I AM NOT A WITCH [3]
A bit too deadpan at first, and the static, symmetrical compositions don't help. But once those quirks are dropped, there are plenty of sharp observations on the trials -- both aspirational and punitive -- of womanhood. As always, the line between "good girl" and witch is conditional, so Shula is tasked with navigating those arbitrary boundaries herself. The emancipatory title is never hers to proclaim, so circumscribed is her autonomy. Director Nyoni's impishness is just the facade atop a rigid social structure. Underneath, sadder realities lie in wait.
FATHER'S KINGDOM [3.5]
Sorry for the inactivity. In addition to attending a film festival this past weekend, I was also deathly ill with some kind of virus. The sickness began over a week ago, and by Friday afternoon I could barely even walk anymore. My recovery over the weekend was long and slow, but I do feel almost 100% again. And, I'm ready to write about what I watched.
FATHER'S KINGDOM was something neither I nor my girlfriend had ever heard of. We saw a trailer for it during the Maryland Film Festival's sneak preview, and it was sufficiently intriguing that we tried to make room for it in our schedules. My girlfriend ended up volunteering on Thursday, the only night we could see it, so I had to drag myself over to the theater, falling apart at the seams, and watch it alone.
But I'm glad I did. The history this film covers is genuinely amazing. Father Divine, a black preacher active in the early 20th century, managed to win millions of followers to his idiosyncratic cause. Natural charisma notwithstanding, the biggest part of his success was a program of comprehensive economic uplift: communal living, sustainable small businesses, and food for all who came hungry. That an African-American man could spearhead what amounted to a Communist sect at the height of the Great Depression, operating across the Jim Crow USA..."unbelievable" doesn't even describe such impossible feats.
And yet there's plenty of archival material for director Lenny Feinberg to draw from! Father Divine was a hugely significant figure, so the era's newsreels paid close attention to his growing movement. Through the presentation of such footage, Feinberg helps Father Divine feel just as real as any other legendary civil rights activist. There he is, like MLK, leading ecstatic crowds against the twinned evils of segregation and poverty. How could US American history hide such an influential figure? Well, part of the problem is that Father Divine claimed to literally be Jesus reincarnated. As the Second Coming of Christ, he promised to give his followers eternal life, a heaven on earth that must have been irresistible to those suffering under the Depression. It's not hard to see how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presented a more respectable figure for canonization. Father Divine, by contrast, seemed a conman at best and a fanatic at worst.
Still, he did not just talk the talk, he walked the walk as well. Father Divine's followers adored him for it, following him across the Eastern US Coast in thrall to his utopian program. The momentum grew unstoppable. Before long, a mass movement was born out of this one man's evangelical convictions, fighting back against the excesses of capitalism at a truly desperate moment. However, despite his radical fight against racism and poverty, Father Divine's own theology emphasized the power of the individual. He rejected welfare as undignified, beseeching his worshippers to uplift themselves instead. A positive disposition could do what government money could not. So there was a radically conservative side to Father Divine too. As is typical in Protestant theology, a steadfast devotion to God -- expressed through the dignity of hard work -- is the only thing that can redeem and save one's weary soul.
(Father Divine also preached absolute celibacy, as practiced through gender-divided living spaces. So not every aspect of his belief system was emancipatory. But I'll get to that soon.)
Whereas modern preachers and politicians demand work from the poor, Father Divine offered that work himself. Through such businesses as deeply discounted barbershops, he would employ his own followers and use their earnings to fund the movement. Buildings would be bought for living space, business, or even to make civil rights statements (i.e. buying homes in all-white neighborhoods, or beachfront properties where black people were forbidden to swim). Redemption through labor was not an impossible demand coming from Father Divine. He would employ you, feed you, and provide a place to live if you consented to his ethic of hard work. Not a bad bargain in the 1930s, especially for those experiencing segregated poverty.
It's hard to grapple with Feinberg's film without basically recapping the whole thing. I haven't even gotten to the real shocker: not only are some of Father Divine's followers still alive, so was his second wife until just last year! In making FATHER'S KINGDOM, Feinberg was able to film Father Divine's surviving congregation. They now reside in the man's palatial Pennsylvania estate, keeping alive his message of racial harmony and communal peace. At mealtimes, his followers deliberately seat themselves next to people of the opposite race. A white person is flanked by black people, and a black person is flanked by white people. They alternate like that, side-by-side, all the way around the table, with Mother Divine at the head. She, a white Canadian, married Father Divine in 1946 at the age of 21. It was an enormous scandal for a white woman and a black man to marry, especially considering their age difference. But marry they did, and for the next 71 years, she would carry on her husband's mission, living long past his own death in 1965.
