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Also this issue: Welcome to the World The Long and Short of It |
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April 3- 9, 2003
cover story
 The Weather Underground |
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How the Philadelphia Film Festival's directors mix politics and art.
By 1915, when Woodrow Wilson called The Birth of a Nation "like writing history with lightning," politics and cinema had already become inextricably intertwined. But as last week’s Oscar ceremony demonstrated, the marriage is not always happy or trouble-free. Ironically, but not surprisingly, Hollywood’s willingness to address the world we live in has lessened even as its problems have become more critical: From the CGI-enhanced effacing of the World Trade towers to the anxious multiple retitlings of what ended up as Tears of the Sun (a title that can only offend aesthetes), the studios and their faux-indie boutiques have stuck their heads in the sand, dispensing opium to the masses. The one thing this year’s Oscar nominees -- from Chicago to The Pianist, The Two Towers to Far From Heaven, Gangs of New York and even two-thirds of The Hours -- have in common is that they locate evil in the past, a problem that, if not implicitly solved, is at least not taking place now. (Consider that the only contemporary movie with more than two nominations was the postmodern hand-job Adaptation.)
To be fair, confronting our unprecedented status quo is a task with which artists in every medium continue to struggle. But one of the things movies have always been best at is giving inchoate, unspeakable emotions form, and forging emotional connections between present and past. Films that take on such weighty tasks often get lost in the box-office shuffle, but at film festivals, they have a chance to rise above the din, and to meet up with audiences who come in looking to think, not just to kill a couple of hours. This year's Philadelphia Film Festival is rich in movies that address the world and how we perceive it.
Just about every film in the "Cinema of the Muslim Worlds" section (but particularly Bahman Ghobadi's Marooned in Iraq) is required viewing, a critical correlative to the televised images of Arabs either firing guns or fleeing from them.
 West Bank Brooklyn |
Song of the Stork revisits the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese point of view, while the American Civil Brand and the Iranian Women's Prison attack the conditions of women's prisons from two very different viewpoints.
The festival's avant-garde "Beyond the Frame" features an entire program of short films devoted to restructuring the way we see the world, like Travis Wilkerson's Our National Archive, V. I, which builds the military's own footage into an indictment of the cold-bloodedness of modern killing.
Making movies is never easy, but between nervous investors and touchy subject matter, making political movies -- and, more importantly, making good ones -- is even harder. We pulled four English-speaking directors from this year's PFF crew, and talked to them about the difficulties and satisfactions of mixing politics and art.
When Haskell Wexler, who will receive the festival's Artistic Achievement Award on April 7 and be interviewed on stage on the 8th, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain his FBI file, he found it started not in the '50s, when he was blacklisted and helped Herbert Biberman find a lab that would develop film for his anticapitalist Salt of the Earth, not even in the '40s, when he made promotional films for Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace and what would become the roots of the Southern civil rights movement. The file started in the mid-'30s, when Wexler was in eighth grade.
"There was a committee called the Dies committee," Wexler recalls, a precursor to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. "We eighth-graders had a little school newspaper, and we had articles about being opposed to the Dies committee. The principal got a call from a parent who was connected to a congressman -- one of those things. [The FBI] wrote down that my car was seen outside a meeting of the Abraham Lincoln brigade, for example. They had my whole biography. The government spent millions of dollars on me."
Wexler, 81, is an Oscar-winning cinematographer known for his work on such films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, America, America and other immaculately shot films of Hollywood's last golden age. Apart from Medium Cool (1969), which the festival will show immediately after presenting Wexler with the award, his work as a director is unfortunately obscure: His only other feature, the pro-Sandinista Latino (1985), is only available as an out-of-print laserdisc, and his many documentaries -- titles like Bus Rider's Union, Brazil: A Report on Torture and Underground (co-directed with legendary radical filmmaker Emile de Antonio) -- are rarely screened. But Wexler's commitment is evident even in the Hollywood projects he's chosen to shoot: the anti-Vietnam War Coming Home, the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory, the groundbreaking In the Heat of the Night, not to mention his long-standing association with the like-minded John Sayles, for whom he's shot three features: Matewan, The Secret of Roan Inish and Limbo. But even in a movie like American Graffiti or Days of Heaven, Wexler's dedication to visual realism adds a layer of authenticity sorely lacking from glossy Hollywood product.
Medium Cool is still, Wexler says, the movie that "most expresses my person," and with its portrait of a cynical news cameraman (Robert Forster) caught up in the tumult of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, it's not hard to see why. (Wexler also put the most of himself into it: In addition to directing, he wrote, produced and operated camera.) Forster's cynical shooter, who takes film of an accident victim before calling for help, is like a nightmare reversal of Wexler's own involvement, but the conscience he develops, too late, is clearly close to Wexler's own, as is the issue of an artist's responsibility for the images he's captured. "I'd been confronted with that many times," Wexler says. "I was in Guatemala when the CIA had a coup; they had a democratically elected government which was sending students out into the countryside to help make people literate, movements for the rights of women, they'd broken this dictatorship that was running Guatemala, and the U.S. government had a coup and kicked them out. I was there filming Indians, and I was physically taken out of Guatemala by a CIA guy, had my film taken away. So I had a perfect example of knowing, the hard way, that my camera and what I was filming could shake people up." (Sometimes, it shook Wexler up as well: While filming the convention riots in 1968, Wexler was tear-gassed, in a scene that remains in the movie, along with the post-dubbed line, "Look out, Haskell! It's real!")
