Jørgen Leth Box Collection Completed

1st of October is the day where the 6th and final box of films by Danish film icon Jørgen Leth is published. The collection, administered and published by the Danish Film Institute, though financed primarily by a private investor, is an exemplarily well composed piece of publishing, in this case – box 6 – with his experimental film from the 1960’es amd 70’es plus 5 hours of bonus material and a teaser from his coming ”The Erotic Human”.

English subtitles and a booklet accompanies the box. The book- and filmshop at the Danish Film House sells the complete collection.

http://www.dfi.dk/shop

Andris Gauja: Victor

It is one of those films that slowly develops. Something went wrong between Victor and his wife. He drank too much, he used drugs, he cheated on her, she did not want to go on, and he moved from her and their small child.

Which is where the film starts and where we get to know that Victor has cancer. Will he get an operation, will he survive, and at the same time, will he accept the wish for divorce from his wife, who still has a lot of warm feelings for him. Not to forget the relationship he has to his little daughter.

It is one of those films where the interest in and sympathy for the main character grows gradually. The film crew has followed him with respect and he has generously let them into his world of pain, anger and hope.

Latvia, 2009, 52 mins.

www.vfs.lv

Bettina Haasen: Hotel Sahara

Mauritania, Nouadhibou, a place at the coast, a place from where Africans want to go to the promised land, Europe, and from where many boats are leaving and have left, with people on board… with many tragic drowning events as a result. Many never made it.

Extremely well shot and produced, this film takes the audience to a place and an atmosphere of Waiting and to characters, who open their hearts and reveal their dreams to the camera. It’s a film with the ambition to describe a collective, it has the structure of a collage, it gives information, there is a respect for the characters so it understandable and well deserved that the film travels so well – visit the site of the film – as a reference point of one of the most actual problems of today.

But it is also a film that some times, though not all the time, seems to have been taken over by the cameraman. The images are so well composed and constructed (stranded ship wrecks, the Sahara landscape, sequences that play with light and the ocean in several angles, purely aesthetically thought and not really serving any narrative purpose), that they once in a while kill the contents and do not involve the audience emotionally.

Germany, 2008, 52 & 85 mins. (I saw the shorter version)

www.hotelsahara.tv

Aleksander Gutman: 17 August

This fine Russian director has, apart from the masterpiece ”Frescoes” from Georgia, made a couple of very strong documentaries shot in prisons, ”Three Days and Never Again” and ”Blatnoi Mir” (directed by Finnish Jouni Hiltunen, Gutman was production manager), and here comes another that I do not hesitate to call masterly done as well.

One day in the life of a prisoner, sentenced to lifetime for murders, a man in a small cell, watched through the small window in the dark cell door, walking from one end to the other, exercising, making a cup of tea, praying with his head towards an icon of the bleading Jesus hanging on the wall, getting some food… and a small walk to a strongly fenced and guarded courtyard, filmed from above to achieve the impression of a man in a cage, A close-up study that works because of the brilliant combination of pictures with the monologue of the prisoner. On Life, on the conditions in the isolated prison, on being alone and away from it all, on being close to guards who are there all the time and in a way sharing his destiny.

Sometimes with some shots from the courtyard outside. A horse stands there, an old man comes and makes it ready for transport, they leave the prison, and the camera stays – later on they come back with a coffin to pick up the corpse that we have seen in a previous scene. Or a window with a cat. Did I say that it was black and white. And slow. And extremely well edited. Not a moment too much. Sympathy for the murderer? No, not really, but respect for a human being, curiosity.

Russia, Poland, 2009, 62 mins.

http://www.eurekamedia.info/index.php?id=209

Bichlbaum & Bonanno: The Yes Men Fix the World

Well, no need for a review, the film has already been on the market for a long time, discussed and created debate, it is funny, it is a modern satirical, political film, it raises questions like Michael Moore does, you can not but agree with the two activist showmen and wish them good luck. See the film and read this from their website. It will soon be on dvd everywhere, on tv, and in festivals and in cinemas:

“Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two guys who just can’t take “no” for an answer. They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways – basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world.