...Okay really, I want to stop writing soon!! But I haven't even mentioned the person in orbit to this congregation, a gay man whose partner of 26 years struggles to understand the compulsion. The man believes Father Divine's claims of divinity, yet he cannot sacrifice his own life as the others have. He is forced to worship from afar, helping the remnants of Father Divine's congregation while their numbers shrink. There are only about 20 left now, as Mother Divine passed away during the production of FATHER'S KINGDOM. So this history is not even past yet. Father Divine's wife was alive until last year, and his Peace Mission continues to this day, secluded but devout as ever. Few films I've seen give such an impression of history's undiminished presence. Feinberg was very lucky to have filmed when he did.
--
(Lastly: I should mention that Father Divine was more complex than the deity he claimed to be. Though he comes off as genial and kindhearted in the archival filmstrips, several darker aspects announce themselves too. He had a first wife who passed away long before Father Divine himself did. That presented a problem for his theology of eternal life, and so he largely ignored her in sickness, right up until her premature death. There are also intimations that he may have had a 'thing' for young, white female followers. Several newspapers of the day published accounts of sexual mistreatment at his hands. However, while I'm inclined to believe these women’s accounts -- and they're not implausible, since the man operated what was essentially a religious cult -- it's important to remember that these stories were published in the Jim Crow era. Father Divine's properties were often targeted by the KKK, and it's not hard to imagine journalists of the day having white supremacist sympathies. Furthermore, none of the claims were ever proven. Which, again, doesn't mean they aren't true; but given the context, hopefully you can see why those tales of forced 'miscegenation' might deserve more skepticism than usual.
One more thing...there are some painful interviews with a woman who lived as a child at Father Divine's estate. Her family joined the Peace Mission and moved her there with her sister. But children were forbidden from associating with family members, since according to Father Divine, God is every person's true parent. So this woman was kept separate from her sister and other family members, up to the point of having to treat her own grandmother like a stranger. It all sounds extremely traumatic and misguided, and the interviewee has clearly spent decades coming to terms with her emotional deprivation. So I don't want to give the impression that I wholeheartedly admire Father Divine or his movement. Rather, I think he achieved some remarkable things while simultaneously overreaching and doing harm to others. The story of his life defies belief, but in remembering and appreciating it, we must also consider those whose lives were profoundly damaged by his.)
BLACK MOTHER
Beautifully harsh, achingly tender. Life in all its misery, but there's still love to be found, for oneself, one's history, the ancestors who embody those earlier times; and, crucially, for the women who safeguard the newest lives of all. People, in streets and forests, living on an island crisscrossed by rivers, carved out by waterfalls, and surrounded by oceans. Their eyes, looking into Allah's lens, talking without speaking, voices perpetually elsewhere. They sing, and laugh. They tell stories. The camera listens.
MY DEAD DAD'S PORNO TAPES
PUMPKIN MOVIE [3.5]
PALENQUE [4]
A visually confident short set in San Basilio de Palenque, “the first town in the Americas to have broken free from European domination” and, sadly, the last one whose descendants still live there. History’s immense weight is surely felt, but director Silva’s style is laidback, content to meander with his subjects through their daily routines and pleasures.
OPTIMISM
MADELINE'S MADELINE [4]
While introducing her newest film, Josephine Decker expressed gratitude to the Maryland Film Festival for being so supportive of her work. Though not a Marylander herself, she has attended 7 of the last 10 MDFFs, regardless of whether she had a film premiering at the time.
I'm also glad that the Festival has made a point of programming her work. Josephine Decker is one of my favorite newer filmmakers, and I've been anticipating MADELINE'S MADELINE since it was first announced at Sundance. To see it with a big crowd at MDFF18 felt like an affirmation of Decker's adventurous sensibility. This new film sees her liquefying narrativity even further, despite its story seeming more linear on the surface. After the screening, Decker explained that time spent in theater school gave her a stronger appreciation for dance, improvisation, and group co-consciousness. The research she did for MADELINE'S MADELINE reshaped her working method, and judging by the results, she's more willing than ever to leave crucial context unspoken. Note the several consecutive power shifts at the film's end, expressed mainly through suggestion. Madeline acts out her abusive relationship with her mother; Madeline's mother leaves the room, never to return; Evangeline attempts to recuperate Madeline's defiant performance into a theater piece; but as the cast and crew grow uneasy, Madeline leads a hallucinogenic coup d'etat against Evangeline.