Though the film remains a landmark of Godardian political cinema, Paramount released it only grudgingly at the time, slapped with what Wexler's always maintained was a "political X" rating. (The film contains significant nudity, as well as profanities associated with the convention protesters' slogans.) Then as now, the ratings board was composed of private citizens, but the studios' influence has always been strong: A year and a half after the film's release, Wexler says, he was approached by a doctor who'd been in on the ratings process for Medium Cool, and he apologized. "Lookit, Paramount wanted the X," he told Wexler.
"They were obliged to put it out because of my contract," Wexler says, "but they put it out with an X, and with practically no publicity. And, of course, [it was] never to make money. I was supposed to get 50 percent of whatever came in after $600,000, and there's never been a penny of money back."
Still, Wexler says he feels "invincible" behind the camera, whether walking into the Chicago riots or a Vietnamese war zone. Many photographers report the sensation of feeling protected by the eyepiece, insulated from their surroundings, but for Wexler, it's something more. "It makes me feel more powerful, knowing that when I have a camera in my hand, and I'm recording something that none of the networks are going to show, that piece of history is going to be alive."
History plays a pivotal role for Sam Green, whose documentary, The Weather Underground (co-directed by Bill Siegel), screens April 11 and 13. Green, who has a graduate degree in journalism from UC Berkeley, makes his feature documentary debut with an engrossing look back at the Weathermen, the violent splinter group of the anti-Vietnam War Students for a Democratic Society. If the film doesn't lionize its subjects -- most of whom express regret for their actions, and some of whom never seem to have recovered -- it's ambivalent about criticizing them too much. A closing montage melds a smiling Ronald Reagan, Hanoi Jane's workout video and footage of unrepentant stock swindler Ivan Boesky into a damning portrait of '80s complacency, and seems to pose the question: Is wrong-headed activism worse than none at all?
"You do a documentary about the '60s as a younger person, and you're going out on a limb," Green says. "But I was concerned that a lot of radical or alternative history was being lost over time, especially to younger people." Green and Siegel began working on the film in 1998, when there "was not much going on politically," but the WTO protests in Seattle and the Sept. 11 attacks have reopened the debate on the line between violent protest and outright terrorism -- which, though subverting the film's original purpose, only makes it more timely. "When we started the film, politics for younger people was totally uncool. It's really gratifying that the context is totally different now," Green says.
The Weathermen, who took their name from a line in Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," broke with SDS in 1969, taking some of their most charismatic leaders with them. But their tactics -- bombing all manner of government and corporate complexes, though deliberately avoiding any loss of life -- split the movement, and forced them to disappear underground. In 1975 Wexler, along with Emile de Antonio and Mary Lampson, tracked them down and shot Underground, a few seconds of which appear in Green's film. Though they wouldn't let Wexler show their faces at the time, the FBI broke so many laws attempting to track them down that when the Weather Underground did come out of hiding, most were able to get off with no jail time, and their faces are fully visible in Green's film. (A few served time for violent crimes committed after the Weather Underground's demise.)
For his part, Wexler says he has "always been vocally opposed to the Weather Underground, and the violence. I still believe that the weapon that we have as citizens is a nonviolent weapon, and all violence does is alienate us from people we want to influence." But Green, while hardly endorsing their tactics, strives to show the roots of their actions, not least with an opening montage that lays bare the violent horrors being committed in Southeast Asia at the time. "[The Weathermen's] rep was that they were totally crazy," Green says. "They were nuts, they were terrorists, linked with the Manson family. But if you put them in their context, they seem a lot less crazy. If you really try to evoke what inspired them, it makes a lot more sense. Obviously, it never would have happened without the Vietnam War."
But just as the Weather Underground's actions have to be understood in context, so Green's film has to cope with its own context. Despite the fact that all the interviews in the film were done before Sept. 11, 2001 (a reference to the "World Trade Center bombing" refers to the 1995 attempt), the Weather Underground's actions look a lot less harmless in its wake -- something Weatherman Bill Ayers found out when his memoir, Fugitive Days, was released on Sept. 10, 2001. "He was kind of flip [in the book] about bombing the Pentagon, and he got creamed," Green says. Still, he tried to stick to the vision he'd had from the beginning. "I always felt we didn't want events to affect the film too directly. If we had put a bunch of Seattle footage in, it would be stupid now. Even with Sept. 11, I didn't want to reference it too directly. But, of course, it did -- it made it clear that a person has to be way more serious and conscious about this subject now."