One day Andy, purporting to be a Dow Chemical spokesperson, gets on the biggest TV news program in the world and announces that Dow will finally clean up the site of the largest industrial accident in history, the Bhopal catastrophe. The result: as people worldwide celebrate, Dow’s stock value loses two billion dollars. People want Dow to do the right thing, but the market decides that it can’t.”

www.theyesmenfixtheworld.com

Ton van Zantvoort: A Blooming Business

It is actually ”a dirty business” to be interpreted in different ways: the use of chemicals in the flower farms and the consequent pollution of the Kenyan Lake Naivasha, and the abuse of people living there who have no labour rights, very low salary, long hours of hard work, sometimes unprotected against the spraying of chemicals… and so on, so forth. But the film  pleasantly refrains from shouting to its audience, on the contrary the director treats the subject in a careful way, in a low voice bringing the mentioned terrifying information to the spectators through the characters, he has chosen, who are the ones with whom we get linked emotionally:

The mother with three children who gets up early in the morning to make breakfast and who goes to work and comes back late evening to cook again and be with her children. The fisherman who claims that the water is polluted because of the chemicals from the farms. The man who sells water (from the lake!) and transports it around on donkeys. The young filmmaker-to-be who has filmed inside the farms and wants his footage to be shown all over the world instead of the lying news reports from BBC and other Western tv stations. And others…

I learned something I did not know about, I met some people whose life situation is tragic and I was touched and informed in an intelligent non-sensational cinematographically beautiful manner. Thanks!

Have a look at the site of the film, a very well designed and informative piece of work – and did you know that 300.000 people work in the flower industry!

Holland, 52 mins., 2009 (next bigger festival: DOKLeipzig)

http://www.newtonfilm.nl/

Jørgen Vestergaard: Et rigtigt bondeliv

Nogle af Jørgen Vestergaards film er simpelthen umistelige. Blandt disse først og fremmest hans mesterværk Et rigtigt bondeliv. Som altid har Vestergaard taget sagen i sin egen hånd og nu fået også den ud på dvd som led i et stort genudgivelsesprojekt. Det er så godt. Og gensynet med den 15 år gamle film er gribende. Det er jo en stor, en omfattende, men også præcist lavmælt elegi over en vældig kulturs sidste årtier i midten af 1900-tallet.

Det første jeg hæfter mig ved, er de medvirkendes aldeles usentimentale munterhed. Dernæst ved deres vedkommende viden om tingene og nøjagtighed i hver oplysning, i hvert udsagn. Vestergaards værk rejser sig som monument ved sin uhyre omfattende og detaljerede research. Her er noget så sjældent som ordentlig besked om tingene, og arkivmaterialet er på plads. Det, der tales om, er det, som indklippet viser. Det er frydefuldt. Grønthøster og Ferguson. Møgspredning og roehakning. Faglig og nøgtern præcision.

På dvd-en ledsages bondefilmen af den på mærkelige måder noget svagere Fjordfiskerne og den i mine øjne mislykkede Brødre. Den første lider under tydelige ambitioner om større tv-relevans. Om det er pålagte eller selvpåtagne begrænsninger er ikke klart, men så kompromisløs som Et rigtigt bondeliv er den ikke. Værre er det med Brødre, hvor Tue Steen Müller (dengang SFC programredaktør) foreslog at optage den uden dialog! Dels er de to medvirkende ikke meget uden deres særlige sprog som bærer af en særegen livstolkning, dels er det vestjyske sprog nok selve sammenhængskraften i Vestergaards sørgesange over denne egns forsvundne bonde- og fiskerliv. Og skildringen af de to fine mænd i den smukke gård fungerer slet ikke som billeddigt. Heldigvis findes der flere dages optagelser med de to brødre. Med dialog på vestjysk fra Holmsland. Der ligger i det materiale en film og venter på Jørgen Vestergaards energiske dvd-projekt, som han egenhændigt så prisværdigt fører ud i livet: samling på det samlede værk.        

Jørgen Vestergaard: Et rigtigt bondeliv, 1994. 59min. Fjordfiskerne, 1996, 55 min. Brødre, 1996, 11 min. With English subtitles. Forlaget Knakken, Thisted orpo@thisted.dk

It’s (not) only Television

… is the obvious and banal slogan for a professional meeting in Trento, Italy that starts today and goes on in the coming three days. Buyers, tv commissioning editors, festival people, film fund representatives and some critics from around the world meet to talk about documentaries in general and first of all look at what is new in Italian documentary. Organised by the Italian documentary organisation doc.it, which launches the themes to be discussed in captions like these:

Discussion on cross-platforms, Are we serious on series, Theatrical releases for documentaries – How can we break the monopoly of theatrical distribution that banishes documentary-films?, Alternative Distribution.

