hard to watch as any bloodshed. "Don't you have any principles?" asks one incredulous striker. The response comes quickly, cavalierly: "In God We Trust."
As the projected three-week strike drags on into months and months, the rank-and-file Teamsters hold on by their fingernails, but the union's strategy hardly seems to change, apart from an increased focus on "ambulatory picketing," which involves following drivers to their destinations and demonstrating against their clients. But though some drivers talk about being third-generation Overnite employees, there's little sense that the union's reach extends outside the meeting hall, which in many cases houses only a few dozen bodies. (Compare the massed coal miners of Harlan County.) The softening of widespread support for labor, the fact that a staggering number of workers either don't know or misunderstand what unions are supposed to do, is never addressed in American Standoff, though it certainly points to such critical issues. Jacobson and Kopple will attend the screening, and the resulting discussion should encompass many of the topics that the film only outlines.
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Street Movies (Fri., Aug. 23, 8:30 p.m., Hancock St. John's Methodist Church, 1217 N. Hancock St.; Sat., Aug. 24, 8:30 p.m., Sedgwick Cultural Center, 7137 Germantown Ave.) Two homegrown programs within the city limits this week. "A Conversation Between the Generations," on Friday, features Nadine Patterson's LoqueeshaAshleyFranklin-JoséBrown, which marries visuals to Ursula Rucker's words. Saturday's "Genius Among Us" features Wynnewood animator Paul Fierlinger's charming Still Life with Animated Dogs as part of a program highlighting locally based media artists.
The Gleaners and I ($29.99 DVD) It's always interesting to encounter a so-called art film that's escaped the reservation and wormed its way into mainstream culture. In the U.S., Agnès Varda's lyrical hybrid of documentary and personal essay was a well-reviewed curiosity, but in her home country of France, the film was a sensation, sparking a national debate about homelessness and the political implications of trash-picking. That much is attested to by The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, an hourlong follow-up appended to Zeitgeist's DVD. Varda tracks down some of the subjects from the first film, but also muses on the intensity of its reception -- the film generated more mail than any in her 30-plus-year career. Two Years Later has a more straightforward, less playful tone than the original Gleaners, but like the first, it's subtly but thoroughly infused with a wistful sense of mortality. In musing on the way her films, particularly this one, are received, Varda seems to be considering what will be left after she is gone. While the first film climaxed with the realization that reality-based filmmakers, like gleaners, subsist on the discards of others, Two Years Later seems to point at the day when Varda, and her films, return to the scrap heap -- which, in Varda's eyes, just makes them fuel for the next person to come along.
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