All these scenes are legible through social interaction. The characters' motivations have been inferred over time, giving Decker the space to experiment with their convergences. Her cinema is an interpersonal and collaborative one, layered together through the creative energies of the people involved. That may be true for most films, but rarely is the process so transparent as in Josephine Decker's films. Her actors elide screenwriterly proclamations in favor of simply sharing a space. Body language, emotional outbursts, and creative blocking are how she gets us into their heads. Accentuated with frenzied edits and unexpected images, Decker's films ask the audience to be as intuitive as their maker. Their refusal to compromise is nevertheless open, generous, and inviting to anyone curious enough to feel their way through.
¡LAS SANDINISTAS! [4]
There's been some disagreement about the Sandinista Party on my Twitter timeline lately. Though I've not seen such statements myself, I have seen it claimed that tankies are defending the Party against anti-government protestors. This has raised the ire of other non-tankie leftists -- not to mention actual Nicaraguans, whose descriptions of the crisis strike me as the most nuanced. At root, the question is whether the Sandinista Party is carrying on the Nicaraguan Revolution or betraying it, furthering the cause or selling out revolutionary Nicaraguans.
¡LAS SANDINISTAS!, which was directed by a white American woman, might seem an unlikely intervention in the dispute. However, Jenny Murray has chosen to document a crucial component of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The women she films were not just participants or fellow travellers, but active leaders in the Revolution. They abandoned school, domestic life, and family attachments to carry out an underground insurrection against the Somoza Dynasty. Bona fide revolutionaries one and all, these women were transformed by their experiences of leadership in the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). No longer could they tolerate a Nicaragua hindered by pre-revolutionary gender-based hierarchies. Many of Las Sandinistas went on to play an active role in reshaping the new Nicaragua, ensuring that their fellow citizens would have access to food, education, and healthcare. "Women's work," once pejoratively defined by smallness, now denoted the Sisyphean task of rebuilding a ruined country from scratch.
As if overthrowing a militarized dictatorship weren't enough, Las Sandinistas were called upon to rethink the state and its role in Nicaraguan society. There are truly no blueprints for such an undertaking, despite the historical examples of Russia, Vietnam, Kenya, and others. No country can skip the years of collective labor which bookend that day of national triumph. But Nicaragua also faced an even greater challenge: imperialist aggression from the USA and its Contra allies. As such, the Sandinistas' hopes for a peaceful reconstruction were hardened into anti-imperialist resolve. Male revolutionaries unilaterally seized control, re-marginalizing their female comrades. Chauvinist vainglory swallowed up the uneasy process of redistributing social power. After being liberated by revolutionary warfare, Las Sandinistas once again became second-class citizens in their own country.
In the telling of Murray and her interviewees, this domestic counter-revolution was never undone. Daniel Ortega, current President and former revolutionary, basks in the glow of a rewritten history which privileges him as Great Man of Nicaragua. Meanwhile, Dora María Téllez has gone on to form the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS), a breakaway opposition party with intentions of fulfilling the Nicaraguan Revolution's radical promise. She and other female Sandinistas deplore Ortega's personal and political misogyny. They rally against him as an anti-choice r*pist, one whose protracted leadership has devolved into corrupt complacency. Nicaragua's current unrest cannot be separated from this decades-old crisis of legitimacy in the Sandinista Party.
I was aware of Ortega's pro-life policies, but I had not known of his own personal misogyny. However, it makes sense that his disregard for women would be continuous across both domains. Unhappy as I am to learn of his betrayals, I am still heartened by the counter-narrative presented in ¡LAS SANDINISTAS! It's clear that Nicaragua's true heroes are, in fact, its many heroines. The example of Dora María Téllez and her comrades will live on as a noble alternative to left phallocentrism. Whatever its stylistic shortcomings, this film is an indispensable work of political history.
UPDATE (September '18): It has come to my attention that some on the left consider Dora María Téllez to be leading a right-wing defection from the Sandinista Party. In the spirit of accountability, here are my sources of new information:
afgj.org/nicanotes-the-mrs-is-not-left-or-democratic
afgj.org/nicanotes26
Some light research would seem to confirm there are indeed pictures of MRS’ Ana Vijil meeting with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. It seems strange to me that the MRS would continue using left-wing language in defense of a right-wing agenda, but perhaps that’s a strategic choice to siphon support from the Sandinistas? I couldn’t say.
