October 21-27, 2004
screen picks
Jon Stewart on Crossfire The election-year run on muckraking documentaries has been an invaluable counterpart to a shallow and servile broadcast media, but apart from the facile Outfoxed and a few well-aimed potshots in Fahrenheit 9/11, the anti-Bush docs don't address the origins of the gap they're attempting to fill; they're temporary cures, not long-term diagnoses. Jon Stewart may have adopted the voice of an exasperated average Joe during his appearance on CNN's battlin'-heads screamfest last Friday, but in less than a quarter-hour, he reduced hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson to smoking ideological rubble. (You can watch the whole thing at www.ifilm.com or Google your preferred format.)
Ostensibly on deck to promote his best seller, Stewart explicitly declined to be a laff-making "monkey," diverting Carlson's attacks and Begala's hapless attempts to steer the discussion into more jovial waters. Instead, Stewart ripped into the show and others like it for providing "theater" instead of genuine political debate. To call Crossfire a debate show, Stewart gibed, is like "saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition."
Along the way, Stewart got off a handful of zingers, including a cheap but cutting jab at Carlson's floppy bow tie. (He also called him "a dick," which even Carlson's fans might have to concede.) But Stewart was best when playing wounded. "Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America," he pleaded, using the look of defeated disbelief that viewers of The Daily Show know only too well. "Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations, and we're left out there to mow our lawns." Carlson and Begala did their best to belittle Stewart, but proved only their inability to conduct a debate without preapproved talking points.
The audience, who had come for a Punch and Judy show that typically makes Team America look like the Roman Senate, miraculously applauded Stewart, though it's possible they were just getting off on seeing the hosts get better than they gave. Begala, and especially Carlson, seemed incredulous that they were losing a battle to a comedian, one whose servile questioning of John Kerry Carlson took relish in ridiculing. Stewart's response: "I didn't realize that news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity."
What Crossfire's hosts, lining up in obliviousness alongside Ted Koppel, don't get is that The Daily Show draws viewers not because it's an alternative source of news -- a chance, say, to see Kerry answer questions no one else has asked -- but because it's an alternative to news: not to information, but to the partisan pingpong and sheepish stenography that characterize so much of our so-called political discourse. Other shows argue about whether John Kerry favors a "global test" or not; The Daily Show attacks the process by which a violent misquotation becomes a three-day story. People like The Daily Show because they can't stand Crossfire, though Stewart may inadvertently have created the show's first must-see moment.
Films of Matt McCormick (Fri., Oct. 22, 6 p.m., free, Room 3, Annenberg Hall, Temple University; Sat., Oct. 23, 8:30 p.m., $5, Nexus Gallery, 137 N. Second St.) Filmmaker Matt McCormick, whose haunted road-trip clip for the Shins' "The Past and Pending" was a highlight of Small Change's music-video program, drops by for two presentations of "From Tugboats to Polar Bears," an hour-long program including the cult favorite The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal and two brand-new works. Like fellow Small Change alum Bill Brown, McCormick finds a kind of fractal art in urban decay, though the tongue-in-cheek narration (read by Miranda July and Calvin Johnston) occasionally tips into knee-jerk smarm (drive-by swipes at "the oil companies," "the ruling elite," etc.). Subconscious Art, the oldest short in the program, remains the strongest, simultaneously an appreciation of the found art created when anti-graffiti crews replace elaborate tags with uneven polygons, and, less successfully, a parody of art-world jargon. The new Towlines, a semi-lyrical appreciation of the hidden work performed by plucky harbor tugs, never quite comes to a point; Grounded, a free-floating construction-site tone poem, hits the same marks surely and silently.
Moolaad/Ousmane Sembene (Wed., Oct. 27, 7 p.m., $8-$10, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Ousmane Sembene, generally referred to as "the father of African film," does not suffer feminists gladly. Given that he's in the middle of a planned trilogy centering on strong female protagonists, the hostility with which he greeted questions on the subject at last month's Toronto Film Festival -- following a screening of his first feature, 1966's La Noire de , which likewise has a woman at its center -- was almost baffling. "I don't pose issues in terms of gender," Sembene said, spitting the last word out. "I'm talking about thinking human beings."
The 81-year-old Senegalese master, who will present his latest film, Moolaad…, as part of International House and the Philadelphia Museum of Art's African Film Series, clearly doesn't like being put in a box, no matter how appropriate. What he resents, I think, is the suggestion that the repression of women is a "woman's issue," rather than one that affects society as a whole. Moolaad… centers on the attempts of Coll… (regal Fatoumata Coulibaly) to block the female circumcision rituals which have left her scarred inside and out. But the ripples of her resistance quickly spread to the entire village: A pile of radios confiscated from women hungry for news of the (rapidly modernizing) outside world grows to rival the village church and the termite mound which houses the spirits of villagers' ancestors. Such layering is evident throughout the film; the peddler who sells the radios' precious batteries papers his cart with AIDS awareness posters and sells Prudence brand condoms. Bright colors and musical numbers notwithstanding, Moolaad… isn't quite the feel-good experience some critics have proclaimed. It's more like a signpost to rosier times.
A brief note to Wednesday's audience: The Toronto Q & A was marred by long-winded, excessively deferential questions which took hours to work their way through Sembene's translator. Pay the man your respects by keeping questions short and letting him speak.
Ford Transit (premieres Mon., Oct. 25, 9 p.m., Sundance Channel) A month of Palestinian-themed documentaries is capped by Hany Abu-Assad's multifaceted portrait of a bus driver who ferries Palestinians between checkpoints, since driving through them has become prohibitively slow. Frustrations boil over in Rajai's back seat, with Arafat as much as Sharon, but so does a desire for peace, tempered by anger. The most frequent comment starts something like this: "It's not right to kill innocent people, but " That "but" tells the story, as does Rajai's proud assertion that "Palestinians are like ants. They'd get around any roadblock."
Misc. Picks Grouping movies by color intensity may seem a job for the men in foil hats, but International House's Primary Cinema is a must from beginning to end. The schedule, Thursday to Sunday, all at 7 p.m.: the films of neo-primitivist Harry Smith, including a remnant of his unfinished Wizard of Oz and Early Abstractions, a series of geometric creation myths scored to Meet the Beatles; Godard's explosive Pierrot le fou; Vincente Minnelli's gloriously excessive Some Came Running, which features the world's only powder-blue adding machine and explains that crack about the hat in Contempt; and Fellini's daffy Juliet of the Spirits.
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