feng ming

This is a still from Feng Ming: A Chinese Memoir. I'm sure a nearly still shot camera of a woman speaking Chinese for three hours does not sound like an engaging movie, but how about the opportunity to sit in the house of a former committed communist journalist whose life took a horrifying turn after her husband was accused in an anti-rightist deviation purge of the late 1950s. She was later rehabilitated but had to go through it all again during the Cultural Revolution. Once a rightist, i guess... It's an extraordinary film. Because she's a writer, she tells her story in a really simple but totally gripping way. At one point she gets up to go to the bathroom and I couldn't wait for her to get back. Here is a review from Robert Koehler who saw it at Cannes last year. This was my favorite movie at the Buenos Aires festival. Amazing. I love this woman.

the apocalyptic buenos aires film festival

Interkosmos was playing in the Abastos shopping mall when the entire block had a blackout. We were eating across the street. They got the lights back on after 10 minutes or so and then another delay getting the subtitles and projections queued up. The people that stayed for the q and a were really excited about the film. An old couple said that they thought they were going to see Aaron Copeland's "The Planets" but were actually pleasantly surprised. I was asked why I thanked Hugo Chavez in the credits and I said I also thanks Judy Garland and Greta Garbo. But I thanked Chavez because he drives the Bush administration crazy. He is one of their failures. While they were obsessed with Iraq, that coup got away from them. And, of course, he is someone who can kick the ass of the US (at least verbally). Huele a sulfre...(it smells like sulfur, the devil was hear yesterday). The next night was a smoke-filled city. They were burning fields in the islands and areas around Buenos Aires and the wind apparently did not agree with them so all the smoke blew into the city. It was like there was a fire around the corner and you kept expecting the smoke to dissipate but it never did.

the black pope

I just had a strange question and answer of La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo. I have slept probably 3 hours in a plane in the last 36 hours. We checked into our hotel off the airplane in the Abasto neighborhood of Buenos Aires but they wouldn't let us get a room so early so Cat and I walked around the city and I found a DVD rental place that has a bunch of leftie docs about the Montoneros, Tupamaros, etc.. and we went and ate at the Gato Negro, an old and charming cafe. By the time we got the room, I had to deal with festival stuff and then dinner and then my movie and q and a. I tried to speak English but I ended up speaking mostly Spanish, which sounds cool but I may have misread the audience. There were a couple of cranky lefties that did not like or understand what the hell I was doing so they kept the questions focused on why false documentary and how I was kind of making fun of the prisoners and kind of not. A couple Peruvians were there and one remarked again on the facts and what I got right or wrong. What is your concept of ideology is pretty interesting. I kind of rambled with that one talking about evil Soviet bobsledders in the seventies and how after 1989 Marxism is basically forgotten. I want to go back and look at this and remember the good things about the critical analysis of capitalism as well as the authoritarian tendencies of leftist groups. I talked about factionalism as well and how I see my work in the tradition of American satire creating characters that criticize my country and my capitalist ideology from outside the system. The translator and theater guys thought it was great. I felt a bit defensive, especially since many of the critical questions came from people who then got up and left shortly after. Which I thought was lame, by the way. I was tired and managed a 30-minute Spanglish q and a jetlagged so hooray!

Anyway, two women audience members came up to Cat and I and said are you Obama or Clinton, which I thought was funny. I'm Obama because I'm hoping he can do something even though I know he's a centrist, but I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that at this point the two are not far apart and that maybe Hillary would actually be able to get things through the bureaucracy. I asked what they thought and they said that they both were lousy and that Obama scared them. I said why and they said because you don't know anything about him. I talked about the culty criticism of him and one of them told me he was the Black Pope of the Apocalypse, which I thought was an insane and strange metaphor. When I got home, I googled it and found that it's a real conspiracy theory.

observando el cielo

This was my favorite movie at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. I thought it was extraordinary. Like some sort of terrorist imax movie, Jeanne Liotta filmed the night sky for six years and Peggy Ahwesh put together an amazing soundtrack of VLF (very low frequency) sound. The title is nice as well. It can mean a few things: watching or observing the sky or stars as well as the heavens or heaven. We've been in the same programs before at the 2005 NY Underground Film Festival and both made the Village Voice Year in Experimental Film last year. Glad to be on the same team.

rip: new york underground film festival

Sad that the New York Underground Film Festival is closing because it had a real reputation for taking chances on experimental programming while still getting people in the seats. This is the latest in a series of festivals going under like Cinematexas in Austin and the Thaw festival in Iowa City. All three were festivals that showed the breadth of new cinema in the US. They mixed satire and difficult conceptual work with personal docs and performative videos and really focused on film and video as a artistic expression without playing to the fantasy of modernist high art.

A number of things have happened in recent years to affect this. A lot of high quality video work is going to galleries now and a lot of funny and smart political videos are going right up to youtube so that takes a good chunk of the traditional material out. The underground and experimental festivals are getting squeezed out of the market to a certain degree. For me, these kinds of festivals are a safe venue to try different things. My first feature film Interkosmos got great reviews and played at lots of international festivals, but I followed it up with a more difficult film that had almost no plot and was politically very heavy. A number of programmers told me there was just no way they could find a place for it. But it showed at festivals like New York and Chicago Underground, which took a chance on it. I think there has to be options for films that do not fit into a market slot, whether its the independent market, straight political docs or the gallery scene, which is about collectors hoarding work in the hope that they can be buried with their 60-million-dollar DVD when they die like the Japanese businessman with the Van Gogh.

There's another school of thought, which is that everything dies eventually and new spaces and opportunities grow up and adapt. That's certainly true. There's a couple of newer experimental festivals that seem to be thriving like PDX in Portland and FLEX in Gainesville, Florida and the folks who ran NYUFF are now doing screening series (Light Industries and Migrating Forms). But it's nice to have a festival in the heart of the capitalism, which celebrates at one time over one long weekend work that really gets at what the hell is going on in our country and on our planet without playing by the rules set out for us by the folks that are running the show.

venezuela, si!

I just watched 5 Factories by Dario Azellinni and Oliver Ressler. The movie played with my movie La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo at the New Museum last month but I didn't get to see it. So we did a swap across the Atlantic. It jumps right in with the economics and reality of running a factory then goes to the next one. Aluminum, paper, cocoa, textile and ketchup factories. It's beautifully shot and gives a real revolutionary perspective. Not just a Chavez commercial, which I was afraid of. A lot of talk by the president of the aluminum factory about Soviet-style "state capitalism" masquerading as socialism. On the one hand, it's cool that workers really are controlling the factories and are not just ceding control to the state. On the other hand, his rhetoric sounds a lot like a pure Marxist denouncing revisionists. I wonder about some of the problems and how long this is feasible. It seems extraordinary and hopeful. I mean instead of just accepting the great movement of capital and markets, take control of the closing/closed factories and keep everyone at work. The people are inspiring. Have to get used to the Caribbean accent where everyone drops their s's.