In my eyes, the most troublesome aspect of this dispute remains Ortega himself. The accusations of sexual abuse against him are very credible, and I remain suspicious of Nicaragua’s anti-abortion policies. At this moment in time, with no foreseeable end to the current crisis, I can’t speak in favor of Ortega’s presidency or the anti-Sandinista protestors. More information on the subject would be very welcome.
STRANGELY ORDINARY THIS DEVOTION
Out of the ordinary, this short film.
SHAKEDOWN [4]
A wonderful film I hope to rewatch many times. For now, some context from Leilah Weinraub herself.
Most of the videos in this film come from a period of several years, starting in 2002. These are Weinraub’s, but there is also archival footage from the early 90s and more recent material from the 2010s. Weinraub spoke of her interest in the Shakedown club as an economic unit maintained almost entirely by black lesbians. She was an integral part of the experience, and so this is not an outsider’s ethnography. She recalls Shakedown as a utopia, wherein the unique energies of its core staff, performers, and customers coalesced into something unrepeatable. Police harassment would eventually contribute to Shakedown’s closure, which dissolved this transitory shared utopia. Weinraub and Egypt are still in touch, as can be seen from their filmed reminiscences, but utopias can’t be preserved in their entirety. So SHAKEDOWN, the film, is Weinraub’s quixotic attempt.
(She has known several utopias in addition to the Shakedown club, citing a lesbian anarchist school and her current setup in New York. As a result, SHAKEDOWN is not [altogether] mournful, since this is not the only meaningful memory in Weinraub’s life. Melancholia is less needed when other happinesses exist.)
I am also someone who’s drawn to fleeting utopias. Often I’ve found them in other people, but I have trouble sustaining that utopian energy between us. Group chemistry can be utopian too, yet it’s just as vulnerable to sudden collapse. These days, my surest utopias are the places I’m fond of. My love for cities, buildings, and beaches can go unrequited so long as the passion remains. Others can be a part of those big impersonal spaces too, but I seem to deal with people best as abstractions, as fellow travelers beyond my reach or understanding.
Perhaps my utopian thinking has been hurt by this absence of people. And maybe those liminal zones mean more when they’re shared with other people. Regardless, the utopian impulse remains strong in me, and I expect to be following it for years to come, wherever it leads me. In SHAKEDOWN, I see (and feel) a kinship in honoring that same impossible yearning.
A PAGE OF MADNESS [5]
Played with accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra, who specialize in scoring silent films. And they certainly made the correct choice in treating A PAGE OF MADNESS as a horror film. Their wailing, dissonant, unearthly score further fermented the wretchedness of Kinugasa's images. I was terrified at points, overwhelmed by both sound and sight simultaneously. The no-intertitles approach is contemporaneous with Murnau's THE LAST LAUGH, while many of Kinugasa's optical distortions are like Man Ray with a narrative context.
Not that A PAGE OF MADNESS represents a rationalization of avant-garde techniques. If anything, Kinugasa pushes silent film technique to its farthest boundaries of intelligibility. Explosive edits convey the chaos of mental collapse while ghostly images dance across his lens, deranging whatever narrative is meant to contain them. Without benshi narration, A PAGE OF MADNESS demands immersion and intuition to smooth a story out of its jagged rhythms. I would consider myself lucky to see anything half this adventurous in 2026.
MAGIC BULLET
Played before Nathan Silver's THE GREAT PRETENDER...on which, more soon.
I was shocked to learn that Amanda Lovejoy Street was a first-time director! She already has a great command of tone, as evidenced by her guidance of Rosemarie DeWitt through that dourly funny infomercial scene. A lifetime of dissatisfaction manifested through brief irruptions of depressive disgust, the joyless exchanges of sex and advertising.
(Also! My sister and I fantasized for years about owning a Magic Bullet when we were younger. Not that MAGIC BULLET deals with our oddball fixation in any real way, but surely no other As Seen On TV device would have worked here. There's just something about them...!!)