Above all, Green's goal was to let his mixed emotions show, to prevent the film from resting on easy answers. "Showing a situation that's complicated and messy, but at the same time people did their best to try and stand for something -- that's important," he says. "I get bored with docs that are heavy-handed and one-sided. People have sharp bullshit detectors. You can't give young people this heroic sense of, ŒEverything was great -- do this and you'll change the world.' [But r]ather than being cynical, people can at least try and stand for things."
Ghazi Albuliwi didn't intend to make a political film. A 24-year-old aspiring stand-up comedian who'd written sketches for Saturday Night Live (although none made it to air), he was looking to make a name for himself by writing and directing his own project, and turned to the subject he knew best: himself. Jordanian by birth, Albuliwi grew up in an Arab neighborhood in Brooklyn, which seemed to lay the perfect grounds for a comic story of cultural confusion. "I always knew my life was a film waiting to happen," he says.
Happen it did: West Bank Brooklyn, which screens April 5 and 13, is an amiable comedy about a group of young Palestinian men growing up in Borough Park, struggling to be true to two cultures at once. One, a lawyer, hides his Italian girlfriend from his traditionalist father, who still wants to set up an arranged marriage for his son. One takes a job as a home-care aide for an elderly Jewish man, but avoids telling his anti-Semitic friends. And Saddam, a comic foil played by Albuliwi himself, changes his name to Tito and starts pretending he's Puerto Rican, the better to fit in.
Not exactly confrontational stuff. But in the wake of Sept. 11, any movie with Arab characters automatically takes on some political charge. Albuliwi, who finished shooting in late August 2001, says the change in circumstances has definitely affected the way people react to his film. "It's become a different film because of the political climate, which I never intended to happen. I thought having a character named Saddam would be kind of an underlying joke. I never imagined we'd have another Gulf War."
 The War Effort |
Despite the fact the film is a comedy, Albuliwi was very conscious of instilling it with the reality of his life. "A lot of the comedic moments in the film are really dramatic moments -- it's not ha-ha for the sake of ha-ha," he says. "It's very easy to build a scene around a joke; I wanted to build the joke around the scene."
Still, he continues to be surprised by how relevant the film has become, and how audiences have reacted. "It's now this thing that sheds light on this group of people we're very much involved with," he says. "I look at it as an accident that has turned into something that people don't look at as an accident."
By contrast, Bob Cesca's The War Effort, screening April 15, takes dead aim at the post-Sept. 11 Zeitgeist. The Reading-set mock-documentary follows a handful of Pennsylvanians gearing up for a radio contest to name "America's most patriotic American." Some festoon their houses, cars and persons with more flags than there are at the United Nations; one records possibly the worst version of "God Bless America" ever committed to tape. And they all love the good old U.S. of A.
The inspiration for The War Effort isn't hard to spot. "I've always been into politics, and how Americans react to politics," Cesca says from the Reading offices of Camp Chaos, where he normally produces animated shorts for the Web (including the widely e-mailed "Napster Bad"). The upsurge in patriotism, superficial and otherwise, in late 2001 "wasn't unique" to that time, Cesca says, "but it was taken to a level where everybody was Clark Griswold, everyone was trying to outdo the next person. I thought it would be great to do an ensemble piece satirizing the era, creating a template that could apply to any period of time like that. You could apply it to the Gulf War, or certainly to this current war we're in."
Cesca, who followed a degree in political science with a post-college stint in radio, started, like Ghazi Albuliwi, with what he knew: the prank-fueled world of radio morning shows. His time in the off-the-cuff environment of radio also fueled a love of improvisation, which led him to follow the template laid down by a movie like Best in Show, building a story up from improvised comedy. On the ultra-low-budget production, Cesca operated the mini-DV camera himself; at one point, he says, you can see the camera bump when he clapped his hand to his nose to keep from guffawing and ruining the take. As Cesca's not the first to discover, the mock-doc format also helped keep costs down, which prevented him from having to pitch a movie to investors with the line, "We want to make fun of patriotism!" (Funding, under $10,000, came from a Camp Chaos "rainy-day" fund.)
The War Effort is rough around the edges, and some satirical sharpness is sacrificed to the all-improv method. But despite the fact that he rushed the movie through production to try and capture the immediate post-Sept. 11 moment, Cesca says he thinks the film plays "even better now." Besides, he points out, it's not like they have any competition. "Hollywood isn't doing anything about this," he says. "Hollywood won't touch it. The message becomes even more important when that message is being quashed by the major studios. It's purely insane that, here we are defending free speech around the world, allegedly, yet we can't call a spade a spade: We're not allowed to say Bush is an idiot."
Even among his cast, who'd been recruited -- for free -- because they were in sync with the movie's point of view, Cesca ran into problems. "We did have a few cast members leave because of the content. One left because of language, and one because the politics started to grate on him. But the core of the group stayed throughout the process. We'd spend 16-hour days, Saturdays and Sundays, shooting, and we'd do nothing but laugh."
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