The headlines illustrate clearly the necessity for the documentary community to find other funding possibilities than public broadcasters. In Italy more actual and necessary than in most other European countries… with the (almost) total monopoly of the Berlusconi entertainment channels. 

http://www.italiandocscreenings.it

A text about Film by Christopher Pavsek

It is not everyday you see such an interesting thoughtprovoking text about film as the one I saw when visiting the site of Christopher Pavsek, that accompanies his film: To Those Born After (idfa 2005)

I firmly believe that film can be intellectually engaging and emotionally moving at the same time. Flms which demand serious effort on the part of their viewers can also be enjoyable. Brecht taught us that to think and learn does not of necessity exclude the possibility of pleasure. That is, I believe, a utopian element of my film. You have to work at it when you watch, but hopefully the work provides joy and is worthwhile. Not all work, after all, has to be toil done merely to earn a wage.

It is also utopian that something beautiful can be cobbled together from so much that is ugly. It proves that there is hope. This is important to remember for people like me who are constitutionally bleak-minded; it is also good to recall for my friends who tell me that my film depresses them. I think it is the world that is depressing them and my film makes them realize this a little.

If that were all that my film did I would not consider it a success. It also seems to offer a bit of an experience of beauty. That experience is disconcerting because you do not generally expect something like beauty to emerge in an artwork where you see human beings murdered and literally blown to pieces. But it is also intellectually reassuring in that it shows a way forward.

A critic once wrote something about my film that I cherish. He said the film “shows us how to cross the world several times with the minimum of means — with no more than a pilgrim’s staff.” I take this to mean a couple things. “To Those Born After” is a piece of what is called “appropriate” or “sustainable technology” in the arid language of economics. The only difference is that it so far has profited no one. But it is also a comment on the possibilities of minimalism, a minimalism whose goal is not to reduce art to pure aesthetic gestures but to propel art outward into the world and to allow the world into art. The simple signs and symbols have always been the best. My favorites: a camera and an eye; a hammer and a sickle.

There are two images that I believe should be shown on film or video only with the greatest care or perhaps not at all. One is the image of the World Trade Center burning and collapsing. It turns your mind off to see that; the response is Pavlovian. The other is any image of George W. Bush speaking with synchronous sound. The ban on graven images that Adorno and Benjamin so cherished was misplaced. Images of god or utopia are not the problem. It is images of people like Bush that are dangerous because the images grant a particular substance to him when he literally has none, aside from his crude corporal materiality. Godard once said that the original mission of cinema was to show us that the world was there. But then it became the mission of cinema to make us believe in the world on the screen. The last thing we should do is believe in a human being who has no thoughts of his own and who says nothing that is true.

My eldest daughter is the child in the images at the end of the film. She is a remarkable human being worth believing in. From very early on she disliked having her picture taken and that’s why so many pictures of her that we do have are stolen images. Not quite “life caught unawares” but more like “life caught with its guard down.” I don’t bother her much with the video camera now. The few video bits we do have of Sophie often end with her snarling at the camera or turning away as she realizes she’s been caught, as she does at the end of this film. It is a good reminder that we should be careful of what we demand from those born after. We don’t, after all, want them to turn away as well.

http://www.sfu.ca/~cpavsek

… and there are more clever words from this director to read on the site of D Word that right now discusses the report Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work published by Pat Aufderheide on September 8th.

http://www.d-word.com

IDFA Top Ten

An interesting compilation of films has been advertised for the coming idfa:

Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan (Haifa, 1964) will compile this year’s Top 10 for the 22nd International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Major themes in his Top 10 include how our collective memory works, ethical issues and the representation of history. Themes that are also central to his own work. Here is the list of films:

Blind kind, Johan van der Keuken (1964), Ici et ailleurs, Jean Luc-Godard (photo) (1976), Hitler connais pas?, Bertrand Blier (1963), Ma’loul, Michel Khleifi (1985), The Memory of Justice, by Marcel Ophüls (1976), Moeder Dao, de schildpadgelijkende, Vincent Monnikendam (1995), Testimonies, Ido Sela (1993), Punishment Park, Peter Watkins (1971), Philips Radio, Joris Ivens (1931), S21, La machine de mort khmère rouge, Rithy Panh (2003).