THE GREAT PRETENDER [3.5]
In some ways, the biggest surprise of MDFF2018. My girlfriend hadn't seen any Nathan Silver films previously, while I'd only watched -- and rather disliked -- UNCERTAIN TERMS. I held off on buying tickets for this, his newest film, until I remembered how annoyingly hard it is to access Silver's filmography. Whatever we thought of THE GREAT PRETENDER, at least I wouldn't have to chase it down later for curiosity's sake.
I don't mean to sound so dismissive, but I think it's important you grasp my ambivalence about UNCERTAIN TERMS so that you can understand what a revelation THE GREAT PRETENDER was to me. Willful unpleasantness has become a badge of honor in some circles that see themselves pushing back against an encroaching PC culture. I don't think Nathan Silver sees himself that way, but his proclivity for damaged individuals wreaking havoc on one another qualifies him all the same. So something like UNCERTAIN TERMS, in which an adult man gets flirtatious with a teenage girl, accrues cultural (and critical) capital simply for not playing nice.
Defenders of ugliness will tell you that *of course* everyone knows it's gross for adult men to get romantically involved with teenage girls. Not every film needs an editorial viewpoint so you know the filmmakers disapprove of what they're filming. Against these objections, I point to: reality. There's a fundamental misapprehension at work here regarding niceness and its supposed antithesis. At the bottom of every Nice Guy is an ugly truth about masculinity's self-image. Therefore a toxic man is not the opposite of a Nice Guy, but rather his fullest expression. So to embrace masculine dysfunction is not a transgressive gesture. Rather, it is a reification of the dilemma supposedly being 'solved.'
Again, I'm not accusing Nathan Silver of making some kind of mistake. This is a critical fallacy more than an artistic one. But it's worth keeping in mind when considering broader cinema circuits. Watching THE GREAT PRETENDER made me realize how similar Silver's career trajectory is to both Hong Sang-soo's and Noah Baumbach's. These three artists once made rough, intermittently funny films about dysfunctional men and the women they ensnare. Now -- if THE GREAT PRETENDER is any indication -- Silver has joined his spiritual companions on a new endeavor: self-reflexive and structurally intricate relationship dramas with "strong female leads." Regressive masculinity meets its match in progressive femininity, even if the gains for these women remain incremental. Adding more humor probably hasn't hurt either.
Without being too cynical, I imagine these newer models play better than the old ones would now. Male self-absorption is passé; female "empowerment" is in. But if there are new structural incentives for such reconfiguration, I would still question the ability of any man to make an epistemological break with their previous worldviews. Silver, Hong, and Baumbach have not lost their interest in self-destructive people. What's changed is their formal approach to that ongoing theme. THE GREAT PRETENDER folds in on itself like a colorful square of origami paper; Hong darts in and out of metaphysical slipstreams; and Baumbach is now using classic screwball style to orchestrate his deluded creations' encounters. They are each refracting (and refining) the narratives that compelled them to make films in the first place.
Yet even as their styles evolve, masculinity itself is not keeping pace. So there's this issue of how to reconcile with a world that's rapidly leaving behind the men that populate Silver, Hong, and Baumbach films. I don't blame any of them for not figuring that out (have any of us?), but it's telling even so that they haven't. Men exist, and they will continue to do so, and as long as these three artists are interested in heterosexual stagnation, their films will reflect this reality. Which brings me to maybe my only real complaint with THE GREAT PRETENDER, and a small one at that: each man and each woman of the central cast of four sleep with one another, but neither the two women nor the two men do. Their sexual intrigue stops right at the heteronormative boundary. That doesn't make the film worse, or incomplete, or retrograde, or any such negative descriptor. Silver is examining the considerable woes of male-female coupling, as is his prerogative. On the other hand, wouldn't allowing for gay attraction be exactly the kind of exit that's denied to these four unfortunate lovers?
SOLLERS POINT [3.5]
Another fine film from Baltimore's hometown hero. I'm a little too eager to finish writing about the film festival to dig any deeper right now...but, this seems like an evolution for Matthew Porterfield without compromising his established style. It played to sold-out screenings and widespread admiration from festival-goers, who also had lots to ask the director and his crew at the Q&A I attended.
For his part, Porterfield hinted at something new as his next project: a film set in France, far away from his native Baltimore, that would follow a middle-aged rapper's attempt to connect with his growing son. Not trying to be gossipy! Just interested in seeing this prominent regional filmmaker step up to international film production. If I recall, post-production on SOLLERS POINT took place in France, so Porterfield's experience there is what germinated the potential project. It would be a big change, but I'm down if he is.
No comments:
Post a Comment